Features
My Kids Can't Get Vaccinated Yet, and I'm Barely Keeping It Together
In the hospital parking lot, I pulled a stiff painter’s mask over my nose and mouth. I took a selfie on Snapchat, sent it to my brother and sister. My brother responded: “Whoa. That’s apocalyptic.” This was mid-March 2020, when we feared COVID-19 the way you fear an animal’s yellow eyes in the dark, not the way you do when you’ve felt its teeth.
The Edge of the World in Texas
The sun rises on a cloudless day in mid-October. On North Padre Island, a barrier island near Corpus Christi, my husband, Adrian, and I pack our striped beach bag with bright plastic buckets and trowels, fruit pouches and bottles of water. By 8:00 a.m., we’ve buckled our kids into their car seats. We’re on borrowed time, determined to make it count.
I Could Not Have Gone to an Office 4 Weeks After Childbirth
That’s where I was at four weeks postpartum: sleepless, bleeding, raw, so desperately in love and hormonally out of whack that all I could think about was my baby dying. And I was lucky.
Vaqueros: The Original Cowboys of Texas
Samuel Buentello was 14 years old when he left the Rancho Nuevo in South Texas, the only home he’d ever known. In 1945, the road to nearby Hebbronville, a ranching hub 56 miles southeast of Laredo, wasn’t much more than dirt. All Buentello had was a paper sack of belongings and his mother’s tearful blessing.
In Texas, We Are The Rescue Team
It’s nearly midnight in San Antonio, Texas, on Sunday, February 14. The temperature has plunged to 10 degrees, but my husband, Adrian, and I are not yet worrying about how we’ll keep our toddler and baby warm if the electrical grid fails, which it will within hours. We’re not thinking of the hill outside our neighborhood, which will become so dangerously ice-slicked it will effectively trap us in our home. We’re not taking stock of our meager food and water supply, calculating how long it will last. We're laughing.
A New Mom Reclaims Her Freedom on a Motorcycle Ride Through the Devil’s Backbone
It wasn’t as though I’d forgotten the danger. To ride, whether in the front or the back of a bike, is to enter into a contract with yourself: “Yes, I understand the risk, and I accept it because if the worst were to happen, I would leave this earth in the midst of experiencing the best parts of it, and isn’t that the most any of us can ask for?
Creative Nonfiction: The Weight You Knowingly Carry by Katie Gutierrez
The quartz is made to resemble marble: thick dove gray veins, their edges blurred, snaking through a background of spilled cream. You look through other samples, small heavy squares excavated from wire shelving, but you return to the first. I prefer these thicker lines, you say, running your fingertips across the veining. Your husband agrees, and the discussion shifts to the edges and corners of your future kitchen island—straight is more modern, but with a toddler and a baby on the way.
Tacos Were Always My Greatest Comfort—But I Had to Give Them Up to Get Pregnant
At the flour-dusted kitchen counter, Ñaña hands us each a smooth ball of tortilla masa. The rest are stacked in a mixing bowl, tucked beneath a frayed dish towel. A film of cling wrap seals the bowl itself, which Ñaña pushes to the corner where it will wait for two hours until the masa is ready to be rolled.
The most recent school shooting makes us wonder: How can we stay?
The sky is as pink as our daughter’s socks as we leave the restaurant. She is 17 months old, holding my husband’s hand as we cross the street. Her wild chestnut curls are sticky with peanut sauce. In front of Urban Outfitters, three uniformed police officers surround a white man whose shirt reads: “Y’all Need Jesus.” Their cruisers are parked in the street, blocking traffic.
How to Predict the Unpredictable
On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet. I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we me
When Cancer Runs in Your Family
As a birthday gift, my mom wanted to take me shopping. I had one leg deep in a black over-the-knee boot when my phone rang. My mom, still smiling, took a fraction of a second longer than I did to realize: This could be the call we'd been waiting on. The results of my biopsy.
I Named My Daughter After the Woman I Wish She Could Have Met
All day I’d been waiting—something unexpected cracks me open every year: the smear of September rain on a window, the realization that I can no longer remember the shape of Nanny’s teeth. Tonight it was my daughter, recognizing the name I’d given her because I couldn’t give her the woman herself.
I Didn't Want to Breastfeed, But Weaning is Breaking My Heart
The first time I breast-fed my daughter, I was surrounded by strangers. Someone had helped me slide free of my delivery gown, slick with my daughter’s newness. Someone else had helped me into a new gown. There were hands everywhere: first pressing my tender, flaccid abdomen; now sliding a new pad beneath my hips; now holding my newborn to my breast. The hands — blue-gloved, shiny — squeezed my flesh, guided it into her mouth. My husband, Adrian, stroked my hair. I didn’t know what to do with my own hands. I watched, like the most unnecessary stranger in the room.
On Health and Wellness
What I Wish I Knew About PCOS Before My Diagnosis
Up to 75% of women with PCOS go undiagnosed “due to variability of patient presentation and lack of provider knowledge.” If this statistic seems outrageous, that’s because it is. We want to trust our doctors to recognize symptoms that we don’t. We want to trust them to give us answers. But ultimately, we are the experts on our bodies and no one cares more about our health than we do. That sometimes means taking charge and advocating for ourselves.
How a Ketogenic Diet Brought Back My Fertility
We used rubber bands to trace fine, light lights on the eggs. I had chosen a simple design motif from the thick book my friend Sarah showed me — star-like flowers, the petals outlined with white, the centers filled in with pollen-yellow. We were making pysanky, Easter eggs decorated using a wax-resist method, a Ukrainian tradition dating back to early Slavic cultures. My eyes were swollen. There was a glass of wine beside me, at two in the afternoon.
What I Wish I'd Known Before Starting a Ketogenic Diet
Before I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), I’d never heard the word “ketogenic”. I’d never even been on a diet before, let alone one that would reduce my beloved carb intake. But according to functional medicine doctor Tom Sult, author of Just Be Well, adopting a ketogenic diet would sharpen my insulin sensitivity, helping to reset the cataclysmic hormonal response that, for me, led to irregular periods, lack of ovulation, polycystic ovaries, and—drumroll, please—infertility.
Fertility is something we take for granted — until there’s a problem
How naive, how self-involved, to think that because I had finally come around, conception would be easy. As if an unmade baby were waiting in the ether for me to say, “Come — we’re ready for you now.” That isn’t how it works; at least not for my mother and not for me.
I Suffered From Infertility — But That’s Not What Scares Me Most About Trying for a Second Child
The first time I felt the pain, I was running. I was 13 weeks pregnant and starting to train for a half marathon. I’d be five months along by then, and I loved the idea: “We’d already run a marathon together,” I imagined saying to my future child. “So this was nothing.”
On Books and Writing
Three Books that Explore the Violence of Women’s Appetites
During a panel at the recent Texas Book Festival, I laughed along with the rest of the (mostly female) audience when Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites, joked that she knew what “auto-erotic asphyxiation” meant before she’d even gotten her first period.
Reinventing the Canon: Why It’s More Important Than Ever to Read Latinx Literature
In a time when anti-Latinx rhetoric is painful and unavoidable, and anti-Latinx violence hits close to home, it’s unacceptable that Latinx literature occupies such a small space in the U.S. literary canon. If the language of white supremacy attempts to dehumanize us, to erase our value and the richness of our contributions to this world, it’s more critical than ever to celebrate our voices.
Latinx Literature Helped Me Realize The Border Is A Place With Something To Say
The first time I went across, I was a senior in high school. We had all borrowed outfits from our one friend who had going-out clothes, so we looked like a string of paper dolls: four slips of girls in tight black tops and low-slung jeans. Straightened dark hair, slivers of hips and belly, the wink of silver chain belts.
'The Need' Terrified Me as a Mother But Comforted Me After El Paso
The Need made me shiver with recognition. In Molly, I saw myself, and in the intruder, who knows and covets Molly’s life so intimately, I saw the version of me who might exist should the worst come to pass. The Need felt like one of my terrifying midnight ruminations, only extended, exaggerated—the potential for catastrophic loss the very heartbeat of this book.
Writing During Naptime, a Parent’s Practice
The early nights felt like this: the peaceful lull of skin on skin, puffs of milky breath. My mind wandering, circling, ruminating. My body—unfamiliar and reconstituted, still bleeding. I felt scraped open, raw, exquisitely receptive to the world. Sometimes I thought, I am somebody’s mother. The thought shook me, rendered everything else unrecognizable. I sparked with creativity.