Tina Traster is a New York Post columnist, Huffington Post blogger and essayist. Her work has appeared in magazines, newspapers, literary journals, online literary sites and on NPR. Her essays have been anthologized in three collections. Traster lives with her second husband—and soul mate—daughter, five cats, and six chickens in an old farmhouse in New York's Hudson Valley.

Life-line

I was surprised to see he had no front teeth. He smiled thinly while beckoning me to enter his cluttered dining room. Musty and dank, it was a museum of lifetime accumulation. Stacks of yellowed paper, stuffed owls, clocks, a brass American bald eagle affixed to the wall. A worn checkered cloth covered a small square wooden table with spindle legs. Mr. Pulda pulled out a chair and motioned with his beefy hand for me to take a seat. His eyes narrowed. He wasn’t the type of man who entertained guests. He didn’t like outsiders. Not even those who proclaimed they would help him save his farm. Mr. Pulda wanted was to be left alone to feed his cows, to tend his soybeans and corn.

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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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Liane Kupferberg Carter is a journalist whose essays have appeared several times in the New York Times parenting blog “Motherlode.” Her work has also been published by the Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Parents, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, McCall’s, and Skirt!, and many newspapers, literary journals, and blogs. This essay is an excerpt from her memoir in progress, LOVE IS LIKE THIS: A Family Grows Up with Autism. She has been spurned by “Modern Love” eight times.

Repairing Our World

“Okay, here I go!” our son Mickey said.

He  stood at the bimah, a lectern at the front of the synagogue, beaming a mega-watt smile at the fifty gathered friends and relatives who had come to celebrate this bar mitzvah day with him. He had just finished reciting his parshah, in transliterated Hebrew, a passage from the book of Numbers that contains the Priestly Blessing heard weekly in synagogues around the world. He was ready to read his d’var Torah, the traditional short speech on the significance of the weekly Torah portion.

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Julia Knobloch is a German writer and TV producer. Her documentaries have aired on the National Geographic Channel, the Discovery Channel, ABC Nightline, VOOM HD, and German broadcasters Arte and ZDF. Her essays, reportages and travelogues have appeared in several German and Argentine newspapers and she writes a column for the arts magazine Kunst und Auktionen. Since moving to New York last year for the reasons you will read about in this essay, she’s working on breaking into the NYC market and has tackled the New York Times once. So far, her writing has been published by the Brooklyn Rail, Reality Sandwich, telegraph21, the EpochTimes – and Modern Love Rejects.

Life on the Other Side of Love

A full moon lounged above the Crescent City when at last I felt something that resembled peace. I had been on the road for more than a week and began to believe that my trip through the Deep South would really set me free from August.

August is the reason why I moved to the States from Germany last April, where he quickly turned into my down-and-out-in-New York experience. I had to run as far as New Orleans and feel her lavish caress on my wet cheeks, while the St. Charles streetcar was cutting through a mystique night, to connect with myself again.

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Laura Shumaker is the author of A REGULAR GUY: GROWING UP WITH AUTISM, and writes an autism blog for the San Francisco Chronicle. She also writes many things that have nothing to do with autism. Laura received a real rejection letter from Daniel Jones for this piece stating  that it  was too similar  to a previous  Modern Love  essay by Claire LaZebnik.

                                  Containing My Son's Love                                  

It was February 16th, two days after a Valentine’s Day storm paralyzed the Northeast. I had just finished my continental breakfast—a rubbery muffin and weak coffee—at a mediocre hotel near the Philadelphia Airport. My flight from California had arrived late the night before, following hours of delays, and I was tired and jittery.

I was on my way to pick up my twenty-year-old son, Matthew, who is autistic, at his special school in rural Pennsylvania, about an hour west of the city. He had been begging me to take him to Washington D.C. since he’d enrolled at the school three years before, and I thought it would be fun to go over the President’s Weekend break. When the storm hit I almost backed out, but maternal love and guilt pushed me forward.

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