Sandy Jorgenson

Sitting now on the cusp of my 35th birthday, I find myself taking stock of my life thus far, shoving my youth under a microscope while I ask myself this one thing: Am I careening full-tilt toward my final days on this earth, or am I only just getting started here?

So, women, I’m talking to you — give yourself permission to love every inch of you. Honor your body, and meet it where it is. To those of you who’ve given birth: you’re forever changed. Relinquish the idea that you need to get your body back to looking the way it did before your baby was born.

Everybody who’s a parent can attest to the fact that the lives they once knew are far behind them.

You’d have a hell of a time if you ever dared to crawl through the recesses of a first-time mother’s brain.

Life is hard work, and I think we all know this with varying degrees of certainty. It’s grueling, it’s relentless, it’s at times unforgiving, and it is always a damn hustle. So if you want a piece of coffee cake, get that cake, girl.

My daughter was just reaching her first birthday before the dense fog of postpartum depression started to lift off of me. I didn’t realize it right away, though – and I certainly hadn’t even realized I was suffering from PPD at all.

Why are people so mean?

When a bereaved mother is left alone, how deep into the recesses of her mind does she wander? Does she surface for air? Does she want to come out at all?

Two years ago, I had a two-year-old daughter who’d never met her grandfather.

...[O]ur very responsibility is to equip them with everything they need before we shove them out of the nest and watch their wings spread far and wide... But what, then, is left for us?