My youngest brother runs away from home again the morning the baby robins fly from the nest. All spring, I watch a mother robin build her nest under my deck. It rests next to the half-dozen hollowed-out husks abandoned…
It was a hot August morning in 2017 when I finished packing everything I cared to keep into my blue Forester (including cat, dog, and the few boxes of things I hadn’t sold or given away) and left Milwaukee.…
Pilgrims We stumble through the door of our new Florida home at two in the morning, doubled over from exhaustion. My father and grandpa follow closely behind, parking the U-Haul down the street. That makes seven of us in…
i. Candies gush across the ground. They clot and pool. Where the pale floorboards converge against the wall, they glitter in a long stream of plastic-wrapped sweets, the sort you’d see on a receptionist’s desk. Red, yellow, green, swirled…
Max was two. Zoe, seven. I was forty, when the nurse called and told me I needed to come in for a follow-up mammogram and ultrasound. My manners couldn’t catch up with my physical reaction. I started yelling why…
I. Rain gush-pummels our car. Whippet wipers slash frantically at the whitecaps. Off to Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, to watch our daughter, Lily’s, volleyball tournament. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and our son, Hudson, is meeting us there from Pittsburgh. …
Content Warning—suicidal ideation in a child Right after my forty-sixth birthday, I begin writing a novel. It’s about a mother who loses all sense of personal identity while taking care of her very ill son. A mother who…
Content Warnings—cesarean section, traumatic birth I could not milk. Was it due to upset levels of oxytocin, prolactin, beta-endorphin? May have been the morphine pump I kept firing like a trigger from my hospital bed in the postlabor/delivery room.…
The nature center has five baby sea turtles, each in their own 20-gallon saltwater tank. When I see them for the first time, I have to fight the impulse to plunge my hand into the water and scoop one…
We had gone to bed late, on usual terms: “Let’s just talk about this in the morning.” That night we did what we called “No Touch Sleep,” a nickname for exactly what it sounds like, lying next to each…
“Roach Farm” is about the fall of 2020, a period of intense national and personal unrest. The chaos of COVID, the election, and the general doom-fog felt separate from the chaos of my work and relationships. But, in writing this essay, I started to understand that the external and the internal were actually in conversation the whole time, behind my back.
I chose to work at the roach farm because I thought it might offer an escape. I’d be working in a remote warehouse, laboring over bugs—what I thought to be an apolitical life form—alongside strangers. But still, there was the ghost of politics in most of the conversations there. By the end of my tenure, even the roaches felt symbolic of gender issues.
In the fall of 2020, I wondered about my belief systems and what to do with them. I was constantly attempting (both with great self-consciousness and great ego) to figure out where I fell on the spectrum of being a person who cared about the well-being of the world. This attempt was complicated because the only problem actually keeping me up at night was a breakup. It was my first real breakup with my first love. It was excruciating.
This past year. I’ve been reading a lot of amazing braided nonfiction books and essays: Jia Tolentino, Carmen Maria Machado, Jo Ann Beard, Karla Conejo Villavicencio. I think it’s incredible when an author winds narrative and research so tightly together they feel like one story. “Roach Farm” is my attempt at braiding three stories at once: Dubia roaches, the politics of existing in 2020, and my breakup.
I read somewhere that if what’s on the page doesn’t scare you, you’re doing it wrong. With this piece, I set out with the goal to pursue honesty until I scared myself. So, here I am, totally scared.
JT BALDASSARRE is a freelance writer and filmmaker living in Brooklyn, New York. In 2020, she won the James E. Michael Prize in Playwriting. She just finished filming a pilot, and is currently writing a four-part miniseries. She is also developing new personal essays and nonfiction pieces. Find her current work and contact information at her website linked above. She’s on Instagram @jtbaldassarre.
