It’s hard for me to be too deliberate about New Years’s resolutions and all, what with the general and total lack of control I feel in my life (JOKE! …Kind of.), but when I get down to brass tacks I start to realize that I am in dire need of improvement in certain areas of my life–namely organization–and what better time to start pretending I’m someone else than at the start of the new year… amiright?!

Everywhere, we see new mothers. At the store, newborns snugged into carriers, their tiny, soft faces wilted into their mothers’ chests. In strollers, snugged and bundled against the cold, tiny eyes peeking out from under hats. Everywhere and always, heart-wrenchingly adorable.

It feels like I’ve told the story about why I quit my job in television news countless times, and I’m always a bit surprised by how frequently the question comes up not only in interviews I’ve done with other people, but also in day-to-day conversations with friends or other people I meet. Why? they ask. Why would you leave a job you worked so hard to get, and one you so thoroughly enjoyed?

There is no other way to describe this past Friday than messy. I don’t mean that in a figurative sense, but in a very literal sense. Specifically, it was bloody.

No doubt you’ve seen that one scary post your friend has shared on Facebook–the one where she feels she was followed by a strange person in a parking lot or store, and worried that person was tied somehow into a human trafficking ring.

They’re the friends on your feed or in real life who always have–as the name indicates–fabulous birthdays. Let me rephrase that: faaaaaaaabulous birthdays. They drink mimosas on rooftop lounges for brunch. They stuff a limo full of best friends and drive around to all the hot spots in town.

Aaah. The Birth Plan. I admittedly have a complex relationship with this whole concept, given that my first birth plan would have been better used as bird cage lining than anything resembling an actual, it-will-happen-this-way “Plan.”

Remember that TV show “Kids Say the Darndest Things?” It was such a wild success because there has never been a truer statement about raising children.

Rising from a site that has known the deepest sadness, has felt the gravity of unfathomable loss.

That’s the thing about traveling as a mom; you can’t wait to get time away, but when you get back you pay the price in exhaustion.