Gemma Hartley

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 want to live my best life and, honestly, it's exhausting. Sometimes I wish I could just take a break and say I'm content with where I'm at.

When I was a teenager, I felt very certain that I was not a feminist. I didn’t exactly understand the textbook definition of feminism, but I had a pretty good sense from the negative connotation I had gleaned while growing up in a narrowly Christian setting.

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

Clearly, it does not take long for my over-ambition to turn me from a vision of perfection into a train wreck you can't look away from. Behold, my first week of school splendor, versus my second week of school ineptitude.

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.

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.

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.

My husband and I have been together for 12 years, eight of them married, four of them teenaged.