Those who know me or my writing know that I battle with mental illness. As I politely but firmly see 2017 out the door, I am thinking about that battle. This year was a long and difficult one for many reasons, and it has left me bruised in new places, and broken open ancient scars.… Read More On brokenness
In the end, we – or I – caved. My son was measuring big, huge, large, especially his head. There was no way I was even going to try to push him out. Yes, I carry that shame. And I still feel the need to justify it. But his head was huge, look at him,… Read More A Birth Story
I don’t know quite what I expected. For the longest time (and I know how lucky we are that for us, that only meant months, not years), we’d been planning for this pregnancy, working as hard as we could emotionally to conceive our miracle, fighting the despair that threatened to overwhelm anything positive about… Read More On What I did not Expect
I have a very happy, complicated relationship with writing. It is at once very personal, in the ways that only the places you can call home are, and very public, in the way that professional ambition can be. Writing has always been a place for me to take the pieces of my life, sorrowful… Read More Writing against the silence
There’s a word I’ve been religiously avoiding using in all my conversations, and writing about this experience, and the word is this: infertility. I avoid it partly because our doctor is yet to use it to refer to either of us (medically, officially, you are only allowed to assign it after a couple have… Read More The ‘I’ Word
Last week was incredibly hard. Dr Maya Angelou died. I suppose I knew it was coming. And to be honest, it wasn’t a death I thought of with great dread, as I did whenever I contemplated President Nelson Mandela dying. Maya Angelou’s work and her story meant a great deal to me, but I didn’t expect… Read More On mourning Maya Angelou, Ursula Le Guin and Failure
Somewhere along the way, it dawned on me that there will be absolutely no zen-ning this out. All of the wisdom, all of the stuff I’m reading, all the message boards I’m on, all the conversations with our doctors – I mean every thing – tells us to just relax. Rome wasn’t built in… Read More Myth Busting the Baby Dreaming
“A woman watches her body uneasily, as though it were an unreliable ally in the battle for love” Leonard Cohen I’ve been trying to figure out when to write about this. After all the treatments and poking and prodding is done, and the losses have been endured, and we have what we want –… Read More Pre-baby Body
This is my ‘normal’ You get used to the staring. When my husband and I first started dating, the staring bothered me. Wherever we went, people would gape at us, openly unashamedly, wearing all of their (offensive) questions on their faces. At first, I would fly into impotent rages and rant on and on… Read More The New Normal, or what a family looks like
I came to The Help*, the book, late. Long after the movie was released, and discussed ad nauseum, and had its Oscar glory, I have finally found it in myself to read the book. I bought the book a solid year ago, from an airport bookstore. I read a few chapters, stuck my boarding pass… Read More White Women’s Stories: A Late Review of The Help
Rumbi Writes 
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