What is it about this particular milestone that we hold so sacred that we’re humorless about it? Is it because school is the first environment our kids enter without us, and so serves as a proving ground of parenting? If your child is crying, is it because you haven’t done enough to prepare them for […]
I think the fundamental problem here is that our culture has made us believe that two apparently opposing emotions cannot co-exist. Sometimes Sunday is family movie night. I mean, to be honest, sometimes the kids have had so many screens by Sunday night that we can’t really in good conscience let them watch on more minute, […]
We need better options for memorializing impending parenthood than embracing a view of gender that, these days, would be unforgivably sexist in a detergent commercial. I keep waiting for the wane of the “gender reveal party,” one of the most widely-disparaged-on-social-media parenting trends since white people invented adding y’s to names that don’t need them. […]
Inspiration porn does not promote inclusion; it propagates objectification. Inclusion is the brass ring of the disability community. As the mother to a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome, I constantly search for and even engineer environments where my son is welcome, places where the social constructs expand enough to accommodate a boy who doesn’t talk […]
Being a mother in this society is an all-encompassing identity. Each new baby represents more claims on your time and energy, more shifting of your needs to theirs, more of them and less of you. As I smooth the blanket over my one-year-old son, I feel an idle hand or foot drag gently across the […]
When they came into the world, I knew I was complete. I always wanted to be a mother. I loved kids and they loved me. In fact, I was convinced that I was born to be a parent. So while my friends planned take-no-prisoner careers, I thought about baby names and nurseries. The only problem […]
Maybe it’s time we all came clean. If you have kids, you’ve probably found yourself saying some variation of this at some point: “Of course, I can never regret [fill-in-the-blank], because otherwise, my kid(s) wouldn’t be here!” And if you don’t have kids, you’ve probably heard your parent friends say it. Maybe that fill-in-the-blank is an […]
Leaving my boys with their father was the hardest thing I’d ever do in my life. I’ve always been a really hands-on mother. I chose to stay home instead of returning to work, ran the local playgroup for years and genuinely loved spending time with my kids. Watching my sons morph into young men before my eyes was an irreplaceable […]
