The Motherlode blogger, Belen Aranda-Alvarado, thinks her ten-year-old daughter has just the hook she needs: She is a burgeoning equestrian, which creates an unusual combo — a Latina girl from the Bronx who rides horses. Aranda-Alvarado writes: “If my 10-year-old’s experience isn’t a college application essay waiting to be written, I don’t know what is.” She goes on to say, Tiger Mom-like, that she’s so sure this is her kid’s ticket to the big time that she won’t let her opt out:If she complains it’s too hot to ride? Strap on that helmet, my wee one. She wants to stay after school and play with her friends? Tie on those riding boots, little missy. Grumbles about the subway and train ride to get there? Get. On. That. Horse.

So this is what parenting has come to? Sizing up the hobbies of ten-year-olds for their college application street cred? Viewing our kids’ merit through the small, warped aperture of an admissions officer’s gaze? I had to wonder what a college admissions officer would make of how my six-year-old daughter spent Memorial Day weekend when we visited friends in Vermont. What would her hook have been?

She seemed to excel at rolling down a steep, grassy hill, which she did for hours on end. Her rolling was punctuated by long, drawn-out rests in which she just flopped onto the ground and stayed there, like a rag doll dropped from the wide blue sky. Occasionally, she’d turn a few cartwheels before running back up to start again.

At other times, the candidate could be found digging toys out of the basement storage room and putting them to good use, perhaps most deftly in the case of the child-size sleigh she lugged outside. She demonstrated great persistence in trying to get her two-year-old sister into the sleigh. Failing that, she showed ingenuity by popping her Build-a-Bear birthday bear into it instead, and carting the bear around the yard, rope leash tied to her waist as if she were an Alaskan sled dog.

She also tried — and failed — to catch a fish. First, trying to lure her prey with an old fishing line she found, a rubber worm still attached. Then, by tying the fishing line to a fallen branch and standing for what seemed an inordinately long time alone on the dock, no fish in sight. Later, our host guided her with an actual rod and reel, but she seemed to prefer her early, solitary attempts. (Not to be upstaged by his sister’s fishing, one afternoon her big brother canoed across the lake to forage in the woods for morel mushrooms to eat for breakfast the next day, returning with a bag full of them.)

Should the admissions officer be wondering about the candidate’s athletic ability, it behooves me to mention that she beat her father 38-2 in a game of T-ball, in large part because she kept playing long after he retired to the house for a nap.

In all, the candidate seemed to demonstrate the rare ability to be bored, to find pleasure and purpose outside any organized activity, to flop in the grass without worry or care. Does that count? Sadly, as Aranda-Alvarado would point out, no. None of these activities would turn a college admissions officer’s head, and there isn’t a high school counselor in the world who would say she should write a college application essay about it.

Then again, maybe such a sprawling, unstructured weekend is so rare in this age of tightly managed childhoods that my daughter would truly stand out.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

The public reaction was one of thinly veiled reproach. Her death seemed like something we wanted to rid ourselves of quickly. Even among friends, talking briefly about it over dinner last week, I detected an aversion to the topic, as if her suicide were too sordid a thing to discuss over field greens and scallops. I knew that air well, having lost a brother to suicide 25 years ago. The topic isn’t something people want to hear much about, and I don’t blame them. But, by not talking about it, the stigma only grows.Which is why the words of Mary’s best friend yesterday on The Huffington Post struck me as brave. In a eulogy titled “Ode to My Best Friend,” Kerry Kennedy, Mary’s former sister-in-law, gave us the context in which the unthinkable could become real. She wrote:

Like millions of Americans, Mary suffered from depression. She had it for as long as I knew her, and as it reared up in high school, college and beyond, she fought it back, for a day, a week, a month. These last 6 years or more, she fought it as hard as she knew how.

But that disease was not Mary herself. She was deeply Catholic, and she was an angel. And like the archangel Michael, who battled Satan when he tried to take over Heaven, Mary fought back the demons who were trying to invade the Paradise of her very being. She fought with everything she had. And I think God said to her “Mary, you have been my warrior on the front lines for too long, you have fought valiantly, and now I am bringing you home.”

Suicide is unfathomable to people who’ve never experienced depression. And for some who are living with a terminal disease and taking all measures simply to live another day, month, or year — it can seem worse than unfathomable. It can seem unacceptable. In addition, we can’t help but be angry at a mother who would leave four children by her own hand.

But depression is a disease, like cancer, that kills. And the stigma attached to mental illness only worsens its effects. Kerry Kennedy’s brave words challenge that stigma. We should all be so lucky to have such a friend — someone who seeks to understand all that lies within us, no matter how dark.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

As soon as the show started, I realized how much I’d forgotten — the addictiveness of the band’s guitar-heavy pop, the cleverness of the band’s lyrics about love and loss and broken dreams, the coolness of their off-kilter fashion choices, and — my God! — the total, wonderful kookiness of Belinda Carlisle and bad-ass smirks of her devilish counterpart, Jane Wiedlin. Even now, all five of the band members, who are well into their fifties, sport combat boots and fishnets and sling guitars over their shoulders with wide, gleaming bands of rhinestones. When Carlisle belted out the words, “Pay no mind to what they say, in the jealous games people play,” and then fluttered barefoot around the stage like some tripped-out gypsy, all I could think was: “What’s not to love here?”I wasn’t alone. Across the theater, men, women, even children, were singing every word to every song, dancing, clapping, and waving wildly. We swayed in our seats until, at last, the people in front of us stood up and we could dance, with abandon, standing up. How had I forgotten all of this?

When I was 13 and lying on my bedroom floor, staring up at the ceiling for hours on end, it didn’t occur to me that The Go-Go’s were anything more than a catchy pop band with a subtle undercurrent of darkness — precisely what any teenager needs for whiling away the empty hours after school. I didn’t realize what music — and in particular New Wave music — meant to me. I just knew that I needed it, like air, to breathe. When the words, “This town is our town, it is so glamorous. Bet you’d live here if you could and be one of us,” blared out of my speakers, the possibility of a life bigger than the one I was living welled up inside me. Thirty years later, it’s not a feeling I have all that often, and my interest in music is nearly nonexistent.

But on Mother’s Day, with The Go-Go’s themselves whirling, stomping, strumming, and belting out hit after hit not 20 feet in front of me, I did the only thing that made sense: I danced my face off, sang every word to every song I could remember, then garbled the rest, sometimes just shouting random utterances until I could find the chorus again. It didn’t matter. Everyone around me was doing the same. And when the show was over and the lights came on, I was sweaty and exhilarated, my voice hoarse and my body spent as it had been after concerts all those years ago.

As my friends and I reluctantly left the theater, I reached into my purse to dig out my Charlie Card. Instead my hand grabbed a three-inch hunk of orange rock that my nine-year-old son had sanded down and oiled to perfect smoothness in his art class at school. He’d handed it to me in the car earlier that night, saying, almost shyly, “Here. It’s for you. For Mother’s Day.” I’d thanked him and put it in my purse and now, my ears still ringing, I gripped it as we walked to the T. I realized what had changed. Though I missed my teenage devotion to music, I no longer needed it to breathe.

And yet, here we stand a day after the news hit that Massachusetts education and health officials are banning bake sales, which they say endanger children’s health by encouraging poor eating habits. Starting August 1, bake sales will be prohibited during school hours, and the plan is to expand the law beyond the school day to include the sale of pizza, hot dogs, and candy at games and other after-school events. All of which means the bake sale is starting to look less like neutral territory and more like North Korea. How did this happen?Who among us doesn’t remember standing beside a picnic table in elementary school, eyes scanning the tin-foil-lined shoe boxes stuffed with M&M-speckled cookies, frosted cupcakes, wax-paper-wrapped popcorn balls, and fat slices of cake? In one hand we clutched a dollar bill so hard it wilted, while, with the other, we pointed to our carefully chosen confection. “I’ll have that one,” we’d pipe up to the lady behind the table, praying she’d give us a bit of change so we could afford one more. For me, the bake sale was the one time during the year that my mother gave me some money and let me decide what to do with it. And it was that freedom, even more than the treat itself, that was so sweet.

How far we’ve come. Officials are right to be concerned about childhood obesity. “Epidemic” is not too strong a word to describe a crisis in which 17 percent of American kids between the ages of 2 and 19 are obese. The prospects for their future health are chilling. One, because once you reach an unhealthy weight, it’s hard to come back down to a normal one. Two, because, as The New York Times wrote in an editorial yesterday, obesity-related diseases like Type-2 diabetes are also becoming epidemic among the young. Type-2 diabetes used to be called “adult-onset diabetes” because children didn’t get it. Now it’s increasingly common — and troubling, because youth who have it often don’t respond well to treatment, and if the disease isn’t controlled, it can lead to heart disease, stroke, blindness, amputations, and kidney failure.

But isn’t banning school bake sales a little like trying to put out a fire with a squirt gun? In my kids’ school, bake sales occur once or twice a year. Maybe lawmakers should be working harder to make broader, wholesale changes, like removing high fructose corn syrup from things like ketchup and salad dressing and increasing awareness about the perils of fast food. Then busy, working parents wouldn’t be putting foods on the table that they think are healthy only to scratch their heads when their kids tip the scales.

There are lots of reasons to keep bake sales. For one thing, they’re needed money-makers at a time when school budgets are being cut. And, unlike ketchup, at least brownies are enemies we can see — and, in theory anyway, moderate. But more than that: Haven’t we stripped enough of the fun and freedom from childhood?

Our kids don’t play outside as much as we did, they can’t go trick-or-treating without us dressing up and tagging along, and we’ve orchestrated their every waking moment so that they’re never alone or off-task. Couldn’t we let them have the simple pleasure of selecting a sweet, homemade morsel at a school bake sale a couple times a year, then savoring each bite — as they may one day wish we’d let them savor childhood?

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

Unlike aunts, say, or great-grandfathers or second-cousins once-removed, mothers, regardless of what they end up doing, can’t win in the public eye. If you decide to stay home with your kids, people may call into question the necessity of your college education, the implication being that you don’t really need post-high-school skills since all you’re really doing is eating bon-bons and watching House re-runs. If you decide to work outside the home, people might say, as someone once said to me, “Not everyone is meant to be a mother.” (Yes, really. Someone said that.) Or, maybe you’re able to work out some kind of compromise in which you spend some time at home with the kids and also pursue a career part-time, thereby ensuring a soft, steady rain of judgment from both sides.Leaving aside the eye-popping Romney riches and the way in which Hilary Rosen failed to make her otherwise cogent argument with any respect, what’s lost in all the mommy war hoopla is that one of the driving forces behind many mothers’ decisions is written in our tax code. The current system, the bulk of which was put in place in the 1930s and 40s, is biased against families with two earners. The so-called “marriage penalty” is a tax on families that have two earners, and the one who earns less is taxed at the higher rate of the spouse. But there’s more. When you factor in a social security penalty for dual-earner families — plus the high cost of childcare one has to pay after taxes — to many families, once they run the numbers, it just makes more financial sense for one parent to stay home with the kids. And it often winds up being the mother.

What’s interesting about this to me is that it shows how our “choices” really aren’t choices at all. It’s not like we sit around in some big kumbaya circle when our kids are born and plot out the kind of mothers we’re going to be. There are thousands of factors that go into making the decision about whether to don the black pantsuit and zip up the boots each morning or pack up the kids and head off to the library. Some of these factors are so big they hit you like a frying pan in the head, and some are so subtle you don’t even see them.

If we really wanted all families to be able to choose freely which road they should take — both parents working outside the home or just one — we’d need to change the tax code to level the playing field. Even then, unless you’ve walked the proverbial mile in another mom’s shoes, let’s drop the judgment about the choices she’s made.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

In past weeks, it’s been easy to shake our heads over news from area schools. At Boston University, fraternity pledges were brutally hazed earlier this week. This on the heels of sexual assault allegations against two of the university’s hockey players and the resignation of the editor of the Daily Free Press over an April Fools’ Day edition that made light of rape. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone published an exposé on fraternity culture at Dartmouth, and when readers voiced skepticism, one woman came forward to tell her story of hazing at Dartmouth that left her in a near-coma with cuts and bruises all over her body, two broken teeth, and no memory of the night. As a parent of young children, such stories leave me wondering what I can do to keep them from becoming the kind of people who think it’s fun to pour fish sauce on their friends, duct tape their wrists together, and beat them.But the story of Franco Garcia provides a potent contrast to such ugly portraits of today’s college students. Garcia was by all accounts an exemplary young man. He worked full-time at CVS as a pharmacy technician and took chemistry classes at night at Boston College. He hoped to become a doctor one day, but was also a talented clarinetist in the school’s symphony and marching band. In photographs, he has an easygoing smile, plain Dutch-boy haircut, and warm brown eyes behind glasses. In his mother’s heartbroken words yesterday: “He was a wonderful kid.”

Since he went missing in February, his extended family and friends had tried every avenue to find him, even enlisting Bruce Springsteen’s help. (Springsteen has a son at Boston College.) Sadly, the family got the news yesterday that their boy wasn’t coming home.

We don’t see enough kids like Franco Garcia in the news these days, and when we do, it’s often because of a tragedy like this one. But lest we start to think that all college students are hazing each other, blacking out, and living lives devoid of decency, we should remember that there are many more like Garcia, often putting themselves through school to achieve their goals. As his parents grieve, one hopes they know this: The public was introduced to their son after a terrible turn of events. But while his death was tragic,  his life was not. Amid the swirl of news about college students gone wrong, Franco Garcia reminded us how good a kid can be.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

“It gets more difficult every year,” says Bev Taylor, founder of The Ivy Coach, a college consulting firm based in New York. “That’s only because every year we see, not so much more students applying to colleges, but these kids are applying to 20 schools. Twelve schools was the norm about five years ago. Then it came to fifteen schools. Now the norm is outrageous.”Harvard chose its precious few from a pool of 34,302 applicants. While this pool was slightly down from last year, Harvard let fewer in overall — just 5.9 percent — which is why this year’s acceptance rate is the lowest on record.

Why did Harvard let in fewer kids? Two likely factors: the reinstatement of the single-choice early action process and — what else? — Linsanity.

First, single-choice early action. This is the process through which candidates can choose to apply to one school in the fall. If the candidate doesn’t get in, he or she is notified in December and can go on to apply during the regular cycle elsewhere. In 2006, Harvard stopped this procedure, bowing to the perception that it hurt financial aid candidates. That wasn’t true in Harvard’s case, and the college reinstated the practice this year. All of which means by the time the regular applicants arrived in January, 772 students had already been accepted.

According to Taylor, “When you consider the admit rate for those accepted under regular decision, including the 2,838 early action candidates who were deferred, the regular decision rate was actually 3.8 percent.” (Cue the screams.) Not to overcrunch the numbers, but if you really, really wanted to get into Harvard, applying in the fall would have increased your chances substantially — to an 18.2 percent acceptance rate.

Because Harvard realizes that most of those early-action kids will say yes, the school had to be more conservative with its general acceptance this spring, putting more kids in the dreaded limbo of the waiting list than in the past. And this is where Linsanity comes in. Harvard said it offered spots to 100 fewer applicants this year than last year, in part because the school anticipates a high yield, which basically is college-admissions speak for lots of yesses. Both Linsanity and the Harvard basketball team’s appearance in the NCAA tournament, its first since 1946, put the school on people’s radar in a whole new way, potentially upping this year’s yield.

“All that great publicity got kids to think of Harvard as if it were a Big Ten school,” adds Taylor.

But while the school itself may suddenly appear more well-rounded, the students who got in sure aren’t. “The well-rounded kid does not make it into Harvard,” says Taylor. “It’s the angular kid, the talented kid in one specific area that’s going to make it.” They also happen to test off the charts, but so do a lot of kids who don’t get in. According to one article:

[Harvard Dean of Admissions William] Fitzsimmons added that more than 14,000 applicants boasted scores of 700 or higher (out of 800) on the SAT critical reading test, 17,000 applicants had scores of 700 or higher on the SAT math test and 15,000 scored a 700 or higher on the SAT writing test. Plus, 3,800 applicants were ranked first in their high school classes.

That’s a lot of high achievers who didn’t make the cut. I was reminded of Globe columnist David Nyhan’s popular column on college rejection, first published in 1987 (back when I was a sophomore in college). In it, he writes to all the kids who’ve just gotten rejected from the college of their choice. It’s interesting to read now, as researchers are zeroing in on the importance of resilience in life and learning. Clearly, Nyhan was onto something.

But his words, about disappointment and picking yourself up, are also a great counterbalance to the craziness of college admissions that we now find ourselves in. I imagine if he were still alive, he’d write the same thing. Here’s a taste:

They can look at your grades and weigh your scores and see how many years you were in French Club. But they can’t look into your head, or into your heart. They can’t check out the guts department.

This is the important thing: They didn’t reject you. They rejected your resume. They gave some other kid the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that kid deserved a break. Don’t you deserve a break? Sure. You’ll get one. Maybe this is the reality check you needed. Maybe the school that does take you will be good. Maybe this is the day you start to grow up.

Amen.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

And yet, last month George Zimmerman, a 200-pound, white Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla., saw fit to shoot him in the chest as he was walking home from the store with an Arizona Iced Tea and a bag of Skittles. After Zimmerman reported a “suspicious” person to a 911 operator, the operator told him to leave the boy alone until the actual police showed up. Zimmerman responded, “They always get away,” and continued pursuit. A subsequent 911 call from a neighbor captured screams, then a gunshot ending Martin’s life. Now, on the tail of the Department of Justice announcing its investigation and President Obama saying, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon,” Zimmerman is claiming through a lawyer that Martin attacked him.One can’t help but wonder why this news is coming out a month after the fact — and where the details, photographs, and eyewitnesses are. It’s also easy to see a scenario in which Martin felt threatened as he was being followed; perhaps the teen was the one who felt, in essence, that he had to “stand his ground.” Time — and the courts — may answer these questions. But one thing is clear: A black teen is dead at the hands of someone who was charged with protecting people. A family has lost a beloved son and brother. There’s a reason people are outraged; Trayvon Martin’s story, of a black male tagged as suspicious because of his race, is a story we are tired of hearing.

We talk a lot these days about our modern-day helicopter parenting culture, teasing out questions like how old your kid should be before you let him walk to the store alone. But if your child is African-American, you bear a level of worry that many white parents can’t fathom. Since Martin was killed, many black parents have written about teaching their children the unofficial code of conduct they must follow in order to protect themselves from tragedies like this one. You can read these heartbreaking tales here, here, and here.

Last year, when I wrote about the death of another young African-American man — DJ Henry — at the hands of a white police officer, a close friend of the Henry family, Cambridge police officer Douglas Murrell, recalled his instructions to DJ if he ever got pulled over by the cops. “I always told him you just sit there, answer the questions, and you ‘Yes, sir’ them to death,” he said. “You just be polite. Because that’s the kind of situation you can run into, especially being a black child.”

On the night DJ Henry died, a police officer tapped on the window of his car as he sat waiting for friends in the fire lane of a shopping plaza. DJ Henry did not “Yes, sir” that officer — or the one who killed him — to death. Instead, he began moving his car from the fire lane, as he presumably thought the officer wanted him to do. It was then that another officer fired four shots through the windshield, wounding DJ’s friend and killing DJ.

DJ’s mother, Angella, once told me that one of the things she misses most about her son is that he would let her “groom him and pick at him.” I knew instantly what she meant. What mother doesn’t revel in physical connection to her children — in holding their small, soft bodies as babies, taking their hands as toddlers and their embraces through grade school, then marveling as they emerge in adolescence on their own strong legs. Sometimes, while holding my own two-year-old daughter, I close my eyes, dip my nose into her soft blond hair and inhale. She smells of earth and soap and something I can only describe as animal, and I want to hold her there, safe and small, forever. I know I can’t do that, but I also know that I don’t have to teach my white children a code of conduct for survival because of their race. Imagine the difference between a life that bears that burden and one that doesn’t.

Angella Henry told me that since she lost her son, every part of her hurts. She wrote, “Everyday is a struggle for us and often we ask, ‘How did we get here?’ DJ was a wonderful, loving, respectable, giving, faithful, obedient young man and someone took all of that from us. You can’t describe the pain.”

I wish for the Henry’s, for Trayvon Martin’s family — for all of us — that she didn’t have to try.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

Last week, Boston Public Schools joined other public school districts across the country when it decided to ban the unappetizing mixture from its school lunch program after Houston resident Bettina Siegel, who blogs about kids and food at The Lunch Tray, started an online petition, which went viral. This is good news for parents who aren’t comfortable having their kids eat a food product that is more product than food. But it also got me wondering what other misbegotten concoctions have we been ladling onto kids’ lunch trays all these years? I decided to ask a few experts what they would ban, in school or out, from kids’ diets. Here’s what they said:Aviva Goldfarb is a family dinner expert, author and founder of The Six O’Clock Scramble, which helps busy parents plan and execute simple, nutritious meals for their families.

“Canned fruits in syrup,” she says. “Besides concerns about potentially toxic BPA in the cans’ lining, these fruits are way too high in added sugar. And those ‘fruit’ gummies — essentially candy that some parents and kids think has nutritional value but doesn’t. It’s terrible for kids’ teeth and braces and takes up calories that should be devoted to better nutrition. And Jell-O, which is not only empty calories but full of artificial colors and flavors that are potentially harmful.”

In essence, Goldfarb says, she’d like to see “more fresh fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, more low-fat dairy, and less sugar.” For a glimpse of what that might look like, check out what’s happening out in Boulder, Colo., where salad bars have been installed in all public schools.

Chef Ann Cooper, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady, who led the Boulder salad bar movement and aims to do it across the nation through two organizations: The Lunch Box and SaladBars2Schools. Cooper said that, rather than listing specific items to remove from menus, she’d like to take on the elephant in the lunch room.

“What this whole thing with pink slime brings to mind is processed mystery meat in general,” she says. “Some schools have these spicy chicken patties or what they call ‘riblets,’ which is processed pork made into the shape of a rib. If you look at the ingredient labels for these processed meats, there are 50 things on them. What I think we should ask is, ‘What is all this processed food?’ Let’s take a look at the labels. There are often so many items in there that you wouldn’t even want to know what it is.”

Kate Adamick is co-founder of Cook for America, which hosts culinary boot camps for school food service personnel to teach them how to revamp the way their lunch programs are planned and executed. Adamick also has her eye on chicken nuggets, saying, “The manufacturing process for nuggets isn’t terribly different from the processing of pink slime beef.”

In her book, Lunch Money: Serving Healthy School Food in a Sick Economy, which dispels the myth that scratch-cooked school meals cost more money, she says school lunches should not resemble the offerings at a professional sporting event:

“School is not a once-a-year outing to a big league sporting event. Your child doesn’t need to choose among hot dogs, burgers, pizza, and nachos every day. Only one of those items should be available at a time, and not more than once or twice a month for each.”

Given the flood of research tying our children’s unhealthy eating and exercise habits to the obesity epidemic and diet-related illness, these lunch reformers’ calls to arms sound like words to live by — perhaps literally.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com

So, while others have been carping about the video itself, I was happy to hear that 100 million viewers, many of them young people, had at least taken half an hour from their busy lives to learn about a brutal leader and the horrible things he’s done.Sure, the video is slick and manipulative. As others have pointed out, it’s also an oversimplified version of historical events. And, the director’s use of his cherubic, towheaded son to draw us into the story smacks of a form of abuse I call Parental YouTube Coercion Disorder. Further, contrasting the white boy and his father with the black Africans in need of saving has many crying colonialism. But let’s consider the alternatives.

There’s no end to the crap our children can ingest on the web, some of it mind-numbing and inhumane. So what if a kid spends 30 minutes learning about a violent regime in a country he knows nothing about? What if that video moves a viewer in some way to think beyond his own small world?

As a woman who recently did her best to bring down Rush Limbaugh by tweeting while making dinner for her family, I understand the excitement that comes over you when you feel you’re part of something bigger than yourself — in my case, getting Sleep Train to stop advertising on Clear Channel. You think: Maybe someone actually cares.

I’m all for fact-checking the video, critiquing the way the story was told, and checking out the Invisible Children organization itself. But you have to admit that watching the thing beats the heck out of what most of us were doing on our off-hours as teenagers in the 1980s.

The other night I was struck by how much the world had changed in a generation. I was telling my nine- and six-year-old kids that I was once grounded for a week when I was in high school. (Unjustly, I might add.)

My son looked down from his top bunk and said, “What does ‘grounded’ mean — that you couldn’t use the computer?”

I laughed, harkening back to all those quiet weeknights I spent at home in high school, feeling trapped and alone in my small town.

“We didn’t have computers then,” I said. They looked at me as if I’d just flown in on a Pteradactyl. Even I was stunned by the statement. A wave of nostalgia came over me. Was life better then?

No, I thought, just different. I thought of the opportunities awaiting my kids, the way the world has opened up. Just recently my daughter said she wanted to know more about Nelson Mandela. She’s six. We went online and Googled him.

Originally published on Bostonmagazine.com