Jessica Smock's Blog, page 3
October 1, 2020
The Case for Becoming a Quarantine Knitter
I began knitting in college. This was in the mid 80’s, before knitting became cool and funky. Knitting was for grandmothers, but I was drawn to the soothing presence of knitters in my dorm who remained calm during even the most heated floor meetings. They sat there, smiling benevolently while clicking away on their needles, […]
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September 27, 2020
If It’s Not Too Late
As a child I would lay in my bed and imagine strange men knocking the door down, dragging my family into the street, murdering us under the streetlamp. I was afraid of this, but not in the way I fear spiders that dropped silent on their threads in my basement bedroom, or the sound of […]
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September 7, 2020
How to Stay Friends For the “Long Haul”: A Review of BIG FRIENDSHIP
As a friendship advice columnist and a longtime listener of the popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend (“a podcast for long-distance besties everywhere”) co-hosted by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, I was eager to read Big Friendship (Simon & Schuster, 2020), Sow’s and Friedman’s recently-released memoir about the ups and downs of their friendship and the […]
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July 20, 2020
Shifting Normal During Quarantine
I slice my finger during the turmoil of getting dinner ready on time, with the help of an eager, clumsy child. There is a moment between the cut and the pain. I’m doing quarantine wrong, I think. Some families maximize this time turning out full-length operas, manifestos, or alternative theories in quantum physics. Some families […]
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June 29, 2020
How the Pandemic Made My Daughter “Essential”
My daughter works as a cashier at a food market. Back in March, shortly before Florida’s “safer-at-home order,” her boss handed her a letter identifying her as an essential worker. “Keep it to show your grandkids,” I told her. She’s 21. Cue the eye roll. Yet I could tell the thought tickled her. Essential worker. People have […]
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June 18, 2020
I Am The (Gen X) Cheese
My cell phone vibrates while I am on a conference call with the CEO of my company. We’re talking about the impending layoffs and I am trying not to cry, gearing up to tell half of my team that they don’t have jobs anymore. It’s my mom calling me, for the third time in fifteen […]
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May 19, 2020
What Perimenopause Is Like During a Pandemic
By Chelsey Drysdale In the late ‘80s, a mysterious illness hit me with debilitating vertigo, plastering me to the same family room floor where my parents and I now treat the Roku box like a shrine during this COVID-19 quarantine. When I lifted my head off the floor, the world spun upside down. That same […]
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May 14, 2020
How To Explode During Quarantine
by Krissy Dieruf I’m stuffing my feelings—all of them, every day. I am a clinical therapist, so I know better. But quarantine during COVID-19 has created an abundance of confusion, too many emotions waging war in my mind to allow room to breathe. My feelings are like my house, bursting from the inside out, bloated, […]
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May 5, 2020
The Virtues of List-Making In a Dark Time
by Julia Cho I still have a copy of the digital to-do list I had up on my computer the day my 33-year-old husband died suddenly almost ten years ago. The list included everyday things (“Take the car for an oil change; Return library books”), as well as summer plans (“Go raspberry picking in August”). […]
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The Window: The Lockdown, My Mother, and Me
by Emily Blake My mother and I had, for many years, an excruciating relationship. My father was a loving, charming and brilliant man, and my mother seemed a repressive, ill-tempered presence in comparison. Her efforts to rein me in were the bane of my adolescence, and our hostility lingered after my father’s death, which devastated […]
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