Author Archives: linabranter
Hell Years: Introduction to an Annotated Bibliography
Reading. Reading is my comfort, my addiction, my solace. For most of my life I have been able to get lost in a book. Get lost in a book. I never really thought about that phrase before, what it means. … Continue reading
You Only Meet Yourself
It is strange how things come into your life when you most need them. I made a friend recently. We met at a social networking event. The room was crowded and noisy and you had to yell to be … Continue reading
Grief is the Pain from a Phantom Limb
Last week the building where J and I first lived as a couple, our first apartment, suffered a fire. We lived there for two years, from right before our marriage to right after the birth of our daughter. We moved … Continue reading
Midlife Crisis, Part 1: On Freedom and its MidLife Mythology
I have recently experienced my ex-spouse, my friends, the husbands of my friends, essentially many of the men I know who are in their forties (not all of them, of course, but too many to ignore), express a wistfulness, a … Continue reading
New Year’s Resolution #1: Boycotting the Monkey Exchange
My motto for this coming year: Not my circus, not my monkeys. There is nothing we humans like more than to surreptitiously gift our monkeys to someone, and taking on other people’s monkeys can become second nature if we don’t … Continue reading
In Honour of Divorce Month: Mid-Life Crisis, an Introduction
We are in the middle of our life. We have kids and teenagers and parents who are getting older. We have jobs. Houses. Responsibilities. It is our generation that is keeping the world running right now, the ones still young … Continue reading
Hopeful: How to Survive the Collective Malaise
I had the privilege of meeting a woman this year who had been kicked out of her home in Poland after the war by the Russians and sent to Siberia to work. She told me of the horror she experienced there: … Continue reading
