I love moms. I love my mom. Moms created the whole damn world and they run the thing, too. Motherhood is powerful as fuck. Yet, every time I think about being looked at as a mom, I can feel myself shrinking away from the idea. I can feel my other identities as a queer femme, a writer, an activist, a nonprofit director, a leader, a teacher, a badass bitch being forcibly subdued and overshadowed by the looming identity of “mommy.” I can visualize all those parts of me, of who I am and how I see myself, disintegrating into glitter dust, scattered to the wind like ashes.
I am learning that I don’t have the kind of brain that can “stay woke” without periods of rest. I sometimes feel like the spook who sat by the door, squirreling away my training in willful blindness to plot a revolution. I am training myself not only to survive the kind of job I left, but to navigate white spaces deftly enough to spot allies (which don’t exist to the cortisol brain) and support those who are like me — wide awake and impervious to Zen.
what stopped you from giving up? i have read all your stories on autowin and you seem so close so often. what happened to you. how did you stay on this side of the window. i find it so hard to stay here.
i laughed
i laughed because it’s all so silly, it’s all so ridiculous.
even the unbearable is so unbearably ridiculous
so cruel
look at me, hurting –
i laughed!
i laughed and cried at the same time
because it’s all so funny, all of us,
because the problem with tragedy
is that it lacks comedy
i laughed
i laughed and laughed and laughed
I think my ex who broke my heart still likes me. I’m still totally in love with her. Should I consider dating her again? We just broke up last time because she was scared of commitment. I don’t really want to get my heart broken again, but I love her so m
it’s like, a girl really loved strawberry cake. it was her favorite thing to eat and her grandmother would make a strawberry cake for her every week when she was little and now her grandmother’s dead so strawberry cake is even more special to her and has such a place in her heart and her life as she knows it. and then sort of out of nowhere, she learns she has a strawberry allergy. well fuck. so her mom tries to make her grandmother’s recipe, but it’s not really as good, and also it gives her hives, a scratchy throat and an upset stomach. i mean, does it kill her? no. it’s tolerable. it’s sort of like the same cake and really, the scratchy throat goes away after a couple of days and the upset stomach, too. and the best part is that it reminds her of her grandmother and the times they had together and the little plates. it’s nice to remember that. her mother keeps trying with the recipe and the girl keeps eating it and it keeps making her violently ill and itchy. after a while it gets old, the itching and the stomach issues. it’s just exhausting, and honestly, it takes away from whatever enjoyment she could get from this cake that isn’t even as good as it was when her grandmother made it. so she asks her mom what other kinds of cakes she’s good at making – like what were her favorite cakes to bake. her mom tells her that she’s got this spice cake recipe that she perfected like, years ago, and also this new pineapple cake recipe that she’s been wanting to try. they make the two new cakes together and it’s true, the spice cake has been perfected, and the pineapple cake is kind of weird but ultimately good. they buy a cookbook full of cake recipes and they try them all. some of them are terrible. some of them are too fancy and some of them were good at first but then tasted awful. a couple were too sweet, but quite a few of them were really really fucking good. the girl made some cakes with her friends, too, and sometimes all on her own. even though she had new favorites and tons of new recipes she hadn’t even tried yet, she thought about her grandmother’s strawberry cake sometimes. she felt like it was a shame that she was allergic to strawberries, but at the same time, she was over it. there were SO MANY new cakes to eat, and she’d discovered that raspberry cake was really similar to strawberry cake, but actually better? and so far it hadn’t made her sick yet, so she was really into that these days. she had happy memories of the strawberry cake – save for the last few times she’d eaten it – and spoke highly of it to others. but mostly she was just the fuck over it. yeah?
i don’t know, babe. what does your heart tell you to do?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that we all carry irrational beliefs around with us, even and especially into relationships. This is just how humans work! We’re all just trying to keep ourselves safe in a variety of ways, and our brains and bodies are doing their best to work towards that goal. Sometimes the things we do to try to keep ourselves safe are a bit mismatched with what the situation actually calls for. Sometimes the way we respond to something to try to keep ourselves safe is actually counterintuitive and makes something worse instead of better, often because we’re reacting to an extreme situation from our past rather than to a more moderate or even totally nonexistent one in our present. The challenge, both in life and in relationships, is to try to be constantly correcting for this, finding a balance between instinct and reality.
IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIIIIME OF THE YEAAAR!
The Everyone Is Gay + Autostraddle All Ages Pride Party is being hosted at the beautiful, badass @housingworksbookstore this year, and we are joining forces with Tumblr to bring you very, very exciting musical guests (to be announced June 1! Ahh!), delicious (free!) snacks, and oh-so-much additional pride-drenched FUN. MC’d by Gabby Rivera and Kristin Russo!
RSVP here to be entered to win awesome prizes at the event! Ahhhhh!
