Did you know that the baby you gave to my family would be born into the greatest love? For a long time, I believed this wasn’t my story. I started this letter to you a year ago, quietly and in my private journal. After all, I have two healthy sons with my husband through traditional […]
It’s damn hard, but I’m finding the strength to be the mom I never had. My mom died in 2007, two and a half years before I had my oldest son. We had been estranged for nearly a decade before that, so her death was sad, but the emptiness had been there for so long […]
Parental leave and workplace flex time, while extremely important, only go so far. It’s clear that the one thing facing all families today is that parents are struggling to do it alone and do it well. In 2001, Andrea Yates, a Houston mother suffering from postpartum depression and psychosis, drowned her five children in the […]
It’s hard being excited for babies you never wanted. I woke up disoriented, blurry. The anesthesia worked and was wearing off. My soon-to-be husband and mother stood next to my hospital bed holding my hands. I had just undergone laparoscopic surgery for cyst removal. The cyst wasn’t cancerous and was mostly liquid-filled. But once inside, the doctors did a little more […]
Do you have a burning question about pregnancy, modern parenting or family life? Send it to Evie at AskEvieColumn@gmail.com or click here to submit your question anonymously. Dear Evie: I live in a small town with my partner. I work in a restaurant at night and she works a regular 9-to-5 that she happens to love. We […]
Marriage doesn’t mean automatic happiness. I am a single mother of two living in New York City. Even though my kids attend a culturally diverse elementary school, I still stand out like a sore thumb. When I go on playdates, half the time the moms are trying to set me up with someone “they know.” The other half the time they’re asking me how hard it is […]
My kids have always lived with the knowledge that sometimes they can’t touch me. It was raining. This should not have been a surprise. I live in Oregon. I had to walk my daughter in the torrential downpour to school six blocks away with a positive attitude, although the last thing I felt was positive. […]
Yes, every child needs a family, but the composition of the family is not what’s relevant. As co-mamas to a 7-year-old boy named Bobby, my partner Valerie and I are subject to a lot of negative judgments about our parenting. People who will never meet us declare us to be unfit parents simply because she […]
