October 9th, 2015 - Melissa Fraterrigo

It’s 5:30 a.m. or 5:38 a.m. or some other black-marked hour and I am in my finished basement office, reading the last page I wrote the day before, and then I write. I don’t yet know.

Two floors above me, my daughters sleep in their shared bedroom, a small chest of drawers between their twin beds and on this, a lamp. And on its shade a lilac butterfly floats off into the sky. October 9, 2015, the girls are six and in the first grade and I don’t yet know that they will grow up, divide their belongings and move into separate rooms, their voices tumbling over each other so loudly some mornings that my hands will shake. I don’t yet know that Eva will grow as tall as I am and that sometimes friends will make her cry, won’t conceptualize how Jolie will gut me with one look and criticize her body. There are challenges yet to come. The Perils of Girlhood is the name of my new published memoir-in-essays and as much as I wrote the book to help my daughters navigate adolescence by exploring my own past, their struggles could not be bypassed.

I don’t yet know how good I have it.

I’m at the Target desk, a cup of coffee to my right, and I am writing long hand in a yellow legal pad. There will be three of these in total and after I draft all of them, I’ll transfer these words to a Word document. Questions of a Warrior is my YA novel that I will be unable to sell and maybe push me away from fiction for good.

One agent will encourage me to change the title. Another will say that the work is too dark, that readers want escapism and this book, about a twelve-year-old boy who is determined to become a world-record breath holder to restore his mentally ill father to his town’s good graces, will not do that. I don’t yet know that the book will simply remain on my hard-drive like a piece of driftwood.

Our lab shepherd, Cooper, sleeps at my feet beneath the desk. Sometimes there’s the rippled sound of my husband’s snores in our king-sized bed in the room one floor above, his back still whole and complete. Heat blazes from the overhead vent, ruffling my pages, but I continue because it is what I do and I don’t yet know.

I am a writer, although if you asked me then I don’t know that I would describe myself as such. I wasn’t publishing. I’d begun to teach creative writing in our community, but I was years out of my MFA . I was still recovering from the previous years: my husband’s diagnosis, Eva’s life-threatening seizures. All of these things could have stopped me from writing. Instead, I kept reading, kept journaling, kept finding a way to make sense of life through words. For a while, writing was the only thing that felt like mine. But now there is remorse for how I subconsciously put my story first.

At 6:45 a.m. or 7 a.m. or sometime around then, the girls tromp downstairs.

“Hi, girls!” I say, leaning forward in my seat so I can see them at their own table. “Hi, Mom!”

The girls usually don’t come into my office when I write, but now, I wish that they had. Did they think I did not want to see them? Or were they simply invested in their own imaginings?

I’ll never know.

They dump a bin of Legos, the pieces skittering like ice. Their fingers pull and snap the colored blocks while remain at my desk, determined to get in a few more lines before switching gears and becoming. A mom.

*

After a bit, they push the Legos to the side and play Box Car Children. They’ve made their own dolls from ruled paper and I can hear them make Benny talk to Violet, their little girl voices lapping at my ears from some far-off land.

The table where they spread their paper dolls            the stacks of Legos     the red mini kitchen that stood against the wall         the gingham napkins and tiny rimmed plates    the tent with its miniature backpacks and canteen                       and blocks       and Barbies     the doll changing table    and easel         and plastic farm animals         and stuffed bunnies and bears and puppies that go ruff! all of it is now in someone else’s basement, held inside someone else’s small hands and arms. I did not yet know.

But on October 9, 2015, with my paper and desk and pencil, the dog’s plush warm breath on my feet, something shakes me further awake--compels me to push back the chair. Leave the line unfinished--pull the office door wider and step through it--move to the table where Jessie and Violet and Benny are planning their day. The girls do not look up, their still chunked fingers make the wispy dolls tip top as they move from one end of the table to the other.

I sink onto my knees, head lingering just above the space where they play. I watch. I listen.

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Melissa Fraterrigo’s memoir, The Perils of Girlhood was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2025. She is also the author of the novel Glory Days (University of Nebraska Press), which was named one of “The Best Fiction Books of 2017” by the Chicago Review of Books as well as the short story collection The Longest Pregnancy (Livingston Press). Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies from storySouth and Shenandoah to Notre Dame Review, Sou’wester and The Millions. She teaches creative writing at Purdue University, in the Butler University MFA in Creative Writing program, and is also the founder and executive director of the Lafayette Writers’ Studio in Lafayette, Indiana, where she offers classes on the art and craft of writing. She lives with her husband and two daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana and can be found at melissafraterrigo.com.