MOTHERHOOD IS A CONTACT SPORT

I am a car-pooling mother of two, I tell people, and I work for a newspaper in my spare time. Like the athletes I have written about, I have had to make a life after the games are over. This is my life now, and writing about it is the easiest writing I have ever done. The most fun, too. With those words, Susan Reimer made the long jump from sportswriter to family life columnist in the pages of The Baltimore Sun. Since that first column appeared in July of 1993, her candid descriptions of her chaotic family life have touched, with laughter and with tears, the hearts of mothers - and fathers - in Baltimore and in cities across the United States where her column appears. "We all live the same life," Susan Reimer says. "I just get to write about it." In this, her first collection of columns, you will find the comfort so many of Susan's readers have shared in letters to her: "Thank God. I thought it was just me."

Susan Reimer is a columnist for The Baltimore Sun and her work is distributed nationally and internationally by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. A native of Pittsburgh, Susan graduated from Ohio University, where she earned a bachelor of journalism degree. Susan lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband, Gary Mihoces, a sportswriter for USA Today. They have two children: Joseph, 14, and Jessica, 12.