Today is the last day of October and of Domestic Violence Awareness month. Obviously in what I would believe to be a better world such an observance would be completely unnecessary.

My family is blessed with lots of extended family. We are extremely blessed because not only do my kids have both sets of grandparents, they also have their beloved great-grandmother, too. My parents and my grandmother live nearby and we have dinner with them every Sunday. Until last year, my husband’s mother and grandmother lived with us. We just lost his grandmother last year. She was 101. Before she left us, she was thrilled to have been present at the college graduations of all of her grandchildren and many of her great-grand-children. I have been increasingly dismayed with a gradual shift that is happening in our family. The chasm between the kids and the elders is widening.

What should they call me? I’m not the grandmother by blood but the grandmother by love. When I was growing up in St. Louis, we used to have play-cousins, play-auntees (pronounced “ain-tees”), and play mamas. This was the designation for someone who was like family but not actually a relation. My granddaughter’s father also has a son, who lives with them half-time. I love him. Initially, I loved him as I love any child who comes within my orb – a general, all-encompassing love. To me, children are ‘sposed to be loved.

Some parents never fight in front of their kids, and their kids grow up fine. Some parents scream at each other day, and their kids grow up fine. And some in each camp end up with kids who either think a fight means the end of the world or that love is best expressed by yelling and cursing.What's the right thing to do?

My mother tells me I used to wake up in the middle of the night and clean my room. This? Does not bode well for motherhood. Hi, my name is Rita, and I'm a Type A mother when it comes to housekeeping.

Balance can be extremely difficult to achieve especially if you are a control-freak perfectionist.  Unless of course, you choose balance itself to master.  Over the years, I have strived to "have it all", from work, to personal life, and finally family.  Once the kids came however, everything was thrown out the window.  Now that my oldest child is nearly nine years old, I have finally found a sense of balance in most areas of my life, although it sometimes comes crashing down like a house of cards.  Here are some of my tips to help achieve balance.

This week we couldn't help but notice a theme in some of your recommendations for BlogHer of the Week. As I started to read your posts a familiar, but long tucked away, feeling of grief arose, and I was grateful I wasn't in the office at that moment, because the tears came, then again, and again. I remembered how it felt to touch bottom, experience emptiness, and then see life slowly leak back into the picture, sometimes slowly, and other times with overwhelming, ersatz saturation like Technicolor.

Growing up in post-colonial Kolkata and as a student in a Catholic missionary school, we made the occasional trip to what we called "old-age homes" or retirement hostels for senior citizens. Those were heart-rending visits: old women and men miles away from their children, some of whom had left their aging parents for greener pastures in the U.K., Australia and other Commonwealth nations. Many of the senior citizens were Anglo-Indian or Caucasian (from India's British Raj days) whose children left after the country became independent.

First, let me say that while I know that being raised with domestic violence, as it's reported Chris Brown was raised, may result in your becoming a physically abusive partner, my sympathy for the young singer is limited. Nothing excuses a man beating a woman.

BlogHer Contributing Editor Rita Arens recently posted about a mother and her transgendered child. Rita offered lots of wonderful insight and resources. Except the kind that matters. The kind that comes from someone whose been there. The politics around children who have the courage to resist the gender straight jacket have left those same children adrift. Sometimes a child just wants the freedom to explore. S/he isn't trying to make a statement about our society and its penchant for homophobia and misogyny.

One can only imagine the size of the Post-Its in Jenny Lawson's house. Or the size of her cat.

My given name is Laurie (rhymes with "sorry", technically) to most people, much to the horror of the priest who baptized me and my third grade teacher Sister Patricia because although I was not named after a Partridge Family character it's still not a saint's name so basically to them I was Laurence. It's "Yo" and "hey" and increasingly, horribly, "Ma'am" to many more. Some people in a far off land I occasionally inhabit call me "Professor," that is when they're not calling me "Yo." Go ahead. Laugh. I do.