By: Monique I had a plan for my life. I left high school with a scholarship to work on being the first generation college educated in my family. All that weight on my shoulders to succeed. I knew I would meet my husband in college and get married after graduation and have a few kids. […]
By Evie Peck When I was about 5 months pregnant I went to a friend’s dinner party. We met at a restaurant in Hollywood. I was through the morning sickness and the extreme exhaustion and was excited to go out. I hadn’t bought any maternity clothes yet. I was wearing a lot of my normal […]
I’ve been asking myself this question quite a bit lately: what does it mean to be a mother? What does it mean to be a single mother, and by choice? And I really haven’t come up with a decent satisfactory answer yet. I mean I could state the obvious of motherhood – feeding, bathing, educating […]
By Barbara Matousek I spent much of this past weekend in the black leather rocker that was my nearly constant companion before I had kids. I used to spend hours in that chair, rocking and reading, losing myself for days in a Toni Morrison novel or the latest issue of Best American Short […]
By Holly Vanderhaar Back from a brief hiatus! It’s been a remarkably busy few months around our house. I was working two jobs for the first part of the summer, and then we had a three-week trip back East. The girls started 4th grade after Labor Day, and the following weekend we flew to Arizona […]
By Barbara Matousek The Mazda that I purchased three months ago is dead, stranded at an odd angle next to the stop sign on the county road that turns to The Berry Patch. I was revving up and passing a Honda, keeping my eye on the clock and thinking we were probably going to be […]
By Evie Peck I know it sounds crazy, but once I got up at 5am to bake cookies for my new fertility doctor. He was supposed to be the best in town and I guess I was over compensating, because I was nervous about being a single woman trying to get pregnant… and… our first […]
By Evie Peck The woman at the counter handed me two nametags. “One for your husband,” she said. “No husband,” I said, pushing the extra nametag back. At the age of forty, I decided to have a baby, even though I was not in a relationship. My best friend of twenty years was my sperm […]
By: Barbara Matousek I’m not sure what I was thinking. Maybe I wasn’t actually thinking. Mostly now I think “midlife crisis.” Why else would a 45-year-old single mother of two children under five commit to something as time consuming and crazy as a Ragnar relay? For anyone who doesn’t know what these are, they are running […]
