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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“How do you feel about your breasts?” my closest friend asked me as we gathered for a drink after work on my patio. I didn’t have to dig very deep for my response. My feelings about this part of my body haven't changed in the forty-two years since I first felt the beginnings of my breasts rubbing against my shirt as an eleven year old.
Read MoreWhen we were young and budding, we smiled as the girl’s body began to change. She was a skinny little thing without an ounce of fat or a wiggle to her bum.
Read MoreI was seven when I ran past my mother and grandmother, who were talking about whatever two grown Black women talk about when no one else is listening, when the protrusions from under my tank top caught my grandmother’s attention. “Oh! She got milks,” she said in a confounded, awe-inspiring voice mixed with a bit of intrusion and knowingness. I was only seven.
Read MoreYanking at the placket of yet another men’s dress shirt, I tug until I’m able to close the last three buttons around the apex of my chest. Even in a TomboyX compression bra, which works better for someone my size than any binder on the market, the buttons gap and strain. To find a shirt my breasts will fit in, I have to size up and up until the collar of the shirt looks like a gaping, cavernous ring around my neck. The arms sag and cover my hands, and the length guarantees I’ll end up with wads of material bunched up under my waistband when I tuck in the shirt.
Read MoreIf I am ever in the car, and the songs Hotel California or California Girls come on the radio, I do not leave the car until the song is over. It doesn’t matter if I am at work and a meeting starts in ten minutes. It does not matter how rushed I might be later on. I need to hear that haunting, eerie guitar solo in Hotel California. I need to hear the Beach Boys reminding me with their buoyant and bubbly 1960s optimism that they wish we were all California girls, and I sit there, filled with a nostalgic, glowing, hazy pride.
Read MoreI’ve driven by our old farm a few times, slowed down and leaned out the window to review what used to be. But yesterday was different - I pulled in. Waited.
Read MoreBlessed are those who hit the snooze button;
for they shall receive nine more minutes of sleep, unless they accidentally hit the stop button and awake in a panic an hour later.
For most people home is a house, at least in literal terms. It’s brick and mortar, floorboards, paint, and curtains. Maybe it’s where you’re born, where you raise your own family, or where you live with two of your best friends and a stray cat. It’s four walls and a roof that shelters you from the rain. It’s not that simple though, is it? Maybe home is a town or a city. Streets you can navigate on autopilot, familiar fish and chip shops, trees you used to climb and your footprints concreted into the sidewalk.
Read MoreSpecks of dirt and dust are nestled in the ridges of the soft carpet pressed against my cheek. The velvety surface wraps me in a layer of safety as I melt into it like a blotch of watercolor paint expanding gradually on paper. My little cousin, Pipe, lies next to me behind his father’s bass drum, one of the many musical instruments and loose items surrounding us. Past the instruments and piles of sheet music is an opening where light streams in from the Andean sky and into a plant-filled, pebbled courtyard.
Read MoreFor my Lutheran confirmation, my sister gave me a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. Inside the book’s front cover, she wrote, “I hope you find this book useful as a woman and a growing person.”
Read MoreThe pundits on NPR have been abuzz the last day or so about a new report indicating that one in five kids under the age of fifteen has had sex. So-who’s surprised? As soon as adults become parents, they get amnesia when it comes to sex. And they become hypocrites. Kids can smell hypocrisy a mile away. I did. I was a kid during the last great age of hypocrisy, the 1950’s. There was lots of teenage sex around then too, but you’d never know it based on the memories of those who were there.
Read More“The violence I had orchestrated left my insides lacking…”
The violence I had orchestrated.
I had orchestrated violence.
Had I orchestrated violence?
I was prepping for a podcast, scanning through my essay collection, Putting Out: Essays on Otherness, when I passed by this sentence. I used to love it. When I read it, I could envision myself as a conductor keeping in time the crumbling of my early womanhood. I’d visualize the rotation of shot glasses, kegs, faceless men, loose pills, and strobe lights blinking in the basement bangers all circling around me like a halo. By putting myself on the conductor’s podium I could pick and choose what parts of my experiences I illuminated to others.
Read MoreHi. I’m Mabs, and I am a demisexual woman trying to date after a particularly nasty divorce. I don’t know what I am doing.
Learning to live as a solitary person after twelve plus years is not fun. I go to work alone. I run errands alone. I cook dinner alone. I go to bed alone. There is no one to decompress the day with, no one to share all of the little pieces of life beside. I am learning to adjust to my independence and finding parts I enjoy in it, but I know myself. Left to my own devices, I will hunker down. I will crave companionship, but I will not actively seek it. My friends worry.
Read MoreAt the end of the summer of 1986, I stepped into the elevator and traveled alone from the forty-sixth floor of Chicago’s Mid-Continental Plaza to the ground for the last time. For four years, I had worked in that gray rectangular office building that spans a full city block. Its exterior resembles graph paper—gray metal and concrete run up the building vertically and around it horizontally, forming squares. In between that metal and concrete, set back ever so slightly, are windows.
Read MoreI’m standing with One hundred people, mostly women, on the Pawcatuck Bridge in Westerly, RI, holding clever signs and cheering when drivers honk their horns in pro-choice solidarity. I can’t believe I’m still doing this after fifty years.
Read MoreI played with the phone cord in my hand as I sat in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on a lumpy red bedspread. The steamy heat made my shirt stick to my back. What would it have taken to tell my father that I hated that dog? I definitely didn’t want to leave Thailand early to go home to bury him.
Read MoreIn the summer of 1990, Ghost Dad was butchered. The critics all agreed: this comedy, directed by Sidney Poitier, starring Bill Cosby, was dead in the water. The film told the story of Elliot Hopper, a workaholic widower with three children, who were forced to raise themselves in his absence. And this happened all before he became a ghost.
Read MoreMargaret and I are much too sober for this place and I’m not in the mood for what’s on the menu—stale beer and dim neon lights. Eileen, a friend who used to work with me at a now-defunct magazine, wants to stay out at the Legion-style bar across the street from her studio apartment. It’s not a particularity shady late-night bar it’s just not where Margaret or I want to be.
Read MoreFive years after my dad kicked me out, I was sitting in a swivel chair around a large oval table with ten other students in an Abnormal Child Development class. At twenty-one, I’d found my way into being a graduate student at Bank Street College of Education. Our teacher looked somber as she introduced the evening’s topic. “Tonight, we’ll be talking together about Adverse Childhood Experiences.
Read More“Why are we here?” Karl asks and sinks back into the floral, wing-backed chair. His lower legs jut straight out of the seat.
“To dress Dad’s body for the viewing.”
I see Rob’s family arriving.
Ansel goes on a hunt for funeral home candy. Barely-a-teenager, he returns with slump posture and announces, “No candy!”
“Darn it,” Helena, my cheeky tween says, pretending to be angry. She gauges Ansel’s woeful expression and laughs.
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