Sandy Jorgenson

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.

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

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

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

I didn’t start out as a particularly easygoing person.

Whoever is responsible for coining the term “terrible twos” and leaving the entirety of the threes out of the equation is sitting at the very top of my sh*t list. Because a little warning would’ve been nice.

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.

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?

Anybody who has lived through those early days of parenthood (and let’s be totally forthright, here… those seasoned parents, too) knows e