Breastfeeding Art
I had a love/hate relationship with breastfeeding. It definitely didn’t come easily to me. You know those Earth Mama types — the ones who make homemade granola, have long beautiful hair, wear groovy harem pants, eat cheese made from nuts and have chubby babies nursing from their giant milk-producing breasts? That so wasn’t me. I […]
Why I Should’ve “Fell Back” as a Stepmom
When I was 23, I started dating a man who was the father of a two-year-old boy. I was young, way too young to be a mother myself. Motherhood was a million miles away from my galaxy. I was in college, living with my grandparents in East L.A. I was still scrounging up money for […]
Balancing Motherhood + a Creative Life
This season of my life has me creating art. I’ve had to shift the gears of my creative mind. For years, I’ve been used to working at night, under the cover of the moon, sleeping children finally quiet in their beds, the motions of the day on pause. I would work until the birds were heard […]
Trigger warning: Mama, please defend your daughters
I was eleven years old. I know it was summer because I was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit and my hair was wet. We’d spent the day at the lake with my cousins, my aunts and uncles. It was so hot the ground burned our feet so we had to scramble to find our […]
Talking about homebirth with Super Mamás
I had heard so many good things about the Super Mamás podcast, which is a weekly broadcast where sisters Bricia and Paulina Lopez sit down and talk about all things motherhood, sharing their knowledge with other moms — both new, expecting and veteran moms. I met them last year at We All Grow L.A and loved what […]
The role of a midwife
Birth stories are always a lovely thing to read because it gives you the opportunity to hear about someone’s transformative experience during childbirth as you recollect your own. Back in the olden days of the interwebs, written stories were all we had. They were usually categorized like this: -natural hospital birth -epidural, hospital birth, episiotomy […]
When your daughter is a tween feminist
The older my daughter gets, the more she reminds me of myself. Every time I think on it, it catches me by surprise. You see, she doesn’t really look like me, with those impossibly thin, long limbs and the straight brown hair. With her full lips and slight overbite, she favors my mother and my […]
When your teenager turns into a stranger
Life with a teenager is hard. One moment they are the familiar sweet kid you’ve known all their life. The next — rude, moody and brooding. Someone send help because this mama is all twisted up inside. I guess it just hasn’t really hit me until my third son seemingly turned into a different person […]
The Pre-baby body vs. the Post-baby body
When I look at my body in the mirror, I see a woman with her children’s journey literally etched upon her skin. My mama always tells me that I ruined her good figure. My stomach was flat, my legs didn’t have any spider veins and my boobs were like rocks! Then I had you […]