Post-It Sized Cage

For over a year I’ve had a post-it with various weight ranges and categories listed.  As a reminder.  A post-it sized cage.

I’ve spun some pretty spectacular bullshit to justify its existence: That the range helps me from focusing on a single number, that it helps me keep perspective, that it keeps me accountable, that it prevents me from continuing to move my weight goal lower and lower.

And while some of that could be partially true, the underlying point is, that post-it controlled my sense of self-worth.  

I needed reassurance that things were “Okay” and I thought that being in the Fit category would mean that things were okay…. Spoiler alert— THAT’S NOT HOW IT WORKS.

So today… I ripped up the goddamned post it.  I’ll admit, I took a picture of it first.  I felt like it needed to be… memorialized?  Who knows, maybe that’s more bullshit.  Maybe that’s my disease morphing to escape detection.

At the end of it all, I don’t want to externalize my self-worth.

Because the moment I have to PROVE that I’m worthy, I’ve bought into the assumption that I wasn’t in the first place. And that’s the real bullshit.

WE ARE WORTHY BECAUSE WE ARE. Cut and print.

Be gentle with yourself. You are loved by me and others.

Ready or Not, my story

CW: pregnancy loss, abortion

January 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th , 2021 were the worst days of my life so far.

One of the things most friends don’t realize because we were all sheltering at home, is that I was pregnant in 2020.

It was the one redeeming thing of an awful year. I cozied into our little nest, glowing with a secret and a promise of good things to come. Our world had been small for awhile but now it felt special. A merry little Christmas indeed. My growing body didn’t show up on Zoom and I looked forward to a silly reveal.

Rhys and I playfully bantered about if we’d find out the sex this time (maybe, no, yes? no, maybe? yes. no).

We were feeding the cats across the street and enjoying the creek when Twitter told us about the attack on the Capitol. I was stunned. We ordered pizza because I just could not even anything.

That night I started to bleed. Just before bath time with Bean.

I’m not going to do a play by play. This isn’t my space for that. But I held the line for the advice nurse and held hope through the night and into the next day where it became clear that there was no hope.

I went to my doctor’s office.

No heartbeat.

They sent me home.

Holding on to a hope that couldn’t last

But it got worse and I got sicker and sicker. Back on the phone. And to the ER.

It’s always a lousy time at the ER. January 2021 was a really shitty time to go to the ER. Pre-vaccine, mid-surge, there were no rooms.

It was awful.

It was awful and I almost died alone in an ER. And by the grace of my state government, I was not interrogated.

I am aware of that. Of my privilege. On the worst day of my life I knew it could have been even worse. That it WAS worse for so many others out there.

I blamed myself, though the doctors told me there was nothing I did wrong.

Had I been interrogated, I would have confessed to anything.

It was the worst day of my life and that was under the best circumstances. I had care available. I had social support. I had people who could take my child. I had a ride to the hospital. I had an N95 that I could wear in the waiting room. I didn’t catch COVID at the hospital. I SURVIVED.

There was so much that was terrible. The isolation nearly broke me. Maybe it did.

Where they saved me

The financial cost would make you want to tear everything down. Add the Everything Else and I think, yeah, the whole thing broke me down and broke me open and I’ve been rebuilding myself ever since.

So there it is.

Fuck you SCOTUS. You have no idea why a woman would need an abortion. We do not owe anyone our stories, we do not need to justify ourselves to you. Whatever the reason.

I WANT ONE is enough of a reason. Cut and print.

And “I need one” will always be a reason. Without the care that I finally received at the hospital, I could have died. My partner would have been left to raise our daughter alone.

I’ve learned, in order for folks to care about something, I have to frame the suffering of a man. My death would have made my husband’s life less convenient. So maybe now they’ll care.

Ugh.

My daughter and I went to our protest yesterday and spoke. She grabbed the bullhorn and said, “We should be free. We should be trusted. My body, my choice!” (She is six).

So what to do now? Get loud.
Pass the Judiciary Act of 2021 that would expand the court to balance the bench.
Pass the Women’s Health Protection Act (it’s already through the House)
And disrupt as much as we can– refuse to allow things to continue as usual.

Bean and the bullhorn “My body, my choice!”


Unrecovered

I’ve uncovered something about myself.  As honest as I am, I’m a total liar. I lie so much.  Most often to myself, and so often that I sometimes have to pause to distinguish what is true from what I’ve told myself should be true.

I lie to myself out of necessity, for self-preservation.  

I lie to the world for the same reason, or so I thought.  

Until I realized I’m not preserving MYSELF. 

I’m preserving my disease. 

I’m safeguarding my disorder to insure that it will continue.  So It will survive.  It will go underground and change its name to Wellness and garner so much applause it’d keep Tinkerbell alive forever.

But maybe I don’t need applause to survive.  Maybe I could learn to live without requiring constant validation.  

What if I knew that I could weather the storm? What if I wasn’t afraid of my own existence?  What if I hadn’t clipped my own wings?

So I’m asking a lot more questions than I’m answering, and I’m trying to sit with that uncertainty. To let it stay a little messy. To say, huh, how about that, without tying it up with a tidy conclusion.

Times are hard. I’m tired. Recovery is hard. I’m fucking trying.
And some days are easier and some days are longer but every day I get up again. And that’s something. I’m discovering myself in recovery, uncovering myself. Trying to just let myself BE myself. (We’ll get to my ‘best self’ later, one thing at a time, y’all).

I’m learning to trust that I can be myself without any major modifications and life will continue to do its thing. And maybe I can learn to live without applause.

Blasphemy

I’ve been remembering the youth pastor who used his voice to shun homosexuals and then said HE wasn’t saying it, God was.

I told him the only voice I heard was his and he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Thank goodness I had enough fire inside me to stand up to him. I find myself wondering about all the other kids, the ones who kept quiet. The ones who didn’t have moms with a “Question Authority” bumper sticker.

The ones who believed him and the ones who empowered him.

The other kids I can give a pass to— standing up to an adult is tricky and most of them didn’t have a dog in the fight. But the adults? I won’t waste my breath on the ones who agreed with him, they can fuck all the way off.

But the adults who cringed but looked the other way, who shrugged their shoulders and said “a lot of people feel that way,” those are the fuckers I have a harder time forgiving. The “bigotry adjacent” crowd.

Cuz yeah, I have a hard time forgiving adults who enable bigots.

I’m fine with that character flaw.

WTF

I have a lot to say and no idea how to say it.
I have a million words running through my head and nothing to say.

Nothing more, at least.

Except maybe this–

When I joined Moms Demand Action, my daughter was still in a crib. Late one night I was up nursing and scrolling through my phone when I saw a post of a little pixie preschool girl balancing on a toilet seat.

The mom had seen her daughter doing this and thought, “What a wonderful and strange child I have,” until the girl said what she was doing.

It was what they did at school. When they played the Quiet Game, so the bad man wouldn’t find them.

Her heart broke, mine broke. Soon after, I joined our fledgling local group of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Parkland, our own community, and then place after place joined the list, and I became more and more involved.

(And to clarify, I am speaking just as me, not for the group).

I learned a lot of data. That though school shootings were terrifying, they were not where most kids got shot. Most kids that get shot, are at home or a friend’s house. Most kids that get shot, are shot because an adult didn’t lock up their gun.

I learned that school shooter drills are not proven to be at all helpful, but have traumatized a generation of students and increased anxiety in schoolchildren. I learned that most school shooters are students at or former students of the schools. That most of the time (like 80% of the time), they get their guns FROM HOME. Or a friend or relative’s home. From an adult who didn’t properly secure their weapons.

There are certainly other conversations to be had– about gun show loopholes and military grade weapons and high capacity magazines and all sorts of things.

But my biggest take away is that when we get adults to properly secure their weapons (in a securely locked container or disabled with a trigger lock), we stop kids from getting shot. We stop kids from being shot unintentionally, we stop kids from killing someone unintentionally, and we can stop a lot of school shootings.

So let’s do that.

And my little community, we’re doing pretty well. We’ve thwarted some scary situations, we’ve faced a few as well. Our city council was on board for a secure storage ordinance, the interim Chief-of-Police was on board too, and then… nothing happened. It lost traction. It wasn’t a priority for them.

Our school board stepped up and sent home information to parents, reminding them of best practices for safe storage. Parental notification of our responsibilities to prevent unauthorized youth access to firearms. (Thanks NVUSD!)

So I’m getting louder with city council and with the mayor. Because there are a lot of things we need to figure out, but there are some things we already KNOW. We know safe storage saves lives.

We knew seatbelts saved lives and said, y’all gotta wear one. We learned pool-gates saved lives and said, y’all gotta get one.

Well guess what?

Gun violence is the leading cause of death for American children.
Secure storage saves lives.
What the fuck are we waiting for?

I won’t be wearing pearls and saying please.
I’ll be in the red shirt, demanding that we DO SOMETHING.

Because we must.
And we can.
So again, I ask– what the fuck are we waiting for?

My daughter now attends kindergarten. My dream that I could get drills abolished by the time she was in school has revealed my naiveté. She’s six years old, missing her two front teeth, and she told me, “If a bad man comes to my school, I’m gonna kick him in the face.”

And I broke. Not in front of her, but that, I think, is when the hollowness started to creep in. The horror.

But I can’t afford horror. I have a child to raise, there isn’t another option here, we have to keep going. We have to do what we can because we may FEEL powerless, but we are NOT powerless.

The myth of powerlessness is a lie that evil whispers in our ears, shouts in our dreams. That there is *nothing* we can do.

But there are things we CAN.
So we must.
Because WHAT THE FUCK YOU GUYS.

Earthlings for Everything

In the beginning was the Before
And the Time of Unknowing.

As more Became
And More became Known.
We entered the time of Discovery 

And Forgetting.

Now we are in the After the Before
Or the Beginning of the After, depending on your angle.

Much is Known and much is Forgotten.

We listen to learn and remember.

Saturday Insight

I used to despair at what I could not do.
The things I could Not Change.
I would rage and weep and thrash and exhaust.

Now I practice acknowledgment.   
I see it and grieve it.

Mourn and move on
To what I Can Do.

What the birds brought me

I’m not much of a gardener but I’d like to be so I have succulents.

I also have what I jokingly call my “native garden” of flowering weeds.

For the bees, or whatever. I figure anything green is a good idea and I won’t pull it out unless I’m planting something

But in one of my containers there have been little sprouts. Some likely weeds, some unknown.

My laissez-faire approach— if it’s green, it’s good.

Out of an unknown popped this little treasure! I’m so excited!!

The birds and the squirrels often dig up my roots (getting worms or acorns I think). But this felt like a gift! This little volunteer dropped by a bird or brought by the wind.

So thanks! She’s gorgeous and I appreciate her!

Caterpillar Soup

I’ve been sitting in some experience, waiting for wisdom, since Christmas. Practicing non-reactivity, allowing reflection. This is a new practice for me.

What started as an intentional pause, become curious uncertainty and now seems to have settled into some knowledge.

The wisdom is yet to come.

Perhaps you’ve experienced something like it– see, I saw something that showed me the contrast of choices and priorities. How two people can appraise the same situation in such opposite ways. How our actions reflect our values (this I knew) and our reactions reflect our inner state (this is new).

Since my inner state is in flux– it feels like these last two years have been a cocoon and I dissolved into goo and am rebuilding.

Also, YES. Caterpillars do not simply sprout into butterflies like a seed into a flower, they almost completely dissolve, keeping only the very few parts of them that will serve them as butterflies. I can’t make this up. I learned this from my kindergartner.

It makes so much sense.

Of course you don’t just hide for awhile and miraculously change, bippity boppity-new. Transformation like that is grotesque and painful. Miracles are brutiful.

A caterpillar (I still struggle to spell that word), releases enzymes or something that dissolve most of itself.

But the thing is, before it nearly destroys itself, it builds protection. In order to transform, it needs a safe space to dissolve it’s Self and then REBUILDS NEW organs, legs, everything.

The caterpillar is a phoenix, returning with wings.

Completely different.

I feel like I’ve done the dissolving part, maybe right now I’m still in my cocoon, flexing my wings against the confines, gaining strength, stepping into my new self. Or maybe I’m still growing new pieces. I hope I’ll always be growing new pieces.

I’m grateful I had a safe space to dissolve and change, otherwise I’d just be caterpillar soup.

My wish for you today is that you get a safe space to stay in while you can become yourself.

That’s all you need to be, is yourself. You’re the only one who can do it.

You are loved. By me and others.