My voice broke. I clenched my jaw, looked down at the words I had written on the paper and then out at the audience. There they were. Two full rows of my friends. They had left the comforts of their warm homes and the company of their families on a...
My husband and I were sitting outside enjoying the first somewhat cool night since spring. The fire crackled and I relaxed into a glass of wine. It had been a while since I had felt like that. It’s been a helluva summer. In addition to a raging...
From the vault! This is one of my all time favorite Soshally Awkward stories and considering I am coming up on my third anniversary of joining CrossFit Jane, I thought that I would share it again. CrossFit had some issues this year and I had some...
The Lil General convenience store shared a back parking lot with my grandmother’s apartment. Most days, I stopped in after school for my favorite snack – Doritos and a Mountain Dew. I was still blasting N.W.A. through my walkman causing a bolt...
Their faces were blotchy and red, a mixture of the knife-slice cold of an Appalachia winter night and the exertion of hefting boxes of wrapped presents and fixings for the kind of white-trash Christmas dinner that they would never fathom serving...
I was a picky, scant eater when I was a kid. In an attempt to get me to eat more, my well-endowed grandmother and her six equally well-endowed sisters shared with me that the secret to an ample rack was mass quantities of mac and cheese. “Macaroni...
I was stretched out, hammer in hand, nails in mouth, sweat dripping down my face, my tiptoes precariously close to the edge of the footstool stringing fairy lights around the 2020 version of my daughter’s “classroom” because nothing exemplifies...
I spent the first three decades of my life feeling unworthy of love and happiness. The why I felt this way is fairly obvious to even a lazy armchair psychologist. My parents, particularly my mom, didn’t “choose” me. It didn’t matter how good I was...
We sat on the rooftop of a bar that was not quite a tourist trap, but not far from it. The city below us, never known for its humbleness, was peacocking around under a cloudless sky. We assumed a familiar position, face to face across a bar top...
For the first 32 years of my life I had a stick shoved so far up my ass that I regularly choked on it. Therefore, when I became pregnant, everyone fully expected that I was going to be an overbearing, uptight, uber-protective helicopter mom. There...