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.
We’re a few hours in when something starts to go wrong with the epidural. Not all at once, but a creeping awareness of sensation starts to tug at my attention as I lie there and look at the trees outside, and read, and make small talk with my husband.
At first, I ignore it. But then I start to get nervous.
“I can wiggle my left toes,” I say, not really to anyone. Observationally.
Read MoreMaybe the woman holding the child was way too close to the edge of the pier. Way too close for way too long. Maybe that is what the shopkeeper told the Vancouver police when she phoned in her response to the Amber Alert. Maybe the ginger-haired artist who owned the Rare Button Shoppe—herself the mother of a curly-headed toddler—feared for the safety of the child on the pier.
Read MoreCold. Alone. Dead. These were the few words that registered among the many spoken to me on that horrific afternoon when they came to tell me my son was gone. Fentanyl was added to the mix over the coming hours.
“Who? What? How?” repeated over and over again was all I could muster in response.
“We don’t know,” was their answer.
My living, breathing nightmare had only just begun.
Read MoreI nominated my mother to share the news of my pregnancy with the rest of our family. I was confident my father and brother wouldn’t kill the messenger, but I knew for certain they would want to kill the message.
Read MoreMy mother slips her hand into mine as we walk toward the elevator in silence. Tears slide down my face, hidden under my mask. My ten-year-old son and I are flying back home, only I don’t want to leave. At eighty-four, my mother has had her first stroke. It’s hard to figure her out again. While the stroke was not physically debilitating, it scrambled far too many files on her hard drive and erased that many more. Words she once knew disappear at random.
Read MoreSana, sana, colita de rana. Si no sanas hoy, sanarás mañana.
My mother and I, along with my children, have come to visit my Tía Eva. She is my mom’s tía, my great aunt, but I have only known her as Tía. It is what I told my children to call her, as well. Just as her name hasn’t changed, neither has her house. Even though I haven’t seen her in years, I walk the same cement steps leading up from the side of the house into the wood panel living room cluttered with memorabilia. Sit on the same floral upholstered settee sofa amid the photos and porcelain figures (myriad bells and keepsake boxes), crochet doilies like the crosshatch sugar crust of conchas, on the various coffee and end tables.
Read MoreIt is the wettest, coldest winter you can have without the gift of any snow. We slog through one rainy day after another. My husband is working late, and I know I will crash into bed before he gets home. That means that only conversations I will have today are with people who call me “mom.” I am swallowed up in momming. As I trudge upstairs with another bowl of cereal, and a towel to clean up the first bowl my son knocked over in anger that it was “too milky”, I recall a time when I didn’t feel like a mom at all.
Read MoreAt first I didn’t even realize you were there. You sprung up seemingly overnight, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was thirteen, my body already changing in all kinds of ways.
Read MoreThat late-February day I checked me and the triplets into labor and delivery, it snowed six or seven inches, the world outside our room on the high-risk floor like a green screen, blank and full of possibility. Chad and I paid little attention to it—to its icy chill and constant shower of white—once we were inside the clinical ten-by-ten square room where we’d become parents.
Read MoreOne cold winter morning I’m out in the field, surrounded by grassy-breathed sheep, checking tension on the barbed wire fence. My mobile buzzes in my pocket, frozen fingers fumbling and numb. “There’s this boy,” they announce. I check the calendar: nine months of paper-based gestation.
Read MoreI’m sitting on the bench, this time with my pants on, at my midwife’s office.
I’m here because I’m certain I’m off and completely uncertain about what I need to fix it.
Or if I need to fix it.
Or if I can fix it.
Or if it’s even fixable.
I’m here for a postpartum depression evaluation.
Born pre-Google (PG) and it is a mystery how I, not knowing I was (ASD) Autism
Spectrum Disorder, survived fairly happy, optimistic, and somewhat whole. All
those years, the feeling of being an alien enshrouded me, yet I wouldn't give up
trying to fit in. Didn't know anything about it but in the 1980s, when my son was
diagnosed and then I was, well, I just did what I always did: slipped into denial
mode.
“Sit down,” I tell my toddler, calmly but firmly. “Don’t stand in the tub!”
She looks at me, her little legs searching for purchase, and she starts to rise.
She knows she’s not supposed to stand, but she wants that toy just out of reach.
“Sit,” I say again, giving her a look.
Read MoreWhen we were expecting our first child, our friends with babies advised us that living around the corner from the grandparents benefits everyone. My instinct was that a little distance would be better for me and our fledgling family, a necessary step in our independence. We began to explore a move from our Manhattan one-bedroom rental, and I was determined to put a bridge—Throgs Neck or Whitestone, take your pick—between us and both sets of parents.
Read MoreFrom the time she was little, my mother knew she wanted to be a mom. But that didn't stop her from having other ambitions. She went to school and received her bachelors and masters degrees before marrying my father.
Read MoreOn a hot summers day in June 1955 Molly, an unmarried mother, began bringing her child into the world. She cried bitterly whilst pleading to keep her child. There were no words of sympathy she was told simply to go home and forget all about it. As Molly’s child was taken from her she vowed never to forget.
Read MoreI used to view the world only in terms of how it related to myself. What I could see of it, gain from it, and change of it. All my time and energy used to go into making plans for myself and improving who I was. Then I became a mother and everything changed.
Read MoreIn early 2013, when my partner and I had just moved to LA, we found out we were pregnant for the first time (totally unplanned!). I was working on a small stipend in which over 75% of my income was going towards the rent of a furnished 400 square foot studio apartment; while my partner was living in a city an hour away in his first year at graduate school, also living on a stipend that was mostly going towards rent.
Read MoreShe said she thinks it’s terrible I don’t want to have children. Like being childless is the Plague or natural disaster. Maybe to her and to many others it is just that. It’s certainly not seen as natural not to want to do the one thing a woman’s body was built for.
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