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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The box from James arrived months after my birthday, tattered and misshapen. In it, a black-and-white striped purse, gray scarf, face masks, a knockoff Purple Rain CD, and two cardigans: one small yellow one for my eleven year old daughter and another for me the color of a bright orange Boston autumn leaf where James and I had gone to college together.
Read More“John has dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.” The diagnosis came at us like an arrow shot from a crossbow. The arrow went straight through my husband and embedded itself in me. Of course, the disease was inoperable and couldn’t be treated. We both knew the outcome. There was nothing to do but carry on regardless of pain or grief.
Read MoreAccording to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.
“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.
Read MoreI walk troublingly late. None of the doctors know what to make of me.
“You came out of the womb singing your ABCs, but you didn’t walk until you were two-years-old!” my mother jokes. “You were just so smart. You wouldn’t even crawl. You’d just roll everywhere, like a little log. You were very efficient.”
A very expensive doctor on the Upper West Side finally steps in and fits me for special shoes with arch support. They are pink leather and make my feet look comically large for a child so small, and I wail when they are strapped on to me, wriggling as the velcro crunches into place. I detest the process of learning to walk. I fall constantly. My little knees remain perpetually bruised.
Once I finally get the hang of it, though, I am unstoppable.
Read MoreA funeral is an elementary school gym. The same gym where, in the evenings, you memorize the faded lines that mark the borders of the volleyball court, the gym that you and your ten-year-old teammates sneak away from to peek into the boys bathroom, to see if it really is bigger than the girls (“It is!” you squeal, waving over the other girls to see for themselves). The gym where your P.E. teacher sets out little black X’s on the floor to mark each kid’s spot. “Don’t move from your place,” she says, so you sit criss-cross-apple-sauce, even on the day that you sob all through class because you got in trouble for forgetting to write your name at the top of your multiplication test.
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 MoreUncle George lay on his back on the hospice bed looking his ninety-four years for the first time. His usual ruddy face was as pale as the bleached sheets nearly shrouding him.
My cousin had warned me, "Dad's unconscious. He won't recognize you."
I thought I was prepared.
Read MoreI came home to wisps of white paper blowing through the screened-in porch like feathers in a chicken coop. Rosie, the rescue puppy, was sitting on haunches with head bowed and tail wagging sheepishly, white exclamation points in the black spots of her scruffy fur. The trail of paper led from the porch, through the dog door, to the living room floor, to the black leather cover of my grandmother’s Bible, her name in gold on the lower corner.
Read MoreI didn’t know better. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.
I was seven and fascinated by my friend Kasey. She was a redhead, and she’d just gotten a perm. I thought she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. I told no one. I figured we were simply special friends. I didn’t know better.
Read MoreThe sidewalks in West Philadelphia are notoriously uneven. Cracks splinter across a cement landscape of protruding roots and gnarled knots, a battleground of nature’s rebellion against the cages built by mankind. Litter adorns small patches of grass like jewelry, reflecting the sun’s rays as it pierces through thin layers of clouds.
Read MoreReb Nachman of Bratislav, the 18th century sage, wrote:
כל העולם כולו גשר צר מאוד והעיקר לא לפחד כלל
Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tsar m’od v’ha-ikar lo l’pakhad k’lal
The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge and the important thing is to not be afraid.
Read MoreHasbun Allahi wa nimal wakeel. These words had become my mantra. “God alone is sufficient for us, and He alone can rectify our affairs.” These were the words that I would recite thousands of times a day that winter. I would repeat this phrase in the early morning hours when I couldn’t sleep. As I heard myself murmur the words, my own voice seemed to lull me into a trance-like state, as if I floated out of my body.
Read MoreI practice punching at the kitchen table. I practice on the couch. I practice in my sleep. I make a fist and see my life there. I make a fist and study the veins that press out against the skin of my forearms. Hating your hate of love, I practice punching at the kitchen table.
Read MoreI have learned not to get burned.
The year that I turn sixteen, which is a very long year, I often work the opening shift at McDonald’s. Other than babysitting, this is my first job, and I take it quite seriously. Twenty hours a week; more in the summer. I have no license, so my mother drives me, both of us heavy with the want of sleep.
Read More“How fat do I look in this shirt?” my mother asked me, grimacing as she stared at herself in the department store’s tri-fold mirror. All three versions of her fussed in unison with the shirt’s delicate buttons.
By the time I was in the sixth grade, this was not an unusual question. “Mother,” I started, my voice lingering on the last syllable, dragging the er into a nasal whine. “You look fine.”
Read MoreI couldn’t make myself heard for fifty years. Not even the boy could hear me, the boy I lived inside. My vocal anatomy worked fine—larynx, mouth, lungs beneath my breasts—I just didn’t have the words. Nobody did, not in the sixties. I had to resort to signals. Most of them he missed.
Read MoreI didn’t respond to a failed early attempt at motherhood in the way people, and society, expected me to.
I was supposed to be tense, anxious, resistant, sad. Like the way a Chihuahua looks. But I detected, early on in that first unsuccessful year attempting to reproduce, that I was in the process of becoming someone, and not the someone that I had first set out to be, but someone else entirely, someone I couldn’t have fathomed, the someone, the me, that was just on the other side of what I thought I knew.
Read MoreMy dear friend is a crone. Not an ugly, withered woman. No, she entered cronehood with ample wisdom, dignity, and poise. She entered cronehood with a croning, a sacred, near metaphysical ritual where a small group of women honor the crone and her journey. “But it’s also very much about sharing your knowledge and wisdom with other women,” the invite read.
Read MoreWhen my daughter was born, I was worried that I wouldn’t be the one she would call out for in the middle of the night.
Josh brings her warm, tear-soaked body into our king-sized bed – all 29 pounds of my two- and-a-half-year-old. The bed is already fully occupied. Me, Josh and my almost four-year-old son, Miles, sprawled out as if he was attempting to make snow angels in his sleep. But I still welcome Lyla with outstretched arms.
Read More“Mum..ah..” The sound rises from his mouth like a bubble, lifting into the air and popping gently at my ears. He’s grinning up at me with one of those gorgeous, full-face bursts that shows off his four newly erupted pearls.
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