There are moments in life where we hit a new level of independence and experience growth so significant that it changes our reality. I had one last night that was so strong it reminded me of leaving adolescence. My husband and I co –parent; when I go out at night there is no need to tell my husband what my son will have for dinner, what his routine is or when he should go upstairs to bed. I walk out the door give them both a kiss, tell them that I love them and don’t worry about how things are…
Author: Mom Egg Review
The thought of dragging herself and her baby to the store rubbed against her nerves all morning. But the leaking faucet in the kitchen sink made the trip to the giant box a necessity today. And the longer she put it off, the worse it would be. The sun embraced them as they stepped into the warm summer air and she felt almost hopeful when they arrived. “Good morning,” she said with a smile to the first person she saw. She certainly had been guilty of not even trying to smile too often to remember. She kept smiling. At store…
The Mom Egg Benefit for Museum of Motherhood/ 100Thousand Poets for Change The Mom Egg, an annual journal of poetry, fiction and creative prose by and about mothers, will be doing a benefit reading for the Museum of Motherhood, temporarily located at “pop-up” quarters 401East 84th St.(at1st Ave. Lower Level) www.MOMmuseum.org, on Saturday, September 24th from 7-8:30 p.m. This event is part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a worldwide initiative.The purpose of this reading is to bring attention to the need for a museum to acknowledge the vital role of mothers. The event will be hosted by Mom Egg…
Selections The Mom Egg Vol. 9 2011 Get the Issue Sandra de Helen MISSPENT MOTHERHOOD i squandered my motherhood mistaking it for my youth believing that because i was sixteen or twenty or thirty i was entitled to indulge in the activities of youth. scholarship, art, drinking, unbridled sex. dragging my children along as if they were accessories like pocketbooks instead of easily bruised fruit to be guarded from danger tended like gardens raised to be guardians of the future of their own futures i rushed into adulthood as if it were the answer instead of the…
Editor’s Pick by Marjorie Tesser – Perfect for fans of Anais Nin and Marguerite Duras, Margo Berdeshevsky’s collection of short stories Beautiful Soon Enough (Fiction Collective 2; 2009; Winner of Fiction Collective Two’s American Book Review/Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) is a contemporary take on the lives of women from the perspective of a reflective femme du monde. The characters in this book—teens, young women, women of a certain age—are engaged in a balancing act, yearning toward connection while maintaining resolute separateness. Berdeshevsky’s poetry informs the writing, which is lush, sensual, and lucid. A sexy, perceptive, beautifully expressed book. Beautiful…
1973: In the beginning there was mom, music, and movement. My world was rich and alive with trees, fresh fruit and vegetables, and an earthy vibration that flowed through everything I knew. 1988: The lock-down crept up on me, much like my mother’s cancer, a slow mass that weighed on my heart and deadened my senses. Her departure washed over me like an ebbing tide, receding, uncertain, and inevitable. 1999: I began unpacking the emotional burden I’d been carrying. Years of suppressed reactions bubbled within me and needed release. My artistic process was the excavator . My son, then 7,…
I used to live across the street from a little Austrian lady. Hedy’s home was a haven for three-hundred plus birds. Cages lined the walls, and on summer days she would open the windows and let the rest of the neighborhood hear the cacophonic soundtrack of her life. When I worked at a mall bank in the 1980s, before we became neighbors, she was the manager for Noah’s Ark, a pet store. Once, when a canary escaped its cage, we watched from our teller windows as she chased it with a net, yelling for it to come back, oblivious to…
Women Writers Series – Photography by Roberta Fineberg http://www.robertafineberg.com/ The following portraits are selected from Roberta Fineberg’s collection of portraits of One Hundred Women Writers. Portraits of Innocence and Wisdom is a photo essay of approximately 100 women writers, shot roughly between 1988-1998 in Paris, London, Moscow, and New York (and their environs)—the title of the series borrowed from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. In short, the photographic portraits, chronicling female writers I had conspicuously chosen as representatives of serious literature, were in varying stages of youth, middle age, and old age. With the passing of time (over 20 years…
It was the beginning of a semester. I was almost in my second year of teaching at the university and I remember telling my colleague that I was “really doing well.” I was finally able to prepare sufficiently for my classes, change up my reading lists and entertain creative projects. I had just sailed into new terrain with my daughter: preschool. This wasn’t like having the licensed-in-your-home kind of sitter that could be sick or sleeping on the couch when we walk in. Thankfully, that only happened once but it was enough to make me feel beyond guilty as I…
This morning I woke to the music of the clock radio as I did several years ago – B.C. (Before Children). I lay in bed with gray dawn light filtering in the windows to my left and my husband buried under covers to my right. Not even his nose poked out. Shadow, the dog, got up and ambled over to nuzzle my hand with her cold nose, hoping for breakfast. Even if the disc jockey is the only one up, Shadow’s ever optimistic. My husband leapt out of our waterbed, punched the snooze button and jumped back under the warmth…