Mothers who are mothering without being mothered by their own mother are living a completely different reality than mothers who are being mothered while they mother.
Limiting my kids’ exposure to screens is the best thing that has happened to me this year.
Now they are well-adjusted kids with little to no tantrums.
Before now, once they were on their tablets, if you called them to get you something, they would either end up bringing something else, injure themselves on the way, or spill it if it was liquid.
If you tried to take it away after a long time, they would throw tantrums. When visitors were around, they had little to no interaction with them.
What I did was tell them tablets are now limited to out-of-school days, so they started looking forward to weekends. I can tell you now that they didn’t ask for their tablets this past weekend, neither did they care that they weren’t charged.
What I replaced the tablets with:
Lots of colouring books, puzzles, magnetic blocks, pretend play, sensory toys.
We also had a lot of projects together.
Now, when I tell them to sit down, they actually sit. They want to help me with whatever chore I’m doing.
A lot of women don’t climax from penetration not because they’re “too in their head” or because “they’re not fücking back”.
The reality is that over 70% of women don’t orgasm from penetration alone (no matter how good it feels). The CLITORIS is the primary pathway to female orgasm and unfortunately, it’s often ignored because sex is still very penetration-focused.
Even when some women orgasm during penetration, it’s still connected to the internal clitoral network.
Yes, women need to take responsibility for their orgasms but we can’t ignore biology.
I wanted a second child soon after my first became a toddler. I loved the baby stage, but my reason for wanting another was a bit more practical (and selfish). I wanted a playmate for my oldest. As much as I loved playing with him, I needed a break every now and then and I figured a live-in playmate close to his age would be the perfect solution.
It was. In fact, it was such a great idea that we had baby #3 less than two years later (that one wasn’t quite as planned). The more our family grew, the less I had to entertain. Sure, these live-in playmates sometimes fought like tiger cubs, but they always worked it out, usually through a wrestling match. I rarely intervened.
Once the next baby came along, we were in a groove. #4 added a lot of pink to our mostly blue world but she was like a new toy for the tiger cubs for a while. They couldn’t wait till she was old enough to wrestle and play with them.
It seems strange to say that the more kids we had the easier it got, but it’s true. As they grew older they would sometimes complain that they were bored and ask me what they should do. I would (half-jokingly) respond that “This wasn’t a cruise ship and I wasn’t their activities director. Go find something to do.” They always did.
Anyhow, if there are parents out there exhausted from having to constantly entertain their one or two children, or wondering how/why anyone would have lots of kids, I hope this helps. BTW those “tiger cubs” are now in their 20’s and continue to be best of friends.
You have your mother's cells in your brain right now. If she ever carried you, yours are in hers.
Scientists looked at the brains of 59 women after they died, ages 32 to 101. In 63% of them, they found their sons' DNA scattered across different brain regions. The cells had traveled from the womb, through the blood, past the wall that normally keeps foreign material out of the brain, and settled in. The oldest woman still carrying her son's cells in her brain was 94. In mice, those cells became functional brain cells.
The transfer starts as early as 7 weeks into pregnancy. Your cells slip through the placenta into your mother's body. Hers slips into yours. One study found a mother still had her son's cells in her blood 27 years after giving birth. After delivery, between 50 and 75% of women carry their child's cells. During pregnancy, up to 6% of a woman's blood DNA comes from the baby.
When a mother's heart gets damaged during or after pregnancy, the baby's cells travel to the injury, latch on, and turn into beating heart cells, blood vessel lining, and muscle. Heart failure tied to pregnancy has a 50% spontaneous recovery rate, better than every other kind. The Mount Sinai team behind the research thinks the baby's cells are fixing the mother's heart from the inside.
The cancer data caught me off guard. A study compared healthy women to women with breast cancer. 85% of the healthy group still carried their children's cells. Only 64% of the breast cancer group did. That works out to about 4x lower odds of getting breast cancer if you kept those cells. The working theory is that they patrol the body and catch cancer cells before they grow.
A 2022 study found that in developing mouse brains, a mother's cells controlled the brain's immune cells, preventing them from cutting too many connections between brain cells. Your mom's cells helped wire your brain before you were born.
And it stacks across generations. A woman can carry cells from her kids, from her own mother, and even from pregnancies her mother had before her. Three generations of cells from different people, living inside one body.