In response to an article posted on Bitch Magazine’s website ( Trippin' Out: Bristol Palin's less-than-successful campaigning), Bristol Palin is the teenager (gasp!) and single (gasp!) mother AND daughter of conservative Sarah Palin. Not only has her family completely exploited her situation as a single, teen mother but also there does not seem to be any support for her now. She is a mother and who knows what type of judgment she has received from getting pregnant as a teenager or the support that came or lacked from any type of choice she may have wanted.

At 19 I read Adrienne Rich as she struggled to put into words the isolation and terror of being the solo parent of small children all day. I saw her essays as the record of a historical moment, the cusp of change between an era of rigid gender roles and frustrated housewives, and my own time of working mothers and egalitarian divisions of parenting labor. I treasured her insights into how destructive the old system could be to the spirit of mother and child alike. Reading Rich and Audre Lorde, I appreciated their deeply feminist understandings that the children-- even boy children-- were not the conquerors in this system, but equally trapped and isolated.

The difference between me and Adrienne Rich is that she didn't get to read Adrienne Rich in college. She didn't enter into stay-at-home mothering already armed with a rich feminist analytical vocabulary to describe to herself exactly, precisely, incisively, why it sucks.

My most powerful childhood memory is very simple, like all the deepest recollections are: as my mother leaned against the sink of our butter-yellow Minneapolis kitchen, I barreled into her and squashed my face her soft belly. I could have been no older than five, for my head reached no higher than the motherly bulge that bumped out below the high waistband of her 1970s-era jeans. I luxuriated in the warmth that lay there as I wrapped my arms tightly around the back of her legs. I felt at home. I was safe.

"Some mothers work because they have to -- others for their own fulfillment."

And there it was -- it might has well come in the form of a back-handed slap. Somehow because I am sensitive about my fulfillment -- that it's private and not for outside commentary, I felt like this sentence filleted me and left me for dead. I am overly sensitive for sure -- but on this topic, my sensitivity is off the charts. When pressed, do I have to work? Couldn't we downsize or live more frugally on my husband's income? Yes. Is my own fulfillment an appropriate reason to leave my son? Is that really the only purpose of my work? Somehow "my own fulfillment," sounded about as reasonable for a mother as a heroine addiction.

I was born and raised in the rural south, where racial difference was like oxygen. You inhaled it, you exhaled it and you learned about the function and composition later. While my family checked the white or caucasian box on forms, my county was predominantly African-American, a term that did not exist yet. I learned to say "colored", which my mother said was polite, and then to say "black", the term preferred by my classmates to whom it referred.

Could it be that my mother is actually cooler than I am? On Halloween night she breezed off to some party dressed as Cruella De Vil, while I bundled up for a four hour "get out the vote " shift handing out Democratic sample ballots to early voters in Mclean, Virginia.

Have you ever wondered if there is a terrible truth about Santa - who he is, how he treats his elves, and what his home life has become? This holiday season reveals all, in a new play by Greg Kotis, the Tony Award winning writer of Urinetown, featuring the entire multi-talented Kotis-Halliday family! One strong warning: this is definitely not a show for children!

I spend much of my online time catching up with insane things conservatives say, and this election year has been more insane in that regard than usual. American conservatism imploded in 2008, and nowhere is this clearer than in the heights of fantasy and illogic reached in the political conversation of rank-and-file Republicans. You expect some lying and lunacy in these matters, not restricted to any particular ideology or party.