Sons and Daughters
Boys were boys and girls were girls and gender norms were there for a reason. We didn’t realize the reason was to keep women down. Maybe we just didn’t care.
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Posts Tagged: children
Wow, Mom!: Mom Genes by Abigail Tucker
The best books I have read about motherhood have not reassured me that these feelings will resolve.
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A Vocabulary for Apostates
I needed to reshape the definitions of words that were used against me.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Ada Bloom Finds the Windmill”
Ada followed her song deeper into the bush, until the windmill loomed up before her.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Biswell and Hope, Christmas: A Story in Four Epiphanies
She can really throw herself into a stoning.
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Exploration and Connection: A Conversation with Oliver de la Paz
Oliver de la Paz discusses his newest collection, THE BOY IN THE LABYRINTH.
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Split Chins, Open Coats
My whistle was useless. Using it felt like an insult.
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Monarchs, Motherhood, and Transformation
These butterflies needed help, and I wanted to deliver them my garden.
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Telling the Story of Now: A Conversation with Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli discusses her new novel, LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Lifers
We were beginning to exist on the periphery of our own lives.
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The Perfect Childhood
Even when these questions are not articulated, they’re there.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Peter Mishler
Peter Mishler discusses his debut collection, Fludde, the effect of ritual on poems, and childhood psychology.
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Strawberry Field
To pick a strawberry, one must crouch.
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On Birds, Cats, and Children
My devotion to the cats was not an imitation of human motherhood. To confuse the two, I thought, was an insult to both.
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It’s Just Reality: Talking with Meaghan O’Connell
Meaghan O’Connell discusses her new memoir, And Now We Have Everything, perfectionism in motherhood and writing, and being pregnant again.
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The Last Poem I Loved : “The Planned Child” by Sharon Olds
The poem is no longer a part of the book I own. I ripped it out, had it framed, and nailed it to the wall right next to the door in our master bedroom.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #126: Christopher Zeischegg
“Being thrust into forced ritualistic closeness does break the ice, but doesn’t guarantee closeness.”
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Rumpus Original Fiction: One of Them Dies
We seldom forget when people promise to give us something, whether we need or want that thing or not. I promise you death, you want a death.
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After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
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The Miracle Bowl
Praise the family that tethers me. Praise the well-used kitchen utensils and scoured mixing bowls and butter knives, thick slabs of jelly on the bread.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: City of Foundlings
What makes him think she’s in any less pain? Because hers isn’t prolonged by uncertainly, isn’t moored by hope.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Prescriptions
I wore sobriety like a shirt that was too tight in the shoulders, and everyone around me knew it.
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Endless Preparation: Apples and Women’s Work
It makes sense to me that Johnny Appleseed, a man, would travel God’s earth spreading his profligate seed. And then women are doomed to their lives trying to make that seed into something useful.
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A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith discusses her new collection Good Bones, how motherhood has changed her writing, and what it felt like to have a poem go viral.
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Everyone Loves the Pope
My lover became the Pope. It was the twenty-tens and the Catholic Church wanted to rebrand with Newport cigarettes and Hermes chiseled calves.
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A Magpie for the Lord
What would it be like to not be us? We were trying to figure out so much about the world then, and this is something we could never get to the bottom of.
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