Author: resolutewoman
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My mother taught me to work hard
Work hard. Always be ready. Look your best. My mother Ester Burns was a Texas farmer’s wife—and a farmer herself. She cooked, sewed and cleaned the house. She also worked in the fields, hoeing the cotton and then picking it. She fed the cows, slopped the pigs and branded the cattle. She drove bales of…
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Too many things to do? Make a list.
Fayteen is busier than usual keeping up with her business and helping her daughter Ranna get the treatment she needs for breast cancer. Plus, she just spent a few days in the hospital herself. Joy returned from a short trip and will be leaving again in a few days for the University of Tulsa to…
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Thank you very much, mother
Be polite. Say please and thank you. Eat your vegetables. Drink your milk. Do your homework. We all learned many lessons from our mothers. If your mother is still alive, celebrate with her on Mother’s Day and tell her thank you for being such a good teacher. If your mother is no longer alive, remember her…
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Give yourself a pat on the back
We often berate ourselves when we don’t do what we think we’re supposed to do. We feel guilty when we overeat or when we argue with a spouse or when we procrastinate on an important project and miss a deadline. In her book Don’t Shoot the Dog, Karen Pryor, a behavioral scientist who believes strongly…
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Too many things to do? Take a nap.
Pressed by end-of-the-semester papers and finals, my son Jay, who is a junior in college, announced: “I have too many things to do.” “Work hard. Do one thing at a time,” I told him. “And be sure to get enough sleep.” I remembered my own advice Easter weekend. After a funeral on Friday, a wedding…
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What do you do when you lose self-control?
In our last blog post, I confessed that I recently lost control and ate almost a whole box of Samoas, my favorite kind of Girl Scout cookies. Did I enjoy every bite? Almost every bite. I was beginning to feel guilty before I reached for the last cookie. What do you do when you lose…
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The good news and the bad news
The good news is that I practiced moderation during a recent weekend trip to Tulsa. I didn’t eat donuts for breakfast, the wonderful bread and butter offered during lunch at a fancy restaurant or the brownies at an evening cookout. The bad news is that I lost all of my self-control as soon as I…
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Mother, daughter and biographer
Rebecca Skloot writes about the amazing story of a poor black woman and her cancer cells in her book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. But she also tells the story of Lack’s daughter Deborah and her own story, too. Before Henrietta Lacks died in 1951, researchers at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore began growing…
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Why do we buy what we buy?
Marketing plays a big role in what we buy and what we think about ourselves , concludes Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter—Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. Orenstein says that each of us “is a cog in the round-the-clock, all-pervasive media machine aimed at our daughters—and at us—from…
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What kind of room have you created?
Emma Donoghue writes a chilling story in her book Room. It’s about a young woman and her son who are kept prisoners in an 11-by-11 room. Old Nick comes frequently at night to rape Jack’s Ma, but, while he visits, Jack sleeps in the wardrobe, almost unaware of what’s happening. Jack, who is five, has…