Michaela Mitchell

If someone you care about is suffering through the pain of first holidays without someone they love, there are things you can do.

I don't exactly advocate divorce for anyone with a gripe about his or her spouse. Whatever I think of my own divorce, it's not something to take lightly. Divorce is serious. It's the death of a relationship, the end of something that was supposed to last forever. It must be grieved.

During the darkest moments after my split with my husband and then divorce, when I thought life would never get better, and I kicked myself for thinking I could be on my own, it was music that got me through.

My journey to acknowledging my guilt and privilege while embracing my feminist view on the world has been a slow, winding trip — with no end in sight.

In my family, it's not a matter of if cancer will affect one of us, but when. Right now, breast cancer has center stage in our lives.

God forbid a single group, like fast-food workers, attempt to unite and fight for a better living wage. The moment they do, stories about more deserving groups who don't complain about their income are thrown about.

Somewhere between the birth of my first child and the first time my youngest hurt himself and I told him to “walk it off,” I lost much of my mom guilt. It helps that a very good friend of mine, who'd already raised her children years before, shared some of her own hard-earned wisdom with me.

Ah, January of a new year. Time to wake up a completely different person from the woman I was in 2015, including: 30 pounds lighter by February! I call bullshit.

I don't know if it's because I've lived in the deep South my entire life or if it's a generational thing. I do know that I was raised to “act like a lady” — always. Good girls didn't say certain things or look a certain way. We didn't raise our voices or argue with authority figures, and we apologized – a lot.

Older men hooking up with younger women get a bad rap.