There’s a universal fear that paralyzes every parent: seeing their child walk by their bedroom door with an uncovered marker. But also, the fear that something bad might happen to them. That they might get hurt, that someone might be mean to them, that they might get sick, that they might get lost, or worse, that their mother might try to give them a haircut. In my case, because of my anxiety disorders, the need to protect my son becomes truly overwhelming at times. I want him to always be close to me, away from danger, sheltered within an impenetrable wall made of my love, my affection and th ..read more

Thanks to birthing classes, stories from friends and the internet, when a woman goes into labor, she already knows that not just a baby is going to come out of her body, because giving birth is actually this beautiful and magical process during which a woman also loses amniotic fluid, the placenta, urine, poop, tears and her dignity. But what most women don't know is that the moment her baby is born, another two things are born with them: one the one hand, this intense love that she's never felt before in her life for anything or anyone, not even her mom, her family, her partner or taking off ..read more

I think we can all agree the Covid pandemic has been pretty bad, in the sense that the Black Plague was “slightly inconvenient”. The world is in turmoil, there’s an economic crisis threatening people’s jobs and a deadly virus looming over all of us like a deadly virus that just lingers forever no matter how hard we try to make it go away, like the last guest at a party or the memory of that time you got drunk at the office party and fell off the table. And yet, I feel like I’ve been practicing for this moment my whole life. I’ve been quarantining and avoiding social gatherings since I was a te ..read more

After over a year of staying at home because of the pandemic (except for mandatory activities such as buying food, going to the doctor or checking if our pants still fit), we finally decided it was time to go out and do something fun. The problem is that everyone in our home suffers from some type of illness that makes us vulnerable to the virus and makes it important for us to stay in quarantine: my son is very allergic, his father is asthmatic and I don’t like people. But we had been stuck at home for too long and we had already gone through all the stages of life in isolation. We cut out ow ..read more

I can’t shut my brain off. Even if it looks like I’m focusing on one specific task, whether I’m working, playing with my kid, cooking, cleaning or on the second hour of my "only 10-minutes" of scrolling through Instagram; there’s always another part of my brain that’s constantly running in the background, like a TV you leave on in the living room, playing whatever murder documentary Netflix recommended for you that day. Because at any given moment of any day, I know exactly how much food is left in the fridge, what day we’ll need to go grocery shopping and what items we’ll need to buy; I know ..read more

As I watched my kid combine all the different colors of play-doh into one single shade of disappointment-brown, I realized that him and I have very different approaches to fun. I like things to be clean and tidy, and to organize toys according to the colors in the OCD rainbow; and he likes to draw on his pants. I now realize than whenever I’m choosing a new toy for him, I tend to ask myself all the wrong questions like "Is this fun?", "Will he understand how to play with it?", "Is it easy to assemble and store?", instead of the more logical questions "Will this hurt when thrown at my face?" or ..read more

Before I became a mom, I had the preconception that motherhood was going to come naturally to me, as I believed it did to everyone else. Our bodies are designed to reproduce and every animal on Earth has been doing it since the beginning of time, so it should be this beautiful and effortless experience, right? I thought that as soon as my baby was born, I would go through a Sailor Moon-like transformation where my maternal instincts would kick in all at once and I would immediately know exactly what to do while looking amazing in a sailor outfit. But that didn’t happen. All my life I’ve dealt ..read more

Disclaimer: I’d like to preface this post by saying that I know that the gender we identify with is not necessarily linked to our anatomy at birth, and that gender norms are a thing of the past. I believe everyone should be free to be whoever they want to be and express their true identity however they choose to, hopefully before spending 20 years married to a Kardashian. I personally identify as a woman and welcome anyone who wants to be part of the team. We have a variety of new career and lifestyle options available. For those of you who enjoy unpaid volunteer work with no vacation days, we ..read more

Most moms feel pressure to be perfect, to masterfully balance motherhood, relationships and work, while keeping their home and themselves looking flawless; something that can clearly only be achieved with an army of robot assistants, who will be super useful at first but then will inevitably become sentient and attempt to overrule mankind unless Will Smith saves us all, so you don’t really want that. I don’t think this used to happen to moms a few generations ago, because they were too busy guarding their kids from predators and the plague to worry about what other moms were doing. But this is ..read more

Last year, right after my son turned one, we travelled to the US to visit my older sister. The trip involved a 12-hour flight, a layover with an international connection, another shorter flight and a long car ride, which sounds like a lot, but we were excited and hopeful with the kind of naive enthusiasm enjoyed only by first-time parents and people on cocaine. Sadly for us, we thought we were boarding a plane and flying to another country with our kid, but we were actually reenacting the movie The Quiet Place, where the louder our kid screamed the more everyone around us wanted to murder us ..read more