Michaela Mitchell

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.

Ok, for the record, he's in kindergarten, and for his age, it did not suck. It was a masterpiece of little boy seriousness and hard work, actually. (Of course, I might be biased.)

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.

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

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.

You turn your back to deal with a crying toddler (I mean, answer a customer's question) and when you look back, every single shirt is unfolded and on the floor. Just at that moment, someone else walks by and rolls their eyes and sighs at how “nasty the store is" and wonders why they "can't they hire good people to keep it clean.”

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

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.

I've said before that I accept myself as I am, even though there are things I'd love to change about my body. And that's true. But it's not like I woke up one day and thought, “Yep, I'm great. My body is great. Life is great. Everything is great.”

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.