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.
My last child has just turned three. I want another child—a fourth child. The number of children that gets you stares at the supermarket, that makes your mom and sister say, “You’re fucking crazy.” I want this child so badly I can feel it close by, as if it is hiding within me, not to be eventually expelled from my body, but a shadow—a ghost child.
Read MoreIn the high dependency room, the room before graduating to the special care baby unit, I would cut your fingernails for the first time.
My mom took a bus to Hackney Central in East London, to buy the tiny, baby-doll sized fingernail clippers.
Grandma had traveled from Michigan, where I grew up, and was not used to big city living. For her, a bus ride to a very busy place, by herself, was a brave step for her. She then walked from the bus to the Woolworths on the corner.
She did it for me, because I couldn’t leave you.
Read MoreThe evening before you came into this world we endured the longest blackest night.
Winter. The hibernal solstice. Our slice of Earth turning her back to the sun, head bowed, submitting to the dark.
That night imprinted its suffocating length onto my birthing body. Within the week, wrapped in tendrils of dread
postnatally deeply depressed.
Read MoreIn a conference room cluttered with cold Chinese take-out, I sat with Jane as she wolfed down shrimp and noodles, finally eating lunch at three PM. Jane was a small woman with ocean blue eyes, golden dot freckles, and a pixie cut. She listened patiently as another OB/GYN resident in the room talked about a recent study proposing C-sections as standard of care over natural birth.
Read MoreThe first memory I have of our camping friends is of the day our daughters started kindergarten. We weren’t camping friends at this point, just parents of two children apiece. Their daughter—crying quietly at her desk. Mine—bright-eyed in her blue/green/white plaid skirt, matching headband, white polo.
Read MoreWe’re a few hours in when something starts to go wrong with the epidural. Not all at once, but a creeping awareness of sensation starts to tug at my attention as I lie there and look at the trees outside, and read, and make small talk with my husband.
At first, I ignore it. But then I start to get nervous.
“I can wiggle my left toes,” I say, not really to anyone. Observationally.
Read MoreMaybe the woman holding the child was way too close to the edge of the pier. Way too close for way too long. Maybe that is what the shopkeeper told the Vancouver police when she phoned in her response to the Amber Alert. Maybe the ginger-haired artist who owned the Rare Button Shoppe—herself the mother of a curly-headed toddler—feared for the safety of the child on the pier.
Read MoreCold. Alone. Dead. These were the few words that registered among the many spoken to me on that horrific afternoon when they came to tell me my son was gone. Fentanyl was added to the mix over the coming hours.
“Who? What? How?” repeated over and over again was all I could muster in response.
“We don’t know,” was their answer.
My living, breathing nightmare had only just begun.
Read MoreI nominated my mother to share the news of my pregnancy with the rest of our family. I was confident my father and brother wouldn’t kill the messenger, but I knew for certain they would want to kill the message.
Read MoreMy mother slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the elevator in silence. Tears slide down my face, hidden under my mask. My ten-year-old son and I are flying back home, only I don’t want to leave. At eighty-four, my mother has had her first stroke. It’s hard to figure her out again. While the stroke was not physically debilitating, it scrambled far too many files on her hard drive and erased that many more. Words she once knew disappear at random.
Read MoreSana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.
My mother and I, along with my children, have come to visit my Tía Eva. She is my mom’s tía, my great aunt, but I have only known her as Tía. It is what I told my children to call her, as well. Just as her name hasn’t changed, neither has her house. Even though I haven’t seen her in years, I walk the same cement steps leading up from the side of the house into the wood panel living room cluttered with memorabilia. Sit on the same floral upholstered settee sofa amid the photos and porcelain figures (myriad bells and keepsake boxes), crochet doilies like the crosshatch sugar crust of conchas, on the various coffee and end tables.
Read MoreIt is the wettest, coldest winter you can have without the gift of any snow. We slog through one rainy day after another. My husband is working late, and I know I will crash into bed before he gets home. That means that only conversations I will have today are with people who call me “mom.” I am swallowed up in momming. As I trudge upstairs with another bowl of cereal, and a towel to clean up the first bowl my son knocked over in anger that it was “too milky”, I recall a time when I didn’t feel like a mom at all.
Read MoreAt first I didn’t even realize you were there. You sprung up seemingly overnight, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was thirteen, my body already changing in all kinds of ways.
Read MoreThat late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.
Read MoreOne cold winter morning I’m out in the field, surrounded by grassy-breathed sheep, checking tension on the barbed wire fence. My mobile buzzes in my pocket, frozen fingers fumbling and numb. “There’s this boy,” they announce. I check the calendar: nine months of paper-based gestation.
Read MoreI’m sitting on the bench, this time with my pants on, at my midwife’s office.
I’m here because I’m certain I’m off and completely uncertain about what I need to fix it.
Or if I need to fix it.
Or if I can fix it.
Or if it’s even fixable.
I’m here for a postpartum depression evaluation.
Born pre-Google (PG) and it is a mystery how I, not knowing I was (ASD) Autism
Spectrum Disorder, survived fairly happy, optimistic, and somewhat whole. All
those years, the feeling of being an alien enshrouded me, yet I wouldn't give up
trying to fit in. Didn't know anything about it but in the 1980s, when my son was
diagnosed and then I was, well, I just did what I always did: slipped into denial
mode.
“Sit down,” I tell my toddler, calmly but firmly. “Don’t stand in the tub!”
She looks at me, her little legs searching for purchase, and she starts to rise.
She knows she’s not supposed to stand, but she wants that toy just out of reach.
“Sit,” I say again, giving her a look.
Read MoreWhen we were expecting our first child, our friends with babies advised us that living around the corner from the grandparents benefits everyone. My instinct was that a little distance would be better for me and our fledgling family, a necessary step in our independence. We began to explore a move from our Manhattan one-bedroom rental, and I was determined to put a bridge—Throgs Neck or Whitestone, take your pick—between us and both sets of parents.
Read MoreFrom the time she was little, my mother knew she wanted to be a mom. But that didn't stop her from having other ambitions. She went to school and received her bachelors and masters degrees before marrying my father.
Read More
