Families

It’s that time of year again, time to hide from your kids in the bathroom! I mean spring break. It’s spring break!

If a woman displays an outward interest in liking sex, she is automatically labeled "promiscuous." I'm a single mom and I still like sex. A lot.

When I was first diagnosed with Stage IV endometriosis and told that my fertility had become a now or never proposition, I didn’t know anyone else who had faced anything similar. All of my friends were at the point of marrying and having babies themselves. Several had gotten pregnant without even meaning to. Meanwhile, I was 26 and single, being told that it might never happen for me at all. The whole thing was crushing, perhaps even more so because I didn’t feel like there was anyone I could talk to about it. My friends couldn’t relate, and even those who were most empathetic and anxious to help were often at a loss for what to say.

“Congratulations, Joni. You have a UTI so bad my machine can't even read it.”

I like to give everything 110%, even my bacterial infections. I like to give everything 110%... except myself.

Although I haven't gone out of my way to be naked around my 6-year-old daughter (and we haven't had any direct discussion about my nude body), I certainly haven't hid my body from her either. If I’m in the shower and she needs her hair washed, I'll pull her in with me. If I’m drying my hair, naked as I do, I don’t mind if she's standing next to me brushing her teeth. Why? I don't want her views on what a body is "supposed" to look like to be shaped by the one-sided view the media presents.

It is hard to find any real numbers about how many people do "direct sales" or how much money they make. The web is full of either big promises or pissed-off former sellers. What I do know, from bazillions of friends and family, is that making much more than pocket money means selling like a real job. Yes, it might be more flexible, but there’s no magic formula.

“Then why are you so worried about the scale?” Why was I? I had finally let go of the scale as an indicator of my own health, but my inability to do the same when it came to my daughter was bringing up the same old feelings of inadequacy and frustration.

I have 14 body piercings, a rib tattoo, a thigh tattoo, an inner wrist tattoo, two “tramp stamps” (and, yes, both were acquired when I was 18), and a full sleeve. In fact, I have more tattoos than I can count, since most of my pieces meld right into the next. But you know what? My piercings don’t make me masochistic, a degenerate, or some sort of delinquent. My tattoos don’t make unemployable. And my body modifications definitely do not make me a “bad mom.”