Punishing children is a fraught, occasionally necessary task. I know we live in a time of positive rewards and encouraging good behavior rather than punishing the bad. But toddlers are basically tiny psychopaths who will destroy you. Don’t believe me? Just trying blocking a two-year-old’s access to bleach. They will…

I walked into the darkened auditorium of the conference center at nine in the morning, with my baby girl Olivia strapped to my chest in her wrap. Linda Gray of Dallas was speaking to a large audience of women. I stood at the back of the room with Olivia, while my friend Angela, who had come to the conference to help…

While human people are sleeping, my baby awakes. She whines and wriggles over to my listless body. Leading with her pale, swollen cheeks and newly cut teeth, she pounces on my chest. My flesh of my flesh uses her sharp talons to pull the wound on my breast into her mouth. Then, she sucks my blood.

During a radio interview called Woman’s Hour in England, Sex and the City actress Kim Cattrall said she didn’t have any kids but acted as a surrogate mom for younger actors as well as her niece and nephew when they needed her. Now people are mad at her because… frankly, it’s unclear. Because she’s helpful?

My sore 36Cs are trying to bust out of my bra; my nose has become bionic, smelling toast burn from two blocks away. I am nauseated but starving for oranges. I re-read the section on pregnancy from Our Bodies, Ourselves over and over again, and finally buy a pregnancy test, which confirms that yes, there is a tiny…

On Saturday night, Rose and Trevor Abbud were driving to the hospital via a New Jersey Shore highway to give birth after Rose’s water broke at around 6:30 p.m. It soon became clear that the baby would not wait to be born.

Leaving the spa, my mom surprised me by saying something as awkward as it was true—that we’d just had two old Korean ladies strip us down and clean us better than we’ve ever cleaned ourselves.

In an effort to retain female service members, the Air Force has announced that women will be able to defer their annual fitness test for up to one year after either giving birth or miscarrying a pregnancy that lasted at least 20 weeks. The change, which doubles the current post-pregnancy deployment deferment period,…

A brand of extremely sentimental woman might choose to send her breastmilk to a company called MommyMilk Creations, which promises to transform your mommy juice into an adorable little pendant. But now, dozens of women who have paid and sent in their organic materials have been basically stranded—the company will not…

“Stand up straight,” I tell my daughter, for the tenth time in an hour. I notice when she rolls her eyes. By the time she’s staring straight ahead again, I have seen myself reflected entirely in her behavior at her exact age of 14. I’ve heard the echoes of my mother instructing me to stop slouching, to stand up…

Maggie Nelson writes like no one else on the planet. Her work dives—headlong, yet gracefully—into the ugly, messy, or simply complicated; she treats our bodies’ instincts, whether fear, desire, or violence, with the same erudite analysis more often accorded to art and literature, the offspring of those instincts. She…

Though most American mothers work — nearly three quarters — broadly speaking, culture has never quite accepted the reality of mothers in the workplace. See for example, a recent Pew report that found 41% of Americans thought that working mothers were probably tearing the very fabric of our society to shreds (or, at…

You deserve recognition for completing the hardest break-up known to the human heart.

In April a viral video showed 50-year-old Melanie Gilmore reunited with her birth mother, 76-year-old Zella Jackson Price. The video, featured by nearly every news organization, showed an emotional reunion between Gilmore, who is deaf, and Price who believed her child had died immediately after birth. But now it looks…

If you’ve had a baby or plan to have one or know someone who might have a baby or already did — in other words, if you’re human — you’ve heard of the struggle to regain the “old self.” This is the person you were before a whole ‘nother person came along and the struggle to regain the old self is real. I spoke with my…

Sophie B. Hawkins is a singer, songwriter, and activist with a catalogue that's five albums deep, though most people of a certain generation know her best from her 1992 chart-topping smash, "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover." She's currently working on the follow-up to her bluesy 2012 album The Crossing, but lately she's…

Here is how the story goes: One day, the Countess Margaret of Henneberg met a poor woman who said she was carrying twins. The countess was confounded by the prospect of birthing two children at the same time. She told the poor woman that the only way twins were possible was if they had two different fathers. Outraged,…