Tag Archives: womanhood

You sound white! You speak so well. You’re very articulate. As I was coming up in the world,  a brown-skinned Bronx born Boricua at a time when my appearance and the sounds coming out of my mouth didn’t compute for many people. I’ll never truly know what they expected to hear, but I remember what it felt like to receive ... Read More »

Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative. ~Maurice Chevalier   I lost my best friend when we were 32. We met when 5, in kindergarten. Marsha Moore was a wonderfully tall fat Black girl who treated me like her sister. We were sisters. Marsha didn’t get the chance to grow old. Her life in this world was ... Read More »

My entire life, I got sick very easily. Always something wrong with my stomach, complaining of nausea constantly. As a kid, tests were run, though my mother made sure we all had a healthy diet, doctors thought I had one illness or another. At around 11 years old, my mother called me into her bedroom. Before I was blindfolded with ... Read More »

Remember in high school when you would break up with someone and still have to see them every day? same class, same parties, work together on projects?. Crying in the playground about a relationship that will never be. Remember in the beginning how dreadful that was? … well, that’s me at 35 years old. It’s all the same, just now ... Read More »

I’ve never been good enough to be me. I’ve been told.  Confusing isn’t it? I am a professional scuba diver of the depths of the soul.  What?!? What I mean is, I spend a lot of time thinking, digging within, trying to find answers, making sense of the world, in a quest for truth, our connectedness and more importantly what ... Read More »

You’re made of so much beauty, But it seems that you forgot, When you decided that you were defined, By all the things you’re not.                             ~e.h I have been brewing this idea of photographing my body for a long time. A few weeks shy of my 42nd birthday, I arranged for a “boudoir” photo-shoot, truly an empowering experience to ... Read More »

  It was an unspoken vow. It just sort of happened. I got pregnant, then married, gave birth to a beautiful baby girl, and then we divorced. She was just a toddler. That’s when I married my three-year-old little girl. One of the vows that I made to her when she left my womb was that I would always put ... Read More »

For the past twenty-five years I’ve worked on Wall Street, a place that was very foreign to me in my childhood, but one that has been such a big part of who I am as an adult, and one that has driven my mission and work in the Latino community. Unlike many of my colleagues, I didn’t have a formal ... Read More »

In her 1985 one-woman show, Whoopi Goldberg morphed into a child and draped a shirt over her head to stand-in for long, blond hair. That piece of her show was real for me. My sister, Fox, and I used cardigans. Heavier than a blouse, a cardigan stayed in place without fussy re-adjusting, the neck- band shaped itself around our heads, ... Read More »

I’m the first Puerto Rican to have been admitted to the Delaware bar. Sans one Russian woman born in Cuba due to her family’s refugee status, I was the first Latina lawyer in the state of Delaware. That was back in 1980. I had been a lawyer only two years working in Boston when I moved to Delaware to be ... Read More »