We often assume mothers carry an instinct to nurture, that somehow mothering comes naturally. At the very least, we believe that the women who appear to choose motherhood want to be good mothers or have it in them to do so. …

Self-love. It’s a self-help buzzword. It’s a cliché. I used to think it didn’t matter. But then, I used to think that I didn’t matter. — In the nineties, Phil Hartman invented a character on Saturday Night Live called Stuart Smalley who would look into a mirror and recite cringe-worthy affirmations to inspire self-love. And everybody laughed. The self-help explosion of the 70s and 80s made it the butt of the joke in the nineties. …

Get up. Make coffee. Breathe. Your life is just beginning. Again. Make it better. — Have you wished to be young again but know what you know now? I think divorce may be like that. We cannot be young again, but we can be single, and now, armed with what we know we don’t want, we can move toward what we do want. I don’t…

I received divorce papers from my husband this week. Well, I should be calling him my ex-husband. I must get used to that. When the officer of the court arrived, my husband answer it. He came to the room where I was getting ready and said abruptly, “Amy, they’re here.”…

In a post-Roe world, it can be hard to know what to do, how to help, or even how to feel about the future. — Don’t look back. Regret nothing. You see many near you fall? You feel compassion? But you should live your life, since then at least one in a thousand will remain. You cannot halt dying. — C.G. Jung, The Red Book Swiss psychologist Carl Jung wrote this on the eve of…

I’m hurting. I won’t sleep tonight, which is a particular kind of torture and it’s all because I started making videos and posting them to YouTube. I can’t explain it, I’m just telling you about it. I’m hurting myself. I’m hurting and I don’t know how to make it stop…

Healing allowed me to remember loving someone with the purity of a child. — Trigger warning: content contains a description of child sexual abuse. Following an EMDR therapy session, I remembered my first love. He was a little red-haired boy and we were in second grade. He sat next to me at lunch and one day his mother packed little cakes for me. That’s…

Trauma shatters you. You splinter. All of those shards of your once whole self now languish out of reach in a region so far below your own skin they feel lost forever. — Trauma shatters you. You splinter. All of those shards of your once whole self now languish out of reach in a region so far below your own skin they feel lost forever. But they’re there. They grow. They take on a force you don’t understand and when you’re triggered they…

In the wake of the reversal of Roe V. Wade, one wonders if this isn’t the beginning of the end of joy — Dear regular readers, this will be a departure. I have many feelings about the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe V. Wade but need some time to formulate those into a coherent argument. However, my husband, quite unexpectedly, wrote a piece on the topic that I felt needed a venue. He…