Michaela Mitchell

Several months ago I read a piece from a mother who was so over people comparing raising kids to taking care of their “furbabies.” The annoyance and eye rolls practically leapt off the page.

I can't decide which school of thought is more annoying. “Lose weight, get healthy, don't be a drain on society, and finally have the best, most perfect life once you're skinny!” or “Screw what people think! Be comfortable in your own skin! Don't ever change because change equals conformity!”

Ok, for the record, he's in kindergarten, and for his age, it did not suck. It was a masterpiece of little boy seriousness and hard work, actually. (Of course, I might be biased.)

My journey to acknowledging my guilt and privilege while embracing my feminist view on the world has been a slow, winding trip — with no end in sight.

God forbid a single group, like fast-food workers, attempt to unite and fight for a better living wage. The moment they do, stories about more deserving groups who don't complain about their income are thrown about.

Older men hooking up with younger women get a bad rap.

In my family, it's not a matter of if cancer will affect one of us, but when. Right now, breast cancer has center stage in our lives.

I don't know if it's because I've lived in the deep South my entire life or if it's a generational thing. I do know that I was raised to “act like a lady” — always. Good girls didn't say certain things or look a certain way. We didn't raise our voices or argue with authority figures, and we apologized – a lot.

Somewhere between the birth of my first child and the first time my youngest hurt himself and I told him to “walk it off,” I lost much of my mom guilt. It helps that a very good friend of mine, who'd already raised her children years before, shared some of her own hard-earned wisdom with me.