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.
I’m lying on an operating table, shaking involuntarily, but the nurse checking my vitals doesn’t seem concerned. “The mommy shakes,” she tells me, the blood pressure cuff tightening around my arm. “We can give you something for that once the baby is out.”
Read MoreI attended AWP for the first time this year. In my memory now, it is a fluorescent lit blur of searching for faces I recognize, of endless flyers and stacks of books and a lanyard around my neck. And the men. I can’t stop thinking about the men.
Read MoreJust 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 MoreMy daughter doesn’t say my name.
Read MoreI do not remember the name of the first child, buck-toothed, big-eyed, who called me an Oreo—a racial slur meaning someone who is black on the outside; white on the inside. I do not remember the name of the second, either. I remember sticky summers in blistering Birmingham, Alabama, legs itching from the long, prickly grass and perpetual mosquito bites. I remember waiting for night fall, the symphonious synth-sounds of crickets, the steady flicker of lightning bugs. I remember sitting on the crumbling porch of Bunk’s house, alone. Distanced from cousins whose Bama dialect compelled them a unique kind of elide, swallowing the sharp point of R’s, so when they said (speaking of me) She talks like a white girl, it came out sounding like gull. I remember biting back tears, picturing myself; head of a girl, body of a seagull, grey wings flapping, soaring above the stifling Hooper City ghetto with its collection of shotgun houses in various stages of dilapidation, far, far away to AnywhereButHere, anywhere the colour of my skin wouldn’t define me.
Read MoreIn the Dalmatian hinterland village where I was born, there was no word for "fun." There were words for work. For bread. For grit. For silence. There were even words for hunger and sorrow. But not for joy without purpose.
Read MoreLosing my mother to Alzheimer’s disease feels like my teeth are being yanked out slowly, painfully, one by one. Our favorite things to do together wither away along with her brain cells. I try to cook with her, but her culinary skills have dwindled to putting the pickled beets on a relish tray.
Read MoreI was 36 and feeling perfectly fine about my post-baby body the first time a saleslady suggested I invest in Spanx.
Read MoreI was driving to an appointment with my periodontist when I glanced down at the gas gauge and discovered the tank was almost empty. I panicked. As a newcomer to driving, I had zero idea how to “gas up.” Just learning how to go down the road without killing myself or someone else was in itself a major accomplishment.
Read MoreThere is a feeling I get when I travel alone. The moment I get to my destination—a hotel or Airbnb—when I walk in the room, roll my suitcase into a corner, and close the door, it hits me. I am hopeful on every trip that I won’t feel it this time, but I always do. My chest and stomach get tight. I can’t catch a full breath. There is a sense of dread and impending doom. And emptiness so loud one might think it is the thing I’ve come to visit. As if it lives right there in that room and has been waiting for me since the last time we saw each other.
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