Forty is such a special time in a woman's life. Age spots blossom on your hands, your back aches for no reason, and if you're truly fortunate, you may begin to develop soft, jiggly jowls that small children can treat like Play-Doh. Yes, you're about to experience some wonderful developments! But don't be alarmed by the changes in your body as you mature from a young, vibrant woman to stale, middle-age goods. Some women may start this transition earlier than 40, and some may start later, so remember it's not a contest. It's all a natural part of growing old and being cast aside by society, a process every beautiful woman endures 30 or 40 years before finally dying. Perhaps the greatest rite of passage after turning 40 is going for your first annual mammogram. Also known as taking your sweater puppies to the vet, having your cans x-rayed every 12 months is an important screening exam to check for pesky cancer cells that can invade a woman's most private parts...

It waits. In January, my sixth-grader missed his first middle school dance. He had really wanted to attend this masquerade-themed party for three local parish schools. I confirmed with his friends' moms that they would be there. He designed a mask made to look like a monster character he has written about for a Young Authors book. I helped him bring it to life.  The plan (top) and the execution (bottom) He was all set to have a great time. And then: the flu. On the Wednesday before the Friday dance, he came home early from school feeling queasy. By dinner time he was dealing with nausea, a stuffy head, runny nose, a slight cough, and a 102-degree fever. He hardly moved off the couch for the next two days. When he asked through a fatigued haze if he could still go to the dance, I had to break the bad news that he could not. Tears dripped down his flushed cheeks. My heart ached for him, because I had wallowed through that kind of disappointment. But mine has an embarrassing story att...

Sit down, we need to talk.  I've got something to tell you that I've been keeping to myself like a shameful secret for a while now. It's grown so heavy and thick, I need to get it off my conscience so I can sleep better.  Deep breaths. It's not about the children; they're fine. This is about me.  Over the last year or so, I've developed an addiction.  Every single day I crave this thing so deep within my bones that I have to have it, or I can't function. Without it, my body starts to break down and my brain begins to melt to uselessness. I can survive from dawn until lunchtime, but then I start plotting and planning and counting the hours. What errand can I skip, what chore can I put off so I can get my fix? What is drop-dead necessary, and what can wait until I fulfill that indecent need burrowing inside my head?  My friend, I'm profoundly addicted. To naps.  It started innocently enough, just a recreational resting-my-eyes. I could get up anytime I wan...

It's spring.  The world is rubbing its sleepy eyes and stumbling out of bed. The birds are singing from budding tree branches and (when it gets a little warmer) the bees will begin their rounds.  It's time to talk about sex.  Not how babies are made. As has been tradition at least since I was a child, in the spring of fifth grade students gather together at school to sit in uncomfortable silence while a teacher explains the basics of puberty and human reproduction.  Body hair, growth spurts, and menstrual periods, oh my.  I knew my son would get these lessons this school year, and I wanted to get ahead of it. By talking with him beforehand, I hoped to make him more comfortable while also giving him solid, fact-based information before he could hear rumor, innuendo, and falsities from his friends or classmates. Unfortunately, I held a lot of untrue and unhelpful ideas about sex and sexuality when I was young. And I didn't know all the parts of my own anatomy unti...

"Some kids just need it," the principal told me, with a look on her face that said she understood that need. We were standing in a doorway during the school open house, talking about some of the things the school offers that are so beneficial for my children.  One of those things is giving students the choice to have "quiet lunch" - meal time with just a few other students in a classroom, away from the cavernous cafeteria-slash-auditorium that teems with boisterous students. It's was a new program this fall, and both of my kids joined in.  Over the last five years, my son has complained many times about how loud the cafeteria can get. So loud that he has to yell to be heard, so loud that the principal has walked down from her office to deliver admonitions and a warning glare. Like his mother, my son finds it overwhelming and distressing to be in noisy or chaotic places for too long; it was no surprise to me when he said he signed up to have "quiet lunch...

America worships children.  Parenthood is a religion with its own symbols, texts, and rites. The adoration of a protruding stomach, a dog-eared copy of What To Expect When You're Expecting, baptism by potty training. We warn other drivers of our babies on board as we move toward monuments built for children, stuffed full of entertainment or education or endless (unnecessary) consumer supplies. Then we drag our hours to the alter to be sacrificed for play dates, extracurricular activities, and child-centered vacations. Parents are a body continually devoured, week after tiresome week. Yet America generally ignores mothers.  Judged for not having children as well as having too many, women are pushed out of the hospital 48 hours after pushing out a new life, still bloody and battered. While fathers return to old responsibilities, mothers take one of two paths: Devote the minutes of the day to enriching play and early learning for which they have no training, or work like they're ...

Dear Secretary of State: This letter is to inform you of my decision to organize my uterus, fallopian tubes, cervix, vaginal canal, and associated reproductive tissues (henceforth "MY UTERUS, LLC") into a domestic Limited Liability Company.  This will be a single-member LLC, entered into by myself, being the sole owner and operator of the aforementioned reproductive system.  Much like small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, uteri are the literal blood and tissue that keep the country moving forward. While small businesses account for 43.5 percent of the gross domestic product, uteri account for 100 percent of the people.  The purpose of MY UTERUS is to provide a uniquely safe and nourishing environment in which to grow a fertilized egg throughout the stages of gestation - from zygote to embryo to fetus to viable baby. However, recent court cases have shown that, in my state, I no longer have full rights to control my unique bodily organ in the ways that...

"Enough psychiatric prescriptions are written each year to give one to every person in America. If we are treating everyone, what are we really treating? Life? Because life isn't a symptom." Four years ago, these words were spat at me by a miserable man trying to pass himself off as a psychiatrist employed by the No. 2 hospital system in the world.  Last Friday, his voice echoed through my head while I stared at my bottle of alprazolam. Brand name: Xanax.  My anxiety first showed up in grade school and was thought to be a "nervous stomach." The kind of stomach that prevented me from eating out in public because I would become so nervous that I'd vomit.  By high school I suffered panic attacks that left me sitting on cold tile floors, sweating and shaking and fighting nausea. As an adult, I learned yoga breathing and coping strategies. Still, I occasionally get so upset or anxious that I run back and forth to the bathroom with bowel complaints.  Thanks to co...

I frowned at the infographic. Detailed symptoms and signs for varying stress levels in neat, color-coded columns. As if emotions - life - were that easy to catalog. Green means you and your calm, steady demeanor are thriving, focusing, taking things in stride. If you're feeling yellow, then something isn't quite right but you keep on keeping on. Orange indicates struggle; you feel like you can't continue, you're self-medicating and performing poorly. By the time you get to red - "I can't survive this" - you're experiencing a disabling distress and loss of function.  Mental health and mental wellness (and there is a difference) are not so easily separated into rectangles like jars. Feelings are sloppy and uncooperative, like trying to pour water from a cup but instead it dribbles down the side of the glass and onto the floor.  This list pokes me uncomfortably between the ribs, tells me I have never thrived for more than a month at a time. I hang out in ...

Calling Poison Control was not in my plans, yet here I am. People rarely use rubbing alcohol yet everyone keeps a bottle, typically in the back of a medicine cabinet or under a sink. Yours is probably covered in a layer of dust to rival the ruins of Pompeii, with a label that was printed in a font discontinued when laser printers were invented. That's the way of domestic afterthoughts. Several years ago the bottle I was probably gifted at my christening ran out, and I moseyed up to Target to buy another dusty, leftover bottle from the bottom shelf of the health and beauty aisles. As soon as I got it home, that brittle plastic bottle gave up the ghost and began leaking from its side seam. It threatened to ruin the other forgotten things buried in my linen closet, like the rectal thermometer from when my kids were babies (RECTAL written on it in permanent marker), a pair of eyeglasses missing one screw, and a set of hot rollers that survived the 2001 flash-flood of La Nana Creek whic...

"Who did you play with at recess today?" "We didn't get recess!" my son exclaimed. "Mr. K said he was embarrassed that we were so loud at lunch, so we had to walk five laps around the parking instead of playing."  This year my oldest is in third grade, and third grade is hard. It's changing classes, letter grades, and increased expectations. And we've moved away from motherly teachers toward tougher teachers, it seems.  My son's story took me back to my own elementary days, in a sand-colored building with three cavernous halls ready to swallow me whole. Each classroom ceiling terminated in the point of a triangle, its vertical side featuring a row of windows designed to withstand Gulf hurricanes and tornadoes. But the storm I weathered in fourth grade wasn't wind and water. It was Mr. Meacham, who taught math, science, and social studies - and also educated me in debilitating anxiety.  Fourth-grade me I first became aware of Mr. Meacham...

The troubles that you waste nights worrying about are rarely the troubles that actually strike. This sticks in my memory from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich , offering advice to the class of 1997 -- one year before my own high school graduation. It became a spoken-word hit when Australian movie producer Baz Luhrmann inexplicably hired an actor to read it against some jaunty ambient music, and the single was released to radio in 1999. A bizarre pop-culture moment that landed in my quote book , it often pops into my head.  Specifically the line, "The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday." It was probably closer to 10 a.m. for me, but the Tuesday part was correct. On a recent Tuesday this month, I was standing in a mammography room with my left breast painfully trapped between two plastic plates while an x-ray machine moved in an arc in front of my face. This was...

Once upon a time, I was the proud parent of 17 fertilized eggs. Notice I did not say children. I have two beautiful, healthy, very-much-wanted children who once numbered among those embryos, but already-born people are not the same as fertilized eggs, zygotes, or embryos. I know from experience. Several years ago, in the thick of my own infertility procedures, a specialist who was trying to console me said, "human reproduction is a wasteful and inexact process." It's true whether reproduction  occurs naturally  or with assistance. (This was no consolation, by the way.) This may look fun, but it isn't. Multiple grueling rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) proved over and over that he was devastatingly correct. I know without a doubt that fertilization does not always equal life. And it concerns me that the Supreme Court doesn't agree.  Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation process was abbreviated to only five weeks, is a devoutly religious ...