Gemma Hartley

Travelling solo for the first time allowed me to regain my sense of self outside of motherhood. It showed me that I could still be a whole and interesting person without using my kids as my stand-in.

You are a professional. You want to handle your business with a certain air of sophistication. You want to tell them "f*ck no," but want to do so graciously, tactfully — you are, after all, a wordsmith.

I don't want motherhood to be where my life begins and ends. Sure, we can still talk about our kids, commiserate, and share in one another's parenting accomplishments — but at some point, we need to be more than mere storytellers of our children's lives.

I hate some of the things I see my friends and family post on Facebook.

How was I supposed to tell my son, who was already preoccupied and frightened by the idea of death, that his new little brother or sister was gone, that I'd had a miscarriage? I didn't know. So I lied.

My husband and I have been together for 12 years, eight of them married, four of them teenaged.

Did you read “gymnastics for grown-ass adults” and get real excited? Like, where can I find this? How can I do this? This sounds awesome! 

I am sometimes painfully envious of other (usually childless) writers who are doing the very thing I swore I would have done by now — publishing a novel.

I know it won't be long until he can read the headlines before I can bury the truth. He will learn to read, and then to suffer. Words will haunt him.

When I was a teenager, I felt very certain that I was not a feminist. I didn’t exactly understand the textbook definition of feminism, but I had a pretty good sense from the negative connotation I had gleaned while growing up in a narrowly Christian setting.