An Extraordinary Essay

I feel better today. I want to thank y’all for letting me vent yesterday. I immediately felt better after writing about my feelings and I appreciate that it was received with open hearts and minds. Y’all are the best!

Photo by Nazar Hrabovyi on Unsplash

So today I want to share an extraordinary essay with y’all. It’s written by someone who’s become a trusted friend through discovering each other via our writing and on social media some 2 - 3 years ago. Jamie Etheridge is a talented writer of Creative Nonfiction who writes with her whole heart. It’s evident in her work. Besides being a wonderful writer, she’s a wonderful friend whose advice I treasure. She has mad editorial skills and has helped me see holes in my own work, gently and compassionately. Oh well, I could go on for days praising this woman. Instead, I’m directing you to her latest essay in Porter House Review, the official literary journal of Texas State University’s MFA program. It is a deeply personal and stunning work of art about her nomadic life, settling and marrying in Kuwait, adapting to the culture, and the mother/daughter bond that grew between her, her newborn, and her mother-in-law. Braided into the narrative is a gorgeous meditation on olive trees and olive oil and their significance throughout cultural history. Yes, I’m biased but I’m not alone in my opinion that it is an extraordinary essay as it is a Finalist for Porter House Review’s Editor’s Choice Award.

I am wishing very, very hard that someone will nominate it for Best American Essays.

I’m sharing a paragraph here (hope that’s ok!) but I highly recommend you clink the link and read the whole essay. You will love it.

My mother-in-law towers for an Indian woman, almost regal in her bearing and wears her long, dark hair braided and slung over her left shoulder. I watch as she rests my daughter’s head against her knobby knees. This is a woman I barely know, who let’s face it, I’ve resisted knowing. Yet at this moment, she seems like a goddess to me. Demeter anointing Persephone with life-giving ambrosia. She sits straight, her legs forming a platform, and lays my naked child facedown and lengthwise, along her thighs. Naked hands, naked skin. Skin-to-skin. Life-to-life. We are women, all in a line, from the first mitochondrial Eve until this baby girl splayed across her grandmother’s lap. 

I almost cry; it hurts so much to see someone else tending my child.

— from “In the Garden of Gesthsemane, a Lamp” by Jamie Etheridge

Big hugs to you, Jamie!