I always got confused when a paper asked, “What was your first language?” I didn’t have one language, I had two. For as long as I could remember, I was spoken to in English and in Spanish. My parents had immigrated in their teens with my grandparents to the United States. By the time their… Continue reading Losing the Language
Inspired by a line from Juno where the main character, a pregnant teen, refers to herself as a “cautionary whale.” Available at http://teewit.com. Motherhood is hard. And I don’t just mean raising the babies. I mean having them. I mean trying to have them. And yes, raising them is hard, too. After finishing up a… Continue reading Making a baby?
My husband’s yeshiva is studying “The Rabbi and People with Disabilities” in various different lectures throughout the week. The topic of people with disabilities obviously interests us because I struggle daily with fibromyalgia and all the wonders of living with chronic pain and the ensuing ferocious battle against depression. To say that I am a… Continue reading The Wrong Place @ the Wrong Time
Father’s Day came a bit early for me this week. An excerpt of a short story, Daddy’s Little Girl, about my strange relationship with my father and the trip to the Dominican Republic that brought us back into each other’s lives after a nearly ten-year estrangement was published in Tertulia Magazine. Given the format of… Continue reading Happy Father’s Day?
I’ve been convalescing on the couch with a heavy dose of Gilmore Girls reruns. The rainy weather has got me down. Or maybe it’s all the running around like a Kentucky Fried chicken with its head cut off. It’s probably the latter. Yesterday was a very long day. I logged in my exercise hours (which… Continue reading A Good Old Fashioned Monster Story
“How do you feel about the fact that your baby looks nothing like you?” I asked a new acquaintance after being shocked by the dissimilarity between her face and the face of her interracial baby. While Mom is half-white, half-something else, baby is at least three quarters white and only 25% something else. Given these… Continue reading Baby Face
We went to the Five Towns for Shabbos. Everything that could go wrong did. Traveling and fibromyalgia don’t really mix. Sitting for too long (so my muscles and bones atrophy and start to hurt unbearably), over-stimulation (from subway noise and train noise) and carrying heavy things (like our bags) all spell disaster. To get to… Continue reading A Rainy, Racist "MEXICAN HOUSEKEEPER" Kind of Shabbos
Everyone I know is pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Well, everyone except me. The other day I felt like a hostage as I sat around with moms discussing daycare options over lunch. During my regular Target shopping spree, I became harried going through racks of baby clothes as I searched for a gift for… Continue reading Mothers/Submission for "Personal Essay Clinic: Writing about About Family" Class
An all too common question after I got hitched was: “Are you pregnant?” and “Are you pregnant yet?” and “When are you having a baby?” and sometimes there would be a statement: “You should get pregnant!” Some people actually thought that because I was home sick and unable to work for a year, I should…get… Continue reading Don’t ask about my uterus…please.
I didn’t grow up hearing many stereotypes about Jews, I just knew that we (Dominicans) didn’t like them. The focus was more on the fact that Jews didn’t believe in Jesus and therefore, wouldn’t be saved. No Jesus, no free pass to heaven. At least, that was more of the focus than say the stereotype… Continue reading When Dominicans Haggle…
Memoirs of a Jewminicana 