After being mostly offline and out of it with illness since early September (and on bedrest with pneumonia since the 30th), I reach from beneath the warmth of blankets with a message of gratitude. I am so very thankful to be getting better, inheriting a bedtable from which to work, respecting my body’s mandate to reject grind culture, life, and the opportunity to resume work on unfinished writing and creative projects. TaDaCo, our little family, is the recipient of all of my love and care, but also the fuel which sustains me. My gratitude for the Da and the Co, in our wild and motley crew? Immeasurable. In all of the places I’ve lived or experienced through travel, an element of nature made me feel at home. Asheville, NC, has been a longtime special friend. Together we made many special memories over the years with the help of some amazing humans (and canines too!) My sweet family has heard all about my prior adventures in Asheville, and told my TaDaCo tribe that it would be an honor to one day show them the magic of that place. Now my heart breaks over the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene, and the many people who are now dealing with the loss of loved ones and homes, and amid their grief must figure out next steps for survival. Help them, if you can, by buying CARDINALS AT THE WINDOW ($10 on Bandcamp): a compilation of 136 songs by various artists including R.E.M., Indigo DeSouza, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Yasmin Williams, Sharon Van Etten, MJ Lenderman, Mary Lattimore, Sylvan Esso, Angel Olsen, Feist, the War on Drugs, and obviously more.
I wonder how many writers, authors, freelancers, artists, etc. face eviction from their apartments or foreclosure on their homes; forego food, heat, and other life essentials; develop mental or physical illness from financial strain and resultant life turbulence; lose relationships to gigs, side hustles, second jobs taken to patch together ends; or give up and take their own lives once they realize the shambolic nature of it all. It being the innerworkings of institutions which have failed to evolve to include realities outside of their own (white, financially advantaged). Their failure to shift procedures and processes to accommodate all people they are working with ensures that for people traditionally disenfranchised from these spaces rare, cherished, long-sought blessings arrive wearing dresses stitched through with barbed wire. Hardship, thus, accompanies opportunity. Even the scrappiest among us -- we, the Contortionists in the Circus of the Colonizer -- eventually break.
A back, a brain, a dream, a soul? Albatross cares not. A memoir in poems and images about the universe delivering the love of my life to me during the pandemic, falling in love, and sensing an unfamiliar warmth. From cities separated by hundreds of miles, we packed our respective possessions; she assumed the more difficult task of finding affordable housing for our pending cohabitation. We did not yet have a house, but we a home we certainly did -- within each other. And this reality proved to be divinely-timed, as it coincided with estrangement from my family of origin, beings who did not meet my love, bid me salute, or send so much as a text message of email of well-wishes. Though I did not expect better from them, I had hoped to avoid feeling gutted. But I had been seriously wounded. A/typical Lesbian Love Story: Surviving a Pandemic + Middle-Child Shit is what I did with the entrails.
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Provincetown, Mass. (June 2021) | Photo credit: Tamryn Spruill.
A pretty label-averse person, I found myself today pondering the (lack of) evolution in the English language when it comes to labels and identifiers. Who or what gets labeled, and why? What is deemed worthy of naming -- remembering, writing and recording into history -- and what is not? More importantly, who gets to decide? Historically, it has been men. And one look at who gets a moniker indicating familial bond in the English language illustrates a wholly heteronormative, patriarchal view: father, mother, sister, brother; aunt, uncle; niece, nephew; grandmother, grandfather; mother-in-law, father-in-law; and sister-in-law, brother-in-law. So, what do you call the mother of your soul mate/partner while not bound to your partner by law? If my partner and I get married, her mother would become my mother-in-law. But what is she to me now? A word does not exist in the English language for this relationship (and so many others). Our society’s struggle with acceptance and inclusion in some ways is caused by (or at least upheld by) the limits of language. Linguistically, we have chosen not to recognize some relationships simply by refusing to, first, acknowledge their existence and, second, to name them. Homosexual relationships have been criminalized or legally delegitimized worldwide. So, if same-sex couples must continue their struggle for recognition and persistently resist attacks meant to erase them, it makes logical (though tragically unacceptable) sense that language would not evolve to include the couples’ respective family members. And heterosexual couples living outside of wedlock face a sliver of this issue; only after saying "I do" does a person's partner's family members take on named significance. My partner's mother is more to me than "the mother of my partner." She is special and that's why I've decided to call her by a tender nickname she has been called by some of the special people in her life: Susu, who sends us mail. This afternoon I reached an arm outside the door and cool rain trickled over my hand. As with all the rainy days, our black, metal mailbox did not protect our parcels from dampness. But left for us today were not the sales papers, letters for prior tenants, papers of personal business and such that usually stuff our box. Inside, a small, cream-colored envelope -- its corners damp with rain. It was addressed to my partner, from my Susu. My partner had not been expecting anything and and had no idea what it could be, so she placed the envelope on the table and opened it carefully. Inside, this radiance on an otherwise dreary, spring day: Three pins of "pride" and one, to be shared, declaring, "home is for everyone."
Three small pins, and now "pride" accompanies crybear on my canvas messenger bag, and pride enlivens the shade of my partner's yellow desk lamp. I'll be adding a magnet to the "home is for everyone" pin and we'll place it on our busy fridge door -- perhaps next to Julia Child teaching Fred Rogers how to cook or Maya Angelou, Malala Yousafzai, Frida Kahlo or any of the other "Little Feminists" sitting spiffy in magnetized cartoon incarnation. And for the rest of my days I'll remember walking into the living room after seeing the pins. There to do yoga with my partner, I dissolved into tears. Just the staggering beauty of not only being seen and accepted, but cherished. Plus, a lingering, dull ache from feeling this for the very first time. |