This Is Us
I understood, even as a young girl, that I was much too much.
I was too wild, too exuberant, asked too many questions, and paid far too little attention. I stared out the windows of my elementary school and imagined myself hanging upside-down from the trees, staring back into the classroom. I would not hear the teacher calling my name. Gwen. Gwen! GWEN!
On the playground, I would run fast and peg balls at the boys, smacking them in the head with red rubber. I would make wild dashes to release my teammates from the jail at the end of the dodge ball court, screaming and whooping, imagining I was a cowgirl releasing…
THIS IS US
Grandma, why do you have so much hand sanitizer?
My great-grandmother saved Sweet ’N Low packets. Those little pink rectangles of currency now only found in very old, very sticky diners where rent is minimal and corporate interest in property nonexistent. In her lifetime I don’t think my great-grandmother ever purchased an artificial sweetener of any kind. She never needed to. There was always a healthy supply in whatever giant purse was within arm’s reach. If those ran out (they never ran out), there were old shoe boxes in cabinets serving as secondary stash. …
THIS IS US
Don’t depend on the kindness of strangers, but do celebrate it
To paraphrase a great sage: The subway’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
Some days, what you get is human fecal matter underfoot. In case you’re wondering, that’s the best case scenario for encountering human fecal matter. It’s also possible to encounter it underhand, as my sixteen-year-old son discovered one afternoon during his commute home from school. Never since Lady Macbeth, or the year 2020, has someone washed their hands with such desperation.
Other days on the subway, what you get is tourists from Paris who let you speak terrible French to them and…
THIS IS US
In a binary world, everyone who looks at me sorts me into “man” or “woman.” Everyone is wrong.
“You look very much like yourself,” my husband told me. We were in a pool in Virginia, late at night, taking turns dragging each other through water as warm as blood.
I had no idea what he meant. My husband went to grad school to study Wittgenstein, at one point, and he has an academic’s habit of choosing a word located two doors down from the one you’d use in casual conversation. You can sit with his little poems forever without decoding them.
“You’re all sharp and spiny,” he said. “I can always tell exactly what you’re thinking when I…
THIS IS US
On closure and cassette tapes
In September 2012, I purchased a portable cassette player. From a dinky thrift store that smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and a sweet, middle-aged woman who questioned why this gangly teenager had cassette tapes in that day and age. The player had served its purpose, was outdated. Perhaps it did and was — thus ending up in her store. The music was worth it though.
A friend once called me a hooligan and a hipster, and I’ve dragged that description onto every website’s “Tell Me About Yourself” bio section. This friend also liked to point out certain habits of mine…
THIS IS US
How moving into my own space helped me find my own joy as a first generation immigrant woman of color
When there’s a full or new moon, I have this ritual. I like to write my intentions in this journal with a silk sari print blue cover. I have entries filled with things I wished to release, like deeply held insecurities. Things I wanted to call into my life, like healing my inner child who was bullied in school. A conscious and healthy romantic partnership. Job opportunities from companies with leadership that cared about anti-racist business practices and centered community care and healing. And a home. I described the space with vivid images: an open, airy room or apartment filled…
THIS IS US
What rock music taught me about being American
“Born in the U.S.A.”
Picture it, a most American of all American pursuits, either an Indian Guides weekend or a weekend for Cub Scouts. It was my brother’s gig, but we all went along, me, my mom, and my dad, and after we’d set up our family tent, I spotted a kid from my school and his younger brother, marching towards our tent in jeans and T-shirts. One of them had a boombox on his shoulder. I just knew I was witnessing something so American it was nearly sacred. From the boombox Bruce Springsteen was yelling like he does: “I was born in the…
THIS IS US
Of all the haunting remnants of the past year, the one I can’t shake is my daughter’s eerily real doll
We were falling deep into our pandemic winter, and after the better part of a year of fully online or hybrid school, my daughter’s noneducational hours had become dominated by additional screen time so that I could keep working. She transformed into a third-grader with a casual online “window shopping” habit and a growing obsession with Reborn Babies, strangely realistic, silicone baby dolls.
I wasn’t sure how I’d survived the better part of the year as a freelance writer in shutdown with a throbbing ball of stress growing and contracting somewhere over my heart, my nervous stomach. …
THIS IS US
If cake were a drug, this one would be a Schedule I substance
BTR (before the ‘rona), my beautiful sister, KC and I hosted a girls’ night. She served these two cute little cakes from Whole Foods Market with a warning: “The strawberry shortcake is good, but the Chantilly cake is a problem; be careful.”
All of us laughed, and I playfully rolled my eyes, thinking, “I’ve met very few non-chocolate-related confections worthy of my love and devotion.”
Welp, she didn’t lie. That Chantilly cake was a magical and addictively delicious berry-filled delight. …
THIS IS US
We’ve all been stuck in some way or another
Last summer, my eight-year-old got trapped inside a couch. Under the couch, technically, in its undergirding. It was complicated, the way scenarios involving children often are, especially in the middle of a pandemic.
See, this is a story about a kid in a couch, but it is also an allegory.
It was August, a time when, normally, our family of five would be undertaking epic summer adventures, casting off from Brooklyn to shores unknown. But like everything else — school, sleepovers, birthday and holiday celebrations — summer adventures had been canceled. Both of our attempts to visit my husband’s family…
Human Parts
A publication from Medium about humanity: yours, mine, and ours.
