My ex-boss scared the hell out of me when I told her I wanted to go freelance. She was the editor-in-chief of a high-profile national magazine, but she’d done a six-month stint as a freelancer. “I never got anything done,” she said. “I’d wake up, read the news, go out and buy a chicken to cook for dinner, and suddenly I’d realize it’s 6pm.”
This was my worst nightmare of how freelance life could go if I let it.
Read MoreI just watched the episode of "Louie" where Louis C.K. gets an annual checkup from his old high school friend (played by Ricky Gervais), who's now a doctor. Gervais jokingly insults his physique, tells him he has the worst penis he’s ever seen, says "you don't need a doctor, you need a time machine," and jiggles his man-breasts: "Did no one tell you that tits are meant to be on women, not men?” Louis mutters under his breath: "I can't believe you're a doctor."
That’s pretty much how I felt when I went to see the new genetic counselor that my OBGYN sent me to, after confirming that I was in fact pregnant. The cheerful genetic counselor who'd been there for my first baby had since left and been replaced by another seemingly perky young hipster (let's call her Gen), who turned out to be anything but perky.
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The first time I was forced to care about school supplies, Trapper Keepers were a thing. This was back in the early '80s, the dawn of the cool-binder era in American history, and the Ocean Pacific-wearing kids who bought the first wave of Trapper Keepers are no doubt busy stocking up on Oculus Rifts for their teens right about now. For reasons no longer accessible to memory, I never owned a Trapper Keeper myself, but damn if I didn't covet one.Fast-forward a few decades later, and I'm school-supply-shopping again, this time for my four-year-old, who starts preK this week. The challenge this time is, sadly, not as simple and human as envying a classmate's glistening, unicorn-festooned binder. It's that I have no idea what the hell the stuff on the school supply list even means.
Read MoreAfter a jammed summer of juggling work deadlines and trying keeping the kids sane and squeezing in desperately needed vacation time, while attempting to get a decent night's sleep on occasion, and call up a friend, and try not to totally lose my mind—in other words, the usual—I only had about 0.3 percent of my brainspace left to care about the total eclipse of the sun. Granted, here in New York we got just a partial eclipse, but still, it was a fairly big deal. A bigger deal, cosmically speaking, than finally climbing off the waitlist at the PreK program we were gritting our teeth to get into. I was vaguely looking forward to seeing what this whole eclipse business was all about, but it wasn't exactly top of mind. Until two things happened:
Read MoreStarting a family at “advanced maternal age”? Hate that term as much as we do?
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We’ve said it before but here we go again: Women and men know surprisingly little about how our bodies work, procreatively speaking, beyond the basics. Along the way we tend to pick up a few more clues than we got in our first awkward parent or sibling-led convo about the birds and bees . But not that many more clues.
Unless we’re medical professionals or biologists, chances are we’re out of luck.
As one study pointed out, less than half of American women and even fewer men who recently graduated from college have any concept of when fertility might start to decline. Shocking? Yes. It should be.
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