{By Pauline Campos}

“It’s time to exercise, baby,” I call to Buttercup. “Did you want to play or workout with Mama?”‘

She’s in the playroom she has dubbed her “magical land,” but immediately joins me at my side and waits for the DVD to cue up. “Are we going to get healthy and strong?”

I smile. “Exactly.”

When I was a baby, my thighs were so chubby that one of my aunts used to eat them like drumsticks. It’s a story I heard often when I was growing up, usually told with the requisite giggles from my mother and a pinch on my legs from whomever else was within reach. I thinned out as I grew, but I never thought myself skinny. Instead, “big” was how I classified my body. “Big” because I was five feet tall at eight years old. The same height as my mother and almost every other adult woman in my family. “Big” as in not dainty with curves that snuck up on me when I was 12 and muscle definition that would have put me in the “athletic” category. But that word didn’t exist in the Spanglish craziness my family resided in. Instead, children were scolded for not finishing what was on their plate and reprimanded for needing to watch what they were eating, usually in the same breath.

I remember very clearly the day my father noticed my new set of hips. I weighed 156 pounds and stood 5’6” tall. I wore a size 10 and only now realize I only thought that was a bad thing because my mother never shut up about the size 6 she could still squeeze into after five kids. If I could wake up with that body today?

A’ye, M’ijita.

{by Mary Murdoch of Wild Tigers Have I Known}

(photo credit)

In order to accumulate a soul, you have to suffer.

As if, once enough suffering has tumbled down upon you,
building up like a mountainside,
your second life will begin.

Like Athena you will sprout from Zeus’ head and appear in a ball of light, naked and red.

Love is what brings all the suffering.
Love is watching everyone you love leave, die, perish- each person wilting slowly.
Like day old geraniums in a Mason jar that sat on the kitchen counter when I was eight years old.
They dried and mummified like King Tut wrapped in cheesecloth.
Carelessly, I knocked over the glass jar and at once, everything fell to the ground.

Two weeks later my dog died, and I was convinced the falling jar was an omen.
A sign from the other side that death was creeping over into the living’s territory in a dense fog
(like there are chalk outlines dividing space between life and death, war zones, agreed upon plots of land.)

{By Megan of Undomestic Diva}

Today is one of those days – one of many recent and one of many more to come – where life’s new twists and turns have me walking out the door of several years of fond memories and unthought of heartache towards a future of Who Knows.

It isn’t a fancy place, this house. And while smaller than many, it was enough; certainly more than many others hope for and at the end of the day it wasn’t just stucco and wood and cement and shingles – it was our home.

This is the house that broke us, in many ways, though of course it’s not only to blame – not one single thing is. But it was also the house of much happiness – where two of the three boys were born, where many Halloweens and birthdays and summers were spent, where Easter eggs were hidden and found, where dinners were concocted and birthday cakes created, where oranges were picked and eaten in the yard, where swingsets were built and ignored, where gardens were planted and bloomed, where Christmas trees sat (and fell), where life moved at a speed quicker than we could register – all inside these walls that were being fixed and patched and painted as we fell apart.

I slowly circle one more time in the living room. It still feels oddly full, even in its bareness. Though the smell of cardboard boxes and laundered clothes and nostalgia has left in trucks and U-Hauls, a vaguely familiar scent remains – the way the house smelled the day we got the keys – of vacancy and emptiness. It sinks in. The truth is, this house didn’t break us. We did. And this house isn’t haunted. We are.

It’s hard to fathom that I’m taking one last look around our house and leaving it to go to my house. The newness of everything is jarring and yet exciting and the adventure of it all has its moments of hope and its share of fear.

I shut the door. I pause on the porch step, taking in this very moment, soaking in this change like sunlight on my skin, breath in my lungs. There’s nothing left here for me anymore. Today is another reminder of moving onward, this time, literally. I remind myself: A house is a house but a home is what you make it so I have not just packed our clothes and photographs and books and toys but our memories too. They, though the heaviest of all the things to carry, are the easiest to move.

{By Michelle Palmer of One Roof Africa}

“Mama will you lay with me?”

I sigh. Why is this glaring screen more enticing to me than her seven-year-old nighttime snuggles?

“In a minute,” I reply, thinking she might just go fall asleep before I get to her. More than “a minute” passes and then, from the bedroom, “Mama?”

I relent. Walk down the dark hall into her even darker room. Grumble as I trip over the toys left out and the Sit-n-Spin rumbles loud under my feet. Will this house ever be mess-free?!

She’s tucked in under her t-shirt quilt, a Christmas gift I had made for each of us before our move to Uganda. I cuddle her close, smell her hair, rub my fingers down her arms, think of how big she is growing and she really should have had a shower before bed and she giggles, “Mama, you’re taking up a lot of room.” In my snuggling I inadvertently took over her pillow and now she’s just lying on a corner. I scooch over a bit.

She asks for a song. “But not a catchy one–I don’t want to be singing it all night.” I begin to sing “Stay Awake”, but she stops me. “No, no, not that one! Less catchy!” Aggravated, I sing “Amazing Grace,” with all the verses. She calls Benny to her side; he lies down and lays his head across her tummy.

{by Wolf of Just Add Father}

Don’t open the door to the study.
Take down a lute.

Rumi

I wake up too early and lie in the dark, thinking. I have eight unfinished ToDos from yesterday. I go downstairs and open the study door.

On one shoulder sits a little man, saying, Lute! Lute! Play the lute!

On the other shoulder is another little man. This one says, Are you good enough yet? There’s work to do.

I think the lute man was there first, at least that’s the way I remember childhood. But the other man soon followed. He’s pretty much run my life since the first grade, and maybe before that. My wish for Nick, my eight year old son, is that he listen to his own lute man for as long as possible.

My fear is that the other man is already whispering to Nick. The idea that I can help Nick put this man in his place is a great seduction for me. Perhaps all it means is that I want to help him to be me, doing it right.

Nora and I try not to mindlessly praise Nick, avoiding “Good job” and such when we can. Instead we say things like, “Look at that yellow line you’ve drawn there. It’s twisting like a river.”

Nick likes to draw. But he worries that he’s lousy at it. This worry used to stop him cold, but now he draws and draws anyway, I’m glad to say. For the moment the lute man is winning.

A couple of years ago I got him a book about mistakes that turned into useful inventions. Not-sticky-enough glue that led to Post-Its, and so on. But the book was more for me than for him. It gave me something to say when he complained about himself. I told him he needed to make 10,000 mistakes to get good at something.

“It doesn’t look like it’s supposed to,” he’d say, showing me a drawing.

{By Alexia from Say Another Lexi}

(photo credit)

If he sees me when I am with people, he will think my cheeks must hurt from smiling so much. He will wonder if my fingertips are worn down from touching people all the time. He will see how my eyes are really magnets, gravitating towards anything that glitters. He will know that ever time I throw my head back to laugh, I am really swallowing a falling star. He will see all the different shapes my mouth makes, because it moves even when I am listening. He will see the way I hold my hands on my lips when I think before I speak, as if words will escape without permission. He will see my thoughts splash across my face, emotions striking my face like lightning, one after another. He will see that I can never hide behind my expressions, and he will understand that my readability is a sign of sincerity. He will know that those thoughts are just drops, and that inside me there’s an ocean. He will want to swim in that ocean.

If he sees me when I am alone, drawing hearts falling from trees like leaves, he will think of me as a girl from a sad song. He will wonder why the frown in the middle of my forehead is so deep. He will wonder who hurt me and gave me such hollow autumn eyes. He will think someone broke my heart and he will be jealous of that boy for getting so close. He will wonder what I look like when I smile. He will think of my notebooks as keys, and know that they are filled with words falling from a fountain that goes on forever. He will wish his heart was a musical box that played my favourite song. He will follow my gaze and wonder if I’m really looking at the horizon or something else that he himself cannot see. He will be discreet but he will want me to see him seeing me. He will smile when I scowl and go back to scribbling. He will know that, one day, we will laugh about this. He will want to see my hair spread across his pillow like an auburn pien-mien, lying with his head between my breasts, sharing secrets we swear we’ve never told anybody else. He will want to be the one to light up my eyes, and the one to catch the glint of tears before they fall. He will see the effort it takes sometimes just to stand up straight and he will know what that feels like, but he will stand up straight, even straighter, sometimes, just to teach me how.

{by Maggie May Ethridge of Flux Capacitor}

I grew up poor, at times literally poverty stricken- collapsed into tears over our lack of money for basic necessities, food, electricity, housing; we spent one year living, the four of us, in one room of a mousy beach hotel, and another in the four bedroom home of our best friends, which already housed their five family members, two dogs, birds and a few cats. My parents slept on the foldout couch in the living room. After that long, crowded year my mother moved my sister and I back to our birthplace in Jackson, Mississippi while my father stayed working in San Diego.

Lura and I took turns sleeping in bed with Mom, while the one out slept on the cot placed horizontally at the end of the bed. This was my 4th grade year: the year I read Pet Cemetery, made friends with Julia, whose father had died of cancer the year before, the year I moved into a home at the end of a cul-de-sac where my sister and I were the only white girls on the block. We were the only white girls for miles of blocks.

{by Dana McGlocklin of Urban Utopia Photography}

You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb

-From Robert Frost, Blueberries

{by Keri Always}

A daddy, daughter game of “bulldog” before her turn at bat, an intense moment. Captured.

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Check out more of Keri’s photography and her ability to capture a moment.

Featured by Editorial Director, Jennifer Doyle

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“Clink” by Kathleen from Sugar and Spice | @ksugarandspice | shared by ksugarandspice on Instagr.am

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