“We’re all a little weird thanks to our mothers. I’m carrying that tradition on with my own children.” Mary Laura Philpott, who blogged previously at I Miss You When I Blink, shares an excerpt from her new essay collection at Longreads.

After her mom’s cancer diagnosis, a daughter reflects on her mom’s joyous approach to the time she has remaining: “This faith is a gift from my mother and very likely, my best lesson.”

At Tea & Bannock, shayla snowshoe reflects on the joys of mothering her daughter, Dani-Mae: “But with each passing day, I become more aware of myself as a person and the strength that I carry.”

“Same kid. Different wrapper.” In 2004, the Smartypants family adopted baby Nora. In 2018, they amended Nora’s Certificate of Foreign Birth when Nora transitioned, changing his name Aaron.

Designer, author, and AltSummit founder Gabrielle Blair created Design Mom in 2006; since then, she’s published thousands of posts on design and parenting, travel, food, and other topics (from the evergreen to the timely).

“Our world focuses on the looks of girls and the accomplishments of boys.” At OTV Magazine, Angela Noel reflects on the gendered compliments adults give children, and how they make it hard for girls to separate their self-worth from their appearance.

“Why do ratings in general, and Greatschool.org’s ratings in particular, perpetuate segregation and resource hoarding?” Ali McKay at Integrated Schools take a closer look at the school ratings website, GreatSchools.

Lisa Lim creates a comic about her favorite matriarch in life, her grandma. It’s about a long Chinese tradition of loving boys over girls just because they’re boys. “It’s about a woman who scares the sh*t out of me, and the world, but who inspires me every day to be just as bad ass.”

At Longreads, Paris-based pastry chef Frances Leech reflects on taste, memory, and literature’s most famous confection: the humble madeleine, immortalized in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

The yellowed newspaper clipping Rita Byrne Tull found in a box of papers was her great-grandfather’s obituary. But when she turned the paper over, she discovered a story of life in rural Ireland.

A blogger reflects on a series of tragic life events: “We’ll look for artifacts and make up stories and I’ll show them how, defying all logic, the river runs north, but still it flows.”