Words matter. These are the best Sandra Tsing Loh Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely ‘decent’ schools, the ones that are simply ‘fine.’
When husbands and wives not only co-work but try to co-homemake, as post-feminist and well-intentioned as it is, out goes the clear delineation of spheres, out goes the calm of unquestioned authority, and of course, out goes the gratitude.
I think that in L.A., one thing that nobody will ever talk about is, for instance, how just one in five kids in L.A. County is white, so when you’re looking out there, it’s a very brown city.
Life at the top may be privileged, but it is not simple.
I eye ‘Modern Love’ warily between that second and third cup of coffee on Sunday mornings, calculating how much of a push I need to get through the day’s unhurriedly earnest saga of heartbreak and recovery.
The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You’re sleepless, you’re anxious, you’re fat, you’re depressed – and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn’t help.
It is during fertility that a female loses herself and enters that cloud overly rich in estrogen.
In the ‘Mad Men’ era, the archetypal dad came home; put down his briefcase; received pipe, Manhattan, roast beef, potatoes, key-lime pie; and was – apparently – content.
Things need shaking up when American women feel endangered even as Yosemite bears lumber around belching, their eyes glazed with surfeit, their pelts covered in Oreo crumbs.
I agree that mommy wars are not good for any mothers: that such wars are time and effort wasted.
In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson.
In the end, we all want a wife. But the home has become increasingly invaded by the ethos of work, work, work, with twin sets of external clocks imposed on a household’s natural rhythms.
I think private school is much better at customer service and making the parents feel better, especially in Los Angeles. It’s almost like a spa for the parents where you drop your kids off, where they give you a beautifully baked thing and let the parents write their own newsletter about global warming.
My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that’s blended a certain way from Costa Rica.
Oddly, in this age of the blinding white Oprah pantsuit, when everything is illuminated, it seems a Victorian lace curtain still hangs over the delicate womanly matter of our personal expenditures.
The very success of the modern American family – where kids get punctually to SAT-tutoring classes, the mortgage gets paid, the second-story remodel stays on budget – surely depends on spouses’ not being in love.
We women make the lion’s share of household purchases in this country. We ourselves drive billions of dollars a year in sales.
I am a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol.
Having blown up my own long-term marriage via an extramarital affair, followed by a traumatic divorce, I tend to think of love as less a gently glowing hearth than a set of flaming train tracks you strap yourself onto.
Journalists are quite surprised outside their dinner parties when they hear where I live. ‘Van Nuys? You still live there?’ It is like saying you’re from Alabama.
Menopause is your return to where you were before, when your hormone levels are the same as a pre-adolescent girl’s.
There’s an image that some of us have of Jackie Onassis, stepping out in the rain, and Maurice Tempelsman is holding her umbrella. We want that man. We want the man to be the concierge and the masseur and the travel booker.
In 1900, the average life expectancy of a US citizen was 48, so most menopausal women were dead, which is not a great place to be.
I find I’m the sort of harried working mother who has difficulty scheduling in a bit of rest amid the Ptolemaically complicated interlocking gears of professional and personal life.
I will never do Pilates. I walk.
Some of us stay married because we’re in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage.
I admit to a bias toward high culture.
While having two biological parents at home is, the statistics tell us, best for children, a single-parent household is almost as good.
Yes, I was one of the slightly vintage women who let out a shriek when we saw it at Costco: ‘The Nancy Drew Mystery Stories’, a complete boxed set, fifty-six familiar yellow spines, shrink-wrapped.
Struggling with my finances, nudging toward 50, I sometimes daydream about being happily married to a matching frugaholic husband in a matching Christmas-red tracksuit with matching walkie-talkies as we troll Ralphs, excitedly comparing triple coupons.
I really don’t think our school system is an evil borg force. It’s sort of like the government. It’s not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.
Whether you wish to chant ‘Our houses, our selves’ or ‘We have houses, hear us roar,’ for us women, home is where the heart is.
When I think of Chinese parents, I think of people who weep upon hearing Beethoven, but who can’t necessarily bring that joy to others.
I am a member of the ‘sandwich’ generation, that group that must simultaneously care for elderly parents and support children.
I’m pretty sure that changing diapers of all sizes isn’t the kind of women’s work Betty Friedan had in mind, nor Linda Hirshman.
With more women in power, the world would be better off.
Although my life is far from perfect, the irony is that in a divorced parent’s custody schedule – with days on and days off – instead of like it was before, when I felt ragged and still oddly guilty all the time, now I feel guilty but not ragged.
You go into the book store, there’s the cut-out of Dr. Phil, and then the dreaded women’s health section where every book, instead of the menopause book with the fanged Medusa head on the cover that might be more pertinent, you always see a flower and a poppy and a daisy and a stethoscope.
Approaching 50, I am living a life that is less sunlit Waldman/Chabon than tattered Charles Bukowski.
In Los Angeles, we’ve seen a phenomenon where a school will go from one that no one will go to, to within three years becoming the ‘hot’ school. I’ve seen this over and over again.
My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not ‘fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don’t know where their next dime is coming from.
Typically, middle-class educated parents’ search for their children’s schools takes on the feel, if not of teen girls trying on different outfits, of adolescents trying on various selves.
I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she’s living with – first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner.
Work… family – I’m doing it all. But here’s the secret I share with so many other nanny- and housekeeper-less mothers I see working the same balance: my house is trashed. It is strewn with socks and tutus.