Tag: mother/daughter (Page 1 of 2)

One Out of Ten

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stephanie Shafran

“No one has feet like mine,” my ninety-three-year-old mother announces to the hovering doctor.

“Well, let’s see what brought you here today,” the young doctor smiles as she pulls up a stool directly facing her new patient. After removing the sock as if it were a ticking time bomb fastened to my mother’s foot, she examines the flame-red toe yielding to her curious, slender fingers. It is the third toe on her left foot, rubbed raw by my mother’s second toe, which has long ago snaked over the big one—and twisted itself into an awkward, but permanent position. This deformity is a logical consequence of my mother’s lifetime habit of jamming her foot into ill-fitting shoes.

When I arrived at her apartment yesterday, I found my mother sitting on the bed, cradling her bare foot in her lap. Spotting me in the doorway, she stood up— a grimace spreading across her face as her left foot touched the floor.

“It’s my damn good-for-nothing toe again,” she’d scolded.

My heart slumped, remembering her excuse for refusing to undergo the surgery years ago to remove it. Three weeks off her feet and out of work! she’d whined. I knew the truth—her fear of misshapen body parts. At the Boston skating rink, there was a girl whose stumped arm had barely developed beyond the shoulder. After three Sundays of spotting her on the ice, my mother made excuses whenever I asked why we weren’t going skating anymore.

“Let me see it, Mom. Sit down.”

Plunking her body back on the bed, she lifted the foot an inch from the floor and pointed to the swollen, tomato-colored toe.

“Yikes, that looks infected. We’ll have to see a doctor.”

“You’ll take care of it, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course. By tomorrow, I hope.”

I’d have to take her to urgent care, take time off from work, cancel my afternoon hairdresser appointment most likely.

A day later now, we’re seated side by side on grey metal chairs in the clinic’s examination room. The throbbing in my head has finally quieted.

The doctor’s slender fingers wander across the bloated flesh.

“Does this hurt? Or this?”

Savoring this caress, my mother lets out a deep sigh. She shakes her head from side to side, yet her brow furrows and her eyes shudder as the doctor probes the toe.

“I was wondering, Doctor, will you have to amputate this corkscrew toe?”

The doctor lifts her soft brown eyes to my mother’s.

“Heavens no. We’ll just treat the infection on the toe next to it. You’ll be free of pain in no time.”

My eyes moisten. This doctor’s reassurance to my mother—like a mother to a needy child.

Now the doctor swivels her stool to face me.

“I’ll write a prescription for a two-week course of antibiotics. I’d like to check her toe in three weeks.”

Then she swivels a half-turn, shifting her gaze to my mother.

“You must be proud to have a daughter who takes such good care of you. I imagine she learned that from you.”

“Well, I don’t know if she’d agree.” My mother’s eyes ping pong between the doctor’s and mine. “At least I made sure she had a new pair of shoes every September. For the new school year, of course.”

She offers me a shy nod. I can’t deny it—yearly trips to Stride Rite Shoes in Brookline each August, just before the start of the new school year. Choosing a new pair of shoes with sturdy soles and laces, sized correctly to fit my feet, whether I loved the color and style, or not.

As the consultation wraps up, I lift the sock from my mother’s lap. Like a suppliant, I kneel at her feet and lift the bruised foot into my hands. As I do, my mother’s hand reaches to rest on my shoulder. After a long intake of breath, she announces,

“Nine miscarriages. I almost gave up—your father convinced me to try for ten. And then you, one out of ten, like a miracle.”

Her foot still in my lap, I give its heel a gentle squeeze.

Stephanie Shafran’s recent writing appears in literary journals such as Emulate, Persimmon Tree, and Silkworm. Her chapbook “Awakening” was released in 2020. A member of both Straw Dog Writers Guild and Florence Poetry Society, Stephanie resides in Northampton, Massachusetts; read more at stephanieshafran.com, including monthly blog posts.

For Every October

12 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

The leaves have begun to turn from green to yellow to brown, falling from branches to land in the lawn beside me. The grass is littered with them, the hard cusps of acorns rolling beneath my toes. A cooler wind wisps against my cheek and darkness falls earlier each evening; summer heaves her last breaths as October’s notes become the steady hymn of autumn.

Before last October, autumn would have been my answer to the question: What is your favorite season? Like so many artists, my muse is found in a cool darkness stitched with stars, in nights fragrant with the scent of smoke and glow of firelight, in walks through forests thick with trees that shiver in the breeze, their leaves shimmering green-gold-rust in sunlight as they fall to hard ground.

Before last October, I would have told you that October was a beautiful month, one where nature glistens wide with colors, the one in which my son was born. The month of pumpkin spice, sweater weather, homemade chili and Halloween. I would have told you that October felt lovely and comfortable, a relief from the stifling heat of summer.

I’m not sure how I feel about October now. How I feel about that fateful day: October 12th — Diagnosis Day. The day an MRI revealed that my fourteen-year-old daughter had a brain tumor.

The day was blissful with sunlight and a soft breeze that welcomed in the beginning of my favorite season. In the early afternoon, while she and her brother were still at school and before we knew anything of scans or tumors — I took a journal out on a nature walk. I gathered leaves and wrote verses, pressed them in. That journal sits in my bedside drawer, untouched now since then, almost a year later.

Like autumn, I’m nervous to revisit it, to open it and find whatever beauty is left there. Beauty that is evidence to how October gives life and changes it, evidence to how different the world felt last October from this October.

But as we approach October 12th this year, I find myself drawn to the journal, drawn to touch and examine the leaves I pressed into its pages, to read the words I wrote before I knew anything of brain tumors or intracranial pressure or hydrocephalus or medulloblastoma, of MRIs or lumbar punctures or biopsies or surgical resections. Of shunts or ports or proton beams or absolute neutrophil counts. Before I knew what it means to have a child with cancer.

Yesterday we decorated the house with balloons, celebrated my daughter’s NED status: No Evidence of Disease. She has completed her treatments, completed a year’s worth of life-altering experiences that have both saved her and changed her. She has shown us her resilience and breaking point, her incredible strength and heartbreaking fragility.

I watch the balloons bounce lightly in the breeze on our mailbox, their colors and confetti bright in October’s sunshine. I walk through the lawn, unraveling ribbons to watch them travel higher into a clear blue sky, listen to the chirps of blue jays in the branches.

I hear the sounds of my daughter waking; she comes to sit beside me as I write. We watch the squirrels chitter and chase each other through the lawn, gather acorns and bury them. I tell her about the journal, and she fetches it from my drawer, anxious to see the memories left in its pages.

We touch the dried, spiny pressed leaves and read my words together, October’s light vivid with sun in a clear sky. I feel something loosen, something lighten inside me, and a warmth despite the cool breeze that brushes my skin.

Before last October, I didn’t know light would still be possible through darkness, that survival meant looking for it in each hour. I didn’t know joy would find its way to us through grief.

I look up into the sunlight of this October and see the beauty that remains, glimpse how nature and life are colorful and changing and resilient. I accept that this October will never be the same as the last, that life and experiences have ways of changing you that cannot be undone. And I breathe.

My daughter hands me a clutch of pink, purple and blue ribbons and we walk across the grass together. Slowly, we release strands of ribbon upward, watching the balloons confetti swirl into a cloud of rainbow in blue. We twine our fingers together and look up, up — up.

We breathe in the scents and sounds of October and tell each other we are glad to be home. We talk about her brother’s birthday; how much taller and bigger and stubborner and smarter he is now that he’s almost fourteen.

I think of how amazing it is to be awake together to watch the wings that fly between the trees, the squirrels rush through the grass, the green-gold leaves shimmer in autumn’s light. Present, familiar, yet ever-changing, and wondrous — this month with a heart for so many things, this October and the way it unravels me, the way it breaks me apart and stitches me back together again.

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, poet & singer from Louisiana. Her poems have recently appeared in The Healing Muse, Inlandia Journal and Susurrus Magazine. During 2023, she lived in Tennessee, where she wrote while caring for her daughter through cancer treatments at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. www.stacieeirich.com

In My Mother’s Last Garden

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Regina Berg

The roses near the house have bloomed
and bloomed again.
The tomato vines are lush, laden
with fruit, sun-warm, red, taut with sweetness
and crisp green globes you will slice
thin, cornmeal coat, fry golden
and wrap in a fold of white bread.

The collard greens and cabbages are full grown,
though you will leave them to tender
with the first frost. Cucumbers secret themselves
on the other side of the neighbor’s chain link fence
until your quick eye guides me.

Your eyes and ears are the only things quick about you now.
Cancer and age have leached your bones.

We sit on the small concrete patio where the sun rests
on your thin shoulders and a wind warm
as the remembrance of a Mississippi spring
soothes knuckles swollen with years and labor.

Silvered hair scraped into a single braid and pinned
at your neck, you lean close and laughingly gossip
about the young man who bought the derelict
house next door, though you call hello and wish him well.

You won’t come out here on your own, even
with your cane, you are so fearful of snakes.
and truly we may see one sunning itself
against the house once or twice a year.

When we lived in the small jumble of a house
just down the alley, you tended a patch
in a vacant lot hidden by weeds that towered
over your garden stakes.
There were surely snakes, but
you had children to feed and a sharp hoe.

You who made something from nothing
for so long, have a freezer full.

Now your garden runs
a slender path between the fence
and the concrete walk, filling every inch
with food that will feed us still
when you are gone.

Regina Berg is an emerging poet who resides in Chicago, IL. She is GGE (greatest grandma ever!), a baker, crocheter, and sometime traveler. She enjoys solitary writing, retired life, and lively conversations.

Hope like Sunlight

18 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Stacie Eirich

for Sadie

Sunlight rushes in a brand new day, heart lifting
with hope in the knowledge
of a day without clinic appointments, a day to play and create, a day
with no expectations, no decisions, a day to just be.

Slip into the slowness of the hour, sip a latte and leave the phone
tucked away. Let a breath out and listen, listen to the stillness
of the morning, watch the way the breath
rises and falls, contracts and expands.

Her beside me, wrapped in blankets, still asleep, face pressed
against the pillow, a soft whirring of breath reaching me.
I light a small lamp and dress quietly, wanting
to let her rest.

Outside, the day brightens with a promise that meets
my fledgling heart: today will be easier, today will be ours
to make and hold light in.

I stretch my fingers towards the sky, bending left, then right —
fingers open to the window, open to the light.

Behind me my daughter shifts, blankets rustling.
I turn to see her waking, eyes meeting mine
with the sun, morning written on her face
like the light, vivid, beaming—hopeful.

Eyes holding hope
like sunlight, face shining brilliant
as stars. She greets me softly, her voice keeping mine
in tenderness, her heart holding mine
steadily beside her: rising, rising.

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, poet & singer. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cantos Literary Journal, The Healing Muse & Remington Review, among others. She is currently living in Memphis, TN, caring for her daughter through cancer treatments at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. www.stacieeirich.com

When Stars Align

11 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Simone Kadden

Schlepping past tailgaters in parking lots isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my
mother’s. She stopped to examine a plate, a vase, or a necklace and speak to the vendor about a similar one in a distant place. Then, she’d put it down, and we’d move down the line.

When she was in her nineties and used a walker, we opted to drive into the countryside for our treasure hunts. Traveling along curvy back roads with handwritten road signs, we scrounged odd shops offering catches that otherwise detoured to the dump.

Scavengers have their Holy Grail—tea cups, costume jewelry, bird cages, dishware, and figurines. For us, it was buttons. As a kid, I collected them in a tin when I wasn’t arranging them on the floor. Each was a piece of art, distinct in size, shape, and design.

Aunt Lisel, my mother’s older sister, was my leading supplier. As Head Seamstress at Bergdorf Goodman, Manhattan’s premier department store, she brought buttons from coats, suits, and gowns she altered for the rich and famous. “Where did you get this one, Tante Lisel?” I asked, and she described in detail the article of clothing and its prominent owner.

One day, my mother and I took a 20mph cruise down a sleepy main street in a mountain town. Suddenly, my mother extended her left arm and grabbed my right elbow. “Hold it! Slow down and park the car.” I followed her orders and helped her out of the car. We walked a short distance until we stood before The Button Up, where the window displayed bolts of fabric, yarn, and crocheted throws. Blanketing the entire black floor were buttons, studs, and toggles made of velvet, glass, leather, pearl, rhinestone, and fabrics in vibrant colors, dazzling like the night’s brightest stars.

“When you were little, we collected buttons and kept them in a container, remember?” my mother asked, without turning from the display.

“Of course, I remember. We had a tin with triangle-shaped wafers on the lid we always struggled with, as if its bottom were bigger than its top.”

My mother laughed at what she had forgotten. “On rainy days when you were a little girl, we sat on the floor for hours, spreading them out and making pictures.”

“Remember when we had enough duplicates to design twins?” I asked, to which she knowingly nodded.

I still had the collection at home and wanted to go spill out all the buttons, thinking, like a Ouija board, they’d offer a mysterious projection into the future.

“When I was four,” my mother began, “my wild imagination was my best friend after my mother died, and I dreamed the impossible. My grandmother’s apartment was on the first floor of our house. I loved to visit her and thought my mother would be there, hiding behind the couch or under the bed where I liked to crawl.

“My grandmother would take all her buttons from a black silk coin purse and create designs on the dining table. ‘Let’s make something pretty that your mother would have loved,’ my grandmother would say. Sometimes she mentioned one button came from my grandfather’s coat or another was from my mother’s sweater. It was a lovely distraction for a sad little girl.

“The emerald glass buttons, the enamel ones with gold filigree, and the square silver-plated ones found homes in my creations. The jewel tones reminded me of my mother’s green eyes, though her jewels had gold flecks dancing in them.

“One autumn day, during the afternoon’s waning hours, Oma Julie entered the room with the silver tray holding hot cocoa and homemade butter cookies. She placed the tray on the table, and from the buffet, she retrieved a bundle tied with a purple ribbon. I unwrapped it to find a deep burgundy velvet pillow, the color of grapes in the vineyards that blanketed the hillsides. Sewn on the pillow were buttons duplicating the image we last created. A little face (me!), a house with a black chimney churning out brown and gray buttons resembling smoke, yellow and white flowers, and the sun peeking out from the pillow’s corner.”

My mother wanted to show her mother what she and Oma Julie had created, even
though my mother didn’t know when that might be. Her sweet memory continued.

“I hugged Oma Julie’s tiny frame and put my face against her neck. I inhaled the jasmine-scented soap she used. The warmth of Grandma Julie’s body encircling mine, the scent of freshly baked cookies, and the beautiful pillow left me missing my mother more than ever, and I unraveled into tears. My lost mother, wherever she was, had come from this petite woman, and in my child’s mind, I thought my mother might be nearby and return to the place from which she came.

“My Grandmother slowly pulled away from me. Her gentle hands cupped the sides of my head. She looked at me intently, as if hoping I would record the moment within my young soul.

“‘Gretel,’ Oma Julie said softly, ‘this pillow is for both of us. What we share is ours forever. We will keep this pillow as a reminder that people sometimes leave us and don’t return, but they are not lost. Every day we find them again. We only need to know where to look.’”

My mother sighed deeply and shifted her gaze from The Button Up window to me, indicating the story had ended. She looked at me with what I believe was the same look her grandmother gave her 90 years earlier. With a slight shake of her head, as if releasing a moment, my mother asked, “Now, how about some hot cocoa and cookies?”

It sounded like a tender toast to another time.

My mother stores her memories like a squirrel stashing nuts within a tree trunk. She retrieves them one by one, and when the stars align, she reaches for her silver tray.

Simone Kadden lives in Madrid with her husband and rescue dog, Lulita. She’s collected stories, relationships, jobs, and dogs in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Sonoma County. She taught at Harvard, worked at The Washington Post and on U.N.-sponsored projects, and wrote two books for the University of Michigan Press.

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash

Picnic on a Plane

9 April 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Serena Burman

“Pilot to copilot, are we ready for takeoff?” Mom looks in the rearview mirror and back at me. I roll my eyes because I’m 16. She laughs, “It’ll be nice when you start liking me again.”

How did I almost miss it, austere letters on neon yellow plexiglass: AFFORDABLE CREMATION & BURIAL. I swerve into the lot. Inside, it’s 1978. I pause, my eyes adjusting to dim light. Faded shag carpet flatters the persimmon pedicure I got on the way here. Stuffing pokes out of the olive paisley couch. It smells like a mix of mothballs and barbecued pork.

“Hiya, how can I help?” The man who emerges behind the wood-paneled counter looks like the emu guy in Liberty Mutual ads. Hank, his tag says.

“I’m here to pick up my mom. Well, her remains.”

“You mean cre-mains. Common mistake. Sylvia?” I nod. He lifts a small cardboard box from behind the counter.

“Here you go. She’s a heavy one! Gotta be over five pounds.”

It looks like the box of spare batteries in my pantry. Timidly, I reach out. My hands drop a few inches with its weight. One of the flaps is untucked. What did I expect, an ornate urn? Shit, was I supposed to bring one? Mom would have thought of that—an old vase from Goodwill she’d decoupaged with gold leaf or something. She knew how to mark moments.

“Men usually weigh in around six or seven pounds, women, more like three or four. You get real good at guessing without a scale around here,” Hank chuckles.

I pull on the loose flap. Inside, a plastic bag stuffed with chunky gray powder. I hold it up.

“Is that amber?” Hank asks, pointing to my ring. The stone is loose in its silver setting. I constantly thumb it like a loose tooth. It’s nothing special, but Mom never took it off.

Hank leans in, says amber is really just resin. Tells me he used to collect jewelry. Launches into a soliloquy about his favorite precious stones. Through the wall, I imagine an ornate wood-fired oven, giant pizza peels on wheels for sliding corpses in without a hiccup. How do they gather ashes? How do they know these are Mom?

I could probably give him five minutes of water cooler talk. I want to go. I dig for my wallet and he takes the cue, asks to see my ID. I can’t think of a joke about stealing cremains. I pick a ballpoint pen from the cup, sign the papers and hurry out the door. What now.

I walk in circles around my red jetta. Open the passenger door, close it. Open it. Swipe an old sandwich wrapper to the floor and set the box against the black leather. Resist the urge to reach for the seatbelt.

Whenever we traveled, Mom brought a reed basket as her carry-on. While everyone around us ate bland airplane food, she’d unpack a full picnic: classic calico napkins, water crackers, brie. And mini apple pies she’d baked in a muffin tin expressly for the flight. Pielettes, she called them.

I yank a sweater from the backseat and slide the cream wool under the box. Across the parking lot, a splash of golden wildflowers. I gather a small bouquet. Tie it with an asphalt rubber band. Drape it over the box. I start the engine. Put the car in reverse.

She usually wouldn’t tell me where we were going until we were on the plane. As we checked bags, walked through metal detectors, cinched our lap belts tight, I’d beg to know. She’d just smile.

I’ll tell you once we’ve left the gate.

Serena Burman lives on a small island in the Pacific Northwest. Her recent work appears in The Audacity, Pithead Chapel and Invisible City. She received Honorable Mention for The Pen Parentis 2022-2023 Writing Fellowship for New Parents (in flash fiction) and was a Semifinalist for Ruminate’s 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize.

The Hip

6 February 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Dawn L. C. Miller

Her ashes came to her grown daughters in a lovely box,
mahogany and rosewood,
accompanied by another box, containing
what had sustained her past the pain,
preserved her from disability,
entitled her to a parking permit.
It was her hip. Titanium and some ceramic.

Clarise and Susanne stared at it gleaming on the red velvet.
“It’s her hip,” murmured Clarise.
“Of course it is,” stated Susanne. “I can see that.”
“What are we supposed to do with it?” continued Clarise.
“Well, we can’t scatter it with her ashes. Someone might find it.”
They stared some more.
Together they debated all evening, agreeing on nothing.

The next morning it gleamed at them from the mantle.
Without looking at it,
in between angry silences,
and tears,
they talked.

The memories of places their mother had never been
floated into the morning light.
The seashore, when she stayed behind to take care of things at home.
The mountains she did not go with them to see:
no need to pay extra fare.
All the beauty and the music of far cities,
too expensive.
“Let’s take her there now!” they both said together.

And the journeys began.
Perched on a gunnel, their mother’s hip resounded with sea sounds.
Lost in the luggage for three days in Kenya,
Mother was found at last by a drug sniffing dog.
She rolled off into the snow at an Austrian ski resort,
but sat gleaming on a chair in the best restaurant in Paris
as her daughters laughed and toasted and remembered.

Dawn L. C. Miller has been writing poetry since childhood. Her poems have been published in Poetic Hours and Pegasus Review. She enjoys living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with her two cats and orchids.

close up photo of a barbie — Photo by Наталья on Pexels.com

My Mother, Feminism, and Barbie

5 November 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Anna Stolley Persky

When I was about five or six-years-old, I asked my mother for Barbie dolls. I also wanted the Barbie Dreamhouse, which had an elevator. My friend had several Barbie dolls and a Ken doll, along with the Dreamhouse, and we would spend hours dressing the dolls and sending them up and down the elevator, only to change their outfits again and send them back up and down the elevator. We had to hide the Barbies and Ken if my friend’s brother approached us because he would pop their heads off, but other than that, I found my Barbie time to be tranquil and wanted to replicate the experience at home.

It was the mid-1970’s, and my mother, who was just returning to work after having three children, was dabbling hard with feminism. Barbies, she said, did not represent our values. Barbie was a bad role model. Her body was unrealistic. Barbie, my mother said, was all about materialism. She cared only about her looks and fashion, maybe Ken.

My mother said she didn’t want me to become materialistic. She refused to buy me any Barbie dolls. I cried. My sister, five years older than me, comforted me, but didn’t relate at all. She had no interest in dolls of any kind, and also hated to dress up, which my mother made us do when we visited her side of the family. Sometimes my mother had the three of us wearing matching dresses embroidered with kittens. We even had matching brown tights.

But at Barbie she drew the line.

I kept asking for Barbie dolls. I longed to be handed a gorgeously attired Barbie with tiny high heels, still in her box, waiting for me to free her and undress her, then dress her again.

One afternoon my mother presented me with a garbage bag filled with naked hand-me-down Barbie dolls, their limbs tangled against each other, their hair knotted and matted.

“Here are your Barbie dolls,” my mother said. She then handed me a sewing kit. “If you want to dress them, you’ll have to learn to make their clothes.”

I didn’t touch them. I gave up on asking for Barbie dolls. I moved on to toys my mother wouldn’t find objectionable. But a simmering anger stayed with me. Even at that age, I knew that while my mother had made her point with dramatic flair, she had done so at my expense.

I grew up, went to college, then started applying to law schools. My mother asked me if I was sure I was smart enough to compete with all the young men in law school, and I remember thinking, ah there’s the mother I know, still one foot in and one foot out of the feminist movement.

After my first semester of law school, I flew from California to stay with my parents in their new house in Maryland. My mother led me on a tour around the house that she had decorated. We came to her study, and a giant glass-fronted cabinet filled with her latest hobby – collecting Barbie dolls. There were some traditional Barbies, dressed in pink or evening gowns, then one with roller skates, a cowgirl, a Barbie in a suit. Several of the dolls in her collection were from the 1970’s, some of them still pristine in their boxes. She’d also bought a tongue-in-cheek black market White Trash Barbie.

“You have to be f***ing kidding me, Mom,” I said, shaking, livid. “F***ing Barbies?”

My mother quickly reprimanded me, as she always did, for cursing. Then she asked me why I was so angry.

“You didn’t let me have Barbies, remember? They aren’t feminist.”

“I don’t remember that,” she said. “Or maybe I do. But that was a long time ago. See, they have career ones now.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I hate your dolls.”

My mother’s face crumpled. At that time, I loved to try and make my mother cry. If I succeeded, I felt happy and then overwhelmed with guilt. She started crying. I apologized, but for years, she couldn’t mention her Barbie collection without igniting in me a seething fury. Maybe she mentioned it to see if I would still get angry, and I responded in a sharp, spiteful way to see if she would still get upset. Maybe we needed to know that we were still connected enough to elicit emotion from each other.

My sister was unfazed by the Barbie collection. She told me in private they were ugly, but she didn’t care what our mother collected. She had plenty of leftover anger from our childhood and failing to meet our mother’s conflicted expectations, but none of them involved dolls.

“You were my real live baby doll,” my sister said to me years after our mother passed away. “Why would I want anything else?”

After about ten years, my mother sold off most of her Barbie collection, doll-by-doll. Each time I visited her, there would be a few less of them in the cabinet.

I inwardly celebrated their quiet disappearance. I said nothing to my mother for fear that my response would somehow change her mind, produce a rebellion against me, convince her to start collecting them again. It wasn’t long after that that I had my own babies, twins, to dress in matching outfits, but by then my mother was too weak to hold them.

Anna Stolley Persky, a lawyer and award-winning journalist, lives in Northern Virginia. She’s pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University. Her fiction has been published in Mystery Tribune and The Plentitudes. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Pithead Chapel.

gray and white wallpaper — Photo by Johannes Plenio on Pexels.com

Just a Glimpse

16 September 2022 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pat Hulsebosch

Scratchy stubble on long muscled legs. That memory from my 12-year old self comes unbidden in a lifetime of moments. Powerful for its uncharacteristic intimacy, and for its peek into a mother I seldom saw.

Our new color TV was reason enough to gather, and Sunday night was special. First came the magical fairy dust over Cinderella’s castle alerting us that Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was about to begin. The Ed Sullivan Show at 9 pm was a stretch, since tomorrow was a school day. But tonight, the star was Topo Gigio. I knew Mom hoped this squeaky-voiced charmer would occupy us while she got things done.

My younger sister and brother watched from the couch’s comfort, leaving me, the oldest at 12, to the maple rocker. Disdainful of that option, I sprawled at my mother’s feet as she perched stiffly in her recliner. A whiff of fresh paint mingled with the smoke of Mom’s cigarettes laced with Youth Dew as I leaned against her legs.

My brother’s and sister’s eyes were riveted as the diminutive puppet skipped onstage, pirouetting and bowing. But I had more important things to think about. My fingertips skimmed Mom’s calves as the sound of opera mixed with Topo Gigio’s giggles filled the air. Mom’s legs softened against my spine and I glanced up, knowing that my explorations could continue only as long as they went unnoticed.

We had recently settled into this new brick colonial. Our Texas to Florida move had followed my father’s fishing business. This house had been the lure that drew my mother across the Gulf, marking her success as a wife as my father’s just-built steel-hulled boat marked Dad’s cutting edge reputation in shrimping. With that boat Dad could now trawl farther and farther out into South American waters, staying for eight or more months at a time instead of the usual three. We barely noticed the difference.

Mom was usually on the move, bustling about, finding work where no one else would know to look, famous for trailing behind us, scrubbing floors as friends entered the front door. But tonight seemed different as she tenderly selected deckle-edged photos, one-by-one, from well-worn shoeboxes. Strange behavior for such an unsentimental woman, a fact attested to by my baby book, blank after the first page.

I was preoccupied with legs since I’d recently started shaving my own peach fuzz. Rumor had it that the razor magically left you with the smooth sleekness that every woman longed for. So far, I only been able to manage bloody nicks. As my hands ran up and down Mom’s womanly legs, I was startled by coarse prickly hair scattered from ankle to knee. Expecting the silken smoothness promised in Nair ads, I felt betrayed.

Ugh, is this what I have to look forward to? I wondered.

Mom glanced down.

“Patty, what are you doing? Stop rubbing my legs!” she scolded.

Caught, knowing I’d violated unspoken rules, I steeled myself to be banished. Instead my mother’s voice softened. A faint smile crossed her face, coupled with a faraway look. I was fascinated. Smiles were almost as rare as touch in our house.

“You know, my legs have always been my best feature,” Mom crooned. “When I was young my nickname was ‘Gams’ because I had terrific legs. See, take a look at this.”

Mom held out a snapshot. I recognized the Jersey Shore beach from summer visits to Grandma’s. A young woman stood on the beach on a bright sunny day, staring boldly into the camera, smirk on her face, hand on hip, as if she was in on a joke told just before the shutter clicked.

That’s my mother, I thought, noting the crisply ironed man’s dress shirt trailing over a barely visible two-piece Miss America bathing suit. Her bobbed brunette hair, flipped on either side to frame her face, seemed untouched by the sun and surf. The jaunty angle of her pose made this woman look ready to take on the world.

Her legs do look pretty good. Lean and strong and very long. Maybe I’ll have Mom’s legs when I’m older.

I was yanked back from the future by Mom’s voice as she continued.

“We were always fooling around, playing ball, hanging out at the beach, wandering around town,” Mom recalled.

“I felt like such a kid with this crowd. I was the baby in the family – really an afterthought,” she added. But I had brothers and sisters who looked out for me, and nieces and nephews who were my age,” she explained.

“How old were you there?” I asked.

“I was 28,” said Mom. “I’d come home from secretarial school in New York City. No job, no ambitions. Just having a good time, playing ball and going to the shore,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. “Then, two years later, your father proposed and friends said I’d better say yes since I this might be my only chance.”

Topo Gigio bowed and left the stage. I held my breath, longing for more, even as I began to inch away, sensing we were done. My mother stiffened as she stood up and briskly shoved the shoeboxes back on shelves.

“Bedtime you kids,” she commanded. The moment passed as suddenly as it had arisen.

As I drifted to sleep, I reveled in the brief transformation from dutiful, detached Mom, husband perpetually at sea, to another mother. Mom as the baby in the family. Mom as an overgrown kid in her twenties. Mom with the gorgeous gams.

Waking early next day I ran downstairs for another peek at the photos, another glimpse at a young woman with her life ahead of her.

Gone. The shoeboxes had disappeared.

But I’d now had a glimpse of possibilities. Possibilities of playfulness. Possibilities of intimacy. I vowed I would be that kind of woman and that kind of mom. Long muscled legs that went on, maybe even danced, scratchy stubble and all.

Pat Hulsebosch is a queer Pippi Longstocking wanna-be who writes about cultures and identities in a never-boring life of teaching and learning. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Columbia Journal, Lunch Ticket, Furious Gravity, Grace & Gravity, Vol. I, and The Washington Post.

petaled flowers with dew drops on close up photography — Photo by Anthony on Pexels.com

Places I Have Unexpectedly Found Tears

22 July 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Samantha Ashe

a spin class,
the final song
that one collective push
the recognition of each other
in this synchronized struggle

a Macy’s,
after overhearing an adult woman
refer to her mother as “Mama”
the softness of its sound
the summoning of sweetness
the remembering of my own

in traffic,
interstate 5 heading north
the woman by herself
a passionate steering wheel drum solo
head swaying
screaming the words
witnessing a spirit
unleashed

the bathroom,
in the middle of the night
the fifth ungodly night of no sleep
palms cradling my face
pleading to the sleep gods

in my daughter’s room,
watching as she tucks
each of her babies in for bed
the gentle timbre in her voice
the tactile tenderness of her hands
the hope
that maybe
she learned this from me

Samantha Ashe lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and daughter where she works as a personal trainer and fitness instructor. She spends her free time writing next to an open window or in the woods, chasing summits and sunrises.