Tag: Essay

Motherless Mother

Urinating on my bedroom carpet as a child some thirty years ago had been intentional, though not malicious. I’d been going through a curious phase and discovered rather quickly that the bodily process responsible for urination was indeed voluntary. When I told my mother about it she barely stole her weary gaze away from the…

Kuchen—A Love Story

When I was eleven years old, my mother took me for Kaffee und Kuchen | coffee and cake at the Café Landtmann in Vienna. We sat in an elegant room with high ceilings, under severely beautiful lamps. We were tourists, like several other customers, but there were a handful of old Austrian men, too, wearing…

Pink Sugar–an ode to queer femininity

I recently bought a Pink Sugar perfume dupe online. The bottle has a white label with looping writing across its front, nauseatingly pink cotton candy liquid sloshing inside. I wear it almost every day, as some return to my 10-year-old self: bright red hair extensions, shimmery lips from dollar-store lip gloss, Hello Kitty keychain dangling…

Going Dutch

“What about me seems Dutch?” I asked my husband, thinking he’d say something like ‘you’re a hard worker’ or ‘fairness is important to you’ or ‘you’re an innovator’. He thought for a moment. “Well, you’re quite tall,” he said. Another thought came to him. “And you like cheese.”  * I have an indistinct memory of a…