Megan Neuringer

Actor Vincent Schiavelli and Tembi’s husband, Saro Gullo, in L.A. with the journey cake, 1997 I am a southern black American woman who married an Italian chef. The kind of Italian, husband and chef who, on a whim, once offered to carry a cake across three continents because a baker in a remote village in Sicily we had just met asked him to. I am the kind of American, wife and woman who snickered at the absurdity. But he was dead serious. The cake came with us.

A bomb exploded inside my body. It was an ectopic pregnancy rupture. So rare that in 25 years of practice, my OB/GYN has seen only a handful of them. Internal bleeding. Emergency surgery. In a morphine haze, I blurrily signed a hysterectomy consent form, having to immediately choose between my own life and the potential of being able to create one. I’m in my late twenties. My mother passed away when I was 12, and I wrote an investigative memoir about her life.

I talk to my therapist a lot about Donald Trump. And it’s not just because of the normal stuff, like how we are being led by a man who formed when a patch of sunlight hit a dumpster filled with self-tanner, although that’s part of it. It’s mostly because, three days after Trump was elected, my mother unexpectedly died. I know. But I have to say, while I don’t recommend losing a person who connects you to this world the week that world gets upended, I admit there were some advantages.