Cara Natterson's Blog, page 5

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This week, I took my kids to Staples to do our back-to-school shopping. No, they’re not going back to in-person school. But bypassing the fresh-start ritual of picking up new three-ring binders, pristine tab divider inserts, and fresh reams of college-ruled paper felt wrong to all of us… that was until we found ourselves standing in the middle of the massive-and-nearly-empty store, debating whether or not there would be any papers to sort in the first place. I mean, it’s not like teachers are…READ MORE

Pressing RESTART

I am a tab hoarder, which is ironic because I don’t hoard anything else. My kids will tell you that I am the queen of reorg and the deep clean, a lifelong minimalist, one for whom Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up was far from revelatory (though I loved the read!). So it’s fairly ironic that on any given day, my screen is cluttered with a slew of open tabs – sometimes as many as two dozen. The chrome browser square is home to beloved articles and unread ones waiting patiently for my eyeballs, an array of simultaneously inviting and stress-inducing rounded rectangles staring back at me…READ MORE

To Pod or Not to Pod

It doesn’t seem to matter if your kid is in preschool or college, the word of the month is “pod.” Which makes sense, because these days the only way to gather safely is to do it in small groups– yes, masked, ideally outside, and for sure not sick with any teeny tiny little symptom that may have been blown off in the past. Because a pod can mean many...READ MORE

What He Said

In lieu of my own comments today, I am posting the last written words of John Lewis, penned in the days before he died and published in the New York Times, per his request, on the day of his funeral. If you would rather take 5 minutes to listen, you can do that, too. As I read his article, I was struck as much by the power and beauty of his sentiments as I was by the resonance of his wisdom. Lewis speaks directly to race and voice and peace in profound and important ways. His sentiments can and should be applied across our culture, in multiple settings, broad and local, as applicable to...READ MORE

Get Over It

How should we all parent – frankly, how should we do just about anything – when the advice from experts keeps on changing? It’s a question uttered through the ages, prompted every time a mom or dad experiences the whiplash of flip-flopping guidelines on everything from baby feeding strategies to the balance between enrichment and…READ MORE

I'm Tired

It’s Friday, the end of a long week, halfway through a slog of a month, smack in the middle of a year that feels more like a decade. We’re all living it, and it’s exhausting.

Part of my fatigue comes from the Groundhog Day nature...READ MORE

It’s Been (Another) Long Week

It’s been another long week, another head-spinning round of breaking news. In honor of Friday, I’m keeping things simple: no big opening statement about the state of the world, just links to articles I found impactful over the past few days. The links are pulled from the tabs I keep open way too long--so many and for so long that my computer will sometimes slow to a crawl and my kids more than sometimes…READ MORE

Selfishness, the Other Pandemic

There’s no “I” in “coronavirus”… wait, yes there is. And there’s an “I” in “COVID,” “pandemic,” and “I just infected grandma,” too. There’s just no “I” in “mask.” But there are many “I”’s in inane ideas like “I can’t get infected, and if I do, it’ll be no big deal.”

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The Importance of What We Say and How We Say it

I have one of those names that gets chronically mispronounced, so much so that I have established a lifetime habit of not correcting anyone. Cara. Car – a. Pronounced Cara-ah, exactly as it’s spelled. But for every Car-ah there’s a Care-ah, and for every one of us that starts with a “C” another begins with…READ MORE

Marathon Thinking

Remember flattening the curve? The catchphrase that was everywhere eons ago… which turns out to be only two months ago but pandemic time is funny that way. It’s an important phrase to dig out of your memory banks, though, because its relevance, much like coronavirus itself, is back on the rise. The goal of our sequestered springtime…READ MORE