Michaela Mitchell

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.

How many times have you opened your mouth only to hear your parents instead? This happens to me all the time . . .

During the darkest moments after my split with my husband and then divorce, when I thought life would never get better, and I kicked myself for thinking I could be on my own, it was music that got me through.

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.)

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.

In a do-nothing Congress that barely manages to pass resolutions supporting cute puppies with big brown eyes (okay, I made that up), the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has managed to vote 63 times to repeal Obamacare. Oddly enough, the last vote I’m aware of was on...wait for it...Groundhog’s Day. Oh, the irony. Have they seen the movie? Bill Murray’s version was much funnier, but even he had to change his ways in order to move forward.

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.

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

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.