Lasts
Friday marked my final appearance as snack mom at any nursery school, anywhere, ever again. I got very sentimental, even though I had spent the entire year attempting to avoid the job the way a medieval peasant might well have tried to avoid catching the plague. I read Rockabye Crocodile to the assembled masses and sniffed a lot. When school starts in the fall, it will be the first time in nine years I won’t have a baby at home or a child attending a limited hour’s nursery school.
I came home and signed on to The New York Times to discover that both the both the price of oil and the unemployment rate had surged. Another story announced massive job cuts (and probable newspaper destroying cuts) by a former employer. I sniffed more, suspecting that many of the things I’ve considered great problems over the past several years will, in retrospect, feel like very frivolous and luxurious things to have spent any time worrying about at all.
2 Responses to “Lasts”
About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
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My son (has aspergers) had was nearly 9 lbs. I was 37 my husband was 40. BUT I was diabetic and high risk and had 2-3 songrams a month, it makes me wonder what role sonograms play in autism.
I’ve heard people express concern about the role of sonograms in the Aspergers/Autism epidemic too. I think all of these things really need to be looked at. I think the age/fertility issue is particularly hard to discuss, because it really calls into question the way we live now.