Proudly serving unpolished working motherhood, with bipolar depression & hilarity on the side
“Aren’t you afraid he’ll slit your throat in the middle of the night?” These were the fears of the neighbors to Mayme Czajka when she fell in love with Lawrence Voletti in 1936, an era when “Italian” was synonymous with “mafia”, or at least it was in their first-generation Polish neighborhood. Mayme knew this for […]
After I left the psychiatric hospital, I went to mental health grad school. Every weekday morning I’d leave my newborn with my husband or a sitter, head across town and spend the morning in classes and groups with my fellow recoverees. We’d start the morning with an optional spirituality/mindfulness type thing, which I liked the […]
Five years. It took five years of convincing, cajoling and damn near pleading for me to swallow a pill. I am not a Jehovah’s Witness. I am not a cat (or a guinea pig, despite the profile picture). But this was an SSRI, a pill to treat my depression, and I grew up with a […]
“It sounds like you’re saying you want to talk to one of those people,” my mom said slowly, across my teenage bedroom. I sat unevenly on the twin bed, eyeing the pictures of me and my friends taped around the dresser mirror and my CDs stacked up in uneven towers everywhere. I had corralled her […]
Being a kid is both comforting and maddening because it’s all so pre-plotted for you. Milestone to milestone, grade to grade, many of us are more or less traveling the same path as everyone we know, shepherded by grown-ups. The twenties? Mon Dieu! You’re Audrey in Breakfast at Tiffany’s! Actually, hopefully, you’re not, but you […]
If you’re reading this, I salute you. You have made it through a year in this sci-fi movie that’s not a movie, that’s your life and my life and everyone else’s life in the time of COVID-19. If your science-fiction life-year has been particularly horrific – I’m so sorry. I wish I could do or […]
You know how when you’re approaching a milestone, it feels almost inevitable to look back and reflect on what’s gone down in the past decade or two? I am standing on the cusp of 40 and thus far have failed at my younger adult dreams. I haven’t written a best-seller, haven’t started a world-changing nonprofit, […]
My husband thinks we are animal whisperers. Considering that we have been forced to trap-and-remove small wild beasts in our own home – the same small wild beasts that we brought into our own home under delusions of domesticity – he is clearly wrong. It all started so innocently. Oh, and I started it. We […]
It starts small, masquerading as tiredness or temporary irritation. Maybe you hit the snooze button too many times. Maybe you trail out of conversations, shrinking into yourself and losing eye contact. I do all that stuff and then pull up the best of me, rising from the ground like a Macy’s Thanksgiving day balloon, to […]
I’m sitting here on Martin Luther King Junior Day, pondering whether it’s safe to go downtown like I’m supposed to this week because armed far-right extremists may be there too, protesting the outcome of the presidential election. The irony is not lost on me that, after the past year of pandemic and protests and rioters […]