Cry Dance Rant Fuck Ghost
Reckoning and Crossing thresholds
Happy belated Mabon/Fall Equinox and Jewish New Year!
I’ve been unable to tend this writing space for a while now, so before I get to the writing, some notes.
This Saturday I’ll be hosting a baby-wearing event in Bellingham, WA. This a great class for any parent/caregiver or birth-worker who wants to learn more about the baby wearing. Sign up here.
I am slowly returning to doula work for both birth and postpartum clients. I have openings for clients October- December right now. I am not sure yet about 2026, but feel free to reach out. You can learn about those services here.
This past weekend I hopped on a late afternoon Friday ferry boat and by 8pm I was dancing in a dusty field next to some of my favorite humans to a band I’ve seen play many times over the past 15 years. But as soon as that ferry boat docked at Lopez Island I burst into tears. I sat in my parked car waiting to unload, feeling the boat gently rock beneath me, inhaled that salty sea air, gazed out at the rocky treed edge of the island and cried. I cried and cried and cried, and am embarrassed to say I felt ashamed of my tears; they caught me so off guard. Grief is funny like that; and it makes perfect sense to me that given this grief-illiterate culture where we don’t have regular communal grieving practices like I think we should, Grief sneaks up on us because how else is Grief gonna get us to pay attention, to give Grief its propers? So there I was, crying into a crumbled rough bathroom paper towel in my non-tinted windowed car. Crying from grief, relief, for longing like always, from exhaustion, and old tender places that a single harmless text message tripped me up. So I took a breath and just let the tears come. I was still crying when I drove off the boat and on to the island, but they were mostly all wept by the time I got to my friends’ place. There I was greeted by her neighbor, another old friend on the path who hugged me and validated my cry. And then I crossed the threshold into the house, felt the welcoming arms of my friends home where I have spent countless hours over the years, and entered a new space where Grief didn’t need so much room. I set down my bags and freshened up. I changed into my "going out outfit,” swiped on some gold shimmery eye shadow, fastened on some dangly earrings, packed my bag with extra layers, refilled my water bottle and headed out. I drove down to the Southend blasting this song that I can’t stop listening too because being boy crazy has been a central theme to my life and there’s more to that later…. By the time I got to the music festival I was saved by the cover of the night, and could enter the space relatively incognito. I don’t leave the house much these days and feel that my social skills have atrophied some. I met friends on the new moon darkened road, who greeted me with good cheer, so that when I entered the field next to the stage it did not come with any surprised to see not one but two men I have sexual history with. So sometimes tears are preemptive protection. Making space inside me so I could walk in the present moment, sloughed off from all I’ve been carrying, to greet the inevitable rich/dark/wonderful and sad history that island holds for me; and in particular be able to cross that threshold from mainland time and space to island time. It’s a thing you know and the more I spend time away from there the more I see how full time island living really shaped me.
Next up I wondered if I still knew how to dance. I can’t recall the last time I went to see live music, to dance in a non-choreographed way (come see me perform as a Venus fly trap lol)?!! I long ago figured out how to dance sober and for that I am forever grateful. That pat phrase "dance as if no one is watching” takes on new meaning when you realize most people at live music shows are dancing drunk. I like a drink (or two or three) from time to time), and yet often I want to meet the music sober prior to letting the cloak of Alcohol have its way with me. I am so accustomed to small humans always reaching/needing/taking for-and-from my body, it has become much harder to find my body, to place my body in time and space- to re-member it is MY BODY at the end of the day. But like muscle memory, I did and do indeed remember how to dance- to stomp, to dust up and break in my new leather boots. To dance next to familiar women I’ve danced besides many times before, to dance next to strangers. Communities need to dance together like we need to weep together.
A friend came up and acknowledged me with “QUEEN!!!” Another told me some big news and we sat in sadness together. I made a new queer friend and hung with my trans friends all night- we talked about INCEL life (involuntary celibacy), online dating, and being over-touched as parents. I wandered around alone and chatted up a young man who is living away from home for the first time. I drove home alone to my friends and slept in the bed, alone at her house, while she stayed at her boyfriends. I ran into many people I love. I got to see the fruits of my friend’s labor who is just hosted several queer artists for an artist residency. I had many many hear to heart talks. I took long walks - one with one of my best friends, and one all alone with nothing but Cedar tree and Salal shadows and Chimpmunks chattering off in the brush. I took a nap. I started reading Beloved again; it stunned me and broke my heart open just like it did when I was first assigned it as an AP English 11th grade student under the care of the brilliant and one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, Mr. Bob Raven, at Irmo High School. Reading it now as a 43 year old woman I cannot think but "Damn Mr. Raven! You had some courage to assign us to read this book- uninitiated mostly white kids, in that painted cinder block room in the corner of the high school, where you let us write our favorite quotes from the books we read on the bricks.” I’m praising now the fact I read this book in those formative years given that it’s frequently on of the most banned books from so many English classes across the country. I wondered about Toni Morrison and learned that she was 56 years old the year of 1987 when Beloved was first published. What she carried with being that age by the time this heavy gorgeously written book about slavery and its legacy was published. I think it’s an apt book to be reading right now. There’s too many ghosts out there still not being reckoned with. What if we started referring to more ghosts as Beloved? I know I need to do this and I’m scared.
Sethe in Beloved lives in a house with her daughter and a ghost- also her daughter. Anyone who walks by their house can feel that a ghost lives there. The family is lonely because of it as no one wants to get close to them, to be invited into the house-but the ghost is lonely too - for many hard sad reasons I won’t go into. Read the book.
There was a celebration of life for a long time community member on the island. I knew her, most everyone knew her- she was kind and warm and welcoming. I did not know her well enough to think I ought to attend her celebration of life but now, I regret that I did not go since the purpose of a funeral or an event to honor the dead is supposed to be a village making thing- even with out recently shared life, I was once part of her village and she mine. I asked a friend after how it went. I said "did anyone wail or weep or cry?” She said "no. not really.” She knows me and she knew exactly where I was going with this. I said “I wonder when that will change?” These celebrations of life are quite popular these days. There is some sadness, but mostly everyone gets together to talk about how much they loved the person; which is all fine and good, but what about that part of weeping and wailing that the person is no longer alive and walking amongst us? What happens to us when we no longer hear those sounds in public? The Irish keening tradition was such, that the keeners were hired to cut through that loving and sentimental talk- TO GET PEOPLE TO WEEP, because they believed that the sounds of grief were instrumental in helping get the person’s soul on over to the other side, and that communities need to actually cry together to remain healthy. It makes sense to me. Later I got stern with my friends and I said something to the effect of, "Look. When I go, I want a traditional Irish wake. Come sit by my body. I want you and others who sing to come keen and wail over me. And I want you to tell the truth of how I was. That I was wonderful and that I could also be a hell of a mean bitch some times.” So now y’all know too it’s in writing here. And I want this song and this one and this one too especially please, played or sung or performed.
This was my second weekend alone away from children in the past year. A friend told me "thank you for modeling taking such good care of yourself.” This is because so many women don’t take time away from their children JUST BECAUSE. We make up stories that no one else can care for them like we do. We refuse to spend time apart from them. I’ll never forget being invited to a local full moon femme gathering and a woman I know refusing to go because she couldn’t bear to be away from her children for bedtime; one would presume she had attended to countless bedtimes prior, so why would missing one make that big of a difference? It also makes me wonder now about the nature of the care work in her marriage to a straight white man- was he not capable of doing bedtime? Why was he not also reading stories and attending to the transition of bedtime? I just don’t believe that one missed bedtime will ruin a child. I do think that the lack of women gathering in ritual, in regular time together will ruin us as women and our ability to collectively organize. I miss my monthly coven like hell and have yet to find anyone to commit and create a new one. Sigh…. I see this time and time and time again-women burnt out, men who won’t step up-and it goes around and around. On the one hand it’s true that one cares like us - the mother, the birth giver, but it’s also true that no one parents like the non-gestational parent; that our children need more than us. Care work is not gendered remember? It’s the work that makes the world go round. Just because a person has been socialized to believe that certain people do it "naturally” does not make it so. Yet I’m seeing this narrative reinforced all the time and in women I am frankly, surprised to see it in. Yet recently I’ve been asking myself why am I surprised? Do not most white women in the U.S. more than likely have a christian nationalist tradwife buried so deep inside that they haven’t even cracked the door on saying hello to her? And our refusal to begin to reckon with her keeps us tethered in relationships with white men who really don’t want us to be free? White men who don’t give a fuck about legislation being passed that will charge us for murder when we seek to obliterate a tiny bundle of cells that would bind us to our rapist/our abuser/or just some sad fuck of a man who can’t be bothered to care about anyone but himself…… In more ways than ever I’m seeing how white women (myself included) cling so hard to the little bit of power/privilege/social/economic clout we get in our proximity to straight white dudes, and by our clinging, how captive we remain.
Having dated and fucked many many (mostly) straight white dudes, I can say that holding out for marriage was the best thing for me. My marriage is by no means a cake walk, but it is a relationship that was founded on principles of honesty rooted in some understanding of the systemic forces in which we fuck and marry and love in. It’s understanding the state sanctioned and cultural privileges that come with marriage, that we did as way to protect the children we have together, and to provide me with some legal assurances to the generational wealth my husband (in particular has) as acknowledgement for sweat equity (not to mention birthing our children). Most people I know in cis-het relationships don’t even know how to have these conversations to start, much less create a relationship where you can have some degree of autonomy. I had a splitting headache the entire weekend and now a few days out it’s gone. Did the island cause the headache? Was I truly relaxed away from my family? It’s hard to say. Was it caused by seeing men I had relations with (albeit how warmly they both greeted me) that I now recognize how much I compromised myself right from the start? Was it hearing about a powerful writing practice a friend took on to reckon with and re-member her womb? Was it watching a weekend of music where pretty much everyone singing and performing on stage was men? Was it watching so many drunk men leer after beautiful and in one case a much younger woman? Was it hearing a man reject any of the good parenting advice the three Mothers around him, digging in his heels as I’ve known him to do so many times it’s boring as fuck… will he ever self reflect? Do generational healing work? Nothing new, nothing unexpected…. all things certain to give any one paying attention a head ache.
Throughout the weekend I found myself repeating a particular sentence to anyone that would listen… words I can’t set down ever since I read them. Paraphrasing writer Hannah Leffingwell’s analysis of feminist Catherine MacKinnon’s work; Leffingwell uses some of MacKinnon’s writing as a lens for which to discuss the much lauded and talked about film on women’s sexuality, Babygirl, starring Nicole Kidman. I took it as this- are women ever truly sexually free in a patriarchy? That’s what I kept repeating to my friends over the weekend and it’s alive now - in Toni Morrison writing Beloved, in my own life and it’s long trail of male lovers, in the South Carolina legislature. I’ve known this for some time now but haven’t felt this clearly able to name it until Leffingwell articulated it in her brilliant piece of writing.
Are women ever truly sexually free in a patriarchy?
I’ve written before how relieved I am to no longer live full time on the island- the pressure of it is too much and I start to feel like a caged animal. And yet there is nothing like that place and the friends-like-family I have there. To say I LOVE YOU so freely, to hug warmly, to be in time/space with people who helped me grow up in so many ways. To say to one another "I don't care if it’s been a year or two… you are always welcome in my home.” To talk about some of these things I’ve been wondering on. To grapple out loud with friends how these dynamics of gender, of sex, of capitalism, of able-bodiedness are being lived out second to second, minute to minute in our days.
I may sleep through the night most nights thanks to this 3rd baby being such a great sleeper, but for those of us whose bodies bring humans into the world, I think sleep is never fully restful when those tender ones are living under our roof. The constant state of hyper-vigilance being both a Mother and a neuro-divergent human is something I am getting more and more in tune with and is a main cause of my perpetual state of soul/mind/physical exhaustion. I would like to return to a more analog life, but it’s near impossible given the tentacles of big tech which is now surveillance tech. I am not able to tend this writing space right now because of it. I cannot divorce myself entirely from social media, of which Substack is quickly becoming another form or, nor do I want too. There are too many brilliant thinkers doing amazing work in spaces like Instagram (like Erika Hart for instance) for me to quit these platforms entirely any time soon. I am trying to figure out how to have both a writing life, which is, by its nature, a solitary life, and a public community life, since stay at home motherhood (for me) by its nature is often a solitary and lonely endeavor.
I do know that most of us are treading water these days. I used to love treading water in swim practice just like breaststroke was my favorite stroke- I felt like I could just go and go and go- find a pace and set it- figuring out ways to take rests in between certain strokes or kicks- almost like the blessed rest in between contractions. This summer when I went lake swimming though I kept going for backstroke- feeling my arms pull up and over my head in long strong strokes was a wonderful antidote to all the hunched reaching I do all day long- through the postures of slinging, baby wearing, wiping butts, harvesting, chopping, and nursing. In back stroke I was held by the water; and I see now how being held is something deeply missing from my life, even in my marriage unfortunately simply due to the stretched nature of our current family/work load. In back stroke I could see the beautiful sky above me and the sounds of the noisy lake crowds mostly muffled. I was sandwiched between water and sky and felt so perfectly anointed by them, so seen, so held, and like I almost always do when swimming, I was in rapture- utter peace & joy. So yeah I think backstroke is where it’s at for me right now. And this idea of how to find rest in the pauses between strokes, between contractions.
While I try to find my own rests here and there so I can keep going, I also think daily, how black and brown people have been living under the violence of white supremacy culture for generations. How little rest they are granted. How terribly loud the white supremacist propaganda machine is- how so many activists I follow keep reminding us that "hey white folk, we’ve been under fascism for a while now.” And it’s true. They are long over due for reparations, land back and so much more. The political propaganda machine wants only to divide people in this country while billionaires are raking it in. Scapegoating, red herrings, and all the classic logical fallacies are par for the course these days, which I take personally as someone who loves intellectual life, who values critical thinking, and also acknowledging my own blind spots, internal biases, privileges, and hypocrisies. Trans people make up an estimated 2% of the population- their existence does not affect your life negatively. Lax gun control laws are a negative. Cutting medical benefits are a negative. Deporting people who grow and harvest our food is a negative. Bullies love a scapegoat now don’t they? It’s been really fucking hard for me to see friends I loved in high school post on facebook about this bull shit- calling Charlie Kirk "non-violent” and such, and it does make me wonder how people have lost sight of what VIOLENCE truly is.
Poverty is violence.
Dying from lack of medical care is violence.
Homelessness is violence.
Black women dying at 4x the rates of white women from pregnancy/childbirth related things is violence.
Demonizing the only "safe” pain relief that pregnant people can take is a yet another form of violence against those of us with wombs.
Denying people gender affirming care is violence.
Deporting family members and splitting them apart is violence.
Spouting off hate speech and propagandist rhetoric is violence.
Funding genocide is violence.
Slaughtering trees, damning rivers polluting water and soil is violence.
I think right now if there are any hackers worth their salt they’d cause a nationwide internet outage so the white christian nationalism propaganda machine could finally shut the fuck up. So working class people could actually come together to take down the billionaires to recognize they have far more in common with that farm worker living in the trailer across from the raspberry farm with its big white fancy house and the signs that say "Samson” (true scene just a bike ride down the road from me), than you do the Peter Thiels/Erika Kirks/Curtis Yarvin/Taylor Swifts/ of the world. (and before you come for for lumping Swift in this category- I don’t care how popular your music is, billionaires should not exist).
I went to the island and I had a good time.
I came home and I was happy to be home.
A woman I’ve never met called me on the phone as she and I connected thanks to facebook and we are both in the throws of loving and caring for boomers with dementia. We said we will share resources. In this moment a moment of village making happened in the local sense. These are the kinds of opportunities I want to create more of. Another friend said she is spending time with an elder every week- getting paid a little just to do some cleaning and care, and she loves it. This is the kind of movement work we need. We need actual grown ups reaching out to young people instead of constant handwringing over teens and their phones and red dye. The bard and writer Martin Shaw once told a class of us "If you haven’t been fed, become bread.” In the words of the late great poet, singer, philosopher and I’d argue holy man, Leonard Cohen, (and I quote this often)…. "I’m tired and I’m angry all the time.” Thank goodness too because it means I’m here. It means I still give a fuck. And it means I will keep showing up.
If you’re glad to hear from me, and I know it’s been a while, (thanks especially to paid subscribers for not giving up on me), please like this post and share it with a friend. The Substack algorithms are now making it nearly impossible for smaller time writers like myself who don’t have the capacity to put out weekly content, to get our work circulated beyond our intimate circles and subscriber list. It’s also hard to keep putting out writing work when I don’t get a lot of feedback. Just hit the like button is all I ask of you!
There is still a part of me holding on hope that my writing work will become a small source of sustenance for others and for me in the form of paid subscriptions or other writing projects (which I do have one right now). I’m also taking heed from Queen Toni Morrison in that some of her greatest writing work was not achieved until she was well into her 50s.
Let that be a reminder and a blessing for all of us- not only that black women continue to teach us and to lead the way in so many facets- but that good work- the kind that is willing and able to reckon with the horrors of what humans can do to other humans, like Morrison does in Beloved, takes time, and that it’s healing work more people need to take up.
Until I’ve got more things to get off my chest, take care. Give your money to black and brown organizations. Talk to your neighbor. Attend a community grief ritual. Stand up for trans people. Learn how to keen. Resist resist resist.