Port Day

 Next Friday I will have my chemo port removed. 
For those not in the know, this is a big milestone; the chemo port was surgically implanted to help protect my veins from the chemotherapy drugs, and was the site of so many saline flushes, painful sticks, and colorful bandaids.  Because it was difficult to place and is a easy to remove, the protocol for taking it out means it's another step closer to achieving 'cured' status.

It has been 16 months and a few weeks since my initial diagnosis, 15 months since the port was implanted and I began chemotherapy, and 13 months since I had my first clean PET scan.

I hated my port when it was implanted.  It was the last of a series of quickly scheduled surgeries, procedures, and scans.  The previous surgery, performed by Dr. Natasha Bir, had been a surgical biopsy of my lymph node to diagnose the cancer I knew was there.  She was patient, kind, and relatable.  She talked to me about my cancer and how treatment would affect me as a person, a mother, someone who planned to work full time through treatment.  Her incision was clean and healed to the tiniest scar.  I trusted her.

The surgeon who placed my port was new.  He said he could tell by the sun damage on my chest where to place the port, so I ended up having to wear low cut tops to every chemo appointment.  The scar, perhaps inevitably, was larger, more obvious and more visible to the world.  I hate that scar.  

I hated my port.  It was sore for months, and August would accidentally kick it regularly when we played, making me feel like 'sick mommy' more than ever.  My seat belt irritated it, and the generously provided port pillows were kind but made me feel ridiculous.  It was a visible outward expression of my internal illness.  I have been waiting for the day it is removed since it was first implanted.

And now that day is coming, and it feel anti-climactic.  The new daily reminder of my illness is this awkward haircut that refuses to grow out, and my port no longer aches, is no longer irritated by my seat belt or painful when kicked by August.  I sometimes even forget about the scar, and wonder what new scar the removal will leave.

I wonder when I will get my hair back, if I will ever feel the same as I did back on February 1st, when I excitedly made an appointment for a physical as an early 40th birthday present to myself.  

I wonder if  "Stage 3-B Hodgkin's Lymphoma" will ever feel like a real diagnosis, or if I will ever feel like I have truly beaten this thing.  I wonder what will come next, now that my body has been through some of the most rigorous drugs on the market.  

And I want to celebrate this port removal, like I wanted to celebrate shaving my head.  But I am afraid to celebrate it, afraid I am asking for too much, afriad it will turn out odd because it is still so near the surface (like the port!), the vulnerability around being sick, getting better, trying to define this new cancer survivor self that I am.

Which is all a very long way of asking, would you like to go out for cocktails and appetizers after my port removal?

A Story About Recovery, Nine Months Later

 Nine months later, and my hair is still so sparse.  It's thicker, to be sure, because people are commenting optimistically in careful tones about how great it looks.  Talking to me like I'm a sick person, because I am.  I was...I am still at risk, still vulnerable...still recently 'recovered'.  

I am still processing the feelings of this all...how to feel, who to be.  What does it mean to be a cancer survivor?  It sounds so cliche, so much like someone else, like not me, but it also is me, definitionally.  I am a person who has survived cancer, I am a cancer survivor.  So now I have to figure out what that means to me, for me.

Which is not to say that cancer or recovery define me, but I am undeniably changed.  I supposed that's the weird, back-handed gift of my short hair; every morning I wake up to a reminder that I am never going to be the person I was before February 2022, before that first physical, that first imaging appointment.  Before I felt that little lump start to grow in my neck and then, later, saw the bugling image of my cancer straining against the barrier of my collar bone, struggling to grow beyond the confines of my body, my neck, my spleen, by shrunken stomach and infected heart.  

It makes sense, something like that, seeing an invader lit up in bright yellow inside the deepest parts of your own body, entwined with your lymphatic system, impossible to cut out.  Something like that should change you.  No one should be able to stay the same after that. 

And after everything that came after that.  The many tiny losses.  The total physical change that slowly overtook my body as I gripped my past life, my 'normal' life with white-knuckled fists.  

I comfort myself with all the things I managed to keep, all of the normal I managed to preserve and insert in that time.  Rather than focus on the loss.  The times I told my son I couldn't because I was too tired.  The times I felt myself start to faint.  The time I fainted, and lost a bit of time between when I was standing, focused and alert, and when I was on the ground, the man I love standing over me looking as scared as I have ever seen him, me not understandinghow I got down there in the first place.  

The times I would enter the hospital to undress, don those paper gowns and be scanned, imaged, cut open and sewed back up, explored and biopsied.  

The many, many, many ways I lost control over my own body. Or, really, gave away control.  But is it giving away if it is under threat?  If you don't do this you might die, that was the constant fear.  And I am nothing if not obedient in the face of authority and death.

So now, here I am.  Trying to keep up the same face, the same facade.  But now the fear and adrenaline and fight are all gone, because I've won the fight.  

And I am just left here with my body, altered forever but technically health.  My mind, also altered forever but reeling from everything that has transpired.  My thoughts, also reeling, flying from memory to invasive thought to missed deadline to next task, as if getting back to normal is the new goal.  As if getting back to normal is a weighty enough goal to replace my former goal; beat cancer with a smile.

How can anything fill the hole in my to-do list that Beat Cancer With a Smile left?

Best/Worst, Cancer Edition

 Here are some of the worst things about my cancer/chemo journey, not that anyone asked.

Worst chemo side effects?

Bone and joint pain!  oh, i hate this.  It's like a dull, nagging soreness in my knees, shoulders, wrists, ankles.  In my arms and legs.  Especially at the end of the day and first thing in the morning.  Tylenol will knock it out usually, but I am always worried about timing the pills so I can sleep through it.

Hair loss.  The journey that I have been on with my hair this year is long and complicated.  I look like a crazy person almost every morning.  I started trimming my hair as it thinned, doing a half-assed job.  Finally got it cut in July, and it looked like healthy hair again for a few weeks before even at that short length the hair loss beat out my attempts to look like myself.  I no longer ask folks what they think because I am terrified of hearing the lie in their voice when they say they haven't noticed.  I wear my hair up every day and am not far from putting a scarf over it all. 

Tired is not the right word.  My body feels like someone else has used up all the fuel, all the youth and strength, and I am left piloting a vehicle with no gas in the tank, trying to turn the radio off to conserve juice.  It comes at awful times when I want to push through...baseball games, birthday parties, August's school picnic.  Sometimes I cry form exhaustion, or faint.  It is embarrassing and frustrating.  I have never not been able to will my way through a situation before, and I hate feeling so tired, so weak.

Best?  That's easy.  The people who came though for me in a thousand small and big ways.  Chris, holding my hand as they punctured my port the first time.  Emily sending August ice cream money.  Promising to visit if I would just ask.  Jenna surprising me, traveling down for our not quite chemo weekend in a hotel.  Marsh, Omo, Dave, Delaney, Mom, Jon, Diane, and Steve all pitching in to help with childcare so I could focus on work and my health.  Sheila sending me articles about head shaving and information so I wouldn't have to do my own depressing research.  The flexibility offered to me by David Lang at work.  Oh the sweet, thoughtful support of my amazing students.  The words from folks I'd lost contact with over time.  The jammies from Melanie and my cancer guidance and gifts form Aunt Joanne.  Chris taking care of August, making me a milkshake or soup or dinner.  Chris telling me I look the same as I did when we started dating 6 months into chemo draining all the rapid multiplying cells form my tired body.  Chris sitting with me at the infusion center, putting on ancient aliens and the price is right.  Trish, calling to check in day after day, making sure I am okay after every day.  Emily, tracking my chemo schedule from Indiana.  Jenna, being the place I put my fears, my safe place to be honest and sad and scared, so I could be happy and positive the rest of the time.  Trish organizing my meal train. Nathanial and Belinda picking up where Chris and I leave off with Squidy.

Strangest?  The journey progression that hair loss has been.  It was not a single day, a moment.  Hair loss was a daily reminder of being sick, evidence of chemo hanging off me and staring at me from the mirror morning after morning.  I started to dread shampooing because the unmanageable handfuls of lost hair I had the frustrating chore of collecting each morning.  I cried in the shower about that one a lot.

Sitting in the big comfy chairs at the infusion center every other week, I was surprised but how much my fellow patients complained.  I get it, to some extent.  We're sick.  But isn't that the best reason ever to try to see the bright side, to take control, in the face of such loss of control over our bodies, of how we feel and react?  I get that I might sound naive, but for me that's what made this whole process simpler; the control I had over me.  I lost control of my body and choices in so many ways, between the surgeries and scars, the implanted port, the limitations on what would make the chemo worse, and the ways my body responded to the chemo with more limitations.  So smiling and laughing in the face of all of it felt like the way to win, the way to pass the time with all of the wonderful nurses who made it as painless (literally and figuratively) as possible.

 

Silver Linings and Rainbows

 Yesterday I had a bad day; I was feeling crummy, feeling sorry for myself.  A pulmonary function test showed decreased lung function, which implied the strongest of my four chemo drugs might be causing permanent damage.  Pulmonary Fibrosis.  This meant a 12 day delay in chemotherapy and a new batch of unknowns after feeling so confident in my chemo routine.

Yesterday a tiny misunderstanding sent me to Chris' room with a scotch and a couple of comfort foods.  Today, I woke up newly committed to feeling okay, even as some of the unknowns stubbornly lasted through my 'education'.  Then, in the nearly empty infusion room where I get my treatments, I overheard the nurses talking about a patient.  Apparently this patient came in for her oncology appointment, only to be told she'd been referred to hospice.  This woman was only a few years older than me, also with children, and was apparently not expecting this news.  

Hospice is a word people have used with me before.  Somehow it manages to escape some of the awful connotations other words, like cancer, carry.  It doesn't sound immediately like death, but it is.  It is a promise from the medical community to help you be comfortable, but that promise feels condescending and insulting to those of use who are still fighting.  Like I am.  Like this poor woman who could have been me thought she was.  That's why the nurses were discussing it; they'd had to help this woman bear the news, asked her if she wanted comfort care now or to go home.  She thought the fight was still on, but her oncologist had already made arrangements for her surrender to the disease.  In that moment her diagnosis went from being a protracted struggle to a slow submission.

I remembered all the worries I had briefly, before I learned how manageable cancer of the lymphatic system is.  How confidently I get to tell folks that my cancer is curable, is already undetectable in my body.  Even though the chemo is no picnic, and risks and uncertainties keep popping up, no one is asking my insurance for permission to make me comfortable.  And I suppose that's the lesson; I am healthy enough to keep being uncomfortable until  the doctors are confident I can return to a life pretty close to normal.  I can wrap up chemo today and have a slice of pizza with my man, a snuggle with my boy, and plan the next trip.

I am so damn lucky, and the light of all that good fortune banished shadows of doubt and self pity back to the darkest recesses of my mind.  Because I am the lucky one. 

Just Stop.

 Everyone wants to talk about your weight loss until they find out it's because you have cancer.

Maybe stop talking about peoples' bodies.

Borcherding

 I still cry when I see his name. 

He died years ago, 8 now, and at the time I remember if it was fair or right that I felt so sad, so wounded by his sudden departure, that my loss felt so great.

And there here, hundreds of miles away and 8 years since saying goodbye, and I see his name in a footnote and tears rush to my eyes before I can remember why.  The feeling is reactive, immediate.  It is not a thought, it is a reflex.  I still miss him imperfectly loud as he was, inappropriate, brilliant, and supportive.  I still think of him, what he would say and how he would react to the new realities emerging in his absense.

This is the surprising thing, the way loss is its own dynamic secretive thing.  It can emerge from the thinnest of memories and take hold, pulling you back into the void of the person no matter how much time and space you have but between them and you, no matter how many relationships and memories you layer over the old treasures.

I see his name, and I cry.

Fine. Everything is fine.

 Stress Dreams I've Had Recently

• The key to my office door broke off and it was my fault and I couldn't fix it
• I got Covid-19 again, but, like, super Covid?
• My mom tried to pick me up from the post office but just ended up dragging my around the parking lot and running over me, and I tried to explain that she was driving poorly and hurting me, but she kept saying she couldn't use the break or she would cause it to rain.  I called her irrational and told her I would drive but she refused and left me in the parking lot
• My brother hates me
• My family hates me
• I am in Thailand with my brother, boyfriend, and son, and we're trying to check out of the hotel and leave the country but I can't get my son out of the hotel room and they're cleaning it around us and my brother and boyfriends are disappointed in me and going to leave without me.
• My mom is mad at me for not having another baby
• My son runs into a parking lot and is almost hit by a car driven by my cousin
• and I am still married to my ex-husband
• and he is a dick, and leaves us to wait in the parking lot
• I am responsible for 8 other 5 year olds and we are for some reason at a warehouse, and some kind of big gun deal is taking place and I get captured by the bad guys
• I am responsible for a bunch of kids and they want a snack, which I make, but then they won't eat it. 
• I'm traveling to Europe with my boyfriend and another friend, and halfway there my friend says I am a bad friend and we are stranded in an airport.
• basically, I am a bad person.
  

Bigger Isn't Better, Actually.

 I lost a bunch of weight.

I mean, I gained a bunch first.  During Covid, switching from running around campus lecturing all day to sitting in a desk chair on Zoom for 8 hours straight changed my body, as did finding comfort in meal time. 

But then, after a summer of trying to make good food choices and incorporate more movement into my daily life (which did nothing), the weight started melting off.

I think it was stress?  First I stopped eating and enjoying food, and beer started to upset my stomach.  Then I became anemic, which somehow made food even less appetizing, plus I began throwing up occasionally.  Stress?  Maybe?  Who knows. The weight melted off, quickly enough for the uninvited comments from older acquaintances to pile up in one week.

Here's the thing folks don't realize.  When you say, "Wow, you look great, you've lost weight!" what I hear is, "We noticed you got fat and we didn't like it.  So glad you are back on team-thin, where we want you.  You are a much better person now than you were when your pants size was bigger."

more or less.

 At least that's how I feel.  I had close family members insist I was getting healthier, even though I felt tired, stressed, fatigued.  The connection between thinness and health so strong they could imagine that I hadn't taken up a secret gym membership somehow, or stopped gobbling pints of ice cream to lose the weight.  I haven't.  No one seems to care.

What they care about is that my body is smaller, more acceptable.  "Buying clothes will be so much more fun!" my mother exclaims, as if we have identicle preferences.  The feedback is consistent and omnipresent; I am better for my smaller body.  Everyone is proud of it, prefers it.  It is a great way to make people I'm not particularly close to happy with by existence.

 So, it feeds into my codependency nicely. 

What Isn't Owed, Actually...

 Just a friendly reminder that we are allowed to be depressed.  We are allowed to make space for our feelings.

We don't owe the world perfection while we glue ourselves back together.

So, ya know, give yourself time.  Nothing in nature blooms all of the time.  Be patient.

What makes you think...

 I think it is a uniquely feminine problem, exacerbated by social media and this perception that people may *always* be available, that men think they are entitled to women's time.  

What on Earth makes you think I want to be your Facebook pen-pal?!

I understand that you lonely old boomers are bored sitting on your piles of money and easily won prestige (it's a lot easier to compete when whole swaths of society are marginalized), but in what world do you think I have the time or inclination to carry on some "friendly chat" with someone I've never met!?

Fuck all of the ways off.

All of them.

This sense of entitlement, that you are entitles to the time of a woman because you find her compelling, even in a seemingly innocent way, is wholly toxic because it ignores the reality that she may have no time for you.  No interest in chatting with you.  My dear, I have enough friends.  I'm sorry your wife dies 14 years ago.  I hope you find some other poor sap to listen to your meadering stories and thinly veiled pleas for pity and attention.  I would rather work, or write, or talk to people I am actually interested in.  Or fucking sleep, frankly.  Watch TV?  Play Sudoku?  Yup.  Those all sound more fun.  Those are things I actually choose to do.

Talking to random men on the internet is not something I choose to do.  It is not my fault that toxic masculinity means you've never learned how to form emotional ties with another man and now seek out female friends to help you deal with your mountains of repressed emotions.  I am actively working to destroy the hetero-normative cis-gendered racist capitalist ableist patriarchy that made you, I do not also have time for you.  I have my own damaged men to deal with.

So please, kindly, fuck off.

Baseball

 The other day my roommate said to me, "I had no idea you were so in to baseball."

Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, baseball felt like an inevitability.  Wasn't everyone this into baseball? It felt like part of the fabric of daily life.  T-ball, Giants games at Candlestick, A's games with Grandma Kate.  Will Clark and the way he wound himself up when he really took it out of a ball, Jose Canseco and his legendary attitude.  The Bash Brothers.  The Battle of the Bay.  My Grandma Kate and my dad had a friendly rivalry as an A's fan and Giant's fan, respectively, and that felt like the only real rivalry in the world, to the point where I barely registered the betrayal when I moved to Los Angeles and started attending Dodgers games.  I remember even after the Giants moved, and I moved, going back to South San Francisco felt special because that was where Candlestick park was, and that was a special place.  

Moving to Indiana in the summer of 1993 meant going to Wrigley for the first time and watching our beloved Giants play the Cubs.  Learning that my dad could also be a Cubs fan, and watching him slowly disown our Giants felt like a parallel story to the one we were living; trading the Bay Area in for the Midwest, learning to see my father as a much more complicated person with desires that might be contrary to my own, or to our family's. 

I remember going to so many minor league games over the summer in Indiana, usually coupled with blues music and barbecue.  The baseball felt like a thin string connecting the past to the present, to some bright future I would have to imagine.  I did not always enjoy these games; triple A ball felt like a cheat, like a trick my dad was using to make things seem normal when they weren't.  It felt like having an off-brand Disney character show up to your birthday party.  But now I look back on those games with fondness, treasuring the idea that you could always see good baseball at great prices if you could find a minor league game.

When I moved to Arcata for college, discovering the Humboldt Crabs felt like a revelation.  It was minor league ball with all of the things I loved, was learning to love as an independent, individuated person.  Cheap tickets, cheap hot dogs and beer, loud local crowds and a rowdy band.  If felt like home on those aluminum bleachers.  The Crabs were an easy symbol of what made Humboldt County feel special to me; the quaint small town feelings wrapped up in hippie-dippie nonsense at a price I could actually afford.

When I started going to Dodgers games, it had been a few years since I'd been to a ball game.  I was responsible for teaching my immigrant husband all about the sport of baseball, why it mattered and how it was played.  He latched on to some of my favorite elements, the camaraderie found between neighbors, the bitter sweet of the overpriced beer, and the thrill of shouting at the great plays and terrible calls.  Dodgers games became part of our Summer tour for visitors, and I watched him teach his little sister about the game a few years later.

Last Friday I went to my first baseball game in 2 years.  I'd watched half of a Crabs game two summers ago, and it had been years before that.  But We got great seats at Oracle park and watched the Cubbies play the Giants in the chill of a San Francisco summer night.  I felt alive.  It felt like it was for me.  After the first few innings I barely paid any attention to Chris, because he didn't seem to care enough about the game and one thing I know from being a sports fan is that you have to care.  It's bad luck not to.  It felt good, like a homecoming.  The city has changed a lot, and I have spent a lot of very different times there under very different circumstances over the years, but it felt like I was where I was supposed to be.  And that's a good feeling.

I guess, in a way, that is my point.  Sometimes that's the way a good baseball game makes you feel.  It makes you feel like you're at home.  I don't get that 'home' feeling a lot, so I treasure it when it floats to the surface.

Things I would Post if I had a Finsta

•  I have decided to start making two breakfasts every morning.  It's more work, but it's worth it.  I've realized I no longer really know how to feed myself, just make elaborate feel-better meals and eat the leftovers from what I made my kid.  And I guess it's time to start feeding myself again.
  
• My kid is low key spoiled.  Every morning I get up early and make him a lovely balanced breakfast and leave it by his bed before I shower and get dressed for work.  It's an example of the little things I do to try to make him feel special and cared for, and it makes my morning a bit easier.  If I had more than one kid, I might not be able to do these things with the same level of care and thought, and while I am sure it would be fine, it would bum me out.  My son's father chose addiction over being his parent, so I need him to know every day that I am still here, consistently picking him.  Hopefully that at least gives him the chance of blaming his dad instead of himself.
• There will always be a part of me that wants a big house filled with lots of loud, laughing kids.  Desperately.  The other day my son ran off with some other children, and I waved the parents off to go corral the mini posse, and it gave me joy to laugh and play children of all different ages and stages.  That doesn't mean I will ever change my mind about my decision to only have one child.  It just means that somewhere, out in the multiverse, there's a different me with that life, and she is so, so happy.  But every once in a while she sits along with just one baby and thinks of what that would be like, or gets a night alone and wishes she had more opportunities for that.
• If you don't get the vaccine, or choose to ignore climate science or other generally accepted science, you should have to give up other technological advancements, too.  No more antibiotics for you, no more iPhone.  No more fancy fermented kombucha.  Go live with the Amish (who *are* getting vaccinated!) if that's how you want to live your life.
  
• My man.  Running off to appease my child at the second cry of "mommy",  he came back undaunted a minute later when he couldn't solve it on his own.  "Pacifier?  He can't see you, but what should I do?"  That's the biggest everything energy.  I know I can't do it all, but help me take it of you plate with out fucking things up for kiddo too much.  That's a real man.   That's some mother's day shit.  Leaving the fully packed pipe as he left didn't hurt.
• Several times a week I can't find my keys/cellphone/glasses/other essential item because my purse has too many tiny trucks and snacks in it.
• I have an idea for a game.  I'd call it "Kid, Dog, or Lover" and it would be people saying different things with the phrase "big boy" in it, and you have to guess if hte preson is talking to a kid, a dog, or a lover.
  

Post-2020, But Not All the Way

 How do you go through everything we went through, and not want to do everything possible to kept it at bay.

I don't know how anyone can have gone through any version of the last year and not want to do everything in ones own power to get the fuck back to normal.

The pandemic and the entire year have brought so much death and pain and struggle and torturous survival.  I watched children commit suicide, adults overdose, students drop out of school, get sick, and complete assignments between funerals.  We watched our children de-socialize, we de-socialized.  We gave up holidays, birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, graduations, and who knows what else.  Said goodbye to movies, concerts, sports....

And I don't get it.

How do you come through that *more* selfish?!?!  Less willing to work towards a world where all of that fades to black.  How on Earth is anyone saying no to a vaccine that can save lives and give us normal back.  I cannot tell what kind of human being would give up life, love, and freedom, health, the sanity of friends, family and strangers.

  Who the fuck is so selfish as to duck a shot and refuse the world that?  Risk that, leave that up to chance.

I am sorry, I don't want to be friends with those people.  If you don't get the shot stay the entire fuck away from me.

I'd Like to Speeak to the Manager of Patriarchy...

A (white, female) friend of mine recently posted something on social media about how it's strange there is such a backlash against white women "calling the manager" on BIPOC [Black & Indigenous People of Color] when most women are still unable to get fair/equal pay, benefit, medical treatment, etc...
Which naturally got me thinking about overlapping systems of oppression and the role white women play in the patriarchy. 
But before we get started you need to get on board with a basic concept that might sound radical at first; people really love to hate women.  Love it.  It's basically a national pass time.
Think about the vitriol female politicians face.  Think about popular culture, the popularity of hate-watching real housewives shows (there is no male equivalent...).  I think, sometimes, about the unpopularity Anna Gunn faced while playing Walter White's wife Skyler on Breaking Bad.  People hated her for playing a wife who was mad at her husband for making meth and ruining their lives....crazy no?  Don't believe me?  Check this out.  Women are easy to hate because they often form stand-ins for the nagging, cranky, buzz-kill, frigid, rule-enforcing, angry women we hate in our own lives.  Which is a huge part of my whole theory regarding the electability of women and why women seem so cranky, angry, frigid... but that's an entirely different conversation.

For now, take me at my word that culturally, Americans and lost of people generally find it easier to hate women (Peg Bundy, Lorena Bobbitt, Carol Baskins, Skyler White, Hilary Clinton, Ann Coulter, Kim Kardashian) than men.  Seriously, how was Al Bundy *more* likeable??

Now consider the roles of race and gender in patriarchy and white supremacy.  Sex and gender have been used throughout history to create and maintain racial divides, from the practice of raping male slaves to "break them" ("buck breaking") during slave trade, to using white female sexual virtue as an excuse to lynch black men in the Jim Crow era, the the mythology of black hyper sexuality that persists largely today.  The intersections of male power over women, sexual power, physical power, political and financial power, and power and privilege white people enjoy of over people of color.  This means that where we all stand, in terms of privilege is complicated by the many dimensions of our selves and the way others perceive us.

So taking these ideas all together why is society so mad at white women, why are white women the current embodiment of white privilege and racial oppression. Yes, of course white women enjoy white privilege, and the women calling the cops on innocent black people are heinous and weaponizing their whiteness and, honestly, female victim hood to police the spaces black people occupy.   But if we are being honest with ourselves, white women are rarely the architects of the systemic racial oppression that makes it possible for those "Karen" phone calls to have any effect.  Rich, white, cisgendered and able-bodied  men, historically are the architects of the capitalist system of white supremacist patriarchy that pits marginalized people against each other.  And that feels like a part of what's happening here.  By targeting white women as the personification of the evil of systemic racism, we are missing the point, and aiming at a lesser target.  It's shooting at the messenger without dismantling the message. 
If we really want change, we need to not only stop these women from weaponizing systemic racism but also dismantle the white supremacist patriarchy that gives these woman the power to keep BIPOC out of traditionally white spaces.

All My Friends Are Metalheads

A friend of mine got married a few weeks ago.
Not a big deal, I know, but it feels like a big deal, because we were kids together.
Not 'kids' like we were young and grew up together.  I mean, we were young when we met, but 18 or 19.  Not that young.  We were kids together in the sense that we were emotionally stunted outcasts rejecting the normal trappings of growing up together.  We were weirdos together. 
And now so many of us are getting little bits and pieces of normal, and it warms my heart.  We are having children, and successful careers, emotional growth and meaningful relationships.  We are still ourselves, but there is something so optimistic and hopefully about seeing the people who were so weird with you, who saw you when you were your most outlandish and nonconforming, and went along with you for the ride, finally find their acceptable bits of whatever version of happiness and dream life suits them.

It makes it all seem possible, without immense compromise.  Like I can do it, too, with just a bit of maturity and patience.

The people about ten years younger than me are going through this strange phase, where everyone is getting married and having babies as they begin to exit their late twenties, and I really never experienced that.  I mean, there were a lot of weddings, I suppose in the years that bookended my thirtieth birthday, but nothing on the scale I am watching others experience.  I am sure part of it is grad school, but I also feel like the misfits I clung to and came up with needed a bit more time to settle down.  And now that they are doing it, it is coming in such interesting and exciting packages.

I'll be frank and say there are not many things that inspire optimism in my these days, especially in the realm of romance and love.  But this does.  This makes me feel like doodling hearts on note paper, makes me feel like there's still time for anyone willing to make an honest go of it.

Even me, maybe.

Five Month Post-Break-Up

I am a good person.
I am worthy of love
I am a good person
I am worth of joy.
I am stronger than I remember and I am going to be okay.

I write the words over and over, trying to inoculate myself against pain, doubt, sorrow, weakness, and suffering that keeps washing up against my feet, chilling me and dragging me down...

I am worthy of love
I am worthy of good love
I want love, and I see myself as worthy...
maybe not all the time,
but often enough
to know
The tears on my cheeks and my desk and smeared across the backs of my hands will dry.
Because I deserve my fair measure of joy.
Not more than my share, just enough.  Just enough to love the sunrise again, and delight in the little things again.

Just enough to feel the warm waves of hope at my feet again.
Instead of these cold waves of loneliness, doubt, and hopelessness.

When Doves Cry...I guess.

Mourning Doves always remind me of my grandmother.  My paternal grandmother, my dad’s mother, did not really like people much.  She preferred animals and kept a variety of them in large quantities in her home all of the time I knew her.  On the balcony off her bedroom (which was later converted to a room for her literal hundreds of mice) was a cage of mourning doves, and the sound of them calling always makes me think of her, makes me feel like I might be six years old and in awe of everything again.  I feel light shining through dirty glass windows, I feel warm and that magical nothing-can-be-that-wrong feeling you only have when you are very young and innocent. 

It took me a long time to realize that they are mourning doves, not morning doves, and I actually like that so much better.  

Sitting now, in my father's house, as he and I both age and with my grandmother long gone, I listen for the sound of my little boy, listen for him stirring from his afternoon nap.  I hear the doves calling in through the windows, and it strikes me suddenly, that they sound just like my little boy when he first wakes up, when he's entertaining himself and speaking garbled half words to himself.  He sounds like summer light shining through glass, like the magical innocence of youth and possibility.

He sounds like love.

Solace in the Forest.

There are times when life, and the problems that come with it, feel too big.  Much too big.  Too big to manage.
It is comforting, though, that in these times, the scale of nature can be so reassuring. When life is too big, the ocean is always bigger.  A proper forest filled with redwoods growing over their fallen brethren is bigger.  The life outside my head is bigger.

That has been a huge part of the solace I've found in running away to the North Coast in the last few weeks; immersing myself in nature is a balm to my tattered soul, letting me feel healed, even for a moment.  Letting the scope of my view expand so far beyond my own troubles that they seem manageable.  Letting my eyes rest on unreachable horizons, wander unknowable labyrinths of ferns and wildflowers.  Letting the cool air blow through my dark head, refreshing my thoughts, even if only for a moment.

In dark, heavy times, nature is salve.  It can feel like the only salve.

For the Fisrt Time in Forever...

It took me a while to put my finger on it, to actual find the words to describe the feeling of meeting someone new.  There's an enthusiasm and optimism that can be difficult to place, but I think what it comes down to is hope.
When you meet someone new, and there is some kind of connection, there is the flash of hope that this might be one of those rare gemstones of a person who might see you, who might understand you.  And that is thrilling.

I feel like most of life is spent walking around partitioned; you have a work self and a family, maybe different versions of your self you share with different friend groups.  But there are those special folks who see the whole person,the light and the dark, the silly and the serious, and can make one truly feel seen.  Like, Seen, with a capital S.

And I believe that is one of the goals of life, one of the touchstones of a life well lived.  I think we are all wandering around hoping to find someone who looks at us and says, "Yes, that is incongruent and confusing, but cool.  Show me more."  I read somewhere once that the point of falling in love and sharing your life with someone was to have someone to bear witness to your life, so that you could have that one shred of evidence that life was not being lived completely alone.  Actually, it was in a  movie and I'm trying to sound smart, but the point remains.  That rings true like a thousand bulky church bells in my heart, and I don't think it's just romantic love that can give us that sense of being seen, of existing in a world with understanding rather than in the cold, indifferent vacuum of casual acquaintances and lost friends.  We all want to be seen, have witness borne, have our trivial triumphs and minor disasters dissected by someone willing to take our side, see it from our perspective.

And that's the optimistic euphoria that bubbles up when you first meet someone and wonder, holy shit, is this someone who might actually be interested in my mundane existence?

It's The End of the World....Again

Not much more than 5 years after my divorce from my secret husband, whom I loved very much but was also a narcissist who more or less tried to separate me from my family and sense of self to fully engulf me in his world, I am at another cross roads.
and not the drinking-game movie with Britney Spears

My boyfriend...of almost five years, with whom I have an amazing child, is leaving me.  Someday.
Until then he is drinking again, after struggling to get sober 4 months ago, hurling insults at me, and generally trying to prove how much better he is than me by absolving himself of responsibility.

and the usual thoughts creep in.

What is wrong with me that this is happening again?!

Today, at work, while trying desperately to compartmentalize so that I could lecture a bunch of twenty-somethings about product safety, I thought of Friends, and Ross Geller.  Three divorces.

I don't know it I am grateful to not have to claim another divorce, or frustrated that the words I have to describe my situations are so disappointing.
My boyfriend is breaking up with me.  My son's father is moving out.  My baby daddy is over it?  I'm going through a split up?
I don't know.  It doesn't feel like any of those appropriate phrases explain it properly.  They guy I was planning a future with, after my last future blew up, is yelling insults at me.  The thing I was working on, working towards for the last couple of years is garbage.  Break-up doesn't quite cover it.

But to be fair, rarely do the names of things truly fit the size and scope of the situation.  Realistically, words can't be expected to capture the nuance and the gravity of massive life events.

I try to comfort myself by reminding myself that disentangling from my ex-husband seemed impossible, and now he's not a part of my life in any real way.  I know this process will be so painful and complicated, and I know I will survive.  But it is so much more complicated and painful now.  Because of my amazing child.  If anything, I hoped I could save him from some of the trauma I endured as a child, and now I know he will have a much more complicated, painful life.  I am so ashamed, frustrated, and worried.
I just don't know what to do next.