Catherine Gigante-Brown

I saw my present mother-in-law in a whole new light the first time she held my newborn son.

8. Educate, don’t fixate.

"Sometimes David wore his hair spiked like a cockscomb. Others, he wore it feathery like a baby chick. He wore his Mohawk to summer camp (exchanging encouraging head chucks with another older camper who sported one, too) and even to Vacation Bible School—no judgment there."

We’ve pieced ourselves back together in a patchwork quilt of ragged emotions. The aftermath of 9/11 wasn’t easy for us, yet it was much easier than for some. People standing 50 feet away from Peter didn’t come home that night; he did.

The Daily News quoted one painted lady as saying, “People come up to us sometimes and say what we do is disgusting,” she said. “But what is disgusting about the female body? They shield their kids sometimes, and I think, ‘Kids come from the female body.’”

Instead of categorizing people as different colors, I proposed we might begin to think of each other as Earthtones—because our skin colors are based on hues from the earth. Just as the planet is made up of a myriad of shades, it’s still one cohesive entity. We can be thought of as one entity also.

I know it’s not a politically correct one, but I’ve got a confession to make: earth-friendly hotels stink. There, I said it.

To the tattoo artist, I was a flesh canvas that she could transform into something beautiful.

Re-imagining the cervix, preserving the earth, facing breast cancer a whole new way…Annie Sprinkle’s wisdom abounds. “Life is a performance art piece,” she said...

I immediately developed a hot-and-heavy girlcrush on the wild, wacky, brash, candid, feminist, rubber-faced comedian—and you should too.