Kids—they break you wide open and expose parts you didn’t even know could feel pain.
By Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Category Archive: Parenting Challenges
So why is it you want a baby, my therapist asks. Love, I answer.
By Bethany Marcel
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
I wait for sleep, for the fever to break, the tooth to fall out, the rash to go away.
By Zsofia McMullin
Sorry, can’t make it to the sorority reunion. My thermometer says I’m ovulating!
By Amy Klein
“We’re happy, the three of us, aren’t we?” I asked my husband.
By Leslie Kendall Dye
We’ve raised three children of our own, but still have a little parenting left in us.
By Julianne Palumbo
The doctor finally looked at me and said, “We can’t hold her down. She’s sixteen.”
By Laurie Lichtenstein
Nobody told me while my house was falling apart that eventually I would start to see clearly again.
By Lauren Apfel
None of the parents I know are copping to having a kid who is average.
By Christie Tate
I want my children to be part of a college community that is more in line with the ideologies of #Imwithher than #MAGA.
By Randi Olin
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