Michaela Mitchell

I don't exactly advocate divorce for anyone with a gripe about his or her spouse. Whatever I think of my own divorce, it's not something to take lightly. Divorce is serious. It's the death of a relationship, the end of something that was supposed to last forever. It must be grieved.

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.

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.

You turn your back to deal with a crying toddler (I mean, answer a customer's question) and when you look back, every single shirt is unfolded and on the floor. Just at that moment, someone else walks by and rolls their eyes and sighs at how “nasty the store is" and wonders why they "can't they hire good people to keep it clean.”

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.

Ah, January of a new year. Time to wake up a completely different person from the woman I was in 2015, including: 30 pounds lighter by February! I call bullshit.

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.

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

Ever hear the phrase, “We were poor growing up, but I didn't know it?” It was a common refrain in my family. When my mother and aunt speak about those days, they wax poetically about tomato sandwiches and bread with every meal (meant to fill an empty stomach when there wasn't enough food).