Gemma Hartley

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.

The real reason I’m worried about sending my kids to school is that I’m going to be alone. For the first time in nearly a decade. And that’s scary.

I am sometimes painfully envious of other (usually childless) writers who are doing the very thing I swore I would have done by now — publishing a novel.

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.

I spent most of my life assuming I was an introvert, but not a very good one. Then finding out I'm an ambivert totally changed my life!

I had a lot of well-meaning friends and family searching for the right words to say after my back-to-back miscarriages. So many offered solace by guessing at where my lost babies resided in the ether: taken away to Heaven, perhaps forever, perhaps waiting for a better moment— an unknown, destined time these small souls were meant to break into the world. I accepted these comments silently, because they did nothing to comfort me.

I spent the better part of two years a frazzled mess over things that ultimately didn’t matter. My child was still growing up perfectly normal, even when he didn’t follow the straight and narrow path set forth by his pediatrician. I was driving myself over the edge for nothing.

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.

It wasn’t the name I would have picked — not originally, at least — but as days turned into weeks, it grew on me.

Becoming an adult didn’t magically open me up to their world and their psyche as I thought it would. Even having children of my own did little to unravel the mystery of my parents, because I wasn’t really interested in exploring honestly. I have always been concerned with who my parents were in relation to me, not who they were on their own.