How Formula Helped Me Connect With My Baby

Motherwell

The formula recall came days after I quit breastfeeding. Perfect timing for an extra dose of anxiety and guilt. Not that moms can just quit breastfeeding, it’s much slower and more confusing than that. By the time the recall hit, I had dropped pumping sessions and ounces, but not so many that I couldn’t reverse course and preserve what little supply I had left.

“Do I quit quitting?” I asked my husband after he told me about the recall.

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The Birds & The Sea Monkeys

HerSTRY

I learned about menstruation from sea monkeys when I was eight or nine. Since then, I haven’t given my body much thought. Maybe that time in Sicily, when I flew off my bike and skinned my knee and elbow, leaving a scar. Or perhaps when my legs sprouted hair and everyone in the sixth grade shaved before my mom let me. But now that we’re trying to have a baby, it’s all I can think about. Read more …

Miscellaneous

SUNSPOT LITERARY JOURNAl

Every Monday, she wrote the list of spelling words, looping white cursive on the board as we spilled into the room, scrawling powdery white chalk across a sea of green as we copied them down cockeyed and tilting on ruled lines. By then, the Word of the Week—the extra credit word that made my grandma whistle and say, “That’s a doozie,” the five-dollar word that Miss Tighe posted the definition beneath to unlock its full power—was already pinned to the yellow paper-covered corkboard.

This is the room where I must have learned words like pedantic, ostentatious, or connotative. Miscellaneous. That’s the one I remember. The way it rolled off the tongue, each syllable dancing to the next. Mis-cell-an-e-ous. A word to describe the random, the indescribable which now could be named, to cover an entire category which had never been open to me before. Read more …

Thesis Talk Interview

I sat down with fellow essay writer and Johns Hopkins University alum Tiffany James to chat about our writing processes and more.