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.
Just after the pandemic, I went to New York City with my aunt Mimi. We had planned the trip as a way for me to learn everything I could about my mother, who died thirty-five years ago from an aggressive form of breast cancer. It was the hottest day on record for the month of May and we sat in an air-conditioned restaurant in Greenwich Village.
Mimi listed things my mother loved: dancing, parties, fashion, Bailey’s Irish Cream.
Read MoreI read an article in our local newspaper about a high school coach who had just been fired for abusing his male students. I was in my early forties, and remember taking in the article (yes, back in the day when people still read an actual newspaper) and contemplating the unpleasant information that a football coach in a city just north of where I lived had inappropriately touched his male students. My next thought was, Oh, that happened to me.
Read MoreYou stand with your husband on the balcony of a hotel room in Ao Nang, Thailand. Together, you watch the sky turn from pre-dawn pink to blue. It rained during the night and the air smells like damp teakwood and salt. Your hotel sits at the edge of town on top of a steep hill. As the sun rises, you contemplate the serenity of the Indian Ocean—a sea without waves.
Read MoreAfter running around in the heat of a South Carolina sun all day, I didn’t think there was anything that could scare you. We wandered from pier to pier, picking up nearly every shell on the shores of Myrtle Beach and kicking over abandoned sand castles. After a long day of pink streamer bike rides and arcade bubble gum, it was time to rinse off the day and rinse the sand out of our Kool-Aid dyed hair.
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 More“There are two parts of the mind. The outer mind that records facts and the inner mind that says ‘Yes’ and ‘no.” –Agnes Martin
1.
Once, years back, a woman, an acquaintance, asked me why I decided to become a speech-language pathologist, a person who works on helping children who can’t say their rs, who sits in quiet classrooms with the thud of the other, happier children outside, or who leans in, in the dead of winter, in a trailer because that’s the only extra space, a metallic trailer with stucco on the sides, and who rehearses the way sounds go.
Read MoreAnd to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
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 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 MoreIt was a night like any other that summer. Short skirt, fishnet stockings, thick lines of black eyeliner, ruby red lips, and dancing. I’d had a line of coke before the night began, and part of a bottle of cheap wine—seriously cheap, dollar-a-bottle Strawberry Hill. It was early in the night for us, a hallway mark of 1 a.m. David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” was at the part of the song where everyone screams along.
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