Segullah Journal

The atmosphere in the newborn intensive care unit was hushed, the light dim. My son Sam, one week old, lay naked on a padded warming bed, covered with a mess of tubes and wires. IV lines in his hands and feet, monitor leads on his chest, a ventilator tube down his throat—all connecting him to [...]

Like ripening raspberries, red welts raised their fiery heads on my skin. I was at war and my skin was the enemy. I was very young, but I remember holding my limp arms in front of my father and pleading with him to make the pain go away. It seemed he was the only one [...]

I am often told the story of how right after birth when I, a 10 lb. 4 oz. Caucasian who looked like an Inuit, was surrounded by petite Latino babies in the hospital nursery. My proud, bilingual parents stood admiring me at the window until they heard the petite, Latino couple next to them talking [...]

The tragic thing is that I used to be tall. In third grade I was among the giants. Whenever there was an occasion for lining up in order of height, like for school pictures, I made my way to the front of the line. There was this kid (Caleb, I think his name was) who [...]

I enter the hospital in a rush. I have been frantic since the phone call and the drive from Payson was excruciating. It’s only a little over a hundred miles, but today it felt like a thousand. My husband pulls me close to him as we wait for the elevator. My eyes plead with him [...]

My hands are aging. I know, the rest of me is aging along with them; but I can easily ignore these changes or ascribe them to babies or chocolate rather than the passage of time. But my hands . . . I cannot escape the evidence in my hands. It’s hard to say exactly what [...]

Regurgitate. Vomit. Purge. Cleanse. In my home we were not allowed to use the word “fat,” as if not saying it would erase the fact that I had a clinically obese sister and a mother who was always fifteen pounds away from happiness (and that smaller-sized dress on the back of her closet door). I [...]

The bus slows just enough to cough us out, and already my companion is begging me to leave her there, right there on the last curb before the pavement ends and the street turns to red mud. I’ll just sit here, she says. She points to the spot. She promises she won’t move. Her eyes [...]

In the first line of an early poem by Keats, he refers to his “mortal body of a thousand days.” The strange premonition that he would die within three years haunted him; when he first began to cough up blood, a few months after he wrote this sonnet, his reaction was one of resignation, rather [...]

Mary was an elite child gymnast and is now a massage therapist for BYU athletes and Real Salt Lake. In that man’s world of professional soccer, she is known as “the little mother.” She lives in Spring Lake, Utah with her husband and four children: Anikin, Ren, Max, and Trinity. You were trained to be [...]

I first saw an umbilical cord in 1965 when the doctor called me into the delivery room moments after my second daughter was born. She was a bundle of angry red flesh, kicking and waaahing in protest of the bright lights and cold air her mother’s womb had protected her from. As the doctor severed [...]

Exposed: my belly. Swollen, white, marked with winding lines. Within: a bumping child, bound and fed by blood and waters, liquid prison, tissue home. I watch his blurry pulsing heart, see the shape of arms and hips, the thin clenched hands, the wound-up cord. We both await release: the pain and freedom of an empty [...]

She sleeps on my chest her breathing steady, lavender rises and calms my nervousness For now I can hold her close, rock her lightly, keep her safe It cannot last, will not spoil her . . . It may spoil me But I will cherish her pudgy fingers gently reaching for a few loose strands of my [...]

The state of being scantily clad at the beach, as far as I can tell, is less about being sexy and more about being candidly naked. I will concede the odd person who looks alright in little more than just their skin. But I am more charmed by the floppy gallop of skinny legs; boys [...]

She bought the land for the w i d e n e s s of it, not the trees. But it was trees that defined the land, chopped it up into lines and spaces the eye could order. She knew nothing of filberts, or orchards, or the harvest of nuts. All she knew was to [...]

The world we know is old; and past are days When every turning season was so new That all mankind would dance and sing for joy At sight of it. For us, time turns in gears— Each day and season measured out in numbers As though it were the striking of a clock Ordained by [...]

The Seventh Ward Relief Society presidency argued long and soft whether Janie Goodmansen deserved to have the sisters bring her family meals. It seems that precedent was vague— no one was sure if “boob job” qualified as a legitimate call for aid. Janie herself had never asked for help— a fault they found it harder [...]

First a twinge that something’s not quite right, like when your sock twists inside your shoe or your hair is blown across its part. Off-kilter, I pat my pockets, count my kids, assess my life. Then a dull heaviness, Not quite pain. Then emotions swell to the surface, ooze out with every touch. I walk [...]

Mother-fluids: Tears and milk and sweat. Filling and draining, at once, I thirst. Hurtling through the day, Or else meandering. (Both perilous, both right.) Haunted and hungry, Yet blossoming, widening, I abound as I yearn. A whole universe To some, and still Less than the dust. Bent forward, I fret, Bentback to regret. Waver and [...]

I was ready to shower halfway through the class, but we had another hour and a half to go. We all situated ourselves into a circle and Raymond, my professor, asked, “Are you guys ready for a little improvisation?” My stomach sank to my knees as something blocked my airway. Although this was my second [...]

My first child was an unexpected gift. I’d never really thought about children, and it didn’t occur to me that I could be pregnant. I had no idea how that big watermelon-sized lump in my belly was going to get out. No one told me about birth, and I never asked. I was that ignorant. [...]

I watch my daughter, Tessa Joy, blow little puffs off of a dandelion head. My heart catches a little bit when she doesn’t get the cotton off right away. But I exhale with relief when she tries again and manages to send several seeds sailing. I tell her, “Good job!” and notice my eyes pooling [...]

Raising children to respect their bodies can be difficult, especially with the distorted body images we are often presented with today. How can we teach our children to understand their bodies in a healthy way, in a spiritual way, in a godlike way? —Kylie Turley, Focus Editor This year, more than ever in my seventy [...]