He and I went out a couple of times. One time, we stayed in. There was chemistry, the kind that turned my legs towards him under the table and opened my knees. This is the kind of chemistry I pay attention to. It’s the kind that churns up all my deepest inner material. I get to touch parts of my history that I cannot touch in the same way (and sometimes cannot touch at all) without some kind of erotic intimacy to open the door. Intimacy is like this, we know this. It allows us to transform. I hate the word “heal” because it doesn’t properly account for the fact that some damage is…done. There is scar tissue. We never heal. We’re just hurting for the rest of our life.

So let’s stick with “transform,” although this word is also overused and rendered meaningless– and recall that on the other side of that transformation is retraumatization, always. And no matter how careful we are or lovely our lover may be, that risk of retraumatization is right there, across a thin and hazy line that can easily begin to bleed.

His home is very different from mine. He felt a little self conscious. Approximately 100% of the men that I date feel self conscious about their home when they first invite me in. An occupational hazard. It was funny, though, because of course part of what happened was that I imagined how I would feel if I had invited him into my home, and then I was the one who felt cripplingly self aware. I would be embarrassed. Not because of him specifically. I would feel embarrassed to have lots of people in my home, because my home is NOTHING like the homes of the people I socialize with.

My home is not earthen and warm and old and well lived in. There isn’t an overgrown garden of native pollinators or jars of hand processed food lining the walls. We’re not even allowed to have candles. It is a standard apartment, I’m sure you know the kind. There are millions just like it. There is nothing about it that is special at all, it is defined by its un-specialness. It does not denote my values or my tastes or my lifestyle. The lights in the outdoor passageway are blindingly fluorescent. There is a chemical sprayed, frequently mowed lawn and crowded mulch bed of ugly landscape shrubbery.

I LOVE this apartment, though. I love it.

There is a playground with a view of the mountains. Rows of blooming trees that change color every spring and fall. A hill right outside our living room windows where we watch the deer. And it’s mine, it’s ours, it’s home. It’s the most stable, functional housing we’ve ever had access to. Considerably more livable than what passed for housing when I was trying to raise two kids below the poverty line on the margins of a land trust community. It doesn’t have mold or mice and everything isn’t falling apart all the time. There is trash pickup, a flushing toilet, reliable internet access, and a maintenance person who shows up right away.

This is where the story is starting to come apart a little…the way the weave at the base of my broom bristles started to come apart. I had to restart that part of the broom no less than three times. I wanted to give up. I wanted to just call it, take it home half finished, sit it in a corner to haunt me for six months. I didn’t. I kept going. I finished. The weave followed no rhyme or reason. It was messy as fuck. But it held, goddamn it. IT HELD. Ok. Here we go.

The long and short of it is that I decided to end the dating relationship before it even really began, because one of the deepest, oldest wounds was rising to the surface and I could tell I was repeating a pattern I didn’t want to repeat. It’s not an easy choice to make, when a connection is compelling. It had nothing to do with him, it’s just stuff that was hurting inside of me long before I ever met him. Damage caused by other men. Someone else would have been perfectly fine under the same circumstances. But I knew myself well enough to know that what I was feeling was way too close to what had wrecked me in the past. It wasn’t the belonging stuff, it was another thing I won’t get into here.

But yes, the belonging stuff started coming up for me in a big way again, you know? I went through a community break up at the same time as that romantic break up that stole all my words for pain. I kept finding myself mentioning it to him, and he was really interested to know what had happened, but I never got to tell him about it. And I even said something in passing about seeing him as a person firmly nestled in a community, and he said something like, “Oh don’t underestimate my ability to feel like an outsider even when surrounded by other people.” And one of the stories he tells me is about his beautiful ex-girlfriend, and how she has considerable belonging wounds too.

And then, lo and behold, I am at a broom making workshop and one last magical witch arrives late to our crafting circle. It’s her. It’s the beautiful ex-girlfriend. She is passionate about broom making. She even grows her own broom corn. It’s the second time she has taken the class.

So to complete the back-in-highschool ritual, I am now sitting across the broom making circle from someone who used to go out with the person I like, and she’s a lot better at making brooms than me. I’m grinning, I hope you’re grinning too. Isn’t it too perfect?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2024

This essay is unfinished because I wrote it live on my FB feed while my kids interrupted me, and promptly crashed and burned, but oh well. People still tell me about how big an impact it had on them. Maybe I will finish it, but I am putting no pressure on myself because I am in severe pain and disability at the moment. I would love to finish No One is Making Me Do This, but things are incredibly difficult. So instead I’m practicing sharing old essays that feel deeply embarrassing.

You can buy me a coffee here.

Sign up for my upcoming house tending ritual here.

I forgot an important detail. When I arrived, I had to walk past a couple of hot guys to get into the barn. I wanted them to check me out. But I wanted them to do it the way guys in progressive spaces always do; a subtle, almost indiscernible glance, an immediate aversion of the eyes if they think you saw them seeing you. They clearly feel guilty, like a little kid who knows he’s not supposed to peek into the living room when mom and dad are watching a PG-13 movie. Like he knows you caught him red handed and he runs as fast as he can back up the stairs because if he gets into bed under the covers quickly enough, you’ll pretend you didn’t see.

But men (god bless them) often can’t help themselves, and I don’t mean that in a rape culture-y, biological essentialist kind of way. I mean it in a human way, in a way that invites some goddamn levity around a really serious social issue. Because women are fucking pleasing to look at, aren’t we? Women are sexy. They command the eye. And to tell you the truth, I find the progressive-guy-stealth-mode-check-out hilarious. I feel a little bad for them that their healthy desires have been cloaked in shame. And I feel love for them because they’re trying not to be disrespectful or make women feel unsafe. They got the memo, they read it, they adjusted. Also, it gives me an ego boost. But I rarely get checked out anymore, not by men who are shameless and not by men who are ashamed. Not by men who are imposing and creepy, and not by men who know they stand a better shot at actually connecting with women if they train themselves to look away.

I could write several pages about class, race, gender, culture, and men checking women out, don’t worry. But I’m so fucking tired of having to explain to everyone on Facebook what I DON’T mean, I made a creative choice this time to be wreckless with my depictions, even if that means someone out there is going to get their boxer briefs in a bundle and assume they know what I don’t know or can see what I don’t see (unlikely). I quite literally wrote SEVEN PARAGRAPHS explaining what I know and don’t know about the particularities of earth skill genre jocks and cheerleaders, but it was going to ruin the story. Just let me tell the fucking story about the fucking broom, ok? We can analyze my hypocrisy and the unfairness of blanket judgements and all the ways everything I say is wrong and doesn’t accurately describe what is really going on in the scene another time. For fuck’s sake.

So anyway. They don’t check me out, not even in stealth mode, which is what I expect. For months now I have been attending as many random events as I can, determined to make new friends, meet new people, and maybe just maybe meet the next great love of my life, or something? I think this is called “putting yourself out there,” and my expectations are firmly rooted, however often my heart leaps with unfounded hopefulness. I have learned that it’s very okay to strike up a conversation with strangers, to talk to the one person you happen to know who may introduce you to their friends, to give a guy your number and be unsurprised to learn he has a girlfriend (or three, because polyamory).

And it’s mostly false starts, but it’s basic human interaction and I’ll take it. I am pretty old now, so social events are usually what I expect they will be. Almost everyone is partnered, poly, or they don’t look at me. My expectations are low and I am occasionally surprised. This was no exception. I knew the vibe would be impeccable. I knew the farmers would have insanely fashionable yet functional outfits, like the cover of an indie punk rock album (I LOVE cute clothes and care about fashion, that is sincerely not a dig, just an observation…but there I go over explaining myself again). I knew there would be guests on the farm and that they would drive fancy cars and wear expensive sunglasses. I knew they would be remarking on the novelty, the beauty. I knew I would feel slightly superior that this is all old hat to me. This is my life, this beauty is mine and it’s not a surprise. Or at least it was, before the builder grade income based apartment complex. But I’ll circle back to that.

I expected the workshop to be mostly, if not all, women. It was. I expected it to be both easier than I thought and harder than I imagined. It was. I expected the finished product to look different than I imagined. It did. And I expected it to be a potent magical force of transformative movement in my spiritual journey, with impeccable timing. Or that it would fall kinda flat and feel ultimately uneventful. It kind of was, kind of wasn’t.

Here is why that detail about wanting the hot guys to check me out is important: I have been learning how to pay attention to the themes that emerge in a real time, unfolding ritual process. These themes can be kind of silly.

Yes, silly.

I know we like to think of the spirit realm as heavy and serious and important and profound, and it certainly can be. But in my experience, many spirits have a (sometimes dark) sense of humor. They are the height of equanimity. They know the plastic $18 broom is as magical as the $125 sacred besom, yep. They speak to us in ways we might not expect, if we don’t know how to pay attention to what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING as opposed to what we THINK should be happening when the spirit realm moves through to the other side and speaks. Wanting the hot guys to check me out was a clue. And the next clue was something I debated leaving out of my story, because the guy I’m referring to reads my writing. Ultimately, though, this detail was too good to deny all of you, so I opted to leave it in and trust him to reach out if he feels interested in talking to me about how it made him feel.

Ok. So there was a guy in my life fairly recently, and I see him as a person at the center of all the earth centric ways of life. But not one of these people who does it in a kinda cringe-y way. Like one of those people who does it in a way I respect. Who does it with self awareness, humility, openness–who is in the informational-experiential lineage of all the big writers and thinkers and teachers of the scene I most admire.

I asked him out two years ago. At the time, I was challenging myself to ask out the guys I thought would never be into me. I scanned for the men who felt out of my league, who felt like they’d never notice me. There were two who immediately came to mind, and I was like…fuck it. Literally nothing to lose. Both of them responded in exactly the same way: “I am super flattered. I think it’s rad you asked me out. I have a girlfriend, though. And we’re not currently opening our relationship because it seems to be destabilizing.”

That actually happened. They actually both responded in almost exactly the same way, for exactly the same reason. At the time, I was like, “Well that figures all the good ones are finally realizing that these things need to be treated with tremendous care, but now none of them are available.”

I snooped, because of course I did. They were both dating women younger than me, who were both extremely physically attractive, intelligent, artistically talented, and well placed in the earth skills scene. These women were the spiritual ideal, at least from what I could see on the surface, from afar. So I was like…welp. I kinda knew that would be the case.

And I know I’ve been writing about being immature, feeling 15, holding bitterness and projecting my own superficiality and rejecting that which has rejected me, but I don’t hold this reality against anyone when it comes down to it, because I respect reality more than anything. It is simply the reality that men like this get LOTS of incredible women. They just do. I’m amazing, but I don’t really stand out compared to these women who are physical perfection AND have an authentic personality and bonafide spiritual depths, you know? I’m okay with this, I was just shooting my shot.

Life carried on. I found another relationship. I loved him more than I’ve ever loved anyone. He hurt me so badly that I–-a writer–have no words that come close to describing the pain. Several months pass. Then, I get a text.

It’s this guy I asked out two years ago. And it’s this sweet, compelling, respectful, sincere, adorable explanation that he’s been through a breakup, he finds me attractive in xyz specific ways, and he is humbly inquiring if I would be willing to give him a shot?

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2024

This essay is unfinished because I wrote it live on my FB feed while my kids interrupted me, and promptly crashed and burned, but oh well. People still tell me about how big an impact it had on them. Maybe I will finish it, but I am putting no pressure on myself because I am in severe pain and disability at the moment. I would love to finish No One is Making Me Do This, but things are incredibly difficult. So instead I’m practicing sharing old essays that feel deeply embarrassing.

You can buy me a coffee here.

Sign up for my upcoming house tending ritual here.

In this episode, I sit down with my sister to talk for the first time about her conversion to Christianity a few years ago. Following my three-part conversation with my brother-in-law about the polyamory to orthodoxy pipeline, we go a bit deeper into some of actual theology involved in a conversation process, how this massive worldview shift occurred in small ways over a long period of time, and how religion can provide structure, bounds of integrity, humility, and absolution in the face of struggle and suffering. You can listen to episodes 8-10 first to understand more of our backstory.

Listen on Spotify here.

This podcast is entirely tip-supported. If you find that you look forward to listening each time there is a release, you can buy me a coffee here to keep it going.

Listen, he was in an emo band. He had a tattoo. We talked all the time over IM. He confided in me. We had an intellectual connection.

Then he got a girlfriend. I was a supportive friend. He processed the relationship with me. I worked really hard to never experience any bias against her just because I was envious. To the point where, when she cheated on him at summer camp, I overcorrected and empathized with her in the story. “She must feel horrible,” I told him. “SHE must feel horrible??” he said. (I mean. I wasn’t wrong.) They worked it out. I think they’re still together. Isn’t that kind of incredible?

Regardless, I had no words for this experience and I shared my feelings with no one. I didn’t understand what I was feeling. But I have a very distinct memory of forming a core belief, Inside Out 2 style. The belief was this:

I am not pretty enough, subversive enough, or interesting enough for the cool alternative intellectual guy to like me back. I will never be good enough for guys like that to find me desirable.

I got my first boyfriend. I stopped talking to my crush. I never gave him an explanation. I just dropped off all communication. I found out a few months later, through a mutual friend, that my crush was sad I had stopped talking to him. He valued our friendship. “Tell her I really cared about her,” he passed along. And knowing him, I’m sure he was sincere. He was that guy. He actually valued women as friends, that’s why I liked him.

I felt so many feelings when I heard this, but numbed them to be a “faithful girlfriend” and not set off my insanely possessive, jealous boyfriend. It was such a god awful relationship I literally jumped for joy when I finally broke up with him three fucking years later, but that is another tale for another broom.

This formative experience (rejection from the cool alternative guy I actually liked, settling for a guy I did not like at all and had nothing in common with because no one else would have me) triggered a dating pattern that I would not break for the first time until I was 24, and then continued to repeat until like two or three years ago.

Ok. So. Today I attended a workshop where I got to craft a sweeper broom.

I hate crafting.

And this is sacrilegious where I live. As far as some people are concerned, I might as well say I hate the earth. I might as well reveal myself to be some kind of television portrayal of a snooty, consumer culture It Girl who spends all her parent’s money on designer crocodile handbags and paints her lips red with the blood of a rare indigenous orchid that only blooms once every seven years.

Where I live, earth skills are the only skills anyone cares about if they’re scanning for someone hot to date.

These skills are seen as the epitome of living in accordance with the highest values of the scene; they are a virtue signal of aesthetic compatibility. Not just in terms of looks, although that’s part of it. But in terms of the embodied, sensual, lived experience of the material plane of reality, and how this is impacted by our exposure to different ways of being and seeing.

It’s kind of like how there is no going back once you know the difference between wild grapes and Ingles grapes. Or how you feel like you’re dying because someone wore too much cologne on the airplane. Or how you go off sugar for a month and EVERYTHING you can buy in an American coffee shop tastes so unbearably sweet you can no longer eat it.

It’s like that, you know? I get it, because my actual aesthetic sensibility is compatible with the dirt worshippers. I am a dirt worshiper too. I make out with dirt. I kiss dirt’s hairy Hobbit feet. Everything about me, my spirituality, my way of experiencing the world, is 100% compostable. I know all about all the things; the Monsanto supervillains and the land back movement and the green washing and the mother/maiden/crone and the cycle syncing and the semen retention and the difference between pasture raised and cage free and how to not over harvest ramps and how to tell my magic mushroom tea “thank you” and song circles and alters and lucid dreaming and the mythopoetics of Trumpian presidency and a two headed party system and, yes. Yes. I get it. I fucking get it.

When we make things with our hands, when we find sticks in the woods and let them dry out for 4-5 months before they can even think of becoming a broom handle, when we grow the broomcorn ourselves, when we harvest the plants to make the dye to color the twine–that is a very different way of relating to our own humanity, to our interdependence with other beings, with the earth–not just a very different way of relating to physical objects or material value.

In fact, my ENTIRE PROFESSION is centered around getting at the root system of consumer culture, I just do it in a way that is ideologically, neurologically, culturally accessible instead of predicated on maintaining the specialness of a highly exclusive, completely inaccessible social scene dominated by white people with hot yogi bodies and intergenerational land access who subconsciously don’t want everyone to live like they do because then they don’t get to feel better than everybody. A scene that hoardes a meaningful life like a scarce resource all while making grand declarations about abundance mindsets. And no, it doesn’t fucking matter how you as an individual feel about that or whether or not it’s true for you, because we are not individuals (nor are we “all one” omggg) and y’all need to get your people in line around this shit, because I already don’t get invited to the party, so that’s on you. BOOM.

I just hate crafting. I find it tedious, hard, and under stimulating. I have zero patience for detail oriented technical skills. I thrive in intangibility. I’m a soft skills kinda gal. I EXCEL at soft skills. I’m better at soft skills than the vast majority of the people in my community. That is not a humble brag (clearly), it’s just facts. I give myself this credit where it is due because I have learned no one else is going to give me that credit.

And yes, you guessed it.

OH MY GOD. None of these fucking alternative hippie boys who can actually keep up with me spiritually or intellectually even notice me as a romantic possibility, ALL BECAUSE I DO NOT WEAVE MY OWN BASKETS. They think I am not living in the same reality as them.

Hello, wounded 15-year-old me. I see why she rebelled against the pressure to take up crafting. It’s not just that I find it kinda boring and annoying, it’s that I resent the superficiality of the scene. I resent that I have to be good at the hard skills and that no matter how exceptional I become at every other fucking thing that matters to this community at its core, none of these guys see me as anything but normie. That they compare me to the women who better match their brand identity, who affirm their easy in-group belonging.

Before I continue, let me clarify something.

I get that I’m rejecting that which has rejected me. I get that I’m projecting my own superficiality. I get that none of this is about getting laid, but about anti-capitalism or something (that was a joke, I get it I get it I get it, I swear). I get that I’m not 15 anymore.

The first thing the instructor had us do was sweep the barn floor with her stunning artisan broom. She wanted us to learn how to tolerate using something precious and valuable for its intended purpose. She wanted us to confront our own fear of RUINING NICE THINGS, the way we get overly precious about nice things because they are so rare in our world now. This is quite literally EXACTLY what I teach my clients. I teach them to practice tolerating the best of the best.

I do this because THIS is the most anti-consumerist thing we can do. And the way I teach it takes it one step further, because guess what else I teach? Fucking class literacy, culture weirding, and nonbinary thinking. Boom. Soft skills.

So the way I do it holds the mass produced plastic broom with equal fucking reverence as a sacred besom, and do you know why? Because not everyone can access a sacred besom. And that doesn’t make them less spiritual than you or me or anybody. You can make do with the fucking $18 broom. That was outrageously expensive to me last year, and this year I could take a $125 sweeper broom crafting workshop and only panic a little about the money. Not to mention, many of these crafts that were once provision skills of the working class are now hobbies of the privileged few. In short, I cannot stand the poor socio-cultural literacy of the earth skills scene. I have never felt I belong there, and now I can’t get out because I cannot unsee the weirdness of the mainstream either. I’m hurt, lonely, angry, bitter, immature…I am 15. I am fucking 15.

And when I decided to take this class–which appeared with perfect, spirit led synchronicity–I imagined I would be anchoring my hearthcraft and instead I left feeling affirmed that I can hate a process but cherish an outcome. Something I already knew, something I’ve been learning for a long time. Nothing new.

And the true ritual that emerged had less to do with witchiness or vocation or protection or healing my creativity wounds, and almost everything to do with the fact that, yes. The cool alternative guy will never choose me. So. Sometimes you get the ritual you need, not the ritual you want.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN AUGUST 2024

This essay is unfinished because I wrote it live on my FB feed while my kids interrupted me, and promptly crashed and burned, but oh well. People still tell me about how big an impact it had on them. Maybe I will finish it, but I am putting no pressure on myself because I am in severe pain and disability at the moment. I would love to finish No One is Making Me Do This, but things are incredibly difficult. So instead I’m practicing sharing old essays that feel deeply embarrassing.

You can buy me a coffee here.

Sign up for my upcoming house tending ritual here.

Magic is mundane.

In fact, one of the ways I choose to define magic is: “Do anything, but do it on purpose.”

Autumnal churnings and turnings naturally compel change. We can feel things dying all around us, signaling an approaching season of contemplation and hibernation, and the hopefulness of renewal on the other side. The veil is thin. The time is ripe to reset and restart the structures and contents of our lives.

During this three hour house-tending ritual that precedes the autumnal equinox, we will bring loving care and attention to our home, bury our dead dreams, and ask: “What am I dying into?”

Part of the reason domestic labor feels draining rather than restorative is because we are not meant to do it alone. Reap the rewards of keeping house in good company in this group container nestled in the safety, sanctity, and comfort of your own home.

First Hour: Cleansing & Clearing

We will spend the first hour locating and deep cleaning the center (hearth) of our home. Cleansing and clearing is not about “removing negative energy,” it is about creating movement/change/renewal where there is stagnancy. While we will not be deep cleaning our entire home, we will be gaining valuable house-tending momentum to carry us through the next moon cycle.

Second Hour: Creating Sacred Space

During the second hour of the ritual, we will create a sacred space in our freshly cleansed/cleared hearth, and settle into contemplation and conversation around the distinct grief of letting dreams die. We must negotiate the limitlessness of our desire with the hard limitations of our life. The rage and grief we encounter in this negotiation deserves more depth than simply writing what no longer serves us onto a piece of paper and tossing it into the fire. Intention setting is not enough. Longing is not enough. How can we move beyond symbolic spiritual platitudes and allow ourselves to know the instruction of true loss?

Third Hour: Funeral for Dead Dreams

The final hour of our ritual will offer a funeral for dead dreams; together, we will bury our burdens, stoke our righteous rage, and breathe our never ending opportunities to begin again.

Bonus Materials

~ A fall cleaning & decluttering checklist

~ A grief-aware how-to handout for decluttering

~ A printable Hearthcraft Spell Book for gentle habit-building in the home

Register here. It’s only $25.

In this episode, I break bread at the Supper Table with Eryn Joy Murphy, a restorative landscaper based out of Denver, Colorado (who I am pretty sure is secretly a wood nymph). We discuss what is like to begin growing familiarity with plants, and working through the guilt we may feel when we know we do not know anything about the place we live. We also explore how the lens through which we view the so-called “natural world” can be tinted by rose-colored glasses, and how we may flatten our perception of the land we inhabit when our eyes are untrained to take-in the true ecological diversity around us. We wonder and meander through the place-based belonging wounds we all carry, and discuss how we have each learned to develop a sense of home wherever we happen to live.

If you are interested in Eyrn’s work or would like to learn more about restorative landscaping, you can visit their website.

You can listen on Spotify here and watch on YouTube here.

This publication is entirely tip-supported. If the Supper Table has become part of your routine, you can say ‘thank you’ by buying me a coffee.

Just a heads up: we do talk about the concept of social hierarchy in this episode, but don’t explore it thoroughly. Hierarchy is an incredibly upsetting way of framing reality that is responsible for some of the worst human behavior in existence. I understand that it is jarring to hear someone say “hierarchy is reality” and then not explain what they mean beyond what they don’t mean.

But this is an unscripted supper table conversation where the entire point is to discuss what we are told to avoid discussing over dinner (i.e. avoid all topics that can offend and hurt, avoid all engagement with the enemy, avoid all pain points in our families), and this is also a podcast that gets about 20 listens and makes me about $5 if I’m lucky, not a government funded nazi convention. Please mitigate and right-size your reactions accordingly. My own family is a microcosm, not a punching bag for every listener’s projected pain.

In this third installment of a supper table conversation about my sister and brother-in-law’s conversation to Orthodoxy, I share a little more about my own reactive process post-polyamory chaos, and we discuss how marriage can be a vehicle for developing spiritual fortitude and selflessness. We also touch on the vulnerability women experience as childbearers (not to be confused with weakness), the way this vulnerability and risk could be mitigated by men developing stronger integrity, and the need for robust social scaffolding to support young families through the trials and hardships of early childrearing. This is NOT because I personally believe that the only solution for the suffering of mothers and children is for women to be able to depend on men.

Yes, all of this is heteronormative, and all of this is predicated on a belief that there is a more or less correct or desirable way of doing things, but please bear in mind that as a single mother of two children with two different men, I’m not exactly sold on the idea of trad family just because I had my own theories about trad family 10 years ago. Nor am I incapable of acknowledging that things could have been different for me if my children’s father’s had been dedicated partners, or if I had chosen partners more wisely. I get that it’s all made up and that the protection of normative nuclear families pretty much only always ends up hurting anyone who doesn’t fit the mold, because I also don’t embody that ideal despite my initial entitlement and privileges. At the same time, if all we’re ever talking about is how it’s all made up, then we’re not really engaging on the level of reality where constructs have both purpose and consequence.

You can listen on Spotify here.

After sitting on it for a month, asking myself if I should edit it or add an introduction...I have decided to just share it as-is, uncut, and trust that the people whose opinions actually matter to me are intelligent and compassionate enough to not expect perfection or to assume that everything I am trying to parse in one triggered conversation with a family member is indicative of how I feel or think about some of these issues.

So here it is. Part 2. Play nice, kids.

You can listen on Spotify here.

This podcast/publication is entirely tip-supported. You can buy me a coffee here.

Work with me to reclaim your home.

If you do not want to receive my Holistic Housekeeping newsletter but still want to receive everything else, you can unsubscribe to just that one section through my Substack page.

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