Segullah

Mormon women blogging about the peculiar and the treasured

Tentatively Untitled. Because you’ll see why.

Here’s what we need to just get out of the way: My writing is crap. Also, if another child gets out of bed to tell me something “important,” I may actually start crying. REAL tears. It’s not that I don’t want to listen to them tell me their importants, but I don’t really want to [...]

Free Fall

We were in Mexico. We wore swimsuits only and climbed a winding path holding hands and laughing. It was warm and thick humidity hung in the air around us, a third character in the vignette. We were giddy and nervous and excited, because we were almost there: the edge of a cliff over water. The [...]

What He Sees

I love people watching and have convinced myself that I’m a pro: my sunglasses hiding the direction of my gaze or the incognito peering from behind the pages of an uninteresting library find. Inevitably the words hold little sway to the treasures of humanity beyond the pages and the assurance of real, live social graces [...]

Behold The Thistle

                          Autumn comes on timidly and I feel the last few strains of summer sing out to me when I attach the baby to my chest and take a bike ride. We ride the paths that wind through farm acreage the suburbs have [...]

Cures For Things I Don’t Want

When the pediatrician told me that she thought it was best for my 10 year old to get the HPV vaccine, I said, “Isn’t that a sexually transmitted thing?” And she responded with unchecked wide eyes. Was she surprised at my nonchalance? I couldn’t tell. She said to me: “Yes. It’s sexually transmitted,” and then [...]

VT: Bane of my existence? Or blessing my life one plate of cookies at a time?

I ignored the telephone call three times. My answer to the call being along the lines of “of-course-I-haven’t-done-my-visiting-teaching, sister so and so!” And if I actually pick up the phone at this point, your kindness will make me feel bad and I will offer some excuse about how my energy feels low and you will [...]

Slipping Through the Cracks

As I listened to my ward’s seminary graduates speak in sacrament meeting a couple of weeks ago, I found my throat swollen with emotion and an unexpected love fill my heart for all the sudden girl/women who bore testimony boldly (or nonchalantly or emotionally or monotone) and who thanked their parents and teachers with an [...]

It Was Good

Night begins to encroach upon the edges of my windows, and the slackening sun is orange and dull, but the front room is illuminated in its entire Lego-spilled splendor. And I am searching for a pacifier for the baby. He is clean and warm, in fresh jammies—extra soft from hand-me-down wear and the recent dryer—and [...]

The Princess and Appease

“I envy my dad and his faith. I envy all people who have someone to beseech, who know where they’re going, who sleep under the fluffy white comforter of belief.” — Kelly Corrigan (The Middle Place)   The first time I read this quote I was a little bit bothered. The idea that faith was [...]

Life, Punctuated

The big kids are off to school for the day and I have exactly 60 minutes to write this before I take my oldest to the orthodontist. My five-year-old is by me, silly and loud and distracting playing Just Dance 2, and she calls me over and I am sorely tempted because have you played [...]

Dragging Feet to Catching Stride

Once upon a time I met a really funny girl who I was certain was to become my best friend.  She had a silly, easy breezy, lovely way about her—open eyes, real people jeans on, her hair hastily pulled up into a something-or-other type mom hairdo with an elastic. We met on the root-torn sidewalk [...]

When Two is Too Many

Beneath the rubble of Christmas morning, I chanced upon a small dolly, cozily tucked up to his armpits in a red and green felt stocking. I could call the gesture motherly, but I knew better by the skew of his striped nightcap, and then, by the presence of foil-wrapped chocolate Santas still underneath his feet: [...]

Hearts Turn

This morning the texts are flying back and forth like a frenetic game of ping-pong. I wish I were there. I can imagine the scene if it was 20 years ago, and my parents would have let us miss school for the day and we’d be snuggled up to cocoa in paper cups and those [...]

Do Holes Make You Unholy?

I am so lost in the Isaiah chapters of Gospel Doctrine that I’m almost embarrassed, and so I sit in the back of the classroom, near a door, claiming “baby distraction,” or possible “baby emergency,” all the while not following the discussion in the least. Till a couple of weeks ago, when a woman raised [...]

On Names

This morning at the temple initiatory, most of my names were simply surnames and this struck me in a way that it can only strike a sleep deprived and anxiously addled brain that resides in the cranium of a lady still very much postpartum: I just spent almost nine months obsessing over my baby’s name… [...]

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