Dear Helen,

What’s your best advice for surviving (or dare I hope, thriving) when everyone’s little? I feel like I’m living life on hard mode with a 4-year-old, 2-year-old, and an infant, and I need actionable wisdom. My husband works long days, I work from home par…

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After my recent review of Yesteryear came out, I received a couple comments along the lines of “these bitches are just jealous because Ballerina Farm is blonde and pretty.” While I totally concede that the culture can be very punishing for beautiful women—men and women alike enjoy seeing them punished—I remain unsatisfied by this…

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Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear hit all the benchmarks that a New York Times bestseller should: a propulsive premise (with a culture war lightning rod as centerpiece), a twist that lends itself easily to…

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Inkwell

Death Cannot Be Managed

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Helen Roy…

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5 months ago · 38 likes · 9 comments · Inkwell and Helen Roy

This week’s CALL YOUR MOM comes from a reader w…

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Welcome back to CALL YOUR MOM, where I answer my mailbag. Scroll to the end for the latest!

But first, some housekeeping:

My personal crusade against the clickbaitification of everything continues apace. In case you missed it, I debuted in the print edition of First Things this month, a review of Carrie Gress’s Something Wicked. It’s called …

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Dear reader,

Given a recent influx of subscribers, I feel it may be a good time to re-introduce myself. I’m a work-from-home mom of four kids five and under, a hobbyist ballet dancer, and a lover of my local community with a background in political philosophy, language, and the arts. I’m interested in politics (though p…

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Wealth may or may not trickle down; bad ideas certainly do.

Rob Henderson coined “luxury beliefs” to describe ideas held and promoted by culture-shaping elites that signal status but impose costs on the less fortunate. Take, for example, sexual liberation. For the affluent, misbehavior is understood as a phase one passes through …

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Welcome back to Helly Blue Book! This week, I’m sharing the deep dive I took over the past few years to repair my hair.

I know I’m supposed to say that Tik Tok is the end of the world and it’s killing our brains and it’s Literally So Over, but, sue me, I like it. I like it because when it comes to all the really …

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Welcome to Call Your Mom, where I respond to my mailbox. What secret trouble stirs thy breast? Message me.

Dear Helen,

I was raised in an Evangelical background, heavily influenced by the prosperity gospel. It basically said that if y…

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O…

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Dear reader,

I took the month of December off of writing to creatively recharge, spend some much-needed time with loved ones, tie up some professional loose ends, prepare for the coming year, and reflect.

First of all: I am so floored—with total gratitude for everyone reading this—by what has be…

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I am challenging myself to become a better communicator in 2026 and so venturing into the scary world of video content. Follow me on Instagram and TikTok if you haven’t already!

We cannot live securely in a world that is not our own, in a world which is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening, to put our ears to our own inner voices, to see our own light, which is our birthright, and comes to us in silence.

Elaine Bellezza

Welcome to Call Your Mom, my biweekly advice column. On the weeks I don’t publish a letter, I go live with , exclusively here on Substack. Ask us anything anonymously here, or you can message me as a subscriber!

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Dear Helen,

I’m 28, and I’ve been with my boyfriend for four years. He’s 38, successful, and I really love him.

He’s very into “red pill” content online. When we first started dating, I didn’t pay much attention to it. I thought it was just guy stuff, bodybuilding, “locker room talk,” edgy humor, whatever. He’s said more than once that women “lose value” when we turn 30 and “hit the wall.” He never says this about me specifically, and I guess because I’ve been younger than that since we’ve been together, I thought it didn’t apply. But 28 suddenly feels very close to 30, and more and more, hearing the man I love talk about women like a depreciating asset really hurts my feelings. I tried to bring this up and he brushed it off saying, “you’re different because we’re going to get married.” But that doesn’t make sense. If anything, I feel like single women are less likely to lose their looks because they don’t have to go through pregnancy.

This year, he’d promised to propose. Instead, he told me he’s “not ready” because he needs to see more proof that I’m capable of running a household. He says he doesn’t like the way I clean or the way I “manage” things, and that if I want to be a wife, I need to show him I can handle it.

I graduated from a baby Ivy and had a budding career when we met. He “retired” me two years ago, the logic being that once we were married, this is how our life would look anyway. It feels like he put me on a timer and then waited it out himself. I’m trying so hard to be good enough, but I’m exhausted and scared that the closer I get to 30, the less likely he is to fulfill his promise.

I love him. We have a real soul connection. I see these as red flags but ones that can be fixed. So my question is–how do I address them?

Sincerely,

Heartsick

Dear Heartsick,

I say this with love. Do you understand that you’re being mistreated?

Your letter was legitimately hard to read, partially because you aren’t alone. I’ve actually had several women write into CALL YOUR MOM with similar concerns. Should I marry this guy? He always listens and laughs along to [insert any of the odious homosexual rw misogynist podcasters here]. He gets prickly about me working/having social media/leaving the house/see my friends. He jokes about repealing the 19th amendment. He won’t commit to me unless I have sex with him.

“When people tell you who they are, believe them.” There is a deep resistance to taking these men at their word about women because no one wants to believe the men they love (and see as full human beings capable of imagination and reason and feeling and the whole spectrum of human interests) possibly do not reciprocate that basic dignity, empathy, or theory of mind. Because much of it is couched in shock-jock humor to always retain plausible deniability, it’s easy to dismiss. Many women choose to anesthetize the sexism by pretending a more benevolent version is what really lies beneath the rape jokes. The reality (betrayed yourself for nothing) would be too emotionally devastating to confront.

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In a postindustrial, discourse-driven, extremely online political environment, a lack of empirical constraint invites a deluge of theories of everything.

A theory of everything (TOE) purports to explain all phenomena through a single principle. In physics, it names the hypothetical formula that would reconcile the laws of …

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Dear Helen,

I’m a young mom with 2 kids 2 and under, and my sleep is a complete disaster. My baby’s up every few hours, and the toddler is still waking up randomly. I’m up at all hours and I feel like a zombie. I can’t think straight, I forget everything, and I’m snapping at …

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I have a very special essay to share with you today from someone I deeply respect: Samantha Stephenson is a Catholic author, bioethicist, and host of the podcast Brave New Us: Being Human in the Age of Biotechnology. She blogs here on Substack about faith, family, and the future.

Samantha took issue with my use of the word “disembodi…

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It was a crazy time to Be Online this week as a postpartum woman, as the topic of our bodies and their beauty (or lack thereof) was the talk of the town. It went like this:

The artist formerly known as Radfem Hitler, on the platform formerly known as Twitter, quote-tweeted a user who said that women don’t want to get pregnant because they’re afraid of what it will do to their body, explaining, “That’s because men are disgusted by postpartum bodies.”

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Dear Helen,

I have been struggling with health issues for the past several years, autoimmune issues among these, and have had the s…

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The long anticipated Life of a Showgirl is out, and I spent the day working with it on in the background. That’s the thing about Max Martin; he makes great background noise. It’s pop. I’m not terribly compelled by anything but “Opalite.” I miss Jack Antonoff. I also miss who I was before “Wood.” Oh, wood I go back in time in order to never hear all that about Travis Kelce’s penis! Or to return to the days when Taylor Swift did not feel the need to do lyrical OnlyFans so people would stop talking about the gay conspiracy. Because as my friend said, I’m now more convinced than ever. Do normal heterosexual people talk about one another this way? I think Sabrina Carpenter can get away with it because she’s funny. Is Taylor now doing to Sabrina what she did to Lana with the Covid albums? Uncanny mimicry? Tongue-in-cheek works better without the outright vulgarity. We get it, you enjoy heterosexual sex. Congratulations!

Anyway, the most hilarious part of this release was the fact that conservative Twitter is now in a frenzy trying to convince themselves and the world that, actually, this is an album about secret feminist fantasies to be “traditional.” Lord have mercy, could the Chat GPT tradslop get any dumber? We need a complete and total shutdown on Evie magazine until we can figure out what’s going on.

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I have gotten in hot water plenty of times with conservatives for pointing out that they’re getting really weird and frankly idolatrous about the things they (most normal people?) like: babies, marriage, religion, maxi dresses. These are all great things, some of the best parts of my life, that have been totally flattened into these ridiculous memes that influencers are using as weapons of information war specifically in order to sow division and self-congratulate. No, I’m being too cynical. It’s because engagement pays, and memes are predictably engaging.

In case anyone needs to be reminded, as wrote a couple months back, women loving men is a totally normal and not particularly political choice whatsoever. This desperate need to code (and, more often than not, distort) basic realities as “conservative” or “liberal” betrays the fact that you’ve been mentally raped by memes. This album has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called “traditional” living. She’s a female billionaire who wrote an album in no small part (harhar) about her boyfriend’s privates! What are you talking about!!!?

There’s a secondary annoyance here, which is that outrage reaction slop is just the whole content ecosystem now, especially on the right.

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Thanks to everyone who came to last week’s CALL YOUR MOM livestream with . It went so well that we are planning to do it again this week: Friday 7pm EST, right here on Substack. Please continue to send in your questions; both our DMs are open!

Because of the quantity of requests (and my backlog from the summer), I’ll continue to answer as many as I can t…

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