I remember Michelle Otero as the girl who could do everything. She wrote for the school newspaper, made all-state in band, sang in chorus, acted in drama, was a member of student council, honor society, the prom committee and served as student body president before going on to Harvard and, later, Vermont College.

I hadn’t seen Michelle since the summer that we graduated high school back in 1990, so I was very excited when one of my sisters had a chance encounter with her and snatched up her email address. Over the last few months, I’ve gotten reaquainted with the girl whom I called “best friend” back in the days of parachute pants and Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No campaign. In the process of getting reaquainted, I’ve learned that there was so much about Michelle that I didn’t know.

When Michelle was 32, she journeyed to Oaxaca , Mexico to facilitate a creative writing workshop for women survivors of domestic violence and sexual assult. Since returning, she has written a moving, deeply personal chapbook of essays titled Malinche’s Daughter, put out by Momotombo Press of the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Through her book, she shares her personal experience with sexual abuse while giving voice to her students’ stories, touching on a culture of shame that has silenced women for centuries. Read on …

Fact: The San Luis Valley is the largest alpine valley in the world, surrounded by mountains in all directions.
Fact: Our average growing season is a whopping 90 days.
Fact: July and August are generally the only frost-free months out of the entire year.

In case I’m being vague here, this place is in a perpetual state of COLD, as I’ve mentioned before.

That is, until now. My favorite time of the year used to be fall with its turkeys and piles of yellow leaves and Labor Day sales. That was when I was a southern New Mexican, back when fall was a tall glass of ice-cold beer after weathering the climactic equivalent of scalding-hot lemonade for five solid months.

But now that I’m living in a satellite of the Arctic Circle, SUMMER is my new season of choice. The heck with soaring gas prices ’cause this is the time of year when I am totally committed to NOT travelling. I’m telling you, come July, THE SLV is the place to be.

So in an effort to maximize our short stint with Mr. Sun, my children and I are ignoring our allergies and electronic addictions to go HIKING. We are reading trashy novels under shade trees. Read on …

I have a niece who for the longest time referred to pickles as “shupet.” Like filet or valet or CABERNET. In fact, for the first five years of her life Megan spoke the most adorable make-believe FRENCH I’ve ever heard. Megan is now 13 and there isn’t A TRACE of foreign in her day-to-day speech and text-messaging. But there was a time when her mother wondered if Megan’s lagging speech development had something to do with a hearing impairment seeing as how “shupet” has but one thing in common with the word pickle: It’s a cute name for a pet hamster.

Luckily, it wasn’t her hearing. And, much to my dismay, she eventually started referring to pickles as… well… pickles.

My three-year-old Kyra doesn’t speak quasi-French the way that Megan did but, like many toddlers her age, she struggles with certain sounds. She says “queese” instead of “please.” She says “wike” instead of “like.” She totally avoids words like “bourgeoise.”But who cares, right? She’s THREE.

Well. As it turns out, there was more to Kyra’s speech impediments than we realized. Thankfully, my husband Allan put two and two together before it was too late. “Do you think Kyra is hearing okay?” he asked me as she was whispering jibberish to herself one day. It had never occured to me that she wasn’t. But he’d noticed Read on …

When it comes to parenting, you’ve got to know when to hold ‘em. Know when to scold ‘em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run to the therapists. I’ve got it all down pat. EXCEPT the scolding part. This is where my kids would roll on the floor laughing like people who’ve recently discovered that, indeed, a platypus should be feared. They’d be quick to correct me by saying that Mom has NO PROBLEM in the scolding department.

But oh, how I do. Or DID.

Like any mother worth her salt, I had my excuses reasons for lacking in disciplining skills. Initially, I blamed it on the divorce several years ago. It was then that I seemed to lose all perspective. Not to mention part of my backbone.

The three-year-old wants to stay up late watching Sponge Bob? Well, he’s been through a lot lately. And, c’mon, it’s Sponge Bob! Lemon cake for dinner? Okay. Just this once. And only if you promise to share! What? You used my lipstick to paint your shoes red? Fine. But do Mommy a favor and use the pink one next time.

This went on for a lot longer than it should have. I felt like I needed to give them time to mourn the separation of Mom and Dad. How much, you ask? Read on …

So I have started this new THING at dinner called “What would you do?” Because I’m always trying to find a way to inject a life lesson when my children are NOT in trouble, NOT tuning me out, and NOT crying so hard that my platitudes about how you should “never ever NEVER grab a cactus with your bare hands” tend to go unheard. For my kids, life lessons work best if they are game-like in nature.

So it works like this: I set up a scenario and then ask the contestants, “What would you do?” My two oldest children, highly competitive in nature, work out their answers, trying to outdo the other in terms of overall impressiveness. They get graded on “Applicability.” “Creativity.” And there’s bonus points on “Brown-Nosing Suavity.”

Generally, the game ends with, “Okay Mom, what would YOU do?” Not because they care about learning a lesson, so much as because they’d like to dissect my answer in search of a slip-up/inaccuracy/misjudgment. Read on …

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Sitting between my grandmother’s legs, her fingers intertwined in my clean, moist hair, my eyes pulled back into painful slits as she braids the ponytail sitting high on top of my head, I quickly learned as a child what “no mueves” means. Sitting at the kitchen table between my siblings before the bus arrives, eating the thick ham steak and sugary-hot oatmeal and heavily-buttered toast my grandfather systematically made each new day, I instinctively learned what both “come más” and “come todo” mean.

Listening to conversations in the first grade between Lorena , Sandra and Laura (all names necessitating a roll of the tongue), I eventually learned what things like “¿Que tienes?” and “Juega con nosotros,” and “¡Estúpida!” mean. Between my parent’s late-night squabbles that I strained to overhear and my uncles’ soused wordplay while tossing horseshoes at summer cookouts and my aunts’ whispered gossip while they made the macaroni salads and salsa, not to mention the eight tracks that lamented “por un amor;” and Chispita, my mother’s favorite telenovela, playing in the background of my youth, I learned enough Spanish to plainly ask you, in the name of God, where have you been? And will you please shut up! And watch out, man! And I cannot believe how that woman lies. And I’m so sick. And, by the way, I love you! Read on …

In preparation for having children, I devoured books about how to take care of diaper rash. How to check for signs of dehydration. How to administer CPR on an infant. Once the children arrived and I felt like I’d mastered infancy, I sought out the books that discussed things like “how to raise confident girls” and “self-disciplined children.” Before I knew it, I was needing literature on “how to talk about sex with your adolescent.”

But here’s something that nobody tells you before you bring children into this world. It helps to learn “how to be fast on your feet.” And I don’t mean when working the dance floor. It doesn’t matter if I’m dealing with a child, a customer, or that rude lady waiting behind me at the checkout counter, I’m always three days late with a quick answer that puts a stop to the conversation that needs to be stopped. And, 99 percent of the time, three days is just too long. I have yet to meet the person who appreciates the phone call that starts with, “And this is what I MEANT to say to you three days ago!”

My ten-year-old daughter came home from school last week and asked me if it would be OK for her to start shaving her legs. I simply said NO. And maybe that should have been the end of it. But when she asked why, it would have been nice if I had prepared a succinct answer that went,”Because *fill in the blank here with a great parable, metaphor, or analogy* The End. “But I wasn’t ready. In my defense, I didn’t think the shaving question was going to happen for, like, another three YEARS. And so, like so many other times, she caught me unaware and the best answer I could come up with was, Read on …