I have a confession. When my three-year-old started preschool, I was relieved. I was the kind of mom who was excited to have part of her day child-free. I wanted a few hours to get caught up on work, go grocery shopping, manage doctors’ appointments, or even just watch a show that wasn’t the umpteenth viewing of Cars on the Road. The idea of someone else caring for my child seemed wonderful.

However, even as I let a professional care for my son, I still wanted to hold onto a little control. That’s why my husband and I opted out of the free school bus and chose to spend at least an hour idling in a sea of SUVs every day. We’re small-business owners and I work remotely, so our schedules were flexible enough to allow this time sink. I didn’t mind it so much, as I got in some great audiobook listening. And it gave me a sense of security, however misplaced it may have been. My husband and I, not a random bus driver, were responsible for our little guy’s safety for a portion of the day.

But when we went to kindergarten orientation at our son’s new school last August, we quickly saw how difficult it would be to keep up our chauffeur system. Cars spilled out of the school grounds and down the street, around the corner, and into a nearby church’s parking lot. Admin told us the street becomes one-way during pick-up and drop-off hours, like a parade with less confetti and more cold coffee. The principal didn’t quite beg parents to choose the school bus, but her “please consider” reminded me of my son’s desperately hopeful pleas for a Popsicle.

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We’re so excited to welcome Lindsay Fickas to The Pomegranate’s writing team!

Every group chat has their antagonists. Former friends, vindictive exes, nosey co-workers, and the relatives we have no choice but to keep around. For a period of time with my friends, it was a guy named Travis.1 Travis was a twenty-something-year-old who had been tasked with leading my son’s competitive soccer team. Working with him had quickly become a nightmare. He never responded to the parents’ questions and ignored every email. He missed at least one game and waited so long to tell us about the players’ fees, all the parents owed a fine. It felt like a small miracle one day when the entire team received a notification that Travis would no longer be working with our kids. He was now the problem of recreational league seven-year-olds. The Lord had heard our prayer.

My three kids have been playing soccer since 2022 and have been involved with several different clubs. For the most part, the overall experience has been great. My younger two have stayed with their same team since the very beginning. These kids have grown together and found their place, first running the field as an untamed pack before distinguishing themselves into forwards, goalies, and non-committed centers mostly just there for the vibes. But sports are tricky. The more you see how it’s supposed to work, the clearer you see potential dysfunction.

For every few great coaches you’ll encounter, there is one who has the potential to completely derail your life. Before the advent of Travis, my oldest was a part of a rec team coached by a grouch of a dad who stepped up solely because no one else would. Throughout practice, he would scream at the kids for an hour before walking away in a huff. My son didn’t learn a thing from him throughout his tenure. It wasn’t until we pulled him out and switched to a pricier league that we realized our kid was actually a pretty skilled soccer player.

And then came the parents. With my oldest son’s former rec team in particular, it was rough. They would pull out cans of beer at morning games, drinking and yelling until they were ejected from the fields. As we would walk back to the car afterward, they would stop us and ask if we at least won. The answer was always no.

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The drinking parents were far from the worst. Aggressive sports parents have been a trope for decades now, getting satirized in everything from Will Ferrell movies to episodes of Bob’s Burgers. Nearly every field now has signs reminding parents that, believe it or not, the referees are human. Yet things are more toxic now than ever. One recent weekend, my sister left a baseball game for her kid and texted us horrified. Things had come to a head when one dad started yelling that he was going to bring a gun to the parking lot and threatened to call ICE on another parent. The middle-school players just watched in horror.

These actions from the parents undoubtedly bleed into their kids with trash-talking starting well before they can even play with full-sized goals. This past year, my kindergartener told me after a game that the other team kept calling them losers, taunting them as they chased the ball down the field. It was a dark transition from their normal, friendly games where even getting the ball into the right goal felt like a major accomplishment. We had a problem with another former team where one kid could not stop getting ejected from games. All of nine years old, he would hurl insults at the referees until he was removed. If he did manage to last the entire hour, he would aim his ire at his teammates. Every time they would lose, my son would sit quietly in the backseat in such a foul mood, nothing could cheer him up.

Much of the toxicity both on and off the field comes from a sense of entitlement. The fact is that these parents see sports as an investment. They want to raise the next Lionel Messi, and some of them have the means to do it. And let me tell you, it takes a lot of means. You could sign your child up for a rec team that will cost you $150 for the season. At this stage, your child will likely be on a team coached by a parent volunteer and refed by a mix of teenagers and retirees. Any growth potential to take your child from a participatory player to a great one will come with additional time and money.

If your child does fall in love, they are going to move up to competitive teams. This is where the cost of playing is going to quickly move into the four digits. Here in my LCOL city of St. Louis, one of our primary clubs costs over $2,000 per season. The price will cover your entry fees and game fees, uniforms and alternative uniforms made of such a cheap polyester, they will tear from even the slightest bit of tension. At this point, the experience becomes remarkably better with full-time coaches, elevated turf fields, and refs who bring some knowledge to the sport. Things like gear, specialized position camps, and tournaments will cost extra.

Excelling at sports is something that is simply out of reach for most working families. We all love hearing about that kid who came from nothing and bought his hard-working mom a house once he hit it big. In reality, kids in lower income households are at an instant disadvantage because they don’t have access to the targeted development needed to hone their skills. The most raw talent likely rests in kids with no means to express it, practicing in backyards and on cracked pavement while scholarship-bound athletes are halfway across town driving to practice in their parents’ Lexus.

That cost, of course, doesn’t take a family’s time into consideration. During soccer season, we have three practices on weekend evenings on top of a once-a-month Friday training. Because I am lucky enough to work freelance from home, it’s doable even if it is stressful. Then come the weekend games where we spend at least one day driving across town, living in a lawn chair, and eating lunches made up of concession stand hot dogs and stale coffee. We duck beneath pavilions on the hot days, try to thaw our hands in the car on the rainy, cold ones, and miss major plays because we have to run one of the kids to the bathroom four fields away. We can’t agree to plans with friends or extended family without first saying, “let me check to see what time we have games.” To be a sports parent means replacing some of your community with the people hurling insults at their third-grader as they walk off toward the car. It is isolating at best.

Don’t get me wrong. We are lucky that we get the chance to let our kids pursue something that they love. There is nothing better than watching their confidence take root as they find a breakaway or block a corner kick. At the end of the day, it remains one of the best activities to build up their social skills while pulling them away from screens. But sometimes, when I’m hunting down missing shin guard sleeves or planning out another week of 30-minute dinner recipes, I start to resent it all. Why do we have to spend another night convincing our kid that yes, he really does need to go to practice? Why do we have to put our entire lives on hold for seven months out of every year? Why do we have to deal with bad coaches and angry parents and parking lots filled with post-2024 Teslas and endless laundry piles and so-called Mother’s Day tournaments I swear were planned by men unwilling to actually do anything for their wives?

The day I started to work on this essay, my kids and I wound up in a teensy Italian market after a game so we could get ingredients for dinner. I stood in line exhausted, entertaining the younger two while my oldest walked around in his cleats. After I had finished putting in my order, a man ahead of us turned around and looked at my son’s uniform. “Did you have a game today?” he asked.

My son paused the music in his headphones to say he did.

“Well, did you have fun?”

It wasn’t a question if he had won or lost. If his team was good. If he was good. It was as simple as that. Did you have fun?

“Yeah,” my son said, his eyes lighting up. “I scored a goal.”

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On an unseasonably warm end-of-winter day, my kids are carousing at the park with a gaggle of other preschool-aged children. On and off the swings, down the slide, swinging from the monkey bars and fighting over who got to bang on the plastic drum set. I am in the middle of pushing my two-year-old on a baby swing he’s nearly outgrown when another child approaches me. Five or six, perhaps, a similar age to my older son. “Push me too,” he demands.

I pause. There’s no please, no request, no politeness of any kind, nothing to intimate that I am a stranger who does not owe him entertainment or assistance. Who is raising this kid? I think, while out loud I say, “Can you ask your mom or dad? I’m pushing my little boy right now.”

He asks again a few more times, wending his way through the playground and back to me again, and each time I am perfectly polite to him but internally I become more and more annoyed. This isn’t my child. I have enough to deal with. It’s not my job to keep him occupied on the playground. Where are his parents and why aren’t they stepping up?

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When I started working on my third novel—a story about a woman who unexpectedly returns to the Pennsylvania lake house where she spent her childhood summers—I knew I wanted my main character, Marissa, to be a burnt-out single mom. I’d never written a protagonist who was a parent before, so I expected this to be a challenge. I did not, however, anticipate that it would become a central theme of the novel. But as the idea took shape, Marissa’s struggle to balance her own needs with her desire to be a good mother became an inextricable part of the story I was trying to tell. Looking back, I think it might’ve been a story I needed to tell.

In Rewrite the Stars, which releases on July 7, 2026, Marissa doesn’t just find romantic love; she also finds her way back to herself. At the lake house, she realizes how much of her identity she’s lost since becoming a mother, and as the summer progresses, she starts to reclaim those missing pieces.

Many moms experience some sense of identity loss after having kids. Once your priorities shift, it’s all too easy to lose yourself in the process. For me, writing is a way to re-center when I feel like my sole purpose in life is playing chauffeur and battling endless piles of laundry. But it wasn’t until I started drafting this book that I realized how much I had to say about motherhood and the constant juggling of everyone’s needs, including my own.

As I mentioned, motherhood wasn’t the initial inspiration behind this novel. That seed was actually planted two years ago, when Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were breaking up (again). It seemed like every time the press ran a story, Ben’s first wife, Jennifer Garner, would get dragged back into the narrative. My friends and I texted about it constantly. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? We wanted (nay, demanded!) justice for Jen, a mom who was clearly bearing the brunt of parenting, yet somehow couldn’t avoid her messy ex’s drama.

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It also got me thinking about Jen’s acting career. In recent years, she’s stepped back from Hollywood to prioritize her family, and I found myself reflecting on my own career path. Before my second child was born, I was a full-time English teacher. I was on maternity leave when the pandemic hit, and when my son was diagnosed with autism at eighteen months and early intervention was recommended, I needed to stay home to manage the services he needed. It worked out okay for our family–we were already relying on my husband’s health insurance and the pivot allowed me to pursue my longtime dream of becoming a writer. But a lot of families are not so lucky. And when sacrifices are required, more often than not, it’s the women who make them.

When I start brainstorming a book, I tend to weave two or three ideas together. As I was mulling the Jen/Jen/Ben love triangle, I was also in the thick of autism therapies. We spent a lot of time in the car, since my five-year-old was splitting his week between general ed preschool and center-based autism services. My husband is a terrific partner, but he’s also a physician, and his busy schedule meant I handled most of the daily load: the drop-offs and pick-ups, the weekly parent training, and the home visits from therapists. (He manages a lot of behind-the-scenes tasks, especially when it comes to medical insurance, a part-time job in itself).

It was a lot to juggle, even with a partner who was loving and helpful, and during the long drives, I occasionally found myself wondering, as writers often do, how things would look if the circumstances were different. What would it be like if my marriage felt unbalanced? What would it be like to raise an autistic child as a single mom, or even as a married one with a disengaged partner? Soon, those questions merged with the celebrity romance I’d been brainstorming. What if a divorced celebrity mom of an autistic child escaped the spotlight and found love again? And that question set Rewrite the Stars into motion.

Romance is the highest-selling fiction genre, and according to the Romance Writers of America, roughly half of its readership is women aged 30–54 (aka, prime parenting age). It makes sense; the genre is pure escapism, and who needs an escape more than exhausted moms, who are not only juggling their own lives and careers but also the mental load of parenting? (Trust me, I could go on and on about the myriad of ways in which romance novels fulfill women’s unmet emotional needs, but that’s another article entirely). And one thing I’ve learned in the three years I’ve been publishing books is that there is a huge demographic of romance readers who are not only moms, but specifically, moms of children with special needs.

Readers want to see themselves in a story’s protagonist, because it deepens relatability and builds emotional investment. So whenever a reader tells me that Marissa made them feel seen as a mother, I feel like I’ve done my job. But while I’m thrilled that this story resonates, I’ll admit that writing a mom as a main character had its share of practical challenges. Specifically, now that I’ve created these fictional children, how do I get them out of the way?

Last year, I did an event with Laurie Gilmore, author of the Dream Harbor series. She was promoting her newest title, The Strawberry Patch Pancake House, and during our discussion, I asked her about the experience of writing a main character who was a single dad. Laurie told me her biggest hurdle was finding realistic ways to get his daughter off the page. A couple needs alone time together for intimacy to flourish, and as any parent will tell you, that’s no small feat with kids around.

I faced the same problem while writing this book. Marissa is spending the season at the lake house with her two young kids, and while I wanted to explore her life as a mom, I also needed her kiddos to leave so she could pursue her romantic relationship with Jesse, her carpenter turned love interest. Since the book is set in the summer, I did the same thing with Marissa’s kids that I do with my own: I packed them up and sent them off camp (and then later, on a trip with their father).

Luckily, that challenge helped me to build Marissa’s character, because it provided a vehicle to explore that push-pull feeling we all experience as moms. We want (and need!) time away from our kids, but the minute we get it, we feel guilty and miss them. No matter what we do, we are like the “vegetarian” vampires of Twilight: never fully satisfied. So instead of avoiding it, I harnessed that tension in order to enrich Marissa’s emotional arc. Writing it was healing for me as well, and I hope readers will find her story both relatable and enjoyable.

Representation is important, so if you’re looking for more romances featuring single mom protagonists, here are a few of my favorites:

• Seven Days in June, by Tia Williams

• Nora Goes Off Script, by Annabel Monaghan

• First-Time Caller, by BK Borison

I also recommend This Could Be Us, by Kennedy Ryan, which features a single dad raising autistic twins. Kennedy is a fellow autism mom who drew on her experiences while writing. She’s also an advocate and the co-founder of LiFT 4 Autism, an annual charitable book auction that fundraises for Kulture City, a national autism organization.

Finally, I’d love to close out with a quick plug! Preorders are crucial to the success of a book and if the plot of Rewrite the Stars resonates with you, I’d be so grateful if you purchased a copy. As an extra incentive, I’m currently running a preorder campaign from now to 7/1/26 through my local indie bookstore, Cupboard Maker Books. If you order a copy here, I’ll not only sign and personalize it for you, but I’ll also include a boyfriend bookmark shaped like Jesse, Marissa’s dreamy contractor love interest. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to get updates about other promotions and tour dates.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope my book will provide you with both a sweet, summer romance and a reminder that it’s never too late to reclaim ourselves, even amid the messiness of motherhood.

Lindsay Hameroff is a writer, humorist, and former English teacher raised in Baltimore, Maryland, and based in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Weekly Humorist, and fan letters to Harry Styles.

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One of the hallmarks of the BBC’s long-running historical drama, Call the Midwife, is that the cast of characters shifts and changes every few years. The original series was based on Jennifer Worth’s memoir of working as a nurse midwife in London’s East End in the 1950s, but by the third season, Jenny Lee (later Worth) had left the show, and the other nuns and nurses stepped in to fill her gap. Fifteen years from its premiere, Call the Midwife is still going strong, and only five of the original cast are still playing the same roles. The rest of the main characters have joined at various points in the last fourteen years, bringing a constant roster of new stories and perspectives to the ever-evolving story of Nonnatus House.

I love that. I love that the community of nurses has eddied and changed like water flowing through a stream (ideally not feeding into the east London harbor though because I understand that smells really bad). People come and go, some stay and grow, others move on to different pastures and sweeter-smelling tributaries.

Running an online publication can be like that, too. Sometimes, other life obligations get in the way of writing—work, babies, other and equally exciting pursuits. Sometimes it’s time for a season of rest. And, though real life does not usually unfold with the poetic justice of an episode set in Poplar, it’s very exciting when more wonderful talented people step into a new role.

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We are thrilled, therefore, to announce new writers on the Pom team!

Lindsay Fickas is joining us as a Contributing Writer. Lindsay is a freelancer and copywriter based in St. Louis, and known on the Internet for writing about music, culture, American history, and parenting. She previously wrote for the Pom in January 2026 (Motherhood in the Age of Incels) and has made many podcast appearances. She is the mother of three boys and two dogs. Lindsay’s essays will be regularly featured.

Taylor Schumann is also joining us as a Contributing Writer. Taylor is the author of When Thoughts and Prayers Aren't Enough: A Shooting Survivor's Journey Into the Realities of Gun Violence (InterVarsity Press, 2020). Taylor has written for Christianity Today, Sojourners, and Plough Magazine. She is the mother of a boy and a girl, one puppy, and many formerly feral cats. Taylor’s essays will be regularly featured.

What does this mean for the future of The Pom? Well, the general format is staying largely the same. , who is writing this post, is remaining with the team as editor. will occasionally pop in as a Contributing Writer. , and have all moved on (very amicably!) for the time being, but their work will continue to live in our archives and perhaps in future guest appearances. We are anticipating the feature of a few new guest writers as well, and of course our submissions are open should you wish to send in your work.

We are excited to see what 2026 will bring for The Pomegranate, and as always, thank you so much for being here!

Got a question for Lindsay or Taylor? Leave us a comment!

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I am the mum of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl, (E) a wife to a full time PhD student (L) and a freelance writer/editor. My daughter is in childcare two days a week, but otherwise I spend my time caring for her in between other things. We live in Sydney, Australia (we relocated here from elsewhere in Australia for my husband’s PhD). Because my husband is doing a PhD in theology at a Bible college, we live in college housing, two minutes from campus, in a street where all our neighbours are students or staff of this particular college. A lot of our life revolves around the college community, which is a blessing mostly. But this context is important for understanding a lot of my life in this current season!

5am - E wakes up and knocks on our door. We’ve been trying to teach her to stay in her room playing until 6am (with varying success). My husband gets up and redirects her a few times before giving up at 5.45am and getting up to take her downstairs. We are working on toilet training, so the first thing he does is put her on the toilet.

6am - I check my notifications and emails, then get up, put together clothes for both myself and E for the day, and head downstairs for breakfast and coffee. We let our toddler have some screen time each morning on an old, cracked tablet I used to use in the classroom when I was a teacher (we don’t own a TV at the moment). It’s the only way everyone gets fed and caffeinated without drama.

7am – After breakfast, we somehow get everyone through the shower (I am requested to sing ‘the duck song’ while my daughter acts out the drama of little ducks being lost and then found with her bath toys), and then with a lot of negotiation I get my daughter dressed and her hair done. She requests ‘twin tails’ (pigtails) and wants to look at photos of herself as a baby while I do this.

8am - We say goodbye to L, who heads off to start work across the road at college. E and I bob around at home, her playing with various toy animals, me packing her lunchbox and bag. I make and drink a second coffee while reading some stories to E, then we feed the cats (we have two cats). I attempt to do some washing up (E ‘helps’) before it’s time to leave the house.

9.30 – I drop E off at our childcare co-op in the college playground and head to Bible study. As part of the college community, a co-op of mums have started a rotating Friday morning childcare and Bible study system. My group had been on childcare for the first two weeks, so this is the first week of the year I get to go to study.

11.30 – Having enjoyed a peaceful two hours reading some Psalms and praying with other women, I return to the playground to pick up E, plus a bonus child. My friend is off getting a scan for her second pregnancy, so I take E and my friend’s little boy back to my house to play.

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12.30 - My friend returns and shares the delightful news that everything is progressing well. My daughter, who has been having an amazing time with her friend, promptly has a meltdown when it is time for him to go and her to have lunch and get ready for a nap.

1pm – E has requested noodles for lunch. She is not patient while they cook. She eats about half the bowl before encountering some frustrations with her fork and deciding the best solution is to flip the entire bowl. Now she is upset about the rest of her noodles being on the floor. I give her a yoghurt pouch to calm her down and fill the rest of her tummy.

1.30 – Upstairs to her room for a nap. There is some screaming and protesting (including repeatedly asking for Daddy) but she is pretty tired, so she falls asleep eventually.

1pm - I eat my lunch (leftover lasagne reheated from the freezer) and make the foolish decision to catch up on the horrifying news on my phone, rather than what this time is meant to be for, reading historical fiction (currently The Pearl Thief by Fiona McIntosh) from the library. I used to try and do chores during my daughter’s nap, but we’ve reached the stage now where I can do things like washing up and laundry with her in tow, whereas rest and book reading are impossible when she is around, so I prioritize. I also send some emails and let E’s childcare know about upcoming holiday dates. I’ve also been sent the files for an editing job I will be doing next week, and I have a quick look to see what state the manuscript is in. It’s similar to a lot of the work I do, where the person writing it is an expert in their field and has lots of knowledge to share, but needs the help of a writer to communicate it clearly and well. It’s going to take me slightly longer than I anticipated, but as I charge by the hour for my editing freelance work I will still get paid fairly.

2.30 – We have to get to a GP (general practitioner - in Australia this kind of doctor is a one stop shop for basically all medical things) appointment for an ongoing, mild issue my daughter is having, so I bundle her into her pram still half asleep with her pacifier and a blanket and get the bus two suburbs over to my fantastic GP. She listens to my concerns, we come up with a new treatment plan, and she renews some medication prescriptions for me, which is one of the benefits of sharing a doctor with my toddler! We stop by the pharmacy to fill these scripts and then get the bus back to our place. E is not fully awake really until about halfway through the appointment. But she gets stickers from the GP so she is satisfied.

3.30 – E wants to go to the playground, so off we go. She spends a lot of her waking hours when it isn’t raining in this playground, and because it’s shared with our college community, there are usually friends around! She finds some little friends, I half chat with other parents and half make sure my daughter isn’t causing herself or anyone else issues. E has been playing in this playground since she was eight months old, so she is very confident with the play equipment. But being two and a half, she is still navigating all the nuances of playing with other children. We’re working on being gentle and kind with those younger than her, and also on using her words if she needs a break from someone (she is getting pretty good at yelling ‘space please!’ when necessary).

4.15pm - My husband texts that his afternoon meeting has finished and then comes and joins us in the playground. He offers to take over so I can have a break before a solo bedtime, so I head home to bring in the washing before it rains and then lie on the couch for 45 minutes.

5.30 – L and E come home from the playground. Part of my husband’s PhD involves Latin zoom classes that are based in Europe and therefore at weird times. L says goodnight to E and heads back to college for his Latin class.

6pm – E and I eat dinner mostly together (it’s leftover green tofu curry and rice from the slow cooker I did yesterday – E picks out and eats the tofu and rice, ignoring the vegetables). She struggles to stay still while eating, so we change locations from the kitchen to the living room and back to the kitchen again, but eventually have both consumed our dinners.

6.30 - We do showers in the morning, but sometimes E will also have a bath at night as well, but she hasn’t asked for one tonight and I don’t have the energy to offer, so I get her to sit on the toilet and we brush her teeth. We head upstairs for some playtime and wind down (I play some calm music in a hope to prepare her for bedtime). She sets out a blanket as a picnic rug and instructs me on where all her animal friends should sit. She ‘makes tea’ and it’s pretty cute, even if she is bossing me around about what food goes on which plates.

7pm – I negotiate E into pyjamas and then we look at her prayer folder full of pictures of people we pray for and things we pray about. She tells me she wants to thank God for her friend coming over, and also dinosaurs. Very fair. I put her to bed.

7.30 – I thought she was asleep but now she is knocking on the door telling me she needs the toilet. We trudge downstairs, put her on the toilet and I sing nursery rhymes while she does what she needs to do. As we are cleaning up from the only mostly successful toilet trip, my husband gets home and takes over. I make a cup of tea and take it to drink upstairs while he makes a second attempt at bedtime.

8.30 – Okay, she is actually asleep now. L and I talk a bit about various things, I update him on the new plan from the GP, and we make a plan for Saturday (I have a different editing job due before the next one starts, so he will take E for the morning while I finish it). I listen to a history video (“Reading the Past with Dr Kat” tonight) and play some games on my phone while a cat comes to sit on my pillow and purr extremely loudly, before I eventually go to sleep later than I should.

The flexibility of my work (and to some extent my husband’s work) is a huge blessing and challenge at this stage of life. It’s so necessary, as you never know when a virus will hit and suddenly you have a toddler home sick from childcare, but it also kind of means I am always working and always not working. I snatch time for edits and emails in nap times or half an hour pockets in the evening when my husband is home. Most weeks I get two days of concentrated work time while E is at childcare, and for that time I am incredibly grateful.

But it does feel a little bit I am always weighing up priorities and making sacrifices - do I stay at the playground for an hour and enjoy chatting with friends and catching up with my husband while she plays, or do I do an hour of work, an hour of cleaning or that most coveted prize of all - an hour of relaxation time to myself? Whatever I choose to do, there will be a cost for it somewhere else, and I’ll always kind of feel like I am missing out on what I am choosing not to do. Again, I am so glad I am able to do work I enjoy to help support my family and still get so much time with my toddler or have the choice to do other things - a lot of working mums would love to get to go to a weekly Bible study on a mid-week morning with childcare provided. But it’s all a balancing act, and sometimes I wobble. I don’t really know yet how life might change once my husband finishes his PhD (hopefully at the end of 2027), or when E starts school, but this is what my life looks like for now, and so I’m trying to soak up the good and not get too caught up in the bad. Both will pass, all too quickly.

Rebecca (Beccy) Sharley is a freelance writer and editor at Rebecca Sharley Writes, who also writes her own substack at Searching for Grace. She lives with her husband, her daughter and too many cats in Sydney, Australia.

Searching For Grace

Writing from Beccy about life and faith and all kinds of things

By Beccy

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When I became pregnant with my first son, I worried a lot about stretch marks. I bought cocoa butter lotion, used it religiously, and drank water as if I were training for a marathon in the desert. I didn’t really need to worry, as it turned out. I was in my mid-twenties, still producing plenty of collagen, and the two or three marks that showed up near the end of the third trimester faded pretty quickly. I got lucky.

But my first experience with stretch marks didn’t come through pregnancy. My first stretch marks showed up on my thighs when I was in my early teens. A growth spurt in height followed later by puberty weight gain brought them out. They’re still there. I hated them then, and I can’t say I love them now. They’ve clung to my legs for twenty years, a constant reminder that my legs– and I myself– have never matched the models selling skincare or actresses on magazine covers.

Another baby came along, more stretch marks showed up and stayed. These days, I’m bigger than I ever was in my most self-loathing years as a teen. One night, scrolling Facebook Reels, I pause against my better judgment on a video that purports to fix my self-esteem issues.

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I’m Lauren, and I’m a working mom of 2 children, ages 3 and 5. I’ve worked full time most of the time I’ve been a parent. Since my 5-year-old daughter was born, I have had about 28 weeks off of work. Most of that has been maternity leave, but some of it has been bereavement, other types of leave, or time between jobs. I run long distance as a hobby, which I have done on and off since I became a mom. Otherwise, I am often pretty booked. As you’ll see, my day is broken down into 15-60 minute increments and I keep a pretty tight schedule. This isn’t always very relaxing, but it helps keep us on track and prevents tasks from piling up.

There have been times when this was very hard, and it’s still not easy, but it’s gotten easier. I wasn’t always so good at getting all this done, and it’s taken a lot of trial and error to find the right ways to do all these things.

12:00AM: I am probably asleep, but not necessarily. In the last few months, our son - always a good sleeper - has been sleeping fitfully. The winter stream of coughs and colds doesn’t help this, so now it’s not unusual for us to have our 3-year-old get up at some point. We trade off nights putting him to bed, but who helps him back to sleep is complicated. If he wakes up early in the night, it’s usually me because my husband probably just fell asleep. If he wakes up closer to my alarm, my husband will usually try to jump in to save me the sleep. I am a light sleeper, though, so I rarely fall back asleep once I hear him, even if there’s nothing for me to do. This has been taking a toll on my overall health, but I understand no parent really sleeps well.

3:45AM: My alarm goes off. I may take 5-10 minutes to orient myself, but I am used to this now, and I also don’t have time to waste (more later). I grab my workout clothes from the bed side table and put them on. I usually grab the laundry from our basket and also the kids’ baskets and head downstairs to throw it in the machine.

4:00AM: I try to be on the treadmill or bike by now to ensure I’m off in time to do the rest of my day. My workouts are early, and I don’t always love this - but I look forward to them, also. More than that, I look forward to the longer runs this consistency enables me to do on the weekends, which I do love. I’ve learned that on weekdays at least, if I don’t get it done in the morning, the odds of me fitting it in later are pretty slim. Too much can get in the way once the world is awake and has access to me. I fought this fact for a few years and I’ve been happier since I just accepted it.

5:00AM: I start some coffee for myself. I put the laundry in the dryer and make the kids’ breakfasts. Usually, I have pre-cut fruit that I did on the weekend and a muffin or hard boiled eggs for them to split. I add their vitamins and fill their drinks, then grab the lunches my husband packed the night before from the fridge and fill their school water bottles. I get their backpacks ready and put them by the door, then feed the dog and empty the dishwasher. I may prep a component of dinner, like rice, that’s mostly hands off.

5:15AM: I hustle upstairs to get in the shower. I’ve gotten my get-ready routine down to about 45 minutes with a shower, but I can’t waste any time. I try to listen to a podcast or audiobook during this time so I can feel informed, but often I forget and just charge through my tasks.

6:00AM: Dressed and ready, I get the dog out of bed to eat and give him his meds (he’s old!). I finish packing my own lunch, which is usually precut fruit and veggies and whatever I meal prepped for myself over the weekend. Sometimes I will take a frozen cube of soup from the freezer if I didn’t have meal prep time that week. It’s easy to assemble but rarely very exciting. I add that lunch, alongside any snacks or drinks I want to bring to work, to my work bag. If I didn’t finish any of my 5AM tasks, I’ll do them now.

6:15AM: I wake the kids up. My oldest is 5 and can usually dress herself and brush her teeth but sleepiness slows this process considerably and sometimes I will need to help her focus and make decisions. I’ve had on and off success laying out her clothes the night before, but she’s opinionated about her outfits lately. She changes her mind often enough that I’ve decided it doesn’t save any time to choose in advance.

My 3-year-old boy will often need a lot of help getting himself up and ready. I feel conflicted and guilty about not making him do more of these things himself, but I try to maximize their sleep so don’t wake them earlier even if it would allow me more time to teach independence.

That said, this is something that has absolutely gotten easier with the kids just being a little older. The days when I used to fully dress and hygiene two babies are over, and I didn’t really do anything but wait. I remind myself of this when something feels really tough. Change is a constant, and more independence usually brings more calm. The key is not to have a hack for everything, but sometimes just to wait and trust.

6:30AM: My husband is now up and showered and jumps in to help expedite everything. The kids have about 30 minutes to eat their breakfast. I will do my daughter’s hair usually while she’s eating and if they wander or lose focus I’ll assign tasks like putting on their shoes to ensure they don’t get absorbed in toys. We aren’t a “screen rules” house really, but I never allow them in the morning because truly the less there is for them to do other than eat and get dressed the smoother this all goes. I try to do any dishes I didn’t get to the night before and finish any dinner prep.

6:50AM: Final call for shoes, coats, gloves. I’ll start the cars and my husband will either shovel or de-ice as needed so we can both get out of the driveway (Midwest!).

7:00AM: My husband will take the dog to daycare. Our dog is old and can’t be home alone all day, and dog walkers weren’t cost effective. We each have a remote day each week, but on the days we aren’t, we always take him. I will take the kids to daycare. The daycares near us had insane waitlists, so our kids’ daycare is a town over. I usually will arrive in about 20-30 minutes depending on weather and whatever else.

7:20AM: I bring the kids inside and get them settled in their classrooms. They’re early arrivals, so there’s limited staff and I end up walking all over the building for drop-off. One stop each to drop off their backpacks and coats and then a stop each per early arrival classroom. Despite their close ages, they have never been in the same mixed-age early drop-off room, which I both understand and really sweat when I am running late. Four stops is a lot of transitions for little kids.

7:30AM: I commute to work, which is about 30-40 minutes from daycare. I’ll usually call my mom to check in or listen to an audiobook. I don’t mind the commute; it gives me some time to clear my head and a nice buffer between home and work.

8:10AM: I am at work! My work day is always a little different, but mostly I will do tasks and/or meetings until lunch. Most of the time, the morning goes fast because I am busy.

12:00PM: Lunch! If I don’t have a lunch meeting, I’ll try to catch up on any school forms in the app or other household admin that I didn’t get to. I may plan the weekly menu, sketch out a grocery pick-up order, RSVP to birthdays, or order items we’ve outgrown or used up. I also try to spend a little time sending messages to friends to stay connected, but this gets cut pretty often honestly.

12:30PM: Back to work! I’ll work until 5:00PM-ish.

5:00PM: I get in my car to leave. With traffic, I’m rarely home before 6. My husband picks up the kids and the dog most of the time because his commute is much shorter, unless I make special arrangements to do it.

6:00PM: Home! Dinner prep. Our weekly dinner rotation usually looks like this: Sunday leftovers on Monday, husband cooks Tuesday, I cook Wednesday, and then we switch off Thursdays. We sometimes get takeout on Fridays or eat from the freezer. On my nights, I try to have dinner prepped either the night before, that morning, or on the weekend. I’ll make a component like a sauce or dressing, cook a protein, lay things out on a sheet pan, or otherwise get it as far as I can. If traffic is really bad, my husband might finish cooking the dinner I prepped before I arrive home. I feel bad about how often I’m not home in time to help with this, but I also can’t bend time. If he’s cooking, I will fold the laundry and put it away while he finishes that.

I know it might be easier if we were to cook less often, but in the past it didn’t make as much of a difference as we thought. By the time I have selected a restaurant, gotten everyone’s orders, gone to pick it up, plated it all for the kids, and sat down to eat, I haven’t saved much time or effort. The cost and quality of eating that much takeout are enough to push us in the opposite direction.

6:30PM: We eat. I put my phone aside and hear about the kids’ days.

7:00PM: I do the dishes if I didn’t cook. If I did cook, my husband will do the dishes and I will do the laundry. I try to fold the laundry in the common area while the kids buzz around and chat with me. I know if I don’t do it daily I’ll never dig my way out, but so much of the evening is structured that I have to multitask if I want to spend time with them. I’ve experimented with every-other-day or designated days for these types of tasks, but it’s mostly been a flop. If I shoot for “every day,” I know it will happen maybe 80% of the time, which is the key to keeping tasks from drowning me all weekend long.

8:00PM: Laundry is put away. I’ll settle in on the couch with the kids. Sometimes we’ll watch TV, sometimes we’ll read books. We’re all pretty tired, but we’ve embraced a late bedtime so I can have more time with them. If we are giving a bath, we will do it now.

8:30PM: My husband and I each take a child for bedtime to ensure each kid gets some special one-on-one with both of us every week. My 5 year old is generally content with a story or two and a song, but my son has been especially fearful of the dark and having nightmares. We need to stay with him until he falls asleep right now. Also, daycare insists on a 2 hour nap daily and he is rarely tired enough on weeknights to crash. This is one of the downsides of daycare. I absolutely love our school, but I also know my son does not need a nap that long. The vicious cycle of poor sleep, which then pushes about two hours of his nighttime sleep to nap, then more poor sleep, is impossible to break. I don’t know what we will do other than continue to support him until something changes.

If I have my son, I will seldom leave his room before 9:30 if not later. I believe it is the right thing for him right now and also it really cuts into my sleep. I tell myself he won’t want this forever, but that 3:45AM looms pretty large as the minutes tick by. I try to plan my workouts such that on the nights where I have my son, I have an easier, shorter morning.

I’ve been tempted to call this a season where morning workouts aren’t a thing, but I did that after my father’s death, thinking I was prioritizing rest. Just about everything in our lives got worse. Without time and space to care for my body, I recede into nothing but a set of tasks and my mood, health, and energy all take a dive anyway. The extra hour or so of sleep is a sacrifice, but without my 3:45AM wakeups everybody suffers.

9:45PM: I am in bed. My body basically shuts down. I have been known to fall asleep with my glasses still on. I try to spend a little time with my husband, but since my son’s sleep issues we haven’t been able to watch a show or anything like that. Again, I tell myself this isn’t forever.

My husband is usually still awake and closing down the kitchen. He will pack lunches and finish any dinner or toy cleanup that didn’t get done so we don’t wake up to chaos. I’m glad he’s a night owl because I am more than done. It took awhile for us to stop focusing on equal and start focusing on equitable and effective. I shoulder more in the mornings and he shoulders more in the evenings. We don’t switch off, and this works a lot better. It didn’t happen overnight, but trial and error and a sense of humor honestly get you pretty far.

I will sleep either until 3:45AM or until a child or pet needs me. This is reality for us as a working family. I think there is often a sense that working moms outsource a lot of these tasks, but we just dive in and do it. I am thankful that we’ve created systems that keep our heads mostly above water, but it’s about consistency. The biggest thing is doing things in small chunks, in the pockets of time we have, every day. Every small bit of independence the kids gain helps this feel more sustainable, but I also love their littleness and never wish the time away.

We want to hear about a day in your life! If you’re interested in submitting a piece on this topic, check out Lucy’s and Amy’s entries in this series to get a feel for the formatting, and then send your DITL to thepomeditors@gmail.com. All moms from all backgrounds, ages, occupations and stages of life are welcome!

12:48am- I wake up to pee.

2:22am- I wake up to pee.

4:38am- I wake up to cough violently, which makes me pee my pants a little, and I realize I need to get up to pee.

4:39am- My 8-month-old kitten Ivy sees I’m up. How perfect, she thinks, now Mother can pet me. She lies on my face and purrs and kneads her claws into my neck. I try to go back to sleep with a cat on my face and a set of small daggers in my neck. Somehow, I am successful.

6:58am- My 5-year-old Elliot bounces into my room and launches himself into our bed, landing squarely on the fetus growing in my stomach. It’s only 2 days after Daylight Savings and my kids haven’t yet adjusted. Normally, he gets up at 6am, so the 7am fetus launch is actually a welcome reprise from our normal wake-ups. My husband and I switch off nights and mornings, so one parent is on duty all night if a kid wakes up (which happens rarely at this point, my kids are 3 and 5) and that same parent gets up with the kids while the other one gets to sleep in a little. Our normal routine is that the kids get in bed with the parent on duty and watch videos on Instagram. The videos are supposed to be educational, like a zoo or aquarium’s account, but sometimes we slip into HelloKitty or Pokemon. Today my son requests to watch a snake account, where a guy in his twenties walks around Texas in board shorts at midnight and flips over rocks to find snakes set to music that’s too Gen Z for me to identify. I actually love this account.

7:45am- Suspiciously, my 3-year-old daughter is still not up. I guess it’s not that suspicious because of Daylight Saving time and because she threw up at school yesterday, so she might be sick but truly, who can say. Kids throw up randomly all the time, I’ve learned. My son runs downstairs because he has the idea to make a treat stand and “sell” treats to our three cats.

7:51 am- The treat stand is a huge hit, despite the cats not possessing currency. While my son does this, I make the cats’ breakfast and start making coffee, lunches, and breakfast. My husband emerges from upstairs, and he starts getting the kids’ clothes ready.

8:11am- My 3-year-old Winnie emerges from her room, holding four Pokémon toys in her tiny hands.

8:13am- Oh no, I took a bite of Pirate’s Booty I was packing for my kids’ lunch and my crown fell out. I spit it out in a lump of chewed Pirate’s Booty. I will deal with this later, I guess.

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8:15am- Normally, we all eat breakfast together at the table like a movie family, but the late wake-ups have messed it all up, so my husband hands my son a bowl of cereal and tells him he has to eat it fast because they’re leaving for the bus in five minutes.

8:26am- Miraculously, Elliot is ready to leave for the bus, which arrives in 4 minutes, but it is a 5-minute walk to the bus stop. My husband pulls out Elliot’s scooter and runs behind him as he scoots to the bus stop. I hope they make it, but this is no longer any of my business.

8:30am- Winnie and I sit down for breakfast together. I am having yogurt with granola, and she is having toast with sprinkles and strawberries. She only eats the sprinkles off the toast and complains that the strawberries are “too slimy,” and she needs a fork to eat them. I bring her a fork. She does not eat them.

8:45am- I get Winnie dressed. She goes to preschool three mornings a week, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays, my mom watches her while I work. I try to brush her hair, and she screams, “NO, I LIKE IT MESSY,” and messes it up again. Whatever. I feel my half tooth with my tongue. Will I get bacteria in it and die? Is that what crowns are for? My mom has a friend who had a toothache and went on a cruise anyway, and then died. Right on the cruise. Of tooth. I should call the dentist, probably.

8:57am- We finally leave the house after trying to find new shoes for Winnie because yesterday she threw up on hers, and I haven’t cleaned them yet. We settle on a pair of too-small Crocs from last summer. I bribe her to leave the house with a Kit Kat, even though she absolutely loves going to my parents’ apartment and begs to go there every day. But getting in the car is the hardest thing a 3-year-old can do. I’ve spent most of the last six years of parenting trying to convince my children to get in the car. When we get to her car seat, she claims she “forgets” how to get up. The actual problem is that she’s still holding four Pokémon, but I don’t have the fight in me today (have I mentioned I’m 27 weeks pregnant?), so I just lift her into the car seat and hand her a Kit Kat.

9:00am- We finally pull out of my driveway. We are supposed to BE at my mom’s house at 9am, but whatever. My daughter wants to hear “Go Go Flamingo,” a song from the Disney+ show The Lion Guard, four times in a row. It’s kind of a banger, though, so I don’t mind. I briefly wonder if I could sing this at karaoke.

9:16am- It takes about 30 minutes to drive to my parents’ apartment in the morning. This is a really long time, but we all pretend it isn’t because having my mom close by and willing to watch the kids for free is such a huge benefit. Winnie asks if I’m sure we are going the right way. I assure her I know how to get to my mom’s house, but she is skeptical. She yells my name many times in a row as if she has something very important to say, and I am refusing to listen to her. I assure her I’m listening. Finally, after a dramatic pause, she tells me, “Cheetahs need water and food to live.”

9:30am- We finally roll up to my parents’ apartment complex. She lets me press the elevator button, a huge honor in her culture. I tell her I appreciate it. When the elevator opens, she makes me race her down the hall to my parents’ apartment. I lose, and she taunts me. We open the door to my parents’ apartment, and I flop down in a chair and open my laptop to start working. I usually work at their house on Tuesdays because it’s too annoying to drive all the way back, and I belong to a gym near them. My daughter announces to everyone that when she was a baby, she jumped out of a plane with a parachute.

9:30-11:50am I work while my mom plays with my daughter. At 11 am, my dad asks if we can watch “The Ladies,” by which he means The View. He loves The Ladies. I say sure.

11:50am- I close my computer and leave for my 12 pm workout class at F45. Have I mentioned I am 27 weeks pregnant? I still go to F45, which I’ve been going to for about two years. It’s a hard workout, and I’m very proud of myself for showing up every week. I used to go a few times a week, but now once a week is enough to almost kill me. I usually go with my best friend Joanna, who is not pregnant and goes every day, but she’s skipping today to run outside because it’s the first warm day in a while. Annoying for me because I can’t talk about how pregnant I am so everyone else in class can hear me and be proud of me, but whatever.

12pm-12:45pm F45. The workout isn’t that bad and I only have to skip one or two of the exercises due to my large belly getting in the way. I think everyone is very impressed.

1pm- Staff meeting over Zoom. My mom and Winnie have made me lunch! Homemade mac and cheese and a salad with apples. It’s so nice! I eat it while I do my meeting.

1-3pm I keep working while my mom and Winnie play.

3pm- I pack up Winnie and my stuff and get us in the car, once again bribing her with chocolate. We drive back to our house, and she falls asleep on the way, which is great because now I can listen to my audiobook instead of The Lion Guard music. We stop at the bus stop and wait for Elliot. I call the dentist and make an appointment for tomorrow.

3:50 pm- Elliot’s bus arrives and he jumps in the car. Winnie wakes up and is Mad. Toddlers HATE when they accidentally fall asleep in the car. Incredibly embarrassing to them.

3:55pm- We get back to our house and it’s actually warm outside today! After a really cold winter where we’ve barely been able to go outside, the kids are very excited. I bring out a small water table, some bubbles, chalk, and some popsicles. They happily play with these things and chase each other around while I sit and scroll on my phone and draw a chalk drawing of a cat on the sidewalk. This is my ideal afternoon with the kids normally, but at 27 weeks, I do kinda wish we were doing what we’ve done the rest of the winter which is crash out on the couch in front of the TV until dinner. But they are happy and my seasonal depression is melting away.

5:11 pm- My husband comes outside. He is done with work! He works from home as a lawyer. He’s always super helpful during the day when I need help with the kids, but today I haven’t needed him at all. I go inside to start making dinner. I’m making egg salad sandwiches for me and my husband, avocado toast for Elliot, and, sigh, sprinkle toast for Winnie. I will also put out some yellow peppers with dip that they may or may not eat.

5:27 pm- Elliot comes in crying hysterically. I ask what’s wrong and he says he isn’t going to tell me and stomps to his room. I quietly go up and let him sit on my lap and cry. Tantrums like this used to really set me off, but last year I got on anxiety meds and they have changed my entire parenting life. Now I don’t mind waiting for him to relax into my arms and tell me what happened. He finally does and says Winnie ruined his chalk drawing of a dragon. Winnie comes up with Matt and says she’s sorry. Matt explains Elliot dumped her water table over first and they both agree it was both of their fault and hug. For the first year and a half of Winnie’s life Elliot hated her so much. He would ask us every day to throw her in the trash or give he to another family and could barely be in the same room with her without screaming. I was distraught, worried they’d never have a good relationship. Watching my friends’ toddlers fawn over their baby siblings was incredibly difficult for me. Maybe they were just not compatible. I often found myself reading incredibly depressing essays about siblings who hated each other all the way to adulthood. But in the last year or so, they’ve become good friends. They still fight a lot, but when they aren’t fighting, they are usually playing a game and giggling together. It’s such a relief.

5:38 pm- The kids pull out Perler beads and start quietly crafting at the kitchen table while I finish dinner. Is this...a dream? Whose children are these?

6:10 pm- I put dinner on the table. Winnie refuses to eat and wants to finish her Perler bead project instead, so we just let her. Her doctor recently said toddlers sometimes really don’t need dinner, and we’ve held onto that like gospel.

6:37 pm- Dinner is over and Winnie is done with her beads. I iron the bead projects while Matt plays a board game with Elliot and Winnie watches. Elliot’s only 5, but he plays adult board games. It’s sort of unnerving how good he is at them, especially because he literally can’t read.

7:15 pm- The children notice they haven’t watched TV all day, but we have a strict no TV after dinner rule. I’m sure this will change eventually, but right now it’s too hard to pull them away from the TV, and I can’t handle fighting that fight AND the bedtime fight at the same time. Instead, I agree they can listen to Lion Guard songs on Spotify with me. They stare at the still picture of Kion the lion that appears on the phone like Victorian children who have just encountered a photograph for the first time, thirsting for their daily allotment of Media.

7:30 pm- Generally, we start bedtime now, but Winnie has decided to throw her nightly fit about only wanting MAMA to put her to bed, but it’s Dad’s night to put her to bed. But she doesn’t LIKE dada (she does). We make a deal, she will let dad put her to bed if I give her a bath. It’s too late for a bath, but I am a pushover. I try to remind myself that my kids are very good kids and giving in to them for wholesome things like “spending time with mom” isn’t going to make them spoiled brats. The boys play another board game while I give Winnie her bath.

8:06 pm- Oh no, she’s still in the bath. I have made a mistake.

8:30 pm- I finally drag Winnie out of the bath and get her pajamas on. My husband and I switch kids. Elliot picks out the longest book in the world about snakes for me to read to him.

9 pm- Jesus Christ, we finally finish the snake dissertation and I argue with Elliot about going to bed. It is NINE PM. Daylight Savings has really messed us up, but I can’t complain because it’s also curing my seasonal depression. I tell him to go upstairs and brush his teeth and he tells me I’m yelling at him, which I am not. Upstairs, I can hear my husband STILL reading to Winnie, who won’t stop talking. God help us.

9:10pm- The kids are finally all in bed with lights off, and we have been released. They may or may not be asleep, but I don’t care. Winnie often stays up and plays with toys or books in her bed, but that’s none of my business, as long as she doesn’t call for us. I am done being Mother to Humans, but now I must clock into my shift as Mother to Cats. The three cats have been following me around meowing for food, so I go downstairs and make their dinner and make myself a giant tumbler of ice water. I leave the dishes for my husband, we switch off making dinner and doing dishes every day. I made dinner today, so it’s his turn to do the dishes.

9:15pm- I head upstairs to shower. I have grand plans to fold laundry as well, but again, 27 weeks pregnant and exhausted, so chances are I will not. My whole house is in shambles in this season of our lives, but we do manage to get the dishes done and vacuum up crumbs, clean up cat and child vomit, etc. But the house is rarely tidy. It makes me anxious, but I remind myself this is temporary and one day I won’t have small children who pull everything out and throw toys all around the house and I will probably miss the feeling of stepping on a Barbie shoe.

9:16 pm- I make the mistake of lying down on my bed before my shower and now my kitten Ichabod wants to play fetch. He’s brought me a toy. I throw it and he brings it back and I throw it again. It’s so hard to say no. This is my problem with animals and kids. They’re so cute. He moves on from playing fetch to just attacking my feet. Time to shower.

9:32 pm- Oh no, I’m still scrolling on my phone in bed. Must get up to shower.

9:47 pm- I have now showered. I get into bed with wet hair, which will look insane in the morning for my 9 am dentist appointment to put my tooth back in my mouth. My husband is already in bed, doing lawyer work on his laptop. Normally, we would watch TV or a movie together, but I’m so, so tired and can’t think of anything to watch and he’s doing work anyway, so I just turn on my audiobook. Two of my cats climb on top of me and fall asleep.

10:02 pm- I start drifting off to sleep when I realize I’m STARVING, and run downstairs and eat a string cheese, a slice of Munster cheese, cold pesto noodles, and some cut-up pineapple while standing in front of the fridge, all with my hands like I’m a raccoon who just discovered an open trash can. Have I mentioned I am pregnant?

10:08 pm- I get back in bed and turn on my audiobook again. This time, I really do drift off to sleep.

11:38 pm- I wake up to pee.

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We’re starting a new series at The Pom: a peek into the everyday lives of other moms! Each of our managing editors is going to present one of these, and then we’ll open up the floor for your submissions. (In the meantime, feel free to check out our general submission guidelines if you have an essay you’d like to send our way.)

I’m Amy, and I am a part-time SAHM and full-time student (taking classes three days a week). Until recently, I also worked part-time in childcare and then as a virtual assistant, but made the difficult decision earlier this year to quit my virtual assisting job, which was not actually paying enough to break even on childcare (lolsob) and lean into finishing my degree. I didn’t have a traditional path to college, and I’m only just getting my bachelor’s degree now at 31. I’m studying English and Creative Writing with an eye to teaching at the college level someday following grad school, and in my spare time I read and write whenever I can. I have two boys aged 5 and 2, a cat, and a husband, and we all live in a small house in central Pennsylvania where the water is bad and the wi-fi is pretty good.

I’ve chosen to focus on a Monday in the winter, following the trajectory of an actual day as closely as I can with some notes about where “the norm” might differ.

3 AM: My toddler wakes up crying from a bad dream/blanket kicked off/room temperature a degree higher or lower than his preference, so I tuck him back in and climb beside him into the bottom portion of the boys’ bunk bed. Is this good for his development? Idk, it’s what works for us now. Is it good for my back? Definitely not.

7 AM: The kids are awake and now I am too (yes, I’m still in my toddler’s twin bed). My alarm went off at 6:15 but my phone was in my bedroom and I slept right through it. This is pretty typical and I’d be lying if I said I really wanted to fix it. I just love sleep. I need sleep. I CRAVE sleep.

The next hour is a flurry of breakfast (cereal), showering, getting kids ready for preschool, breaking up fights, finding shoes, and making sure I have all my school supplies for a day on campus. My husband leaves for work at 7:45, and the boys and I leave at 8:45 (although I usually aim for 8:30 because it takes them one million hours to decide which stuffy to bring and to cry about having the wrong socks). In the interim time, I frantically tidy up the house as much as possible (not much) so that my mother will not think I am a total slob. I start dinner in the crockpot: the most basic chicken-and-potato-and-carrot dish you could possibly imagine, with some garlic and onion and thyme and a big dollop of Better Than Bouillon soup base.

8:45 AM: I drive the boys to school. We live very close to the preschool and it probably would be faster to just walk, but I need to leave immediately for class. My 5-year-old goes to preschool 5 mornings a week, and my 2-year-old goes on Mondays and Wednesdays. Their classes begin at 9 and end at 11:30, at which time my mom will arrive to pick them up and take them back to our house for lunch and playtime.

I’ll pause for a moment here for a grandma acknowledgment– if I did not have help every week from my mom and my mother-in-law, I quite literally could not go back to school. I can’t say enough how thankful I am that they each take a day to watch my boys and give them love, attention, lunch, and a safe environment to grow and have fun.

9:05 AM: I’ve dropped both boys off at preschool and now I am taking the fastest possible route to my college campus. Was I wise to enroll in a 9:30 AM class when preschool doesn’t begin until 9? Yes, actually, because this class is required for my major and wasn’t offered at any other time. Galaxy brain.

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9:32 AM: First writing class of the day! I struggle sometimes with balancing my appreciation for rules and consistency (such as the requirement to be on time for attendance, and to not miss more than one or two classes over a semester) with the very real obligations of my “outside life.” Having children is not a disability, and yet it would be nice if higher education offered some more accommodations for students who are caring for young children. I’m lucky enough to have had a string of kind and understanding professors who have been generous with extra credit options to make up my absences and tardies, but I’m constantly aware that I am one sick child and rigid-Ms.-Trunchbull-type away from a really bad grade.

10:45 AM: Break between my first morning class and my two afternoon classes. I usually try to reserve a room in the campus library where I can work uninterrupted if I need to be in a Zoom meeting (I’m an editor for the campus literary magazine, and our credit hours are scattered throughout the semester in variable blocks of time). I’m going to do homework now for one of my afternoon classes, and pick up some books I reserved via interlibrary loan for a research project. Then I pay the credit card bill, catch up on a group chat, and check the registration dates for kindergarten this year. My 5-year-old is suddenly morphing from a little kid into just a kid, and I’m not ready.

12:00 PM: Done with the first leg of homework and now I’m going to grocery shop. There’s a discount grocery outlet located very close to my campus, and though I can’t buy everything we need there, the amount I’m able to save on what I can buy more than makes up for having to do an Aldi and/or Costco run later in the week. I eat a haphazardly packed lunch as I drive to the store (apple, Larabar, peanuts, banana) and get a soda while I shop. It’s cold enough that any perishable groceries can just hang out in the car while I return to classes.

1:25 PM: Biology, the current bane of my existence. High school bio was 15 years ago for me, and I didn’t do, shall we say, a stellar job with that. I’m holding my own in this course but only barely, as long as we define “holding my own” as “passing with a C.”

My mom texts an update with the boys. They ate their lunch and are having a not-so-quiet quiet time. My brain stretches luxuriously when I’m working on campus, enjoying the ability to think without anyone singing the Happy Birthday song and substituting the word “poopy” every other syllable, but darn it I miss my kids. I zoom in on the picture my mom sent. My two-year-old has ketchup on his face. I wish I could kiss it off. I wonder who I could ask to babysit so I can go to the township meeting about the new kindergarten building, or if I should just take the kids with me. Surreptitiously, I sneak my phone out again to make a note about finding a sitter.

2:15 PM: Race across campus to my 2:30 literature class, because of course I scheduled back-to-back. I didn’t actually finish the reading, mea culpa, so I frantically skim the rest of the text on my phone as I wait for the professor to arrive. A classmate sitting ahead of me says she didn’t do the reading either, and cheerfully acknowledges that she used ChatGPT to “catch up.” Inwardly, I seethe.

2:30 PM: Literature class. I have to step out midway to take a call from a friend who needs a ride tomorrow to a job interview, another thing pressing on my mind. I don’t have a lot of time to help her out, but she’s been unemployed for two months and is deeply stressed about it. I’ll just have to find time tomorrow. No one bats an eye about my momentary absence; this professor is pretty chill about that sort of thing, and I’m grateful. It’s been an easy A so far, but I’m trying to keep working ahead so in case someone gets sick, I don’t miss a deadline.

3:45 PM: Class is over and I’m ready to head home. I check some emails on my phone before beginning the drive back, mentally prepping for the transition from Campus Work to Home Work. When I was still doing my virtual assistant job, I sometimes pulled over on this route to take a Zoom call, which–looking back–is insane behavior and I don’t know how I was doing that. (By not studying! That’s how I was doing it.)

4:30 PM: Home again, time to relieve my mom and be attacked/snuggled by my kids, who purportedly missed me and practically are now ready to exhibit their worst and most wild behavior. It’s an insane transition every time I get home and I’m trying my best to roll with it. I offer to read them books before making dinner, and they stickily pile themselves on top of me and the couch. My mom makes a graceful exit so I can focus on the kids, and I notice, with appreciation, that she has definitely tidied the living room and kitchen, and dirty dishes are now in the dishwasher which makes my evening easier!

5:00 PM: CAN WE WATCH TV CAN WE WATCH TV CAN WE WATCH TV? Both of the grandmothers are really good at keeping my kids occupied without screens while I’m gone, and I wish I had the strength to continue that, but the reality is that while I make dinner they watch a show. It works for us all. Except today I have dinner in the crockpot so I take the time to bring the groceries in from the car and gather up all the household trash for bin night while the boys watch Spidey and His Amazing Friends.

5:30 PM: Dinner time. My husband has texted to say he won’t be home until late (usually he gets back around 7) so I opt to eat with the boys tonight. 5 eats chicken and some strawberries and apple slices, straight up refusing the potatoes and carrots. 2 chows down happily on everything. They beg for their leftover Valentine candy and I barter a single bite of carrot from 5 in exchange. While we eat, I read aloud from The Enormous Egg by Oliver Butterworth.

6:00 PM: The boys ask for more TV and I want to get a head start on laundry, so I cave. Technically I have a chore chart with different rooms of the house designated for different days, and Monday is the boys’ bedroom, but I don’t want to bother with changing their sheets right now so I tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow, and focus on putting the groceries away instead. There are one million groceries and no cabinet space. I’m not sure how this squares up with the fact that my kids frequently eat like centipedes with IBS, but somehow we go through $200 worth of food every week.

6:30 PM: While the boys watch more Spidey and fight over the baby octopus episode (5 is tired of it, 2 obsessed with it), I start a load of laundry, catch up on the group chat, and load the dinner dishes into the dishwasher. Then I feel guilty about not spending more time with the children so I abandon cleaning the kitchen and bring them up from the basement when their episode is over.

6:45: We play Sorry!, or at least 5 and I play while 2 hops his own pawns around the board and makes a mess of things before departing to do the twelve wooden puzzles he likes to complete every single day. 5 and I snuggle on the couch and read more picture books, a giant stack of dinosaurs having sleepovers and Franklin the turtle learning soccer and the Berenstain Bears going to school and getting a pet and calling each other G-rated swear words.

7:10 PM: I realize it’s getting late and start hustling the boys toward bedtime. They brush teeth, fight, put on pajamas, fight, insist they need band-aids for invisible boo-boos, and hug each other. Then they fight again. I lie down on the floor in a vain attempt to self-regulate. The children climb on top of me.

7:30 PM: I wrangle 5 into the top bunk of the bed, lie down on the bottom bunk beside 2, and recount the incredibly boring firefighter story that I made up on a whim one night and am now mandated by 2 to recount every single night without fail. 5 has to be tucked in a dozen times and 2 needs me to squeeze him with both arms until he feels “safe,” and then everyone needs a drink of water. Then I read aloud a chapter of Freddy Goes to Florida by Walter Brooks on my e-reader and wait for the boys to fall asleep while reading my own novel on the e-reader, My Friends by Fredrik Backman.

8:30 PM: The boys are asleep, and my husband has just come home. I exit the bedroom as he goes in to kiss the kids goodnight, and we perform the tired kitchen dance of reheating food and finishing the dishes and sweeping the dining area and making lunches for tomorrow while talking about the high and lowlights of our days. “Want to watch something while I eat?” he asks, and I have to say no because I still have homework.

9:30 PM: “Homework,” but actually catching up on group chats for 30 minutes and then scrolling Instagram. Oops.

10:00 PM: Actual homework and late-night snacking, which I know I shouldn’t do but it’s been a long DAY and I have peanut butter cups calling me.

10:20 PM: Run the dishwasher, move the laundry over, pack 2’s day care bag for tomorrow morning (he goes to day care two days a week to supplement the grandma care and preschool, so I can complete schoolwork). My husband is feeding the cat, who has been whining incessantly since 6 PM despite being fed at the same time every evening. He asks again if I want to watch an episode of something or start a movie, and I reiterate that it’s too LATE, and we brush teeth and fall into bed and scroll Facebook reels together anyway.

11:00 PM: I read about three pages of my book before getting too tired, and resolving that tomorrow night I will ACTUALLY READ for real, and not go on my phone.

11:05 PM: Open my notes app to remind myself that I need to write a piece for The Pom. Look at my WhatsApp one last time and then spend 20 minutes in the group chat. Perhaps I have a problem.

11:30 PM: Actually go to sleep, annoyed with myself for staying up so late, because I’ll be up at 3 AM with the 2-year-old. The days are long but the years are short, something something sleep deprivation.

I wouldn’t trade this life for a different one, though, and I hope it shows.

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In blackjack, a hand of any 10 plus a 7 is referred to colloquially as the mother-in-law hand. The reason for this is twofold. First, players with a “hard 17” can’t draw a card to improve their hand, as very few cards take a 17 to 21 without overshooting. They also will lose to common hands of 18 or better. The mother-in-law name is a little joke about this misfortune: “you don’t want it, and you can’t get rid of it.” I am thinking a lot, these days, about matriarchs—women who have raised their babies—and what happens after the baby-raising. There are endless pop culture tropes about “the mean mother of grown children”: the mother-in-law who won’t accept her son’s fiancee, the mother who critiques her daughter’s parenting and style until they are both in tears, and more. If you watched The Bear, you will recall matriarch Donna Barzotto (played expertly by Jamie Lee Curtis), seething quietly, then loudly, as she prepares dinner for her ungrateful clan. The episode ends as she, in mounting desperation no one notices until it’s far too late, drunkenly drives a car through the side of the house during Christmas Eve dinner.

Reading any internet forum, or even talking with my own friends, it’s clear that art imitates life (if generally less extreme). These figures are intelligible to us because we know them, or know of them. In my friend group chats, it’s common to discuss the elder women who both reassure and bedevil us. We are all so reasonable, we tell each other, we will never turn into this stereotype. We will be different, and better. It isn’t lost on me that these mothers who haunt our cultural consciousness, if not our every holiday dinner, did not spring this way from the ether. If group chats were a thing in their day, my sense is they would have made a similar promise, quite sincerely. Why is it, then, that it’s so common for women of a certain age and stage to go from revered and praised domestic perfection to a hated footnote?

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The other day I had a strange thought while trying to explain to my hysterical 3-year-old that we were not going to watch any more episodes of The Lion Guard and it was actually time to eat dinner: How did Pilgrim moms deal with tantrums? We don’t talk much about the actual day-to-day parenting of the past, but children must have been throwing tantrums since the dawn of time. Children are no different now then they were hundreds of years ago, and parenting has always been very hard, so sometimes in my most challenging moments, like trying to wash my 3-year-old’s hair, I wonder: would I be able to handle any of this if I was a Pilgrim? (Puritan? I like Pilgrim better for the purposes of this piece. I am not a historian.) Could I mother without modern conveniences such as indoor heat, a dishwasher, Disney+, or ibuprofen?

The answer, of course, is no. For so many reasons. First of all, I wouldn’t have even gotten on the Mayflower. If my husband was like “let’s leave England to sail on a wooden ship across the Atlantic to go camping forever with our children,” I’d be like *heart hands* “No, let’s just convert to the Church of England and stay here, I’m literally so tired.” There’s a very strict limit of time I’m willing to spend on a ship with my children and that limit is like, at most 2 hours, certainly not 66 days.

But say I was born in Plymouth and had a name like Patience Mercy, and I had no choice but to live there and raise my family there because it was literally impossible to leave because everything else was the woods. Would I be able to handle any part of it?

In reality, I probably wouldn’t have made it to the point of having children anyway, because I definitely would have died before then. I got strep like 500 times as a child, so if Scarlet Fever didn’t take me in my pilgrim youth, I also have OCD, and someone would have eventually burned me for being a witch once they noticed I had to tap the left side of the thatch every time I left my cottage and was constantly convinced I left my butter churn on. But say those things didn’t do me in, and I actually got pregnant, I definitely would have died after that because I’m blood type A- and my kids are B+. They definitely hadn’t invented the RhoGAM shot in the 1600s, so I probably would have died of blood poisoning at birth, anyway, after a miserable pregnancy where I desperately craved pineapple and Hot Cheetos but they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet, so I had to choke down venison and squash stew.

But just say, against all odds, I survived all of this and managed to bear children and now am raising them as a Pilgrim mother. Would I be able to do it? Let’s break down what exactly Pilgrim mothers and kids were doing, because I truly cannot imagine they were doing what my kids would be doing while I sat and churned butter (whining “MAMA WHY ARE YOU CHURNING BUTTER CAN YOU PLAY CORN HUSK DOLLS WITH ME NO NOT LIKE THAT”)

As a Pilgrim mother, I would have been expected to spend most of the day cleaning, cooking, hauling water, mending, canning, and caring for animals. None of that sounds terrible to me, to be honest. I love horses and I like to work with my hands. Except for the fact that I’d have to do all this while taking care of my kids. I can barely load the dishwasher while taking care of my kids, much less haul a bucket of water from a well. But the good news is, the kids would be sent off to work chores around age five, so I would only have to take care of the little ones, who were often on a leash. I don’t think my kids would enjoy being on a leash much, judging by how they each reacted to being put in their cribs when they didn’t want to be. (Jail for baby???? Jail for 1000 years???) but I do think they’d be psyched to do Pilgrim kid chores, like collecting eggs and digging for worms. I couldn’t get much info on what pilgrim mothers actually did with their small leashed children during the daily chores, probably because none of the men who wrote anything down noticed or cared, but I assume they didn’t sit there like well-trained golden retrievers. But then again, maybe they did, because the Pilgrims were really into beating their children into submission, which I would not be on board with. They also thought all children were born evil and had to be tamed of their satanic ways, but that’s obviously wrong: that’s only three-year-olds, and they grow out of it on their own. Anyway, even with all the beatings, I can’t imagine it was easy for Pilgrim mothers to keep their leashed toddlers at bay while they knitted. I’m going to go ahead and say I wouldn’t be able to handle it and would have probably run screaming off into the woods to find that mushroom that made everyone go crazy and accuse each other of being witches, but for my own recreational purposes.

Would my children have been able to handle it? Like I said before they would have been down with rounding up chickens and having access to dangerous farm tools. They also would really like this one particular thing Pilgrims did, which was for some reason they didn’t let their kids sit down to eat, they had to stand. My kids would be all over that, they can barely sit down to dinner as is. Although I can’t imagine having to try to convince my kids to eat anything the Pilgrims ate, stewed pumpkin, eel, cheese curds: not a buttered noodle in sight. They also weren’t allowed to speak, which would be difficult for my children, who haven’t stopped speaking since they learned how. And difficult for me, too, since one of the most fun things about having kids is hearing what insane things they have to say. My 3-year-old daughter recently told me she wakes up in the night gets out of bed, goes to her window and watches a cougar playing with a snowshoe hare outside our house. This is clearly a huge lie; we don’t have either of those animals in Washington, DC, and would have gotten her swatted with a buckle shoe or burned at the stake for sure in Pilgrim times. But I love how creative my kids are. Creativity is really not a Pilgrim virtue.

Kids did get to play, after all their chores were done. They had dolls and toys just like our kids have. I doubt their parents did much playing with them, which honestly seems like a benefit of Pilgrim parenthood. I can’t imagine a Pilgrim dad sitting on the floor playing carts and horses with his son and being bossed around about how to pretend to harvest wheat. (More like Miles Stand-offish, am I right?) The good thing is my kids would definitely not be bored with Pilgrim toys. I recently learned that, much like my kids, Pilgrim children blew bubbles, which seems wildly anachronistic, even though logically water and soap were around, so why not? As long as my kids didn’t know TV existed, they’d be fine, they can make anything into a toy. A stick that kind of looked like a lizard and some anachronistic bubbles would be enough.

In general, I think I would be a terrible Pilgrim mother and I’m glad I don’t have to do it. Aside from the freezing cold, the many petticoats, or having to supervise a toddler while also having to de-feather a turkey, I don’t think I could handle worrying my kids might die at any moment of measles or from falling down a well. I don’t think I could handle being expected to treat them like demons who needed to be tamed. I don’t think I could handle eating eel, it just has a really gross texture. It really puts modern parenting into perspective when I think about it this way. Of course, in 2026 there are many horrors. But at least we have indoor plumbing and vaccines (for now).

Every few weeks, I delete Instagram. I tell myself it’s because of the time-suck. I open the app, I scroll for “just a few minutes” which somehow turns into an hour that I was going to spend reading before bed. My list of completed books stagnates, my sleep suffers, and within a few moments of my light going out, someone is going to wake up wailing for me.

But if I’m honest, it’s because every little upward swipe of my finger, every pause on a Reel, every click to a username to snoop around someone’s profile is germinating jealousy and discontent.

She’s funnier than me. She takes more care of her appearance than I do. She lost the baby weight and kept it off. She makes money from her social media and doesn’t work. She thinks of fun activities for her kids and they do them without whining. She disciplines gently and authoritatively and her kids listen the first time. She bought just the right bins for organizing her house and no corner of it is a Chaos Zone strewn with plastic Penguin Pile-Up figures waiting to impale someone’s foot in the middle of the night.

And, when I’m feeling particularly bad about myself, the jealousy takes a darker turn: She’s probably lying about all that anyway.

As the Winter Olympics unfold, I’ve watched bits and snippets of premier athletes on social media Reels. The figure skaters are my favorite– so fluid, so graceful, absolutely effortless. I can’t ice skate at all. I probably never will.

But when I look at Kaori Sakamoto or Ilia Malinin on the ice, I don’t feel overcome by envy of what they can do. It wouldn’t cross my mind to assume they’re faking their achievements. Because I’m so far removed from the world of ice dancing, it doesn’t occur to me to feel as if I’m not measuring up to them. I’m not a skater and I likely never will be; I’m okay with that.

But as a mom, watching other moms of young children succeed in areas where I think I’ve failed is a lot harder to reconcile.

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The bike park is a truly magical spot with my preschooler during nice weather days. There’s a pump track, a series of dirt hills that my son can tool over on his balance bike. On wet days, though, I still give my son the option to go to the bike park, even though all that fun turns to mayhem and potential for injury quite quickly. The whole place becomes a mud pit, and my son is so ecstatic barreling through a serious puddle on his balance bike with both legs akimbo, spraying his entire back with mud and water. Usually at least two or three times during a mud-pit bike park day, he wipes out hard and takes a full body tumble. He looks up to me, betrayed, surprised, and occasionally a little scraped up.

The nice thing about my five-year-old not yet being willing to tackle the pedal bike life is that he’s amusingly close to the ground when he wipes out. Still, no matter how close you are to the pavement, it’s not fun to get forcibly ejected due to slippery tires. This park stays on my list because the available damage is so minimal; he’d have to be doing some kind of stunt I’ve never seen him attempt in order to sustain any real damage. The constellations of bruises and boo-boos on my kid at this age are pretty rough to see, layers of recent to mostly-healed, but they are all fine, ultimately - he’s not unsafe, and he’s not incurring piles of medical bills. He heals fast.

That doesn’t mean he won’t scream himself hoarse when he sees an errant trickle of blood. Yesterday, he took a scrape to the elbow, and two thin scratches welled with a tiny amount of blood after I gently cleaned off the rainwater and leaf litter. He couldn’t get any words out as I made my leg into a seat for him and let him crumple up to me. Eventually, he talked through his snotty, nasal sobs, and said, “Band-Aid!”

This is exactly what The Band-Aid Industrial Complex wants my kid to think, I thought. But then I carried his cute little frame up to the nearest bench, set him up with an applesauce pouch, and walked back to the car to get a Band-Aid.

I am not a “rub some dirt in it” parent. I’d love to have a “rub some dirt in it” kid, like the next-door neighbor’s grandson who tries to get out of trouble by saying that his most recent wipeout doing some kind of daring stunt “didn’t even hurt!” That kind of kid would be a pleasure to raise, if occasionally rough on the blood pressure.

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But I don’t want to be the kind of parent who provides contradictory evidence to what my kid experiences in the world. Reassurance is crucial, but invalidation is so rough on the psyche. If my kid is a little bit histrionic about boo-boos, well, that’s his personality. He’s not going to become a tough dude just because I constantly tell him to stop crying. All that will teach him is that I have a short fuse for crying.

Instead, I lean on a good ritual. Since he was two years old, my kid has known that any bump or bruise that happens at home will elicit a calm question from his parents: “do you want an ice pack?” He doesn’t use the ice pack correctly at all; he quickly touches it to the boo-boo like a magic wand and then hands it back to us, despite plenty of demonstrations of how the cold could help him feel better. But no, for him it’s a totem, a way to transition from the shock and sadness of pain to the next thing of the day. He invariably stops crying, says, “you can put that back now,” and goes back to playing, placid as a lake.

Band-Aids are like ice packs for us, but for whenever scrapes or blood are involved, so we keep them with us all the time. There’s a reason why people refer to not really solving a problem as “putting a Band-Aid on the problem,” because the Band-Aid doesn’t do the healing work, it just keeps a few things at bay while the healing work must continue. But for my son, they’re more than that: they’re a sign that the challenge has been managed, and that we can all move forward.

Band-aids are to my kid moving on from a minor injury what confessional is for sin, what forgiveness is for resentment, what funerals are for grief; a kind of documentation and a kind of ceremony, a way to say that something unsolveable, something that won’t really be right again, must be moved beyond anyway, and this is the thing we’ve agreed will help us move beyond it.

Parenthood has taught me how many solutions aren’t durable, how every time you solve the kid climbing out of the crib by putting him in a “big boy bed” you are just picking new challenges, not by solving all nighttime woes. For people who don’t parent, I think that would sound incredibly disheartening, since so many of the other parts of adulthood have at least the veneer of real solutions. But parents will resonate and recognize this: the challenges we face are always in flux. Sibling rivalry persists, independence comes and goes, and picky eating worsens or improves. Very few things are done and dusted as a parent. Everything waxes and wanes, building a kind of long-term patience unlike anything I’ve ever known.

That’s why I like the Band-Aids. Because my kid’s knee is going to keep having all those scratches, small scars where things went a little deeper, and four different shades of healing bruises. But a Band-Aid is me saying, “I’m here while you’re healing.” It’s me saying, “You can look at this glow-in-the-dark jellyfish print rather than just thinking about your pain.”

And when we build these rituals, these care-moments that help us accept the real healing timeline, we can invite others into them too. When a friend at the park gets hurt instead of my son, offering a cool-looking Band-Aid is a tangible way for my son to start learning how we take care of each other: imperfectly, without really taking on the bulk of healing that most people have to do for ourselves, but in community all the same.

Laura L is a writer and editor who is thinking about parenting, community, and ethics over at Vita Incognita.

A guest post by Sally Nicholls

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With the start of the new year and new ventures for some of our former editors (for which we’re very happy), we’ve done a little internal restructuring at The Pomegranate and changed the bank account to which our Substack payments are being sent. Despite lots of effort to keep things running without hiccup (and a lot o…

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When I was a child, young teens and tweens looking to make a little cash often offered babysitting services to families in the community. It was a bit of a win-win. Teens could earn their own money, often in cash, without the rigid schedule of many part-time retail or food service jobs. They also gained experience with young children, a skill that pays …

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It is a frosty witching-hour in late December, the kind of cold stillness in the air you can almost see: clear hard outlines of trees and streets in the fading light, shapes and shadows defined stiff and frozen. My children are alternately plodding and skipping up the steep sidewalk ahead of me. Cabin fever was infecting us all, and so I dragged both my…

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For days, we didn’t bother picking up the mess from Christmas. Toys piled on top of each other like sediment covering calcifying dinosaur fossils. Pokemon on top of Barbie clothes on top of Frozen underwear on top of a half-eaten chocolate Santa, stuck to the rug with a shred of Bluey wrapping paper and a piece of Scotch tape covered in brown shedded pi…

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In 2014, I gained membership into a brand new club: #boymomhood. There were t-shirts; they were insufferable. If the parenting forums were to be believed, raising a son was something so terribly brave. Girls were demure and mindful. Boys ruined your drywall as they swung from your curtains. According to the boymom bylaws, all of your sons’ clothing had …

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