HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
My mother slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the elevator in silence. Tears slide down my face, hidden under my mask. My ten-year-old son and I are flying back home, only I don’t want to leave. At eighty-four, my mother has had her first stroke. It’s hard to figure her out again. While the stroke was not physically debilitating, it scrambled far too many files on her hard drive and erased that many more. Words she once knew disappear at random.
Read MoreRight now, I am looking at a photo of us. From a lifetime ago. Stuck within the pages of an old book, the photo fell to the floor.
Read MoreIt’s going on thirty-six years, yet I still argue with the thing. While walking in the neighborhood, I sketch out plans for a new beginning that will free me from the past. Or, say, I think that I will not think about it, but end up not fully admitting to consciousness the trauma surrounding what seems to have snowballed into its own life-form. A mass of pain is located in my lumbar spine—I know the discs leak fluid, though the last MRI showed bulges but no actual herniation.
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