Here Are Our Favorite 50 Romper Stories This Year

"You may not know that many of us are living with stress levels similar to those of combat veterans. You may not know that some of us have to unfollow you on social media, because the photos of your children vacationing with you on the beach, videos of your toddler's milestones, and complaints about your mom stress are just too much for us. You may not know that, despite our current apparent fluency with all things medical and developmental, we were not necessarily any more prepared for our children's challenges than you would have been. You may not know these things about us... but we want you to know."

Read it, and the whole Now You See Us series, here.

Romper's first video series, Romper's Doula Diaries, covers a lot of ground, from how doulas support women of color, the most underserved population of pregnant women and new mothers, to how they can be helpful to a stay-at-home dad, but Episode 1 is a showstopper. When things really don't go according to plan, the doula, Emilie, says, "Sometimes, we're the most qualified person in the room."

Watch the full series here.

"The split was immediately met with horror and dismay from fans, as is usually the case when two extremely likable, attractive, charismatic, and famous people divorce. But in truth, we knew this was coming. We knew it because, let's face it, we caused it."

Read it here.

"As one of the first 'big' tiny-home families, Miller often receives messages from couples looking to follow her into tiny-living, but has also seen a reliable amount of criticism over her choices. In fact, she says, it made parenting easier. 'It was difficult for me when I was pregnant and everyone was telling me I had to change for the kiddos,' she says. 'But I lived in a tiny house and I got a lot of criticism over that, and that prepared me more for parenthood, because I had already gone through it.'"

Read it here.

"No. Stop. I'm usually not one to deride youth culture or trends (because, if history has taught us one thing, it's that those who do so always come across as looking like bitter idiots), but I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit in my very best folding chair, don my fanciest housecoat and hair curlers, shake my fist crankily, and insist that you damn kids get off my lawn. Because enough. You've proven that you cannot handle 'mom' as a compliment and now it has to stop."

Read it here.

"Almost five years after Emilie was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on Dec. 14, 2012, Alissa is still finding Emilie’s notes. A few days before I spoke to her, she found another note Emilie had left hidden in a book in Alissa’s room. The note said 'Love you - Emilie.'"

Read it here.

"The sad truth is that rape culture is everywhere, and probably in my own house, despite my attempts to teach my children otherwise. It makes itself known when I talk to my children about bodies or consent, sex. I feel it when I hear my children discuss what they overhear at home, school, or on television. My son is young, and I know he means no harm, but if I don't instill in him the need to always seek out consent? Well, thinking of how he could act in the future is unbearable."

Read it here.

"Your fans have gotten used to you sharing the less perfect parts of your life —your fertility struggle, the daily internet harassment you weather with such strength and perspective — but that doesn’t make your honesty on this subject less remarkable. Thank you for talking about one more thing that we don’t talk about enough: the week-to-week or day-to-day struggle many women have with alcohol, no matter how successful they are, no matter how famous, how happy, how beautiful, how #blessed."

Read it here.

"It is a night shoot, the mall has been emptied of customers — though some stragglers stay behind to catch a glimpse of the action — and let's just say the Williams-Sonoma looks festive for May 11. Kunis, Bell, and Hahn are filming a scene where they wreak havoc on the mall, spike apple cider samples outside a shop, and take over the mall's PA system, spreading a message many moms during the holidays can identify with: when you're a mom, Christmas can suck."

Read it here.

"I didn’t share a single picture of Arabella publicly until after her first birthday, SO YOU MEAN YOU DIDN'T PUT ANY PHOTOS OF HER ON FACEBOOK OR INSTAGRAM? LOTS OF PARENTS DON'T POST PHOTOS OF THEIR KIDS ON SOCIAL MEDIA at which point the paparazzi snapped a photo of us at an airport. OH. OK, THAT'S NOT WHAT YOU MEANT AT ALL. I didn’t want the first photo of my daughter to be sold to the press, CUT, THIS IS AN ISSUE THAT AFFECTS ONLY YOU AND BLAKE LIVELY AND MEMBERS OF THE ROYAL FAMILY so I posted an image myself on one of my social media accounts; after that, I began posting photos of our family more frequently. CAN YOU ADD WHAT APP YOU USE TO MAKE YOUR HAIR LOOK SO SHINY ON INSTAGRAM? THIS ISN'T AN EDITORIAL NOTE; I JUST WANNA KNOW."

Read it here.

"My desire to be the best mother in the world didn’t translate into knowledge about how to do it. I was pretty inept at first. At one point, Chelsea wouldn’t stop crying, and I was nearly frantic. Finally, I looked down at this tiny squirming infant and said to her, 'Chelsea, this is new for both of us. I’ve never been a mother before. You’ve never been a baby. We’re just going to have to help each other do the best we can.'"

Read it here.

"This essential work is mostly invisible. My husband will always say something nice when the house is particularly clean when he comes home, but most of the work I do all day isn’t easy to spot. There is nothing to notice when the laundry is put away consistently each day or when I’ve smoothed over multiple tantrums or spent an afternoon working with our preschooler on writing her name or made the vet appointment for the cat. There’s certainly nothing to notice when I’ve been meal planning in my head, or worrying about the next level testing at gymnastics. Yet all of these things take effort and time. It is work, no matter how unappreciated and unnoticed."

Read it here.

"Why is she sitting on the cold floor in lingerie (which is, of course, white)? Someone get that woman a chair."

Read it here.

"I mean, my body is different. It doesn't look right, doesn't work right, and quite frankly, I am more than a little pissed off at it right now. Yes, I know I just grew a human and that's amazing, but I can think childbirth is amazing and not love the body that did that amazing thing. The two are not mutually exclusive."

Read it here.

"Society: 'This is your birth experience! All doctors everywhere, in every instance, are only interested in money, which means they are going to want to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Advocate for yourself! ... If you listen to your doctor and you wind up getting a C-section it is a moral failing and you should be ashamed for not standing up to the Industrial Medical Complex.'

Also society: 'Your doctor is a well-educated, infallible medical professional. What you want, think, or feel doesn't matter.'"

Read it here.

“'I would hide in the shower so I could cry and my husband would literally beg me to stop breastfeeding,' she said. 'He said it wasn’t worth what it was doing to me.' Though she did eventually switch to formula, she said she felt so ashamed of her choice that she refused to leave the house for months."

Read it here.

"I was a tough woman, or so I had thought, but I felt betrayed by my own body, like I was physiologically incapable of having an easier birth. I'd been having clitoral orgasms since I was a child, but now I was a mother, a grown woman. The level of pain that I lived though made me desire a deeper understanding of my inner parts. I am a strong Viking woman, or so I had thought. I'd sat through tattoos in my armpits and on my scalp with hardly a squirm. I'd been in knuckle-bloodying fistfights as a teenager. I'd climbed the trees and crashed the bicycles. But as a grown woman, I was shocked at how shook I felt by my own childbirth. After reaching the pit of agony stretched through my birth canal, I felt that I owed it to myself to discover the peak of its ecstasy."

Read it here.

"I didn't think it would be this difficult. My husband and I agree about most things — politics, religion, the weirdly unacknowledged annoyingness of Kristen Wiig — so I figured coming up with a name for our child would be a snap."

Read it here.

"I’m one of the good ones, I want to tell myself.

But the thing is… so many moms like me think we’re one of the good ones. Even the moms who voted for Trump. Even, yes, the moms who voted for Moore. Very few of these women are rubbing their hands together as they cast votes for someone just to be evil. They're telling themselves that they just can't go against their beliefs about abortion. They're telling themselves that this is the kind of man who can keep them safe, and protected. They're simply upholding the status quo — a status quo that has been so, so carefully constructed over years and years and years to make all of us white women feel cushioned and protected."

Read it here.

"I made the whole box and artfully arranged them on a platter, which I ate in the backyard at sunset like a goddess. There were still two poppers left on the plate when I had to make my first emergency trip to the bathroom, but don’t worry, I came back and finished them. I am no quitter."

Read it here.

"The main reason I hated ALICE Drill days was the simple fact that these were children, practicing what to do if a gunman came to their school. This wasn’t a fire drill, or a tornado drill. Mass shootings are not accidents, or scientific forces of nature. They’d be completely avoidable with the implementation of common-sense gun policies. And that’s what is so infuriating here; instead of our lawmakers taking action to ensure that no one ever brings a machine gun into a school, teachers have to take time away from learning to inform students what to do if it happens."

Read it here.

"Now that I'm a parent, it's almost like approaching this film with a fresh pair of eyes. I find myself less focused on the magic of it all and more focused on the total lack of adult supervision throughout the entire story. (Though if you don't think I still burst into song during that 'I Put A Spell On You' scene, think again.)"

Read it here.

"There are very real, structural challenges that women face to spending time with their kids right from the time they are born. For starters, the United States is one of only nine countries across the world that doesn’t mandate maternity leave — and the only developed country. This is outrageous."

Read it here.

"The first thing I did was tell him I was so sorry he was feeling that way and calmly asked him why. He sat quiet for a few seconds and then said, 'Because I don't like my skin. I want to be white like you. My skin is too dark and I want to be rebuilt into a new boy with white skin.'"

Read it here.

"I then started making the rounds on a list of OBs covered by my insurance policy and within 30 miles of my home. But every one of them vocalized some derivative of that first call: 'We can't be liable for any possible problems.' Or, upon finding out that my partner and I planned on moving to England to raise the child, 'Taking on a new patient for such a limited time isn't worth our resources.' With every conversation, I grew more and more familiar with the unofficial script for 'How To Turn Down A Scared Woman Who Didn't Know She Was Carrying A Life Inside Her.'"

Read it here.

"Popular culture tends to view motherhood through a gauzy, oversimplified lens: it's the white knight of life choices, a decision that will erase all your problems and replace them with baby snuggles and divine purpose and a maternal sense of self. But in To the Bone, it's clear that motherhood is not a cure for eating disorders. It wasn't enough to keep Megan from purging after she ate, and the birth of my son wasn't enough to keep me from doing the same."

Read it here.

"Most people assume I'm straight, and I can't blame them for their confusion. After all, I'm a monogamous, cisgender woman married to a cisgender man, and I've never been in a same-sex relationship. And it's not like I have a huge tattoo across my chest that says "Bi Life." (Note to self: maybe get huge tattoo across chest that says "Bi Life.") While being labeled straight makes me feel misunderstood and unseen, I can't deny that it imbues me and my family with enormous amounts of privilege that, say, a bisexual woman in a same-sex relationship would not enjoy."

Read it here.

"'Some doulas understandably feel comfortable only in the joyful spaces of welcoming new life, yet I strongly believe that the line is thin between welcoming life and saying goodbye,' Blackwood says. 'Mothers deserve to be nurtured, cared for and listened to, whether they're birthing a full-term, healthy baby or a baby who isn't going to live.'"

Read it here.

"'I remember when one of the killings happened, one of our boys — I'm saying our boys because I can feel for the actual mother who lost her blood child — my best friend's son kept asking "What happened, why did they kill him?,"' she tells me on the phone. 'So many different questions, and I'm thinking, "Oh my god, my son is going to ask me these questions that are going to make me completely uncomfortable, but how do I answer him?"'"

Read it here.

"The country is riven, and yet Target Mom crosses cultural and partisan boundaries. She is in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Austin, in Burlington, forever prying gingerbread house kits from the hands of her toddler or throwing miniature Hunter boots that are unaccounted for in the budget into her cart. We are all Target Mom."

Read it here.

"The gravity, exhaustion, and tempered anger in Poppy's voice was staggering, especially as she continued. 'As far as the 20-week ban, these women are going to have to go to New Mexico or somewhere else now, if they can. That's really going to be their only option if they're that far along. There is Fund Texas Choice, who might be able to help them, and some funding agencies that might be able to help them, but obviously that's the most difficult area of need — where these women are right up against a wall.'"

Read it here.

"For me, makeup was like armor. I figured that if I applied it well enough, people wouldn’t be as likely to clock me as a trans woman. So I’d insist on wearing a full face of makeup before leaving my apartment, much to the chagrin of my then-boyfriend and children. 'When are we going to go?' my 7-year-old would whine by the time I got to my eyeshadow."

Read it here.

"In American popular culture, we've typically only seen Indian women depicted as either unwilling partners in arranged marriages or women who are pressured to choose partners who will meet their parents' approval. In movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Meet the Patels, and, to some degree, Master of None, we've seen this narrative time and again."

Read it here.

"My firstborn spent basically my entire pregnancy huddled up as high as he could possible go in my uterus. I've interpreted this to mean that he would be an ambitious person who always wanted to be on top, and that he is the most stubborn person on the planet and didn't want to come out, so he kept himself as far from my cervix as he could. Whether or not that's true, what's definitely true is the fact that he put pressure on my diaphragm and lungs and I couldn't get a deep breath in for months."

Read it here.

"'[The doctors] told me upfront that it’s too bad we missed that initial ultrasound because we’d know where [the placenta] was, and if there was one or two. If they had known that was a risk factor, they would have taken greater care.'"

Read it here.

"When I got the emails stating that he had been kicked off, I was mostly stunned. Ihad expected them to just delete the photo, or maybe attempt to talk to him. When they notified me that he had been banned from both platforms, I went into the bathroom to cry at work. I felt like I had succeeded, for the first time in years, at making people recognize what had happened to me."

Read it here.

"As I mentioned before, my mother pierced my ears, and her mom pierced her babies’ ears, and so on and so forth. It’s a big part of the culture in many places. From Latina America to India to parts of Africa and the Middle East, people pierce their baby’s ears early. It’s like the turkey at Thanksgiving or the male circumcision — except ear piercings are nowhere near as invasive as circumcision and won’t make you sleepy like a plate of turkey."

Read it here.

"'I definitely felt like I had to relearn who I was, and relearn my body and how clothes fit on me,' Holliday says. 'It felt like everything that kind of made me feel like me was stripped away a bit.' But after reconnecting with the Tess she knew, she realized putting pressure on herself to return to her pre-baby appearances was absurd."

Read it here.

"Being awkward and accepting one's awkwardness still does not fully prepare one to actually take a number two on the delivery table. When it happened, I had just gotten an epidural so pushing was an exciting, pain-free, if tiring process. And even though I couldn't feel anything from my waist down, as I started to push I could feel a pressure ... in my butt."

Read it here.

"Miscarriage and abortion are sisters. Just like my body knew what to do when an abnormal embryo implanted itself in my uterus, my mind knew what to do when a healthy embryo found its way to the soft lining of my uterine wall back when I was 23 years old, in an unhealthy relationship, living paycheck-to-paycheck, unwilling and unable to be a mother. They haven't always synced up, my body and my mind, but even separately they've known what to do at different times in my life. I do not regret my decision to have an abortion."

Read it here.

"In B.C. years (that's Before Children), you'd think nothing of walking naked from the shower to your closet or being topless for a few minutes while you hunt through the laundry pile for a bra. And when your baby was still a baby, you probably didn't change your naked ways all that much. But as your child gets older and refuses to let the bathroom door close unless they're on the other side with you, you might start to wonder if you need to to start covering up. Is there a point at which allowing your kids to see you naked isn't the best thing for their development, or is simply inappropriate?"

Read it here.

"Now that we’ve been on the road for almost a year, it’s amazing to see how little stuff our family actually needs to get by. Because we only packed what we could fit into our 300-square foot RV, we have very few unnecessary items. We bought a Costco chest freezer to store food, but it seems unnecessary now that we are managing with a standard freezer and a small fridge. Kitchen supplies, pots and pans, dishes — I don't miss any of it. The things we do miss, like an oven, counter space, or a second bathroom, still feel like fair trade-offs for the freedom and simplicity we are experiencing on the road."

Read it here.

"In the past, I never really thought about my children making friends with white children. For the most part, I was just happy they were making friends. But one day at my son Beck's preschool, I was talking to another mother about being black and raising a mixed son. She turned to me and said, 'We don't even see Beck's color! He's just Chance's friend!'

It felt like someone had kicked me in my stomach. "

Read it here.

"'Every prison has kitchens and industrial refrigerators,” Fettig said. “You could say ‘OK, we’ll store it up to a week, and you can have a family member or next of kin come and pick it up, and then if no one does, then we’ll dispose of it.’ That would be a fair thing to do. The problem is that across the country, institutions have no policies at all. They don’t try [to support nursing mothers] in the least. And by failing to do so, they’re actually hurting people in the community, specifically the child.'"

Read it here.

"Let me make one thing super clear, by the way, because I will no doubt be accused of being 'catty' or 'judgmental' or 'unfair to women who don't adhere to a very specific and unrealistic set of societal standards that basically exist to make women feel terrible about themselves.' I talk like this because I care so damn much. I believe mothers deserve to be treated like sex objects whose primary function is aesthetic and sexual pleasure of others, just like all other women! #MommysAreWorthIt! So when they let themselves go, and peek behind the curtain of society's expectations for ideal beauty and appearance, I'm like, 'Run, girl! Run! You can't ever unsee what's behind there! We'll never get you back if you do!'"

Read it here.

"According to a study published in the British Medical Journal, many moms find the reality of breastfeeding to be so much harder than they expected. Another study found milk supply issues, returning to work, and infant and maternal illness to be reasons for stopping breastfeeding or supplementing with formula. In Lanisoh's survey of over 13,000 new moms, the main challenge for moms across the globe was pain while breastfeeding. None of the aforementioned reasons for weaning came a surprise to me at all, and most can't be changed by more breastfeeding education alone. The truth is, exclusive breastfeeding is another example of something that sounds great in theory, but completely falls apart in reality for so many moms."

Read it here.

"I was 100 percent on board for my natural, unmedicated birth-center delivery. But I figured I could be natural without being 'au naturale.' It wasn’t like I was planning a water birth. And even those women always seem to have on sports bras in the YouTube videos I’d seen.

I heard it again a week later in a documentary. Then again in a book. Something about a woman’s animal instinct coming out and her inhibitions disappearing.

My inhibitions are steel. Mine are solid. I don’t do naked."

Read it here.

"According to the law, 'a woman cannot be fired, denied a promotion, demoted or forced to stop working because she is or might become pregnant, and employers cannot refuse to hire someone because she is or might become pregnant.' But a survey of 500 managers by law firm Slater & Gordon found that 40 percent of managers would 'rather employ a man in his 20s or 30s over a woman of the same age for fear of maternity leave.'"

Read it here.

"As luck would have it, I was the only woman on the floor delivering that night, so I had the maternity ward staff mostly to myself. I didn’t have to wait for my epidural, and my OB-GYN and nurse spent a decent amount of time with me while I labored. We chatted for hours, which made an otherwise scary experience rather pleasant.

Then it happened."

Read it here.

"Trump's policy reversal will have a devastating effect on the thousands of transgender service people in the military right now. But it will have devastating downstream effects on transgender youth, too. Trump is sending my transgender son the message that the fact that he is transgender is strange and discomfiting. He is saying to my son that he is unfit – not only for military service, but also to be among cisgender kids at school. He is saying that my son is not a boy, with the rights of a normal human boy. In the eyes of the President, my son is a transgender. And this is terrifying."

Read it here.

"I am still nursing at 11 months, which I consider a small victory against the demands of office work, but it means my boobs are not the volleyballs of the newborn period. Rather, they have the collapsed look of oxygen masks dangling inside the cabin of a plane. Often when I wonder if my son is actually getting any milk, I remember those safety demos that have been drilled into our subconsciouses: Bag may not inflate but oxygen is flowing."

Read it here.