Posts from the ‘Thinking Out Loud’ Category

Allergies, Naturally

Written by Amanda Levitt, ND

Flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and spring is in the air.  For many, the changing seasons mean allergies symptoms.  Are you one of the forty to fifty million Americans that suffer from allergies?  It is estimated that allergies affects between 10% and 30% of all adults and as many as 40% of children.  Symptoms may occur at specific times of the year, like spring and fall, or be present year round.

The membranes that line our nasal and bronchial passages contain immune cells called mast cells.  These cells respond to allergic triggers by releasing histamine and other chemical mediators that stimulate a cascade of reactions that result in allergic symptoms such as; post nasal drip, dark circles under eyes, (allergic shiners), itchy eyes, throat, and /or ears, sneezing, sinus pressure, runny nose, fatigue,  and swelling of the bronchial membranes which can exacerbate asthma. Read more

Strange Days

Written by Aviva Luria

A few days ago I got an e-mail message from a friend, who lives in another city, saying her son is being bullied at school. Now she is in the throes of trying to find a new school for him while wrangling with the former school, which denies there has been any bullying.

I don’t know a whole lot about the situation—I’m not sure how long it’s being going on, how she found out, or what the bullying entailed. We’ll catch up at some point, but for the time being I sent an expression of my concern and support and will wait until she’s ready to talk about it.

In addition to the news being upsetting, it was strange timing. That same morning, Jonah, my five-year-old son, had asked about a boy who was in his pre-school class last year. At the time, Jonah had complained about Harris (not his real name); he would tell me Harris had pushed him or had told Jonah he didn’t like him. Even after Harris’s birthday party (to which the entire class was invited), Jonah complained that Harris had been mean to him.

I talked to Jonah about it at the time, but to be honest, it was a little difficult to ascertain what, exactly, was going on between them. First off, Read more

Diary of a Working Mom

It’s only just started to hit me.

Long before I went back to work, I never identified with being a working mom even though I had already been spending countless hours working every night on kidHaven.  Even when kidHaven started to trickle into the daytime hours, my “stay at home hours”, I treated it more as a hobby than work.  I think a lot of me has always associated “working” with bringing home the bacon and since I was only bringing home a slice every now and again, kidHaven was as I always described it – my connection to the outside world.  For my extroverted self it was a critical connection, but it was never work.  Another reason is that everything in my life was in balance.  Nothing felt like a juggle, which for whatever reason is how I’ve always thought it must feel like to be a working mom.  However inaccurate that assumption was, it’s what I believed.

But then I was driving home the other day.  I was coming home from work, my new, real deal, daytime job.  The sun was down.  My husband had already picked up the kids.  I walked through the door having not seen my kids all day.  I walked into the kitchen and realized my uber-organized self hadn’t planned for dinner.  The kids were hungry and crashing.  Shoot, I was hungry and crashing.  In that moment, the only word that came to mind was overwhelmed.  It was the straw. Read more

Fictional Me

Written by Aviva Luria

One question that comes up often when writing a personal blog is just how personal to get. Before embarking on Old Mom, Young Child, I debated (for instance) whether to refer to my child by his real name, his first initial, or a pseudonym. I settled on the last, both in respect of his privacy and to offer him a little protection, because, well, you never know.

How much of my personal life should I share to make this blog “authentic”? I wonder about this regularly. On the one hand, I’d like to have the cajones to just lay it all on the table (so to speak), but on the other, that seems like a truly boneheaded thing to do. Especially in this day and age when you can’t take stuff back: You never know where in cyberspace your shit is floating around.  Uh… so to speak.

A friend, whom I’ll call Sue Collins, left Facebook for privacy reasons. She was afraid the opinions and affiliations she disclosed might one day come back to haunt her. I told her, C’mon. Your name is Sue Collins. If one day somebody confronts you with something you wrote you can claim it was one of the other 63,452 Sue Collinses on Facebook.

Moi, last I checked I was the only Aviva Luria on Facebook. (There is an Aviv Luria, though. He’s a young Israeli.) Still, without being a complete moron about it (“Going on vacation. Door unlocked. I’m sure no one will steal the heirloom jewelry”) I make my posts available only to my Facebook friends and state my opinions pretty freely. I’m sure I piss even my friends off at times, but I truly consider airing my opinionated opinions on Facebook an expression of free speech. If someone decides not to hire me one day because I stated that Rick Perry is an ass (which is a fact, not an opinion), then they’ve saved me the misery of working for someone who doesn’t think Rick Perry is an ass. And that can only be a good thing.

But back to the question at hand, which is, in case you’re wondering, What is “authentic,” anyway? It’s not just an issue of what makes a blog, or a memoir, or novel, film or whatever else authentic, but what makes a person authentic? How can we tell if we, ourselves, are authentic in everyday life, or with our partners, or children? Read more