Haters Gonna Hate

I chuckled looking at the computer screen, nearly choking on my first cup of coffee.  Was that the best they could do? This week our town held its annual budget vote.  In our tiny New England town, the residents have to approve the spending plan each and every year at the polls.  It’s called an [...]

How Did This Happen?

Bizarre. There are days that I can’t believe this is my life…today feels like one of them.  I am killing time before my morning PTO meeting at the middle school.  I’m going there as a member of the “Executive Board” which sounds impressive but basically means that I’ve branded myself as a sucker that can [...]

Visiting A Sick Friend

“You look so great!” Kelly enthused, the pitch of her voice rising so artificially high that I cringed. She had turned on her personal brand of “hospital charm”, the same charm I’d used all during my mother’s illness and when I visited my ex’s father in the hospital after serious open heart surgery.  I had [...]

Drinking Alone

I was sitting alone, on the sofa that Thursday night in November.  It was quiet save for the sound of the television in front of me and the occasional clink of my wine glass on the table as I lifted it and placed it back down.  I hadn’t eaten dinner, but the plate of chocolate [...]

Lock, Stock and Veiled Threats

I stared at the second page of our local paper in disbelief.  There it was, my name, my full name.  Not mentioned in an article about how the four of us had gone to an information session to learn how to be a good board of education member, or how we’d met with the chair [...]

Worried

“I’m tired,” Tom said sheepishly, sitting down as the crowd at the local senior center dwindled. My girlfriends and I had been invited by our first selectman to join him for a campaign appearance at the town senior center; this was a tough crowd for anyone running for our local board of education.  Since we [...]

Welcome to Politics

“What the hell is this?” I said into the phone while simultaneously scanning the news story online.  I wasn’t exactly used to seeing my name in the news, though it had happened several times through my education advocacy work.  But this, this was different. It was September, and my three girlfriends and I were running [...]

The Price of Winning

We stood around the kitchen island, toasting our victory in this year’s budget battle. It had been hard fought.  We’d had two elections where the votes came within several hundred votes, but we still had been unable to convince voters that a small tax increase was better than the cuts that were inevitable if the [...]

Philosophical Differences

“What the heck is this?” I said, handing over our town’s local paper to the person sitting next to me. We were at our First Selectman’s home on a Saturday morning in April.  He’d invited my group of education advocates over plus a few of his political allies in town to discuss the budget defeat [...]

The Taste of Victory

“I can’t fucking believe it!” were the words of our illustrious First Selectman on the night of the second budget vote in April, 2008. We were standing in the small 1970s era hallway that led to the Town Clerk’s office on the night of the vote.  Those of us who had spent the last two [...]