“Where are we going?” Her every morning question. “Miss Patty’s house today.” “But I don’t want to go there! I want to stay home. Hmmp.” “Put on your socks—please!” “I can’t do it. I’m little.” She puts her socks on fast enough while playing dress up. “Give me a foot.” Out juts a petite, near-rectangular block. I nab it with pink cotton and then begin pulling up the flowered zipper-flipper of her bubble-gum purple jacket. She proclaims, “Iiiii’m thir-sty. I want some juice.” Opening, slamming kitchen doors, I produce a sippy…
Author: Mom Egg Review
My mother had two sisters she never told me about. When she mentioned her large family, she told me she was one of ten children. I boasted to my friends—ten kids! That was bigger than any family I knew. My father once explained that in a family that size, there’s not enough love to go around. Was that why my mother was so cold? So unhappy? My father’s explanation provided no comfort, but many images. I pictured the family my mother never talked about–she and Teresa, the two girls, twenty years apart, and the eight boys that came between. Everyone,…
This is the story my sister-in-law’s brother Andrew told over dinner: One night he, some friends and a fellow female student at Brown University went to a local bar hangout. The waitress brought them a tray of tortilla chips and the house salsa, which contained a special, secret ingredient. They all drank, ate, and laughed a lot, especially when the young woman pretended she was choking. Only she wasn’t pretending. Ten minutes later, when the paramedics arrived, the girl was in the final throes of anaphylactic shock, and, before the eyes of horrified strangers, died. The salsa’s secret ingredient? Peanut…
I’m having the biggest ego trip in my life. Lucas, at one-and-a-half years old, sees me everywhere. He notices a woman in a magazine ad and squeals, “Mommy!” Same squeal with the woman on the back of the Cheerios box, the female firefighter in his picture book, and the image of a mermaid in the Starbucks logo, Mommy. (Okay, maybe that last one has more to do with the frequency with which Mommy visits Starbucks.) Every woman depicted, regardless of ethnicity, age, or any remote likeness to me, is Mommy to him. His squeals are embedded with such toddler joy…
– I was at the shoe store the other day and a father said the most refreshing thing to his five-year-old son. “You look like a pimp in those red shoes.” The child didn’t say, “What’s a pimp, Daddy?” But even if he had, that would have been okay. Why do parents lose half their vocabulary and their sense of humor when they have young children? Surely a five year old doesn’t get that pimp joke, but he does get that his father is funny and quirky. It’s sad to listen to parents dumb down their talk. They refrain from…
It’s quiet. Really quiet. My son is at my ex-husband’s place for the week. The constant outer noise and inner static of an intimate relationship that is now over is gone. Most efforts at reaching out to build business interests beyond what was already emerging stopped around six months ago so all my energy could go toward finishing the Eden trilogy. And now, the silent prayer of the last fifteen years has been fulfilled. My life is very quiet. Not only is my outer life very quiet, my inner life, my mental life is much quieter. I was shook three…
Twenty years ago, there was only one reason I coveted turning forty. ONE. As a hungry student, on the scent of the Shechina (immanent presence of the divine), the esoteric, and the mysterious, I discovered that the rabbis forbid anyone to learn Kabbalah before the age of forty. Suddenly forty became to me like sixteen to a young adolescent yearning to drive a car: The age of unencumbered freedom. The age that the doors of universal wisdom flew open and the full buffet is there for the taking. Forty became the age of permission. Of course, there would first be…
As I began to inch closer to forty, I was stunned to realize that for all my efforts of the last twenty years–working day and night literally through day-dreams and night dreams trying to tear down what was non-essential to my soul and build up what was, my big dream of having a real home, a stable home, had still eluded me. Over the years, I had invited a stream of goddesses, archetypes, artists, and imaginary friends into my private cauldron of destruction and creation to assist me with the art of letting go of what is dead and opening…
I moved from New York City to a northern suburb in the ninth month of my first pregnancy. The initial deluge of visitors eager to see the new house and the new baby subsided to a trickle; I was alone with this little alien, whom I loved more fiercely and tenderly than I would have thought possible, but who was a little dictator, mewling and calling whenever my attention was diverted for more than a moment. The nearest town was a mile’s walk all uphill; my driving skills were rudimentary. I felt like a rowboat tied to shore with a…
Interview by May Joseph On November 7, 2006, as she was writing her book Quickly Changing River, Meena Alexander was interviewed by May Joseph in New York City. J: Meena, I’d like you to talk about writing childhood. A: Ah, writing childhood. Well, where to start? I have a poem I wrote a long time ago in a volume called Stone Roots. The poem is called Childhood, and there are lines that run: Quite early as a child I understood flesh was not stone… Childhood for me really is the ground of much of what I write. Privileged territory.…