Editor’s note: I wrote but never published this in late January 2021, just a few weeks after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and about two years into going low contact with my parents and no contact with my sister. It has taken three years, but I finally feel ready to share it. — Lindsey On Jan. 6, I was in a video conference call for work when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol.…
If I were to give the Universe’s writers’ room a note on this season of the show called My Life, it might say, simply: This feels like a bit much. Why force her to go through the emotional roller coaster of a miscarriage in order to discover the cyst? Seems overly cruel and unrealistic. Maybe save the miscarriage for another season. Don’t burn all your plot points at once. But the writers are the pros,…
Content warning: Graphic descriptions of pregnancy loss We’re looking at a scabby, reddened wound on our dog Sarge’s side — a bite mark from some other moody dog at the park. It’s held together by two small silver staples. Richard looks at it under the light of his cell phone and pronounces that it is healing acceptably. “Injuries heal from the inside out,” he says. “Not from the outside in.” The dog seems fine, as…
It wasn’t temporary; it drags on and on; it may never end; oh godddd. How could we have known in March that America wouldn’t have the capacity to put its big-kid britches on and end this shit? (Okay, yeah, now that I’ve typed it out, I see it. We were doomed from the start.) It’s been a dark summer. The novelty of being stuck at home wore off in June but at least it was…
• Perspective, if you look at it the right way. • A three-inch white hair that grows out of your temple overnight. Overnight. • Ideas, so many ideas, that will burn in the back of your head for days, weeks, months, years, waiting for you to feed the dog and clear your desk and load the last dish and answer the last email and sing the last bedtime song and fold the last towel until you…
“You have a lot of scars.” My son is standing next to me as I’m sitting on a truck-stop toilet, my pants bunched around my knees. He’s looking at my thigh. It’s extra pale in the fluorescent light. He is six years old and does not know what cellulite is, what ingrown hairs are — only that his mother’s legs are dimpled and marked in ways that his own skin, smooth and caramel colored, is…
Some day you’ll be thirty-seven and you’ll have this amazing, eclectic collection of friends all around the country. People who, even if it’s been months or years since you’ve seen them, always seem to feel like home when they come around. You’ll be lucky, you know. But you’ll need to make more friends, specific friends — the kind who have children who go to the same school as your kid, who are in the same…
The abortion didn’t hurt but the three weeks after it did. It was a low ache down deep in my belly, pressurized. I wore dresses to work so I wouldn’t have to button any pants. I was tired. Two weeks after, I was on a plane to Syracuse to judge an international news-design competition. No one knew. I didn’t tell my parents. I didn’t tell my friends. It was between my boyfriend and me. It…
We bought bikes. It was at my insistence, a desperate middle-aged Hail Mary to try to find some form of exercise that I don’t hate so that I don’t end up in a Little Rascal at Walmart before I’m forty. “Let’s get bikes for Christmas!” I told my husband back in October, when we were settling on the notion of not buying Christmas gifts for one another. He agreed, as he is wonderful and actually…
I was sick the entire first half of 2017. It was a tour de force of ailments — sinus infections, ear infections, pink eye, strep throat — cycling through my body and returning at their leisure, like microbial timeshare owners trying to make their individual marriages work. I remember two low moments in particular in that span of months: 1. Sitting in the Walgreens well clinic exam room, my throat swollen painfully shut, unable to…
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