Jessica Yen Houdini When your second child has been thrashing for twenty-one minutes in their bassinet, you finally recognize, with a clarity you could not have possessed with your eldest, that your infant is so achingly overtired they are physically unable to drift into slumber. Two newborn phases and three pregnancies have acquainted you with the peculiar combination you now recognize in your flailing baby: the muscles that throb with exhaustion even as the mind skips and glides, churns and crashes. As you watch them drift into deep slow breathing, only to flop onto their back and scream in…
Author: Mom Egg Review
Jen Bryant Lessons My son hunches over a math worksheet, brow furrowed in concentration. He solves an addition problem quickly, then reconsiders, doubling back. I watch as he erases carefully, then pencils a new answer over the gray smudge left behind. Pink eraser shavings dot the back of his small hand. For the past few weeks, we’ve been doing our homework together on the back porch, taking advantage of a string of warm fall afternoons. I’m supposed to be working on my own paper, due tomorrow. Instead, I peer across the patio table at my son, waiting to see…
Tracie Adams All My Love, Monitored and Recorded There never seemed to be a good time to see the jail’s number on our caller ID. The phone ringing didn’t surprise us, but it sure pissed us off. Our oldest son, adopted at age eleven, would call from jail, usually while we were eating dinner or having a family game night with our other three kids. “You have a collect call from an inmate in Pamunkey Regional Jail. This call is being monitored and recorded for security purposes. Please refrain from discussing the inmate’s case, as any and all communication…
Nettie Reynolds Crossing the Canyon In June 2011, a month after my divorce was finalized, I packed up the car in Austin, Texas, and took the first of what would become many trips with my two kids—my nine-year-old son, my eleven-year-old daughter—and our pug. We had always wanted to see the Grand Canyon, and that summer I decided: we would go. Just the three of us, finding a new path. The Grand Canyon is still forming. The Colorado River didn’t carve it in one dramatic gesture—it shaped it slowly, over millions of years, with flood and drought, ice and…
Melissa Fraterrigo Mother-Daughter Osmosis Last week, my daughter Eva and I walked to the neighborhood swimming pool a few blocks from our house. The sun glinted off the water’s surface as Eva and I tossed our towels on lounge chairs. She took off her t-shirt and shorts, her long limbs and muscular thighs as strong as any engine you might find beneath a hood. At fourteen, she’s nearly the same height as me but with a splattering of freckles across her nose. Some family members say Eva looks just like I once did. Eva grabbed a pair of goggles…
Jennifer Harris One Hundred and Forty-One Miles I was walking up 19th Street in Dupont Circle listening to Sinead O’Connor’s You Cause As Much Sorrow on my iPhone. She’s saved under my “Goth Alt” list, which, if you must know, is mislabeled. It’s really an indie-folk list. But sometimes I mix up words. You should see my computer files. You would think I was a spy or something. Everything is coded for stealth. I hadn’t listened to Sinead in a while. When I do, I am transported to Tucson and the 1990s. Hotel Congress on East Congress Street where…
Kresha Warnock Becoming a Mother-in-Law I listen to the baby cry in her room. It’s 7 a.m., I’m up, and I wonder if I should go get my little granddaughter. Her dad, my son, worked late the night before. He’s a cop and last night was the fourth of July, and he had to make sure everyone stayed safe, didn’t get too drunk at the big fireworks display at Gas Works Park, down by the water in Seattle. This is Saturday and her mom gets up early every workday and deserves what the Brits call a “lie-in.” I’m visiting.…
Review by Sharon Tracey Laura Cresté’s first full-length poetry collection, In the Good Years, opens with dead horses and ancestors, garden slugs and chipmunks, and two feisty and devoted mothers. There’s an immediacy and honesty as the poet writes of the angst of growing up—mood swings, depression, sisterhood, a shifting sense of roots. Then she equally turns her attention to the larger world in an expansive rendering of the personal, political, and environmental, rich in the details of daily life but cognizant of how the self is a small part of the world and needs to find connections…
Review by Susan Blumberg-Kason Diane Botnick writes in the prologue of her novel, Becoming Sarah, that a midwife at Auschwitz delivered 3000 babies and most were brutally murdered as soon as they were born. Only 30 survived. She imagines what became of these babies and uses this premise to craft a sweeping story that spans 100 years into the past, present, and future. Through the fictional Sarah Vogel, Botnick explores questions that are not typical of Holocaust novels, namely what happens to survivors who are too young to remember the Holocaust and can a nurturing environment help them overcome…
Review by Melissa Kutsche The events of Susan Buttenwieser’s debut novel, Junction of Earth and Sky, are set into motion by World War II, but this is not a typical World War II novel. Instead of epic battles, Buttenwieser lays bare the conflict and warfare of domesticity. In lieu of heroes forged from bravery, there are complete, flawed characters navigating everyday life, figuring out how to love and be loved. Readers of Kristin Hannah’s novels might enjoy this literary historical fiction and its multidimensional characters, Alice and her granddaughter, Marnie. After the war upends teenage Alice’s life in coastal…