This is Dear Abbey,
The Girl’s Guide for the Good Guy

Dear Abbey,

I’m a big fan of the podcast. I love the way you and Candy play off of each other so well. It’s always hilarious and engaging. But I also love the way you two are so open and honest about important topics that are touchy to talk about. When I was listening to the “big dicks” episode, I was struck by the way you two approached the subject, you talked about the subject beyond the physical. We’ve all heard the cliches, “size doesn’t matter”, or “it’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it”, or “it’s not the size of the boat, it’s the motion of the ocean”. As a guy who wouldn’t be considered ‘well-endowed’, these sayings have always felt like consolation prizes. Like participation trophies, maybe because they stay at the physical level. Even though I’ve never had complaints, I still can’t help but feel some insecurity around the matter. I was intrigued to hear you both say that size wasn’t something that concerned either one of you when it comes to intimacy. Could you say more about your thoughts on the size issue, and if it’s true that it doesn’t matter, what does?

Thanks for taking the question,

Underwhelmed in Arizona.

Underwhelmed in Arizona!!! Hi!! Whew. Ok, this is such an important topic, and I’m so happy to cover it. Thank you for asking! (And for listening to the podcast!)

When Candy and I approached this subject, it was organic and unplanned. And I’m really proud of how we handled it. You’re so right. It, among other things we discuss there, can be touchy. She and I like to take things head on (pun intended); just dive right in and trust that we’re both kind and caring people, so whatever comes out will show that.

The fact that you’re asking this question tells me a lot about you. And… honestly? That’s kind of our whole point. You seem like you’re invested in a woman’s pleasure and what part you play in that. That is FANTASTIC. Kudos, UA.

So as usual, we’re gonna get all sciencey first. And I’m going to make sure this is noted upfront that I’m approaching this subject from a heterosexual perspective because of the specificity of your question. I, by no means, intend to exclude anyone by doing so.

But we’re going to school first, because somewhere along the way we were all told this story that the bigger the winkle, the better the lover. And I think that story needs a rebranding.

The Greeks liked them small, and the Romans associated a larger size with good luck and fertility and even thought them to protect from the ‘evil eye’. (Being someone who wears evil eye jewelry on the regular, I’m now highly concerned with what I’ve been protecting myself from all this time.)

And if we look into the animal kingdom, in species where the females mate with multiple males, both the penis and testicles have evolutionized themselves to be larger in order to conquer the game of breeding.

So… basically, the men made themselves bigger just to try to win.

The ladies never asked for this, mind you. It just happened because the boys kept competing themselves into bigger-ness.

Anyway. Let’s learn a few more little tidbits about animal peckers. Because why the hell not. Maybe it’ll come up on Jeopardy and you can dazzle the living room with your schlong knowledge (Schlongedge?).

Did you know that the barnacle has the longest penis relative to body size, measuring at roughly 40 times its body length? Yup. It just casts that sucker out and fishes for action since the rest of him can’t move.

As fascinating as that may be, that’s precisely what I fear will happen if you all keep evolving into bigger dicks. Just a bunch of couch turnips with fishing cocks trying to catch anything it can stick to. Like those stretchy, sticky hands we all had in middle school. Or a frog’s tongue when it sees a bug on a rock.

Did you also know that the blue whale holds the overall record for largest penis ever? It’s 8-10 feet. That’s just under 3 feet short of a whole Manute Bol. I’ve always wondered where the whale keeps that extra cargo. Is there a storage compartment under there? Does it dangle? Does it also catch stuff like the barnacle’s fella? Do they maybe work together in a great big pineapple under the sea?

Now, if we’re talking land animals, the elephant unsurprisingly has the largest, with his extending to almost 7 feet long. (That’s almost a whole Manute Bol if we’re still using basketball player metrics.) It’s a good idea the elephant and the blue whale don’t know each other. I don’t wanna see that cock fight.

Oh, and this one makes my day. Did you know that the honeybee has a microscopically small penis that explodes during mating, which then rips off, plugs up the female to prevent any other bee peenie from getting inside, and then kills him?

Read that back again.

Also, lastly (and I promise I’m done with animal knobs) the gorilla has the smallest penis relative to body size of any mammal… averaging at about 1-2 inches hard.

UA. Duuuuuude. That’s King Muthafuckin’ Kong. Who has serious anger issues. Is it because of his micro peepee?

we. just . don’t . know.

Just saying. You only rage and thrust and show everybody you’re a ‘big, strong man’ like that if you’re overcompensating for a Not-So-King-Sized-Dong.

So listen up, UA. While you may not consider yourself ‘well-endowed’, you can keep moving through life with the knowledge that your dick is bigger than King Kong’s.

Plus, unless you left this out of your letter, you’re far better off than a honeybee. Assuming that since you wrote me, your buzzing, little willie didn’t detach and murder you.

Ok. Let’s hop off of animal plonkers now.

Scientists believe that the shape of the human penis evolved in order to clear and clean the semen from a woman’s past lovers. They think it looks and behaves the way it does so it can literally get on in there and scoop out any competitors’ traces and replace it with his, thus increasing the chances of him becoming a father… assuming she’s had multiple partners in a short amount of time.

Leave it to a man’s penis to assume she’s just out there spraying all over town.

(Probably fair, though… probably fair.)

That just shows how competitive you boys have always been with your dicks. Your penis head can smell another man’s presence, and the genetic main focus of your action becomes to clear that fucker out so you can mark your territory.

Just a bunch of untrained puppies out there peeing in all of us.

And that’s all fine if we’re talking only about humans having sex to mate. But that’s just not who we are any more. Sex is also a sport now, babe. It’s a trade. A hobby. A pastime. Sex is for fun and pleasure and a way to connect with another human, in whatever capacity you both choose.

It’s a way to kill a few minutes, show off your fresh shave, or murder a migraine.

So if we’re not needing the penis to scoop us anymore, why would we still be thinking bigger is better?

Well, there is the cervix of the matter. The longer the penis, the easier it can reach our cervix. And that’s like a game show challenge to you boys. That mystical cervix. All up there and hiding, and you can’t see it or ask it to bring you a bagel. You gotta try to reach for it. You just have to do your damndest to touch that thing, don’t ya. Like that Snickers bar that got caught in the vending machine at work.

And, sure, that cervix-pounding can be pleasurable for some… but it’s also very painful for a lot of women. The cervix is a really sensitive organ, and that type of forceful or deep contact can literally bruise us up there.

Has any Long-Dicked-Dan ever asked a woman how high her cervix is?
Well, he damn well should.

Why aren’t we on the topic of high vs. low cervixes anywhere? Where’s that conversation? The cervix has to be able to take the size of the penis that you’re all so obsessed about, so why aren’t we ladies bragging about that? Bringing our OB’s to parties and letting them speak the gospel that is MY HIGH CERVIX 🙌. Just waving our X-Rays around like it’s Mardi Gras. Flashing ‘em for beads.

“Look how high mine is, ya bitchesssss!”

I, for one, have a very high cervix, so I can take a lot. (ahem)

Do I need that?

Nah. We cool here.

But, alas, that’s not what you came here for, is it UA? You sweet, sweet man. Ok, I’ve gotchu.

So, intimately speaking… Every single man I have been with who has not had what would be labeled as a large penis, has pleasured me in ways that no other man has. These men have been creative and attentive. They’ve taken their time. They’ve devoured me in nibbles and swallows and made my back curl and my toes furl. I’ve screamed into pillows with these men. I’ve made noises no one thought were possible.

And not one bit of it has been because of his size. It’s been because of who he was and the attention he gave to my body.

It feels good in there no matter the size, UA.

Sex with these men has been a conversation, not a soliloquy.

I have never once been with a man who was forthcoming with his braggable dick size and left feeling satisfied.

Not. Once.

Maybe some of you are out there, and I mean no disrespect. I just haven’t met one. And neither have any of my girlfriends.

Because that man has been told all his life that he doesn’t have to try. He thinks he can rest on his big ole joystick laurels and everything else will just fall into place. The women will just come running and open up like he’s wielding a vagina magnet down there. This guy even likes to show it off; pull it out like it’s our little pet we get to fawn over.

We do not want this, boys.

This man is so proud of his big dick because he has been conditioned by society (and probably his diluted, big-dicked dad) to think that he has the ultimate prize. And he doesn’t have to do a damn thing with it except wait for us to get it hard and then poke us with it.

We don’t want to be poked, UA.

Like, never.

Not on our shoulder. Our bellies. In our vagina (or cervix if you’re long-donged). Not one woman says yes please to being poked. By anything. Anywhere.

And you know what else we don’t like? Having to do more work than we’re already told we have to do in this damn man world. So Mr. Massive Member who just thinks he can lie down and have us do it all, or climb on top or flip us around and jackrabbit us like he’s clearing cement, has no idea how to pleasure a woman.

But you, UA, you seem like the kind of man who definitely wants to… and probably already does.

Here’s what I’ve learned from my experiences with men who are not “well endowed”.

These men care. They’re aware that they don’t come fully loaded, so they take time to learn what makes us quiver. What makes our face make that shape that only you have ever seen. What makes us want to keep coming back for more because something mind-bending happened that we have to return to.

These men have researched what makes a woman feel transcendent. They’ve purchased books. They’ve studied our anatomy like it’s a goddamn fantasy football league.

THEY. CARE.

And that, UA, is what matters to us. You wanting us to feel good? That’s such a turn on. And guess what?

We will want to return the favor.

that’s . how . it . works.

That guy who just hammered us with his eyes closed? We don’t want to do any damn thing to him. He lost his chance. His turn has passed. No soup for you!

Ok, sorry for soup in an otherwise moist environment.

Also, sorry for the moist.

My point is, it truly does not matter the size of your dick. I promise you, it does not. Unless you’re standing naked to compete in some sort of twisted naked body competition, it’s not a thing we care or think about when we’re considering wanting to be with you.

We don’t spend as much time as you do thinking about your dick, I promise you.

I don’t need to see it first before I agree to date you. I don’t need to check references. I don’t need to shake, rattle or roll it to test for durability. If I connect with you, and want to share my body with you, that’s because you did something before your penis was ever a part of my thinking.

As women, we have to receive you. We need to want to open up to you, and for you. For us, foreplay starts way before we’ve even hit the sheets… or that edge of the sink at the bar because we just couldn’t wait until we got home. So much of that comes from how you treat us, and how you make us feel.

That’s it.

That’s truly it.

You’re doing great, UA. I promise. Keep it up.

Also, the clitoris does not care one bit about the size of your penis, my love. That’s the area you should be focusing more on anyway. And we can take care of that with our vibrators, so you all better make sure you’re up to speed on it.

xoxo,
Abbey💋

The first Dear Abbey piece can be found HERE.

For any questions you want answered by me for this new column, either comment below or DM me. Or ask a friend to DM me for you. I’ll keep you anonymous; you’re safe here.

This is Dear Abbey,
The Girl’s Guide for the Good Guy.

And if you like to listen to girls talk more about boys and stuff, you should absolutely subscribe to my podcast, Candy Downs Abbey Wade with my bestie Candy Downs . We’ll be back soon, promise.

I love you 💋

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What no one tells you about mothering is that one day you will be sitting in a waiting room that also serves as an office for someone named Janet with a ferret waiting for both of your teenage children to return to you from getting their mouths cut open.

I said yes to my children’s wisdom teeth removal surgery on the same day and called it good parenting.

Look, I love efficiency. I’m an efficiency aficionado (efficientado?). Efficiency is my jam. I don’t leave a room without a handful of found things that are meant to be homed into other rooms. I even sing a little song about it so I don’t forget which thing goes where.

So when the doctor told us we should do them both at the same time, it made some sense to me. But it also raised some concerns. My oldest is eighteen and my youngest is fifteen. He leaves for college in two months. His wisdom teeth were already through the gum, doing what wisdom teeth do best, which is get in the way.

Fifteen seems so young for this surgery and her teeth hadn’t even broken the surface yet. It felt like we were just lumping her into a two-for-one deal for the sake of efficiency. But we were told it was perfectly fine and it didn’t matter. I wasn’t so sure.

Doctors have all their doctory reasons to suggest certain things but they aren’t the ones herding hungover humans at home.

Whether it was right or wrong doesn’t matter at this point because it’s already been done, but we should always trust our mother’s instinct. That’s the first rule in Mom Club.

When I had my absolutely unnecessary stupid extra teeth removed, I was in college. I was twenty years old, which feels like the correct age to yank evolutionary leftovers from a mouth.

And I ate pizza the first night. I had no good parents to tell me that this was not a good idea, but yeah. I had pizza on night one of having four holes instead of four teeth.

My kids did not have pizza on night one. My kids couldn’t locate their mouths on night one.

Not one bit of it was something I was prepared for, and I am prepared for everydamnthing. I do not trust well, so I travel heavy. I am set for any sort of disaster or need at all times. And the moments I've let my guard down and trusted something I don't know, only for it to turn out to be a lie, does not sit well.

Nobody thinks it’s important to tell you that your children come back from anesthesia as completely different people. In a what-the-hell-have-you-done-with-my-son way. That was the first infraction.

The plan was always to have him go first, get him settled at home while she’s having hers done and then bring her home. And that sure sounds super easy on paper. So that’s what we did. I’m not a tooth robber, so I let them make the call.

My son is not a nervous guy. Never has been. And he’d never tell you if he were. This is the kid who will be sick for days and not say anything until day five when he’s on the mend. He just doesn’t like to draw attention to himself. And keeps most things inside. His threshold for pain is, and always has been, immense. His entry into the world was very painful so this is just how he does life.

Then there’s my daughter, who makes sure you’re fully aware of all the letters forming words into feelings and thoughts at all times. She gets nervous easily, which she will be very clear about. He was cool as a cucumber pre-surgery and she was a wiggly giggly mess.

I thought I’d be able to walk back with them. Hold their hand as they went under. Be holding it when they open their eyes. But they just took my kids away from me and I didn’t like it.

They took her back for hers before they brought him to me and let me tell you… sitting in Ferret Janet’s office alone while your babies are either about to be put under and cut into or having just been put under and cut into is not a settling place to be. Even if it’s only teeth they’re after.

I paced the halls, fiddled with the pretend teeth on the desk, counted ferrets. Waiting rooms are stupid and should be called Worry Rooms. They should let me name more things.

When they finally wheeled him out to me, he was hunched over, shaking and coughing. He couldn’t lift his head up. He couldn’t open his eyes. He couldn’t talk. He looked unfinished. It was absolutely mortifying, but the second rule in Mom Club is to act like everything is fine when you’re feeling like everything is not fine.

Getting him into the car was like rolling a boulder up a mud hill. He was not my kid and I hated it.

After all this child went through in his entry into the world, seeing him not ok again was just really unsettling. I started to resent teeth. These fucking bones back there that we don’t even need still show up and then we have to have someone cut our mouths open to dig them out because our teeth don’t need to be food processors anymore. Teeth are dumb and they’ve hurt my kid and I want to speak to the manager.

He got sick in the car and at home. And when the nausea lessened, he started to mumble the same things on a loop.

“Did you see me on laughing gas?” “Is this what being drunk feels like? I don’t like this feeling.” And then he thanked everyone for their help.

And honestly, that sounds exactly like drunk college me. I hated the feeling of being drunk, but always took it too far and would get sick. Then I’d call everyone the next morning to apologize and thank them for their assistance.

He finally was able to be changed into clean clothes and set on the couch to rest. He fell asleep immediately in his ice pack headband looking like a defeated prize fighter who didn’t even know he’d been in a fight.

Meanwhile, sister’s surgery is almost done and I’m on the phone trying to find out how the hell we’re supposed to get this passed-out man new gauze in his mouth after being sick and also eat something in order to take his pain meds that he’s required to take right now.

How has no one else thought about this? The instructions make it sound like a toddler could do it… take them home, change the gauze as needed, keep icing, wait for the anesthesia to wear off, get some food in their system immediately and take their medicine immediately… which you also have to go pick up. All while babysitting a vomiting linebacker.

He’s finally settled at home and my daughter gets wheeled out. And this child came back to me as a circus performer. Confidently chatty with not one coherent thing coming out of her swollen and gauze-stuffed mouth. And drunk, fully drunk. The good kind of drunk that fifteen-year-olds are not supposed to know about.

She climbed into my car backwards. Started with the wrong lead-in leg and ended up facing the wrong way. Which, having shared a bed with this child, completely tracks. She sleeps sideways.

She started a dozen conversations on the drive home and never finished a single one. She was also very vocal about the laughing gas. A lot about not liking Taylor Swift. She kept showing me her arm where her IV was and calling everything her IV. “They couldn’t find my veins in my IV.” “My IV is still there!” She kept rolling down the window to go for a run, and asking where her face went.

She never once got sick, stayed alert and weird, and the only challenge in getting her ready for the living room resting stage was that it felt like I was removing clothes from one of those flailing blow-up things at a used car lot. So much wiggling. She kept putting her clothes back on as I’d take them off like a damn farce and thought she could move freely when she could not even stand on her own.

When she saw her sleeping brother on the couch, she started walking like a cartoon burglar to “stay quiet.” And since I was holding her by the waist behind her and didn’t want her to think she was out of her mind, I also had to walk like a cartoon burglar. Just a two-woman conga line, Thriller dancing down the hallway. I about lost her in the guest room to a throw pillow race.

I got her changed and put new gauze in her mouth but immediately had to change it again. She was bleeding so much. So much more than we were told with the whole bullshit stained sack of lies in “you’ll only need to change the gauze a couple times within the first couple hours or so.”

I tried to get her to drink some yogurt for her meds to be taken but she couldn’t remember how to eat. And she tried. Hard. Stared at herself in the mirror like she was rehearsing for a one-woman show. Her mouth was so numb and she forgot how tongues worked. She was also drooling. A lot. So I’m holding this tiny human upright while blood-swirled yogurt is dripping down her chin.

Sometimes she thinks it’s hilarious. Other times I keep losing her as she leans right. But she is absolutely trying to behave like this is just a normal Tuesday.

And honestly, that sounds exactly like drunk college me too. I’d never admit to being drunk and worked so very hard to perform sober instead of leaning into the fact that I was absolutely off-my-rocker wasted.

I moved her to the chair opposite her sleeping brother and because she won’t stop talking about her IV and her disinterest in Taylor Swift, he is now awake.

His eyes shoot open and they stare at each other. Like aliens finally connecting. They’re both in their ice hats but don’t know that they are. They only see the other one in an ice hat so they’re asking questions about the appearance of the ice hat.

And by questions, I mean point and mumble. They are communicating through some foreign sibling language that they seem to fully understand. He doesn’t remember much. He asks what he looked like when he came out. I told him he didn’t look like himself and that he was in a lot of pain.

“What was that like seeing me like that? Was it scary for you?” My sweet boy. Concerned about me when he’s in so much pain.

“It was hard, buddy. It was really scary, but I’m glad you’re better now.”

“Can I have the Oreo yogurt now?”

And she’s slowly becoming one with the chair.

I tell them both to stay put and try to rest.

I head to the bathroom to grab a tissue for LL Drool J and come back to both of them standing in the middle of the living room dancing. They’re dancing. These two drunkards are bandaged up, swollen, and they are dancing.

I tuck them back into their resting places and go back to the bathroom for more gauze. I walk back out two seconds later and they’re dancing again. I tell them to sit back down and I’ll give them some sorbet if they would just sit the hell down.

They sit down. I make a freezer run and come back to them standing up in the living room arm in arm.

“You should take our picture,” my son says. This kid has never once asked for a photo. And he wants this moment documented?

She’s in my oversized sweatpants and my oldest t-shirt covered in bloody drool. They’re both in chin-strap ice hats and have never looked happier.

I take their picture and they continue posing. He looks at her. She looks at him. They both look at each other. Both look at me. Her hand around his shoulder, which is a stretch for that little arm. Just happy as a bucket of drunk clams, these two.

I finally get them both back down, mostly through threats involving sorbet, and I see that my damp daughter can’t close her mouth. This explains the drooling. She’s small. The gauze she’s having to bite down on is not. And she’s bleeding fairly heavily. Her brother is not. Whatever version of not-fine-ness he had right after his surgery has now disappeared. He’s pizza confident.

So I grab something for her to mop up the drool. And since I’m me and prefer to not throw things away and instead re-purpose them, the thing I grab is one of their old burp cloths. Those things are lovely snot wipers for any age because they’re weathered and soft. I highly recommend all of you young parents out there hold onto them. I even have one for my guitar to wipe the finger oils from the strings before I tuck her back into her case.

I also keep my picks in a Sucrets tin if I’m taking questions.

She takes it and tucks it into her chin hat and drools away. My baby girl.

Third rule of Mom Club: You will use whatever’s in the house. Nobody’s coming to save you.

She’s now chair-sunken, drunk-texting her friends and taking Japanese lessons. And he’s placing sports bets.

They both try to speak and I have to pretend they sound cool and normal. They do not. My daughter absolutely isn’t making one bit of consonant sound and my son thinks because he’s not throwing up anymore, he can make speeches.

I give them sorbet and it’s a disaster. Just nope. She’s bleeding while strawberry goo is free-falling from her lips and none of this is ok. He’s licking it from the ramekin he’s holding like it’s The One Ring. Nobody seems to remember how mouths work.

They start to talk about their laughing gas again. What it felt like, who saw them on it, where can they get some for their next dance party.

Please note that they both have lisps and sound like their tongues have been sacrificed. Still with lots of pointing. So much pointing. At each other. And themselves. Pointing and nodding in agreement like two tipsy disco monkeys.

He’s coming back online faster than she is, which feels unfair given he’s the one I watched get rolled out of there looking like a stringless puppet an hour earlier.

A couple hours later my son asked me to watch A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic, with him. This child does not know who Bob Dylan is. But I do, and hell yeah I’ll watch a movie with you, drunk buddy.

Sister isn’t up to it. She’s not doing great. And I don’t trust leaving her alone with all the blood drooling and weeble wobbling. So I prop her up Weekend at Bernie’s style in the corner with her Japanese, and he and I watch the very-too-long but fine movie.

My son, who does not approve of anyone getting up during a movie ever, gets up to talk numbness to his corner sister. It’s a very serious conversation.

But I’ve got both of them in the room with me and they’re finally sitting. I’ll take it.

And Daisy has decided that she needs to stay close to the little one. She doesn’t move from her side for hours.

The next morning I fed them oatmeal. Or tried to. My daughter ate hers with chopsticks.

She’s still not ok and he’s recovering at rapid speed, or at least really working hard to prove that he is. She’s still very swollen and quiet in a way that isn’t like her. Bleeding still. It’s hard to watch my little girl take this on so intensely and consider the fact that her teeth hadn’t even shown up as a problem yet. They were still under the surface and we were told it was ok to just go and cut them out.

That’s one of the most difficult parts of parenting. Watching your kids go through pain and struggle and knowing it could have been prevented, but you just aren’t sure if the current pain and suffering outweighs the future potential for further pain and suffering.

A week later they decide they’re going to the movies and out to lunch by themselves. They came downstairs and declared it the same way they declared their drunk dance party and photo session. They’ve bonded this year. They both quietly know he’s leaving soon and it’s their last year of things being how they’ve always known it. Right across the hall from one another. Just a knock knock away.

They were best friends when they were really little. He was so protective over her. He’d hug her so tightly. They’d snuggle all the time. And she thought he hung the galaxy. Then there were years in the middle when they didn’t really have a lot in common and sort of drifted in their own spaces around one another.

And then this year it all changed. They started to play and laugh again. They’d go thrift shopping together. They had conversations behind closed doors. It’s been incredible to witness.

And I think this surgery pulled them even closer to one another. They went through something hard and real together and are coming out of it together.

The day after their surgery, they both asked to watch a movie with me. My daughter and I have been working through the Jane Austen catalogue and he wanted to watch Emma with us.

The fourth rule of Mom Club is you never question when a child’s request comes from left field.

And unlike normal TV times where they’re scattered around the living room, they all piled on the couch with me. My two teenagers, all bandaged and iced up, right there with me on the couch. Willingly. I enjoyed the movie far more than I would have without them snuggled up next to me.

At some point our hands found each other. It was playful because it has to be with teenagers, but it was good and real. And all in one moment I felt the weight of my two children having gone through the most painful thing they’d ever gone through, my son’s pending exit, and the fact that we are just a family sitting on a couch watching a movie together.

I box this moment up and wrap it tightly in pretty paper. The good kind you save for the in-laws. This is what life is made of. Tiny moments of hands finding each other and saying more than words ever could.

Mom Club doesn’t have a fifth rule for this. There’s no rule for watching your kids come back to themselves to only lose one again two months later. The on purpose kind of losing that you know is coming the first moment you hold them in your arms. The inevitable moment that you push down deep inside of yourself and don’t worry about it until it’s right in front of you.

That’s the hope in raising kids, isn’t it? You shape them so they’re fit for the world without you. It’s a bittersweet, beautiful, and brutal task. But it’s the right one. You want them to want you, but you don’t want them to need you. And that’s the hardest thing to figure out.

If you do your job right as a parent, they will leave you happily. And they will come back to you willingly.

My mind will always hold onto the moment we all held hands on the couch. Their weird dance parties. Their on-demand photo session. Even the drool.

In my mind I will always be holding the hands I had while I had such easy access to them. It became a memory the moment it happened.

Wisdom comes in strange packages sometimes.

Thanks for reading and for being exactly who you are. I love you. I miss you💋

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You lived inside of me so easily. So comfortably. You were the first life I had ever grown and it was effortless. You and I jumped and climbed the slippery mountain rocks at Hound Ears to the shock of everyone around. Me and 6 month old fetus You hopping from wet stone to wet stone.

I never felt you were unsafe.

As long as you were with me, you were ok.

As long as I was with you, I was ok.

But you couldn’t stay inside as long as you were supposed to, and around 2 a.m. weeks later, I was hooked up to machines to make sure you were ok. Something in you was ready to leave and explore, but you just couldn’t leave me.

They gave me drugs to make you leave me faster and more drugs that made me ill. My body and your body couldn’t take it. You tried your hardest to stay with me and I tried my hardest to set you free. I knew I would keep you safe on the outside. But you didn’t know. You were happy and warm.

You still like it happy and warm, baby.

Several hours later I pushed you out. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the most pain I’ve ever endured.

And they took you away from me.

Your little heart wasn’t doing its little heart things and I was in convulsions. I remember a room full of crowded people with pretend smiles on their faces congratulating me on what I had done. But I didn’t have you. You were what I had done and I didn’t have you.

You had a hole in your heart. You couldn’t find your breath on your own.

They put you in a glass box and hooked you up with the things I was supposed to be able to do for you by just being your mommy. I went to see you, and reached my pinky to the glass from my wheelchair. All I wanted was to touch you.

I made you and I wasn’t allowed to touch you. I felt so empty and inside out.

Why would the universe bring you to me so easily and then take you away so abruptly?

The next morning the doctors came in and told me that the bad news they hoped wouldn’t happen had happened. You needed to be rushed to a bigger hospital that could better take care of you.

I wasn’t finished healing. My body had been so badly damaged and needed more care. They told me to stay. I told them to fuck off.

Ripped, bruised and bleeding. They fought me. I ripped out my IV’s and bent over and took the shot in the ass that made my blood, unlike your blood, not attack the existence of your future sister. I rode in the ambulance for 50 miles to the place that was supposed to be better for you.

I was supposed to be the best place for you.

Someone told me to wait outside of the NICU doors. I sat on the cold linoleum and waited for someone to tell me what to do next. You weren’t with me. You had been with me for so many months and I wasn’t done feeling you inside of me. I was lost without you.

I sat for an hour by myself staring at the doors until a nurse spotted me and asked if I was ok.

I had never said this before and I didn’t know how to. I just had my baby last night didn’t feel right because I didn’t have you right now. I just gave birth felt so clinical.

I said I don’t have my baby. I just had him last night but I don’t have him now. They took him in there.

Her face went pale. I was broken and should not have been on that floor. And I should not have been alone. But you were behind those doors and that's as close as I could get to you.

She brought me a doughnut pillow to sit on and I waited some more. Someone came and covered me in a yellow gown, sanitized my hands and ushered me in. I could barely walk.

A giant room full of dolls hooked up to machines. Some the size of my hand. Red-eyed mothers and fathers waiting for good news. I found you. You weren’t the smallest in the room but you were still small. And yellow. They had you under the lamp that takes the yellow away.

Because of all of your complications, they had to starve you for the first several days of your life. My milk had come in and I was pumping through tears all night alone and freezing tiny vessels of future food for you. I had never had breasts before and waking up to a C cup was not something I was prepared for.

I stayed with you all day, every day. They told me to leave and to rest, but I couldn’t. I’ll rest when I can have my baby. I stayed on someone’s pullout couch close to the hospital when they made me leave every night. I’ll go home when my baby can go home.

They needed to put an IV in you one morning and they couldn’t find a vein. You were fighting them. It took several nurses to hold you down and finally they gave up trying. They said they needed to put the needle in your head.

Everyone was scared of watching and scared of you having a needle in your head.

I wasn’t scared.

You can handle it. You’re so strong.

I stayed and watched them do it when no one else could. You didn’t cry. I didn’t cry.

I held you a couple days later. Everyone was so scared to hold you, so scared to handle you, so scared to break you. I held you like you were mine. No fear. No precious gloves. I kissed you like you were mine. Not something that could crumble, something that was real. No fear. Just like you and me on those slippery mountain rocks, as long as you were with me, you were ok.

The first time I got to feed you, I’d never been happier. You could only take a bottle because you could only take one teaspoon of my milk, but I still got to hold you and feed you something my body made for you.

I cried when the last drop passed your lips and you sucked for more. You were so hungry and my heart was broken. It was my job to feed you and I couldn’t. They took you away again.

Every day I could feed you a little bit more and a little bit more, and one day they moved you to the fancy room and I was able to nurse you. I didn’t know what I was doing. Only having a machine suck the milk out of me all at once, I wasn’t prepared for the squirt, spray and slip ‘n slide that happened. So many nurses around me telling me how to hold my nipple and where to put you, and then holding my nipple and holding you.

We were both drenched by the end of it and it didn’t matter. I was holding my baby. I was feeding my baby.

I was feeding my baby with a body that was still missing my baby. My body was mourning while it was celebrating.

Nobody told me it would feel like that. I didn’t even know I could feel like that. So full and so hollow at the same time.

Grief and gratitude in tidal waves and wade pools.

I took you home that night and I wasn’t scared that I couldn’t check your heart rate or oxygen saturation or blood pressure. I never looked at the machines when you needed them. I didn’t need to. I looked at you and knew all I needed to know.

You slept with your mouth on my mouth on my pillow wrapped like a little burrito, and I nursed you every time you moved.

For months you stayed attached to me. I couldn’t let you go and you didn’t want to be let go. We were one again.

Mine and mine. Yours and yours. Forever and ever.

Before I built my own family and lived inside the lies of the family I was born into, I had music. Music was sacred. Music was mine.

There is a Jewel song called “The Absence of Fear” that I used to play on my secondhand sea-blue six string as a teenager. Alone in my room. Confidently barefoot and unsure of everything else. I played it on repeat. I played it the way teenagers play songs they don’t yet understand but can’t step away from because it’s speaking to a version of themselves they haven’t met yet.

Something in it recognized me before I recognized it.

It’s a love song. At seventeen, I knew enough to know it was about love and loss and longing in a way that I couldn’t color completely inside the lines about.

Inside my heart, there's an empty room
It's waiting for lightning, it's waiting for you

It’s a song that has recircled and revisited me as I’ve gone from the age of my now-son to my now-me. It always felt like a template of a familiar canvas that hasn’t yet been painted.

There is this hunger, this restlessness inside of me
And it knows that you’re no stranger, you’re my gravity

The hollow that lives inside a person who has learned that the people who are supposed to stay sometimes can’t. A room that keeps itself ready for the leaving.

A body that has learned to want, and try, and need, and give cautiously. Yet wholeheartedly all at the same time.

I am wanting, I am needing you
here.
Inside the absence of fear

I didn’t know then what I was rehearsing for when I was a teenager on my stained carpeted floor; barefoot and finding whatever version of comfort and pride I could from the strings and threads of what existed inside my bubble.

I was thirty nine years old when the people who made me left me. It happened in its own particular way, and also in the way these things happen. Seeping, secreting and stealthy. And then all at once. The way the bones of a house you thought was solid reveals it was just built from the mineral dust it was always meant to be.

I spent thirty nine years believing I belonged somewhere, to someone, and then I just didn’t any longer. The rug doesn’t just get pulled when that type of loss finds you. The floor goes with it.

The foundation, the roof, the walls, the furniture. It all goes and then you’re left with a chance to find what family means again. To hold on to what you already have. To notice when someone comes to you unexpectedly. Like an avalanche and a quiet remembering all at once.

You stand in the middle of a crumbling and sift through the rubble and decide what will compost the land you discovered together, what you’re meant to take with you, and what you’re meant to fight to keep… or hope you’re worthy of their fight.

My boy is eighteen now and his bedroom floor is slowly becoming visible again as things migrate into boxes and bags. He moves through this the way he moves through everything. Quietly, deliberately, without production.

On his own time.

My boy has always been this way. The funniest person in the room who never needs the room to know it. The one who has already thought the thing before anyone else has started to think it.

And if you can make him laugh, you have won his heart. He gives it away willingly at that moment. He got that from me. Laughter is the ultimate release into relaxation. It’s admitting you trust where you are and everything is ok.

My boy was the first person who ever stayed.

And I made him. Out of knowing and will and the dust of dreams that kept ending before they ever finished for me, I made this boy. This man. This person.

I created my own people to feel what family means.

And in two months he leaves for college. He’s ready and hesitant all at once. Just like he entered this world and left my body, he is leaving my home. I know the difference now between someone leaving and someone leaving you.

I built him to go. That’s the whole point of him. That’s the whole point of me.

And the whole point of me turned out to be easier to recognize than I ever could have known on that stained carpet with my six string and my bare feet and my rehearsing for a grief I hadn't been handed yet. I have always been training for the leaving.

My beautiful, darling boy came into this world needing everything, and now has everything he needs inside of him. I did that.

We did that.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for being here.
I love you. I miss you💋

We’re all haunted houses.

That’s what he wrote me back after I sent him the song Ghost, by Sigrid.

A friend had sent it to me a couple weeks ago and I fell deeply and instantly in love with it.

He and I talked about how gorgeous the concept of being someone’s ghost is. How no matter the story behind a meaningful love, we’re tethered to one another even by shadow.

I’ll always be your ghost.

Memories are all haunts.

Haunts are memories of all the people who have visited us.

We are built, every one of us, out of the people who we have let inside. We maintain these spaces that hold them. We dust the rooms. We leave lights on. We decide what to exorcise and what we can’t bring ourselves to remove.

We move through life haunted
and haunting.

But the haunting is not something left behind. It’s not the faint impression of a body in a bed long made. Not something that fades with enough time and tidying.

It moves. It exhales in the walls. It knows your name and the particular way you say it when you’re afraid.

Memory is not residue.
It is residence.

And the things we cannot let go of do not wait politely. They pace the length of us. They know which floorboards creak and where the light comes through. They drag their weight through the passageways we’ve tried to forget we built.

We hold them. And in holding them, we are slowly, quietly, and entirely reshaped by what we refuse to put down.

What we harbor, harbors us.

If you believe in ghosts and haunts, then you believe they linger because they’re waiting to be freed of something.

But love doesn’t free itself.

We can’t let them go.

We just can’t.

Love doesn’t always heal and fasten. It can carve you open without mercy.

Some rooms in our haunted house of self are there for everyone to see. We paint them bright and set the table and call it living. But there are wings of ourselves we keep battened. Windows we keep shuttered. Doors we pass a hundred times a day without opening.
Not because we’ve forgotten what’s inside.

Because we haven’t.

We are keepers and creators of our own haunting. We choose the relics. The photograph left face-down but not thrown away. The voicemail saved so long the phone it lived on is long dead. The t-shirt that has lost the smell but we keep reaching for it anyway, praying the scent will haunt us again.

And the ghosts. They aren’t frightening because they’re strange. They frighten because they are familiar. Because they wear the faces of who we were before. Of who we loved before. Of who we thought we’d become by now.

We built the doors here in this house. We hung them on their hinges. We never greased them. And we still act surprised when they swing open in the night.

We are all haunted.

But we are also the haunting.

We move through familiar halls of bodies we once held. We are woven into their walls. We clatter things they cannot name. We breathe cold spots in rooms they can’t stop returning to. We lie next to them in bed because we haven’t learned how to sleep without being wrapped within them.

It’s what we do when someone has left their shadow inside of us.

To be human is to be inhabited, and to inhabit. To carry the dead and the living and the lost. To be a house without blueprints. A layout unknown to anyone. Not even yourself.

Maybe this is just what it means to have loved anything at all. To have let someone walk through you and leave their toeprints in the carpet. We were never going to come away unchanged. We were never going to be empty houses. We shouldn’t be.

We were built for this. These hearts full of ghosts, these selves made of returns and presences and lights left on in the dark.

A life well lived is a life haunted.

Every person who mattered rearranged the furniture a little. Moved things we’re still looking for. Left doors open we’re still trying to close. Left some open we’re grateful for.

And you should always leave the light on. Welcome the ghosts, the memories and haunts and people who built you. You are a haunted vessel, and you should be. Even when the bones of it creak and moan more than settle.

Because a house full of ghosts is still full. And you have loved enough to carry it.

To be haunted is to be the proof that you mattered. Its weight is the specific gravity of having loved something you let inside.

This was inspired by a conversation with . We both wrote a piece on the topic. You can find his here.

And the song was sent to me by the incredible

I love you 💋

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Healing looks different on everyone. There is no right or wrong way to do it. And I’m grateful when I find people to walk with on a shared path.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with !

Love you all 💋

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I’ve known my daughter for lifetimes. She came out as someone I’ve already loved, many times before. Meeting her was a revisiting. A returning. A remembering of souls.

Raising her and watching her shift and evolve has been the greatest treasure this life could have given me. I’ve never pushed her towards anything; she has always known who she is. I’ve merely walked beside her and given her permission to keep moving towards finding herself.

My girl has always reminded me to marvel at the hidden and overlooked things. When she was small, a walk in the woods was stopping to notice fallen petals, or broken stones shaped in a way that made her brain sparkle. She loved rocks and sticks and leaves. Collected them in her tiny hands and created games for the nature surrounding her. Rocks would be mountains. Sticks, bridges. Leaves would be hats or flags or blankets for ants.

She has always seen things other children don’t, and things adults have forgotten to look for.

She cries at movies when the hero’s heart is aching, but laughs when the dinosaur rips a face off a man.

She is full of mixture and spice. Of peace and tornadoes. Her mind is the most magical land one could ever get to visit.

She is not easy. She never has been and never will be. She is complex and booming and filled with words she must let go of immediately. She is alive and proving it at every turn.

The world is not built for girls like her, and I have always known it. It wasn’t built for me either, and it took me breaking away from the family that caged me to recognize myself within it. Loving her has made me grow bigger than I was permitted to grow. Raising her is raising myself. I am better because of her. I am me because I got to be with her in this life.

I have given her permission to become fully herself and in doing so, I have found pieces of me I was never shown. She taught me where to find them.

She listens to the people, places and things we didn’t think had a voice. She hears things people have stopped listening for. She is made of magic, and I’ve always known it.

She is smarter than I ever tried to be, than I ever thought I could be, and I learn from her daily.

I knew that when I gave her this name, she would have big things to say. She is here to keep changing things and make them better. To right the wrongs and speak for the silenced. To make more beautiful things. Art and music and cookies. She is here to teach and speak and create.

She is my child and my growing creation. An ever-changing prism of expanding curiosity.

She is Wander and Wonder. Allusion and Illusion. My never Idle Idol.

When you move about life today, stop, even for just a moment, and try to see something the way my girl does. Listen to someone like they have secrets. Let yourself learn something new.

Be kind. Be present. Be child.

I love you 💋

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I was always homesick at home. Not for somewhere else exactly, but for something I couldn’t name. An atmosphere I’d never breathed. A room that felt like it had been waiting for me. I looked for it in the cluttered corners of that house and never found it.

So I learned to carry my unease quietly. I got very good at performing belonging while feeling like a guest in my own life. I smiled at the right moments. I shrank at the right moments. I became fluent in the language of a family that never quite learned mine.

And eventually I stopped waiting for them to.

That is not the sad part of this story. That is the beginning of the good part.

The kind of loneliness that lives inside the wrong family has its own accent. It is not the clean ache of missing someone. It is the dull, persistent pain of being unseen by people who are supposed to know you best. But instead were people who looked at you and saw something inconvenient and something to be corrected.

I was not who they wanted. I was never going to be. And the grace I had to eventually grant myself was understanding that this was their failure, not my flaw.

When you grow up never feeling like your feet are firmly planted on anything safe, your definition of home becomes more flexible. You make the decision that if you want to feel what home is meant to feel like, then you better be creative.

It’s why people become nomads. They make a religion of not arriving. They choose the in-between permanently. Because if you never land anywhere, you never have to feel what it costs not to belong. They learn to love the motion because stillness asks too much of them.

And it’s why some never leave a place that has never felt like home. They decide early that the wanting is too expensive, so they avoid that feeling of home-ness, or never try to find it. And they spend a lifetime making sure they never want it badly enough to feel its absence.

But home is not a place. It doesn’t have to be. It is not the house you grew up in or the city where your things are or the zip code on your license. Home is a felt sense. It is the specific ease of being known without having to perform or explain or apologize for the full, complicated weight of yourself.

I was homeless for a long time.

And I’ve built a family and a home now for myself. And it’s beautiful. I’m so grateful to have what I have gotten to have after losing all that I have lost. And I thought I was done. And then, within the span of two months, the universe did something generous and slightly absurd. It sent me two people. They both arrived through a screen, across many states, and without fanfare.

And the recognition was immediate. Marrow-deep. The kind that doesn’t ask for references or a waiting period.

There is something quietly radical about that. About finding your people online, through the beautiful accident of algorithm and timing and whatever invisible frequency you put out into the world that sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone else is tuned to.

We are told to be skeptical of digital intimacy, as if geography and a third dimension is what makes love real. But these two people know me, like they’ve always known me. Like no one ever quite has. They see the version of me that exists underneath the clatter, and they have never once asked me to be smaller or different or easier to hold.

That is home.

I have this particular kind of ease with them both. But there’s a kind of ease that feels less like a new relationship and more like a long exhale with one. Like I’ve been holding my breath for 44 years and I finally have space in my chest. He feels like a place I have always been trying to get back to without knowing it. There is a returning inside this friendship that defies logic or time, and we stopped trying to define it months ago.

It just is. It’s just us.

It’s even in that mug he chose that says #1 Dad, which is the right amount of dumb funny we thrive on.

The other arrived like a mirror. A recognition in a different key. She’s a kindred little thing, the kind of friend who holds your whole self without flinching. I can tell her anything and she carries it close to her heart and won’t put it down until we’re ready to laugh at it and make it all feel better. She sees the sharp edges and the soft ones and loves both with the same steadiness. I did not know I needed that until I had it, and now I can’t imagine the architecture of my days without her in them.

I’m silly with both. I cry with both. I hold them both, and they hold me. I can come to them with darkness and with light. With glitter and grunge. It’s dancing to Whitney Houston, and inside jokes that no one else would find funny and we still don’t know why we do, and emojis that only we know the meaning of. It’s pure, unfiltered, 100% proof good love.

I am not homesick anymore.

I am not without grief for the family I deserved and didn’t get, for the child who spent years feeling like a stranger in every room. That grief is real and I don’t try to rush it out the door. But it lives alongside something else now — something that is larger and warmer and louder.

Gratitude.

A giant, spilling-over bucket of gratitude for the people I found, or who found me, or who the universe magneted together because the math finally worked out.

I carry my home with me now. It lives in the specific feeling of being seen by people who didn’t have to see me. It lives in the ease of a conversation that goes four hours without anyone noticing. It lives in a kitchen table in a house I was welcomed into like I’d always belonged there. Where I felt like a daughter for the first time in my life.

It lives in easy silences and in all the somethings about what happens when we talk.

Home is not an address. It never was. It is the people who make the world feel survivable. The ones who make it feel, on the very best days, like something worth showing up for.

I found mine late. I found them across a screen and across a table and across the particular quiet knowing that only exists between people who have decided to keep each other.

That is enough. That is, it turns out, everything.

I love you all so much. Thank you for being here, and being you 💋

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There’s a certain kind of architecture that exists nowhere else. Not in churches, not hospitals, not even in the lobbies of hotels where lovers begin and end their journeys in miniature.

The airport is its own country. It has its own solar system. Its own timezone. Its own bylaws and infrastructure. Fluorescent and brutally honest and merciless, it spotlights everything you’re used to keeping soft.

You know the drive there by heart. The exits, the merge lanes, the particular way the sky reveals itself at the terminals. Your hands are easy on the wheel, and that ease is a special lie to yourself.

Arrivals is the happy place. The place harboring possibilities and excitement and glee. The people waiting there have an overflowing quality to them. They’re checking their phones, they drift toward the exit, unsure of their placement. They look up every time a car approaches.

And when the right car does, and you’re met with the face you’ve had to survive by with the crumbs of photos and texted words for weeks, something in the area shifts. Suddenly you are the main act without realizing you were on display. You both rush to each other and hold tightly to something you thought could only exist in the wildest of someone else’s dreams.

You kiss. Your first real actual kiss, on display for an audience of weary travelers and other lovers meeting for the first time.

And you’re envied and celebrated by them all.

Airports hold this sanctitude and precious eggshell of firsts.

And also lasts.

Or maybe just pauses.
Lingering grey plains of waiting, until the next time your skin can touch.

Departures exist cruelly in the same space as the hope in arrivals do.

There is a merciless mocking in how ordinary it all looks. The same walls dare to secure you. The same coffee that was forgiven for its failure now mocks you in its flavor. The same announcements overhead, detached and procedural.

You say goodbye in the car. You remove the bags from the trunk and the sky opens up and dares to compete with your tears. And you’re standing under a rain that feels like a sign from the sunny skies that you are making a mistake.

And there is a moment where both of your hands are touching the same suitcase handle as if it’s the only thing keeping you upright. A moment where the ordinary mechanics of goodbye have to somehow contain something they were never designed to hold. The hug is too long and not long enough. Tears fall onto the lips of a kiss that is never meant to say anything other than,

I am here.

There is always something left unsaid, and both of you know it, and neither of you says it. All you can say is I love you. The same phrase you have repeated every other minute for days now feels heavy as stones and holds more meaning than it ever has.

This evading of other words is its own kind of conversation.

You watched them go through the doors the last time. And now it’s your turn. You mouth the words I love you over and over from the curb while their car becomes just another car in a line. Leaving you with your lips not knowing what to taste anymore. Your hands no longer feeling necessary.

The distance has already begun its quiet work.

How can one building, one built on the faith that we can be held safely in the sky among the clouds, be so giving and also so thieving. Arrivals and Departures, sharing walls and escalators and the same recycled air. Joy and grief as neighboring rooms.

You ride the elevator between them.

What the airport understands, that most places do not, is that love is measured in distance. That wanting someone to stay and being glad they came are the same feeling wearing different clothes. That the anticipation of arrival and the dread of departure are not opposites.

They are the same ache, timed differently.

Their car pulls away from the curb and merges back into traffic and you are already counting. Not consciously. But the number is there, somewhere. The number of days, the number of weeks, the number of times you will look at your phone before the next time you find yourself at another airport. You hold the number in your chest like a shell found by a child on the shore.

Hopeful and delicate.

The drive home after an arrival is long in the best way. Time moves slowly and allows the love in that car to be nurtured and felt with every mile. Hands are never parted and kisses are shared at every stoplight.

The drive home after a departure is long in the sad way. There isn’t a hand to hold and there won’t be for a long while. At every stoplight, you touch your lips so they’re less alone. Your fingers hold the wheel like it’s the only thing maintaining your balance. You struggle to sit in the silence that your sobs interrupt. You try music, but every song says,

Turn back around, you fool. You left your heart on that curb and you’re moving in the wrong direction.

The airport knows things about you that most people never will. It has seen you at your most undone and your most luminous. Your most overfilled and your most empty.

It keeps no record, and it keeps every record. Every arrival, every departure, every careful goodbye is pressed into its indifferent floors.

You hope to approach arrivals again soon. You don’t know when, but that hope is all that you have so you hold it with the tenderest of hands so its chest is free to breathe. But with every arrival, you know there is a departure waiting. You hope the next arrival is as exciting as the last and that the pending departure never tints that excitement in a color that takes away from how brilliant it is.

Some places hold us whether we want them to or not. The airport doesn’t care. It never has. That’s not its job. And somehow that’s the most comforting thing about it. It has held everyone in the same way. With stability and strong arms. Watching you cry and laugh and fall apart and come together. Every longing looks the same under the light of an airport.

You’re never truly alone inside of one. But it’s the place that can make you feel the loneliest when it’s what watches you say goodbye to someone you’re never meant to part with.

Some places hold us whether we want them to or not.

You learn this slowly. Then all at once. Then every time.

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I didn’t choose to be a daughter. None of us choose to be born. Some of us were willed into existence; whether it was an easy journey, or heartbreak after heartbreak until wishes and wants turned that break into a heartbeat. Some of us were meticulously planned; thousands and thousands of dollars and painful injections, or long waits on lists just hoping for someone somewhere to produce a child that needs to be taken care of.

And some of them were like me. A late night drunken, lazy mistake.

I’m not ungrateful to have a life. I love being alive. But I never asked to be here. I never asked for the title, daughter. I didn’t audition for the role. I didn’t apply for the job. I know I can say that I earned it… but that’s only because my version of daughter was so very hard.

Being a daughter was never easy. Maybe I missed the instruction manual, but the version I was given was a lot of work. It was confusing; rules changing every day, and I never knew what facets of my daughterhood were allowed to be shown and which were meant to be hidden for another time.

Being a daughter felt like being cloaked in a metal suit I was expected to grow into without any direction. And for almost four decades, I wore my daughter suit. I wore it when its sharp edges cut me and bled me weak. I wore it through love deserts and blame monsoons. I polished it when it rusted; mended it when it began to fall apart. It was the only thing linking me to these people I was told to love and who were supposed to love me. This ill-fitting, cumbersome covering is all I had to try to feel safe.

But I never did grow into my daughter suit. And it slowly began to suffocate me. The very thing I was put on this planet to be turned against me and started to steal my life.

I am no longer a daughter. And I will never be one again.

That’s the thing that no one tells you about choosing estrangement. There is a lot of loss; even when you’re the one who made the decision to stay away from the people who brought you here. You can feel happier and healthier than ever, and confident in your decision every day of your life. You can go weeks without thinking of these people; you can forget their very existence. You can recall moments and memories that feel like ghosts of yesterday.

But it’s not just the loss of people and future memories that have buried themselves in the deepest of graves. It’s the loss of a title that you can never recover that continues to haunt.

You can become a wife and not be one, and then become one all over again. You can become a mother several times over, even if loss finds you somewhere in the middle of your motherness. You can become a friend as many times as you wish, and move in and out of friending with as many people as life allows you.

But a daughter is meant to be forever. And when it breaks; when it stops breathing and dies, you can never become one again. A daughter and a mother, a daughter and a father — those are bonds that are meant to be strong and evergreen. Implied, even. An everlasting coupling that stands the test of time when all of the other relationships were choices. A bright and guiding star in the night whenever you need to remember home.

But for me, the choice that I never made became a choice I can never have again.

In the house I grew up in, love came with receipts. Invoices were kept and purchases were tallied to be used for battle. Both of the people who raised me were narcissists. Are narcissists. Unlike daughter, that’s not a title you grow out of. And when he applied alcohol to it, he became evil in a loud way. His temper was terrible. His fists were clenched more than they were open to another.

He blamed hitting me as a child on ‘the times’. As if punishing a child who wet the bed with the strike of a hand was ever acceptable. The amount of nights I woke up in wetness terrified of being in trouble, and snuck to find a towel to lie on are uncountable.

Sheets in that house were never washed. From childhood to teenagerhood, I cannot recall one piece of bedding being laundered. I didn’t even know you were supposed to clean your sheets or towels.

So I slept in my childhood mistakes every single night under that roof.

You’ve made your bed, now you must lie in it, a common idiom in that house, was literal for me.

Her damage was less anger-fueled and more emotionally applied. She was a proficient pout and a marvelous martyr who couldn’t be bothered for accountability. Everything was about her and done to her. Everything was rotten unless it was hers. Her damage was insidious and didn’t need to bruise to be felt. And I was the daughter who was never good enough, yet always being told to dim any light that escaped and threatened to compete with hers.

Everything was my fault in my version of daughter, and my worth lived entirely in being the Feelings Manager of the family.

I was the reason and the cause for the bad day, and the fixer and the keeper of the peace all at the same time. I learned how to code switch at such an early age, that I can sometimes still feel dizzy within myself. I learned to read a room at age five, to gauge that father’s mood by the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, or how the backdoor sounded when it closed beneath my bedroom. I knew how to contort myself into whatever shape was least likely to set something off.

I was good at it, too. Disturbingly good. So good that for a long time, I confused it for love.

But the problem with being the one who fixes everything that you are told you caused is that eventually, you run out of things you’re willing to break yourself against.

I never felt the people who raised me liked each other, but they said the word love a lot. To each other, to me. I had a lot of spoken love in my house, and to the untrained eye, we looked like we meant it. I never knew what true love was in that house, but I knew we say the word at the end of a phone call.

They fought a lot and they laughed a lot. When he stopped drinking, they never seemed to enjoy each other as much. An alcoholic who never labeled himself as one, he made the choice to stop drinking before he drank himself to cancer. She resented his sobering and tried hard to get him to fall back off the wagon. She would try to bribe him with sexual favors to get him to drink again.

Last I heard he had throat cancer. I was to blame for that as well. Was it the breaking of my daughtering that made him drink himself to cancer? Or was the damage already done? I’ll never know, and I don’t wish to.

The pandemic broke a lot of things. A lot of things that didn’t need to be broken and should never have bent to begin with. But it helped break up my family, and I’m glad that it did.

The pandemic helped break the last thread of a relationship I had been grieving my entire life. It had been dead for so long, and should never have been alive in the first place. I just didn’t realize I was woven into such a feeble fabric until they left for four months without a word, and I felt… nothing.

That nothing was so much of a something. I’d never felt nothing before. I had spent my entire life carrying such a heavy load for these people and the very moment they were gone, I felt weightless. Unfettered. I felt without something for the first time in a life where I was always with and withholding so very much. The absence of them was such beautiful nothingness, I immediately knew I could never be without it again.

So that’s when it all ended. That’s when it broke. It’s both a long story and a short one. It’s easy to explain and simultaneously requires a translator. But it needed to end and I’m thankful I was given the opportunity to usher it to a close.

Their version of the story is different. Their story is one that helps them continue to live a life of the blameless, heartbroken grandparents who lost contact with their only grandchildren for no other reason than their daughter is cruel and heartless.

It’s not always easy hearing lies about yourself. I’ve heard them all the way these things tend to travel — carried back to you on someone else’s breath like smoke from a fire you didn’t start. There are stares and glares and whispers and a lot of people have fallen from my life because of their story. It’s a small town, and that family I was a part of used to be the star.

I walked away from a legacy. Slow motion, with their smoke and flames rising behind me, I walked away from languid nobility and never looked back.

The lies don’t bother me much because I know the truth, and so do they. But they need the lies. And I don’t need to wave the truth like a flag.

Being an adult orphan by choice is complicated. It’s both the easiest and the hardest all at the same time. It’s easy because breathing is no longer painful. My joints and heart don’t ache from the continued contortion of trying to shape myself appropriately. I no longer perform illusions and tricks and emotional acrobatics during every phone call, every visit, every holiday. I no longer lose myself a little bit every single day.

That’s the easiest part.

It only becomes a little hard when I realize that I used to have a title that I don’t have anymore, and I can never do anything to get that title back.

I can’t force myself into daughterdom. And that’s just a weird fact I now embody. The moments when I realize this are small, but detectable. They come through me like a tiny ocean ripple that merely changes the shape of the sand beneath your toes. It’s not enough to move me, to pull me under or steal my breath. It’s just enough to make me notice something is different now.

Maybe I’ll hear the word, daughter, and it feels like a foreign language. Maybe I’ll fill out a form and remember that my next of kin doesn’t exist. I’ll watch a father hold his daughter’s hand on a walk, or play with his grandchildren in a park. And something in me softly notes the loss of a thing I never had, but know I deserve.

I don’t want it with them. The stability and comfort of what having a parent should feel like… I don’t want that with those people. But I know I should have had good parents. And I know I should still have them now. I am worthy of having people who created me want to stick around and see how this thing turns out.

But that’s not what I have. I re-raised myself after they left and did a better job than they ever did. I like who I am now. I’m nothing like them. I never was, but I tried to be. And that almost killed me.

Something that’s hard to explain, yet still easily possible to do is — I grieved parents that are still here. That’s the special kind of madness about this type of estrangement. Last I heard, they are alive somewhere. Living their lives under the umbrella of a lie they clutch so desperately. And I am here, living freely with the ghost of a label I will never be again.

Nothing I can do will change that. And as strange as that may be — just simply knowing that’s a door that is forever closed — I could never, ever go back. Even if I did, I wouldn’t be a daughter. I would be their project again. Their emotional landfill and their first aid kit.

I guess I was never actually a daughter to begin with.

I’ve made my peace with how my life is, was, and will end up being. And I want to be clear about what peace means. Peace is a word that gets romanticized into a fallacy. Peace isn’t the absence of grief. It’s not pretending that whatever version of this loss is isn’t a stranger that occasionally arrives unannounced and sits down at the table.

It’s not pretending there wasn’t any sort of loss to begin with, even if the loss feels like a win.

Peace is the knowing that I made the right choice. And I would do it again and again and again.

Peace is in my children, who get to grow up in a house where love doesn’t come with a contingency plan.

Peace is the life I built on the other side of a hurricane.

Peace is the woman I became when I stopped performing the show of Daughter and started being myself.

I used to be someone’s daughter. A name and a title that I never asked to have.

And now I am just me. Peacefully, me.

peace. And fully me.

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There’s a particular kind of cool that returns to us in the spring. It’s not the same as the cold that winter brings. Winter cold has its own certainty, its own commitment. The spring returning of cool arrives like an apology. It lands softly through a window you forgot was open. It’s a reminder that the world is still turning, still deciding. Still negotiating with itself, still figuring out who it wants to be.

Sunday feels the same.

I see you in this Sunday, in this reluctant cool, and I can see the storm behind your eyes. You are somewhere far away from here. You are running the numbers, rehearsing the disasters, cataloguing every possible way that the thing you want could fail to become the thing that you need. Your worry is a full-time job and you are giving it your everything.

I know this place in you. I’ve stood at its edges and called your name.

Come back to me.

Come back to me, not because the worry isn’t real. It is. Not because what you’re afraid of isn’t possible. It might be.

Come back to me because you are standing in the doorway of something beautiful. And you cannot feel the warmth of it because you are so busy noticing the dark.

Look at this Sunday, my love. Look at what it’s doing for us. The light is coming through, tentative and gold. And the trees haven’t decided what to be yet. Mid-bloom, mid-commitment, one more cool morning away from second-guessing themselves.

That’s what this is. What the world feels like, what these moments you fear feel like. The world itself is suspended between what it was and what it is becoming. It hasn’t fallen apart. It isn’t broken. It’s just pausing. Breathing.

It’s here.

Come back to the window, my love. Let me give you something warm to hold.

Let us sit together in this cool returning, in the particular quiet of a Sunday that hasn’t asked you of anything. Let me be the thing that is not afraid. I can hold the steadiness while you feel what you need to feel.

You are not behind. You are not failing. You are not the worst version of all the possibilities you keep rehearsing.

You are here.

On a Sunday. In the warmth of the cool. With me.

We are here.

The joy you are looking for is not somewhere you have to get to. You don’t have to plan and pack for joy. It is not a destination you’ll arrive at once you’ve worried your way through every obstacle.

Joy is not waiting on the other side of certainty. It is right here. It’s in this light, in this embrace. In the way the air smells when spring takes a step back and lets you feel, for just a moment, what it was like before everything asked so much of you.

I know you can’t stop the worry all at once. I’m not asking you to. I’m only asking you to let me lie beside it with you. You don’t have to hold it alone, I’ll hold it with you so there is still space for something sweet and still and good.

Come back to the window.

The light is doing something extraordinary, and you’re going to want to see it.

good morning, sunday beauties. i love you 💋

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This is Dear Abbey,
The Girl’s Guide for the Good Guy.

Dear Abbey,

I’m not in great shape. I’m not in bad shape, I don’t think. Honestly, I’m not even sure I really understand the subtle differences between the two. I go to the gym everyday. I eat fairly clean. But I’m not ripped or shredded. Despite my best efforts I’m still doughy around the middle. I’m average at best, I’d say. The women I’ve been with have said they like the way I look, but I’ve never really believed them. It feels like the polite thing to say to someone you’re in a relationship with. It makes me wonder, what does a woman actually like, look for, and find attractive about a man’s body. I’ve never heard this discussed much, and I’d love to know.

Thanks for your help,

Shapeless-in-Seattle

Hi, Shapeless in Seattle! Ok, cute pseudonym. I like you already. Personality and wit are highly important in this matter, so this is good to know. Thank you for being here and asking such a personal question. And honestly, this is one of my favorite topics to cover!

First of all, you sound like you’re very healthy and I’d like to applaud you on that. What we put into our bodies, and how we move them, doesn’t always have us looking like what other people look like who do the same things. And that can be incredibly frustrating. So, I’d just like to firstly congratulate you on what seems like a solid relationship with health and fitness.

I’ll be a little bit scientific on this first, if you don’t mind. I have studied nutrition and fitness my entire life and have a few wisdom nuggets I can offer… plus, I’m wearing glasses in my photo so you know I’m serious.

Body composition (the ratio of fat mass to lean mass of your muscle, bones and organs) plays such a huge factor in our physical shape. Because muscle tissue burns more calories at rest than fat tissue, someone with more lean muscle mass will naturally burn more calories daily, which leads to more fat loss.

You said you go to the gym everyday, that’s great! If you don’t already, I highly encourage weight lifting and strength training. Muscle takes a lot of energy to maintain, build and perform. And the more muscle you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which means the more calories you’re burning just being sedentary.

And I hope you’re not gauging your progress via a scale, because that’s such a tricky metric. It’s just one number that doesn’t factor in your muscle, fat, and water. You could see that number go down… but it might be due to muscle loss, which would be slowing down your metabolism and making it harder to maintain long term weight loss.

Also, muscle is denser and takes up less physical space than fat, so two people with the same weight (and even ingesting the same foods) can look significantly different. A higher muscle-to-fat ratio usually results in a leaner and more toned physique at the very same body weight.

Genetics also play such a large role here. As do hormones. Our genetic makeup determines where we store fat, what your natural metabolism is, and your capacity to build muscle. And hormone balance (insulin, cortisol, testosterone) is very important in how our bodies use energy.

Now, we can’t change a lot of that… especially the genetics part. But we can control cortisol. Cortisol is the hormone that’s released during stress. And chronic stress triggers the release of a whole lot of it, which leads to weight gain due to a few factors. It causes us to overeat with an increased appetite, it signals our body to crave foods higher in sugar and/or fat in the search for comfort, and it encourages extra fat storage… particularly around the belly.

You mentioned being ‘doughy around the middle’, and part of me wonders what your relationship to daily stress is. I wonder if you could adapt some practices to potentially lower your stress, and therefore the high amounts of cortisol being released in your body? Just a thought to think on, if that’s applicable at all ;-).

So, now that the science has been taken care of, I’d like to switch gears. Take off my medical hat and put my lady one on. (Don’t worry, the glasses stay, so you can still trust me. Also both hats are cute, so we’re all good here.)

Social media, literature, film and tv have always depicted ‘desirable men’ as burly and, using your words, ripped or shredded. These men are presented this way to rescue us poor little ladies from danger, dragons and despair. It’s a necessary trope to keep us women small and incapable of self regulation…

But that’s not really why you’re here, is it?

Look, SS (can I call you SS?). That’s all a giant, smelly crock of dumb. But it’s one example of a story we’ve all been told a million times and no-one has attempted to debunk it. We’re all just a bunch of sheep-minded folks who go along with bad plans because it’s just what’s laid out before us. And I’d like that to change.

I’ll do my best.

As women, we may marvel at the muscled man on the beach taking his shirt off. It may catch our eye, and we may even linger on him a bit. We may giggle and blush and nudge each other about it.

But we’re staring at art. We’re staring at a sculpture behind a glass case. We can’t get too close to it, or god forbid touch it, or else it crumbles. It’s too fragile of a state for any longevity. It’s a fleeting image that draws our attention for a moment, and then we move on.

It’s a quick bump in the bathroom versus the slow burn of feelgoodness that we’re really after.

Every woman wants something that lasts. Even if we’re moving through some easy targets because it’s easy at the moment… deep down, every woman wants something to stick around and never leave.

That’s not what we see when we see ripped and shredded.

Women all have a real, under-bellied fear of you leaving us for another newer model. So we are so very attracted to stability.

Society may tell you that you need to be big and perfectly toned for us to want to sleep with you… but it tells us that we lose our shine before we even hit pre mid-life.

So we don’t look at a shiny, buffed, fast moving vehicle and think ‘forever’. We think… oh that’s fun to look at. Cool.

And then we get distracted and move on.

Here’s the secret, SS. What women really want, in the physical sense, is a man who looks like he takes care of himself.

We want your toenails clean and clipped. We want your fingernails un-hanged. Neither have to be polished and paid for, but just please have them tidy.

We don’t wanna be shivved whilst snogging.

We want you to put some effort into the way you keep your body hair. We don’t need you to be dolphin’ed, just look like you don’t want someone to get lost in there.

We want you to smell good.

Jesus, please smell good.

And I mean EVERYWHERE.

From tongue to testicle, pay attention.

We don’t even need you to wear cologne. But if you do, Heavens-to-Betsy, keep that shit light. We want you to enter the room first. Not Drakkar Noir on his steed.

Soap is just fine.

Use it.

And a wash cloth. That’s the least amount of exfoliation you should be doing.

No one wants to spoon a stinky skink.

We want you to put some effort into how you dress. But please don’t spend more time than we did getting ready.

Same goes for hair, if you have it. And if you don’t? Please don’t worry about that… bald is incredibly sexy if you’re doing everything else right. But if your hair is greasy or crunchy from products?… we out. We want something to run our hands through and grab onto, not snap off or stain our clothing with. And again… if you’re bald? We’ll find something else to hold on to, don’t you worry. And it will probably be somewhere in that doughy center vicinity.

We’re very grabby when there are things in front of us to grab.

So, as far as clothes… have a ‘uniform’ that you feel good in and wear it proudly. Change it up to keep things interesting, but we don’t want a runway show every day.

Look like you can handle a wrinkle and a shoe scuff and not have a conniption. We like you weathered and unwavering.

Beyond that, we don’t want to spoon Thor. No woman wants to even ladle that.

That guy with the 9% body fat with abs you can play music on is of no real use to us outside of the window display.

And here’s why. Because for women, it’s very rarely only about one thing. And it’s almost always about the emotional, mental and history behind what we’re addressing at the moment.

That guy with the big muscles and the extra tight skin wrapped around each and every one, spends more time in the gym than he does with us. We’re very aware of that. That guy wants to talk macros and leg day instead of feelings. That guy doesn’t notice us like you do. He’s only noticing himself.

Because his body is his priority. It’s his job. And he’s a very dedicated and loyal employee.

Shapeless-In-Seattle, I’ve been in the fitness world, and I know what it takes to keep up that level of ripped physique.

It’s hard as hell. So, much respect to the diligence and dedication... I mean no disrespect to the folks who live their life that way.

I used to be one.

But they aren’t happy. Not in the real, lasting way. They aren’t happy because they aren’t eating enough carbohydrates to give them the energy to be happy.

And they’re constantly chasing the dragon. Constantly nitpicking and tweaking certain body parts, never quite fulfilled.

Their life is their body. And that job is full-time. So they have no time left for anyone else. And they certainly have no time for fun.

What a woman really wants in a man’s physique is the knowledge that they care about themselves enough to put in some effort to be healthy and strong. But they’re soft enough around the edges to bend to us.

We like a little pooch. It shows us you don’t take yourself too seriously. We want a real body that knows what to do with ours.

Not untouchable art.

We want to cuddle you without getting stabbed by a hip flexor.

We want to go out to dinner with you and not sit across from a Tupperware of steamed broccoli and poached chicken breast.

We want to sleep in with you and not roll over to an empty bed-half because you chose the gym over morning sex again.

That little dough in your middle, SS? Not only do we not mind it, we like it. It shows us you’re real and sturdy.

That dough is stronger than any deltoid could ever be.

It’s stable.

Because you’re here.

The super fit man on the beach is a postcard.

You’re the novel.

I want to tell you that these women who’ve told you that they like the way you look?

Listen to them. If they are still coming back to you, they mean it. If they continued to climb in bed and touch you and ask to see more of you, they mean it.

And isn’t that what you’re looking for after all? The woman in your bed to accept all of you fully and truly?

That’s all that we want too, SS. We all just want to be loved and accepted for exactly who we are… with the wiggle and jiggle room to be able to grow together.

I appreciate you and your vulnerability here, Shapeless-In-Seattle. I can tell a lot about a man in how they choose to frame a sensitive question.

Your heart is doughy, and it is strong. And so are you.

Both things can be true.

And that counts for a lot in what women want. I promise you that. The right woman is the one who sees all of you and accepts all of you.

I promise she’s out there if you haven’t already found her.

So, yeah. I imagine your shape is just right, SS.

Take care of you xo

For any questions you want answered by me for this new column, either comment below or DM me. Or ask a friend to DM me for you. I’ll keep you anonymous; you’re safe here.

This is Dear Abbey,
The Girl’s Guide for the Good Guy.

And if you like to listen to girls talk more about boys and stuff, you should absolutely subscribe to my podcast, with my bestie .

I love you 💋

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The rain came in the night, and stayed like an old friend.

We watched it threaten. You and me and the trees before us, quiet and loud with a knowing only we know.

The air was warm enough to linger, and cool enough to keep us still.

Wine and whiskey went slowly; words took their time: the kind of conversation that has no edges, only space blooming.

We left the rain outside, my ringed finger touching yours.
Skin and sleep beckoned.

I heard it again before I opened my eyes, soft but insistent on the glass, falling water asking permission to stay.

You were still sleeping, last night’s arm reaching for me, unbothered by the light sneaking in.

The house held us the way old houses do, creaking and familiar, full of our easy silence.

Your arm found me, hair unruly and smelling of you.

Without a word, our skin whispered good mornings and remembered good nights.

And that was everything we needed.

One Ring touching another and never ending: an ouroboros of love, sitting in that silent ease we have grown together.

Outside, the world was cancelled.

Softly postponed.

Good morning, beautiful people. I love you💋

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I’m the button you push when you need something fast.
Steady, firm, you can finger my margins and I’ll obey.

I’m the metronome drip of your coffee when the day leans toward leisure.
Slow and considered. Waiting to be tasted.

I’m the wrinkle on your pillowcase–edges of dreams pressed against your skin.
And the cold spot your foot finds on the sheets.

When the clouds swarm the sky that once was still, that’s me, excited to hear your voice again.

When the last frost blankets the town, and Spring is whispering close, I’m there.
Between ice and the breath of warmth is where I live.

Mailed boxes and typed letters bridge the river from yesterday to today.
Ink to paper, and stamp to cardboard is love with aim.

My absence exists in everything I have yet to touch that gets to touch you every day.
In the mirror that has never been cleaned and gets to study your face, your chest, your walk.
In the paper in the binding of the books that get to hold your hand and your gaze every night.

The hurt lies in the minutes I miss, unable to press my knee to yours or watch you think too much.

The hurt is heavy, but it is where you live within me. There is no you without the absence of you.

The sky is ours; it cradles us both.

I can’t share a home with you, but I’ll settle for sharing the moon.

I was challenged to write something under 250 words. This is 247. Also, this part doesn’t count.

I love you 💋

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One of my best friends is one of my favorite writers. Of all the writers I’ve ever read, he’s at the top of my list.

And he hates writing. With a passion, this man despises writing. It’s a chore for him to do so; as if someone is pressing a gun to his head every time he approaches his computer.

And he writes and publishes a newsletter multiple times a week. Several times a week, this beautiful mind is putting out words that etch out a space in your heart and changes its shape. And he resents the entire process.

I feel something inside of my marrow when I read his pieces. My nervous system takes a valium and I am both relaxed and inspired every time I read him. It is such a gift to be able to do so.

And. He. Hates. It.

So how can someone who writes with such an ooey ease do so with such obligation in his fingers. How can the letters he seasons into words and the words he plates into sentences come from such a forced place?

He has something inside of him that is so natural and beautiful and brilliant that I don’t think even he understands. But he’s meant to be writing. It just falls out of him, and maybe that’s the part that he struggles with. Maybe the fact that something in his life can be so easy and almost thoughtless in its depth is a hard thing to reconcile when other things seem to be harder to reach.

Or maybe not everything needs to make sense or be easy or hard to matter.

I love to write. It’s easy for me. And I still struggle with labeling myself as a writer simply because it’s not something I studied. It’s not even something I wished for. I just happen to be a big, complicated and imaginative thinker who’s a fast typer. And I’m a little kitty on the last half of her lives, so I’ve seen some shit and been through some shit. You blend those together and you have whatever this Abbey cocktail is called.

But I haven’t written anything new here in quite a long time. I’ve published elsewhere a bit, but not here.

Here is different. Here is where you are. And you are all my friends. Here is where I need to give you my best.

So I have been waiting for my best to resurface for months now.

Since the first of August, I have been struggling with many health issues. They will all remain unnamed for the sake of privacy, and also for the sake of “we’re not entirely sure what everything is called yet”. I have told very few people, because that’s how I Life. I don’t burden someone with something I’m struggling with until I have it handled. Because I handle everything. It’s what I do. I don’t see the point in forcing someone to spend time and energy on a thing I can’t even name yet.

When I had surgery to remove a tumor in my head during the pandemic, I drove myself. And then I drove myself home with a bandaged, throbbing, now holey head. I recovered in silence until I was well enough to announce it.

Do I think that is the healthiest way for someone to handle what I went through?

No.

But it was the only choice I saw at the time.

Also, I have this affliction where I’m convinced I’m not everyone when it comes to ‘handling things’.

This, again, is not recommended as a life application.

So I’ve been waiting on things to regulate with me, and it’s taken far longer than I thought it would. Since the first of August, my life has been put on a very strange version of pause.

I’m able to do many of my regular life things, but this limbo-y liminal space I’ve been in has been so boldly quiet. There’s more silence and waiting in my life than there has ever been, and the silence pierces my ears with everything it says. I’ve never been good at waiting, at not knowing things, at being still.

And I have been forced to do all of those things every day for almost 7 months.

As the person who prides herself in always being one of the strongest in the room… it’s been a challenge living in this space. Having to ask for help more, or not being able to contribute as much, is hard. Not having control over my own narrative is very difficult for me.

Growing up as a sexual abuse survivor with my very first memory being unable to control the action… this has been very, very difficult for me.

I’ve learned a lot about myself during this time. Mostly patience. I never knew I had so much. And that being still and quiet isn’t all that bad. Resting used to be something I had to earn. And I had to change that up real quick when August came around.

I’m thankful for a lifetime of shape-shifting and forced adaptability to allow that to happen.

And thank GODS for the people in my life on whom I can lean and trust with the truth of my state. You’re all three reading this right now and I love you so very much. I couldn’t have done any of this without your unwavering support, wildly inappropriate jokes, and the extremely unprofessional names you have decided to call my body parts.

I have been waiting since August to get ‘better’. It’s been almost 7 months and I don’t know if that’s serving me any longer. Maybe waiting for everything to be back to normal again is a lie I need to recognize I’ve been telling myself. Maybe there isn’t a normal again, and only a new version of me that I haven’t met yet.

So if my friend hates writing, but still shows up every week to do so, maybe I can too. Even in my imperfect state. Maybe I’ve gotten too used to the waiting. Too used to the rest and too comfortable with the break I’ve been forced to take. And maybe I just needed to write this little thing to break the seal and rip the bandage off and jump head first back into the pool.

That’s right, I do remember I liked metaphors and analogies… see?! It’s all coming back to me now.

I’m not promising a weekly regime. I’m not promising I’ll rearrange your DNA every time you click on me. And I’m certainly not promising I can be what you may still wish I was.

But I can say that sitting down to write this today felt like an offering. It felt like opening myself up in a way that I’m not used to, but one that I challenge you all to accept with soft hands.

We can keep doing life as long as we keep showing up. I’ve learned this. We come as we are and we hope to surround ourselves with the people who not only allow that, but accept and honor it.

I have that. And I’m beyond grateful.

I love you for exactly who you are right in this very moment.

Until next time💋

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This is the week we are told to not eat or drink or think the things we were told were allowed last week.

Last week was the day to eat and drink and think that thing.

That thing is now bad.

That thing didn’t change. But the day on the calendar did. So its goodness has expired.

So, I hope you drank all the booze in the house last week! Because today it’s poison.

Last week, it was liquid life.

And dust off that gym membership and remember what a squat looks like because I can’t believe you let yourself go so far after listening to us tell you it was ok to eat food and enjoy yourself for the last 2 months!

Keep up, slob.

Your Instagram feed is yelling at you that today is the day you start drinking mushrooms instead of wine. And you absolutely need this ashwagandha gummy that will make you feel like you’re drinking wine but you’re not drinking wine, and that’s for sure the healthiest way to think about alcohol. And also? Surprise, there’s mushrooms in that too.

The new and better you is being birthed today!

But not yesterday.

That wasn’t you.

It’s not going to be fun, but it’s definitely necessary for your health to not have any fun getting there. It’s going to be hard and boring and bleak, but you can do this.

It’s all about discipline starting today.

Why?

Because today is January something.

Keep up, idiot.

Every year leading up to Thanksgiving here in the U.S., the messaging is that we are to put ourselves on “vacation mode”.

Treat yourself.
Indulge.
Don’t restrict.
Relax, and enjoy life.

And then the calendar flips its page to the first of January and we are told to swing that pendulum way on back to the other side.

Focus on health.
Exercise more.
Restrict.
This is not enjoyable; it’s health.

We are told that our goals only count and matter at the beginning of a new year. That our ideas of what healthy means only become facts on January 1st. And every other day leading up to it doesn’t involve health or taking care of ourselves.

…

Can we pause on how unhealthy that mindset is?

Can we zoom out and see how toxic that is?

That’s like saying our bodies are garbage cans for a couple months. And not just regular garbage cans. But, like, bedazzled and necessary ones. Be excited about being a garbage can! See just how much garbage you can squeeze on in there. Just really go for it and be the most garbagest garbage has ever been.

That’s your job during the holidays.

Because you’ve worked so hard. You deserve that garbage.

That message is telling us that we don’t need to take care of ourselves… until we need to take care of ourselves.

But our bodies don’t change out on a new year. Our minds don’t get traded in for a new model on January 1st. We are the same person every day of every month of every year. And every minute of that time, we should be being kind to the skin and molecules that shape us.

I grew up in a household run by addicts. And I had eating disorders for most of my life that began at the age of 3, when I was put on my first diet.

We had Yes days and No days. Yes weeks and No weeks. Yes months and No months. The holidays were full of overeating the things I was told I otherwise wasn’t allowed to have. I was the kid who ate all your E.L. Fudges at a sleepover because I was told at home I couldn’t know what they tasted like. (Sorry about that, Mrs. Mele.)

I hid food in pillowcases under my bed if I found it in the wild. If I wanted something sweet after dinner, like that piece of pie I was allowed to have the night before, I was told today to pour myself a glass of Juicy Juice.

Why?

Because I guess today is a No day.

It was either starvation and restriction… or an embarrassment of gluttony in my childhood home. And that messaging tried to kill me.

I remember the childhood delight in feeling the freedom on those Yes days. Man, it was like Christmas Day — sometimes it was — when I felt that pendulum swing to the Yes side of things. They didn’t yell at me for getting a second helping of dinner, or for sitting on the couch instead of doing my crunches on the floor.

But then soon enough those parents would start to fill up with too much Nabisco and shame and start to spill out of their pants, and I was told to diet again. It didn’t matter that I didn’t feel shame or guilt, it mattered that they felt it. And since they’re both narcissists, and I was their scapegoat, it was my job to take on their shame.

So we dieted. We restricted. Sugar and fat were bad today and we were bad because we ate it yesterday. We exercised. I ran after every meal. I was told to sip broth instead of chew food. I had Diet Dr. Pepper for breakfast. I was told to mix powders with liquids to create the illusion of calories.

This mindset and behavior continued, and I continued to slowly kill myself every day of my life until I was 39 years old and divorced those parents.

It was only then that I was able to realize that the key to my personal health is to stay in a well rounded place of balance every day of my life.

No restrictions. No Yes or No days.

Every day for me now counts as a full and complete day of being kind to anything my mind and body could benefit from. I don’t diet. I don’t have cheat days. I don’t get drunk. And I don’t have guilty pleasures.

I allow daily pleasure, guilt-free.

Healthy for me is likely not the same for you. But that’s because healthy shouldn’t be the same thing to anyone. That’s assuming that we are all stitched up the same way and have the same experiences and trauma and achievements and memories. And that’s just plain silly.

It’s preposterous to treat healthy as a bumper sticker or a universal language. Healthy is a goal we all should try to achieve… but something that looks, tastes, and feels different to us all.

And for me, healthy is to tell myself I can have whatever I want to have. I’ve lived this way for so long that it’s no longer a mantra or anything I’m aware that I tell myself. But, I suppose it’s almost like a mind trick. I put no restrictions on anything, and therefore nothing is off-limits, or limited edition.

So, nothing has any power over me.

All the things I like and enjoy that give me pleasure are all just out there doing their thing, and we’re coexisting.

Living that way has allowed me to listen to my body instead of someone else’s messaging.

And because of all the work I have done on myself, combined with my personal past trauma and abuse and indoctrinated disordered thoughts and habits… it works for me.

And I also know it may not work for you… which is essentially my point.

It’s not just about food and drink. It’s about how we speak to ourselves. It’s about the money we spend; the things we are told we must buy for reasons we no longer have control over. It’s the journaling and the dreaming that doesn’t need to begin on a new year.

It’s the good sleeping that shouldn’t only be a focus after we’re told to stay up until midnight to watch a giant disco ball slowly descend to the littered ground.

It’s the overworking to be ‘allowed’ to take a break and rest.

It’s everything.

I haven’t been hungover in five years. I haven’t felt guilty about a thing I put in my body in five years. I haven’t known my weight in five years.

I haven’t felt lazy for taking a hot bath on a Tuesday with a candle that makes me feel happy. Or wearing the lipstick that makes me feel pretty in my pajamas to drop my kids off at school. I wear the expensive perfume at home. I eat off the good china. I tell you I love you when I’m thinking of you at 3:42 pm. I put on a tutu and a pair of heels to go to the grocery store because I don’t save anything for a special occasion.

Every day we have on this planet is a special occasion.

Not one thing in my kitchen or on my social media feed holds any power over me to make me feel any sort of way about myself.

That may be only because of my very specific past and journey towards wholeness. But I do know how I live is the healthiest way for me to be.

And that’s all I want for you. I want you to believe that you are capable of making the best choices for yourself and that you don’t have to rely on the media or anyone else in your life to dictate that for you. You don’t have to save whatever healthy means to you just for today. You don’t have to save whatever happiness and freedom means to you just because it’s a holiday.

I know I can’t change the way our society looks. I know I can’t change what a new year means and what resolutions are and the entire food and drink culture.

I don’t have the power to start a revolution against resolutions.

But I do think it all starts with us. You have the power to change you. And I have the power to change me. And together that’s pretty damn revolutionary.

I love you 💋

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I’m so far behind on reading all of you. I’ll get there soon.
I also haven’t written anything in a very long time. I’ll get there soon.
This was published on Medium in September ‘25.
I love you and thank you for being here💋.

When I was a young mother of two, I lived a mile away from the house I grew up in. You’d never know it; my old bedroom was swiftly turned into a t-shirt Mausoleum the minute I left. The woman who raised me had a peculiar affinity towards white t-shirts. Always on the hunt for the perfect specimen, she would buy them in multiples. And over time, the surplus moved into my old bedroom to wither and yellow from the sun.

Where rainbow curtains once hung and glass beads swayed, now stood a naked window with no whiff of the character I worked so hard to cultivate. Every corner of that little 10’x12’ bedroom was once kissed by my growth. Dried petals from boyfriend flowers scattered the dresser. Magazine cutouts of heroes embellished the walls. Guitar picks snuggled in piles beneath a plastic galaxy of stars.

I filled every inch of that tiny terrain with trinkets that brought me joy. It was my territory in a union where I never felt unified. On the other side of that door, every corner was cluttered with chaos. Three people were a part of a team out there that I was never invited to try out for. And every day there was a new game of which I never knew the rules.

And now, along with a sewing machine that she never used, those decaying t-shirts became the next tenants in the room that watched me rise.

My space was erased as if my memories were disposable. But the brother’s room next door remained alive with expired teenage dreams. Kurt Cobain renderings, Smashing Pumpkins posters, Green Day album covers… every piece of him was preserved like relics in a shrine. And mine was shamed sterile and expired.

All of this made sense to me, even if it stung a bit. I was never the favorite. That fact was shown to me, and it was told to me. He never got punished. He was never forced to exercise his missteps or growth curves away. He got away with getting C’s when my A- was cause for a lecture. I had chores, he had free time. It was a bit like being Cinderella, except the other characters were actually family and had reasons to love me.

My experience of being a part of that family was equal parts feeling invisible and misunderstood, and being the sole reason everyone was unhappy. And that’s a strange combination of weights to carry.

Some part of me still hoped that becoming a mother — and living close by — might open a new chapter. Maybe proximity and their only grandchildren could rewrite the script.

All my other girlfriends were having kids at the same time as I was. But once we all started our parenting journey, it became immediately very clear that my familial support system looked a lot different than theirs did.

Their parents would come to their house to watch the baby. They would take the baby out to give mom a break. Mine did none of those things. If I wanted help with my children, I had to bring them to their house. They never came to me unless I bribed them.

And being a poor, young mom, I had very little to give. So I’d cook and bake for them. It was the one thing I could do that seemed to provide them satisfaction. Feeding the people who were supposed to nourish me became a job.

Cooking gave me purpose, and a place on the team. I flexed my desire to control something through casseroles and soups. And it was the one thing that could get a parent to come to me.

But even my cooking couldn’t buy me what I truly needed from them. In all of those years, the two of them only came to my house once to watch my children.

That’s a mere one time they could tuck my babies into their own beds together as grandparents. And they didn’t even do that right. She put them to bed; he stayed on the couch. And when I came home later that night, both kids were frightened at the top of the stairs with The Good Wife blaring on high down below.

One time, my 1 year old and I were deathly ill with both norovirus and rotavirus. I couldn’t walk; I could barely move. I’d never been so sick in all of my life. After a week, I did the hardest thing I could think of and mustered up the emotional — and physical — strength to lift the phone to my ear and call my birth mother for help.

She refused.

I powered through.

I just didn’t have the kind of experience that I saw everyone else have when it came to parents. Mine never once inconvenienced themselves. Their comfort was the most important thing to them. It was more important than me. And it was more important than my children.

This became abundantly apparent when I made the choice to cease all communication with them about 5 years ago. They showed me for the very last time how they would not be inconvenienced, and it was my final straw.

We haven’t been a family since.

I don’t think about them during my days. I forget they’re alive, to be honest. And when I do, it’s like seeing a ghost of a skeleton. I don’t feel lacking in love without them. I feel the opposite. Once I removed them and the massive space they had been taking up by doing more harm than good, more love was able to fill my world.

Everything became richer and gratifying.

Without their weight pressing down on me, I discovered how much more space there was for light and color. It was so very much like Dorothy waking up in Oz. Tastes, feelings and shapes were all revealed to me in bright colors I didn’t even know existed in the grey world I had just left behind. My crayon box grew the moment they walked away.

Keeping them far away was the best recipe I’ve ever created for my family, and I don’t regret a morsel of it.

But sometimes, I’ll be reminded of the things I don’t have — and never did have — and it will shock me into a strange emotional state. Someone will say something or do something so very small and seemingly insignificant, and it will land as something so deeply heavy to me.

I will start to feel things ooze from the sloppy stitching of my structure. Feelings from something I vaguely still remember will find a way to escape from a previous lifetime of compression.

I was talking to my friend the other day. I asked what he had for dinner — as a chef, this question is always an important one. He’s a vegetarian, and his folks are not, and I’ve known this as long as I’ve known him. Nothing about this moment should have made any sort of impact.

I simply asked what his dinner was and he said, “Dad made vegetable soup.”

And the room felt different. Everything sort of stopped and hovered around me. There was something about his father cooking that felt so sweet and sacred when I’d only heard about his mother doing so. The father I grew up with only knew how to charcoal-burn a raw steak and open a can of green beans. The thought of his father chopping and stirring something in order to feed his adult child warmed my insides.

And then that simple sentence expanded and folded into itself all at once.

His parents continuing to cook him vegetarian food when they are not vegetarian was the most extraordinary thing to me in that moment. They were happily and effortlessly inconveniencing themselves for him. They were showing love and support for their child by way of simple nourishment.

And it was gorgeous.

“Dad made vegetable soup” hit me like a thousand butterflies. It wasn’t massive in weight. It was so many tiny flutters of beauty all around me all at once, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open inside of it.

It was bigger than dinner. It was easy commitment; naturally occurring unconditional love.

It was just so… normal.

But its normalcy is what made it begin to feel too heavy to hold. And it stole my breath and infiltrated my little mosaic heart like a tidal wave.

I started to cry and I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t explain it. I tried to. It all gushed out in weird ways and I couldn’t translate why it was so heavy to me. I was so happy for him. I was so insanely grateful that he never has to go one day without knowing how much the people who raised him love and honor him. So absolutely thankful that he’s so taken care of.

I felt such a strong urgency to hammer this into him because I know so very well what it’s like to have none of that.

And in this moment, I was slapped in the face with the hyper-awareness that it’s only dinner to him.

It’s just soup.

I realized I was speaking a foreign language, and it hollowed me out. I felt the sharp split between the kind of love I was witnessing, and the kind of make-believe love I grew up with. The gap between those two worlds yawned open and suddenly I was sitting with the little girl I used to be.

The one who learned to be quiet instead of question. To wane instead of wax. Dull instead of delight.

All of the removing and distancing I’ve done with the people who raised me has me forget sometimes that little me is still in there. Even now, with my life full and different and happier, she’s still there. And she is still hungry for something she was never fed.

I can’t erase all her pain, but I can keep showing up for her when no one else did.

I don’t miss those people who raised me. Not for one minute have I ever missed them. And I don’t wish them back into my life again. But I do know I deserve to have better parents. I deserve to have had better people usher me through life and still be there for me if I need them. I know I deserve that.

So when I see an example of a really good parent, even if it’s just in the form of a soup maker, it can sometimes take my breath away and remind me of all of the things I’ve missed out on. And that feeling can be so overwhelming. And lonely. But then the moment passes, I send my younger self love and hope, and I can blink myself back into my reality where I am surrounded by love.

I know I won’t stop having moments like this one. And as hard as they can be sometimes, they’re a really brilliant reminder of how far I’ve come. And all that I willingly left behind. Those moments are like little lessons on the wings of a thousand butterflies.

I have a family now with people I’ve created, and people I’ve chosen. My creators were never meant to stick around, even if part of their existence still resurfaces from time to time.

I think that’s just part of what can make life so full of color and flavor — remembering that we are the creators of our world. We are in charge of what goes in the pot, what stays out, and what was only meant to enhance a portion of the journey before it gets tossed in the compost.

It may have just been soup that took me on that emotional deep dive, but as an expert now in both food and family, I know what it takes to make the good stuff that will continue to nourish me. And the most important ingredient is knowing I will never go hungry for love again.

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My beautiful friend, published this here in her outstanding publication, , back when not a whole lot of people knew who I was.
I have a few more friends here now.
I’m grateful for you all💋

Written January, 2024 as a follow-up to my first essay, How to Accidentally Break up A Family

My alarm clock was pink. She came from Sears with the pack of undershirts they gave me for Christmas in the 3rd grade. I don’t know what happened to that alarm clock, but I can tell you that I held onto, and continued to stitch up the holes in those undershirts until the relationship ended when I was 38 years old.

I’ve always been sentimental with things.

This was the 90s so there was no option for a gentle warm light wakeup call… or a soft little birdie ditty. You had two options: raging, menacing beep — or — the radio. And since I wasn’t allowed to wake anyone else up when I was getting ready for school, I chose the safest route.

Bob and Sheri on 107.9 FM were my school morning parents. When it was dark and otherwise quiet in my home, they were the voices who ushered me into each and every school day. They told me the weather so I knew what to wear, some talking points for the commute, and an ear-worm or two to keep me company while I got ready for the day.

When that alarm went off, I had very specific tasks I needed to complete before I could do anything for myself. My mission, which I had no choice in accepting, was to get ready for school without waking up the adult sleepers downstairs.

The tasks :

1. quietly open my bedroom door and sneak down the staircase that always had something to say

2. find the right boards on the floor that would cushion my bare feet instead of announcing their presence

3. walk like a cartoon bank robber to their bedroom and figure out how to close the oldest door in the world using the loudest knob on the planet.

As I’m typing this, I’m wondering why their door wasn’t already closed by them the night before, instead of putting me through this obstacle course every Monday through Friday.

I never asked.

The house I grew up in was built in the 1930s, so closing any door quietly was an impossible mission — about as impossible as quietly walking across that floor. The doorknobs were glass and they screamed at you every time you touched one, the door hinges screeched, the latch was disobedient, and the sleeping lady on the nearest side of the bed could hear someone breathe across town even with the pillow over her head.

You know that scene in Return to Oz when Dorothy has to sneak into Princess Mombi’s bedroom to steal the powder of life without waking up any of the heads on display?

It was like that. And it was every morning.

The generation before me had No Wire Hangers!!!

I had a headless lady chasing a little girl down a hallway of her screaming heads.

This whole process took about 10 minutes. And once I secured the area, I had to carefully avoid all the landmines on the way back upstairs to get myself ready. My bathroom floor sat directly over their bed, so I knew to not flush the toilet or run the shower.

My bathroom used to share the wall behind their bed before the renovation.

…I really was not set up for bathroom success in that house.

Once all of my getting ready was done, I was to feather-walk again back down the stairs and into the kitchen to make my breakfast and lunch in the dark. The kitchen was directly across the hall from their bedroom, and there was about 3 inches of air thanks to 1933 in between the bottom of their bedroom door and the floor. So any amount of light in the general vicinity was a big No.

My breakfast was usually her recommendation of a vanilla Carnation Instant Breakfast packet mixed with orange juice. She said it tasted like an Orange Julius and would keep my weight down. I mixed it with a fork inside one of the many free plastic sports cups that littered our cabinet.

Lunch was usually a bagel sandwich with deli turkey and honey mustard, Gardettos, and an apple. But if I was running late, or just felt like remembering I was a teenager for a second, I would put on my brave girl panties and sneak into their room to steal some money from his dresser.

He kept a large jar of quarters up there with some dusty photos and stacks of envelopes. He saved them to roll on Friday nights for savings bonds. So many quarters; just a vat full of free money up there for the taking. One was all I needed to buy a giant yeast roll from the cafeteria, but I generally took a big handful just because I could and it felt good.

I considered it my fee.

With a dozen quarters shoved into my Merona jeans pockets, I would sneak back around their bed in the dark, and through the door that I carefully closed again behind me. I would then go back into the dark kitchen to stare outside the tiny window into the doctor’s office parking lot to wait for the headlights of Kerrin’s car.

Kerrin was my ride, and I often wonder what she thought about this whole process. Did her mother make her breakfast and kiss her goodbye before she left? Did her father stand at the door and wave as she drove away with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper rolled up in the other? I never asked.

I couldn’t go out the back door — the main access — because their bedroom was saddled up right next to the driveway. Any headlights coming in or out would wake them up. And a car door opening or closing would for sure wake them up. Then there were the dogs that I needed to keep asleep back there — because a barking dog would absolutely wake them up.

No one was allowed to come up the driveway during (their) sleeping hours.

Once I saw the headlights of Kerrin’s white sedan in an otherwise opaque morning, I turned my feet into pillows again to make it to the front door and lock it behind me with the key in the quarters pocket. And I navigated my way in the muddy dark, through the overgrown and neglected knockout rose bush jungle that thorned me so many times it became a metaphor.

Kerrin’s car was always so warm and comforting. Maybe because she had Bob and Sheri in there too. Maybe it was because she was the first real person to show up for me. Maybe it was because by the time she got there at 6:30 am, I had already lived a day of impossible missions, and all I had to do was sit and let her take the wheel.

I was thankful to be out of the jungle.

I learned how to steal in so many different ways growing up that I still regularly think like a criminal. That’s why I would make an excellent private investigator. The kind that old white men write about where the old white man knows how to catch the bad guy only because he used to be one, and somehow other old white men find that endearing.

Going to the movies with the family was one of my main lessons in stealing. Every weekend was spent at the movie theatre. And sometimes we would pay for just one movie, and stay for a second. ‘A double feature!’, we called it to help everyone forget it was stealing. There was a whole process in picking the right movies based solely on their showtimes to make our scam work.

It never even mattered if we wanted to actually see those movies we chose. We did it because we could.

Then there was the training to get the fake free popcorn refills. She would keep used plastic grocery bags in her purse and once we sat down, she’d dump everyone’s popcorn into them and tell me to go find a line with an employee who wouldn’t recognize me. Sometimes I’d miss the beginning of the movie trying to find the right employee to scam while also trying to not get in trouble with either that employee or the bloated popcorn machine back in her seat waiting for the refill.

Every weekend we went through 5 gallons of popcorn in one sitting before dinner.

We were not allowed candy at the movie theatre because sugar is bad for you.

I hate the movie theatre now.

By the time I was in middle school, I was deep into some light shoplifting. I was so used to sneaking around at home by that point, that it all just came naturally to me. My training for that, and what my high school mornings would become, started when I was 5.

My weekend mornings were for them to sleep off their big nights. I sometimes had 6 to 7 hours to figure out how to keep myself safe and occupied before they woke up.

My parents were Muppet Babies, Gummi Bears and DuckTales.
My breakfast was a giant bowl of popcorn left out for me the night before.

Sometimes I would find things around the house to wrap up and give them when they woke up. A deck of cards from the hanging wicker basket by the den door, the remote, a carrot.

I needed something to do and would be so excited to finally have someone to talk to that my little self turned their waking up into a big event that required celebration and presents.

I was later scolded for wasting paper.

Soon all of that training morphed into finding little things at the drugstore to sneak and steal. Little trinkets for them, my friends, me.
I started to be a big collector of things from a very early age.

Children of trauma tend to hoard and collect because it brings them the comfort they aren’t able to otherwise find in their lives. It is literally about us finding ‘stuff’ to fill the hole left by emotional abandonment.

If you don’t show a child what Love is by merely being there when she needs you, she will find a way to create it. By any means necessary, that child will find her version of love.

So I continued to figure out what my version of love was by collecting things to fill that hole. Sunglasses and keychains were my big ones. I had a table of sunglasses on display in my bedroom as if I was running a kiosk.

And I had the largest, most heaviest keychain by the time I got to high school. It was about the size of my head, and it made me so happy. Mini manicure kit, baby flashlight, lip gloss, a tiny deck of cards in a tiny case, erasers, micro notebook with a detachable micro pen, a Troll doll… all bunched together with my home and car key. I loved that thing.

Not all of the things I collected were stolen, but I was obsessed with tangible expressions of love and surprise. And sneaking around to get them was not only easy at that point, it literally seemed like the right thing to do.

I found out that my version of love was attention, and it was cultivated in all of the many hours I spent alone sneaking around to protect the people around me.

Sometimes I’d hand out some of my pocket quarters to the other kids at school so they could buy their own giant yeast roll. It made me feel cool and liked.

Swiping a tube of lipstick from Revco made me feel powerful and in charge.

And sneaking out at night the very same way I was taught to sneak out on a school morning was how I proved that I was as responsible and mature as I was trained to be from the age of 5.

Around midnight, Katie would pull into the doctor’s office roundabout and wait for me once I knew everyone downstairs was asleep for the night. I had this keeping them asleep routine down to a science at this point.

Practice makes perfect.

I went to countless parties all over town and outside of it. Drank my share of tepid screwdrivers and skunky Budweisers, flirted with everyone’s share of older boys, and got myself into a number of really stupid and scary situations involving getting into dark corners with strangers and a lot of drunk cars.

Just as I learned to steal from going to the movies, I learned to drink and drive by watching him and his lap Bud.

The best part about being a kid growing up in a house like I did is the next morning you get the ride-along to McDonalds for ‘the morning after’ meal. I rarely had this kind of food unless they were hungover and needed it. She stayed home in bed and he drove—still drunk. Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese and a large fry with a Diet Coke was her order, and I could sneak some of her fries on the car ride back home with him.

When I was really little, we’d get to take the CJ-7. This vehicle had no doors, no seatbelts, and only got FM radio if the temperature went above 97 degrees. It lived in the garage that wasn’t really a garage but more of a home for several mice and our drooling, feral bobcat that someone named Mingles. Riding in this Jeep was about as safe as all the times he and lap Bud put me on the bow of the Donzi and raced over the ocean waves so fast that my 10-year-old butt would be airborne more than touching the boat itself.

But I loved those times as a kid. I never felt like I was in danger. I watched drinking and driving and surviving it... I spent so much time taking care of myself alone — I just don’t think I knew what danger really was as a young girl. But I look at it all now and it’s hard not to think of my life as just a series of really lucky survivals. All of it was normal to me, and I just loved having the time with a happy, awake version of one of them.

I lived for those moments.

That’s the thing about being a kid raised in this sort of environment — a lot of times, it really is so much fun. A child will train themselves to focus on, and remember, the highs instead of dwelling on the lows… because they instinctively know they have to rely on these people to walk them through life a little bit longer.

It’s self-preservation.

It’s survival.

But the shift happens when the child gets older, and the behavior around them does not change. They start to remember the fear a little bit more, because they know a little bit more, and things just aren’t quite as fun in their head as they used to be. And once the child outgrows the adult, that emotional imbalance and the keen awareness of the unsafety that has existed for so long becomes all too difficult to ignore.

When I was a senior in high school, I was still performing my impossible mission every morning before school, except now I was the driver.

I would delicately leave my house every morning, cross my fingers when I started my car, and with headlights off, slowly and carefully pull out of the driveway and onto the road in the dark. Sometimes if their night was particularly in need of sleeping off, I would have to drive my car to the doctor’s office parking lot the night before to make it easier on them the next morning.

I had a passenger in the front next to me, and one in the back. And one morning, someone didn’t stop at the red light at the Quik Stop and crashed, head first, into my car. I woke up hearing moans from both the back and the front, and feeling a massive pain in my forehead. My head had smashed into the steering wheel of the old hand-me-down Ford Aerostar with no airbags. I had a concussion and a hematoma.

The sleeping adults back home got a different kind of wake-up call that morning.

And the only thing that saved my life that day was my largest, most heaviest beloved keychain that had, over time, loosened the steering wheel column so much that when my head hit it with such force… it moved with me just enough to keep me safe.

I may not be proud of all the things I did when I was a teenager. And I can’t explain how I survived as many near-deaths as I have. But I am so very proud of how, somehow, and by the grace of something I cannot name, I have collected enough tools on my own that have saved my life.

Some of the things you didn’t agree with when you were little can still be things you keep with you when you’re older. The hope is that you’ve been able to re-shape them a little by that point; tweak and twist them into something that serves you better.

And then some things you never go back to because they just no longer benefit you. Some things were forced upon you so much that it’s as if your body learns to reject them in order to keep you safe.

Some of the things that used to be what nourished you become your poison.

All of the popcorn I was taught to steal, and the powdered dairy drinks I was told were food…

I am allergic to corn, and I’m lactose intolerant.

And I am perfectly ok with that.

But I do find myself loving a dark and quiet morning all to myself. It doesn’t make me think of neglect or fear. I’ve been able to surgically remove those parts of it and build something new with what was left.

Now my mornings are a source of peace and gratitude.

My kids are both teenagers in high school now. The alarm on my phone plays me a soft piano song to usher me into the day before 5 am. And I have about 30 minutes of quiet, alone time in the dark before my children get up.

I am their first source of warmth and comfort. And I am the first real person to show up for them. I make sure they are fed, and I hug them goodbye before they drive off to school.

They hear and feel that I love them before any other source of information enters their brain.

We sometimes have only 5 minutes together, but it’s enough to remind us all what our version of Love is.

I am there. Tired or not, I am there.

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For anyone who has ever lost a friend, fought for a friend, or knew it was time to let go of one.

xo💋

The idea that you have to be either a lover or a fighter has never made sense to me. Claiming to be a lover, not a fighter implies you’re prone to peaceful resolutions and harmonious relationship building, over conflict. It says you want everything to be good and balanced and positive.

Well, I want that. I want harmony and peace and balance. That’s the ultimate goal in life, isn’t it? Finding whatever our version of okay-ness among everyone and everything.

I want my life and my relationships to be symbiotic and tuned to the perfect key. I want to feel safe and understood inside every room I stand with the people I walk through life with.

And I have that. I have so many very special and deep relationships. I have so many beautiful rooms I’ve built and furnished with incredible people I’ve collected throughout my life. Rooms full of the brightest of colors that only shine because of the jagged pieces of stained glass we placed together after we thought all we had was broken.

But I have had to fight like hell to have them. That’s what I don’t understand about the binary concept of lover vs. fighter. The truest kind of love doesn’t come easy and stay that way. The richest, most meaningful relationships are that way because of the fight. Because of the shifts and shakes, and ultimate resolution.

Choosing to keep building something together when things are hard and seem impossible, is not simple. It’s not guaranteed. It’s hard. It’s word-wrestling and questioning everything and pushing and pulling. It’s tears and fears and strife and ache.

It’s dissecting something that once felt whole, but stopped functioning properly. It’s taking it apart, piece by piece, and examining each piece for their usage and importance before attempting to rebuild it.

And most of the time you find screws leftover; a couple missing parts from what was before. The thing looks different now. It’s still familiar; it’s just been altered.

But then you get to see that the new machine still runs. And it runs somehow smoother. It went from Bambi on ice to Simba’s strut on the log in the jungle. From Slippery and Can’t find your footing to No worries.

It’s just as nostalgic of a scene and a feeling, even if it looks different on the outside now.

And this refurbished machine can only still function because together, you both decided these were all the new necessary parts of it all. Not because you followed a piece of paper with someone else’s instructions.

A relationship that never had to be rebuilt or reexamined has never been tested. It’s never been stretched to its limits. It’s never been bent. It’s never been broken. And if something has never been tested, how do you know it will function properly?

Faith.

Yes. Faith can take you a very long way. So can trust. Assuming that things will forever stay as good as they are now. Faith is a beautiful concept and it sounds so promising and romantic on paper.

But paper rips.

You can glue it. You can frame it. You can erase and rewrite things as they come.

But that glue will lose its sticky at some point, and the corners will peel and break from its assigned resting place.

That glass from the frame can shatter if it falls from its position in the room.

And the force of the eraser over time will rub a hole where you kept trying to make new things make sense in place of the old things that no longer do.

One drop of water can bleed the inked words into nonsense.

So, faith on paper isn’t built to last.

But something that you had to fight for and decided to come back to you will always have more staying power. That’s the kind of love that allows you to keep drinking from its well and be able to still stand on your feet. Even if the juice has moments where it feels more turpentine than wine, you keep coming to that well because it’s sturdy and true.

It’s the fight that makes the love last.

I had a friend recently try to rearrange the relationship machine. It was a relationship that came so easily, and then started to unravel in tiny corners. Every time a piece broke off, we found a new place to put it. We rebuilt the machine together, like a collage forged from metal instead of paper. And every time we did, it came back stronger.

Until one day he decided to rebuild it on his own. I was locked out of the room for the first time while he started to change everything. It was cold and dark, and I felt lost. A tornado had come through and rearranged my insides, and I couldn’t find my center.

So I started fighting.

He wasn’t letting me back in, but I didn’t quit. He felt we had been broken because things were different now. But I knew that it was something worth fighting for. So I fought and I fought, and so did he. But we weren’t fighting for the same thing, and everything stopped working.

Until I broke the locks and forced myself through that door and gave it one last try.

And something happened in that moment where I was able to meet him where he was, on the other side. He didn’t move towards me because he was scared, but he let me come to him. Like a scared, wild animal who forgot how to trust, he allowed me to slowly approach him and offer up a glass of resolution.

And we found one. We laid everything on the table and discovered that we were both scared of different things that were causing friction, but ultimately still wanted the same thing.

And it was easy again.

It was only easy again because it got so very hard.

That moment of reckoning felt like an earthquake. But not the bad kind that breaks things and hurts people. It was a quake that mended something that otherwise would have stayed apart. The kind that forms mountain ranges when two things collide towards one another with such a force that all they can do is press against each other and rise together.

Love was recognized again, but only because of the fight.

And I find that whenever I have such a big, momentous event where everything feels perfect and clicks, there is something that still needs to be said in the settling of all the dust. Like the aftershock from the earthquake that finds the pieces of truth floating around. And if you don’t take the time to gather them, that massive rearranging can start to feel too big to revisit.

In the shock of the after, things feel clearer. The pressure in the air has regulated, and you’re able to walk outside without fear again. Gratitude and appreciation lie in the aftershock. It’s a gentle knowing, an easy silence.

I have found that the richest relationships in my life are the ones with people who communicate very differently than I do. Maybe that’s because I learned something new from them that rearranged my molecules. These relationships always struggle with such dissonance because of a loss in translation. My offering of love from a pure place is received as something foreign and scary.

And I’ve been the one who’s had to decide if the fight is worth it.

Because a lot of people give up when things get hard — even the really good things they know are important and meant to last. They pull away and suppress it all and choose to forget it ever existed. They dive into work and structure and routine to pretend it was nothing they needed to remember. It’s their easiest choice, and they make it to feel more comfortable.

But that’s not how I operate. That is a language I will never understand.

I lived a life without feeling loved or understood, and the people who raised me eventually left me. I am an adult orphan who never had real love from the truest source it should be coming from. So I yearn for it. It’s a signal that I emit from the depths of my soul without knowing how to wield its trajectory. And when someone sees it and feels it, and they come to me, I hold on tightly.

Not everyone knows what to do with that grasp, but it’s the only grip I know.

If I love you, I tell you so whenever I feel it rise from my belly to my lips. I wear everything on my sleeves and wrists and hands like tattoos, and you’ll never have to guess where I am with you.

I am the bestest friend to my friends because I know what it’s like to live without that love. And I never want anyone to feel that. Loving them the way I always wished to be loved feels like a piece of my puzzle has been properly placed.

I don’t know how to edit that part of myself. I don’t know how to box it up and filter it. I just open my mouth and my feelings fall out. And a lot of people don’t know what to do with that amount of forthright earnestness.

But if I love you, I do so with my whole self.

I will bury the body at 4 am and scrub the crime scene. I will feed you when you’re hungry because I always have snacks for the both of us. I will remind you to take your electrolytes because the humidity on your run will deplete you, and I never want you to feel empty.

I once clothed my best friend’s toddler at a festival after he spilled his smoothie on his shirt and peed his pants, with a full outfit I had in my car for such a potential occasion. Just popped the trunk and we went shopping. It’s as if I have walked the path for everyone in my life and I know where it leads.

I come prepared every day of my life not just for me. But for the people I choose to carry.

Sometimes people see this and take more than they give me. And sometimes I allow it simply because the giving is so nourishing to me. But sometimes things have to break for good when I realize the balance is too off that the scales can never recover.

I’ve had that happen too. And when it does, it’s never a hard break. It’s a very easy knowing that I did all that I could, gave all I can, and there is simply nothing left.

That’s when the machine expires because of all the reworking.

I will never stop being a fighter. And I will never stop being a lover. I don’t know how to fight without it being for the chance of love to stay alive. And I don’t know how to love without having fought for it.

Maybe it’s because I started my life with a fight. I lived most of my life being tested and questioned while somehow also being tolerated and cast aside.

That kind of childhood can either turn you cold and alone, or make you full of the desire to be willing to break your own bones in order to help someone walk easier.

I choose this Me. I choose the me who puts her whole ass into everything she does, even if it means the machine will eventually expire.

Because I know what it feels like to find the person in the dark again.

It’s the most nourishing; the easiest, most muster-able knowing.

I choose to be equal parts lover and fighter, and I always will be. Because it’s the only knowing my heart has ever known.

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