So why is it you want a baby, my therapist asks. Love, I answer.
By Bethany Marcel
Category Archive: Obstacles
He’s passing as a boy now—as long as he binds his breasts.
By Katrin Grace
When you’re a parent, you have to believe that no matter what your child does or says they still deserve to be loved.
By Erika Sauter
More than my body and my schedule, IVF took over my mind.
By Belle Boggs
Sorry, can’t make it to the sorority reunion. My thermometer says I’m ovulating!
By Amy Klein
I waited to feel that my first child was not enough. I waited for a hunger that can be satisfied in only one way.
By Leslie Kendall Dye
All the years of doing and hoping, praying and sculpting—you wait to see if it worked.
By Lisa Romeo
The doctor finally looked at me and said, “We can’t hold her down. She’s sixteen.”
By Laurie Lichtenstein
It made me spitting mad, the way the daily duties of parenting and home ownership began to rest entirely on me.
By Hope Edelman
I cling to the knowledge that if I have given her anything, I have given her hope. I see it in her smile.
By Jenn O’Connor
I can’t imagine spreading my legs and letting doctors make quick work of this loss.
By Nicole Piasecki
If actively fearing for your children’s safety is a natural instinct, my maternal hardwiring must be faulty.
By Lauren Apfel
Motherwell publishes provocative, evocative essays on all aspects of the parenting experience. Here are our most-read pieces from 2016.
I’m postpartum. Without a newborn. At 20 weeks of pregnancy, my baby didn’t make it.
By Jenn Press Arata
What shocked me most about online dating was the absolute scorn for women who wanted, or already had, children.
By Dena Landon
If bad things really do happen in threes, then my son being hit by a car had completed our 2016 trifecta.
By Samantha Shanley
Photographs suggested a future, a future in which we would look back at this moment, but a future where our baby might be gone.
By Yvonne Spence
If you calm down about the illicit nature of the words, we’re just talking about talking.
By Brianne DeRosa
Our no cursing rule is one way I maintain the boundary between child and adult.
By Lisa Sadikman
One day my son was a typically developing, albeit shy, three-year-old. The next he wasn’t able to say a word in public.
By Tanya Mozias Slavin
I am shocked still by the parenting moments that break my heart.
By Catherine Newman
Caregiving, which is typically undervalued and underpaid, needs to be given the respect it deserves.
By Vicki Larson
Nowhere in my plans was talking to a stranger about teaching basic social skills. Nowhere in my plans was autism.
By Katie Read
By the time we left China, it felt like he was ours, wholly and completely. And he is. But he is not.
By Kelly Westhoff
Beyond the pillow fights and giggles, how can we make sure our kids will be safe when they sleep at a friend’s house?
By Randi Olin