And then I put all of the things that made up my feelings and experiences and deeper layers of who I am away. Out of sight. Then I quite literally held on to Dear Life. A few years ago, I became pregnant with my son. We were thrilled. I was sick as a dog for […]
For too long, the dialogue around breastfeeding has been a deeply privileged one that erases and ignores Black women. Racial inequality in the U.S. is so entrenched, so debilitating, that even Black babies—even, sometimes, within their first hours of life—are impacted by it. Consider, for a moment, these chilling facts: The infant mortality rate for Black […]
When it came to breastfeeding my son, it seemed it would be him or me. I chose him. The thing people never tell you about when it comes to breastfeeding is the pain. I suppose if you search through enough breastfeeding blogs and recommended products, you would start to get the hint. There are endless […]
There is not a one-to-one relationship between effort and reward in this job, and this uncertainty, which graduate students often learn about by observing their PhD supervisors, is a turn-off, especially for women. On January 21, 2017, the first full day of the Trump administration, women will march on Washington in a demonstration of unity […]
What if we can’t always parent on instinct? What if our experiences of our children compete with our instincts as adult human beings? It’s a cool, clear summer night in Binghamton, New York, with faint, jewel-stud stars beginning to fix overhead in the purpled sky. I’m sitting outside on a gravel patio with my mother, […]
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 […]
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 am a mom. I have a proper name, but I think I forgot it. Even my husband refers to me exclusively as “Mommy.” My day starts […]
What token of acknowledgement do I bestow upon the man who decided that my resistance and pleas were of less value than the penis he pushed into me? I don’t need flowers or a card, I’ve always been a low-maintenance kind of girl. And I certainly wouldn’t expect you to know that, traditionally, copper is […]
Breastfeeding was a war zone and we were both casualties. It was my friend who finally made me see sense. She’s a doctor so her opinion cut through in a way my other friends couldn’t, even if they’d told me the same thing. “Mia, you’ve been on antibiotics for 70 days in the past six […]
Women are harassed daily for breastfeeding. Some incidents are reported; most aren’t. And many, many women simply don’t breastfeed in public because they know how vulnerable they are to such harassment. By the time my son was a few months old, I became an expert at nursing anywhere, anytime. And let me tell you, my […]
Much attention is paid to the parenting choices of privileged white women, but what about the women of color and poor women in the background who are often doing a significant portion of the domestic work? It’s a photo that is shocking and almost dystopic—a group of dark-skinned women in neat rows donning hospital gowns […]
Just before my milk let down, I felt a wave of sadness swell from the pit of my stomach. It was a feeling I described to friends as wistfulness, even homesickness, a scooped-out, hollow feeling. A short, but powerful unmooring. Because my pregnancy had been hard, I decided I would only breastfeed my baby if […]
