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 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“Shoot your vagina up to the ceiling” one male doctor helpfully suggested as your head inched forward and back into my body again. Limp I stared into the bright white hospital light above me where I saw a vision of my own blood and guts floating on the ceiling. I learned later that this particular delivery room was famous for having a tinted convex light that reflected the labor in detail if you knew to look.
Read MoreI inherited three things from my paternal grandmother: my middle name, an engagement ring, and the desire to be a writer. I didn’t know that Gram’s ambitions to be a writer matched mine until I was sixteen, when I read an essay she wrote titled “Why I Am What I Am.” In it, she writes, “I have a very decided ambition to become an authoress. I have always loved to write…I have a vivid imagination, which was probably kindled by the necessity of my finding something within myself to amuse myself, for I had very few friends my age.” As the youngest person in both my extended family and my neighborhood by nearly a decade, I knew what she meant.
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