Month: May 2022

Posted in Uncategorized

What is There to Say

Posted on by Queer Mama Rising

CONTENT WARNING: This post deals with the horrific events this week in Texas and Buffalo. It’s raw and does contain significant imagery that I imagine others will also find disturbing; I certainly do. Even if you are a fan of this blog, please, everyone, feel free to *not* continue to read this.

I didn’t think I’d be writing that night. I’d had a migraine, bad enough that I had to leave work before I was unable to drive. I was feeling better, if a little off from the medicine, when I happened to check the news section on Facebook after getting home from picking Lucy up. 

Fourteen kids, one teacher, at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. That number would only increase until nineteen children and two teachers were known to lay dead in a classroom. 

Last week, it was eleven people, grocery shopping, Buffalo, NY; because by a shooter who hated black people. Then four more, church parishioners in Laguna Woods, California, because by a shooter who hated Taiwanese people. Hatred or not, I cannot fathom that violent of a response.

Who could hate young kids so much? 

I have a memory of talking to Clark (on one of his good days) and Hawthorne; Clark had made this point before, I knew. He was talking about terrorism, you know, your general light dinner table discussion. He said that the enemy would never win with the large scale attacks like 9/11; America was more unified than ever on 9/12/2001, after all. No, he said, it would be small attacks; “soft targets,” he called them. Supermarkets and movie theaters, malls and sporting events. And this was back in 2011. He was saying this before Sandy Hook, before the Boston Marathon, before Charlestown and West Webster and El Paso and Las Vegas and Orlando and the rest of the mind- and heart-numbing list. Attacking innocent people here, there, who were just going about their daily lives would sow fear into the social fabric of America. Not for the first time, today those sentiments haunt me. 

I wonder if he would be surprised at how many more mass shootings there have been since he died. Or how little has been done to prevent them. Or how Americans have responded to the pandemic. Probably not, I figure; he had his health problems, but never was afflicted by optimism much.

Clark didn’t live to feel Oscar kick, or see Hawthorne discover and settle into themself, or hear Lucy’s ridiculous giggle. He missed those joys. Yet I find myself grateful that, as with my own parents, he also missed the entire Trump presidency, the pandemic, and the death of his firstborn. He didn’t have to know that pain. 

Hawthorne had been so immediately and deeply affected by the death of RBG, mere hours before their own. It broke my heart that we spent our last night together with that tension between us. Three and a half months later, I was grateful that they did not know of the attack on the Capitol; they would have been terrified. They already lived with so much fear – of violence, of death, of losing their rights. We used to laugh about their “prepper” ways, the supply of canned goods and campstoves, the tote filled with space blankets and lighters, gallons of potable and non-potable water and container of bleach, “8 drops/gal” scribbled on the white bottle. They weren’t jokes so much as a dark-humor attempt to bring levity to Hawthorne’s real, deep-seated fear that we would one day have to suddenly fend for ourselves.

It was this mentality that had Hawthorne demanding that, if we were to have a gun in the house, I needed to know how to use it. Clark had recommended a particular rifle, and that’s what Hawthorne wanted. A couple days after filling out the paperwork, we stood in the yard of the local instructor. I cried as I loaded, racked, and shot twice. I hated the cold, heavy feel in my hands, weighing on my heart. It didn’t matter that I had managed to hit the broad side of the hill that served as the target. My soul hurt worse than my shoulder as I left Hawthorne and the instructor to their apparent enjoyment of handling this weapon. I told Hawthorne on the way home that, even knowing how to use it as intended, I was far more likely to swing to hit someone with it. I didn’t think I could ever pull that trigger.

I do not understand the appeal of guns, for any reason – for hunting or sport or protection. I have seen firsthand the damage they do to the human body; I’ve staunched the blood and bandaged the wounds on the living, and closed the glassy eyes of the dead. The headlines in Uvalde, the closeness of the community where I lived for seven years in Buffalo; all the details I try to avoid haunt me. They needed DNA samples to identify some of the children. I’ve seen the wreckage bullets leave in the flesh of grown men; I can’t stop thinking about what they would do to a child. I look at my own child, and she does not understand why I am silently weeping, but pats the tears on my face anyway. My two-and-a-half year old tells me, “Mama, it’s okay, it’s okay, Mama, good Mama.” She’s far too young to understand that some things won’t ever be OK.

I don’t want to send her to school in a few years. I barely want to send her to daycare now. It’s not like I feel like she’s any safer with me, these days; I definitely thought twice about grocery shopping this week. How quickly could I get out? Where are the other exits? Maybe I should just do Instacart. Is that putting someone else in danger, someone else’s kid or parent that could be taken away? Am I willing to put my life on the line to assuage this theoretical guilt in what should be an impossible scenario? 

Is your belief in the Second Amendment, that you have the right to bear arms and fancy yourself a vital member of a “well regulated militia,” stronger than any other single person’s right to buy their fucking groceries? Sit in a goddamn classroom? If your answer is “but my freedom!” then you go take your hard-earned “IN GOD WE TRUST” freedom and just buy yourself a bigger dick at the local Amazing and wave that around instead. Bet they’ve got bullets, too. 

No disrespect to Brian Bilston, America is not a gun. It is the blood-stained money that passes over glass counters into the hands of men, men who profit in the wakes of innocents, who mumble “thoughts and prayers” like it’s their get-out-of-hell-free card. 

If admitting that I am scared means “the enemy has won,” whichever enemy that happens to be today, so be it. Just stop killing our kids, our families, our elders, our lovers. I, like so many, really believed that things would change after Sandy Hook. And instead of those twenty kids getting ready for junior prom, and those teachers getting ready to wrap up another pandemic school year, they are nearly ten years gone, and we are again in mourning. This time, the rage feels helpless. There is no unity, no banding together of what felt like the whole country the day after the towers fell. I have more faith that once again, the gun rights activists – especially now, in what I wish we could call a post-Trump era – will make sure to line the pockets of enough of those government influencers, the politicians, so that nothing changes; I am more certain of that than I am of my own relative safety while running errands anymore. 

There’s no silver lining; there’s no coming back from this. The incidents in Buffalo and Uvalde blend in my mind until they are nearly indistinguishable in the well of collective grief. This is not the world I want to raise my daughter in. If she chooses to go into battle, I want her to be old enough to make that decision logically, and be aware of the consequences; not when she’s learning what a goddamn preposition is. If she’s going to face death, I want her to have lived more than a scant few years. Instead, I’m going to send her into a brick building that may have a door left unlocked, to be protected by someone who is vastly underpaid and undervalued, and never asked for this shit. I’m not okay with this; but this is the world we live in now, where hope is school child, playing dead among the bodies, still in the line of fire. 

Posted in Beliefs and Practices

Blessed Be the Fruits

Posted on by Queer Mama Rising

“Why aren’t you crying? I mean, are you even upset? Do you understand what this means?”

This was the start of the argument Hawthorne and I had the night before they died. I had just told them that RBG had passed away, and they immediately became distraught. I was sitting on the edge of the bed where they were laying. I may have had to wake them up to tell them; I don’t remember anymore. 

I sat quietly. Yes, I was upset. Yes, I understood what it meant to lose RBG, a sitting liberal justice who had championed civil rights for everyone who was not an affluent, cishet, white man. 

I was also exhausted. It was Friday night, and I was balancing working full time, doing all the driving needed, and providing the majority of care for Lucy, who was just ten months old. I reminded Hawthorne, too, that I was not the type to get emotional right away. It would hit me later, I said. This did not satisfy my wife, who was absolutely distraught. 

“They’ll kill me,” they said. “There’s nothing to stop them now.” 

I thought back to election night 2016, how awful yet different it had been. Watching the results start to roll in, 1, 2% at a time, we had snacked and gotten slowly drunk on bourbon. It was before Lucy, before Oscar. We had recently lost Clark, Hawthorne’s father, and remarked about how in a lot of ways, we were glad that those who had gone before us weren’t here to see this. I figured my mom would have been making plans to move back to Poland; Clark, were he healthy, probably headed for Canada. It had already been ten years since we lost my dad. 

Hawthorne and I had felt a lot closer. We were standing on more equal ground; both of us working; school and family plans had yet to steal attention away from each other. We talked about how we were in the best place for this eventuality to happen; Vermont would not be taken over by Trumpers. Sold to Canada, perhaps, but that was OK. We joked that maybe we could ask them politely to annex us sooner.

We knew this was more than an election; this was a regime, with a long-range agenda and the weaponry and war chest to carry it out. Obama’s Supreme Court pick had already been stymied, and the court sat at 8. We knew Trump would cater to his base, after all, he had claimed to be Christian, and the evangelicals ate that shit up and asked for seconds. As long as he was getting the kind of attention the Republican party and lobbyists were willing to lavish on him, he’d do their bidding. That included seeding the courts with anti-choice judges, and cherry-picking the perfect “moderate” justices. 

Over the next few weeks, we heard (as many of our progressive, queer, trans, and myriad of “othered” friends did as well) that it would be okay. We were overreacting. The US government had checks and balances, Trump wouldn’t be king, after all. The courts and Congress would balance things out. 

Right. 

Now here we were, four years later. We had been through the wringer. Hawthorne had come out, changed their name, their pronouns, and their body to match and reveal their true self. It was a journey that even they weren’t sure where it would lead – though we had never dreamed it would be so abruptly interrupted. 

Hawthorne was scared of what would happen; Trump had already put Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the bench. Ginsberg’s breath had barely left her body before the Republicans turned a wild and greedy eye on the vacancy. Their strategy had worked, and their chance had come.

I knew Hawthorne was terrified, and I understood. We had so much to lose, so much that had been decided in just the past ten years that made our family possible, and safe – and even that felt tenuous. I was upset, but not scared yet. I didn’t have the energy to be scared. I was still processing the loss of life; death has affected me much differently since losing Oscar, and I couldn’t tear my thoughts away from Ginsberg herself to focus on what was so disturbing my wife. I could only take care of the baby, tidy up a little bit, and try to get Hawthorne to calm down enough to get some sleep. 

Hawthorne had put the message out on Facebook, needing to talk to someone who was similarly emotional; I watched as they stepped outside to pace the porch and smoke while I cleaned up the kitchen and took care of Lucy. I could hear their voice rise and break at times, the deeper timbre still relatively new. They spent an hour in the cool September night out there, talking to their cousin. When they came in, they demanded to know if I had even cried yet. I hadn’t.

They died before I shed a single tear for the Notorious RBG; after that, all my tears fell for them.  

In the days since the Supreme Court leak of Alito’s draft opinion, I have thought of that last night more often that I feel like I have since their death. I have been so angry; the kind of hot, pulsing anger I keep thinking I’m done with. I’ve had more memories surface this week, none of them happy. I understand that with the traumatic events that are happening in the world it’s only natural that it would stir the painful memories first. Still, I am frustrated that it feels like the best memories still lay beyond my reach. 

I cannot help but see beyond the potential fall of Roe v Wade, however. I see this as the first in a long series of dominoes that would put my humanity, the rights associated with that humanity, back in the hands of the state courts. And yes; I live in Massachusetts, have always lived in the Northeast, and have much less to fear than most. I would be safe; my family and local friends would be, too. 

I don’t want to go back to a time where we had to wonder if we were safe – if we would be considered married still, over state lines. If Hawthorne had ended up in the hospital somewhere out of state, how would they be treated? That was somewhat of a concern, even here in New England. Bigotry and hatred don’t care about state lines or laws; they just don’t man the political wheel where we have lived. 

If Roe falls, it is only a matter of time before marriage equality – as far back as Loving v. Virginia, I fear – are back up for debate. I am utterly incensed with the court’s apparent willingness to undermine the autonomy of half the country. In a country with some of the worst maternal health statistics in the developed world, they want to force more people into risking their lives in being pregnant and giving birth. 

There has been nothing in my life that has made me more pro-choice than my experiences with pregnancy and birth. I did not recognize how endangered my life was, when my blood pressure began to rise and rise. I did realize how uncomfortable and painful things could be; how my kidneys could start emitting blood and shards of calcification, how my gallbladder could fill will sludge, how my placenta could trick my body into changing insulin production. Being pregnant is a (at times hostile) takeover of one’s body and lifeforce in the creation of another, which may or may not be healthy enough, or lucky enough, to survive the ordeal. 

I have carried my two babies, not easily. Both pregnancies were celebrated, and both were difficult. One ended when my body turned on me even more, and Lucy had to be welcomed six weeks early. The other ended with an aberrant twist of the very cord that gave my baby his life. I delivered my son, already dead, at more than a week older than my daughter at her birth. 

I would never wish that on another. I would never wish pregnancy on someone who did not want it. And I would certainly never wish anyone to be forced to go through what I have. 

There is a march today, in cities all over the country. I was prepared to go, thinking of bringing my daughter, but ended up securing a babysitter since I simply do not have the energy to wrangle a toddler in the heat and press of bodies. Either way, the plans did not come to fruition; mission aborted, as it were. It’s a hard decision. There is a part of me that still wants to find a way to go – because I believe in activism, and this is a cause that calls for action. However, most of the reason I wanted to go specifically today, goes back to that night where I never cried for RBG. And while she played a role in the events leading to today, it is the memory of Hawthorne that makes me feel most like I should go. I have to remind myself (with the assistance of beautiful friends) that I do not have obligations to dead people. Not to RBG, not to Hawthorne. 

Maybe that seems cold and unfeeling. Maybe you don’t feel the same about doing things that “they would have wanted,” whoever “they” is for you. I promise you, there is a tumult of emotions every time I think about what Hawthorne “would have wanted.” That is a storm I am very familiar with, and will continue to go through. Yet I have come to a place in my life, as a person, as a mother and friend and widow and everything I am, where I am living this life for me. Not for RBG, not for Hawthorne, not even for Oscar. My life. My body. My choice. 

To everyone marching today – your reasons are your own, your journey is your own. I raise my glass (mmm coffee) to each and every one of you; know that I am with you in spirit if not in sneakers. To everyone Roe v. Wade has affected – my heart is with you today, as well. You always have a safe space with me. To everyone worried about what this will mean for them, now and in the future – I’m with you, too. 

And to anyone who wants to deny people their autonomy on the grounds of “morality,” politics, or religion; anyone who wants to roll back civil rights for folks who have had to fight for every inch of them; anyone who wants to bring back any measures of discrimination – let me make it absolutely clear that I am not with you. 

It’s a lovely May day, don’t you think?

Posted in Uncategorized

I Know How to Love Me

Posted on by Queer Mama Rising

It amazes me, the way our brains can handle two lines of thought separately, and seem to deliberately keep them that way. I’ve been very cognizant that it’s my birthday; and also, wondering why this week has felt difficult and I’ve had so much trouble focusing. 

I’ve had a hard time celebrating my birthday since Oscar was born, and after losing Hawthorne, I just don’t see the point. This year is an improvement over the past few; I’m able to say it without crying, and I haven’t spent the week leading up to it in absolute despair. This year, it’s a little closer to just another day on the calendar, and a little further from being a reminder of the ones I love most who don’t get them anymore. 

Hawthorne was the birthday celebrator. They’d wheedle me into taking time off from work to celebrate, to go do something fun, have a fancy dinner or dessert. They grew up in a family where birthdays were important and special. 

In my family, things were much more muted. We would go to a nice dinner, something would arrive with a candle, and that was pretty much it. The effort went into the kids parties: what to do, how many guests, how many conversations to watch my sugar or chocolate intake. As a parent now, I’m already exhausted by the thought of Lucy’s school-age birthday parties. I don’t blame my parents for keeping our own celebrations more subdued.

For Hawthorne’s 36th birthday, we went all the way up to Burlington with a friend to see the movie Midsommer. I felt utterly traumatized; I could hardly acknowledge the aesthetic beauty of the film, and certainly had no interest in analyzing it. I just wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I’m sure now that this is because I was 5 months pregnant at the time, and far more sensitive than usual to certain types of horror. I cried the whole way home, my fingernails digging into my arms as I tried to hold back the outright sobs. I may have been distraught but I did not want to ruin it for Hawthorne. As it turns out, it was the last year of “normal” birthdays. 

It is now my 36th year, and I find myself thinking about the film more and more. I don’t know if I’m ready to watch it again; yet scenes play over and over in my mind. In the movie, 36 is considered the midpoint of one’s life. While I don’t feel as if I’m in the throes of a mid-life crisis, there has definitely been a shift. Coming out of the season of depression I was recently so deep in, I have made a lot of changes. I’ve started to transition my diet (at home) to more plant-based and pescatarian. I’ve started running again, and as difficult as that has been, the joy of feeling the wind on my face as I plod along could not be more incentive to keep at it. I have missed running. 

I am being more proactive about my health. With hypertension that began in my twenties, and two rounds of gestational diabetes under my belt, I understand that the risk of developing heart disease and type II diabetes are very real for me. And while I believe that people can be healthy at any size, I don’t feel like I am at my optimal size or health. 

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t questioning myself to death over this. Both my parents died at 63. My father did everything “right:” he exercised, he ate extremely healthy, had something like 7% body fat. I mean, the man was 2 seconds off the time to qualify for the Senior Olympics in the 800 meter race. He was fit as a fiddle. And he got ALS. 

My mother wasn’t quite so well-behaved. She smoked as a teenager and young adult, as nearly everyone did then. She enjoyed her wine and her chocolate with less reserve than my dad wanted, and I remember his occasional admonishment, which she would wave off. And really, to be fair, her usual dessert was trail mix – which is just more evidence to the hard-ass my dad was about sweets. Trail mix had chocolate chips in it, and was automatically unhealthy to him. 

She had some health problems, but were seemingly well managed; then one day she had a hypertensive event, was diagnosed with a 10-day old heart attack and stage 3 cancer, and was gone just days later. 

It definitely feels like a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. I lost my son to an umbilical cord accident, before he could even draw breath. I’ve lost family members in their eighties or nineties. And I lost my wife, my forever person, at age 37 on a normal, sunny Saturday. 

I am not afraid of death in the abstract; we have been friends for too long. I am afraid, however, of dying young. I have so much to say, and I am terrified that my time will be up before I have a chance to do that. Or, like my father, that some disease far outside my realm of possibility will steal my ability to do that. This is a fear that Oscar left me with; I need to tell my stories, and there is no telling when something will happen and abruptly end my chance. I ache for the time and space and bandwidth and energy. All of these are in short supply with a full-time job and a two-year old, and on the days I don’t quite get around to writing, the nagging fear is there to remind me that I’m going to leave things unsaid. 

The fear that Hawthorne left me with is quite different, and is currently, finally, stretched out face-down while the changing colors of the nightlight illuminate her curls. Now that spring has arrived, the days growing longer and the weather enticing us outside more, the TV is not on nearly as much, and I’m enjoying the company of my kiddo again. To watch her learn is just incredible. You can practically see the synapses dance as they find where to put each new piece of information. I don’t want to miss a moment. 

I have started the process of spelling out my end-of-life plans and wishes – my mom never had a chance to update the basic template she used, which made things difficult for my sister and I (and the wonderful people who helped us navigate that after her death); and though Hawthorne had spoken about death and what should happen “if and when,” there was no guidebook. Of course, now that Hawthorne is gone, there is Lucy to be even more worried about should something happen to me. I don’t want to see that light dimmed by anything.

And so, plans are in motion, some already in place. Bloodwork has been collected; medications and monitoring scheduled, and daily intentional movement and stillness have both increased to try to achieve some state of balance in what feels like a very busted-up body, mind, and soul. Two knees and one ankle scream at me after every installment of Couch to 5k; my abdomen is strengthening, though I feel like I have looked pregnant going on four years now. I forget how to breathe while I’m focused on breathing; as soon as I turn my attention to my form, it generally evens out.

There is nothing pretty or exciting about this; no “most improved!” award I’m aiming for. I am consciously not following the footsteps of my father, with his strive for perfection; or my mother, who would put off getting something checked out until she had time. I’m not doing this to get skinny, or look better for other people to enjoy. I don’t give a single fuck if someone at the beach on a hot day thinks I should wear something less revealing. As Janelle Monae clapped back at one tweeting moron, “Sit down. I am not for your consumption.”

I’m doing this for me, and for my daughter. I want to feel better – body, mind, and soul. I want to do things I love – eat, write, and run. I want to be around a long time; I have a lot to teach her, and a whole hell of a lot more to say.