I was ashamed of my pregnancy losses. I felt I had been kicked out of some elite club of women with impeccably functioning wombs.
By Stephanie Sprenger
A mother of a special needs child finds unexpected common ground with her neighbor.
By Brianne DeRosa
After infertility, she’s not the parent she thought she’d be.
By Amy Klein
It is an awesome responsibility to be entrusted with the care of someone’s child, but for the first time I’m less anxious about it.
By Teri Carter
For now, what I hope my kids see is that family life is a team effort. We may run different plays than other families, but we’re only interested in the home field win.
By Ann Cinzar
Both my children hate being around me and water—I’m the parent whose urgent, borderline hysteria ruins all the fun.
By Christie Tate
If calling me Mrs. Badzin makes me seem more uptight than other people’s parents, I almost welcome that boundary.
By Nina Badzin
One of the hardest parts of parenting is deciding when to let your children come to their own conclusions and when to steer them down a certain path, in the name of transmitting values.
By Lauren Apfel
Is it possible to love being a mom without knowing why?
By Christine Organ
What grooming habits is my daughter going to learn from me, and what will I say to her about why she might be expected to shave her legs but her brothers won’t be?
By Lauren Apfel
The chance to remember myself at that age, in a way that I often don’t when I wrangle with my own teens, was illuminating.
By Sarah Werthan Buttenwieser
What can be seen as the messy complications of a blended family are, when viewed differently, just more branches on a beautifully tangled family tree.
By Elizabeth Maria Naranjo
A summer internship might help my daughter narrow down her career options, but I think she needs a break from the stress of her freshman year. By Randi Olin
Being a mother made me a feminist, it brought me face to face with ugly truths about society I would have rather not seen before.
By Lyz Lenz
Cousins are more complicated than I’d realized. They give more than I thought possible, but they also demand more than I’d ever known.
By Antonia Malchik
What makes this an exceptional book is that it always steers its eye away from self-pity and toward a greater understanding of love and acceptance.
Abigail Rasminsky and Mira Ptacin
Children are resilient little creatures and they don’t need our eyes on them, our attendance at every single school function, to know how profoundly they matter.
By Lauren Apfel
The idea of my son scanning the stands for my face and not finding it is a horrifying thought, a cross I cannot seem to bear. By Randi Olin
My entire life had become an existential paradox: I could endure neither my love for the baby nor the idea that he could be lost to me. By Catherine Newman
If my partner and I had been straight we might have all nodded to each other in recognition, but because we are queer, our difference is what stands out.
By Jennifer Berney
Without practicing curious, respectful engagement ourselves, we can’t expect to pass it on to our children.
By Sharon Holbrook
Would having another baby after 50 salve my grief over my children leaving home?
By Andrea Jarrell
Does the minute matter? If they didn’t know about it, would Baby A tease Baby B less? Would she watch out for her less? My hunch is no.
By Francie Arenson Dickman
There’s a fine line between being proud of our kids and bragging about them. Pride keeps the accomplishment firmly in their own hands. Bragging is a more public endeavor.
By Lisa Sadikman
That little boy who would cling to me is now a teenager who opts to spend much of his time in his room. By Randi Olin