Kelly Burch

Don’t talk politics. Do. Not. This old adage is more important than ever this year, with an election that started off bad and has gotten consistently worse.

Just like kids who kick the seat in front of them and middle-aged women who get drunk and chatty on long flights, crying babies are a fact of life.

I certainly still have moments of self-doubt, but I make a conscious effort to change my internal monologue at those times. Instead of saying, "If only you were good enough to write a book," I tell myself "You're doing great accomplishing small steps to get there." Instead of berating myself for always splitting my attention between my daughter and my work, I congratulate myself for juggling writing and motherhood.

I’m one of those bigger girls that confuses the medical community by being entirely healthy. My doctor body shamed me and lied to me about tests she ran.

Parenting a toddler is invigorating, exhausting, dirty, and intense. But since I want my daughter to have cousins (or at least pseudo-cousins) one day, I can’t always share the truth about my tiny tyrant on social media, for fear that my friends and siblings would never reproduce. And because, sometimes, you just want to project the image that you're calm, cool, and collected.

While I would like to think that I paused for a minute or two to think about what it means to be American, I was mostly focused on looking forward to the fireworks show.
But all of that changed for me last year. Three weeks before the Fourth of July, my husband became a citizen of the United States.

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No having a community rally in support, like it is supposed to during a crisis, can make a family in mental health crisis feel shamed and stigmatized.

Last week, as the U.S.