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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I have never been a wilderness person, preferring to hike through urban shopping districts, explore museums and cathedrals, and slide into cafes for an espresso respite. There is no call-of-the-wild in me. But, at sixty-years of age, I craved nature’s inspiration. I wanted to see ancient beauty that would exist long after my expiration date.
Read MoreDear Eleven,
The fire will come and change you. I could tell you to brace yourself, but I know you won’t.
You will see the smoke rising over the hill from your seat on the school bus. You will ignore the driver’s objection and get off the bus at the wrong stop.
I love that you’re still a tomboy as you enter middle school. That you still play pickup touch football with the guys in the neighborhood and don’t care about makeup. You’re very smart, but maybe a little naïve about other people’s motivations. I’m hoping you’re old enough to receive the advice I want to give you in this letter.
Read MoreWhere you feel most content is the essence of who you are. The moments in life when what you are doing engulfs you, and for a second, life is simple. Find that, let it become you. Let it never be taken from you or forgotten about as life and her worries take over. Promise me that, young one.
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 MoreDear Pubescent Me,
This is a sensitive topic, I know. I know how much pain and embarrassment it gives you. I know how you avert from peoples’ gazes, maintain distance, never keep your face still. Your hands gesture and distract—all to deter their eyes from lingering. They linger and they see. I won’t even name it, because naming it makes it real and forever, and you can’t fathom living with it forever.
Read MoreThe women who wear athletic leisure apparel are the same women who use the thin, translucent toilet seat covers to protect themselves from the scary whiteness of the plastic seat. When there are no toilet seat covers available, they hover. These women are the same women who look at me horrified when I exit the stall.
Read MoreA twelve hour shift feels like forever when you’re waiting on bad news. If you’re busy, the time might pass easily enough. Otherwise, it’s a relentless crawl. Even the most mundane tasks feel insurmountably hard.
Read MoreThe day after my husband brought our first batch of piglets home to our farm, they escaped. The forty little black creatures that had seemed so content gamboling in our barnyard throughout the morning had, by noon, slipped out of their fencing and assembled under the ornamental crab apple tree on the lawn.
Read MoreBecause I spent too long in Boston with its long and twisted streets, bikers and Priuses negotiating for space, college students converging at the end of summer, forming clusters along the Charles River, Birkenstocks in spring and Blundstones in winter. Because I was tired of texts from my mother asking if I wanted to pop out for a jog.
Read MoreI hear the retching vomit and feel my breasts seize up. Even the mechanical waves of my pump can’t drown out the sick splattering on the linoleum floor under fluorescent lights. I’ve never understood fluorescent lights in schools. Research says they stress and strain, and yet they populate our buildings as if the sun might disappear one day.
Read More“If that’s what you’ve decided to do, then go do it. But if you leave, you better know you can’t come back.”
I sat on the edge of the dining room chair as my mother stood over me, gripping the remote control in her hand, eyes blazing.
“I’m only moving to Astoria,” I said. Although my words came out smoothly, glibly even, my stomach turned over in knots.
Read MoreI’m lucky. I came out as a lesbian in the wake of Stonewall. First to myself, a recent Harvard dropout cleaning houses in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1970. Then to friends, my women’s consciousness-raising group, other feminists, potential roommates and lovers, and finally, after several years, my family.
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 MoreWhen she died, I didn’t miss her, which did not seem right or fair or even biologically possible. All it seemed was true.
I remember the feeling of weightlessness after the funeral, once I was home—in my home, the one that took decades to build by scratch and sweat.
Read MoreWhen my daughter asked if her boyfriend could spend the night, I said yes.
He and his mom had a blowout argument and she ended up telling him to get out of the car they were sleeping in. Each night, they'd park at the Walmart up the road.
Read MoreA lot can happen in ten years. You lose a baby, or choose to lose a baby, though at the time, it doesn’t feel like a choice, more like a pre-ordained outcome. You spend time blaming everything outside of you—your OB, your job, your husband. Blame comes easily; it’s a ready distraction from the blame you hold close to you, like a secret: you were not brave enough, not in love with the baby enough, not selfless enough. When your water broke months too early, you panicked, you decided against hope.
Read MoreI went to college in 2014. I am the eldest of four kids, thus, the first to leave home. Growing up in a Latino home meant the vague expectation of pursuing higher education. In my house, our parents said if you were not working, then you were in school. My parents were not raising a bunch of bums. Mami y Papi instilled in us the importance of working for our own. If we wanted something, we had to work for it. I learned this quickly and, at the age of fourteen, had my first, legal job.
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 MoreI should have seen the signs, long before she fell so far and so hard. Instead, I just kept pushing. “You can do this, sweetie, just focus and try harder.” Seemingly innocuous words, I thought. Encouraging words, right? Wrong.
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