Rethinking Love, Life, Divorce, and What Makes a Happy Family.

In 2009, I wrote an essay for Slate’s Double X site about my “surprise” planned pregnancy, which came about shortly after I got engaged. Six years later, I wrote the bookend piece about the end of my marriage, which ran in the New York Times Modern Love column.  The column became an episode of the Modern Love podcast, with the actress Molly Ringwald reading the essay followed by an interview with me. Since then, my essays on co-sleeping and divorce as an act of self love have also been published in The New York Times, and my newfound love of dogs and pillow fights in the age of COVID have been published in The Washington Post.

In the first essay, I was struggling with how to make a family.  In the second essay, I was struggling how to remake that family—which now included a second child—after the pain and trauma of divorce.

Since then, I have continued to meditate on how to have a “good divorce,” how to exist in the world as a “part-time mom” with a full-time job and long-term career ambitions, and the outside-the-box parenting methods I have turned to as a single parent.