Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Mom Guilt Has a Peak Season, and It's Summer
I used to love summer. Warm sunshine on my face, a good book in my hand, the salt air wind in my face.
Then I had kids.
I should start by saying we live in a beach town, and summer is still superior to pretty much every other season, with the exception of the lead-up to Christmas (for obvious reasons I won't get into here). But working mom guilt in the summer is the pits.
My kids are either watching TV or in camp — half-day, because we don't have the kind of money it takes to send three kids to all-day, all-summer camp. So most days end around 1:30 p.m., and the rest of it is just me, pulled in eighteen directions, doing none of it at 100 percent.
And then Instagram helpfully reminds me that I only get 18 summers with my kids, so I should be crafting them a screen-free, sprinkler-in-the-backyard, "90s analog summer" instead of handing them an iPad so I can finish a work email. Cool. Thanks. Very relaxing content, very normal amount of pressure to put on a random Tuesday afternoon in July.
A 2026 Afterschool Alliance survey found that more than half of families who want their kid in a structured summer program can't get one, and cost is the reason. Meanwhile, the algorithm is busy convincing us that the real failure isn't the childcare gap; it's that we didn't turn off the TV and make homemade popsicles.
My kids won't remember the camp we couldn't afford. They'll (hopefully) just remember that I was there, laptop and all.
Dense Breast Tissue, Thinner Answers
One of my brother's best friends was just diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. When he told me, I was taken right back to when my friend Lisa called me (on Christmas morning) to tell me she had the disease.
I've written a lot about my ATM gene mutation, and the strange, specific limbo of knowing you're at higher risk before anything's actually wrong. So when my co-founder Abby, who recently turned 40, mentioned she'd just found out at her mammogram that she has dense breasts, I knew exactly where that conversation would go next. She left with a piece of critical, potentially life-saving health information — and basically no idea what to do with it.
As of September 2024, the FDA now requires every mammography facility in the country to tell patients whether their breasts are dense. Nearly half of women over 40 have dense tissue, and it's a two-for-one problem: it raises your baseline risk and makes cancer harder to spot on a mammogram, since dense tissue and tumors both show up white on the scan. So the women who most need a clear picture are the ones most likely to get a blurry one.
What the FDA doesn't require is what happens after. No mention of a supplemental ultrasound, no explanation of what your actual risk percentage is, just a sentence, maybe a pamphlet, and the door.
When I found out about my ATM mutation, I was told I'd need regular scans for the rest of my life, full stop, with a new prescription required every single time. So I did the research myself and wrote it all down here.
Lisa didn't get the years to figure any of this out. The least the rest of us can do is not have to start from zero.
I Used to Exercise to Be Skinny. Now I Lift to Stay Strong.
For most of my twenties, I exercised to be smaller. Not stronger, not healthier, smaller. The metric was always the same: take up less space, burn more than you consumed, earn your weekend. I didn't think about what my body could do, only what it looked like, as one does when they live out their teen years in the early 2000s.
But somewhere in my thirties, that (thankfully) changed. After infertility, two high-risk pregnancies, and watching my body do things I genuinely didn't think it was capable of, I started moving differently, wanting to feel capable and strong instead of small. I started strength training and Pilates to build instead of shrink, and the difference in my joints, my energy, my general sense of stability has not been subtle.
What I didn't know when I made that shift was how much it mattered for my bones specifically. Women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years following menopause, so the window to build bone mass that protects you later is right now, in your 30s and 40s, while estrogen is still doing its job. Strength training is one of the most evidence-backed ways to support bone density, and collagen, which makes up about 90% of your bone's organic structure, is the other piece most of us are missing entirely.
I used to exercise to look a certain way. Now I exercise because I want to be strong at 70 — a completely different relationship with my own body, and one I'd be proud to pass on to my daughter.
Support your collagen from the inside out with NativePath Collagen Peptides. It’s unflavored and mixes seamlessly into your favorite beverage (I put it in my morning coffee!).
10 Things That Are Worth the Money: Women's Health Edition
There's a trend going around on social media called "things that are worth the money," and forty-five minutes into it, I'd added a Hatch alarm clock and the softest modal LAKE pajamas to my cart with zero recollection of ever typing "modal" into a search bar. Caraway cookware was in there too, along with Eight Sleep, a mattress cover that costs more than my first car and apparently regulates your body temperature all night — which, fine, sounds like a dream, but I already have three kids doing that job for free (badly, but for free).
Most people can barely afford groceries right now, so the whole trend feels a little tone-deaf. But it got me thinking about what's actually worth the money in my world, the stuff nobody's filming a haul about, and the stuff we still don't talk about enough.
So here's my list. Ten things worth the money, women's health edition:
A heating pad, for the nights my cramps decide they're in charge.
Pelvic floor PT, postpartum. Nobody tells you that peeing a little when you sneeze isn't a life sentence; it's a fixable thing.
A weighted blanket, for when my brain won't stop narrating.
HRT, for the hot flashes that show up uninvited and overstay their welcome.
An Oura ring. It has never once lied to me.
Therapy with someone who specializes in reproductive trauma, not someone hearing the word "transfer" for the first time in your session.
Dollar store ovulation strips, which work exactly as well as the fancy ones, for a fraction of the price.
A good vibrator. Does what it says on the box.
A doctor who listens, without checking the clock.
A Squatty Potty, because IBS doesn't care about your schedule.
None of it's glamorous, but it's the stuff most women would restock without thinking twice, which is more than I can say for the jade face roller collecting dust in my bathroom drawer.
What would you add to this list?!
Fibroids: The Group Chat Topic Nobody Started
Apparently up to 80% of women will develop a fibroid by the time they turn 50. I only found this out a few weeks ago, at age 37, which feels like exactly how most of us learn anything about our own bodies.
Bethenny Frankel talked about hers on Real Housewives years ago: the heavy bleeding, the exhaustion she mistook for burnout, a doctor who casually offered her a hysterectomy like it was the only available option. Lupita Nyong'o's fibroids came back too, and she's now up to 77 of them, still being offered the same two options: surgery or living with the pain. Two very different women, same script, symptoms brushed off as a heavy period or a stubborn UTI, until someone finally calls it what it is.
Nearly half of the 600,000 hysterectomies performed in the U.S. every year are done for fibroids, and close to 60% of those women never tried a less invasive option first.
I can't help but think about all the women who had their uterus removed without ever knowing what their other options were. And then again, I just interviewed Dr. Cheruba Prabakar, aka "The Fibroid Doc," who told me about a young patient who was just done. Done with the pain, done with the discomfort, certain she didn't want kids, and wanted the ability to make that choice for herself.
Newer treatments exist, but that's not really the point. The point is a hysterectomy shouldn't be the only door someone's shown, and it shouldn't be a door that's closed to her either.
It should just be a choice — hers.
Mr. Darcy Is the Original "If He Wanted To, He Would"
I'm not ashamed to admit it: Pride and Prejudice is my entire personality right now.
What I am a little ashamed to admit is that I hadn't read it until now, at 37, with a B.A. in English and almost ten years in book publishing on my resume. I spent a decade selling other people's stories, and somehow the most famous love story in the English language just sat there, waiting for me to have no professional reason to pick it up.
TBH, I've always been a little intimidated by the classics. Call it PTSD from reading for school, and then for work, for fifteen-plus years straight, but the "must-reads" everyone referenced always felt more like things I should want to read than things I actually did. So they piled up. And I let them.
Then I finally picked it up, crushed it in a week, and my takeaway? Everything they said. All of it. Completely true.
And Mr. Darcy — look, the man is the original "if he wanted to, he would." A hero who had to earn it. A woman who turned down the wrong proposal, held out for actual mutual respect, and didn't apologize for either. Written by someone who rejected a perfectly respectable marriage proposal herself, published under a pen name because that was the only way she could get the words out at all.
Austen knew exactly what women wanted and exactly what they deserved. She just put it on paper two hundred years before we had the language for it.
What Wellness Culture Gets Wrong About "Anti-Aging"
I’m in my late-30s, so it feels like everyone is laser-focused on anti-aging for their face right now. The serums, the SPF, the retinol, the treatments that involve tiny needles and a concerning amount of heat. And look, I get it: I have retinol and vitamin C serum on my bathroom shelf, and I'm not giving either of them up. But somewhere in the middle of all that focus on what's visible, we've completely glossed over the thing that actually holds us together.
Collagen isn't just a skincare ingredient. It makes up about 90% of your bone matrix and is the structural foundation of your joints, connective tissue, and tendons — less the thing that makes you look younger and more the thing that keeps you physically functional, the difference between a body that feels sturdy and one that's losing its scaffolding from the inside out.
What I didn't know until recently is that collagen production starts declining around age 25, at roughly 1-1.5% per year. By the time estrogen drops in perimenopause, the loss accelerates. Research shows women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years following menopause — not just from their skin. From their bones.
We talk about anti-aging like it's a cosmetic project, a matter of crow's feet and neck creams. But the version that actually affects your quality of life at 60, 70, and beyond is happening in tissues you can't see and won't notice until something gives way.
Your face will be fine. It's the infrastructure underneath it that's worth paying attention to.
Support your collagen from the inside out with NativePath Collagen Peptides.
The Hour My Doctor Gave Me (That Most Women Don't Get)
Can you honestly say your healthcare provider has sat with you for over an hour during your annual physical?
I can. And it changed something.
I've been dealing with some health anxiety lately because of my ATM gene mutation — an increased lifetime risk of breast cancer, somewhere around 21 to 24%, roughly double the general population's. And despite working in women's health every single day, I still had questions nobody had fully answered: did IVF push that number higher? What kind of birth control doesn't add fuel to the fire? Is HRT actually safe for someone like me as I get closer to perimenopause, or is that a different calculation entirely?
My doctor is amazing, and she sat with me through all of it, pulling up research as we went instead of reciting something she'd memorized. There isn't a ton of data specifically on the ATM mutation, but there is enough to make an informed decision. For me, that's probably the Mirena IUD now, plus an estrogen patch as I get closer to menopause. For someone else with the exact same mutation, it might be completely different.
What actually stopped me was learning that the average doctor visit is 20.8 minutes. Twenty minutes to cover years of risk, competing options, and a decision that follows you for the rest of your life. I got three times that, and I still walked out with homework.
Those minutes aren't extra. Sometimes, they're the difference between a decision made with you and one made for you.
Ask Clara:
"Does IVF cause breast cancer?"
Wait, Is Alex Cooper Actually the Victim Here?
If you've been on TikTok for any amount of time recently, you've likely come across a video about the Alex Cooper vs. Alix Earle feud that nobody has fully explained.
It's still unresolved, but the more I see, the more I'm #TeamAlix. Anecdotal reports just suggest that she's an actually nice person — while this week, a Vanity Fair exposé came out about Alex Cooper's company being a toxic place to work, and her husband Matt Kaplan being, by all accounts, the absolute worst.
I literally signed up for a free trial of Vanity Fair yesterday to read the story (that's a whole other issue), and it gave me almost nothing.
What it did give me, though, was this: most of the decisions at Unwell are apparently made by Matt Kaplan. Not Alex. Her husband. The one allegedly screaming at employees, commenting on their bodies, asking about their sex lives. The one who, when someone called a move against Alix Earle a little mean-girl, said: "We're all mean girls at this company."
Unwell built its entire identity on women saying the thing they're not supposed to say. Create the space, say the quiet part out loud, make women feel less alone. That's the whole brand.
And yet the more I read, the more I kept thinking: what if Alex is less the villain here than we think? What if she's just the name on the door?
That's not an excuse. But it might be the more honest story, and honestly, it's a sadder one.
The Rage-y Middle-Aged Woman Trope Has Got to Go
Can we talk about the perimenopause storyline in Your Friends & Neighbors?
For those of you who don't watch the show: Jon Hamm plays a disgraced hedge fund manager who starts robbing his wealthy Westchester neighbors to maintain his lifestyle. Amanda Peet plays Mel, his ex-wife, a therapist who, by season two, has been fired, dumped, and completely iced out of her friend group, all more or less at once. It's a lot. The show is great.
Was Mel the most likable character in season one? Not necessarily. But this feels like they couldn't figure out what else to do with her in season two, so they said: let's make her a rage-y middle-aged woman with hot flashes.
And here's the thing — it's not that far from the truth of it. Waking up in drenched sheets. The mood that arrives before you even realize it has. Maybe a little vaginal atrophy nobody talks about but apparently Apple TV will. The writers clearly did their research. But it still feels a little forced, like perimenopause is doing the narrative heavy lifting instead of Mel actually getting a storyline.
There's a difference between a show that portrays perimenopause accurately and one that uses it to explain why a woman is difficult. The symptoms can be right and the framing still be off. And I think that's what's nagging at me — because when it's done well, you feel seen. When it's not, you just feel like a punchline with night sweats.
Women going through perimenopause deserve better writing. Even, especially, when the writing is better than usual.
Ask Clara:
"Why does perimenopause make me so angry?"