As Margaret travels to bury her son, she hears a voice from the past echo through the plane’s speakers. She may be reminded that life has a way of purposefully resurfacing even in the face of loss when what begins as a grieving process takes an unexpected turn. Margaret is my name, and I am…
I realized something in our family had already broken beyond repair the moment my mother-in-law told me to leave the house while I was carrying my baby. Just a few days after our baby Tommy was born, I was left alone with his parents while my husband Adam was on a lengthy work assignment out…
With her arms exhausted from holding her four-month-old twins and her eyes burning with the kind of bone-deep tiredness that only a new mother truly feels, Ava Sterling stood inside the sparkling ballroom of the posh hotel. She had barely any time to take care of herself for months because her days had been taken…
Millie Smith had a deep-seated suspicion that her first pregnancy would be unique. She was unable to provide a logical explanation. It was just an instinct that she had from the start. She felt she might be carrying two babies long before the doctors verified it because twins ran in her family. She wasn’t at…
She thought she was saving her body. Instead, she was slowly starving it. At just twenty-seven years old, the young woman had become deeply devoted to an extreme version of “clean eating” she discovered online — a rigid lifestyle promising purity, healing, energy, and total control over health. Influencers praised it constantly. Wellness accounts framed…
I can still clearly see a series of warped, terrifying pictures from the morning my four-year-old daughter, Ava, died. Swinging her legs and using her toy rabbit to “talk” to me in a small, squeaky voice, she had sat at our kitchen counter in her favorite pink pajamas. Despite the stress of my professional existence,…
The last time I saw my mother, I was seven years old. It was a Tuesday morning with a very ordinary rhythm, yet I can still vividly recall it. While I sat on the floor fumbling with my sneaker laces, Mom was at the kitchen table skillfully braiding my twin sister Lily’s hair. She vowed…
The announcement that Emmy-winning actress Patricia Heaton will be the next chancellor of Belmont University has shocked both the halls of higher education and the opulent hallways of Hollywood. The declaration, which was made in front of an enthralled audience in the university’s iconic Bell Tower in Nashville, represents a significant shift from the conventional…
I was stopped in my tracks by what I witnessed close to the arrivals gate. The airport is a site of transit, a transitional area where individuals are typically focused with their own destinations. The anniversary of my son Liam’s death was on my thoughts, and I had returned home a day early from a…
Over the course of almost three years, the adoption process had been an exhausting marathon of background checks, house inspections, and psychiatric assessments. The day they brought their new boy home felt like the realization of a longtime dream for Mark and Sarah, a couple whose hearts had been aching for a child for as…
