Kristyn Hodgdon
Everything you’re feeling, but didn’t know how to say.
Eight Weeks Is Not Enough (And Deloitte Knows It)
When I had my twins, my company gave me four and a half months of paid maternity leave, and I was so grateful I could have cried — which, given that I was postpartum and running on fumes, I probably did. Twin A came vaginally, Twin B was an emergency C-section, I hemorrhaged, and my mental health took a hit I wasn't prepared for. At eight weeks, when I was barely cleared for sex and exercise, the idea of returning to work full-time would have broken me. That leave wasn't a perk; it was the thing that kept me upright.
So when I saw that Deloitte is cutting paid parental leave in half — from 16 weeks to 8 for a segment of its workforce, alongside a $50,000 IVF reimbursement and days of PTO — my stomach dropped, not because I was surprised, but because I know what eight weeks postpartum actually looks like from the inside.
The part that should concern everyone: a former Google head of HR said this move "legitimizes the action for everybody else," meaning Deloitte isn't the ending of this story; it's the opening.
We talk constantly about what women need to show up fully — at home, at work, in their own bodies — and then watch companies quietly pull the rug out and call it a business decision. Eight weeks is not enough to recover from a birth, barely enough to figure out breastfeeding, and certainly not enough to return to a job that requires your full brain. I know because I lived it, and I was one of the lucky ones.
The Chin Hair Conversation I Didn't Know I Needed
This week, mid-facial, my esthetician asked if she could pluck my chin hairs. I said yes, obviously, and then we started talking about all of the things we have to do to maintain our appearance as women, which naturally led to hair loss, and she — who is Irish, which makes everything she says land harder — looked at me completely deadpan and said, "They're losing it on their head and gaining it on their chin."
I've never felt so seen in my life.
Because if you have PCOS, you know. The acne that shows up on your jaw like it's paying rent. The three hairs you find on your chin on a Tuesday for no reason. The question you're always running in the background: is this my pillowcase, my towels, my workout, or the hormonal disorder I'll be managing for the rest of my adult life?
Here's the short version of what's actually happening: PCOS drives up androgens (testosterone and related hormones), which can shrink hair follicles on your scalp while simultaneously encouraging them everywhere else. It's not random or your skincare routine; it's your endocrine system doing its thing, loudly, on your face.
I don't want to go back on birth control, I'm not ready to commit to spironolactone, and I've mostly made my peace with the fact that I will probably be plucking in the car for the foreseeable future — but I'm also starting to think laser hair removal wouldn't hurt.
National Infertility Awareness Week: Three Kids, Eight Years, and a Lot of Feelings
It's National Infertility Awareness Week, which means I've been thinking a lot about the version of me who sat in a fertility clinic waiting room at 28 — college-educated, completely blindsided — and learned for the first time that you actually have to ovulate to get pregnant. I wish that were a joke. It is not even a little bit a joke.
That appointment eventually led to a PCOS diagnosis, a string of failed IUIs, and a path to IVF that took longer and hurt more than I'd let myself imagine. My twins arrived after all of it, but a high-risk pregnancy made sure I never quite exhaled: at 27 weeks, my cervix shortened overnight, and what had been a regular Tuesday turned into hospital bed rest and breath I held for weeks.
My third was a different kind of hard: two miscarriages, several failed transfers, and one last cycle where we'd already talked through what "done" would look like if it didn't work. He just turned sixteen months, which still feels a little impossible to say out loud.
I share all of this because 1 in 6 people will experience infertility in their lifetime, and most of them will do it in waiting rooms and two-week waits and late-night searches that never quite say the thing they actually need to hear. The information exists, but the community, the language, the permission to fall apart and still keep going? That part is harder to find.
That's the whole reason Rescripted exists, and my inbox is always open.
SELF Magazine Is Closing, and I'm Not Over It
When I was maybe ten or eleven, before I knew I could write, I was convinced I was going to be a fashion designer. Or a makeup artist. The plan changed weekly. What didn't change was the ritual: cutting up magazine covers, doing my own makeup on the models with whatever drugstore eyeshadow I could get my hands on, and plastering them across my bedroom walls like I was curating something. SELF was always in that pile.
I found out last week that it's closing after 47 years, and I am genuinely sad.
Here's what I'm not sure anyone is saying: SELF wasn't just a health magazine. Growing up, surrounded by Allure and Glamour and Cosmo and Teen Vogue (RIP to another legend) — all those glossy, aspirational universes telling us to be smaller and prettier and more palatable — SELF was always just there. Telling us to get stronger, to understand what was happening in our own bodies, to actually show up for our own care. It was a different message. And for a lot of us, it helped quietly undo what we'd been absorbing for years, which was, mostly, that our bodies were problems to manage.
As someone who once dreamed of working within the walls of Condé Nast, this stings. As a founder who has spent years trying to do something similar — make women's health feel less confusing, less clinical, more like something that actually belongs to you — it feels like a small defeat.
Every outlet that takes women's health seriously makes that work a little more possible. Every one that closes makes it a little lonelier, and a little more urgent.
I Keep Starting Books and Ending Up on TikTok (Send Help)
I feel like the theme of this column is that I am one giant, walking contradiction. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I always need a book in my head — that it's basically a mental health requirement at this point — and then, as if the universe heard me and decided to have a little fun, I fell into the most stubborn book slump of my life.
It started with Christina Applegate's memoir, which, listen, I wanted to love it. I just think I wasn't quite the demographic. And then I picked up The Secret Lives of Murderers Wives, which had everything going for it on paper: a juicy title, a premise I was fully ready to commit to. Except it turned out to be a lot of character development and not nearly enough, well, murder. Down it went.
Since then, nothing has stuck. I'll read fifteen pages, put it down, pick up my phone, and somehow end up watching a video about botched lip filler at midnight instead. (We've been over this.)
I do wonder if it's partly the weather: there's something about actual sunshine that makes sitting on the couch with a book feel slightly criminal when a patio and a margarita exist in the world. And if I'm not doing that, I'm watching Big Mistakes on Netflix, which is so good that I'm not even a little sorry about it.
If you have a recommendation (literary or contemporary fiction, please!) send it my way, because left to my own devices I will simply keep watching reality TV until the sunshine runs out and I remember who I am.
Ask Clara:
"What are the signs of ADHD in women?"
Zoom Dysmorphia Is Real, and I Have It Bad
Are we looking at ourselves too much? No, like, that's a serious question.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm in my "late" 30s now. Maybe it's four hours of Zoom meetings a day. Maybe it's both. But I genuinely did not care this much about my hairline — or my eleven line, for that matter — before the pandemic and, let's be honest, social media.
Because before we even get the crust out of our eyes in the morning, we're already watching seventeen videos of creators who are simply glowing. Do they have a filter on? Probably. Does that make us any less self-conscious? Absolutely not.
And the numbers back it up: cosmetic procedures in the U.S. have grown 19% since 2019, with liposuction, breast augmentation, and tummy tucks leading surgical procedures, and Botox and fillers dominating the non-surgical side. And then there's the TikTok rabbit hole of botched procedures: people dissolving filler, reversing lip jobs, genuinely grieving the face they had before. Jessi from Secret Lives of Mormon Wives comes to mind. It's a lot.
I think about my daughter watching me look at myself on a screen and wondering what I'm looking for. I don't know what the moral of the story is here, but I will say this: you're perfect the way you are, and maybe we all just need to go touch some grass — not for our nasolabial folds, but for all the girls who came after us.
Ask Clara:
"What is body dysmorphia, exactly?"
In Defense of "Easy IVF"
When our friend Abbie posted a video about her "easy IVF journey," I braced for the comments. And look, I get it. For a lot of people, those two words in the same sentence feel like a contradiction at best and a gut punch at worst.
But here's the thing: she's not wrong.
I've had two completely different IVF experiences. The first time, I got pregnant with twins on my second transfer with untested embryos. The second involved multiple failed transfers, two miscarriages, and a moment where I genuinely almost gave up. I've been on both sides of this thing, which is maybe why Abbie's video didn't bother me at all.
Because what I always come back to is this: for a lot of people, IVF isn't actually the hardest part. It's everything that comes before it. The timed intercourse. The IUIs. The Clomid (oh my god, the Clomid). The months of trying things that feel less invasive but somehow take more out of you, because you're doing them while still holding onto the idea that maybe you won't need the big thing.
And then you do the big thing, and sometimes you find out you're stronger than you thought.
IVF is brutal for some people. Really, truly brutal. I know that firsthand. But giving someone a reason to hope that maybe — just maybe — it'll be easier than they feared? That's not toxic positivity. That's just leaving the door open.
We could all use a little more of that.
The Hearing-Loss-and-Dementia Connection I Never Saw Coming
After nearly a decade in women's health, I thought I'd heard it all. And then a video stopped me mid-scroll and genuinely blew my mind.
It turns out, hearing loss is one of the largest known risk factors for dementia.
I've been thinking about brain health a lot lately: my grandmother had Alzheimer's, and honestly, it scares the crap out of me. I started taking creatine because I'd read it supports cognitive function. (I stopped because the bloating was extreme and I am not built for that kind of suffering.) But the intention was there.
What I had never once considered, in all my reading and researching and late-night Googling, was my hearing. Not as a vanity thing or an aging thing, but as a brain thing.
The research is wild. A landmark study published in The Lancet found that in older adults at elevated risk for cognitive decline, treating hearing loss with hearing aids slowed cognitive decline by nearly 50%. A more recent study in JAMA Neurology went even further: people who addressed hearing loss before age 70 had a 61% lower risk of developing dementia than those who left it untreated.
Once you understand it, it tracks. When your brain is constantly working to fill in missing sounds, it's borrowing resources from other cognitive functions. Over time, that borrowing has a real cost.
I have never had my hearing tested as an adult. Apparently, most people haven't.
The more you know — and apparently, there is always more to know.
The New Cholesterol Guidelines Changed the Conversation — Here's Mine
I was 13 when my grandfather died of a massive heart attack. The kind that doesn't give you a warning, doesn't give you time. One of those moments that rewires something in you — not in a way you can explain at 13, but in a way you carry forward every time the word "cardiology" comes up.
I'm 37 now, which still feels young until you start doing the math.
The American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association just released their first updated cholesterol guidelines since 2018, and a few things stopped me. Screening is now recommended starting at 19(!). Risk assessment begins at 30, and it now calculates your 30-year risk, not just 10, which changes the conversation entirely when you're sitting across from a doctor who thinks you're "too young to worry." For people with a family history, earlier medication is on the table. And there's a new test most of us have never heard of: Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a), recommended once in every adult's lifetime. It's mostly genetic, highly predictive, and almost never brought up unless you ask.
That last part is the one that gets me. About 1 in 4 adults has elevated LDL cholesterol, and most don't know it. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women, accounting for roughly 1 in every 5 female deaths. And yet the default is still to wait, to monitor, to revisit it later.
My grandfather didn't get later. So the next time I'm at my doctor, I'm asking for the Lp(a) test, and I'm not apologizing for it.
Ultra-Processed Foods and Fertility: On Controlling What You Can Control
There's a specific kind of obsession that sets in after enough failed cycles — the kind where you start reading ingredient labels like they contain the answer. I know this because I lived there. Secondary infertility has a particular cruelty to it: you've done it before, your body knows how to do this, and yet. So you find the one thing you can actually control, which is everything you put in your mouth, and you grip it.
I worked with a registered dietitian. I cleaned up my diet in ways that felt both genuinely meaningful and slightly unhinged. I have opinions about gut health now. I became, briefly, a person who read studies for fun.
So when two new ones dropped this week linking ultra-processed foods to lower fertility — women with the highest intake were significantly less likely to conceive; men eating more UPFs took longer to get their partners pregnant — I felt the old reflex. Not guilt, exactly. More like, of course. One more variable to add to the list.
Worth noting: both studies are observational, meaning they show a link, not a cause. Researchers suspect it's not just poor nutrition, but chemicals like phthalates and BPA leaching from packaging (known hormone disruptors) doing damage in the background. According to the CDC, Americans get about 55% of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods, which is a lot of packaging.
Here's what I know, though: I did everything right, and it still took everything I had. The pantry audit matters. It also doesn't save you. Skippy was never leaving my house, and somehow, eventually, it worked anyway.
Ask Clara:
"What should I eat to support fertility?"