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women

Guest Posts, motherhood

Is Motherhood the Loneliest Time of All?

April 9, 2019
playgrops

By Claire Fitzsimmons

“I need new friends.” That’s what I was thinking as I sat in a café in San Francisco in the middle of the afternoon. I was on my own. Soup and salad. And my two month-old son on my lap.

I expected to feel a lot of things when I had a baby, but not lonely. My childless friends were all at work. My family was all the way in the UK where I’d left them a few years before. It was just my husband, myself and our son, Sam.

I needed mummy friends. But how to do this when my boobs were leaking, I was grumpy from no sleep and I had nothing to say that didn’t begin with my child’s name? I’d tried a couple of things already that clearly weren’t working. I walked through my neighborhood smiling clumsily at new mums. I sat in the playground looking approachable, hoping I’d get picked up. A local playspace had the prospects of a nightclub; tea had replaced vodka tonics and circle time the dance floor. I made eye contact, feigned interest, but it wasn’t happening.

As I was in the United States, this was clearly the moment to be proactive and to join a playgroup, which have become as necessary here to modern parenting as baby yoga, birth announcements and Bugaboos.

I’ve never been on a blind date and I’m not a natural joiner, but I found myself turning up, late (as I always am now), to a playgroup formation convened by my local mother’s group. Faced with a room of 60 women, some with babes in arms and each filled with the bubbling expectancy of new relationships, this was speed-dating, mummy-style. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Pregnancy, Relationships

Someday, Baby

September 26, 2018
fire

By Alayna Becker

It’s wildfire season in Spokane, so I’m stuck inside Crosswalk, the teen homeless shelter where I work. I’m the summer employment specialist, hired to help the homeless kids in my group learn to get a job and hopefully keep it. 12 kids are supposed to show up, but only two, Jessica and Reya are here and a third, Makayla is on her way.  Usually we go outside to do the job the city gave us a grant to do – measure the slopes and accessibility of streets all over the downtown area, but today the whole city is obscured by the haze from fires on the edge of town. Walking feels like wading through a swamp.

My title, employment specialist seems ironic because for the past couple of years I’ve been pretty much unemployed. Mainly I participated in medical studies while co-conspirator roommate sold her plasma. I had a job working for a place that did digital investigations on people that were accused of looking at child porn, but when I accidentally saw a picture of a little girl in her pink underwear over the shoulder of one of the other employees, I left and never went back. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts

21st Century Woman: A 20-something’s Ascent into Feminist Ethics

April 2, 2018

By Maria Prudente

On the night of the presidential election, a breakup of mine coincided with Trump’s victory. I couldn’t help but notice the symmetry of two completely annoying things happening simultaneously: a win for a man known for objectifying women and a breakup initiated by a guy who had spent several months objectifying me. One event was meaningful to me so, sorry to the dude who promptly unfollowed me on Instagram but our breakup was small potatoes. I spent the rest of the year dedicating myself to things that were more important: my career, education, health. Men were left off that list. Continue Reading…

Grief, Guest Posts, healing

Hidden Love

March 30, 2018

By Jamie Della

She was a mystery, a ghost as close as my skin. I discovered her love through the scent of old photographs and White Shoulders perfume. And there she was: Della Ruiz Martinez, my nana.

I bought a bottle of White Shoulders when I discovered it was her favorite perfume. I was 19. The first whiff of bergamot is astringent and sharp, like her acerbic tongue. They say she could cut you to pieces with her words. She was a Scorpio woman: born on November 12, 1920 and died November 14, 1967 – 39 days before I was born. They say she happily anticipated the birth of her first grandchild. But liver disease prevented her from holding me in her loving arms. She became two-dimensional and flat: a framed image of young Della at four-years-old, a brown-skinned cherub with a crown of baby’s breath at an altar. They gave me her name as my middle name: an angel and a legacy. It was nearly twenty years before I saw another picture of her. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood

Unbasic Bitch

March 28, 2018
imperfect

By Sarah Huffer

Fitting in is the most miserable decision of my life.

I’m clumsy and mostly awkward. Weirdly happy and bright. Somewhere in life, I decided I needed to blend. Like ya’ll blend eyeshadow. I smudged my personality until I became one watered down fragment of a soul without any defining characteristics.

I agreed with the crowd. I contoured my face(I still suck at this). I worshipped fall. I pinned Pinterest projects. Should I buy a salt rock lamp or eat kale? I was powerless to Target.

Even more, I highlighted the best parts of my life to portray my life. In reality, I couldn’t keep up with the dishes. I burn bread. My kids were feeding their healthy desserts to the dogs. My youngest daughter is, literally, pissed off all the time. She only smiles when you are hurting yourself. Continue Reading…

Friendship, Guest Posts

The Sisterhood of the Jade Fountain

March 14, 2018
jade

By Barbara Krasner

On the night before Passover in the spring of 1972, my mother pointed to our front door and said, “Out! All of you, out!” She wanted us out of the house so she and our longtime housekeeper, Clara, could change the dishes for the holiday. Changing the dishes was a Passover rite of passage and meant changing pots and pans, all silverware, tablecloths, even re-lining the cabinets.

My mother handed my eldest sister, Eileen, a wad of money.  Eileen, twenty-two, in turn, ushered us— my middle sister, Evelyn, eighteen, and my twin, Andrea and me, fourteen—to her red 1966 Ford Falcon. My mother’s mission was clear: Have dinner out at the Jade Fountain. It was situated in the next town, North Arlington, where our father had grown up and where he owned two supermarkets, a Jewish-owned business in a town governed by the Roman Catholic Church, specifically Queen of Peace, which stood across the street from our flagship store.

We passed Krasner’s Market on our way, that part of Ridge Road that intersects with Sunset Avenue, where my immigrant grandparents settled and set up their mom-and-pop shop in 1920. Farther north on Ridge Road, Eileen pulled into an alley which led to a parking lot behind the restaurant. Kitchen workers on break stood by the back door and the garbage cans. Already we could smell the fried grease mixed with sesame oil. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Self Image

Pale Pink Robe

April 16, 2017

By Anonymous

I have a pale pink silk robe hanging in my closet.  Every time I open the door, it makes me feel delicate and artful and foreign and adventurous. In life, I am better off in a gray zippered sweatshirt because of the coffee I dribble, the olive oil spatters that zap me when stir-frying onions, the mascara wiped on my sleeves from the night before. Once a week I put the silk on, feel chilly, and go back to the sweatshirt.

But, god, I love that robe.

I bought it at the Casbah on Sunset. The Casbah was my favorite place to write ten years ago. Everything was beautiful and curated and sheer and perfect and the coffee was strong and there was the sense that the owner didn’t treat the staff like garbage. It was a good place to be. A good place to write and get hopped up on caffeine and candied apricots and look at huaraches and baby T-shirts and Turkish towels I could not afford.

When I look at the robe in my closet now, I think of the day I got it. I was with two friends. I had stared at it during previous visits. The perfect, barely blushing pin-up, nippley shade of pink with a muted, red, woodblock pattern, a simple cut, sheer-ish, a belt. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, The Body

Mythical Beasts

March 28, 2017
hair

By Beth Cartino

“Don’t you secretly want to be fuckable?”

We were in my small kitchen and I was cutting her bangs when she asked me this.  I had just finished dying her hair to cover the course white wires that were sprouting and multiplying on her scalp. I froze for an instant comb and shears halted in midair and then…

“No,” I said the word with conviction. Her brown eyes peered up at me through her thick dark brown hair, I could feel her assessing my answer trying to decide if it was the truth, and I looked way from her focusing instead on making sure her bangs weren’t crooked.  We were both silent for a while and I moved around to the side and began to cut in long layers to frame her oval face (the perfect face shape according to every fashion magazine ever).  Into the silence and safely unable to make eye contact with me she says, “I always want guys to want me, you know? I’m single and I’m almost fifty.”

I hear the unasked question in the slight tremble that enters her voice and the way it raises in pitch at the end.

What if no one ever wants me again?

What if this is it?

What if I die alone? Continue Reading…

depression, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, Writing & The Body

A Tale of 19 Wet Towels or How I Failed to Shed My Skin

March 23, 2017
towel

By Ella Wilson.

1. Birth

Every time in my life that I have had the opportunity – that is to say I have been in the presence of a huge coming or going or leaving or starting, a massive adding on or taking away – every time I have had the chance to step out, to leave behind, to shed, to transform, to butterfly, to snake – every time I could have showered off the detritus of some time in my life that lay heavy on my skin. Every time I could have grown, instead I wet-toweled.

2. Starting school

Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.

3. Suicide attempt age 12

You shiver at first because the wet towel makes you cold. The weight of it makes you slow. After a few days you start to smell old and nothing seems like a very good idea.

4. Puberty

Shame is sticky and the antidote to transformation.

5. Losing my virginity

Shame tells you to hide, unfortunately the tools it gives you for hiding promote shame on shame. Shameless self promotion.

6. Leaving school

When you would rather not be seen it is preferable to hide in anything you can find.

7. Leaving home

8. Getting a job

9. My father dying

When my father died I did not notice. This is not because I was not paying attention exactly, in fact I paid so much attention, maybe too much. Nursing him from when I was 13 to 22. But something can become normal, like someone being ill, like thinking someone won’t really die. So I slept on his hospital floor for months. I swabbed his throat with little pink sponges. I knew the nurses names. He died. I wanted to stay on the floor. I wasn’t ready not to have a father. I wore his clothes. I didn’t cry. I did not become fatherless. I just became personless.

10. Moving to America

11. Being hospitalized for anorexia

12. Getting married Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Sexual Assault/Rape, Vulnerability

Sexual Vulnerabilities: An Education

January 8, 2017
sex

CW: This essay discusses sexual assault.

By Beatrice M. Hogg

After hearing all of the recent media reports of sexual assault and improprieties, I wanted to think, “Glad that never happened to me.” But, like most women in this country, I couldn’t do it. In one way or another, it has happened to all of us. I have friends who have been raped and assaulted; amazing women who at some point barely escaped with their lives from domestic abuse. Some still have physical scars and many others still harbor emotional scars. When I started to think about my own life, I was surprised at all of the incidents that rushed to mind, some that I hadn’t thought about in years.

In my tiny coal-mining hometown, there was a small grocery store, owned by a husband and wife. When I was eleven or twelve in the late sixties, I would walk up there alone with a list of things to get for my mother. I always dreaded when the list included a meat item. That meant that I had to go to the back of the store, where the husband worked behind the meat counter. Almost every time I would go back there, he would come out from behind the counter to give me a big hug. His hugs always included a squeeze or a grope of my burgeoning breasts. I never told anyone. Would my father have believed me? In a town were everyone was armed, would he have gone up there with a shotgun? Would he have accused me of lying? Who was more credible, a shy little black girl or the friendly white grocer who everyone in town loved? As I took my meat purchases to the front of the store for the wife to ring out, I used to wonder – did he do that every girl? Did she know? I was overjoyed when the store went out of business. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, infertility

What The Body Knows

December 10, 2016
compass

By Emily Stoddard

Hysterosalpingogram. There is not enough space in my mouth for the word, yet here I am on the exam table, having the procedure that I cannot say. They fill my uterus with dye. On the X-Ray screen, I watch the fluid expand. I think of it as a sort of carbon dating. We are here to decide how authentic my uterus is.

I remember when I prayed for blood from my uterus. In the back of my middle school journals, I hid a list of girls who had already gotten their periods, according to recess gossip. I knew I was one of the last to start. The knowing held me like a map: You are here.

And now, we are deciding whether my uterus is only a diorama, an altar to something imagined, like those names in my seventh grade journal. We send fluid back, inward. I send small prayers with it. For a new map. Now for different reasons, but also the same reason—to be like the other girls.

The dye flushes deeper, into the fallopian tubes. Fallopian. It sounds as distant as an ancient civilization, until a flare of pain reminds me that Fallopian is within me. Part of my body. I had been tracing the X-Ray screen and wondering what languages they speak there, what weather they have.

The nurse breaks in to report: “Sometimes, we just need to clear the dust bunnies, to get the tubes to behave like they should.” Continue Reading…

Friendship, Guest Posts, Women

A Small Coin For Your Thinking

December 3, 2016
coin

By Liane Kupferberg Carter

“I’m kidnapping you to Italy and this time I’m not taking no for an answer,” my college roommate Pat announces.

Pat bought a vacation house in Umbria, Italy eight years ago, but my husband Marc and I have never visited. We aren’t able to travel together much because we have a developmentally disabled son. “You should go with Pat,” Marc says. “It’s the trip of a lifetime.”

Still, travel is a mixed bag. There’s the pleasure of it, of course. But there is always an undercurrent of longing and sadness too. I so wish Marc and I could travel together. And I feel guilty. Doesn’t he deserve some respite too? Why should I be the one who gets to go gallivanting?

“What can I bring you?” I ask him. “Gloves? A wallet? Wine?”

“An ancient Etruscan artifact,” he says.

“Right,” I say. “I’ll go digging up Pat’s back yard.”

Pat has invited three of her closest friends. None of us knows each other well.  “What if we don’t get along? What if the others don’t like me?” I ask Pat.

“Lynne and Eve said the same thing!” she says. “Do you think I would have put us together if I thought we wouldn’t click?”

So I pack, in my usual anxious way, for every contingency. A first aid kit. A four inch folding umbrella. An Italian phrase book. I’m the kind of girl who always remembers to bring the toothpaste. Continue Reading…

Friendship, Guest Posts

When We Poured Coffee and Dreamed of Men and Horses

November 30, 2016
coffee

By Shannon Spangler

“What if God was one of us?” – Joan Osborne, 1995

I grew up in the middle of Kansas, a place where contrails score the baby-blanket blue of the sky, but only crop dusters land, a place of wind and dust and strip malls, their parking lots littered with fast-food detritus.  Money was tight but my parents were teachers, and we were rich in the currency of education.  My life traced a box, its four corners home, the Baptist church, school, and the public library.

To pay for college, I waitressed graveyard at a truck-stop diner just outside the city limits.  As with any new job, the first task was to learn the language.  “Eighty-six on the fried chicken.”  “Coffees on ten.”  “Hey, bitch,” from another of the waitresses was an endearment, unless it came from Lori.  “Fuck,” at least, was familiar to me (although I’d never actually used it and wouldn’t for many years), mostly as verb and adjective, but here it became a sort of adverb (“fucking running my ass off”) or noun and pronoun (“fuck-wad”). Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, Owning It!

When Girls Make Noise

November 27, 2016
noise

By Kari O’Driscoll

“Do they make noise when you walk?” my 16-year old daughter stands next to me in the shoe store. She and her sister are my fashion experts. I never buy a pair of boots or a purse without consulting them first. I laugh out loud, not because it sounds like a ridiculous question, but because I completely identify with it. In that instant, an image of my two girls playing dress-up as toddlers fuzzes into my mind. Their arms filled with tulle and satin, they ferried outfits from the carpeted playroom to the hardwood floor of the kitchen, emptying the dress-up box trip by trip because that was where the plastic princess shoes made a really satisfying clop, clop, clop.

“Children should be seen and not heard,” was a phrase often repeated in my childhood home, except it seemed as though the boys were somehow exempt. They were encouraged to rough-house and wrestle, yelp wildly through a game of Cowboys & Indians, holler affirmations and pump their fists in the air when they won a game of H-O-R-S-E. The girls were expected to sit quietly and color and if we made any sort of exuberant noise we were shushed post-haste.

By the time my mother and father divorced, I was well-versed in the expectations of silent servitude. My job was to anticipate what needed to be done and do it without protest or inquiry. I learned that chatterbox was decidedly NOT a compliment, that challenging house rules, even in a calm voice, would earn me a belt slash across the backside, and that my charm and value rose in direct proportion to how well I conformed and made peace between my siblings. I was a good middle child but also the oldest girl. When Dad left and Mom went back to work full time, I became the one doing the shushing, reminding my little sister Katy to raise her hand in class if she had a question, perfecting the laser eye that would still her lips at the dinner table, installing an inner monologue in her head designed to help her determine whether her input was important or necessary or if it was just noise. Continue Reading…

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