How can we celebrate our non-blood family with our daughter?
I come from a fairly abusive background, and am perfectly happy with most of my biological family not being in our life. However, I’m finding it increasingly hard to find ways to celebrate the friends that we have made family. I want my daughter to know that she is surrounded by love — even though we don’t have what you would call a conventional family unit.
Confession: I suck at being a working mom
Friends and family often wonder how I “do it all” but the truth is there isn’t any magic to it. I think of how much time I spend apart from my children, and launch into panic mode. I know I’m being a responsible parent by providing the health insurance, food, and security that my job affords my family, but I can’t help but feel that just as not every parent is meant to stay at home, not every parent is meant to be away.
My ovaries, his sperm, and other dinner conversations: why we’re not discussing our conception plans
I’ve always been open about my sexuality and the fact that I want more than anything to have a family of my own. If I had questions about sex or relationships, I went to my family for advice or answers. When I wanted to start on birth control pills, I talked to my Mom about it. I’m generally an open person, so why can’t I just give them a firm answer on the baby of it all? The answers to those questions are somewhat complicated. The reason we’ve decided to be mum (ha!) on the whole situation is not: quite simply, it’s none of their business.
Infertility and a wedding: what if I can’t have children?
Having a baby always felt like a given — I’d get married, have a baby and live happily ever after. That’s the way it works, right? Six pregnancies and seven miscarriages later (one set of twins) we find ourselves facing the very real possibility that I simply can not carry a child to term. Three months seems to be average, though one pregnancy was lost at five months.
My husband and I are big-time introverts: will having kids and losing our personal space be crazy for us?
I fear that the lack of privacy, personal space, quiet and time for us to recharge, could bring out a bad side of us and we’d slowly slide the horrible steep slope in becoming horrible parents that scar their children for life.
How beating up a sack of potatoes helped me deal with my father’s illness
My mom spoke in a tight, scared voice as she told me Papa was being airlifted from their small town to the capital city where I lived. His heart condition had triggered acute kidney failure and he was in and out of consciousness, rapidly sliding closer to death. I said yes and hung up in a daze.
My mom doesn’t like me: parental estrangement and lessons learned
Sometimes, your own best intentions and healthy patterns can’t cancel out the choices your parents make. It isn’t an easy decision to come to, to make, or to act on, but sometimes estrangement is the right choice for you. It was for me. These are the lessons I learned along the way.
Taking a vacation in our city helped get my marriage and parenting focus back on track
Parenthood came with all of its work and exhaustion and then postpartum depression hit and we haven’t been managing those new challenges well. We went from being each other’s warm, safe, place to fall into at the end of the day to adversaries who yell and scream and take out all of our frustrations on the other person. It’s not like this every day, of course, but the grumpy, angry, days are creeping in more and more frequently.