Gemma Hartley

Your dirty brown garbage water is a scourge upon the human race, and I'm here to say it's time to call it quits. Let's all just admit that coffee is disgusting, and move on with our lives. It has no place beside delicious breakfast foods, and it is high time we banned this foul liquid from sullying the world of brunch.

I was lucky enough to avoid a great deal of body negativity growing up.

Back when I had my first child, back when he was still a baby, I imagined us moving to the mountains. I was thinking about having three more kids, living off the grid, and soaking up every last bit of their wild childhood. It was a fantasy, through and through.

If you were to walk into my house on any given day, you wouldn’t know that I am an efficient and organized person.

As a freelancer who works from home, I get the best of both worlds as a parent.

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

To be honest, it’s exhausting, and I am ready to shed this pesky baby weight once and for all. I mean that literally.

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 felt unique in my passion for martial arts, my affinity for Call of Duty, my go-with-the-flow attitude toward boyish adventures. I wanted to be “one of the guys,” while still retaining the distinction of my sexuality. I longed to be the quintessential cool girl — desirable yet approachable. But in retrospect, all that really amounted to internalized misogyny.

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