Melissa Petro

"We built a luxury dream home but can only afford to have two children."

After gaining as much as forty pounds and pushing a cantaloupe out my vagina, I wondered: will my body ever be the same?

It's pretty well understood in 12 step programs that "who you see here and what you say here, stays here."

[I]t looks like our wedding will cost us more like $10,000. That is a hell of a lot of money. Still, it’s our one and only wedding. And for a wedding in Manhattan that includes most of the typical expenditures [...] that’s not too bad. Here’s what I’ve learned about how to make your big day (relatively) less expensive.

Mark prayed to Saint Francis, a patron saint of drunks and (according to Mark) lost causes. Mark wasn’t religious, but he wore a St. Francis amulet around his neck, a gift from his father. Nights when he didn’t come home, I prayed to St. Francis, too.

C-PTSD stands for Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also known as Developmental Trauma Disorder (DTD) or complex trauma. It’s a diagnostic term for a set of symptoms resulting from prolonged social or interpersonal stress, especially in the context of interpersonal dependence. It’s a tricky diagnosis to land on, given the way trauma is dealt with in the mind and by society. Like Kristof, I wouldn’t have told you there was anything wrong with my childhood. It took years of therapy to catalog early life experiences that were profoundly affecting, if not necessarily severe.

We’ve all been in a situation where we've thought NO ONE CAN EVER KNOW THAT THIS HAPPENED TO ME.

"Certainly, my life as an alcoholic was not what most would imagine. I was a writer, living in the West Village of New York City, enrolled in a prestigious graduate program and working on a book. At least, this was my cover story."

The biggest fashion mistake of my lifetime may not be what I wore, but what I didn’t.

Use insect repellent, sleep under a mosquito net, and just don’t get pregnant — is this the best we can do for Latin American women?