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    Blog Posts by Chefdruck

    • 100 words or less: Motherhood

      By Chefdruck | Yahoo Motherboard – Sun, May 8, 2011 7:47 PM EDT

      Mother's Day Sunshine PoemMother's Day Sunshine PoemHappy Mother's Day to mothers everywhere! Whether you're celebrating your first mother's day with a tiny newborn, or Skyping with grandchildren around the world, motherhood is a bond we all share, regardless of age, language and culture.

      When I gave birth to my first child nine years ago, I was just anxious to meet her and to hold her safely in my arms. I didn't realize that I would be joining a special club, uniting women around the world with a common bond.

      When a woman becomes a mother, she becomes much more than a mom, she takes on close to a hundred job titles.

      A mom is ...

      • a banisher of bad dreams,
      • a nurse,
      • the perfect cushion for sleepy heads,
      • a short order cook,
      • an expert blanket tucker,
      • a snack machine,
      • an impartial judge,
      • an evil dictator,
      • a wish granter,
      • a lie detector,
      • an inspiration for leaps of faith,
      • a prison guard,
      • a storyteller,
      • a teacher,
      • someone you can trust with your
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    • User Post: Passing on a Legacy of Fear

      By Chefdruck | Yahoo Motherboard – Sun, Jan 16, 2011 8:34 PM EST

      Before I had kids I thought a lot about what I would pass on to them. Would they have my eyes? Their father 's drive? Or their grandmother's artistic sense? Would they love to travel? To eat? Would they get cancer?

      I never thought that my legacy would be fear. When I was a little girl, when I was old enough to ride a bike without training wheels, but long before I ever struggled into skinny jeans with zippers at the bottom, I was terrified that the Germans would come again. We were still living in France, and spent many weekends at my grandmother's house in the village my mother grew up in the Loire Valley. During the day, I would sit with my grandmother or my aunts, peppering them with questions about living through the German occupation. My mom's oldest sister was a toddler at the time, but the tales of the German soldiers who had taken over the family home were part of our family lore. I couldn't get enough of the stories about being forced to co-habitate with German officers or my

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    • Too Scared to Fight Like a Girl?

      By Chefdruck | Yahoo Motherboard – Sun, Oct 31, 2010 7:54 PM EDT

      I've seen breast cancer try to beat generations of women in my family. My mother. Two of her sisters. My grandmother. All were robbed of some or all of their breasts. All faced their mortality much too early, and came out fighting. All of them beat cancer by fighting it tooth and nail, fighting like girls. Last night I read a post on Stacy's blog about the strength of women as they fight breast cancer. And it's true. We are strong. We do fight like girls.

      But even as I applaud all these strong women in my life for their courage and strength in fighting this horrible disease, I hide like a coward.

      I carry a kernel of fear inside me that flares up in the shower every morning, as I wonder if today will be the day that I first feel that foreign lump,Read More »

    • Nothing Boring about Family Dinner

      By Chefdruck | Parenting – Fri, Sep 24, 2010 9:22 PM EDT

      We never used to eat dinner as a family. The kids would eat alone, a messy affair with corn flying through the air and half-eaten chicken nuggets hidden under the rug while I ran in and out of the room, shouting at them to "eat, eat, eat!" It wasn't pretty, definitely not a Norman Rockwell picture, and it filled me with guilt.

      Last year, we moved to the Midwest and embraced a slower pace of life with bigger houses and shorter commutes. Family dinner finally became a part of our lives. Now we sit down together to eat most nights. Corn still flies through the air but so does conversation. We kick off each meal by asking each of our three children aged 8, 6, and 3 to share their best, worst and luckiest moment of the day. They're giving us more insight into their worlds, telling us about new friends and mean teachers, and we feel more connected as a family.

      To say that our most treasured family tradition is having dinner together every night sounds corny, and possibly boring, but in

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