The Monthly Theme Essays are a collection of essays written each month on a predetermined theme. These essays are always published during the last week of the month. To submit a Monthly Theme Essay check out our upcoming themes.
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For years, I kept my children’s teeth in a drawer. Wrapped in a rainbow silk, I tucked them behind the protection of scarves and mismatched socks. In preparation for a move to a new life, our belongings would sit in the liminal land of a storage unit. It didn’t feel right to put the bundle of teeth in the cardboard box behind bars.
Read MoreI thought I was done with menopause. I hadn’t had my period in over 12 months, which, according to the National Institute of Aging (NIA) definition, meant I was post-menopausal. I’d made it through a year of mood swings and depression. I adapted to thinning hair and dry skin, sleep problems, chills, joint pain, a decreased sex drive, headaches, and fatigue. An entire shelf on my bookshelf at home was dedicated to menopause related books like The Hormone Cure and Estrogen Matters. I joined an online menopause support group. I had a prescription for estrogen pills and invested more than $1k on hormone patches, so why was there blood in the toilet?
Read MoreMy father was a career military man and did three tours overseas. Each time he returned home from deployments his skill at attacking others in darkness was sharper and keener. He drank heavily and became easily enraged, used the skills he had mastered to be quick and precise when striking out at the object of his ire. The only daughter in the family, I was not spared the violence inflicted upon my four brothers. My father did not discriminate in his lashing out. My disadvantage was the possession of gloriously long dark hair that both parents insisted I grow.
Read MoreI grew up in the exalted spaces of a United Methodist Church. Dad was a pastor who, after graduating from seminary in Ohio, drove with my mother across the country to the far west of Washington, with six-month-old me strapped into a bassinet behind the front seat. In the early days of memory, I enjoyed singing hymns, drinking grape juice from thimble cups at communion, and helping Mom entertain parishioners in groups according to their last names for lunches in our home, where she served vegetable soup and black bottom cupcakes until she’d run through all the letters of the alphabet.
Read MoreAugust 1973. I had graduated from high school two months earlier and was in Potamia, my hometown in Cyprus, for the summer. Life in Potamia was hard and uncomfortable, and I had never really liked being there. My father was a farmer, and my parents had to work long hours every day on our farm to make ends meet. When we were in Potamia, my brothers and sisters worked at the farm as well. For most of the year, we, the eldest three of the five siblings, attended secondary school in Nicosia (the capital of Cyprus), where we lived with our grandparents.
Read MoreA summer camp in the Allegheny Mountains is where I lost the plan for my future. Given the early 1960s, one would have thought a loss of virginity the big event of the season, but that dropped away as casually as dandelion fluff in the wind. My lost plan was a casualty of my lost religion. I had planned a career in the church, in one of the limited options then offered to women. I entered camp as a Presbyterian and emerged as an unbeliever.
Read MoreI am so sorry everyone deconstructs and changes your beautiful,
complicated name. The pieces of your soft “ca” and lopping “o”
rebranded into southern alternatives like Caroline or Coraline or Carol
or even Carly once, after the doctor said the only Carolyn he’d ever heard
At Indian Rocks Beach, we stay in an oceanside ranch house. It is small, flat to the ground, and the walls are painted sea green. The living room is covered with sandy, shaggy orange carpet. We are vacationing with my dad’s family: his parents, his sister, her many, blonde children. Absolute chaos.
Read MoreA jumble of buildings squatted some distance away, dark, and low. Not a sight I, at my ripe old age of eight, imagined part of Dad’s homeland. Funny how things stick in your mind, from all those years ago, still sharp now, from so many decades ago. A time of our walkabout. Through ominous towns dotted trying to overwhelm desert landscapes. So different from down south coast dairy farm where I grew up. Possible to glimpse pieces of blue-gray Ocean away in divots between hills.
Read MoreA small engraved bell with a clapper sat on the teak coffee table in the room where my father lay dying. He no longer had the strength to call my mother so this was the instrument he used to summon her. I heard it from the kitchen and went into the living room.
Read MoreI didn’t learn to read until I was eight years old, a full month into second grade. It’s not something that entirely made sense, since I had learned how to spell simple words in the previous year, and I could speak English with the same ease as Spanish since the end of kindergarten. Reading, however, was something that had slipped past until the day my teacher took me aside, bewildered by my scattershot collection of knowledge.
Read MoreFront Yard
The oak tree out front sprawls, and the driveway sleeps contentedly under a blanket of its yellow pollen as we park, leaving tire marks through the fallen powder. My dad sings along to Lynyrd Skynyrd as we pile out of the car. Dad shreds an air guitar, making my brother and I laugh while my mom rolls her eyes.
Read MoreI was nursing my three-week-old baby when the phone rang. It was Jim, the husband of my dearest friend Marjy. He called to tell me she was dead.
Poof. Gone. Just like that.
Read MoreYou haven’t been home in a while. How long, I can’t quite say, but long enough for the stillness to solidify. Dust amasses discretely, until one day it forms a visible shell. I hear you brushing it off surfaces, coughing, groaning in disgust. There are many surfaces. But you’re determined.
Read MoreDear Eleven,
The fire will come and change you. I could tell you to brace yourself, but I know you won’t.
You will see the smoke rising over the hill from your seat on the school bus. You will ignore the driver’s objection and get off the bus at the wrong stop.
June 23, 1985
Dear Lourdes the Younger,
I’m sending you this love and care letter on your sixteenth birthday in the hope that it will save you from more pain and heartache. You don’t know it yet, but this summer will irrevocably change your life in ways you can’t imagine. You will fall in love, fight for love, and then, hide your love.
Read MoreIn early March 2020, my children begged me for a pet.
Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have considered their request; our lives were too busy. But the arrival of the COVID-19 virus, and the departure of regular school, work, or sleep schedules impaired my better judgement. My children sensed my vulnerability.
Read MoreFor months after my abuelita died, I slept with the covers tucked around my six-year-old face. The breeze that blew in from the Caribbean, cooling along the way as it traveled across the mountains, through the concrete city of Caracas, past the iron bars of my bedroom window, entering my mouth, my nose, my ears, felt like something my grandmother had sent from above, just for me.
Read MoreI am standing in front of the microwave with its door open, ready to insert the bag of popcorn I’ll have for dinner. As I reach for the bag, I hear the lush opening notes of “The Blue Danube Waltz” by Johann Strauss. My body freezes, immobilized as if zapped by some 1950s, paralyzing ray gun. Before I can turn around to see if it’s an ad on TV, my eyes puddle up.
Read MoreI met my grandmother Angelay but I didn’t really know her. Over the years, I’ve collected stories about her, stories told by others and stories I tell myself. But I’m not sure what is true and what isn’t. Only she could answer those questions, and she’s long gone. My mother tells me that Angelay had psychic abilities. When she left home to live abroad, Angelay reassured my mother, “You’ll always know when I need you.”
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