Sammi's non-fiction tends to focus on relationships, family, and women's issues. She also enjoys writing reviews for books, music, and food.
After our meeting, while we are Jell-O and waited for our parents to pick us up, a girl with silky blond hair and Baby Spice pigtails asked, “What are you?”
“Eight and three-quarters,” I shared.
Everyone laughed. “No. Where do you come from?”
Alone with a boy, my past traumas hummed up toward my heart in a flurry of fear. Maybe, I thought, he does “like-like” me. Maybe he is no different than the others. Maybe I am not safe.
At the time I worried my Tesla with New York plates would make me enemies as I drove deeper into the conservative south. Now, in 2025, I worry my car will be vandalized in Brooklyn, where most of my neighbors share my same political convictions.
Stress hurts your chances at pregnancy. So why, in the pursuit of making life, are we using a system that causes it?
It once felt like a failure and a loss of self for Henry to suggest we share toothpaste. Now, watching our things get picked from the sidewalk I can’t remember where half of them came from. Whether I bought them or he did. Because now all of it is ours, the stepping stones and building blocks of our shared life.
Since he was a fiscally conservative Republican in life, I don’t know if my dad would have voted for Donald Trump. For this I have a complicated gratitude that I can never forgive our 45th president for.
He battles alone for the great joy of a humble, garden-fresh meal prepared by me, eaten in no time at all. The lady bugs flew to the neighbor’s yard, so used to migration. They carpet the maple tree next door from trunk to canopy now, their astroturf lying unmarred below, as the aphids leave their marks in my husband’s swiss chard.
“Moon has doubled in size in the last week! Grow baby, grow!” I wanted to delete the app, but Moon was still inside me. Sure, the pregnancy was shrinking instead of growing, but ectopic means “out of place” not absent, and I still felt just as pregnant as I had when I first found out.
I knew that infertility support groups exist, but I craved a normalizing of the topic in everyday conversation. Despite my attempts to do just that, telling others about my journey has made trying to conceive during one of the loneliest eras in history even lonelier than I ever imagined staying silent would.
Remember the Halloween cookies and the art shows and the drive-thru lessons and the dart games and the nude park and the collages in the dolphin notebook and the long skirts you wore and the poems? What is love if not this? How old would I need to be to have it?
After all, what are we talking about when we talk about magic? The trick, or our ability to believe in it?
But when we have that feeling, that “I have to tell this one” feeling, maybe that’s not material from the freefall, it’s what’s at the bottom, a tree, or maybe in my case on ocean, with fragments of our familial traumas that we have to retell, to reenact in our own words, to heal, not just ourselves but our families past and present. And maybe that’s why it aches sometimes to have a story you want to tell. Because trauma leaves pain.
What the detective said was this: Because you were too intoxicated to remember exactly what happened, we had to close the case. I breathed into the phone, waiting. There had to be more. He filled the space with this: We just see so many of these cases.
These cases. What he meant was: Women are being raped constantly...
You'll have to put in some effort to gain the love of his/her family, just the way you did with him/her in the early stages of your relationship. It's not just about meeting the parents; it's about dating them and sustaining a relationship. Here are some things to remember before passing the stuffing...
At 24 I’ve been in the restaurant industry for nine years...
I’ve worked for corporations and indie shops, glorified fast food and fine dining, behind the bar and on the floor, but there is an unfortunate thread that runs through these experiences: there is always sexual harassment.
A roundup of what music festivals are offering this fall
