I totally did that. Working at a small nonprofit meant that they were not obligated to follow FMLA and there was no existing maternity policy; I think I may have been their first pregnancy. So not knowing what they would offer, and not wanting to bring it up and reveal I was trying to get pregnant, I just socked away…

And yet, it is in a country’s economic best-interest to avoid a declining birthrate and stay at replacement levels. If not through birth, then it has to be through immigration, which certainly seems to be a hard pill for some to swallow these days.

No shit. I started off all natural with a midwife in a birth center; the baby just would not come out so we ended up transferring to a hospital and I ultimately wound up with a c-section under general anesthesia. Fortunately, my husband has good insurance and we only have to pay for a small fraction of the cost of…

So this week will be my first official week as a stay at home mom to a one month old, no husband on leave, no grandma staying over to help. I’m a little terrified.

In my most fucked up dream, I was an old man, a grandfather, (note, I am a young woman) living in a big massive mansion with one of those sweeping staircases that descends from two sides and meets in the middle. The understood back story was that my wife had been murdered by her granddaughter (who for some reason was…