Gloria

By Nancy Reddy Neither my husband nor I knew anything about babies before ours was born. But I was the one who carried the baby; I was his mother. I’d expected to be transformed. I’d absorbed such deep messages about the magic of motherhood, how once the baby was born, my deep love for him would make all the sleepless nights worth it, how my maternal instincts would teach me how to care for him.

If you grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there’s a chance you over-plucked your eyebrows. If you thinned out your eyebrows years ago, what are your options now? If growth serums don't work, we will have you try a different one for three months. If that doesn't work, we start to talk about makeup, and if that is too much work for somebody, then we can talk about permanent makeup: microblading, nano brows, machine-drawn hairs, that kind of thing. But that's the last resort.

Last fall break, I discovered that cruises are the ideal vacation for parents who are traveling solo with their kids. Yes, taking a cruise is so very basic — and not something any of my LA or NY friends would ever do — but sometimes it’s worth sacrificing cool points for ease. Most importantly, the kids had the time of their short lives. When cruising with my three young children (ages 6, 8, and 10) from Miami to the Bahamas, I welcomed the convenience of not dealing with rental cars and hotels.

Yes. And it's not a movie. It's real life. And this is what happens. I felt so much humiliation and shame because I believed in myself, but I knew those institutions had more power than I did. And isn't that the truth of all of our experiences as women? There are institutions that are making choices for us or inhibiting our choices, and we want to believe, oh, we're feminists. We choose, choose, choose. But we choose given what's available, and those choices are constrained by our circumstances. Yes.

Most of us are aware (in theory) that a good dental hygiene routine includes regular brushing, consistent flossing, and a biannual checkup. Less commonly known is the fact that women’s oral health needs evolve over the course of our lives.

By Leslie Price Everyone has a bad-relationship story, but in Men Have Called Her Crazy, Anna Marie Tendler fills an entire book with them. “Bad” is perhaps too banal a word for the behavior she describes — disappointing, coercive, damaging, and illegal also come to mind. Tendler’s memoir treads territory that feels familiar.

For this story, I spoke to multiple medical experts, and none recommended pellets as a first-line treatment for women in midlife. Some thought pellets could be part of a menu of options, while others were staunchly opposed to any use of pellets – though all understood why women are taking a risk on an unapproved treatment.

The last time I wrote about this (Summer is Jail), someone emailed me that they couldn’t take more of my descriptions of “how much it sucks to have three children.” Huh. I figured it was pretty clear that I love having three children? It was my dream? I am moved on a daily basis that they even exist, that we lassoed them down from the celestial plane and now they walk among us, demanding “mo’ cheese” or explaining Minecraft mods.

Before reporting on Sandra Hemme, I didn’t have experience with wrongful conviction cases. I am not a court reporter and I am not a lawyer. I didn’t know that, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, as of 2023, about 191,000 women were detained in jails and prisons across the U.S., with approximately 84,000 being held in local jails. Among the women in these local jails, 61 percent had not yet been found guilty of a crime and were awaiting trial.

By now, we've all had the conversation about how social media creates a highlight reel that doesn’t reflect what’s actually going on. But that's not what I’m focused on. I'm more interested in how, even after deleting my personal Instagram and ceasing to take photos for performative sharing, the way I document my life with my phone continues to evolve in peculiar ways.