Despite Leslie Kendall Dye’s tangled relationship with her daughter’s hair, she reconciles the fact that her daughter is very much her own, wonderful person: “She knows who illustrated the original Narnia; she is very much my daughter. I recognize the inside of her more and more.”

Writer and illustrator Lucy Grove-Jones on miscarriage: “I could have told this story differently. I could have cut out the jokes about apps and fertility friendly lube. I could have mentally prepared you from the first line, signalled sooner this was a tragedy and half the cast would be dead . . .”

On learning to play: “(Legos are) my escape route from a mind-numbing round of tea-party. I can’t handle sipping air from a tiny teacup, but pull out those LEGO bins and I’ll sprawl out on the floor like a kid. Which, when I’m with my own kid, feels pretty cool.”

Angela Noel on co-parenting and experiencing loss as a part-time mom: “Sucked into this hole are the smiles I won’t see. The giggles I miss. . . . These all live in the hole in my body, the blackhole place where he lives a life outside of the life he shares with me.”

Western philosophy clashes with Rebecca Schuman’s birth plan in her hilarious, harrowing Longreads essay.

“Before they learned to tie their shoes, the boys could loop the long silhouettes of their footie pajamas into nooses. When she took away their craft scissors, they chewed their nails to points, sharpened their teeth on the chipped ceramic edges of the bathtub.”

A mom reflects on preparing her 12-year-old sons to fly alone, to grandma’s house in today’s America: “I thought we would at least get to girls before we got to guns. But this has been an extraordinary year, full of violence and bigotry.”

Lisa Sadikman on raising her daughter: “This is when I feel myself expand, just a little, into the space she’s left behind. There are hours now when I am finally able to twirl in a circle of my own without scraping motherhood’s walls.”

“I walk around like I have a lightning rod through me. I can’t sit because I feel like I should be doing something. I pace, and I’m short with the kids, and I picture my life without them all and I feel like my lungs will explode.” A fraught, bittersweet journey from foster to adoptive parent.

Sarah Menkedick reflects on the very different—and complementary—ways in which her mother and her stepmother have nurtured her.

Jennifer Balink has been thinking about getting a tattoo — and the idea leads her to reflect about family, permanence, and a Mother’s Day gift from years ago.

Alexis Kanda-Olmstead advocates for a Mother’s Day Strike: “We don’t labor on Labor Day, so why should we mother on Mother’s Day?”

Sarah Menkedick on publishing her first book: “By the time it comes out the intensive period that held and fostered its creation has passed. . . And so to hold this book in my hands also felt like holding my child’s babyhood, and my nascent motherhood, realizing that I have come through it.”

Evelyn Shoop on postpartum depression: “I need to have somewhere to come to remember how deep and raw the wound of postpartum depression felt, so that it can hopefully, maybe, allow me to approach others with deep compassion even when the memories fade.”

“I looked pretty, I thought, pretty enough for surgery and possibly Matt Damon.” Sara Dorner, a mother of two, was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. Here, she reflects on her diagnosis with a bit of humor.