M. Sophia Newman is a burgeoning freelance writer whose current "day job" is mental health research in Bangladesh under a Fulbright grant. Soph has worked as a technical writer at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, writing nerdy things about large data sets. She writes about health, travel, and various other topics at msophianewman.com. The essay rejected by Modern Love was the first pitch of her writing career. She can't wait to go back to Ghana and discuss this with Joyce.

Zen and the Art of African Prophesying

“White woman? When you come back, you bring your boy. Your boy have yellow hair.”

Esther's voice broke the quiet of the room. She had slipped past my screen door a few minutes before, while I sat on the bed, working on my laptop. Lounging on the cool linoleum floor, she had planned words until she was ready to speak.

It was a quiet day in the West African village where Esther, age 12, had lived all her life. Outside, the sun was intense on the cement courtyard between the single mud-brick room I rented and the one where Esther’s family lived.

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Cedar Burnett is a Seattle-based freelance writer and journalist. She’s written for the Associated Press, Salon.com, Fodor’s Travel Guides, ParentMap, Seattle Weekly, Alaska Airlines magazine and The Seattle InfoGuide. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, msnbc.com, yahoo.com, Huffington Post Canada and ABCNews.com, among others.

In Sickness

The first time I saw John leaning over the car seat, scrubbing up my “accident” with a bottle of Febreeze and a roll of paper towels, I felt a mixture of shame and gratitude as pronounced as an ice pick to the head. I was 26-years-old and crapping my pants was just part of the deal he’d never quite made.

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Donna Hoke is a writer, crossword puzzle constructor, and playwright (THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR). Her work has been produced across the country, as well as in Seoul and Manchester. She is also the author of Neko and the Twiggets, a children’s book about mice living in a double bass.

Brief Lives, Enduring Love

“Two sets of twins?!” The words are always accompanied by shock, and I cringe even before the inevitable follow-up begins: “Do twins run in your family? What are the odds? How do you do it?” I hate the attention, I hate the prying, but mostly I hate that the truth isn’t obvious.

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Emily Rich is a 47-year-old mother of three. She has taught English-as-a-Second-Language at Northern Virginia Community College. She is taking time off to work on a memoir entitled The Paw of the Family Beast about trying to make peace with her family during the months both her and her mother were going through cancer treatment.

A Monitored Heart

About two years after I finished chemotherapy I had to be fitted with a portable heart monitor. It was temporary, to determine if tamoxifen, the drug I was taking post-breast cancer, was giving me heart palpitations.

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Sarah Shellock is a Naval Academy graduate and just ended her career as a naval officer to stay at home full-time with her daughter, Ruby, and follow her husband around as a Navy wife.  She is obsessed with politics, cooking, and her baby girl. Sarah recently started blogging at Loudmouth Mommy, where she writes about her transition to the civilian world, shares the occasional recipe, and posts tons of Ruby pictures, showing off her non-existent Instagram skills.

Sacramental Milk

In the Anglican Church in which I was raised, a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, and that is exactly what my breast milk is: the visible, physical manifestation of the spiritual and emotional love I have for my daughter, Ruby.

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Allison Ellis is a children’s media consultant and writer. Her essays and articles have appeared in Redbook, Working Mother, Daily Candy and Seattle Weekly. She is currently working on two novels and a memoir. This was her first attempt at a Modern Love Essay. She was so shattered by her rejection that she wrote this but plans on putting herself out on the market with more blind submissions again soon.

My Doctor in Shining Amour

I was on the phone with Jeff, an eligible plastic surgeon in training. It was the night before our tentatively scheduled blind date; he was calling to confirm a time and meeting place. The requisite “screening call” had already occurred several days before and I thought it had gone well. We had spoken for nearly an hour about a variety of subjects and not once did he mention my recent tragedy and for that I was grateful. How tactful, I thought. I found him to be polite, humble and funny; he didn’t come across at all like any of the plastic surgeons I’d seen on TV.  He “sounded good looking” too, so there was hope. At this point I was looking forward to meeting him in person and didn’t feel the need to talk any more than was absolutely necessary, lest I screw up my chances. Still, he had to pry. “How was your weekend?” he asked, casually, after we had worked out the details for the date. What I should have responded with was: “Fine. Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow!” but being exhausted and not thinking I sighed and replied, “Oh, it was interesting… I took my daughter camping.”

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