The XX Factor: What women really think.

Can the Balloon Boy's Parents Really Go to Prison?

A guest post from DoubleX intern Jessica Dweck.

“Poor kid” is right, Emily. The Heenes are not only spectacularly bad parents, but they might soon become inmates in Colorado state prison. In the span of one short weekend, the Balloon Boy drama has turned out to be just that—an elaborate one-act theatrical work put on by the Heene Family Players, staged on television stations and computer screens across the country. We now know that the Heenes' ordeal was just one more attention-grabbing stunt in what appears to be an agonizingly protracted audition for a TLC-style reality television show—the last act in a series of questionable parenting moves ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX).

So Your Mother Married a Convict, Get Over It

My relationship with my mom remains tentative and strained. I worry that it may be damaged permanently,” writes Double X contributor Anna Balkrishna, who goes into great detail about her mother’s exuberant attempt at happiness in an ultimately doomed second marriage. “In 1996, my mother met and later married a man incarcerated in a New Mexico state prison, an inmate who began as her pen pal and ended up as her lover,” she writes. Balkrishna shares her Modern Love-style tale of a second chance gone predictably wrong, titled "My Mother Married Her Prison Pen Pal." The author tells us that 13 years ago, when she was launching her college life, her mother, now in her 50s, “would prod me and my sister to take photos of her in the backyard wearing slinky slips from Victoria's Secret” to send to the mother’s inmate boyfriend, and of her own resentment of the mother who emotionally abandoned her in favor of the unworthy new love... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)