The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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A jarring racket fills our camper on this untamed night in the Sol Duc watershed of the Olympic National Park. Large pockets of water form on Douglas Fir limbs above, collecting, collecting, collecting until…splat, kerplunk on top of the metal-roofed truck camper. Hundreds such collection systems drop like random rocks.
Read MoreI’m sorry I couldn’t go to your wedding and that my explanation was vague and seemed rude. My doctor wouldn’t let me fly. I couldn’t find the words. I worried that mentioning pregnancy loss would cloud the conversation of your celebration.
Read MoreA woman appearing before you desperately frightened by the usual gesticulations, the kicks and rolls inside of her becoming suddenly still, by the warm trickle down her leg, fluid or blood but too soon, too soon. What if you took her by the hand and walked her to a room much like a bedroom, with bleached sheets and pillow cases, bassinet and muslin blankets, with warm light coming through a southern window but stark for its waxed floors where blood pooled at your feet just last week, now a shadow upon which you sometimes slip for the mercilessness of memory? Merciless because this isn’t the first time and, by the wickedness of fate, it will never be the last.
Read MoreI was twenty-nine. I didn’t know what to feel, or what it would feel like. That first sonogram seemed other-worldly. At every twitch I thought I was feeling the first flutters, but when they began to come with regularity, the realness set in that I was at a different stage of being a woman.
Read MoreMy friend came over and we slowly drank wine and talked—her miscarriage (a couple years earlier), my miscarriage (current), the moments that blindsided each of us in a wash of grief, what the aftermath was like for her and what getting pregnant again was like. I was smack dab in the middle of my experience and found comfort in talking to friends who had been there and who had now had time to assimilate it within a zoomed-out picture of The Rest of Life.
Read More“Nature’s the ultimate inspiration.”
The woman speaking was ageless and poised in a way that made me feel homely and naive. Her blowout looked freshly fixed, and her workout clothes looked as though she’d never actually worked out in them—a start contrast to my faded sweatpants. Her make-up was so natural I wondered if she was wearing make-up at all—but no one could look that good at 6:00 am without make-up, could they? Maybe she just had flawless skin. Maybe it is the giant jar of green juice she’s touting.
Read MoreI’m organizing my CD collection alphabetically by artist, like every Saturday. The Cranberries, Janet Jackson, La Bouche, No Doubt, Selena, the Spice Girls, and TLC are among them. I have a stack of cassettes by Michael Jackson, New Kids, UB40, and various Disney movies. A cheerful knock at my open door catches my attention. Dad stands in the doorway, holding a semi-ripe banana.
Read MoreMy desk had become a fortress of pillows, snacks, and motivational sticky notes from my colleagues that read things like “You can do it!” and “Please don’t give birth on my lunch break!” The snacks were essential, as my unborn child had developed gourmet tastes that could rival a Michelin-starred chef. Pickles dipped in Nutella? Sure. Cheese puffs with a side of strawberry jam? Why not? And my chair had been replaced with an exercise ball, supposedly to help with labor prep but mostly making me feel like a circus act.
Read MoreMy drivers license is about to expire and I am trying not to dwell on my recent decision to cut bangs. For the first time in two decades, I have to renew my license in-person. I pull into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I park my car and assemble the papers that sit on the passenger seat. I am optimistic and photo ready. I go inside and get in line. I am here, I tell the clerk at the check-in desk, to get a Real ID.
Read MoreEager to begin research for an article I am writing about being a kidney donor for my older sister in the eighties, I place a hold on two books at my neighborhood branch of the Austin Public Library. When I am notified they are in, I walk several blocks to retrieve them. Yellow tape displaying the first four letters of my surname and last four numbers of my account is affixed to three books on the Hold Shelf I did not request: Attracting Genuine Love, The Soulmate Secret, and Wired for Dating.
Read MoreI thought he was masquerading, even though it was morning and too early for a costume. In my mind, I wondered if he had dressed up the night before, if he went to a costume party where he decided to don the clothes of a cowboy. The bandana looked like he recently pulled it from being wrapped around his neck to cover his nose and mouth, to make him only partially recognizable. It was the early eighties after all, and Village People costumes, the policeman, the construction worker, and the cowboy were still the rage. The thought of this made me want to laugh, to think that this guy hadn't been home since he dressed like the cowboy in the Village People, on his way home from wherever he had spent the night and wanted to pick up a pack of cigarettes.
Read MoreDear Aspiring Dancer,
Thank you for auditioning to be in the Nutcracker; we can tell just how far this was out of your comfort zone. We appreciate that when you dance, your arms flail all over the place like palm trees during a Category 5 Hurricane, you maintain a comical lack of flexibility even after four years of attempting to be anything but a human tree branch, and you will not stop talking to your neighbor about the movie Enchanted, no matter how loud we play Tchaikovsky as a sign to tell you to shut up.
Read MoreThroughout a long and rewarding business career, I have often been asked, How did you get into public relations? Well, it’s kind of a funny story. Or it is now. Today, I can laugh at the litany of misadventures that characterized my first step into the job market. But for years, that innocuous question would hurl me into a flashback traumatic by a young person’s standards.
Read MoreOn the day after Thanksgiving 2022, I dragged my husband to a thrift shop outside Boston to look for a book I'd donated nearly twenty years ago. It started as a Twitter dare the week before. I was chatting with some pals about a book an ex-boyfriend gave me when I was twenty and we were at the height of a love affair that lasted seven years. My ex died in February, and I was having a hard time talking about it; most people didn't seem to understand why I was so upset about the death of a guy I broke up with so long ago. The easiest thing to do, sometimes, was to play it for laughs; at least that way I got to talk about it a little, with strangers who didn't know me well. "Why don't you go look for it?" someone said. "You never know, and it'll be a great story if you find it."
Read MoreMy mother’s eyes registered my arrival, but without her dependable smile. The bones of her face were sharp and craggy, her nose slightly humped from a childhood fall, her eyes blue and deeply set. Tita, who cared for her, had dressed her in her brightest blouse and hung a necklace round her neck. Mom was crooked in her chair and not pretending, while a cheerful string of rainbow-colored letters on the mantle shouted happy birthday for her eighty-ninth and last.
Read More“Dear Poo, I’m sorry I’m writing this in a letter, I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you face to face…”
We’d been in our new house just a couple of weeks when my dad—Da—left a letter and, with it, left us. He was gone. And none of us knew what gone meant. Mom couldn’t tell me where he went or why. She called Grandma to try to decipher his note. Whatever sense they made of it wasn’t shared.
Read MoreWhen my ex-husband told me his father was dead, he said it casually. The way you'd mention an alma mater, or that you'd lived abroad for a while.
"My dad died five years ago," he said. We were at work, in a courtroom with no privacy, dressed in our lawyer suits. He reached down to tug up his socks when he said it. I remember searching for significance in how he announced his tragedy while adjusting his outfit. It made me wonder if his father's death was an easy thing to bear. Or if it were so painful he needed to reveal it in the bright bustle of a courtroom, with busied hands. He usually seemed so guarded.
Read MoreThe platter was lovely. It was a vintage looking black and white interpretation of a sea turtle on melamine. The species was a Kemp’s Ridley. Despite being the rarest and most endangered sea turtle in the world, it is the most common turtle to see stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod.
Read MoreWhen I realized that I probably shouldn’t be there, at your funeral, it was too late to leave. I was sitting alone in the center of a cushioned pew halfway back, picking at my cuticles in my lap, too self-conscious among strangers to put my fingers to my mouth and chew. The little chapel was sparsely filled. It seemed I was one of the few who’d found out about the service, or else, perhaps no one was meant to come who had not been asked. When I arrived, I had expected a large crowd to disappear into, or perhaps an old classmate to cling to, but neither were found. I had not gotten in line, to file past where you rested. Instead, I ducked into a pew and sat down, to hide, to gather my thoughts, wonder if I should leave or stay, try to shake off the feeling of a spotlight on my back. Being there felt like some kind of transgression, though I only meant to pay respects.
Read MoreOn an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.
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