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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At Indian Rocks Beach, we stay in an oceanside ranch house. It is small, flat to the ground, and the walls are painted sea green. The living room is covered with sandy, shaggy orange carpet. We are vacationing with my dad’s family: his parents, his sister, her many, blonde children. Absolute chaos.
Read MoreAt a beach on Madeline Island, my son and daughter searched for skipping stones, flat and smooth, perfectly sized to fit their little hands. They would have been six and nine that summer. We had gone to the island to sightsee, a day trip to visit a friend of my husband who had retired there. She drove us to a quiet inlet tucked safely away from the mighty waves of Lake Superior, and there we walked across the rose gold sand and there we found the stones.
Read MoreA jumble of buildings squatted some distance away, dark, and low. Not a sight I, at my ripe old age of eight, imagined part of Dad’s homeland. Funny how things stick in your mind, from all those years ago, still sharp now, from so many decades ago. A time of our walkabout. Through ominous towns dotted trying to overwhelm desert landscapes. So different from down south coast dairy farm where I grew up. Possible to glimpse pieces of blue-gray Ocean away in divots between hills.
Read MoreA small engraved bell with a clapper sat on the teak coffee table in the room where my father lay dying. He no longer had the strength to call my mother so this was the instrument he used to summon her. I heard it from the kitchen and went into the living room.
Read MoreShe promised me the good wine. The bottle her boss gave her as a reward for staying late on a Friday. But when we arrived at her Brooklyn apartment, she instead grabbed an open bottle of white in her fridge. I didn’t care. My vulva was pulsing like a heartbeat.
Read More“Well, Ms. Song, I have to say, you’re pretty darn unlucky.” I thought about reminding her again—for maybe the 50th time—to call me Julie, but after two years of her ignoring my request, the point was moot. Besides, I couldn’t remind her, I was weeping again. Mike took two steps across the tiny doctor’s office and grabbed a tissue from the box, wiping the salty black tracks that muddied my cheeks. Dr. F pursed her lips, tightly holding back any words of wisdom or comfort she might have had. Her face said it all: pity and boredom. This was just another day as an infertility specialist.
Read MoreIn El Dorado you drive for hours, just to feel like you’re going somewhere. Your dad tinkers with cars and he’s given you one he loves, a 280Z. It’s too fast for you. You get reckless and twist past the pines. Once, you skid in a ditch on a zigzag turn. Another time, you open the throttle on a straight highway and rear-end a brown pickup full of stoners. No damage, dude. They’re the only stoners you’ve ever seen in Arkansas, and when you drive away you start to wonder if they were even real.
Read Morewhited sepulchres which appear beautiful outward
but are within full of dead men’s bones and of all uncleanness
Read More“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.
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