Sandy Jorgenson

The tumult that’s been rippling through our country has me begging the question: what do we do when we feel the defeat of a woman and the rise of a monster bearing down on us?

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.

When I check on our daughter before heading to bed myself, I have to do a quick scan around her full-size bed just to locate her. She is almost never remotely close to where she started out. But she is almost always upside down, head jammed up against the wall or her footboard, stuffed animals scattered like confetti all around her.

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

Why are people so mean?

Death, we know because it’s drilled into us from an early age, is a natural part of life.

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.

This article is the second in a two-part series.

*/

The night I discovered that tumor on her back was essentially just like any other.