News — Identity

My mother is the kind of person who saves everything, including the unimportant, and over the decades, it’s taken over her and my father’s house. Within weeks of my sisters and I going off to college, our bedrooms were transformed into what appeared to be retail storage space for her clothing, as round chrome store-bought racks became centerpieces we had to squeeze around whenever we came home for a visit, the cold metal sagging under dozens of cheap dresses and floral pant sets. I don’t even remember her wearing most of them. To assuage everyone’s complaints and because she actually...

I am dating the male equivalent of the soccer mom. He has two boys, who each play on four different sports teams, and he coaches so much that I can't keep track. For work, he runs a football gaming site he himself created, and is passionate about the sport. I had never been to a game in my life, not even homecoming in high school or college.  He is the last type of person I ever thought I would be dating, and on top of the sports fanaticism, he is a former frat boy.  But somehow, we got together and it feels...