When I was an exhausted, maddened, rabid, smitten younger mother to an infant or two, I growled at anyone who would listen, “Never compare your little bit of tired to a nursing mother.” So I won’t. It’s not that bad. When I wake up for a few moments in the night – with achy hips and shoulders, or else screaming neck and back, maybe my hands asleep from perching across my chest in an average way – I have learned…
It’s not ok. But it is. Forgive me. Or don’t. I know it was a miscalculation that mercury is ever in retrograde, but such a beautiful one. Sometimes we trust our eyes or guts and they’re wrong. It happens all the time. Both/And. Both/And. I’m not being profound. I’m being basic AF. It’s ok. It’s ok to be broken and triumphant. Beaten in the dirt and punching up. There are lame words for this last year, but I can’t ever,…
I don’t want to break this news to you gently: mothers who speak up about domestic abuse are punished and lose custody of their children in abysmal numbers. Schmidt, Samantha. (2019, July 29) ‘A gendered trap’: When mothers allege child abuse by fathers, the mothers often lose custody, study shows. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/a-gendered-trap-when-mothers-allege-child-abuse-by-fathers-the-mothers-often-lose-custody-study-shows/2019/07/28/8f811220-af1d-11e9-bc5c-e73b603e7f38_story.html Dickson, Sean & Meier, Joan S. (2017) Mapping Gender: Shedding Empirical Light on Family Courts’ Treatment of Cases Involving Abuse and Alienation, Law &…
Please Vote Like We’re Family To my beloved chosen family this will be an already understood glimpse into life of those on the margins. For some of my beloved natal, biological, and legal family members and literal neighbors, my heartfelt begging will remain foreign, unrelatable, and ignored. Which is gutting, as we are, in fact, related. And you do, in fact, know how to read. You could practice listening if it’s still really so difficult. I come from the same…
It would be not be so difficult to balance how we are all living. I make fewer than $20,000 per year, as a single mom with two dependents, but I recently lost my BadgerCare health coverage and SNAP food benefits, because I had one paycheck that was $13.95 too high. Most of my paychecks are not over their limit, and even the one larger paycheck will not put me above the $20,000 annual total. It doesn’t seem like a great…
This has recently been posted by many on social media: “ Steve Reichert is with Frank Myers and 17 others.Like Page September 1 at 11:22am · By ?:” To be fair, maybe a dark-skinned black man who feels really well-supported by the NRA and all of the other parties touted below wrote this piece, and Steve Reichert, the NRA, or his ilk just found it, and were super delighted to have their horns tooted, but that doesn’t seem very likely….
Some of my family and I just traveled to work for our neighbors on the Siouxan Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. We were only able to labor for 36 hours, hauling wood from a giant brush pile and driftwood from a river beach, but this place is so familiar. The Missouri is just like the Mississippi. There are more beef cattle than dairy cows, but these are familiar silhouettes of animals that we know well. Rock piles are in…
Dear Rural Hunting Family Members Who Love Your Guns, I’m not sure that you are understanding what those of us on the margins are telling you about our lives relative to guns. I’m walking around figuratively bleeding this week, as many of us do all of the time. Just aching. Hurting. Deep, deep pain about how we all live our lives at the many intersections of injustice. “Yes,” you say, “Mass shootings are painful. Don’t take my guns. Call out…