I always sort of assumed that people were talking about me and my daughter (“Did you know that little M. is really a boy?”), but I’d never had any proof of this until yesterday.  And now that I do, I wish I didn’t. SCENE:  Little Isabella’s fifth birthday party, held at one of those massive…

This was the first full week of kindergarten for M., and it’s getting hard sooner than I had expected. At the beginning of the week, I got an email from M.’s teacher, with a request to all the parents: One tradition in K-1 is to launch the year with a celebration of each community member.…

M. started kindergarten last week.  At pick-up time, I stood in the hallway outside her classroom, exchanging introductions with the other anxious parents as we waited for our children to emerge from the very first day of their school careers.  Like them, I badly wanted it to have gone well, as if this one day…