Francine's Columns

What Francine writes about

Family life, parenting moments, and the small observations that turn into lasting memories.

• Motherhood
• Family dynamics
• Parenting
• Humor
• Personal essays

There is a particular rhythm to writing about motherhood that resembles the rhythm of raising children itself: full of sudden starts, quiet pauses, and the occasional laugh that arrives right in the middle of a serious point. A column built around family life often becomes a kind of running diary, capturing the small, ordinary moments that would otherwise slip past unnoticed. The humor tends to surface naturally, not as a performance but as a way of making sense of the chaos. In that sense, the column is less a finished product than an ongoing conversation, one that grows alongside the family it describes and welcomes readers into its warmth.

Family dynamics offer an endlessly rich landscape for a writer who pays close attention. The way a household negotiates morning routines, the way siblings learn to share space, the way parents rediscover their own parents in moments of fatigue or tenderness, all of it becomes material worth pausing over. A good column treats these patterns with both affection and honesty, resisting the urge to romanticize while still finding the beauty in the everyday. Parenting, when written about this way, stops being a set of instructions and starts being a shared human experience, the kind that makes a reader feel a little less alone on a long Tuesday afternoon.

Humor has always been one of the most reliable companions of domestic life, especially when the dishwasher breaks or the school permission slip goes missing at the worst possible moment. A column that can find the comedy in these small disasters does something quietly important: it reminds readers that laughter is a form of resilience, a way of holding the difficulty of parenting at arm's length just long enough to breathe. The best family humor is never mean-spirited. Instead, it turns the lens gently on the writer as much as on anyone else, inviting the reader to recognize their own household in the story being told. That recognition is the heart of the connection.

Personal essays rooted in motherhood often carry a particular kind of emotional weight, a sense of looking back at a stage of life that is changing even as it is being recorded. The writer notices the height marks on the doorframe, the empty crib in the corner of the nursery, the first day of school, and begins to understand that the work of parenting is also the practice of letting go, gradually and repeatedly. Columns that follow this thread become small monuments to a passing season, gently insisting that the reader slow down and pay attention. In the end, that is the gift a good family column offers: not advice, but attention, and the reassurance that the small moments truly are the big ones.