HerStry publishes one Personal Essay every Wednesday. Weekly Personal Essays are a way for writers to tell the stories they want to tell. There are no rules. No themes. Nothing is off limits. For essay submissions check out our guidelines.
In the minutes after she was born, all of the lights came on. We watched her climb the wall of my body and land, exhausted, at the shore of my breast. Under the sharp white of hospital light, they did the weighing and measuring, and she screamed so that every number and value only reached my ears as alive, alive, more evidence of her realness, her presence. She sent howls up into a brightness that must have been like looking at the sun.
Read MoreI stood in front of the gate, but the Delta screen didn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t the airline have cleared out the Denver flight if the Nashville flight was due to board in the next 10 minutes? I looked for any indication that the departure gate had been changed; I found none.
Read MoreThe basement is filled with junk and gems. I promised myself no space of mine would ever get this packed, but even in her delirium, Mom has conquered. Her gaze was voracious, her taste, sweeping. She was a champion of designers. She was a one-woman environmental disaster, with a carbon footprint as big as a mall.
Read MoreMy brother props his long legs on the dashboard of Dad’s pristine Honda. He presses his feet in their sweaty black socks into the windshield hard enough to leave `a smudge, a crime our eighty-five year-old father swoops on like a hawk.
Read MoreI study myself in the mirror. The same glass in the square wooden frame that has stared back at me ever since I was tall enough to see over the top of the dresser. I concentrate on the small round bumps barely rising from my chest. I call them “my breasts.” “Boobs” sounds like the noise my brother Kenny makes when he imitates drums. “Bust” sounds violent. “Titties” sound silly. I’m not sure about “chest,” the word could belong to a man or a woman. I choose to think of them as “my breasts.”
Read MoreMy preferred route, Back Cove Trail, curves its way around the water of Portland, Maine’s Casco Bay, following Baxter Boulevard to Tukey’s Bridge, bending back toward the parking lot, a Mobius strip circuit for contemplation and exercise. Its gravel is familiar to me, smelling of ocean, sun, fauna, and dog. The tide is coming in.
Read MoreCondensation gathers along the windows, giant teardrops sliding down the panes. The air inside sweats heavily, leaving its imprint on our booth seats and table. I have this habit of tucking my hands underneath my thighs when I’m cold. But the seats are sticky, so I interlace my fingers and hold them between my legs. It’s no wonder people get sick easily.
Read MoreI.
The neglected yard of a local abandoned house stands meadow high. Overnight, the grass floods with brown casings and red-eyed spawn. This is how it begins.
Silently, cicadas surface to molt, climb, mate. Our shoes crunch exoskeleton evidence of invasion. My daughters—five and three—stare at the creeping bark of trees, mesmerized by miniature zombie movements.
Read MoreRecently, scrolling through my news feed on Facebook, I came across a post by a girl from work. It was a picture of her and her mother side-by-side, same cute smile, same long, blonde hair, same eyes crinkled by their grins. She tagged it "#TWINS.” “Vote for me and my mom!" the caption said, with a link to a local radio station hosting a mother-daughter lookalike contest for Mother's Day.
Read MoreI am topless in the women’s beach bathroom, laundering the salt stained armpits of my only t-shirt with hand dispenser soap. I have not yet been sized up as a threat or harassed by a mob of concerned mothers. Perhaps my exposed tits are evidence I am in fact, female?
Read MoreWhen I was five, I got a pair of Wonder Woman Underoos, stars on blue bottoms, a golden eagle on the camisole, which my dad called a wife-beater. I blasted around the yard, kicking Nazis, saving drippy Steve Trevor. The world had clean edges. I was a goddess, a force. Wham! Pow! Look out bad guys. My mom called me inside; I was just in my underwear, and what would the neighbors think.
Read MoreWhen we took her to the toilet for the fifth time that day, as I held her up, and you pulled down the necessary, I noticed her back. She wanted to take her clothes off, and we didn’t have the will or strength to resist this time. She stood there, swaying half-dressed, and briefly one-legged like a disheveled flamingo. I saw how her freckles, the texture and colour of her skin exactly like yours.
Read MoreYou are sixteen years old, your twin sister just had a miscarriage two days prior, and your mother is taking you both to the gynecologist for the first time. The sound of your heartbeat pounding in your ears envelops the male doctor’s words as he pokes and prods between your open, shaking thighs. You’ve only had sex a handful of times and you’re still thoroughly uncomfortable with a strange man standing between your open legs, looking closely inside of you.
Read MoreI stretch out my legs on the sand. I can see her almost approach me. She is wearing a white beach jacket and a straw hat with a veil over it. In sunglasses and standing proud, her breasts sprout. No one would ever have suspected the loss of one or the other. She is smiling, and her mouth says, ‘I am happy in the land of palm trees, coconuts, and certainly, I don’t have to search for any monkeys because I was never one.’
Read MoreMy mother passed away when I was eight years old, and for some time after that, I journaled to cope with difficult feelings. She wrote in beautiful notebooks while she was sick. I suppose I was trying to find a connection. I shared thoughts and feelings about a variety of topics: what pony I was going to ride that week in my horseback riding lessons, stories about my dolls’ lives, and random emotions.
Read MoreThe death of Dianne, my ex-husband’s mother, opened a wound. The service was in California. I wasn’t invited. I didn’t ask if I could be there. Instead, I agonized over whether my daughter should go. She was in the middle of her college semester and travelling to India in a week. My ex-husband and I argued, he bought tickets without consulting me, and I worried it was too stressful for her to make both trips.
Read MoreMy daughter’s teeth stand in a crooked row. Her two cuspids rise above the rest, turned diagonally like twisted fence posts. The uneven spaces in between her teeth make a crooked grin, but she smiles wide anyway. She laughs with her mouth open, and her blue eyes disappear for that moment as joy swallows up her whole face. Sometimes she talks too loudly, not yet having learned a girl’s acceptable volume, not knowing to hide her enthusiasm.
Read More(My mother and your mother were washing the clothes)
The girl stands plucking branches in the wide expanse of the olive grove. Gazing upwards she closes her eyes to the heavens and welcomes the unexpected breeze dancing through her hair. It cools her sweat-drenched brow and the nape of her neck. The girl knows that the wind wants to trick her.
Read MoreThe word quarantined—when I hear it, I can’t not think of you. You were confined to your room for two years because of your illness, waiting. First for a miracle. Then for my visits, which were never frequent enough. Finally, to die. When you tired of waiting for death, you made death happen, by refusing to eat or drink. You didn’t believe in a god or a heaven, which made this final act even braver.
Read MoreI began losing my eyesight when I was three – a result of poor genetics and squinting at the television too often. My sight worsened until I was nineteen; by then, I was nearly legally blind and opted to have my vision corrected through surgery. Until that point, losing my eyesight afforded me both a gift and a curse – the gift of insight and the curse of knowledge. I saw the world in layers of truths and half-truths, of what people thought they knew and what actually happened behind closed doors.
Read More
