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Family

11 Things in Your Kitchen Right Now That’ll Kill You! You’re Welcome!

Parents Be Aware: How Teen Drug Use Can Morph into Mental Illness

The Harrowing Merry-Go-Round of Mental Illness and Addiction Everyone has some degree of mental illness and addiction. Maybe you’re addicted to fairly benign things, like chocolate or coffee. Maybe your mental illness manifests in OCD hand washing or hair braiding

How My Grandma Took a Stand & Decided to Leave Her Church of 40 Years

This Story Is in Honor of National Grandparents Day & LBGT Rights In 1988 at the height of the AIDs epidemic and near-hysterical homophobia, my Aunt Barbara – who’d once been married to a Paul Newman lookalike — came out

He Answered the Door With a Gun

Excerpt: “What happened in the hot tub stays in the hot tub. Let’s just say I did not lose my virginity there, but the Kraken had been unleashed. Lance parked his car a good half-mile from my house at 2 a.m. We alighted, both of us with sopping wet hair, me clutching my dripping bikini in my left fist. I felt sexy, beautiful, daring and free right up to the moment when I tried to open my bedroom window and it wouldn’t budge.” Read More …

Guest Post: The “Real Truth” About my Stepmom’s Boobs

Excerpt: “Should any pimply, horny teenage boy appear on my door stoop he was met full-force by this curvaceous nautical figurehead, her prow steaming right through him as if he were nothing more than a ripple in a paddling pool.” Read More!

A Colleary Christmas 2015 (The Back Waxing Edition)

Excerpt: “Okay, I told Henry he could write his part of the letter because there was a good chance I’d run amuck. But to prepare your palate for propriety I must first offer the most indecorous moment with Henry of 2015. He had no idea this was coming:” Keep Reading …

My 7 Best Summer Memories from 1975: Throwback Thursday

Excerpt: “If any of his four granddaughters (not-a-one grandson!) complained about the fish guts, he’d yell, ‘Shad-up and do it! You catch ’em, you clean ’em, you cook ’em, I eat ’em.’ I both hated and loved the smell of gutted fish each time grandpa drove us past the gutting station; we four girls riding with the wind in our hair in the open truck bed.” Keep Reading …

When The Man You Loved and Lusted For Changes Forever

Excerpt: She did all the things besotted mistresses do. She waited for her phone to ring, she called his home and hung up when his wife answered, she cried in a stall in the employee bathroom, she waxed her bikini line, she bought lingerie and sex toys, she colored her hair, she had her mustache electrolysized, she got manicures and pedicures, she wore perfume, she slathered herself with body lotion, she had a consultation about breast augmentation, she stopped having sex with her husband, she didn’t care if he found out, she became reckless and obsessed. Read More …

Have You Told Your Mom She’s Beautiful? This VIDEO Might Inspire You!

This is one of those videos that remind us of all that our mother has done for us over the years. Get out your Kleenex and get your phone ready to call your mom to tell her she’s beautiful. Happy almost Mother’s Day!!

My Kitties’ Humans Desperately Needed a New Litter: You’ve Saved Our Olfactory Glands, Cat’s Pride! (A Commercial Starring Our Family & Win 100$!)

My daughter Bridget’s bedroom adjoins the bathroom wherein two kitty litter boxes lay in wait to accost our nostrils. My poor daughter’s bedroom always harbors a hint of eau ‘d cat pee.

Her Water Broke – Father Tries to get Home in Time to see his Daughter Born! (Video)

I loooved this video made by filmmaker, Casey Neistat, when he was out of town and found out his wife’s water broke and she was in labor. Talk about rushing to catch a flight.

My early New Year gift to you:

Her Mother was “Difficult” with a “Dollop of Crazy” and Achingly Missed this Christmas

Okay, who here has had a fight with a family member this holiday season? Anybody? Anybody?? Oh, look at all those hands. I count 6,363,247 hands in the air. I’m no different. I had an unexpected row post-Thanksgiving with a loved one where the past was rehashed, shins were kicked and feelings mangled.

Banishing the “Wicked” in Stepmother

She had platinum blond hair worn in an Aqua-Net bouffant, thick black eyeliner and a figure Jayne Mansfield would’ve killed for. At night she peeled her false eyelashes off like she was undressing her face.

Zen and the Art of Sailing During A Small Craft Advisory Warning

I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to barf. I didn’t want to get salty. I didn’t want to smell feces. I didn’t want to be dominated by forces beyond my control. I was invited to take a sailing

How “The Fault In Our Stars” Changed Me

What was I thinking? I just read John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, the one about the teenage cancer patients, Hazel Grace and Augustus Waters, who fall in love. (not a sponsored post and there is a spoiler a few sentences

7 Surprising Things My Mom Did!

Mother Daughter Relationships: I was raised in the 70s; era of the skyrocketing divorce rate (key parties?) and the afternoon martini cart (reference any Bewitched episodes; Samantha and both Darrens kept the Grey Goose flowing). Whether it was the 70s,

The Anti-Thanksgiving

Today, in an effort to prove my Mavericism — a phrase first coined by Tom Cruise when he played Maverick in that cinematic masterpiece Top Gun — I’m bucking the trend and going anti-Thanksgiving by itemizing the things I’m NOT GRATEFUL

The Hubba Hubba Girls: When Girlfriends Save Your Life

When I was nine-years old my mom went through a debilitating divorce from my stepdad and I moved in, permanently it would turn out, with my dad and stepmom. I was a wreck. I threw up and had fevers whenever

When Your Divorced Parents Love Each Other

My mom and dad haven’t been married since I was two years old. Throughout my childhood, they had very little contact. Once custody was settled they passed me back and forth with a minimum of drama or friction. I was

A Few Things From My Life

Ellen Marie Stradall Thank you everyone for all your kind, well-wishes for my grandmother’s memorial service. It was so lovely. All the words spoken were a testament to my grandma’s particular love. Here she is in college in Hays, Kansas

When Caregivers Strike

“We’re born in diapers and we die in diapers.” This is what my grandpa Rusty told my mom, aunt, grandma and me as we hovered over his deathbed. “You four look like a buncha buzzards waitin’ to finish me off,”

What I Know About Sisters, Now That I’m In My 40s

Here’s What I Know About Sisters in my 47th Year The truth will set you free. I’ve been jealous of my younger sister, Gina, for as long as I can remember. Well, that’s not completely true. She did have a

The Celebration of a Life

On Saturday my mom had a celebration at her home for her passionate, intelligent, macho, intrepid, intractable, loving, Rennaisance-Man-of-a husband, Guido, who passed away last September. My mom couldn’t face a memorial until now. Among his vast array of

When Thanksgiving Sucks!

This was the worst Thanksgiving ever! None of the children broke any of their bones. No one got drunk and called everybody cheap bastard sons-of-bitches. No one made a pass at someone else’s wife. The turkey wasn’t as dry as

Who’s The Fairest Of Them All?

Sisterly Competition Bridget and I were lying in bed reading last night when she activated a sleeper cell to commit jihad against me. “Mommy, who’s prettier? Me or Clare?” she asked casually. Clare is, of course, her older sister who

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