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Monthly Review: July 2026

  • r.m. allen
  • 2 days ago
  • 6 min read

We were supposed to stop an hour and a half ago—blood clots, my OB warned me. Get up and move around every two hours. But driving at night like this feels too much like flying. We’re past Milwaukee, through Chicago, into Indiana, and we left just about three hours ago. The last two times we made this trip together we drove through the night, but after two summers off and 18 weeks of pregnancy, we weren’t sure what kind of time we’d make, especially since Mitchell worked a 12 hour day, came home, and got straight in the car to start the drive. But here we are at 11:30 pulling into a travel plaza somewhere in Indiana, and if this first leg of the trip is any indication, we’re going to be just fine.


Normally, our travel philosophy is to get from point A to point B with the fewest and shortest possible stops. Dash in, hit the bathroom, swap drivers, and get back on the road in under five minutes. But there’s no need to rush, no lines to wait in, not another soul in sight as we make our way inside. The fluorescent lights above us glow with a kind of unreality, and our steps echo on the pristine tile. It feels like an abandoned mall. Together, we walk. We loop around the food court, passing the darkened Auntie Anne’s, the Panda Express, the Burger King (why does every travel plaza on I-90 seem to have one?), the Starbucks. Mitchell holds my hand. I glance at my growing belly, which has in the last couple weeks started to look like it actually contains a baby and not just some extra poundage. It makes me want to cry in the middle of the Knute Rockne Travel Plaza: we’re all here. My husband, my son, and me, on our way to the lake.


Since our last time making this trip together, vacation at the lake has become increasingly complicated. Mitchell’s new off-season after his career switch—will he ever be able to travel in the summer again? My grandparents’ aging—how many more summers will we have together? My brothers’ growing families—who will be able to make the trip? My own inability to grow mine—would I ever have babies to bring to the lake? What does next summer look like? What happens ten years from now? The uncertainty clouded each visit like a rain forecast.


Now at last here is something to think about for next year with excitement. Next year, he’ll be here. Next year, we’ll get to bundle him into a life jacket and a sunhat and take him out on the boat. Next year, we’ll clutch him tight to our chests and wade into the lake till his toes hit the cold water—maybe he’ll giggle; maybe he’ll holler till we march straight back out. Next year, maybe a couple of his cousins will get to come till we have bunches of babies growing up on Lake Ozonia summers just like my brothers and cousins and I did, bursting out of the cabin and leaving wet towels on the floor and splashing each other and riding tubes behind the 1977 Cee Bee Avenger and starting the countdown till next summer as soon as they pull out of the driveway.


All this stretches before us, but he isn’t quite here yet. He is drifting in an amniotic sea—dreaming, perhaps, just as I am dreaming now. Once he is here, it will never again be as simple as it is today—I know this—but I will happily trade the longing I feel and have so long felt for its realization, whatever complexities come with it. My parents made the trip with me; next year we will make the trip with him, the fifth generation of my family to know and love the lake. Again we trace the circle, walking it hand-in-hand till it brings us right back where we began.

Here's what I read, cooked, and created in the month of July.


What I Read

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, JD Vance (★★★★)

  • Nurture: A Modern Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, and Early Motherhood, Erica Chidi (★★★★)

  • Cherry Baby, Rainbow Rowell (★★★★)

  • By the Book, Jasmine Guillory (★★★)

  • What Happened to the McCrays?, Tracey Lange (★★★)

  • This Must Be the Place, Maggie O'Farrell (★★)


If you want to hear the rationale behind my rating, head to my Goodreads for full reviews.


What I Cooked

  • Tomato Tart

    • Difficulty: ★

    • Flavor: ★★★★★

    • Keeper: Yes

With Instagram recipes, you never know how good the directions will be, and for this one, I bumped up both the cooking temperature and time to make sure my puff pastry actually crisped, because it did not look promising on the lower temperature. But flavor-wise, this was a quintessential light summer dinner that we found quite tasty.


I would not consider myself the biggest barbecue connoisseur, but these tacos were so delicious I made a second batch of the meat to serve nacho-style. Since I am a certified pickle hater, I used pickled jalapeños, and of course I served with my favorite Mexican coleslaw. I can see myself making these again in the near future.


I made this for my best friend, and if you have somebody in your life who likes chickpeas, kale, and melty cheese, you should make it for them.


Wowza. I am already looking forward to making these again. I marinated my cherry tomatoes with garlic, a little vinegar, red pepper flakes, and course salt, so that definitely added to the flavor as well. My husband did not care for these cold, so this is definitely a hot sandwich.


I almost feel bad saying I made this recipe because I used my own homemade meatballs and store-bought pesto, but the end result was so good that I have to share. Even my husband, who is not the biggest pesto enthusiast, enjoyed. For the sauce, I think I ended up with about a cup of cream and 1/4 cup of pesto along with my pasta water, and it was perfect. Could not have been easier.


A poor-man’s Cowboy Caviar in that it includes about half the number of ingredients but delivers just about the same experience. A half recipe would be sufficient to feed a family (I made the full recipe for a crowd and had about two servings left over), and it is good either on its own or with chips.


I may or may not already have another batch of this dough resting in my fridge. The effort to payoff ratio is just too good.


When I bake fruit desserts, I often end up with so much extra liquid that I almost feel I should drain them off at the end. My peaches were actually a hair dry here, oddly enough. But I loved the pecan sandy topping and the ratio of peaches to cookie crumbs, so I would consider this one a winner.


My chocolate had some melting issues and my ice was a little chunkier than I would have liked, but even so, this was tasty. I may have to make it again soon . . . for recipe testing purposes, you understand. Maybe even with a little peppermint extract.


My sister-in-law made these for a family gathering, so I stole the recipe from her. I had to use blueberries because frozen raspberries were out of stock (cyclospora, perhaps?), so I added lemon zest along with the juice for the jam. Even though these do have 3 separate components to fuss with, they actually came together pretty easily. A deliciously summery dessert.


What I Created

  • Original blackout poem "The Poet"

  • Original Essay "Your Suffering Is Not an Escape Room" for Frontline Magazine

May your days be filled with beauty, and may your heart be filled with the willingness to see and give thanks for it.

 
 
 

Monthly Review: June 2026

  • r.m. allen
  • Jul 7
  • 3 min read

Let it not be lost on me,

what you have given. For all your gifts are good,

but these far more abundant than I dared to ask,

joy to surpass my grief.


Let it not be lost on me

how you are working. The seeds I scatter fall at your will

to grow as you ordain,

fruits timely and surprising.


Let it not be lost on me

where you have led me. The paths I wandered,

certain they went nowhere, have brought me into level ground,

grace to lead me home.

Here's what I read, cooked, and created in the month of June.


What I Read

  • Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, J.K. Rowling (★★★★★)–reread

  • Sunrise on the Reaping, Suzanne Collins (★★★★★)

  • Help! My Kid Hates Writing: How to Turn Struggling Students Into Brave Writers, Julie Bogart (★★★)

  • When We Were Monsters, Jennifer Niven (★★★)

  • How to Dress Vintage, Gabi Jones (★★★)

  • The Magician's Assistant, Ann Patchett (★★★)

  • Rules of Civility, Amor Towles (★★★)


If you want to hear the rationale behind my rating, head to my Goodreads for full reviews.


What I Cooked

Eh, these were fine. I ended up with a lot leftover and turned the rest into hummus.


Cozy comfort food, top to bottom. I did not find the Cheddar Bay biscuit topping to be quite as flavorful as I was expecting, but I did still like the casserole overall. This would be a great meal train casserole.


I made this off the recipe card on Instagram rather than the full blog post version, and I think that would have solved my main gripes with the recipe: the fact that I had to fish a lump of fused wonton wrappers out of the stock and try again and the fact that it included bok choy as its only vegetable. In the future, I think I would use ramen or egg noodles in lieu of the wonton wrappers, and I would add cabbage, mushrooms, and carrots in lieu of the bok choy. It was definitely a quick and easy meal.


Just a great, classic coleslaw dressing.


This . . . was not good.


I've used this method to make ice cream before, and it works so well. I kept wanting to make cookies for ice cream sandwiches and not being able to, but I think that would really seal the deal.


These were tasty, although I found the peach filling texture somewhat odd.


  • Limeade

    • Difficulty: ★

    • Flavor: ★★★

    • Keeper: Maybe

While this was very easy, it had a strange bitterness to it (maybe I left the rinds in too long?) that was less than enjoyable.


What I Created

  • Original poem and essay "For This Child I Have Prayed" (which, by the way, thank you for reading and sharing so much kind feedback, especially on a story I was initially hesitant to share).

  • The rest of my next essay for Commonplace magazine

May your days be filled with beauty, and may your heart be filled with the willingness to see and give thanks for it.

 
 
 

For This Child I Have Prayed

  • r.m. allen
  • Jun 28
  • 6 min read

and peed on sticks; and cursed

the numbered days—the counting up, the counting down, the turning

into months, the dreaded year;

and so I did the questionnaire, the consultation, all the tests,

lay back and thought of babies;

for this child I had switched to Tylenol from Advil,

and so I downed two pills and donned a gown and booties,

and clasped the washcloth from the nurse

and prayed the flush of dye would part

this great Red Sea before me.


For this child I received like Eucharist

three yellow tablets on my tongue

days three through seven,

and pierced my side with needles,

my works of satisfaction for

my slothful follicles, those pools of darkness in my vacant womb, space

for this child, if ever

he should need it; for this child

I choked down vitamins and tears,

for this child

was no guarantee; I filled a chest

with hopes deferred and fading dreams

for one I longed to love

but feared might never be;


For this child we could do only so much,

and there were no indulgences to pay,

no sins to be confessed,

no alms to be performed,

no offering to give;

for this child I surrendered my vain works, my conceptions

of the life that I would have,

the mother I would be.


For this child

I kept one light on upstairs

as though at midnight he would sneak in through the door

long after I had gone to bed

and I would wake to find

my wanderer returned—

mercies great, the goodness of the Lord, the morning’s joy

that followed every night I had endured.


For this child I have prayed,

and in this yes I see

my works could never save,

for it was always, ever

grace.

It was supposed to be quick, easy, and fun. I knew fifteen-year-olds who had done it—first try, practically. We had bachelor’s degrees and jobs and a mortgage and a dog and four years of marriage to our family name; of course we would figure it out. So we started trying.


I don’t think I started to worry something was wrong until the following summer. Now it was a year. Now we needed to see someone. We had our appointments: primary care for a referral, consultation, testing for him, testing for me, then more testing for me until we reached a diagnosis and with it, a treatment plan. We would start with medication. I stood in line at Walgreens for the crinkly paper bag and the question from the pharmacist: “Are you currently pregnant or planning to become pregnant?”


I had been planning. Now I was just hoping.


It had been another year. Ten trips to the pharmacy. Two ultrasounds. No luck. We went back to the clinic. “If you’ve been on letrozole for a year and you haven’t conceived, your likelihood of getting pregnant is 5%.” But we were young. We could try IUI. We could try IVF. We could try what we ultimately ended up trying: Ovidrel, the trigger shot to be taken CD 14 following an ultrasound confirming adequate follicular growth. Two out of the four cycles, everything looked beautiful; the other two, I couldn’t take the shot. At what would be my final scan, they looked for a developing follicle and found my ovaries empty as a starless sky. “We can do bloodwork to see if you already ovulated.” But I hadn’t, and I knew I hadn’t, and I didn’t need to spend however much money it would be on top of the $300 ultrasound and the $250 shot hiding in my fridge door dairy compartment to confirm that. I kept that vial of Ovidrel for another ten months, unsure if the 5/26 printed on the box meant it expired on the 26th of May or the following May. Either way, I couldn’t bear the thought of throwing it out, but I never called the clinic again, not to make the embarrassing announcement that today was Cycle Day 1 so I could refill my prescription, not to schedule another appointment, not to start another course of action that may or may not work.


We didn’t stop trying, but it felt like quitting nevertheless. If you don’t do everything possible to obtain it, do you really want it? We did. I did. I wanted it when my bathroom trash can filled with LH strips in varying stages of development as I sought to divine what was happening in my body. I wanted it when I felt that low ache start in my belly and knew I wouldn’t need to take a pregnancy test. I wanted it when people asked whether we had children and I replied, evenly, calmly, “No, it’s just us.” I wanted it when I hung two stockings at Christmas and we cried again watching Klaus because maybe that was going to be us, growing old together yet alone, waiting for children who would never come. I wanted it when I held my new nieces and nephews—three of them born during that year of letrozole, when I didn’t know whether my sadness and anxiety came from the medication or from the reality of why I had to take it. When I stopped, I wondered whether it had all been for nothing—a year and a half of my life wasted in medicated limbo.


Another December passed and my great fear was confirmed: we would be childless at thirty. “When we have children” became “if we have children.”


Everybody tends to see the future as more certain than it truly is. Only when unexpected circumstances arrive do you realize you never actually know what’s going to happen next. You are never guaranteed a particular outcome; you simply believe your actions will bring about your desired results. You reduce the world to an equation, readily understood and easily solved. But with infertility, there are too many variables. You can take a fistful of supplements and overhaul your diet and swap your personal care products right down to your underwear, but you can’t biohack your way out of a chronic condition. You can follow your course of medication and schedule your appointments and extract all the physical components necessary to make a baby, but you can’t wave your hand over a Petri dish and will an embryo into being. This is not to say, of course, that all medical interventions or lifestyle modifications are immaterial. Such courses of action may be both appropriate and efficacious, but when medical advancements offer no help, we revert to the retribution theology that predates them, this idea that I did all the right things so now God should give me what I want. And if I don’t have what I want, it’s my fault. Maybe it was something I was doing wrong. Maybe it was something I had to start doing right. I wanted my suffering to be an escape room so I could find the key and get out already.


But there is a reason the biblical metaphor for suffering is a wilderness and not a locked room or a math problem. It is a place you must wander, and sometimes it is a place you will never leave. Yet it is also a place in which God is with you, as He was with me through those long years. I thought often of a favorite Proverb: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” I did not give up hope, but I had to allow my hope to change. Children are not entitlements or trophies; they are gifts. Though I could not expect a child, I could expect God to work in my life, to provide peace, meaning, and joy in whatever path He prepared for me.


Over and over my hopes were deferred. But in that instant when I saw those two pink lines, up sprang a tree of life in what had been only a barren wilderness.


When I start my day with prayer each morning, I thank God that He said yes. I thank Him for my child, a son like He gave Hannah and Elizabeth and Rachel and all the other barren women of the Bible whose stories comforted me so greatly. I thank Him for my body, which I felt for so long had failed me, but is to my great delight finally doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: sustaining not only me but also the new life growing in my womb. I thank Him for the miraculous (though sometimes uncomfortable) changes I have seen in it during these eighteen weeks of pregnancy so far. He did not have to do this for us. We could have waited another seven years; we could have waited forever. Sometimes I wonder why it had to take so much time—we could have had three babies in the time it took to have one. More often I wonder whether it’s fair that we’re having a baby while others have waited just as long, or longer. I am, I suppose, allowed to wonder, but I am not appointed to know these answers while I am on this earth. Two things I know for certain: that it is a miracle any of us exist at all, and that any answered prayer is not a measure of faith but a gift of grace.


For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted what I asked of Him. Blessed be the Lord.

 
 
 

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