By Holly Ruskin | Scrolling Instagram while I lay with my daughter as she napped, I came across a phrase that I just can’t seem to shake off. It was in relation to motherhood, how we (women, men, society at large) underestimate the toll that it takes on a woman.

By Holly Ruskin | I have a nightly ritual that I perform after my daughter is finally asleep in bed. It goes something like this: go downstairs, make a cup of tea, sit down in the armchair, think about all the ways I wasn’t a perfect mother today.

By Holly Ruskin | I have a t-shirt and it says, ‘Raising the Future’. It came with a card with the same slogan and the day it arrived I slotted it into the full-length mirror in our bedroom. Every day when I get dressed, usually while my daughter clings to my legs or demands to be involved somehow, my eyes skim over that card.

By Holly Ruskin | There’s a popular game traditionally played at carnivals that involves whacking a mole with a mallet, forcing it to retreat back into its hole. The only problem is that once you’ve whacked one mole, another pops up from an entirely different hole. This is the game. This is whack-a-mole.