#she was a very loving mother

[starrysharks]

ghanaian miku

[wildbasil]

things haven't been great but i think they will be. eventually 🌻🌼🩷

[noirandchocolate]

Several weeks ago one of my coworkers called me over into her cubicle and gave me a very unexpected gift. Her mother passed away recently, and she'd been packing stuff up at her condo to give to relatives and sell, so the home could be sold. The mother was an avid knitter and crocheter, and when my coworker came upon her stash of equipment, she told me, she "immediately thought of me as someone who might get some use out of it."

So, I have inherited a varied collection of knitting needles and crochet hooks, cable needles, sewing needles, and, best of all, now-out-of-print pattern books, mostly for blankets, because that was what this lady loved to make most. Plus, I also have a bunch of gauge swatches she made, pinned to little bits of card covered in perfect schoolteacher handwriting setting out the patterns they were made to test.

And also...

My coworker brought another bag, full of yarn and...knitted blanket squares. Her mother's last started project, before she got too sick to continue. And she asked if there was anything I could do with it.

It turned out, there are twelve completed squares, and I quickly located the pattern book they are from amid those given to me. It's a book of 60 patterns, meant to be put together however the maker wishes into blankets of 20 squares. I figured out which of the numbered patterns were already made, and selected eight more that I thought might go well with them.

So now! I am working on completing! My coworker's mother's last knitting project!

And I really am feeling very good about doing it.

[talesoftheuntold]

The Silver Queen

She was their Mother. Their Queen. A woman born from the magic of a Goddess. A Silver Wyvern who towered over mountains. She was beloved and gentle. She was fierce and wrathful. Yet for all her strength, her fate was knowingly sealed.

Her name was Eleuthera.

[thelucidduchess]

A message for Penelope’s suitors

[stil-lindigo]

motherhood.

[thehmn]

My whole adult life I’ve had to listen to my dear mother defend bosses who deprioritize employees who doesn’t have children or partners because “It’s more important that they get to have holidays/vacations/free time together so childless singles will just have to move over and be grateful for the scraps” but oh ho ho how the turns have tabled now that she’s a senior with no husband and no stay-at-home children and suddenly she’s the one who has to put up with shitty hours. Like she told her boss “I might not have any family at home but I still have a family! And friends! I have a life outside of work even if it isn’t in my house! I want to be able to see them too!”

Don’t we all. Don’t we all, oh dear mother.

But for real, if you have that attitude now, remember some day you’ll be the childless single again. It has to be a give and take where sometimes you get your way but other times you have to make sacrifices. Heck, once I got into a fight with a coworker who had a child because I couldn’t take her shift because I had to look after a family member’s children. Apparently she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that just because I didn’t have children of my own that didn’t mean I was free to do whatever. I don’t know anyone my age who have zero responsibilities outside of work so while I fully understand that people have to be able to pick up their children after school or kindergarten it’s naive to assume childless or partnerless people just party after work as if they were still in their early 20’s.

(Also, I’m going to judge the hell out of you and especially your partner if I find out your partner could have picked your kids up but made it your job. I once found out a coworker could never take the morning shift because she made her perfectly capable partner’s lunch every morning and you better believe I stopped being nice about it)

[bet-on-me-13]

Sam is Adopted

So! Have you ever noticed how Sam doesn't look like either of her Parents? Her Mom and Dad are Blonde and Ginger, and neither of them have Purple Eyes. How would Sam ever come from either of them?

She tells people that she dyes her Hair and wears Contacts, but the reality is that she was adopted as a baby by them. They had just found out that Pamela was Infertile and they wanted an Heir foe their company, so they decided to Adopt a kid.

But the Adoption Agency didn't have any kids who would realistically look like them, so they just got the first kid they found.

She had been left at the Orphanage by her Mother citing an inability to raise her and an unstable income. She never told the Agency her name, but told them that the baby's name was Sam, named after her Grandfather.

Sam was raised knowing that she was Adopted, but never really put much interest into it. Until one day when she decided that her adoptive Parents support of the Anti Ecto Acts was a step too far for her. She took an Ancestry DNA Test to see if she could find her Bio Mom to get away from them.

The results came back, and she found out that her Mom was a woman from Metropolis named Lois Lane.

[prideprejudce]

the tragedy of alicent and rhaenyra giving their hearts (and bodies) to incredibly violent (and misogynistic) men while craving normal human comfort and affection (that they once had from each other) but it never measuring up to their past lives together and instead leaving them feeling hollow and alone

[ultrainfinitepit]

Moon Cycle 2 - a redraw of this piece.

[taxinealkaloids]

horrible children who are. so so mean to each other

[nonasbirthday]

If you were going to make a character that was the soul of planet earth in a human body you might think to make her motherly. Wise. Forgiving. Mother Earth cares for us, she provides, right? But Tamsyn Muir wrote Nona the Ninth and said YES planet earth is loving but also she is SO SO ANGRY and HURTING. And actually she cannot care for others right now she needs to be cared FOR.

Also she wants to eat pencils and she thinks flowers are sexy.

[rogueddie]

El, who learnt through Hopper that if you do something bad then something you like gets taken away, kidnapping Steve whenever someone in the party does or says anything that upsets her

[bluerosefox]

Same As The Day I Lost You

I...

This came to me as I'm making dinner so I'll be quick.

What if we mix deaged Danny and twin/older sibling (either one works) Damian, AND he gets tossed to his sibling in a last minute escape.

Like what if he was fighting Vlad who was doing his whole "denounce your father and join me as my son Daniel!" Thing while in the Zone and knocks Danny into something that's floating in the Zone with the ability to deage or was hit by a new Fenton or Plasmius invention while fighting in town that accidentally deages him.

Danny, who in this was adopted, gets put back to the age of six. The same age he had been found by Jazz in a 'haunted' forest Jack and Maddie were visiting/investigating while also using that time as a family vacation. (They were shocked to see a little boy with a stab wound bleeding out and rushed him to the nearby town, almost completely forgetting about the glowing green tiny puddle they found nearby and bagged most of it as evidence when they heard Jazz's scream of terror over finding the hurt little boy)

The sudden revert into that traumatized age, along with the child response to a fight or flight scenario, and add Danny's deepest need/wish to be protected his child fogged mind wishes to go to the one person who always made him feel safe.

His twin/older brother.

Just as quick as it was with Danny being turned into a child, his ghost powers ripped open a portal and sent Danny to the person he wants to be with...

Only he didn't know that right at that moment his seventeen year old twin/older brother is currently fighting the League with his family's help (his mother was trying to convince him to return to the League and be it's heir) in Nanda Parbat (the very place Damian lost the last/only person he knew loved him without any strings attached.)

So imagine everyone's face when a portal opened up, some muttering its a new pit being formed before them or something, and crawling out of it is a very scared and confused six year old Danny.

[ladyofthecreeddraws]

Might've watched Arcane.

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!