Medium, I’m not leaving you yet. But I‘m cheating on you, just so you know. — Much like “wash curtains” and “organize digital photos,” I’ve had a lingering item on my to-do list to “get on Substack.” I even took a precious PTO day back in October to get all set up on the platform. I changed the name of the publication about five times. Then…

White fragility and interracial coupling do not go hand in hand — On our third date, the man who would become my husband told me, “You get it.” The “it” he was referring to was racism. At the time, I was flattered to have a Black person acknowledge my wokeness. But I’ve since realized that three dates in, I didn’t really get…

Over the course of 773,770 steps, I learned to walk with, not away from, my problems — At first, I tried to outwalk my anger. Maybe if I walked fast enough, I could leave it behind. Maybe if I walked fast enough to somewhere beautiful, I could leave it behind and bury it for good and return home a better, calmer, more merciful version of myself. What…

Protecting our children from the toxic forces that surround us is like swimming upstream — I’m another exhausted parent, and no one wants to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s tiring to raise children, we get it, enough already. But actually, people don’t really get it. I know this because it only clicked for me very recently, and I’ve parented three children, starting with my…

Follow these five simple guidelines if you want a shot at second-best — I’m not sure if you know this about me, but I’m the World’s Best Mom. It says so right on my coffee mug. Some people wonder how I earned this prestigious designation. Sometimes they ask me — rather snarkily, I might add — if I’m not merely the recipient of…

And for the community that came with them — My father and I were always the early risers. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m., I was usually sitting on a kitchen stool eating a bowl of Shredded Wheat. My father was a few feet away from me, sitting “lotus-style” on the window seat. He donned robes that used to…

They are strong, healthy, and entirely gapless — Three dates in, the man who would become my husband told me that he loved my “thick thighs.” I was 24 years old at the time and luckily, by that point, finally secure with my robust femoral region. I thanked him, but I also warned him that should he find…

Such a claim calls for a healthy dose of skepticism and a few key follow-up questions. — When my daughter officially entered toddlerhood, I found myself making frequent comparisons between her behavior and that of my company’s CEO. Both were highly unpredictable and stubbornly unresponsive to reasonable requests. Both behaved as though they were the center of the universe and were prone to temper tantrums when they…

The beauty of unapologetically opting out — Something happened when I turned 40. Essentially, I stopped giving a fuck. Or, to put it more precisely, I continued giving fucks about things that mattered and realized that everything else didn’t matter nearly as much as I’d been led to believe. When I wrote about this a few summers…