Gemma Hartley

My resolutions regularly remind me that I don’t think I am enough, just as I am. So this year, instead of focusing on habit changes, I'm more concerned with changing my perspective.

I wish I had realized there was no such thing as being too young to have mental health issues. That there was nothing shameful about postpartum struggles.

To be honest, I consider myself pretty damn good at adulting. I’m a great cook, as long as I have a recipe. I’m a self-taught professional baker.

Getting pregnant after postpartum depression may have stolen a lot from me, but it gave me a lot more.

It probably isn’t the sort of parenting moment that is supposed to make a mother proud — the hitting, growling, and otherwise uncivilized decorum... But I couldn’t help feeling a deep satisfaction with my daughter.

But I was yet to face the cold, hard fact that my lack of acceptance for my own body, was really a lack of acceptance for all the bodies I had falsely embraced for so long. Could I really love someone else’s ample stomach, when I could not love my own?

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! 

My six-year-old son got into the car after school and declared he only wanted to have one kid when he grew up.

There is a time to be prudent and fair to “many sides” of an issue, but dealing with Nazis is not that time.

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.