Joni Edelman

[CN: suicide, overdose] Gratitude stops me from ending my life, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to end my life. Even the fierce love I have for my family doesn’t mean I don’t feel utterly hopeless sometimes.

By baby three, well let’s just say things are a little anticlimactic, at least where furnishings are concerned. Hand me down crib. Check.

I am tired of taking medication. I am tired of relying on the manufactured versions of the chemicals and hormones my body could — should? — make for itself.

I'll never forget the day I discovered the name for my mental illness.

I don’t think anyone who has been to the spirited child parenting rodeo would call a mother who screams, “bad,” or who loses her temper, a “failure.” I think we all understand parenting is really really hard from the get go, and parenting a kid who won’t sleep, who screams and kicks and says they hate you, is its own challenge

I'll let you in on a little secret - being thin didn't make me happy, but being "Fat" does! Be fat and happy. Be unapologetically fat.

A weekly trip to Walmart would end in tears — first theirs, then mine. Them pining in the toy aisle. Me saying no. Over and over. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to buy my kids whatever they wanted, it was that I couldn’t.

She says she’s worried that the cat, whose name is Jack, doesn’t know what’s going on. She tried to explain to him that she was leaving for a while.

I didn't get a lot of mothering as a child, but when I did, it was from her. She taught me how to sew, how to crochet. She taught me how to stand up for myself, to be tough. She taught me how to make fried chicken and fried okra, which I will never make, because it's fucking gross.

My cocktail is wrong. It’s a gin and tonic with only gin. It’s a martini with 10 olives. And I can’t stand the sun. Not today. Not this month.