My fertility doctor just kind of threw it in there as an afterthought during our final meeting before I started the process of IVF: “You won’t be able to do any strenuous physical activity until your ovaries go back to their normal size.” At this point, I’d heard a lot…

Part of The Belladonna Holiday Essay Collection — The night of New Year’s Eve 1999, I was pretty certain the world was going to end. I was twelve, which is the perfect age for thinking about things like an imminent apocalypse. I was just old enough to comprehend that terrible things happen in the world: murders, cults, house…

We were doing everything right, but nothing was happening — It didn’t seem real when the doctor said we’d have to do IVF if we ever wanted to get pregnant. IVF was the kind of thing you hear about other people doing, a sort of mysterious process where sad couples who can’t get pregnant on their own mix their fluids…

After I left the doctor on my first day of starting IVF, I was supposed to go to work. The appointment was in the morning at 8am, so technically I still had the whole day to get things done, but 45 minutes after leaving the doctor, I wasn’t sitting at…

Flower crowns, bitch. — NOTE: This piece was co-authored by Lucy Huber, Cara Michelle Smith, and Lillian Stone. Planning a summer wedding? Don’t get caught up in the mason jar shuffle. Set yourself apart from the crowd — and your grandma’s head apart from her body! — with these Midsommar-inspired wedding tips. …

It’s so easy, why aren’t you doing it? — Hello! I’m just a well-meaning stranger who overheard your private conversation in this brunch restaurant. While it may be overstepping my bounds as a person you never knew existed until I hovered over you and your sister’s huevos rancheros, I couldn’t help overhearing that you’d been trying to get pregnant…

Last week a tweet of mine went viral. The tweet went like this: Most people thought it was funny, but one thing that really bothered me was the amount of men (and even some women) responding to the tweet saying I was wrong: the guy in my story wasn’t hitting…

I knew nothing at age 22, apart from how to write a check, drive, and possibly make a good grilled cheese sandwich. While working at my first job after college as a teller in a bank in the Watergate complex I was benignly stalked by the man would eventually become…

THIS DIET WILL MAKE YOU LITERALLY GLOW — The Total Mind Body Soul Shiny Hair Diet is not about losing weight. We all know women should be thin, but they also shouldn’t ever actively try to lose weight. That’s why this diet is about feeling better in a vague way. This diet is about glowing. Your body will…