Posts tagged “moms”

  1. There is a home video, made when you were about nine. You watch your nine-year-old self lead your aunt (behind the camera) off into the house, blithely walking past your mother as she sits on the couch. Stop, you want to tell the girl onscreen. Reach out and touch her!

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  2. It wasn’t my mother's prejudice regarding her potential adopted offspring that struck me; it was this racism infecting my adoption origin story. She hadn’t waited years and years for me because there was some baby shortage in our small Midwestern town. She had waited to adopt because she wanted an "all white" infant girl.

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  3. I asked my mother how she put those ignorant bigots in their place. Did she educate them about what Islam really teaches?

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  4. She was a mesmerizing storyteller, with an eye for the lurid detail and a sense for just how much to exaggerate. I had her repeat her stories over and over again, as children do. They were touchstones in a vast, confusing universe. Her experiences and those of our counterparts in Pine Valley roiled beneath the surface of my quiet suburban childhood.

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  5. These are facts: three years ago you were 23, you were in graduate school, and you had cancer. This wasn’t always the case, of course, but that’s what became of you over a single Thanksgiving break. Other facts will emerge over time, many will begin to feel as though they had always been a part of yourself, but these three are constants. You hold them close to yourself.

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  6. The version of me that my mom spent my whole life trying to bring into existence came alive eight months ago. She took her first steps on Facebook, using my name and my face to hide behind. She used the version of my name that I adopted when I left home and stepped outside the margins of acceptable femininity as drawn and reinforced by mom and her idea of respectable religiosity. Her profile picture, ironically enough, was a…

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  7. Felix Kent's previous work for The Toast can be found here. When I was applying to colleges a lifetime ago, my atheist father suggested I write my application essays about Sai Baba. He said there were lots of smart kids more or less like me applying to college -- this part of my life set me apart. It was good advice, perhaps. I didn’t follow it. Sathya Sai Baba, who died in 2011, was…

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  8. In the year since Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown, Jr. in Ferguson, Missouri, graphic videos and images of police brutality against unarmed black Americans have flooded social media feeds, thanks to the potent combination of ubiquitous cell phone cameras and the tireless efforts of Black Lives Matter activists. Like many, I’ve followed this stream of events with increasing frustration and horror, as these incidents remind us of racism and police brutality’s knock-on effects. Racist police brutality degrades community morale,…

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  9. For the Creative-Anxious Parent™ the world is a veritable junkyard of nightmare futures just begging to be collected-- what if my child is bullied ferociously? What if my child makes some disgusting sex party urban legend indisputably real? What if my child keeps large, seemingly-immortal snakes as pets? In developing one’s irrational, ultimately pointless parental anxiety, it’s important to integrate less obvious, more esoteric fears into one’s 2:30 am worrying practice. Here, some…

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  10. Previously by Carly Lane. Growing up, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t surrounded by birth. I’m rarely a latchkey kid who frequently comes home to an empty house at the end of a school day. My little sister and I make the trek home from the bus stop, let ourselves in, and ease our backpacks from our aching shoulders. Our mother greets us from wherever she was in the house, asks us about our…

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  11. There are many traditions in my family that have never been fully explained to me. When I ask why we observe them, the answers I get often amount to little more than “that's just how it is.” On Christmas, we eat sotanghon -- a sort of Filipino chicken noodle soup. On New Year's Eve, my mom tells me to jump up and down with coins in my pockets so I can get taller and richer.

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  12. 1. My First Rattle Was an Improperly-Sealed Bottle of Prenatal Vitamins

    2. Misandry Began At Home

    3. I Am Not One Of Your Commenters

    4. No One Provided Me With An Adequate Explanation of the Difference Between Crocodiles and Alligators

    5. So Few Barbies, So Many Gay Penguins

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  13. lol i have unLOCKED SEO with this post already, just gonna watch the pageviews roll in No, let's be serious, though! I have a lot of opinions on having sex after you have a baby, and now you get to hear them. Let us begin with a brief litany of disclaimers: 1. I don't know your life. 2. There are a billion emotional and psychological aspects to having sex after giving birth which this post…

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  14. Hey mom.

    I’m glad you’re not here.

    It was always hard for me to watch things like this with you. You overreacted to everything on the news. I hated that about you. Every storm, every wildfire, every random shooting, every nighttime strangler, you acted as if seeing them on the news would somehow magically make them show up at our apartment door. You issued nonsensical warnings like “Be careful out there. They’re

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  15. I have four sets of my grandmother's dentures displayed on a porcelain plate on my dresser. I carried them back from her funeral in Ireland on my lap in a velvet bag. My mother found the bag of fake teeth while we were packing up my grandmother's room and jokingly asked if I wanted them. I didn’t think twice before I said yes. When I bring a date home to spend the night, the dentures…

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