How did we get a 5 year old with severe ADHD to wear a mask for a full year of kindergarten?
Something wonderful has happened since I turned 70. Really. I got in my skin. I finally got in. I mean, I’ve been trying to get in my skin for years. But there ...
“People can have crushes just on boys or just on girls???… Why? How does it work? What’s wrong with-” “There is NOTHING wrong with them! Don’t say that!” ...
Dr. Joy is the best therapist ever. She acknowledges my feelings around generational trauma and my fractured relationship with my Korean Tiger Mom.
My favorite grade school teacher was Miss George (the title Ms did not yet exist) in fourth grade. I had a crush on her, though I would not have thought of it t...
In short order, I went from liar to thief. I took my brother's silver dollar collection. No one spent old silver dollars, so when I tried, the manager of the 7...
My mother drove a blue Volkswagen bug that sounded like a dying jet engine filled with marbles. My childhood is marked by a long succession of clunker cars that...
As a little girl reading fairy tales, I came across the word “replied.” Though a bookish child, I somehow read “replied” as “rippled,” as in “Because I said so,...
My voice climbed an invisible staircase until at the top step of my skull it jumped up and down and waved its arms in the air. “Wake up, mom! Wake up!” I said. ...
As I watched this soft-spoken, self-effacing elderly man repeatedly humiliated by his wife, all the venomous rancor I had held for years completely dissipated. ...
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Honorable Mention: Our Family Walks by Nick R. Robinson; unpublished manuscript.
Before my wife and I got married, my mother told me that my father had expressed concern about my future brother in law’s gayness being passed along to our chil...
I grew up in the Jewish version of The Wonder Years, an alternative universe where just about every person I interacted with was a Jew.
In a second union, things you took for granted during those years with your first spouse float in your unconscious like twigs along a clear or muddied stream, o...
I am over 50, feeling 70 and used to being semi-invisible in big, sexy Chicago and currently dressed for something as far from clubbing or prostitution as anyon...
A humorous glimpse of boyhood, “Pincushion” is an audio personal essay written, narrated, and produced in March 2018 by Kyle Stedman.
Hell hath no fury like an 8 year old about to not get Western Barbie. Christmas was not our strong suit. Easter—that my parents could pull off. It all happens i...
When the seventies arrived, I began to learn about feminism. Men could be intimidating. We were intimidating with our physical size, our attitude. I began to pi...
I’m not sure if my mistake was in joining together reality and fantasy or if I simply was treading someplace where I didn’t belong.
His quiet Southern lilt didn’t match what he was saying. There should have been magnolia petals falling out of his mouth or some exhaustive yarn about his mothe...
