Michaela Mitchell

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.

How many times have you opened your mouth only to hear your parents instead? This happens to me all the time . . .

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 have a completely common and certainly not surprising confession to make. Turning 30 freaked me out.

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.)

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.

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.”

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.