Zara Hanawalt

1 week ago | theeverymom.com | Zara Hanawalt

When my social media feeds started to fill up with videos about “things Type A moms do” vs. “things Type B moms do,” I found myself wondering where I fit in. I even asked my husband if he’d consider me a Type A or a Type B personality. “Neither really,” he said. “Or maybe a little bit of both.” Just as I expected. I don’t quite fit into either personality type, at least not based on the extreme examples of both we often see on social media.

1 week ago | sheknows.com | Zara Hanawalt

Three years ago, I found a gorgeous pair of boots and swooned over them for months. My husband encouraged me to buy them, and when they went on sale in April, I finally pulled the trigger. I made a condition with him, though: He had to hold on to them and give them to me as a Mother’s Day gift — that helped me wrap my head around the splurge, and I knew I’d always associate the boots with a special day.

1 week ago | theeverymom.com | Zara Hanawalt

There’s this narrative that when you become a parent, you stop enjoying your weekend. On social media, creators post about how there’s no point in asking a parent what they did over the weekend because, for most parents, it’s not a terribly exciting time. There are multiple Reddit threads from parents saying they dread weekends.

3 weeks ago | theeverymom.com | Zara Hanawalt

When I became a mom, I expected my identity to shift. I even knew I may feel like I’d lost my sense of self entirely. So when my children were finally born, I braced myself for that feeling to set in. But as I stepped into motherhood, I quickly realized that the shift in identity wasn’t the thing I’d struggled with the most. Motherhood didn’t feel like it robbed my identity; it added to it in a way that was both destabilizing and fulfilling.

1 month ago | theeverymom.com | Zara Hanawalt

When Ellen Pompeo’s Call Her Daddy podcast episode dropped, her motherhood quote made its rounds on the Internet. And, one week later, the CHD podcast made headlines again after an interview with Chappell Roan was released. In the former, a celebrity mom reflected on the magic of motherhood. And in the latter? A woman who does not have children made an observation about the parents she knows being, in her words, “in hell.” The takes are very, very different… but neither one is entirely wrong.