Joni Edelman

You do not have to hate your body — but you don’t have to love it either. While I'm happy with my fat body, I miss being thin.

I don’t think anyone who has been to the spirited child parenting rodeo would call a mother who screams, “bad,” or who loses her temper, a “failure.” I think we all understand parenting is really really hard from the get go, and parenting a kid who won’t sleep, who screams and kicks and says they hate you, is its own challenge

Misogyny is pervasive. And my three boys are living it all.

Good god, where will I ever find someone who will love me in such a pitiful condition?

It doesn’t get any more difficult to insult ourselves, regardless of how old we are. It would be ideal if it got easier to respect ourselves, but it generally doesn’t do that either. Every year you age, and every year the aging you looks at the you of the years before and thinks, I can’t believe I thought I was fat/ugly/etc.

photo credit: Lindy West (instagram), by

Now that I've embarked upon the decade I once considered "old," there are a few things I'd like my 20 (and 30) year-old self to know.

A weekly trip to Walmart would end in tears — first theirs, then mine. Them pining in the toy aisle. Me saying no. Over and over. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to buy my kids whatever they wanted, it was that I couldn’t.

The Cabbage Soup Diet, aka The "Torture” Diet. You just put cabbage in water and cook it. And you eat it. All day. It is not good. You will still be hungry, and farting — very smelly, paint-peeling farting.

She says she’s worried that the cat, whose name is Jack, doesn’t know what’s going on. She tried to explain to him that she was leaving for a while.