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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Disclaimer: When I was a kid, Hollywood had me believing that The Typical Grandmother was, among other things, soft-spoken, petite, and cute, with an old-lady name like Alice, Betty, Dottie, or Mildred—Millie for short. She played Bingo or canasta, spoke of the days when a soda cost a nickel, and baked cookies better than Betty Crocker.
Mine was not like that.
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 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 MoreFor years, I kept my children’s teeth in a drawer. Wrapped in a rainbow silk, I tucked them behind the protection of scarves and mismatched socks. In preparation for a move to a new life, our belongings would sit in the liminal land of a storage unit. It didn’t feel right to put the bundle of teeth in the cardboard box behind bars.
Read More“Like, would that string really have stayed on her finger for fourteen years?” Lindsey asks, and I laugh in the carefree manner typically brought about by cheap vodka.
“Well, it’s magic string,” I respond, “because it’s infused with love.”
We continue to watch, a bowl of popcorn between us, buzzing on the fruit-flavored Smirnoff I am finally able to buy legally now that I’ve just turned twenty-one. It is summer; the semester has ended; we are each home from college.
Read MoreIt took me awhile growing up in the turbulent 1960’s and 70’s to claim my feminist inheritance. In fact, the sexual revolution might have passed me up all together had it not been for fate. Beyond any conscious choice, fate shifted some of my inherited puritan ethos to a more playful appreciation of my body. It was my friend Lara, the one who is part-woman, part-mermaid, who played the critical role of ushering in this small but momentous shift.
Read MoreI am so sorry everyone deconstructs and changes your beautiful,
complicated name. The pieces of your soft “ca” and lopping “o”
rebranded into southern alternatives like Caroline or Coraline or Carol
or even Carly once, after the doctor said the only Carolyn he’d ever heard
Dr. Thompson was feeling my breasts. Sitting on the table in his exam room with my gown dropped to my waist, I was embarrassed to have him touch me. I was embarrassed just to be at the appointment. My body developed curves early. In seventh grade, when most girls had flat chests, I wore a C-cup bra and hid in the corner of the locker room to change before and after gym class. By fifteen, my 34D chest was a health concern.
Read MoreA few months after moving to the U.S. from India, on a weekly trip to the San Jose Flea Market, I walked into a store selling art reprints and found an artist whose work would take me by the hand and show me around our new home.
Read MoreThe first beer is easy. You meet in your writing class one year before his wedding. After the first class of introductions and favorite authors, a few of your new classmates go to the local bar. He comes along, though he says very little, keeping a fresh cigarette always lit.
Read MoreJune 23, 1985
Dear Lourdes the Younger,
I’m sending you this love and care letter on your sixteenth birthday in the hope that it will save you from more pain and heartache. You don’t know it yet, but this summer will irrevocably change your life in ways you can’t imagine. You will fall in love, fight for love, and then, hide your love.
Read MoreThe first night it happened, all the windows of our fieldstone house were open. The air moist and still, the sounds of trilling toads filled our bedroom. I’d gone to bed at nine, shortly after the twins, wrung out from an afternoon of playing alligator on the trampoline.
Read MoreIn early March 2020, my children begged me for a pet.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered their request; our lives were too busy. But the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, and the departure of regular school, work, or sleep schedules impaired my better judgement. My children sensed my vulnerability.
Read MoreThe first time that I really tell someone, the words belong to her, like me and everything else in the world around us. We are alone, and I don’t remember where the rest of our friends are or maybe we aren’t alone and all of our friends are with us but I can only ever think of her.
Read MoreFor months after my abuelita died, I slept with the covers tucked around my six-year-old face. The breeze that blew in from the Caribbean, cooling along the way as it traveled across the mountains, through the concrete city of Caracas, past the iron bars of my bedroom window, entering my mouth, my nose, my ears, felt like something my grandmother had sent from above, just for me.
Read MoreSummer bore down hard, distorting the asphalt along with my mood. I damned the weather as it must’ve been close to one hundred degrees. My dogs, trying to cool themselves, unfurled their pink tongues and panted. “Almost home,” I said to them. I kneeled down under the shade of a tall flowering tree to stroke their fur, and noticed a familiar looking leaf on the sidewalk.
Read MoreNot so long ago, the woman who was going to marry my brother called me out of the blue. It was close to the anniversary of the day her fiancé, my brother, dropped dead from nothing. Nothing we could explain then but maybe a genetic flaw, maybe his heart, or maybe an aneurism that killed our father when we were young. There was nothing to explain the suddenness. It was three months before the wedding. The invitations were freshly printed and waiting.
Read MoreDear Scarlett,
I want to tell you not to go to the bar that night. I want to say, “Just stay in with a good book.” But I know you. If I tell you, you'll only be more determined to do it. So get dolled up, go to the bar, listen to the band, and dance your heart out. But listen. Listen when your best friend tells you to stay away from him (they work together and there have been rumors).
Read MoreDear Zebib,
I hope this letter makes sense. It is from the future, from you at thirty, from a land far far away. 2019 sounds impossible even to my ears, like spaceships and dystopia. Did the letter get warped in time travel? Maybe the words ran together, like ink on parchment, held out in rain.
Read MoreDear N_____,
This letter is a little late, fifty years is a sizable chunk of time, but I wanted to tell you that you can stop searching for that lovely brown linen skirt you left behind after a week’s visit with me when we were young girls on the brink of life. I hope you have not spent too many of the decades between that summer and this one riffling through closets, calling various hotels, reaching out to friends to whom you might have lent it.
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