Difficult Decisions
She was fed exclusively through a gastrostomy tube. Although she couldn’t speak, she often smiled and made noises and expressed pleasure in the company of her siblings. Her parents —…
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parenting
358 posts
The Rumpus Interview with Meghan Daum and Elliott Holt
Meghan Daum, the anthology's editor, and Elliott Holt, who contributed its penultimate essay, discuss Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: A Roundtable on Writing, Editing, and Race
With Lisa Factora-Borchers, Patrice Gopo, Jennifer Niesslein, Tamiko Nimura, and Deesha Philyaw.
Children in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans…
“Throw Something Down Hard Enough, You Discover Its Laws”
Maybe my faith that the profoundest feeling we're offered by art that really hits us deep in is a setting free, a series of screens or horizons obliterated somehow lovingly.
There Is No Such Thing as a True Story
Perspective is a fickle beast, and memory is an unreliable traveling companion through the years.
Are We All Our Own Vanishing
We will never be an exclamation point, an ellipses, a question mark. We must all leave with this: a period—solid, and utterly irrefutable.
Plankton (A Body of Stars)
Plankton either grows into something other than plankton—a strong swimming non-planktonic adult, like a crab or a fish, or it stays the same—forever drifting with the shifting tides.
Mole Biopsies and Other Love Notes
If this were a comic book, Bad Mole would be skulking in a dark alley, wearing an ill-fitting trench coat.
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Admission of Guilt
Last summer, I nearly killed my son. It was an accident, but the guilt I live with belongs to those whose malicious deeds are intentional.
What Pregnant Women Read
At Lit Hub, Yardenne Greenspan discusses the solace she found in parenting books during pregnancy: Now that I was in this completely new and foreign scenario, my body doing things…