reframing femininity
2007 was the year I began to write. I wrote to name things I had carried around inside for too long without voice being given to them. I wrote to tell myself my own story. It was also the year my oldest daughter graduated from high school and my youngest daughter turned one. I felt…
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In the wilds of motherhood, professional work, and various other creative endeavors, as an Indigenous/Mexican/Spanish/German woman, I find the spaces shrinking in which I feel intuitively understood. In the ongoing pandemic integration into real-life realities, paired with friction-filled sociopolitical conversations and an ever-emerging mental health crisis, I often “turtle,” or go inward. A few weeks…
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I thought it would be more glamorous, ruling my little kingdom. Perhaps because my mother made it look pretty effortless…or at least manageable. But the truth is, it’s not manageable on so many days. Every day I wake up, and I try and fail and go to sleep and do it again. I’ve read all…
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Some hunt to kill; some to survive and protect. Shards of piercing words flew across the room at her. There was no point in running. She had been captured, and the gunfire from his vocal cords was incessant. Standing, she took the blows, her body numbing with the painful sensation of a thousand paper cuts…
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Errreeeeooooo-errreeeeooooo-errreeeeoooooo-errreeeeooooo. I looked down after sitting attached to the human milking machine (if you know, you know) for 35 minutes only to see 1 ounce total compiled by my milk machines. After so much of my time and life connected to that damn pump, I was so over it.
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At five foot two, he reaches his arms up to hug me. My arms underneath his squeeze tightly as I breathe him in. He is both familiar and mysterious. Stepping back, I stand still as he studies my face. “Mom, my armpits stink,” he says. “Oh, I’m sure they don’t buddy. Let me smell,” I…
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I was cold before I even saw the table. It loomed large in the white-washed room. All around stood shadowy strangers, watching as I hovered in the doorway. Hands twitching at my side, gooseflesh along my skin, I hesitated. I was no one to them. I knew exactly what they saw: another in a long…
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My exhausted, swollen-faced four-year-old son snuggles into my warm-on-the-outside, yet broken-on-the-inside, body. Our eager eyes wait for nurses, who scurry past our jail-like cell window until the hour mark has passed again without any communication. This brand of déjà vu is palpable. We’ve been through this before, so now the wait doesn’t seem to carry…
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It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. –Wendell…
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I place a hand on my heart and a hand on my belly. I take a deep breath in and say, “How can I best nurture and honor and serve you today?”
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