Tag Archives: school

The Last Good-bye

Sophie looked around her daughter’s empty room and her eyes filled with tears. She had just returned from taking Gloria to her college dormitory and the two of them had put up some of Gloria’s posters on the wall nearest the bed to give it a familiar feeling. They were running out of things to do. All that was left was to put Gloria’s clothing in the tiny closet and in the two dresser drawers that were assigned to her. …

Keeping Your Maiden Name

In my generation, it was a given that if you got married, you took on your husband’s name. If Mary Jones married John Smith, Mary Jones dropped her maiden name and took on her husband’s last name and Mary Jones became Mary Smith or Mrs. Mary Smith. Many of these women chose to omit their own name completely and took on the full name of their husband so that every legal document was signed Mrs. John Smith. Then, for a …

Wishing Your Life Away

When I was young, my mother used to tell me that I was wishing my life away because I always wanted to be older. It wasn’t just that I wanted to be older, I wanted the privileges that went along with being older. When I was twelve, I wanted to be thirteen so that I could be a teenager. When I was a teenager, I wanted to be twenty-one so that I could get a driver’s license and vote. During …

How the Mighty Have Fallen

We used to be number one in almost everything but, over the last couple of decades, America has been losing the competitive edge after so many years of being on top. We saw it in the schools when the byword was that it’s more important that students should feel good about themselves than learn useless information in their classes. I’ve spoken to teachers from the elementary school grades up through college level and they are all saying the same thing. …

A Helping Hand vs. a Handout

I keep hearing complaints about people feeling entitled to living the good life but unwilling to work for it but, from where I’m sitting, I see these same people contributing to that sense of entitlement that’s permeating our society. On the one hand, it’s understandable that you want to give your children more than you had, but on the other hand, if you do that, you will probably be contributing to their sense of entitlement. I was just talking to …

The Modern American Woman

We tend to think of women in this country as having all kinds of educational opportunities and all kinds of career opportunities. But is this really true? The majority of women have jobs; a small percentage of women have flourishing careers. It’s not necessarily that women don’t want more, that they don’t want brilliant careers, it’s more that they don’t know how to achieve those goals. They don’t know how to take those first baby steps. There are certainly more …

The Right Career Path

One of the scariest things is not knowing whether you’re on the right career path. After years and years of studying for a career, you suddenly discover that you don’t even like the profession and you’re only a year away from graduation. Many people go into careers because it’s expected of them. Everyone in the family is a doctor or a lawyer, so junior must be one, too. It doesn’t even matter whether he loves the field; the expectation is …

Surviving the High School Years

High school was not a happy time for me. I was painfully shy and always felt as though I was on the outside looking in. I knew that I would love college but I also knew that I just had to get through high school as quickly as I could. Toward that end, I went to school every semester, summer, winter, spring, and fall, with no breaks in between. It was during this time that I became aware of the …

The Starter Wife

A number of years ago, I heard the term “starter wife.” The definition was “The woman you meet and marry while at university or in training who helps put you through school, has your children, and runs your home and contributes financially while your career is being established, and then when you have made it career-wise, you ditch her for a younger, fresher version who coos over you and worships you.” While the terminology was newer, the concept certainly wasn’t. …

Marrying for Money

We’ve all heard stories about mothers telling their daughters that it’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man and that money lasts longer than love. And then came the Feminist Movement and, for the last sixty years, women have been learning to support themselves and not depend on men to take care of their financial needs. But, now things are changing again. Whereas over the last half a century, women had been …

Connie H. Deutsch