Bread and Bread

Last week, Dash turned one. The time has gone as fast as everyone promised it would. I spent four and a half years desperately wanting a baby, and then all of a sudden I had one, and now all of a sudden I don’t. I’ll wean myself from the word slowly, as Dash weans from his bottle. Not a baby. A tiny bear. Possibly a sheep. I always thought of parenthood as some special club, where people exchanged knowing glances, but the only real club is humanity, cliché as that sounds. Yesterday I listened to Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond interview Kate Bolick, the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, as part of Dear Sugar ’ s response to the many letters they get from women—smart, independent, thoughtful, feminist women—who are despairing that they’ll ever find the love of their life. What's she looking for in that tea cup? Not a man! Bolick said that she was a serial monogamist when she was younger, and then decided she wanted to be on her own for a while so she c...

When my sister arrived to babysit Saturday night, I told her that AK, Andrew and I were going to see a movie I described “kind of like a Bosnian Virgin Suicides , I think.” I came up with that tactful description based on the trailer for Mustang —because I’d seen some white-looking Muslims and bored-looking teenage girls trapped at home. The movie is Turkish—in fact a completely different country than Bosnia!—but there are some Virgin Suicides parallels. No suicides for these sisters. Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale are a pack of sisters ranging in age from about ten to seventeen. They all have long, untamed brown hair, and they spend their days wandering the fields and beaches of their small town. Lale, the narrator and the youngest of the girls, tells us that it all changed in the blink of an eye, on a day when they play a game of chicken with some schoolboys in the surf and steal apples from a farmer who threatens them with a shotgun. When they get home, they’re in troubl...