Author: Jackie Pick

Jackie Pick is a former teacher and current writer living in the Chicago area. She is a contributing author to multiple anthologies, including Multiples Illuminated, So Glad They Told Me: Women Get Real about Motherhood, Here in the Middle, as well as the and the literary magazines The Sun and Selfish. She received Honorable Mention from the Mark Twain House and Museum for her entry in the Royal Nonesuch Humor Writing Competition. Jackie is a contributing writer at Humor Outcasts, and her essays have been featured on various online sites including McSweeney's, Belladonna Comedy, Mamalode, The HerStories Project, and Scary Mommy. A graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, Jackie is co-creator and co-writer of the award-winning short film Fixed Up, and a proud member of the 2017 Chicago cast of Listen To Your Mother.

Carrying on Despite the Email Blitzkrieg

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The house is quiet this morning.

The kids’ winter break started on December 21. I modified my schedule so that any work was more of the “clean up/set up/prepare/shallow dive” variety. Noise and festivities do not make for sustained writing.

It’s been a phenomenal break. We all exhaled, enjoyed, celebrated, and overindulged. I said yes (YES!) to things that, during the normal school year, usually get my hearty no. I worked through piles of magazines and books.

Play and rest. Until we hit today.  (more…)

2018 — Rise, Shine, and Toss the Uns

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That’s the bracelet I wore every day I worked this past year. Every day. You can’t look at something every day and not have it sear into your soul, good bad or otherwise. I chose that word because 2017 was a shitshow and I could have chosen to splash around in a wading pool of my own tears, or I could rise.

I refocused and recommitted. I did the work. (I say that unapologetically because I was just completely blown away by Shondra Rhimes’s Year of Yes [more on that later] and we all should be bold if we’ve done the work. ) (more…)

Here Be the Mighty Yawp! or I’m Done. It’s Time to Start.

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Both times I gave birth, I did not fall in love with my children right away. Maybe it was the drugs, or the hormones, or the exhaustion, or some form of shock, or some combination of those, but it took a while for my heart to catch up with my head. I wanted to be one of those mothers who cooed and snuggled and felt that some form of destiny had been fulfilled in one messy whoosh. But I was more “Oh. Babies. Cool. Can I hold them and sniff their heads?”  (more…)