Whenever a health professional asks me if I’ve been pregnant before, it takes me a second to remember how many times. I’ve had two children. I had an abortion in my 20’s. And I had a miscarriage before my first son. That’s four, I’ll remind myself. You’ve been pregnant four times.

The frequency of miscarriages is not matched by the amount of discussion they get. Some estimates suggest that about 1 in 4 pregnancies ends in miscarriage, making it a very unfortunate, but also quite likely scenario. Given that prevalence, and the massive impact a miscarriage can have on a woman, a couple, and more people beyond, we would do well to bring the subject a little further into the light.

I’ve got a new pet peeve at the grocery store. It’s those warning labels on packages announcing that the product is super high in sodium or sugar, or some other terrible ingredient.

Being empowered to make “informed choices” sounds lovely until you remember that you live in a world that constantly crushes you with information and bombards you with choice. We are stuck in a food environment that is at odds with our evolution and benefits corporations who’ve learned how to highjack our taste buds. And now somehow that’s one more thing for me to feel responsible for? Not fair. And just one more reason for me to hate cooking.

It’s hard to believe that the terrible reign of COVID-19 started 6 years ago. The pandemic sometimes feels more like a world we went to than a time we lived through, and we don’t much like being reminded of that place or care to revisit it. Usually when the pandemic comes up in casual conversation, it’s all sighs and sentence fragments. We shake our heads and swiftly shift gears. It’s a lovely little trick of our human nature that we have trouble conjuring experiences of pain. But “the past is never dead. It isn’t even past,” William Faulkner once wrote. And whether we wish to speak any more of the pandemic or not, it continues, of course, to speak through us.