End Game

Disconnection is how we’re here and it’s how we will stay here. Division is the end game.

Remember when we all took those fun online quizzes and shared them with it friends who shared them with their friends? And then we learned that it was just a form of data mining, so we could be sorted into houses by bots who could target us with the information that would keep us siloed with our “online tribe”, disconnected from real humans in our actual communities who might not share our views? People who might look at things differently, forcing us to think more critically about our deeply held beliefs?

I just watched a nation fall to intense disinformation campaigns waged by a dude looking to buy a country and some external players looking to destabilize it for their own goals. I’m rapidly losing my faith in social media over all.

Get on Threads! Join Bluesky! Find your tribe! Connect!

(Isolate. Disconnect from people. Get into a new rabbit hole. Don’t challenge your thoughts, ideas and beliefs. Read only what we put in front of you.)

Does the human brain require tribalism? Or are energetic, committed dangerous folk exploiting the loopholes created by the slow adaptation of our brains to this onslaught of information? 

Remember - over long time, we are a radar blip. Hell we might not even register on the screen we’ve been here so little time. Our bodies and our brains have not learned to manage all this new stuff, like sugar and mayonnaise and the internet. But our brain, that little neurotransmitter addict living in our skull, is having a blast out here…so many things to indulge in, so many things to worry about, so much so much so much.

I ain’t saying. I’m just saying. Push back on your own brain. Read books with pages. Talk to people in the store. Make eye contact. Tell dumb jokes. CONNECT. Not here. Not on the platform du jour. IRL, people, IRL. 

I know it’s hard, I struggle with it myself. I’ve been on more Facebook diets than I can count, and I always get pulled back in. But before we rear an entire generation of people who do not remember the time before, I urge us all to shut it all off. 

The desire for and drive to isolate is very strong, especially now.

Resist. Connect with live people. Please.

Well. This Has Been a Week.

Just one short week ago democracy had a watershed moment. The repercussions will be with us for a very long time. The world is indeed a changed place, although the nature of that change has yet to be fully revealed.

If you have recently begun to question your voting choice, please know that you are not alone. Millions share your concern.

Please know that I forgive you. I realize that my forgiveness isn't necessary or asked for, but I forgive you anyway. It's really more important that you forgive yourself, which may be hard, but may begin with the knowledge that you are no alone.

I truly believe that you were the victim of a massive and extremely well-executed decades long disinformation campaign waged most recently to great effect on social media and through other platforms, including at least one broadcast news channel on television.

I can say this because I was once you. I once succumbed to lies cleverly dressed as truth, and I was primed to believe them by a lifetime of forced adherence (both external and interal) to high-control systems, both religious and not. It is only sheer luck that placed me in the skeptic class at exactly the right moment to spare me the continued plunge down the rabbit hole. And my spouse was not any better. We watched that broadcast news channel named for a sly mammal. We listened to Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. I believed I was on a morally and politically right path. I believed I was not a racist, sexist, misogynist human, and I believed I was not a fool.

I was, however, all of those things and likely more.

I emerged to realize that I was standing on stolen land (my ancestors were here beginning in 1620, and waged a campaign of dominance and terror against the people who had lived on this land for thousands of years), holding as my guide a 2,000 year old book written by humans, and translated over generations to meet the contemporary needs of the writers. I had been sufficiently bludgeoned with said book to keep me asking few questions, and keep me in a sort of line...but the book and it's followers never answered (reasonably anyway) the questions posed by it's own inconsistencies and dichotomies.

Then I got some help and some forgiveness, and the fog cleared, and I can now look in the mirror with a measure of peace.

Hopefully democracy will live to emerge, as she so often does, battered and scarred and wiser for the battle, but still living.

If not, then we take what comes, as it comes, and try to bring to light the deeper truths that got us to a new world order built on the backs of the people for the benefit of the very few.

More, as they say, will be revealed.

Love and peace, my friends.

Wounds

To say that I have avoided this moment for over a year would be an understatement. I do not enjoy this part of Halloween. Painting wounds and gore makes me extremely uncomfortable, no matter how unrealistic. 

I believe I’ve got a good reason.

My mother was “a cutter” in the vernacular of the day. I don’t know what the term is now. For a while it was self abuse. She would use various tools to cut into the skin of her arms, thighs, abdomen and breasts. 

I’m not telling tales out of school - this is information that she willingly (at times almost bragging) shared with people who asked about her scars (including my very small children - without my consent or knowledge - for which I harbor a grudge that cannot be resolved).

I don’t get what you all see in gore, and I think it’s because I saw it myself, regularly, over a half a decade. I think I was around 15 the first time she cut that I knew of it. I do not think it was the first time. 

We argued over my getting a ride to driver’s ed with the mom of another student. My mother insisted that we didn’t “know” these people, an I insisted that it was a MOM driving her KID to driver’s ed, a mom with enough resources to have her child enrolled in a private girl’s school in Springfield, and likely kidnapping an additional teenager from a socially disadvantaged situation wouldn’t be high on her list of priorities. 

There was a lot of screaming. Me insisting my father had paid for the class and I was going if I had to walk, and her insisting I was not getting in the car with “a stranger”. 

I won when Debbie’s mom pulled up in a beat down brown Rabbit, and I climbed in the back. My mother threw her dinner plate at me as I exited. I heard it hit the door. I think Debbie drove, and I was so jealous. I was only allowed to drive with my father in his huge work vehicles. 

The Boston and Maine railroad would not have approved.

When I returned home it was extremely quiet in the apartment. Extremely, eerily quiet.

I found my mother in the little powder room, blood in Dixie cups in a row on the sink, a shard of broken china nearby. My mother stirred when I shook her. I thought she was dead, she was so pale. There was so much blood - in the row of tiny cups, on the wall, the floor, the toilet, all over her. A string of horizontal slashes went up her forearm.

Her eyes fluttered and she slurred “Lissa. Look what you made me do. Why do you make me do things like this? You need to clean it up.”

I do not remember crying or responding. I don’t remember how I got her wrapped up and into bed - I was about 95# and she was closer to 200#. I do not remember cleaning up.

I do remember that on the morning she asked me how many cups there were, and where I had put the plate shard.

Later the weapon of choice shifted to single edge razors, and the area expanded from the arms onto anyplace she could reach. Later I would learn not to clean up after her. I would be asked not to help her. I would eventually learn to call her shrink and rat her out and let him “handle it”. This often involved midnight taxi rides to the ER, with me loading her into the cab and him paying the bill. I did have to help with dressing changes at times, and I almost always cleaned up because I just couldn’t let it sit there.

He, the shrink, said it was not my responsibility. But I never got over part where I believed it was my fault. I still believe it, deep down. She would remind me that I had “started it” that night I went to driver’s ed. 

As I painted these scratches a voice deep in my memory slurred “Lissa. Why do you make me do these things?” Well, one and done my friends. One. And. Done.  

So face painters of the world, and the Connecticut River valley in particular, enjoy your gore. I’ll be over here painting cute ghosts and unicorns in witch hats, grinning candy corn, and a skull or two. 

Recently Discovered

 I just found this, written when I was early in (undiagnosed, because they said I was "too young") peri-menopause, life was a cascading cluster of craziness, and I often felt very out of control. I typed it up and am sharing it now, almost 40 years after the original event and 20 after the second event recounted in this missive. 

Enjoy!

When I was a very young mother (18), my grandmother, who I am certain was convinced that I was inadequate as a mother would appear at my door with food products in unusually large quantities.

She was a member of a local food program that served the elderly, gifting its members with bulk quantities of common standard American grocery items: a #10 can of peanut butter, for example. At the end of the program day, large quantities of food remained unclaimed, as local seniors struggled to get their heads around uses for such large amounts of food. At this point, Gram would step forward and say “My granddaughter can use that.” 

Maybe she thought I had some skills after all.

The following morning she would appear on my doorstep with things like 5 pound boxes of elbow macaroni, or giant uncut logs of American cheese food, or - my favorite - the #10 can of grape juice concentrate. Often included in these deliveries would be a large box of powdered milk, clearly labeled “USDA FOOD PROGRAM” on the side. The boxes stood nearly 18” high. 

I was skeptical about some of these food gifts. A #10 can of peanut butter for example…that is a lot of sandwiches. I made cookies, I made more sandwiches, it was the can that had no end. This was long before I knew the value of peanut butter in, say, an African stew or Asian sauce. But I did my best to use what was given to me. A penny saved is a penny earned. Waste not, want not. And so forth.

I found uses for the pasta and cheese - endless mac and cheese, but it freezes in a pinch. I even managed to make enough grape jelly (from concentrate!) to outlast the peanut butter. 

But the milk. The milk posed a problem for me. I am fundamentally opposed to “just add water” food. I let the grape juice slide, this was the era of juice from concentrate. I am also opposed to foods that refuse to do what the label says they will do - that is to say, dissolve in water. 

I tried everything. 

Shaking, whisking, cold water, hot water, warm water. I tried starting with a low water-to-milk ratio to make a paste that I could then thin into something resembling milk. In the end I had, every single time, I had thin milky water topped with curd-like clumps of undissolved bits that were mostly fine in a recipe, but wholly unacceptable when poured over my toddler’s morning cereal. 

Once, in a final attempt to make the milk obey it’s own directive, I placed the requisite amounts of powder and water into my blender. This was long ago, when my blender was a department store model. Nothing powerful, just a 1980’s household blender. I put the cap on, turned the knob to the highest number, and hit “blend”.

Within seconds my counter was awash in a slippery mess, a raging tidal wave of foam, perched delicately atop a thin layer of milky water. 

It was everywhere. I grabbed containers of every size and shape, and with my hands I scooped the offending slurry into what would hold it. A 5-quart stock pot seemed a good choice. 

Unwilling to accept defeat, I carefully cleaned the counter and pondered with to do with the products of my endeavor. Taking a funnel I poured most of the liquid product into the one-quart glass bottle my grandmother had generously provided for such purpose. I held back that foam with my hand.

The foam. So much foam. Slimy, dense…there was no choice. Down the drain it went. 

Time passes, years go slowly (or quickly) by, and hopefully we live and learn.

Or maybe we do not.

Around 2008, with no kids at home to speak of, I had returned to powdered milk as a stand-by. Not the cheap kind in the 18” tall USDA box, oh no. Bob’s Red Mill Organic Nonfat Milk Powder is what you would find in my cupboard. Neither of us drank fluid milk. so it made no sense to have it on hand. A container in the cupboard of powder, however, can be a lovely stand-in. 

Some things never change, and powdered milk is one of those things. Using a recycled glass bottle obtained from a local dairy, I combined 1/2 cup of powder and 3.5 cups of water, per package instructions, and shock them up. I shook and I shook and I shook, to no avail. There, perched atop the thin, watery, whitish liquid sat those unhappy curds in my “whey”.

Usually I can let things like this go. It isn’t, after all, “real” milk, right? It is a facsimile. I was not going to drink it. I may put some over salt pork, onion and clams in a stock pot. I may pour some over chicken and mushrooms in a crock pot. I may make my favorite rhubarb tapioca. The lumps should, I told myself, should not matter.

Except on this day, for some reason, they did. When everything feels chaotic and dramatic, the soft flow of smooth, un-lumpy milk is soothing. No lumps means something has gone right, for a change. 

Have I mentioned that I am a slow learner?

Frustrated by the lumps, I poured the mixture into the smaller of my two Vita-mix (1380 watts!) containers. I told myself that a quick whiz on low would solve the problem. “Just variable speed 1 or 2.” I told to myself.

The next thing you know I am at variable speed 9, holding the lid firmly on with one hand, insisting in my head that this time, just this one time, there will be NO LUMPS in my stupid powdered milk. “So what” I thought “if there’s a little foam?”

Removing the container from the base of the Vita-mix, hand still clamped on the lid, I noted that the foam had completely filled the container, bottom to top, and was oozing a bit from the lid.

Undeterred, right there on my counter top I brazenly removed the lid. 

And I watched, feeling a bit stunned by the sheer quantity of cascading foam and thin milk pouring across my counter, precisely as it had 20 years earlier. 

I grabbed towels. I grabbed the other Vita-mix jug and the one quart glass milk jug and a funnel and quickly distributed the mess as evenly as possible between them. 

As I cleaned up my mess I thought a lot about irony and the timing of this minor kitchen disaster. This was, indeed, a chaotic season of my life. Hot flashes, brain fog, kids gone…and we were back to cascades of foamy powdered milk.

I wondered as I scooped the slimy mess remaining on the counter into any available container if I were, indeed, capable of learning.

The fluid milk quickly sank to the bottom of each vessel, just as it had in 1987, leaving behind towers of useless foam. Or maybe not useless. Maybe THIS time I would find a use for the foam.

I glanced around the kitchen and spied my coffee maker, half empty pot in place, still warm from breakfast. 

I grabbed mugs, very one I could find, and did the only thing I could think of.

I made lattes. No matter that I was the only person home to drink them, I made them anyway. 

A row of coffee cups, each with a perfectly delightful, cinnamon-dusted tower of foam on top.

I lifted the first one to my lips and drank. 

Yes, I can learn. It may take a while, a really long while, and it may be a damned ugly process, but in the end, when life hands you foam? 

Make lattes.

Thinking Trad Wife? Things to Consider

Purely anecdotal thoughts from someone who's now a grandmother, who lived the life you are aspiring to.

First this - I believed in the family structure practiced by my ancestors, with god at the head, the husband over the wife, the wife under the husband and the kids under that. Umbrella of authority, as it were. It sounds pretty simple and logical right? I mean, in all areas of life, or most anyway, we seem to have a hierarchy of power. Someone is at the top. Someone is in the middle. Someone does the dishes. And so on.

I did not interrogate it. It simply was the space I inhabited. My mother mostly stayed home, my father worked. Most of my friends mothers stayed home as well, or had part time work scheduled around their kids, who generally took center stage. The home was where children were reared. If my own home was not particularly effective, that was a failing of my mother's mental status, and bore no reflection on the system as a whole. It must work, and we had just stepped away and needed to get back to it.

Then I became a single mother of two. Because life happens. I had no job skills, and no prospects, and no choice but to find a way to feed my kids. Their father, who previously had agreed with this lifestyle in which I remained under his authority, suddenly decided that I was a mercenary bitch bent on his destruction, and refused to pay support. 

I went to college. I got a boyfriend who had more stability and commitment in his little toe than my ex had in his whole body. 

I got a degree (and became an RN), and "earned" myself a second MRS. I went to work, but part time with a schedule fit around my kids. I got written up for missing a pop-up meeting to do my daughter's hair before a school event (which I missed, because I was at work). Inhumane work, no work life balance.

Home seemed so far away. I missed long mornings with coffee and dishes and kids, no endless stress, no mountain of work at home and work at work, and juggling schedules. It never occurred to me to expect my partner to do anything to assist with the home. If he did something I took it as a romantic gesture. He did laundry, and occasionally on a Sunday morning he would get really weird about the vacuum and work until there was not a shred of pet hair in any crevice anywhere in the house - I just stayed out of the way, and said thank you a lot, hoping he would do that more often (he did not). It never occurred to me to demand more humane work conditions.

And I had started having panic attacks that I perceived as convictions of the wrongness of my choice to leave my kids in the hands of others. What was I doing, going to work every day when we could make it work with one income...surrendering my kids to who knows what, unable to protect them from the big bad world while I toiled away at a job for some nameless, heartless corporate entity. Big giant panic attacks that made me stop on the way to work and vomit out the side of my car, shaking and pale and pasty. And still, I did not ask my partner to take on a larger load. It did not occur to me. His job was to work and bring home the bigger bacon. Mine was to work and do everything else, bedsheets, toilets, dishes, meals, schedules, shopping, garden. I am not saying that he did not "help". He did. But it was just that - occasional help, not expected contribution. And I certainly still had no expectation the the system should change.

After much soul searching (and some digging into the utterly lacking mental health benefits of our insurance), I returned home. My kids left private school and we began homeschooling. There are many memories of that time that I hold tender reminiscence of. In reality, it was hard. Unpaid, unappreciated, but I was doing The Most Important Thing - I was raising my kids. And the panic attacks subsided some, so I must be doing the right thing, right? I was less stressed. I could focus fully on one thing and not feel endlessly divided between many, doing all of the things, usually badly. 

I sewed a little for money on the side. I baby sat. I gardened and canned and gleaned to keep food costs low. I bargain shopped. We did not have real vacations. But everyone was fed and clean, and the house was mass chaos but full of furry things and dirty feet, and later yarn and chicken poop. I am sure - and I know because you only need to read this blog to discover - that I spun that into a delightful romantic fairy tale. I tried some entrepreneurial ventures, but lacked the education or internal resources to push to real success in any. I do know why, now. I did not appreciate why then.

This is where the catch begins to reveal itself.

Those fun little side gigs. odd jobs, and all that unpaid labor, both physical and emotional? Unless you are lucky, or have previous education or a wide base of resources and connections on which to draw, they don't fill your retirement account, or give you any sort of stability or long-term safety or control. 

You are trading immediate comfort, sacrificing your future, for an illusion. You may believe your kids will rise up and call you blessed. Maybe they will. You may believe that your chosen life partner is committed to you deeply in a "whats mine is yours for life no matter what" sort of way, and maybe he will. You certainly do have it much much easier than your peers, who struggle to keep up with school hours and play dates and work obligations and family obligations and housework. You have all that....you just never get paid, never build any personal wealth or personal power, and that matters. A lot.

So let's fast forward a bit, shall we, from the sunny vision of the "Trad Wife", dutifully grateful (and I was!) for her loving spouse who makes it all possible, for her darling babies growing at her knee - she's made the "hard choices", she sacrificed her goals and dreams and visions. It has been, she is deeply aware and always humbly reminds herself, a privilege to have this opportunity to sacrifice herself for the greater good. And now, why she must be beloved? Cherished? Etc?

Maybe. Or maybe not.

Maybe little Sleeping Beauty wakes up to realize she has no financial security heading into retirement, and if her husband drops dead tomorrow she better hope he had a plan. She better hope she can find a job when the kids go off into the world. She better hope that her thin grasp on co-opted patriarchal power doesn't slip. She better hope those panic attacks don't return with firey vengeance because she certainly does not have the financial resources to pay for therapy. 

Here's what I did:

I made cheese, baked bread, gardened, schooled kids, sold eggs. I sewed and knitted and crocheted and wove. It made for pretty pictures and non-reimbursed content, just like this post. I asked nothing of that dog eat dog 'man's world' beyond the chance to not be starved to death at the end of my usefulness. 

Which I have begun to reach. 

I have no higher education, no savings, no retirement, and am mostly unemployable. You would not believe the numbers of resumes and applications I have filled out in the last six years. I could paper a house, inside and out. I can't get hired. No idea why. I mean, really? So I push onward. 

I have a couple of side gigs - quilting and face painting - but they are gigs, not consistent income that will feed me if Mr. W drops dead tomorrow. I better hope he had a plan. Because mine? Turns out it was built on a bunch of bullshit spun up from a big pile of lies and misrepresentations, both sociocultural and religious. 

So stay home if you want, but understand fully and clearly the choices you are making. I know it's hard. I know you've been reared to believe that those strident, angry first and second wave feminists just didn't understand and need to stop being so....loud. I thought the same. I thought my gift to the universe was quietly rearing my kids and caring for my home and living the lifestyle of white patriarchal privilege, which simultaneously helped me managed CPTSD with no therapy or mental health support. I guess I saved a lot of money that way. Hell of a cost though. 

I was taking the easy way out. It was easier to go home and shut my mouth than to buck a system that dumps the majority of the load on women. 

I know it's hard. I mean I KNOW it's hard. 

But hard isn't wrong. It's just hard. You hand over the money, you hand over the power. You give up your earning potential, you are handing over your place at the table, your voice, your input. You are surrendering all of that to an authority which may be benevolent... or may be malevolent. Maybe you will get lucky. Most do not.

You need to understand completely and fully the choice you are making. It will be easier now, for absolute certain. Much. 

Later? Well. The odds are not in your favor. 

Wishes

 I wish I had always been who I am instead of who I tried to be.

I wish I had a mini van because the girls would fit better than they do in a car.

I wish the supreme court was made up of progressive women in a rainbow of skin tones.

I wish that when my daughter told me I was a feminist I’d realized she was right.

Mostly I wish I could express boundaries in a healthy manner rather than tolerating bullshit and trying to Be Nice and Please People before going all duck and run when I max out on being kicked around.

Oh. And I wish to leave New England again, but I haven’t decided where for just yet.

Meantime?

Dogs. 

I think this is what the kiddies call a cluster f&^k.

I remember the first time I heard that phrase. B came home from college with a t-shirt he adored but had gotten a grease stain on - dead center, very obvious. For a fastidious boy, unacceptable. It had a logo and the words 'Greco Roman Cluster Fuck' on it. The phrase appealed to me. I kept it.

The other day my indigestion (you'd have to go way back here to get that reference...) asked if it was ok if he outed me as agnostic. I told him it was fine. Although I am not advertising, and I am not aggressively promoting anti-religion I have come to a solid and comfortable place of anti-religion in my personal life. 

I think I have always been in a state of reasonable unbelief. But at the same time guilt ridden and struggling to be "faithful" to a 2,000 year old book written by a bunch of white guys. I'm over it. 

The beginning of the end was subtle. The mother died, so the need for a structured system of belief to make sense of the anguish of life diminished. No need for a rigid structure to make sense of the world around me that felt like endlessly slipping sand. One of the last things my father and I discussed more deeply was his failure to read the christian bible through at some point in his life. By that point I was on round 2 I think, beginning in Genesis and going through to Revelation. He was impressed with that accomplishment. At that point I was still forcing belief but it was getting harder.

Two things struck home and ended the charade for good. First, Marcus Borg. Non-literal biblical interpretation makes the most - the ONLY sense. Allegory, metaphor, moral lessons. Jesus speaks endlessly in metaphor. The biblical stories work if they are moral lessons, not literal fact. Not "seven days or bust, the earth is only 6,000 years old, science isn't real" nonsense. And if it isn't literal, and there's other texts that easily pre-date it, then you're really up against it to prove that your one book is the only right one. And you are really seriously arrogant. Second, the moment when I bought a book that explained how to explain away all the inconsistencies in the book. If you need a book to explain all the things that don't make sense...if you need apologetics to explain away everything sensical, rational, logical, touchable, REAL then there has to be a problem with the system. Possibly with the foundation. Probably white guys.

Maybe three things. Hospice, though purely anecdotal. I watched a lot of people die. The most tormented were usually the most faithful. OK, four things. Feminism. Although I have denied, struggled against, resisted with siren call of feminism I simply cannot get away from "...the radical notion" that, as Marie Shear said, "...women are people". Any tome that tries to tell me otherwise is going to have an uphill battle, because I am damn sick a tired of believing that I am chattel or a second class citizen, obliged to submit to a man just because he has a dick and somehow managed to twist history to his benefit.

So there you have it. 

And it feels really good to say all that out loud. But it feels really really bad to know that I should have gotten here DECADES ago. Talk about guilt. (sorry, kids....maturity is the radical notion that parents are people).

So here's my cluster fuck. Gaining credibility when you've proven yourself to be an idiot is hard. Eating crow is hard. Moving forward when you can't fix what's done is hard.

I do this thing I love now. I give natural history museum tours or I fill up a minivan with native wildlife and I travel hither and yon talking about adaptations, evolution, earth history, facts. And you know what? The truth is that the science is so amazing, so incredibly and endlessly fascinating...I love it so much. I feel like - like hospice, it's a thing I was always meant to do.