Mom, the one who fixed things, made sandwiches, and put the house back together when we wrecked it, needed me and I couldn’t help her. When I was growing up, my parents’ marriage was pretty traditional. Yet today, my brothers and I all cook and help out around our houses. I also do all the […]
Adoption is a complex billion-dollar business that often increases inequality. In their efforts to cure what they see as a moral crisis infecting our nation, the anti-choice movement has historically thrown their power, money, and influence behind their two favorite antidotes to abortion: abstinence-only education and adoption. In any era when reproductive rights are being […]
There’s a seemingly endless supply of sympathy for children, like my daughter, who are victims of sexual abuse. But there is a shocking lack of sympathy for the consequences of this abuse on these kids as they age. If parenting was like any other job, my experience as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse would […]
Were you invited to a Moms’ Night Out Holiday Cookie Exchange that demanded you bake 72 homemade cookies and don’t know how to say no? Ask a Single Mom. Thinking about divorce and want to know what life is like on the other side? Ask a Single Mom. Have no idea how to make time […]
How can I push aside my self-doubt and unleash a well of endless energy? How can I fortify myself for the challenges ahead without compartmentalizing my fear? Yesterday I found out my baby is a boy and I haven’t really stopped crying since. The last five months, I’ve been convinced I was carrying a girl. […]
As a queer parent with a donor-conceived child, the market of books with families that look like mine is awfully small. When I found a copy of Horton Hatches the Egg at the library with my daughter, I remembered it vaguely as a cute story from my childhood about a bird and an elephant. I […]
The past year has been particularly brutal for parents, a year of dead children. The world is at least/ fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative/estimate, though I keep this from my children./For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird./For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,/ sunk in a lake.—Maggie Smith, […]
If I hadn’t spent those years feeling like a stranger in my own home and deserted by those dearest to me, the welcoming smiles wouldn’t have shone so brightly. Not long after my parents announced their separation, I met my college roommate’s mother for the first time. Jen had always spoken warmly of her mom […]
