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. I drove to my mom’s house to print the divorce paperwork. Now there’s a blinding white stack of lines to fill in, boxes to check: communal property, dissolution. One of the questions is, is either party pregnant? I lean over the kitchen counter and rest my face on the cold granite. I start to cry.
Read MoreIt’s cliché to say, but time really does have a way of flying by. Slipping by, sneaking by. Tiptoeing at a hurried pace— one month turns into the next, seasons blend, and it’s time to start thinking about summer plans: where should we go this year? Then it’s back-to-school time of year, favorite-season Fall. Football, orange-yellow trees, then the holidays. A dark, cold January-February and it’s time to start thinking about summer again.
Read MoreShe offered her first organ to a boy with a strip of film tattooed around his wrist.
Read MoreIt is 10:34 p.m. I am journaling about the difference between what I eat and how I taste it.
In other words, it’s not about the chocolate cake. It’s about the pool of saliva swirling through each bite. It’s about the tongue pressing crumb into ganache, the esophagus readying itself to carry each sweet offering down. It is about my body knowing it is safe. Safe to sit, to enjoy, to receive.
Read MoreIn the Beginning
I went to a Christian elementary school that taught me A. God loves me and B. God can send me to hell.
Read MoreThe key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. I jiggled it, turning it upside down and right side up again, but the door wouldn’t budge. The superstitious part of me wondered: Is this a sign? Am I making a mistake?
Read MoreIn the summer of 1982, I come home to Edinburgh from university wearing Doc Martens a size too small, thick black eyeliner and my boyfriend’s coat. I spend the week’s wages from my holiday job in a second-hand bookshop getting a bright red streak put in my hair. I strut home from the hairdresser feeling like Chrissie Hynde’s sister. When I open the front door, Dad is waiting for me in the hall.
Read MoreWe had a tradition for birthdays: a call once it was midnight so that we’d be the first of everyone else to groggily whisper our well wishes for each other. It started as a promise from me that I’d do it every year for you, no matter what I was doing, who I was with, or how tired I was.
Read MoreMy friend Marianne died last week. We met through a writers' group that started through the local public library and continued on Zoom during the pandemic. In the beginning, the group was fluid, writers, coming and going, sometimes for weeks, sometimes longer, usually without explanation. But in time, the regulars emerged, with a few of the original members as the bedrock. Marianne was one of those.
Read MoreThe brick-arched doorway houses two twin wooden doors. It smells of early-summer piss. Under the marquee, a small blue and white sign reads, "Air Conditioned." But it's a lie: the club will be sweltering.
Read MoreA few summers ago, I sat next to my dog on a pile of ice-coated rocks in the Brooks Range of Alaska, afraid that my soon-to-be-husband had fallen off a cliff.
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 MoreOne Sunday in January, my twelve year-old and I had an hour between appointments in the Denver suburbs, and found ourselves at a mall. In the age of “add to cart,” we rarely shopped together, and she had grown so much in the previous several months that none of her clothes fit. As we wandered into H&M, my daughter’s eyes lit up. She grabbed armfuls of clothes, including a pair of acid washed jeans with a chain that went from the front pocket to a back belt loop, each link a tiny heart. Maybe they won’t fit, I thought hopefully, as I trailed behind her in a daze. The Friday before, she had refused to go to school, her second school of the year, and one that had seemed promising only a couple of weeks before. I felt like I was hiking along the edge of a cliff in the fog; I had no idea what was going to happen, or how close we were to the edge.
Read MoreThe edges blur and hum around me. Life is continuing. But I’m stuck. Frozen. Back here again. In this familiar place that I didn’t choose to revisit. The seat still feels warm. The past floods back. I thought I’d left it in my wake. Moved on. The tentacles are never far-threatening to lure me back in and swallow me up. I look down at my stomach. It’s grown a little.
Read MoreThe night before my mother’s funeral, I assured my niece I wouldn’t cry. “I’ve shed all my tears,” I told her. “I’ve practiced what I’m going to say until I’m dry.” She nodded, clearly skeptical.
Read MoreI lost my mother on Christmas Eve. Colored lights twinkled up and down the block as I arrived but her window was dark. A pile of mail in the hall. Television on, cold coffee in her mug. The radiator banging away. The tree was half trimmed and the cats were prowling around the apartment crying, unfed. Overflowing ashtray. Cat
toys and dust balls, empty bottles of bourbon.
I remember the backyard of our house by the Intercoastal Waterway, the way the marsh smelled in the late afternoon, salty and a little sweet. My brother and I spent hours there, running around with our dog, who always sprinted in wide circles, barking at nothing in particular. I’d sit on the old swing that hung from the tall tree, feeling the wind as I kicked my legs higher and higher. From the top of the swing’s arc, I could see the water sparkling in the distance, the sun sinking lower, casting everything in a golden light. The marsh grass swayed in the breeze, and I felt a sense of calm, like the world paused for a moment.
Read MoreYou listened to Joni Mitchell’s Blue while you were abroad. Some say an unhealthy amount, but you beg to differ. Something about the timbre of her voice resonates with traveling, long-distance train rides and loneliness. Because that’s what the feeling was, right? Loneliness?
Read MoreOne of the reasons I love children's books is that there's always an invitation to loosen and lighten up, be poured into, be lulled into a place of deeper reflection—to see yourself in mid-grapple. For that reason, happy to be nappy is much more than a children's story.
Read MoreMy mother used to tell me, “Marry a man who’s thin. It means he’s a hard worker.” As she predicted, my husband turned out to be a lot like my father. Not only were they both thin, and coincidentally hard workers, they were equally tough. My own prediction was that their thick skin was birthed from the hearty leather of bulls slaughtered by their own swords in past lives. Men like them have been around before, perhaps returned to this earth to learn a new lesson. Perhaps to walk the earth in softer-soled shoes.
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