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.
The dog is different now. He has developed a subtle yet more articulate language of long gazes and soft moans. Maybe not just expressions of pain but also the frustrating inability to fully express himself. These are of course, just my interpretations and perhaps too self-reflective. “What is it, buddy?” I ask him, “What is it?” It’s cancer and it is, as they say, aggressive.
Read MoreYou and I became acquainted nearly thirteen years ago. It wasn’t love at first sight. In fact, I was initially after another one just down the street. But that one had too many problems and I didn’t want such a big project. I noticed you on the same day that I said no to the other one, and so I came to see you. You were cute, in solid condition. Very old-school but nothing that a little modern touch couldn’t fix. I had been casually looking for a home for several months. I and my now ex-husband, that is. This felt a little different and we really needed something positive to look forward to. Something of a distraction, maybe.
Read MoreWhen I was eight years old, many decades ago now, I learned there were different kinds of dirty. We were new to the mountains, my family and I, renting a cabin at a small, rustic resort where the ghost town of Bakerville used to be, near Loveland Pass. Down the creek a ways, lived an old man we called Pops. At least we thought of him as old, with his pudgy frame, poorly shaved face, saggy skin, and well-worn clothes.
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 MoreEvery Thanksgiving and Christmas we haul the extra table up from the basement: a cheap white pine table, the varnish yellow now, that we used in the kitchen until eventually it became too embarrassing. When we carry it upstairs, we do it in pieces, and once it's in the dining room the tabletop gets flipped over and lowered to the floor so someone--usually my husband or my son Sam--can attach the legs. As one of them works with screws and Allen wrenches, I read the legends inscribed by our kids on the underside of the table when they were little; the one we see first, in large red letters, is "Boo, Sam sucks a lot, by Nick."
Read MoreI.
It wasn’t cool to like the Backstreet Boys while attending high school in the late 1990s, and this may still be true today.
But I wasn’t cool. I didn’t care to get jiggy with it or weep to “Candle in the Wind.” The odes to drugs from Third Eye Blind and Marcy Playground were boring. I didn’t give any real shits about Lilith Fair’s tepid lineup, though I still went, quietly rolling my eyes through “Adia” by Sarah McLaughlin.
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 MoreThe amygdala assigns emotional significance to clutter I can’t throw away. To souvenirs and books throughout our house. To clawhammers, backpacks, yard signs we hang on pegboards. To ordinary places we visit again and again. This precious tiny thing deep inside my head also helps form shiny new memories. I want to hold on to my amygdala for a long time. Keep it healthy and functioning. Feed it. Maintain it. That sort of thing.
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 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 MoreMaybe you saw her serving champagne on a one-for-you, one-for-me basis at a big nun party, shooting corks for children to catch. Later, you’d bond that one summer week watching science fiction movies in the novitiate basement. You’d be thrilled when she came to live in your same convent. It would make sense, the life-sized poster of Spock in her bedroom, just down the hall from yours.
Read MoreShe cracked open one late afternoon. Just like a porcelain doll falling off a shelf. Like the dolls she collected, displayed, and cherished. She shattered in her mind and exploded on to our beings. Shards of her screaming hit our small ears and pierced our hearts. We were her children. She was our mother and then she was not.
Read MoreSomewhere in a cardboard box in our basement lies a cassette tape of me at three years old being coaxed by my mother to sing into a tape recorder. “Canta,” she says.” I must be fascinated by the turning cassette reels, because I ignore her request and say, “Está andando.” “Si, está andando. Canta.” A few seconds pass during which I am either reaching for buttons or fiddling with the tape case, because my mother starts to get mildly frustrated.
Read MoreDo you even remember me? Or was I nothing to you, a little conquest, a trifling diversion that for one brief evening made you feel powerful? Do you know how hard it has been for me to understand what happened that night? To remember how naïve I was, even at twenty-five, and not feel ashamed? To stop blaming myself for getting drunk on a few cups of sake, and for being unable to shove your six-foot-plus body off of me? Did you plan it, or was it merely a crime of opportunity, your secret safe because I was in town for only a few days?
Read MoreI think about becoming a dead girl, not because I want to be one, but because of how possible it is for me, out in public, to become one. I’ve read the news, the stories, watched the true crime documentaries and listened to the podcasts. In Youtube videos, a beautiful woman applies makeup while detailing another’s gruesome murder. I walk through the aisles of the store, filling my cart and avoiding eye contact with men I don’t know, wondering how many of their mouths have watered at the thought of wringing my neck.
Read MoreI winced, not because it was time, but because the nurse had used my full name, a name only my mom still called me. As the nurse announced it I briefly felt as though I was a teenager being called to wash dishes or explain a grade on my report card. But my mom was miles away now, not there to micromanage me as I made a big decision for myself.
Read MoreYears ago when I went to a hammam in Istanbul I didn’t bring a bathing suit. Thinking I was being culturally sensitive or some anthro major nonsense, I figured we would go naked. But the ladies at the public bath the Turkish woman who was marrying my American friend took us to were all wearing bikinis or one pieces. I spent the afternoon cringing in my white granny underwear, a towel awkwardly draped over my chest.
Read More“Do you work?” the man prompts as he pushes his little girl in the swing adjacent to my son, completely oblivious to my visceral reaction.
The swing set yells my fury while I think of a response. Squeal, squeal! My sleep-deprived brain is now fully awake.
Read MoreBarbie. Everyone’s favorite (or favorite-to-loathe) doll-slash-role model-slash-best friend-slash-impossible ideal-slash-icon of cultural demise. Even though I’ve always harbored a fairly incurious attitude toward the Barbie-as-perfection phenomenon, I nevertheless loved playing with my inanimate, buxom, rubbery friends. I didn’t compare myself to them, and they didn’t dictate my self worth. They were just one population in an only child’s universe of dessert-scented dolls, bathtub mermaids, and little plastic people who lived in a furnished tree.
Read MoreI’m still sitting in this car going nowhere, staring at the side of our house with its mildew stains branching across the siding because we’re overdue for a power wash. The car was a splurge purchase several years ago. A Volvo with peanut butter leather interior which, every time I run my hand over, brings me all the way back to an elementary school friend, whose parents drove a similar car, had oriental rugs, and a dog too designer for our cocker spaniel neighborhood. A time when I thought it might be possible to live forever, or at least frozen in time like Harrison Ford in Star Wars, to be thawed out later. The hero never really dies.
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