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Gratitude

Guest Posts, Gratitude

Gods That Sparkle in the Night

October 9, 2023
officer

I don’t know how long the highway patrol car had been following me, but when I glimpsed the flashing light in my rearview and heard the siren squawk, I switched off the music and pulled over. My heart raced. It was a late summer evening, the air thick and warm, but I felt cold; my teeth chattered. Nausea rose up and engulfed me, and I wondered if I would pass out. It had happened more than once over the last year, these attacks.

The patrol car parked behind me, filling my vehicle with light. An officer in a grey uniform and tall black leather boots strode over to my passenger side window. He bent down and beamed his flashlight in my face.

“Ma’am, are you aware that you were driving erratically?”

Just minutes before, I was tooling down this Northern California highway, wide open windows, music blasting. My fifty-year-old Mercedes had no official air conditioning, other than what I’d occasionally manage to jury-rig, namely Ziplock bags full of ice cubes tucked around my body, the intense cold delicious on my hot skin. There was to be no icy relief this night, and the sweat poured out and soaked my face and neck, trickling down my back, tickling my inner thighs. Everywhere felt itchy.

Despite the heat, I was happy to be on the road. I’d recently busted free from a three-year relationship that had allowed no space for forays, solitary or other. I still struggled to speak to people without lowering my eyes, a habit I’d learned so as to avoid appearing interested in other men.

The problem on this night began when I noticed my underwear chafing where crotch meets thigh. That morning I’d donned a skirt for strategic air flow, but the moment had arrived for the panties to come off. Besides, I was only a few miles from my new home. Who would know I’d gone commando, and who’d care? Now I could do as I liked. I kept my eyes on the road and steered with one hand as I shimmied my knickers below my hips, slid them down my legs, un-looped them over each foot before placing them on the passenger seat with a victorious flourish.

Relieved of constrictions, I was taken with the marvelous sensation of air upon skin. Stars sidled out and took their places in the darkening sky, beckoning me to leave the past behind and reorient myself in their direction. I tried to conjure the woman I was before she’d been compelled to go underground: she was curious, a jokester, someone willing to take chances. A woman who spoke freely without a second thought. She wasn’t one to duck-and-cover, to live in fear of the next outburst, the next flinging of her possessions into the street, the next haunted night. Now I could re-inhabit the old me. I could drive all night if I chose. Who’d stop me?

Just an officer who wanted to know why my car had strayed over the yellow line.

With a practiced effort, I steadied my voice. “I was just, oh, you know, taking off my underwear,” I said with a forced chuckle.

I motioned to the offending article on the seat and gave a sheepish shrug. “Wait until you hear this one,”  I pictured him telling the others back at the station. But the officer wouldn’t budge. Humor won’t help me here, I realized, a fact that always scares me.

“I’ll need to see your driver’s license.”

I froze. Had I brought it? For months I’d been skittish and absentminded, forgetting to turn off the stove, to lock the front door, to even eat or sleep. I’d also forgotten exactly why I was living with someone who could alternately love and terrorize with such skill that the swing from one to the other was as hypnotic as a pendulum.

I rummaged in my handbag, a jumbled mess. A jar of sparkly powder, the kind that women sometimes brush across their cheekbones and collarbones, had found its way into my bag. I’d never owned such a beauty product before. Maybe a previous girlfriend had left it behind in a rush and in my own rush to run away, I’d grabbed it by mistake. The lid had come off and the entire contents had spilled inside my bag, coating everything with a sheen.

I located my driver’s license, brushed it off and handed it to the officer. It was so thick with sparkly powder he couldn’t read it. He tried to rub it off and spread it all over his hands, muttering under his breath. Panic ricocheted through me like a pinball. I took deep breaths, methodically slowing my pulse down to the beat of mere dread. Over the past two years I’d learned to survive by keeping quiet, by doing as I was told, by playing dead.

“Any alcohol tonight, ma’am?” the officer asked.

“Only a beer,” I said. “Hours ago.”

“Are you sure about that?”

In one quick motion he thrust his whole torso through the window, into my car. I gasped and pulled back, expecting a blow.

“I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” he said.

I locked my eyes on his finger as it swung back and forth, to and fro, the only thing that mattered in the world, shimmering with thousands of pinpoints of refracted light. For a moment I forgot where I was.

We’d take road trips to Nevada to buy fireworks. We’d stop at an old red barn in the middle of nowhere and buy all the mortars they had, stuffing the trunk. We’d drive back at night, crossing the state line on a dark highway lit by stars. We’d wait for the first rain, then I’d set off the mortars on a mountain top near his house, lighting each fuse with a rebel yell, and people in the valley below would hoot and holler and shoot their guns in the air. I could feel his smile in the dark as he watched my pleasure in the violent noise and the floral bursts. Fire-dahlias, we called them, back when he liked my wild ways.

The officer’s sparkle-covered finger had stopped moving.

I looked up into his face, just inches from mine. He had hazel eyes and slicked-back hair the color of an old penny, and pale, freckled skin. He stared back at me, motionless, as if deciding something. I could smell his sweat mixed with coffee and car exhaust, the scent of secret burdens. I’d always been drawn to a man’s pain, determined to hunt it down and carry it away like a hero, though in the end the trying would always leave my heart sore. Even now, I lit up from the lack of shared history between this stranger and I, the mystery yet unraveled. The corners of the officer’s mouth turned up ever so slightly, and I felt my body go limp. We are gods in one another’s lives: This, I know.

The officer pulled himself back through the passenger car window and recalibrated, then handed me my license.

“Be careful out there,” he said.

He waited for me to start my car and followed me for a while as I continued north on the highway, then he made a u-turn across the yellow line and headed in the opposite direction.

I pulled up to the curb next to my new home, a tiny hideout with a patio shaded by a magnolia tree. A string of lights hung from the branches, illuminating the path to my door. I called my home the Lily Pad. A good place to land. Next door lived a baby who was just learning to talk. “No, no, no, no, no,” he liked to say, his parents laughing at his newly-discovered ability. I had decided I would not be lonely here. I would court solitude like a gallant. I would explore how the air feels on my skin when I move through space in the ways that I alone would choose.

Melinda Misuraca’s work can be found in Hidden Compass, High Times, the Best Travel Writing series, Traveler’s Tales, Craftsmanship, Adirondack Review, Natural Bridge, Portland Review, and elsewhere. She writes and teaches in California and the EU.

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Wondering what to read next? 

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

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Kirkus (starred review)

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Gratitude, Grief

I Say Goodbye and You Say Hello

June 19, 2022
flowers on table time

“When it comes time for you to leave, try to just slip away without him noticing. Do not make a big deal out of saying goodbye which could confuse him, especially in the beginning.”

That was the advice the nurse manager gave to my family when we moved my dad into a memory unit once his Alzheimer’s became too much for my mom to manage at home. The thought of leaving without saying goodbye made my heart break, but I wanted to do the right thing for my dad so I would visit and then wordlessly walk away, wondering how soon or if he ever noticed I was no longer holding his hand and walking the hallways alongside him. Soon I missed the bear hugs that were always a part of our farewell ritual, so I would begin our visits with them instead. “Dad, I’m going to leave in a little while,” I would say, hugging him when I first arrived. “This is me saying goodbye now in case I don’t have the chance to later.”

One time, about six months into my dad’s stay, I tried to slip away, but he kept following me. I could not make myself leave while he was standing there watching me. A member of staff noticed and tried to redirect my dad, but my dad, who by now rarely spoke out loud, stood his ground and said to her, “leave me alone, I just want to say goodbye to my daughter”. That was all the permission I needed to rush into his arms for that familiar hug, look into his eyes and say “goodbye for now, dad,” which I did at the end of every visit after that.

I said my final goodbye to him as he was taking his last breaths, grateful to be able to be with him in spite of the pandemic. Or at least I thought I said my final goodbye. Minutes after my dad passed away I had to call the funeral director. Saying out loud, for the first time that my dad died felt like I was saying goodbye all over again.

The conversation with the funeral director was just the beginning. The next morning I had to call the rabbi and the cemetery to make burial arrangements. There were uncles, aunts and cousins to be notified. Each call, each time I had to repeat the words ‘my dad died’, was like re-opening a goodbye wound that was barely beginning to heal. I began to wonder if it ever would.

Once I came home from the funeral I had to tie up my dad’s affairs, calling his bank, insurance, credit card and several other companies to tell them my dad died. Over and over again I found myself saying goodbye to my father for what I thought was the last time and each time was as painful as those early days in the assisted-living memory unit and the day he died.

For the first few weeks after my dad passed, I experienced pop-up grief that would come as I was driving to the grocery store or gassing up my car or making dinner. A flash memory of my dad – teaching me to check the oil in my first car or standing by the stove chopping onions for his famous home fries – would hit me and instantly tears would flow. And with each time, I felt another painful goodbye. Desperate for help, I finally asked my dad to send me a sign to let me know that he was okay and that I would be okay, and maybe my pop-up grief and ‘goodbye’ pain would stop.

In early January a friend sent me a calendar she made to celebrate the new year. As soon as it arrived I looked through and noticed she added a little saying to one day of each month.  On January 1st she put ‘Happier New Year’. On February 23rd, ‘It’s a glorious day’. I skipped to June to see the message for my birth month, and saw ‘Someone is missing you’ on the 17th, which happens to be my dad’s birthday. And there he was, popping up to say…hello.

Devra Lee Fishman is a writer and long-time hospice and hospital volunteer, in awe of and fascinated by death, life and all the experiences in between. Her essays have been published in The Saturday Evening Post, The Manifest-Station and Laura Munson’s summer guest blog series. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia.

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“Blistering and visionary . . . This is the author’s best yet.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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Statement on Black Lives Matter and support for social change

Guest Posts, Gratitude

Plants, Life and Death

February 8, 2022
plants

I’m in a garden with a potential new client, a veterinarian. She has some tough growing conditions: in the back of the house, there’s dense shade, Japanese maple roots that inhibit the survival of anything planted in the ground nearby, and, in the front, five window boxes in blazing sun without an easy way to water them.

I see her cats through the window. One of the cats, a big tabby, is rubbing up against the window when I put my hand there. I tell her I’ve got a special affection for tabbies, as I interact with the cat through the closed window. She’s surprised, says the cat usually runs and hides from people he doesn’t know, but he seems to be enjoying my attention behind the safety of the glass.

I notice the cat has an interesting colored eye; green on top with gold running diagonally across the bottom. I comment on the cool coloring and she responds that… it is cool looking… but that sometimes eye discoloration in cats is a sign of cancer, and that the only way to know for sure is to biopsy it by removing the eye. Then, she says, she’s glad she didn’t do that, because now the second eye is becoming discolored as well.

I’m embarrassed for having called the cat’s eyes cool looking, now that I know the possible cause.

We go back to talking about plants,  she tells me what she’s tried, what’s worked and what hasn’t, what’s worked on one side of the yard, but not the other.  I name some plants that she hasn’t tried, plants might work in her yard.  I pull up photos of those plants on my phone to show her, and we talk about where I could plant them.

I tell her, too, that it’s sometimes an experiment, we’ll try different plants.

She says: I trust that you know what you’re doing, that you’ll find something that will work.

I say, well, I do know what I’m doing. But that doesn’t mean that sometimes I’m not  experimenting, I try different things and see what makes it, and sometimes plants die anyway.

I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing. I think about her patients, cats that she may not have been able to save, I think about her own cat who might have cancer in his eyes.  I’m sure she knows what she’s doing, and, maybe, sometimes trying to figure out how to save a cat is an experiment, too.

I think about the people I worked with in Harm Reduction – people who were injecting heroin, and sometimes cocaine and other drugs, and engaging in other activities that put them at high risk for HIV and other diseases.

I think about all the people who might not be saved despite the most knowledgeable doctors, the most equipped hospitals and the best medicine.

I’ve told people that I switched from working in Harm Reduction to gardening because the stakes are so much lower. I am grateful that my responsibility is now limited to the lives of plants.

Carrie Borgenicht lives, gardens, pets cats, and occasionally writes in Philadelphia, PA.

Guest Posts, Gratitude

Perspective

November 13, 2020
think

By Erica Hoffmeister

Don’t think about how much you hate parenting. Not being a mother, not mothering, not your children—you love those, you do, really, you do—you just hate parenthood. The menial, daily, repetitive tasks that send you into a spiral. So, tell yourself it’s natural to hate sweeping the floors six times a day. Tell yourself no one enjoys doing other people’s dishes for zero wages or applause. Tell yourself hating these things does not make you a bad mother, does not make you love your children less. Don’t think about how much you often hate breastfeeding, the constant tug and pull and smothering of your skin and parts. Don’t think about how much you’ve actually always hated the company of children, even as a child, how you find them overall insufferable and annoying. Tell yourself your own children are excluded from this blanket opinion. Tell yourself you will do crafts with them tomorrow, like your mother did with you, like your husband’s mother does with them. Tell yourself you’ll build a fort with them, play dress up, teach them their letters and numbers by singing to them, banging on a ukulele. Remind yourself these things are supposed to be fun, not annoying. Not a chore. Look on Pinterest for ideas, plan a social media post to keep yourself accountable. Don’t check that friend of yours that became an “affirmation coach” and don’t think about how stupid you think all of that garbage is. Don’t think about lighting a candle and doing it yourself. Tell yourself you don’t need positive thinking. Tell yourself you’re a realist.

Don’t think about how much you miss not having children. Not being someone’s wife or mother. Not belonging to anything but the earth. Not being anyone’s every or any need. Don’t separate those feelings by dividing memory by before and after so you miss yourself before. Don’t think about how wonderful it would be to see a movie alone, whatever movie you want at whatever time of day. Don’t think about all the times you’ve cried cathartic in the back row of a movie theater because you didn’t have to share the popcorn or the drink or wave little toys around a child’s face or walk a toddler back and forth from the bathroom twenty-seven times, distracted through every important scene. Don’t think about how much you want to get in your car like you did when you were twenty-three and drive down the highway until your gas bleeds half dry, then drive back just for the hell of it. Don’t think about the fact you no longer own a car, how you traded your first in for your husband’s city bike and drive a family car now that only gets 10mpg so you can’t afford spontaneous highway drives, anyway. Don’t think about the hours you’d spend as a teenager locked in your bedroom staring at the ceiling, how much you loved silence, no one touching you, or speaking to you, even before you understood the value of boredom. Don’t think about the unread stack of books in your nightstand. About your chewed finger-beds that bleed into rounded stubs, years from your last manicure.

Don’t think about the guilt imbedded in all these fantasies. Tell yourself this guilt is proof you love your children. Don’t try to pinpoint the guilt’s genesis, when it starts in your life along the timeline of regret. Don’t think about regret. Don’t think about the hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt you are. Don’t think about your useless degrees, your nonexistent career. Tell yourself you’re taking this time to raise your children. Tell yourself this is your choice, that you chose this. You chose this. You chose this. You chose this. Don’t think about countries that have paid maternity leave or affordable childcare. Don’t think about your credit card debt you lived off of because you are not a citizen of one of those countries. Don’t think about how it’s really not the country’s fault you drank and snorted your way out of grad school and then didn’t write a single thing for six years. Don’t think about the karma you earned in that fruitless interim. Tell yourself it wasn’t fruitless, that no experience means nothing as a writer. That it was all for the greater good. Don’t think about how you made all the same mistakes the second time around. Don’t consider choosing your husband over everything else a mistake, think about how you should have prioritized yourself and your career and your future over him when you met instead of falling in love instantly, and rearranged everything to be with him. Don’t remind yourself how many times you’ve done that in your lifetime. Don’t think about how you aren’t published yet. Or at least not enough. How much you hate yourself for wasting your kid-free years not banging out fourteen novels, or something, because now you write in the lost corners of some morning hours,  lucky to get even ten uninterrupted minutes and you really think that whole story about how Stephenie Meyer wrote the Twilight series by the pool while watching her kids swim is a goddamn lie. Remind yourself that you have, in fact, published a lot, and that not it’s not profit, but the act writing that makes you a writer. Don’t think about how you are going to stretch fifty-four dollars for a week’s worth of groceries because being a low-level technically-published writer means still working in a bar. Don’t think about the men that hit on you while you serve tables. Don’t think about how you are still, after seventeen years, still serving tables. Don’t think about why. Tell yourself it’s nice to get out of the house. Tell yourself it’s nice to talk to adults. Tell yourself anything while you do it so no one can see the pain and regret and annoyance and hatred on your face so that you still make at least 20% in tips a night.

Don’t think about the guilt or the shame or regret. Don’t tell anyone. Don’t make new friends and don’t maintain old friendships so you won’t risk spilling it all out over coffee, or a more likely, few drinks.

Don’t think about how the world is ending anyway—stop reminding people of this in person in general. They know. We all know. Stop feeling guilty for having children and helping the world end faster. Stop trying to de-age in general. Stop thinking about all the things other people your age have done in comparison. Don’t think about your empty passport pages, your children’s hand-me-downs, your WIC card. Don’t think about your mom, and how she’ll never retire, or how she takes out credit cards to pay for Christmas presents. Don’t think about how poverty is a cycle, is insidious. Don’t think about how you may have escaped it, but now how everything tastes like Shit on a Shingle.

Think about this instead:

Wrap yourself in the memory of how the sun felt pouring through an open window while driving down Highway 1, feel this sensation when your baby snuggles beside you, her big eyes swallowing the sky whole. Or, the first time you witnessed your toddler perform on stage, exuding more confidence than you’ve had in your entire lifetime, how she unabashedly shares her mind, and how you think of her when you’re scared to tell the truth in public spaces.

Think fondly of before:

The lowlight of city sidewalks on an October afternoon as you hazily held the hand of a new lover and made him your whole life. How you repave entire cities and worlds to find your own path, how unapologetically courageous it is to head into things straight-on, even in the hard times, when you crave stillness. Seek for stillness in the long nights, the tufts of the baby’s hair between your fingertips, your husband’s toes between the arches of your feet to keep them warm. Imagine how your spaghetti sauce tastes only to your daughter, how she’ll spend the better part of her college years missing it with such fierceness, she’ll visit you twice as often—don’t tell her your secret, that it’s canned tomatoes and jarred garlic—so that she’ll keep coming home to ask for it.

Think about your smallness, your bigness, of the impossibility it is to have known it all before, just to have it all then.

Think about Paris in wintertime, the streets slack with moisture, the sound of your heels clicking across cobblestone the night you turned thirty. Think about how that memory will never fade, never disappear into the disintegrated soapy sponge, worn from overuse, how your sense of self has not really been suckled dry by breastfeeding your children, how your abs are still there, below the torn muscle from giving life. That your skin still glows between stress wrinkles, and by God, that your talent for cooking dinner is unmatched, and how no one does that for their families every night anymore but you.

Think of your own mother, the way she looked so tired and faraway, and yet, still held your hand in a gentle squeeze, still rubbed the back of your hand when you were sick, still loved you before and after all her past lives gelled together into yours.

Think of the universe, and stardust, and blackholes, all the shades of green that grass blades can be, how Montana’s horizon looks like a curved earth when it swallows sunset at 10p.m., or the skin of a ripe plum off your childhood tree. How nothing, and everything is just as hard as it always was—how nothing and everything is still inside you, no matter how many times you’ve swept or neglected to sweep the kitchen floors on any given day.

Erica Hoffmeister teaches college writing across the Denver Metro area and holds an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Chapman University. She is the author of two poetry collections: Lived in Bars (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), and the prize-winning chapbook, Roots Grew Wild (Kingdoms in the Wild Press, 2019), but considers herself a cross-genre writer. She has had a variety of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and essays published in several journals and magazines, earning several accolades. She’s obsessed with pop culture, horror films, cross country road trips, and her two daughters, Scout and Lux. You can learn more about her at: https://www.ericahoffmeister.com/

Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option.

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Guest Posts, Gratitude, memories

Take The R Train

April 2, 2020
choice

By Laraine Herring

My mother could have remained in Bay Ridge, taking the R train into Lower Manhattan to work at the Stock Exchange. She could have not met my father, who could have passed Spanish at Wake Forest and graduated there instead of transferring to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where they did not require two years of Spanish for a History major, where he did meet my mother, who was the first female accepted into the graduate school of mathematics at Chapel Hill, at an uncharacteristic football game where she’d gone with her roommate as an out for her blind date. But if she had remained working at the Stock Exchange riding the R train this would not have happened.

My father would have married a woman named Betty, not Elinor. I’m reasonably confident of this because when he died we found drawings Betty had made for him of his face, his golf swing, his eyes, and she called the house a lot and tried to make friends with my mother. She stopped calling once we moved from North Carolina to Arizona, but I still have one of the pictures she drew in a box in my closet. She could have been my mother, but there’s a reasonable chance she is dead now, or at the very least married to someone who never quite measured up to my father, but who nonetheless was a decent man. Betty could be writing this piece too. She would start with: I might have married Glenn…and I don’t know what she would have written next because I don’t know her. But I have her picture.

My father could have died with the polio in 1949 like he was supposed to. Like everyone did. Like the boy who was in the iron lung next to his who died in the night, my father talking to him in the dark, not realizing he had gone. The boy’s name was Charlie, and the two times my father spoke of him, he trailed off into ellipses.

Charlie could have lived like my father lived. He could have broken out of the iron lung and not imprinted my father with his death in the night. It is hard for a boy of eight to carry the death of a boy of seven in the dark. That’s a weight that lingers, like the bitter of chocolate.

My father could have died in 1976 after his heart attack like he was supposed to. Like the doctors said he would. Like maybe he would have, except one round of doctors had already told him in 1949 he should have died and he told them he was not going to die and so he had a script for what to do the next time he heard that.

I could have died in 2017 of colon cancer, but I didn’t. I knew how to tell the doctors no because my father told them no twice. Even when he died, he told them no. He pulled out his tubes in unconscious urgency. He clawed at his oxygen. It was his time for dying, and he was telling them no to the saving.

If my father hadn’t died in 1987, I would have gone to Oregon. I had a scholarship to William and Mary and I was desperate to get out of the desert and into the green. But I graduated from high school in 1986 and I knew I couldn’t go because my father was dying and so I didn’t go, but every time I visit the Northwest I see my shadow in the train and I see a possible life where I wouldn’t have met my husband, who is a born and bred Northern Arizona man, a man who becomes sad in the rain. Too much sun makes me sad, but not my husband, and somewhere between 1986 and now I realized that every choice I make may not give me everything I want. Every choice is many choices. I can visit the trees and the water and the damp, but I slept with many wrong people before I met my husband and I know what right feels like now, even if it’s in the desert.

If I hadn’t lived with the abuser in 1988 after my father died, I wouldn’t have had my heart smashed open to an empathy I didn’t know was possible. Or I might have died there. Other women do. I walked out of their graveyard.

If my father’s family had not been Southern Baptist we might have remained in the will and could be living in North Carolina by the Atlantic in the family home. We could have an altar of sand dollars on the dining table, gathered over years of morning walks at low tide. I might wear navy and forgo white after Labor Day and know how to can peaches. But probably not.

If I had stayed in Phoenix in 2003 instead of moving to Prescott—I had to get out of the haunting heat-sun—I wouldn’t have met my husband. I left Phoenix because a tree fell on my house and then I had a dream that echoed the dream I had when we first moved to Phoenix in 1981—I will die in this place if I don’t leave—and so I was gone in a month. This is the only time in my life I made a decision of that magnitude so quickly.

That’s not true. I told the oncologist I would not do chemotherapy and radiation even quicker. They pushed it like a desperate realtor hawking swampland in Florida but I said no. I come from a long line of people who told the doctors no. They were exasperated and fired me as a patient. This was OK because I am not patient.

If I hadn’t told my doctors no, I wouldn’t have met the psychic in Encinitas the year after my surgery who handed me a rose quartz and looked me straight like only the real psychics can do and said, “It must have been so hard for you to fight for your body’s intuition.” And I cried in the middle of the psychic fair, watching the Pacific breeze blowing her psychedelic psychic skirt around her legs. She was the first person to recognize that—the first person to let me recognize that—yes, yes, I had to fight to say no. I had to fight. The wrong choice was easier. The wrong choice was covered by insurance. My wrong choices—every single one of them—were the easier decisions. The ones that cost me my voice.

“I didn’t know how hard it would be,” I told her. Harder than cancer. Harder than surgery. The refusal to walk the pre-written cancer-journey-story filleted me. “If I did chemo, I would die,” I said. And she held my hands and let me cry and the ocean carried my salt away like she always does.

If my mother had stayed in Bay Ridge riding the R train, I wouldn’t be with her today, riding the R train, returning to Bay Ridge to eat pizza at Lucas, which is now the Brooklyn Firefly, because it was where they went for pizza when she was a girl, back when she wasn’t allowed in the special math and science high school because it was only for boys, back when my father was learning how to walk again and Betty was drawing his picture and I was waiting somewhere velvet-dark until I found the woman who was strong enough to bear all of me.

Laraine Herring holds an MFA in creative writing and an MA in counseling psychology. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in national and local publications. Her fiction has won the Barbara Deming Award for Women and her nonfiction work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in K’in, Tiferet Journal, The Manifest-Station, Quiet Storm, Vice-Versa, and others. She currently directs the creative writing program at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona. She can be found online at www.laraineherring.com.

 

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Guest Posts, Gratitude, Jen Pastiloff, On Being Human

A Note from Jen and Angela: We Are Back!

July 2, 2019
back

Hey everyone! We are back! It’s been a while since we’ve posted, but so much has happened! The big news is that “On Being Human” is in bookstores now! The book was named by both The Washington Post and Inc.com as must a read during the summer – can you believe it? Jen has started touring the country and will be doing both book signings and workshops. She started off July in Denver and is headed East for stops up and down the coast over the month. Details on upcoming events can be found here.

Angela’s life has been about book launch party planning, easing into summer, writing, reading, and getting used to being engaged to The Guy. Not quite as glamorous as having a best-selling book out, but just as over the moon exciting (especially the bit about The Guy).

We both so appreciate your patience during the needed hiatus and are thrilled to be back at it with new posts scheduled starting next week. The essays we are going through are amazing and we are always eager to read more, so don’t hesitate to submit a finished piece about no bullshit mother hood, perspective from a young voice, or observations on making it all work (or not!) If you haven’t received a response on your piece or are looking to know when it is scheduled, send Angela a note and she will get back to you.

In the coming days we will have a form on the site where you can give us feedback on features and themes you want to hear about, so keep an eye out. We want to hear from you and are excited about what ideas you have for the site.

Thank you so much for joining us on this crazy ride and enjoy the long holiday weekend!

xoxo-

Jen and Angela

P.S. If you don’t already, follow us on Instagram and Facebook. Jen can be found here and here. Angela can be found here and here.

P.P.S. Don’t be an asshole.

 

Guest Posts, Gratitude, Travels

The Lasting Impact of “One Last Thing”

January 5, 2017
nourished

By Kristin O’Keefe

Of course she paced the van’s third row. Zoe knew what suitcases signified and she did not like to be left.

Abused as a puppy, our rescue dog would flinch when strangers raised a hand to pet her. She got better over time, but she was still frugal with affection. Zoe loved five people: my husband, our two children, my father and me. She tolerated everyone else.

Unfortunately for the dog, we promised friends in Europe that this was the year we’d visit.

At least Zoe wouldn’t be kenneled; she was old and sensitive and keened mournfully the times we dropped her at one. She’d be with family: first my sister-in-laws’ home for a few days, then off to my parents, where she’d rest her head on my father’s lap and patiently wait to be petted. Our dog was in good hands. Continue Reading…

Gratitude, Guest Posts

The Peak of Morning

September 9, 2016
window

TW: This essay mentions miscarriage.

By Lauren Myers

This morning after my 4-year old son pushed a full bowl of raisin bran and milk to the floor while complaining that there weren’t enough raisins, I yelled. He didn’t mean for it to land on the floor, but I yelled anyway. I grunted, too. I told my brown- eyed, tousle- haired boy, “I can’t even look at you right now.” Ten minutes later we held hands and sang the do over song, a song I made up one morning after a different day started out poorly (this time with his twin sister pinching his arm until he squealed). These moments, soppy or jagged, I can never get back.  A do over would be nice sometimes.

***

Seven years ago I left Boston for Uruguay a free-spirited woman, who thought it was nothing to pack her bags and move to a Spanish speaking country where she didn’t know the language for a man she fell in love with in ten days. Everyone had warned me to be careful, but I didn’t want to fear love at 43.

That first night we had met at a dim lit bar, his brown eyes remained transfixed on the keyboard of his phone despite me whispering about him to my friend as I peered at him without hiding it. His dark curls hung thick as his skin, and his sturdy frame appealed to me under a pilled sweater that smelled of musty wool as if it just came out of winter storage. Strange that a smell such as this would intoxicate me to this day. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Gratitude

A Good Man

August 19, 2016
man

By Ruth Dawkins

I stand in line at the bookstore. In one hand is Gould’s Book of Fish; in the other is The Sound of One Hand Clapping.

“Which would you recommend for someone who’s new to Flanagan?” I ask.

“I love Gould,” says the assistant. “It’s a really beautiful book, but not easy. Clapping is good too, it’s more accessible.”

I keep weighing the two books up in my palms; I’ve read neither of them, so have nothing to go on but the blurbs. Which one best encapsulates Tasmania? Perhaps I should buy Narrow Road to the Deep North instead, but it feels like a predictable choice and all the award publicity means there’s a stronger chance he’ll already have it.

“I’ll go with Gould,” I say eventually. “It’s for an English teacher, I’m sure he can handle it.”

Later that day I stand in line again. I’m at the post office this time, holding a brown cardboard box that contains the book, a bottle of whisky small enough to escape the attention of customs, and a short, handwritten note. At the last minute I almost throw in some kids’ candy, and add a line to the note saying my son helped me pack the box, but I decide not to. Making up a cute story about my five-year-old’s involvement will make the whole exercise feel more weird, not less.

I reach the counter, pay forty dollars to send the parcel to Scotland, and then I wait.

A month passes. There is nothing. Then it’s two months, and I try to stop thinking about it, but I can’t help myself. It’s possible that the parcel has gone astray, but it’s also possible that I’ve made a spectacular misjudgement. Perhaps he hates Richard Flanagan. Perhaps he’s a recovering alcoholic and sending whisky is the worst possible thing I could have done. Perhaps he just doesn’t like to hear from former pupils, especially those who used to be in love with him. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Fear, Gratitude

WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED

August 13, 2016
running

By Kate Abbott

I didn’t know it at the time, but my writing was born on the night I nearly died.   Maybe born is too strong a word but let’s just say I was incentivized by the horror.  Not the horror of what actually happened, but by what could have happened.

I am an ordinary mother.  I don’t suffer from any health issues, well except for my obsession with running, and my kids, thankfully, are well adjusted, at least most days.  I try my best to make my sons’ lives extraordinary and normal at the same time.

It started with a fifth grade science fair project.  After procrastinating to the last possible moment, my eldest came up with his concept: sleep deprivation.  He planned to keep his father up all night and take notes on whether there were hallucinations.   The only wrinkle: dad was out of the country until after the project was due.   No matter, I told my son, mom can step in.  I had an ulterior motive.   In a moment of madness known to afflict runners during post-race bliss, I had signed up for a 100 mile race.   This necessarily meant that I would be running, or if not running at least hopefully moving forward, for probably 36 hours.   An overnight training run was strongly recommended.

And that was why I was outside in the rain as Friday night turned into Saturday morning.  I was doing various loops around the neighborhood, checking in every 45 minutes to have my mental status assessed by my son, who was playing video games.  The idea was to compare the effects of sleep deprivation on a subject who was engaging in physical exercise with that of one who was engaging in a mental activity.   He’d compiled a list of math problems that we would do. Continue Reading…