Irish Daisy

With everything going on in the world right now, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where we are and what we have. The whole concept of Thanksgiving has never been more apt, or more poignant. With bombs and guns and dead children washing up on strange shores, and petty arguments dominating our headlines at home...and we’re going to pause for a moment to gorge ourselves on food, accompanied by shitty debates with our, um, difficult family members, followed by gorging ourselves on the ugliest orgy of retail excess you can imagine, as we gouge each other in the eye to get to the last super-discounted game system in the store. It's all fairly depressing, really. Thankful for Autumn decorations & the house to put them in I’ve been watching the news – the worrisome, tragic and trivial – and I’ve been looking around. We have so much to be thankful for. So much with which we are blessed. So many riches we forget to see or appreciate or pause to really be grateful for. ...

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Really, it’s not. This is not the lament of a parent with a hormonal teenager, or a dirge about girls and emerging PMS, or a cautionary tale about how my once sweet daughter became an actual fire-breathing dragon because…HORMONES! No, it's not about any of that at all...it's actually a whole lot worse. Puberty Sucks Large I went through puberty, and it sucked, but wrapped up in my own hormonal shitstorm I wasn’t able to put my finger on exactly why it was so terrible and soul-sucking. 26 years later, I have a ring-side seat to Quokka’s voyage and, yes Martha, it still sucks. There has been tons of research about what happens to girls in our culture during puberty – in a nutshell, their self esteem and confidence plummet. Feisty, kick-ass little girls, shrink down into pretty paper-dolls, a two-dimensional copy of their younger self. Theories about why this happens focus on the cultural pressures that assault a girl and undermine her en...