Author: Jeannine Ouellette

When you get to a certain age, you realize it’s time to prioritize your to-do list. Not to discount her enthusiasm, but I think Ms. Routson exaggerated in my fifth-grade yearbook when she wrote, “Teacher, writer, astronaut, president—you can do it all!” The truth is, the moon and the White House are not the only…

When I was in the throes of young motherhood, raising three little kids and editing a parenting magazine from home, I signed up for a bunch of email groups for moms. I wanted to tune into what parents were talking about and arguing about. I wanted to know which issues packed the most punch among…

Renowned author Judith Guest talks about “the terror of chance,” taking what you want, and falling in love with your characters. I can vividly recall my first reading of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People twenty years ago, in the bleak midwinter of my sophomore year of high school. When the book’s main character—the mortally depressed teenager,…

Labor Day weekend marked the end of Wack the Iraq, a boardwalk game in the seaside town of Wildwood, New Jersey. (Its inventors must have assumed that customers untroubled by the game’s objective would also be unlikely to bristle at the gross grammatical insult of its name.) The game involved players shooting paintballs at live…

It won’t be long now. September’s weight presses in on my teacher bones, and there’s only one way to stave it off and prepare for the shock of going back to school: Take a road trip of several thousand miles with five kids. So here we are in Mackinaw City, Michigan, where sturdy-looking Midwestern families…

In a sweet little house several miles south of mine, a girl named Esmé keeps a box on her dresser. In the box is a collection of necklaces—a painted chime ball, Thor’s hammer, a polished unity stone, and her favorite, a sterling angel. These are all trinkets I’ve given her over the years that I’ve…