Gemma Hartley

This straggler struggle is weighing on me! That is, the struggle of having one straggler child left at home, and I’m wondering if it will ever get better.

I wish I had realized there was no such thing as being too young to have mental health issues. That there was nothing shameful about postpartum struggles.

Clearly, it does not take long for my over-ambition to turn me from a vision of perfection into a train wreck you can't look away from. Behold, my first week of school splendor, versus my second week of school ineptitude.

Making friends as a grown woman is hard. I figured out a few tips on how to set up successful one-on-one friend dates, as well as how to handle the territory of a budding platonic relationship with another woman.

I don't want motherhood to be where my life begins and ends. Sure, we can still talk about our kids, commiserate, and share in one another's parenting accomplishments — but at some point, we need to be more than mere storytellers of our children's lives.

To be honest, it’s exhausting, and I am ready to shed this pesky baby weight once and for all. I mean that literally.

...[M]en get a lot of praise for the “extra-credit work” they do in regards to domestic labor (the actual house cleaning and keeping work) and emotional labor (the invisible work that ensures the rest gets done) no matter what day of the year.

When I made the decision to become a stay-at-home mother, the choice was an easy one.

It wasn’t the name I would have picked — not originally, at least — but as days turned into weeks, it grew on me.