Feeling Is First

I have started to collect my poems into chapbooks and sell them for $10 each. It is a strange thing to sell one's art. It is uncomfortable to ask friends, family members, and followers to buy your art. When so much content is free, it's easy to be picky about what we pay for. Certainly I, myself, am picky about which art I pay for.  I appreciate artists who are transparent about their finances and their intentions, so I want to offer up my own honesties on those topics. Here it goes:  Our Current Financial Situation We are a polyamorous family of 8 living on one income. My husband is a computer programmer with a good salary. My partner is a college student working on a computer science degree. My main gig at the moment is being Teacher Mommy to our five kids.  I worked outside the home before the pandemic. Most of my income at that time paid for childcare. Maybe I will work outside the home again in the future. Maybe I will continue to focus on parenting and art. We’ll see.  W

One of the best things I saw on the internet this week was the quote, "Self-love without self-awareness is useless." Yes! This quote has been attributed to Qasim Chauhan and Xochitl Frausto, but I don’t think anyone knows who actually said it. What’s important is that more and more people are moving beyond the narrow perspective of self-indulgence as the only type of self-love.  Indulgence absolutely has its place and time. It feels so good to love yourself enough to embrace opportunities for indulgence without fear. It feels so good to let your belly be full. It feels especially good to share treats with others in a sincere spirit of celebration without any guilt.  But indulgence every day isn't self-love; it's just harmful. We limit the kids to two treats a day unless it is a special occasion. Right now the favorite treats are cookies and fruit snacks. We say, "Treats are good for our happiness but bad for our teeth." If I limit the kids, shouldn

A personal perspective feels too small, but a global perspective is beyond my grasp. I want to tell you that for the first time in my life, I'm not sleeping. I stare out the window and wish for sleep until I give in to continued awakeness. I want to tell you that I am obsessively exercising. I keep thinking, "I have to be well for my kids. I might be their only parent soon." I want to tell you that I hate to leave the house. I used to be a person who complimented strangers. Now I am avoiding eye-contact and silently seething about strangers getting too close to me. But all of that is meaningless in context. Who cares about my sleep hygiene when the working poor are being exploited? There are refugees in crowded camps with no protection. There are children, right here in my own city, locked up together and getting sick. There are migrants here in my state, in the town where I got married, locked up together, at greater risk of infection, not for any violent crimes or fli

Him: How many kids do you have? Me: 5 Him: Like all 5 are your kids? Me: What do you actually want to know? Him: What? Me: I have 5 kids. They are my kids. Do you want to know how many pregnancies I had? How many births? If some of my kids are adopted? If I breastfed? What do you actually want to know? Him: *silence* OK, so I barked at the dude. But he is neither the first nor last person to ask me some variation of the question, "Which of these kids are REALLY yours?" Yo. I just told you. They are all mine. I cook their meals and wash their pee-soaked clothes. I bandage their scrapes and clip their finger-nails. I zip up their coats and braid their hair. I read with them and play with them and sing with them. I hold them and comfort them. Every. Single. Day. They call me Mama. All five of them call me Mama. And why shouldn't they? Aren't I doing everything to fulfill that roll? Look, I'm happy to answer your earnest questions. One woman said, "

Disclaimer: I am an average sized, attractive white woman who can pass as heterosexual. My parents paid for my college education. The financial struggles I have faced have been caused by the American healthcare system (Husband having cancer and partner having Lyme) and my own bad choices (buying a house we shouldn't have and then selling it underwater). This is a blog post about money management written by an immensely privileged person. If you are a person who faces systemic discrimination every day and you just want to roll your eyes and keep scrolling, I totally get that. If, however, you are curious about how my family of eight stays afloat, or how three adults can share finances without fighting constantly, read on! Pretty much the whole world is worried about money right now. If you're one of the lucky people who isn't worried about your own financial situation, you're still worried about your friends and loved ones who are struggling. You're still worried a

(Helpful reminders about my family that are relevant to this post: My household consists of myself, my husband, my partner, and our five kids. Husband works from home. Partner has Chronic Lyme.) Yesterday was a bad day. My great uncle died of cancer. My family cannot have a funeral for him, because of the global pandemic. I was informed of his death in the afternoon, while Husband was at the grocery store and Partner was sick in bed. I tried to continue to parent while having phone calls with various members of my family. It was difficult to think straight. It was difficult to remember what I ought to be doing. At 5pm, one of the kids asked, "What's for dinner?" I responded, "Oh shit." I suddenly remembered that I was supposed to be making egg rolls from the cabbage in the garden, which is a long process that I should have started an hour earlier. It felt easier to me to  carry on with the original plan and have an incredibly late dinner than to try to take

Until recently, when I looked for Spoken Word on Spotify, I got a lot of Levi The Poet, Shane Koyczan, and Neil Hilborn. Now these poets are great, and I appreciate a lot of their content. But they are also all white dudes. The human experience - the American experience - is so much more broad than any white man can express.  But then I found out that Sarah Kay was part of a compilation called 27: The Most Perfect Album. Then I found out that Andrea Gibson has a bunch of content on Spotify, and most of it is set to pretty music! Then I found out that Button Poetry started making Best Of albums and putting them on Spotify! Huzzah!  Sure, I could figure out how to make playlists on youtube of all my favorite Button videos, buuuuuuut I'm not gonna. I'm on Spotify more often than I'm on youtube, and Spotify doesn't have ads. So, if you're like me, and you love Spotify and Spoken Word and the opportunity to understand perspectives that are different from your own, pl

In my  previous post , I discussed the first of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. The first letter is mostly about poetry, but the rest of the letters are about life and love more generally. His favorite topic seems to be solitude. Rilke sees solitude as a beautiful and necessary part of existence. He sees solitude as deserving of our reverence.  In his seventh letter, Rilke lauds solitude as the antidote for unhealthy enmeshment in relationships. He writes, "But those who have already joined forces and no longer distinguish and differentiate between each other, those who no longer possess anything that is truly their own: how should they find a way out of themselves, out of the abyss where their solitude is buried?"  Isn't that relate-able? Haven't we all, at some point, lost ourselves in a relationship? Rilke goes on to describe what love could be like if we saw each other as equals, "the love of two solitudes that protect, delimit, honor, a

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet who wrote in German and French. Some of his work is really beautiful, including an entire series of poems about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Even though he was a white dude writing a hundred years ago, he demonstrates immense respect, reverence, and empathy for women and mothers. His best known work, however, is not any of his poems or poetry collections; it is his correspondence with Franz Xaver Kappus. Kappus was a fan of Rilke, and a student at the same military academy that Rilke had attended. The young Kappus sent a few original poems to Rilke and asked, "Should I be a poet?" Rilke wrote back, and the two maintained a correspondence for a few years. Rilke's ten letters to Kappus were later collected and published with the fitting title Letters to a Young Poet. Two different people gifted me two different editions of Rilke's work, (and they each very sweetly annotated them for me - so romantic!) and I too

I saw The Play That Goes Wrong at the Altria Theater in Richmond, Virginia on October 27th, 2019. Afterward, I wrote this:  I go see a play and watch a group of men violate the body of an unconscious woman as part of the plot, you know, for the LOLZ, and boy do they get 'Em. Thousands of people in the audience around me are in stitches. The whole place is an uproar of laughter. And in this moment it feels like all of them are laughing at me.  Triggered is when your heart sinks into your stomach and every cell in your body is quivering and you HAVE to leave the situation. As I get up to leave, I am astounded to see that I am the only one in the hallway, seemingly the only one upset enough to walk out. How is that possible?  So now I'm doing math in my head. There are 3500 people in that audience. Maybe 1750 of them are women. About a fourth of them have probably been victims of sexual assault. That's over 400 women. How am I the only one who couldn't take it