Britni de la Cretaz

I know you’re probably wondering how that happened, so I’m going to tell you. (You’re welcome.)

The first sign that something was wrong was the weirdly watery discharge. I'd never had vaginal discharge that looked like that before, and considering I'd just finished my period, the large-ish amount was confusing to me. But everything else felt fine. So I put a pantyliner on and went about my life, thinking it would stop soon.

Loving someone who struggles with alcoholism and addiction is one of the hardest things to do. It’s a drain on friends and family in both financial and emotional ways. It comes with ups and downs, characterized by periods of hope followed by devastation when you’re let down yet again.

The sex dreams that have caught me completely off-guard. I don’t generally have much of a sex drive during my pregnancy when I’m awake, but when I’m asleep, it’s a completely different story. I have these incredibly vivid, incredibly-detailed sex dreams almost every night. Often, they involve celebrities.

It’s bad enough when I’m street harassed out by myself — I feel vulnerable and deciding how to respond can be hard. But it gets really complicated when I’m harassed and with my child.

This ad is the furthest thing from funny. It’s not humor, it’s not satire, it’s just plain distasteful. Good humor punches up. But there’s no humor to be found in an issue that, according to the Center For Disease Control, killed 47,055 people in 2014. Of those over 47,000 people that died of a drug overdose, opiates — like heroin — were involved in 61% of those deaths.

I’m working on an essay about the time I was raped my freshman year of college. For the very first time, I’m naming my perpetrator. Even if it’s only his first name, there’s still so much power in it.

While people asking about our plan likely have good intentions, the conversation opens you up to so much judgment about how you’re planning to give birth.... Birth plans are personal, between parents and their care provider. We all make choices for our families that we feel are best, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters.

And so, because I love my child, I am doing the thing I swore I’d never do: planning a princess party for my daughter. I am doing the thing that will make her happiest. I am helping her embrace her femininity by letting her be nothing other than who she wants to be.

When I first got sober, I was resistant to a lot of the things I was hearing in 12-step communities and recovery circles. I’ve always been a feminist and much of the rhetoric I was hearing seemed to go against everything I stood for.

I’ve been writing about stigmatized topics on the Internet for almost 10 years, so it’s never a surprise to me when I get pushback or face trolling or abuse for my opinions. I am a woman on the Internet, after all. Men love to tell me how stupid I am on a regular basis.