Marie Southard Ospina

“Gorda,” the Spanish word for “fat,” loomed over me as I wrapped a towel around my body, arms firmly pushing into my stomach. Years later I embraced it.

We can keep the diet talk, the self-criticism, the weight loss rhetoric, and the calorie-counting out of the house, but we can’t keep it out of everywhere else. So, raising a daughter scares the shit out of me.

I just don’t want to rely on my makeup and clothes for my self-confidence. For me, it took leaving the city in order to love my rawest self.

For so long, becoming wives and mothers was our “duty.” Striving to “do it all” and “have it all” is perhaps an act of rebellion against those ideologies.

In some ways, it feels like 2015 has been the year of