Days With Baby
A couple months ago, when I was pregnant and very hungry, I was rooting through my mother’s cookbooks looking for something good to make. I came across a vegetarian cookbook called “Laurel’s Kitchen.” My mom is not a vegetarian, but she used to be something of a hippie, and I have memories of tofu snacks and eggplant loaf. One of the authors, Carol Flinders, wrote a lovely prologue to the cookbook. I can’t remember what it had to do with food, but in one part she talks about nursing your baby. The beautiful passage struck me so much that I wrote it down in my little book of memorable quotes. “You nurse him or her because there’s no question today that it’s the best possible start you could give your child. At first, all the sitting still and rocking might send you into paroxysms of restlessness. But then something in you gives way, relaxes, and your very reckoning of time alters. The present moment takes on an amazing luminosity.”
Some people have been wondering what I mean by “unspoken set of rules.” In my last column, I mentioned that having a set of rules for yourself when dating can give you good judgement, which can help you decide whether he’s the guy for you, keep you out of bad situations, and prolong the romance. 
Have you ever wondered why breaking up is so hard? Why, even when you know you have to break up, it feels like someone ripped your heart out of your chest, and left it on the highway? When I was a teenager, I dated a few guys who were older than me. It was the usual routine. We would become friends at first, and then, well, I was in love. Right?
The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women with no more than a high-school education has skyrocketed since the 1960s but remains very low among college graduates. Divorce has declined among the well-off but is climbing among the unskilled. Although almost all college graduates still marry eventually, marriage rates are dropping steadily among those without a high-school degree. 
When I was a little girl, my mom bought a desk calendar from Unicef. It was full of photos of mothers and babies from around the world, and I remember poring over it for hours. I think I was intrigued by all the exotic ethnic clothing, but I've never forgotten some of the faces. 
When is sex a loving act? Only when it is given freely, totally, and faithfully. “Totally” means that it cannot be selfish, turning you (or him) into a mere object of pleasure. You are so much more than this. You deserve to be loved for who you are, not to be used as an object.
