#the sledgehammers are coming on tuesday or wednesday most likely

[beloved-child-of-the-house]

last night our toilet clogged

right now our toilet is sitting in the shower and we have 2 dehumidifiers and a hepa filter all making a godawful sound they're so LOUD it rlly sets my teeth on edge

[go-redgirl]

Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the ancient joke goes.

It’s the Democratic/media/left’s comprehensive response to the nationwide riots that rage on, seven weeks after the funeral of police-brutality victim George Floyd.

His memory has been kidnapped by the most violent insurrectionists America has seen since 1968.

"Do you disavow the violence from Antifa that’s happening in Portland right now?" journalist Austen Fleccas asked Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., on Sunday. "That’s a myth that’s being spread only in Washington, D.C.," Nadler replied.

On Tuesday, Nadler further explained Portland’s mythical instability.

He excoriated U.S. Atty. Gen. William "Bill" Barr at a hearing/verbal abuse session that the U.S. House Judiciary Committee arranged for the attorney general.

Clearly enraged by the Trump administration’s surge of federal officers sent to Portland to combat the carnage that is not happening there, Nadler said, "The president wants footage for his campaign ads, and you appear to be serving it up to him as ordered."

The Judiciary chairman added, "Now you are projecting fear and violence nationwide in pursuit of obvious political objectives. Shame on you, Mr. Barr. Shame on you."

"The playbook is to create the impression that there is violence, that he must send in federal troops," Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said at Tuesday’s meeting.

"And that is how he [President Trump] hopes to win the election."

Gov. Kate Brown, D-Ore., wrote Wednesday via Twitter that federal agents "have acted as an occupying force & brought violence."

Brown’s words echoed those of Mayor Ted Wheeler, D-Portland. As he wrote via Twitter on July 14, "my biggest immediate concern is the violence federal officers brought to our streets in recent days. . . We do not need or want their help."

But on July 3, Wheeler blamed others for his city’s chaos.

"I remain deeply concerned, however, by groups who continue to perpetrate violence and vandalism on our streets," Wheeler wrote via Twitter, a day before federal Homeland Security officers reached Portland. "This has been going on for more than a month now."

Unlike House Democrats, who mainly told Barr to shut up, Republicans introduced a radical reform: They asked Barr questions and let him answer.

"As far as the weapons you mentioned, let me get this straight," said Representative Steve Chabot, R-Ohio. He listed "rifles, explosives, knives, saws, sledgehammers, Tasers, slingshots, rocks, bricks, lasers. Have I missed anything?"

"You have missed some things, but that’s a good list," Barr replied. "They have these powerful slingshots with ball bearings that they shoot. They have used pellet guns, we believe. We have found those projectiles have penetrated Marshals to the bone. . . They do start fires. They start fires, if they can get the fire inside or through the windows. And they start fires along the outside of the courthouse. When the Marshals come out to try to deal with the fires, they are assaulted."

The Associated Press’ Michael Balsamo embedded himself inside the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse. His dispatches, via Twitter, are chilling. "The lights inside the courthouse have to be turned off for safety & the light from high-powered lasers bounced across the lobby almost all night. The fear is palpable. Three officers were struck in the last few weeks & still haven’t regained their vision."

DHS’ deployment to Portland is not ritual chest beating.

It’s not toxic masculinity.

It’s the law.

According to 40 U.S.C. § 1315, the Secretary of Homeland Security "shall protect the buildings, grounds, and property that are owned, occupied, or secured by the Federal Government."

Acting Secretary Chad Wolf would break federal law if he left the courthouse undefended and let Antifa & Co. burn it to the ground. "What makes me concerned for the country is this is the first time in my memory that the leaders of one of our great two political parties, the Democratic Party, are not coming out and condemning mob violence and the attack on federal courts," Attorney General Barr said. "Why can’t we just say violence against federal courts has to stop? Could we hear something like that?"

[thefabulousfulcrum]

What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns

They weren’t the first mass-shooting victims the Florida radiologist saw—but their wounds were radically different.

via The Atlantic

HEATHER SHER

As I opened the CT scan last week to read the next case, I was baffled. The history simply read “gunshot wound.” I have been a radiologist in one of the busiest trauma centers in the United States for 13 years, and have diagnosed thousands of handgun injuries to the brain, lung, liver, spleen, bowel, and other vital organs. I thought that I knew all that I needed to know about gunshot wounds, but the specific pattern of injury on my computer screen was one that I had seen only once before.

In a typical handgun injury, which I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ such as the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, gray bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.

I was looking at a CT scan of one of the mass-shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, and was bleeding extensively. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?

The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semiautomatic rifle that delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. Nothing was left to repair—and utterly, devastatingly, nothing could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

A year ago, when a gunman opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun, hitting 11 people in 90 seconds, I was also on call. It was not until I had diagnosed the third of the six victims who were transported to the trauma center that I realized something out of the ordinary must have happened. The gunshot wounds were the same low-velocity handgun injuries that I diagnose every day; only their rapid succession set them apart. And all six of the victims who arrived at the hospital that day survived.

Routine handgun injuries leave entry and exit wounds and linear tracks through the victim’s body that are roughly the size of the bullet. If the bullet does not directly hit something crucial like the heart or the aorta, and the victim does not bleed to death before being transported to our care at the trauma center, chances are that we can save him. The bullets fired by an AR-15 are different: They travel at a higher velocity and are far more lethal than routine bullets fired from a handgun. The damage they cause is a function of the energy they impart as they pass through the body. A typical AR-15 bullet leaves the barrel traveling almost three times faster than—and imparting more than three times the energy of—a typical 9mm bullet from a handgun. An AR-15 rifle outfitted with a magazine with 50 rounds allows many more lethal bullets to be delivered quickly without reloading.

I have seen a handful of AR-15 injuries in my career. Years ago I saw one from a man shot in the back by a swat team. The injury along the path of the bullet from an AR-15 is vastly different from a low-velocity handgun injury. The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat traveling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic—moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat—and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.

With an AR-15, the shooter does not have to be particularly accurate. The victim does not have to be unlucky. If a victim takes a direct hit to the liver from an AR-15, the damage is far graver than that of a simple handgun-shot injury. Handgun injuries to the liver are generally survivable unless the bullet hits the main blood supply to the liver. An AR-15 bullet wound to the middle of the liver would cause so much bleeding that the patient would likely never make it to the trauma center to receive our care.

One of my ER colleagues was waiting nervously for his own children outside the school. While the shooting was still in progress, the first responders were gathering up victims whenever they could and carrying them outside the building. Even as a physician trained in trauma situations, there was nothing he could do at the scene to help save the victims who had been shot with the AR-15. Most of them died on the spot; they had no fighting chance at life.

As a doctor, I feel I have a duty to inform the public of what I have learned as I have observed these wounds and cared for these patients. It’s clear to me that AR-15 and other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilian’s gun cabinet. I have friends who own AR-15 rifles; they enjoy shooting them at target practice for sport and fervently defend their right to own them. But I cannot accept that their right to enjoy their hobby supersedes my right to send my own children to school, a movie theater, or a concert and to know that they are safe. Can the answer really be to subject our school children to active-shooter drills—to learn to hide under desks, turn off the lights, lock the door, and be silent—instead of addressing the root cause of the problem and passing legislation to take AR-15-style weapons out of the hands of civilians?

In the aftermath of this shooting, in the face of specific questioning, our government leaders did not want to discuss gun control even when asked directly about the issue. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida warned not to “jump to conclusions that there’s some law we could have passed that could have prevented it.” A reporter asked House Speaker Paul Ryan about gun control, and he replied, “As you know, mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies.” And on Tuesday, Florida’s state legislature voted against considering a ban on AR-15-type rifles, 71 to 36.

If politicians want to back comprehensive mental-health reform, I am all for it. As a medical doctor, I’ve witnessed firsthand the toll that mental-health issues take on families and on individuals themselves who have no access to satisfactory long-term mental-health care. But the president and Congress should not use this issue as an excuse to deliberately overlook the fact that the use of AR-15 rifles is the common denominator in many mass shootings.

A medical professor taught me about the dangers of drawing incorrect conclusions from data, using the example of gum chewing, smokers, and lung cancer. He said smokers may be more likely to chew gum to cover bad breath, but one cannot look at the data and decide that gum chewing causes lung cancer. It is the same type of erroneous logic that focuses on mental health after mass shootings, when banning the sale of semiautomatic rifles would be a far more effective means of preventing them.

Banning the AR-15 should not be a partisan issue. No consensus may exist on many questions of gun control, but there seems to be broad support for removing high-velocity, lethal weaponry and high-capacity magazines from the market, which would drastically reduce the incidence of mass murders. Every constitutionally guaranteed right that we are blessed to enjoy comes with responsibilities. Even our right to free speech is not limitless. Second Amendment gun rights must respect the same boundaries.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the appropriate agency to review the potential impact of banning AR-15-style rifles and high-capacity magazines on the incidence of mass shootings. The agency was effectively barredfrom studying gun violence as a public-health issue in 1996, by a statutory provision known as the Dickey Amendment. This provision needs to be repealed so that the CDC can study this issue and make sensible gun-policy recommendations to Congress.

The Federal Assault Weapons Ban (AWB) of 1994 included language that prohibited semiautomatic rifles such the AR-15, and also large-capacity magazines with the ability to hold more than 10 rounds. The ban was allowed to expire on September 13, 2004, after 10 years. The mass murders that have followed the ban’s lapse make clear that it must be reinstated.

On Wednesday night, Rubio said at a town-hall event hosted by CNN that it is impossible to create effective gun regulations because there are too many “loopholes,” and that a “plastic grip” can make the difference between a gun that is legal and one that is illegal. But if we can see the different impacts of high- and low-velocity rounds clinically, then the government can also draw such distinctions.

As a radiologist, I have now seen high-velocity AR-15 gunshot wounds firsthand, an experience that most radiologists in our country will never have. I pray that these are the last such wounds I have to see, and that AR-15-style weapons and high-capacity magazines are banned for use by civilians in the United States, once and for all.

[lalobalives]

*An essay a week in 2017*

Today I saw a video of a whale caught in a fishing net. A boat approaches. They think the humpback is dead. He begins to move. A last ditch effort to save its own life. The people on the boat radio for help. They know the whale won’t make it until help arrives. They must be the help. They begin to cut away at the net with what they have on the boat–a small knife. They cut and cut. The whale begins to move. He is still tangled. They keep cutting. Suddenly the whale gets free. For the next hour it dives and jumps out of the water. It slaps its enormous tail on the water. It hurls its body above the water and splashes back down into the depths. This is its freedom dance.

***

On Wednesday, in my high school fiction class, we started reading Gabby Rivera’s “Juliet Takes a Breath.” I got the students, three boys and five girls, to talk about people who have inspired them, like the protagonist Juliet is inspired by Harlowe. I ask: “Have you ever had someone make that big an impression on you? They go around sharing.

One boy says he has no big inspirations. I know him to be a huge comic book fan. He’s a burly fourteen year old with kind eyes and a big heart who is often biting with his jokes. He’s awkward. He’s been bullied. His humor can sometimes sting. I’ve had to remind myself that he is just learning how to be a brown man in this world. The world has already tried to crush him.

I ask: “Well, who introduced you to comic books.”

He smiles with no teeth. Says: “No one did.” Then he shakes his head. “No, my dad did but not through comic books. He introduced me to super heroes. He gave me a whole bunch when I was like five or six. He wanted to see which ones I liked.” I smile. Lean in closer. “And a few years later, I learned that comic books tell the stories of those super heroes.”

“And you were hooked,” I finish for him.

“Yes.” He smiles again. This time he shows teeth.

I move on to a senior I’ve known since she was a ninth grader. Before she went natural and now dons a head of tight brownish blonde curls. She looks at me and smiles with her whole face. “You,” she says and starts to turn the pages of her homemade journal. She folds white papers in half, staples them, seals the cover with clear packing tape. I imagine she has stacks of these at home. “I quote you all the time,” she says. “Last week, you told me…let me see.” She flips through the pages. I see lines of poetry. The beginnings of stories. Anecdotes. Musings about her day. Quotes from the many books she reads, some that I’ve suggested. She’s always reading. She stops on a page. Scans it with her index finger. “Last week I told you something shifted in me. I told you I think I’m more than a poet. You said, and I quote: ‘I’ve been waiting for you to see that. You’re a storyteller.’” She looks at me. Her eyes are welling. I blink hard. I can’t hide the heat in my face. I am all the colors.

“You’re the first person to tell me I’m a writer. To make me believe that I can make a life out of words.” I give her a high five.

I will hug her later. Tell her that I love her. Tell her that I believe in her. She is going to Smith in the fall on full scholarship. She is going to major in creative writing. I tell her: “You are light years ahead of where I was at your age. Just keep doing the work. Keep writing and pushing yourself. You got this.”

Later that evening, I cried at a comic shop after hugging and congratulating my sister friend homie Gabby Rivera on her first comic book outing, America #1, published by Marvel. There was a line out of the door for her signing, yo!

On Tuesday evening I went to a screening at the UN of the documentary AfroLatinos: The Untaught Story written by my Comadre Iyawó Alicia Anabel Santos, produced by Renzo Devia. The room was packed!

It hit me in the back of the comic shop on Fulton how very proud I am of these two glorious women who mean so very much to me and are amongst the best humans I’ve known. To say that I am proud does not suffice. I was moved to big fat tears, and just as I was about to apologize, I remembered what Lidia Yuknavitch said during workshop at Tin House: “Never apologize for your tears. My Lithuanian grandmother used to say that crying was the only language she trusted because it was the language of the body.”

I think of the inscription Gabby wrote in my copy of her novel: “We are the revolution.” Indeed.

***

I have a hard time accepting compliments. I have a hard time hearing that I have inspired and motivated and been an integral part of someone’s journey. I have seen these two talented women grow and evolve. We have gone through changes together. There were moments where it was too much to be in each other’s lives, so we weren’t. And then we came back. We’ve shared joy and tears. We’ve shared writing and stories. We’ve sat in classes together. We’ve workshopped each other’s work. They’ve both participated in my Writing Our Lives Workshops.

I tremble as I write this. I want to explain that I’m not say that I’m not taking credit for their accomplishments. I am acknowledging that we have been part of each other’s journeys. I want to say that I don’t know if I’d be where I am had I not met and loved them. I want you to know how much they feed and inspire me; that they are integral parts of my life and my evolution.

I remember when Iyawó told me she Renzo had invited her to tour Latin America and the Caribbean to work on the documentary. I remember when she started preparing for the months on the road and when she left. I talked to her from so many places across the globe. Me here in NYC, being a single mom, working and writing and trying to build a life for myself. Her in Haiti and DR and Brazil and Colombia and Honduras and…

I remember when Gabby told me about this book she was writing. I remember when she shared that Juliet came to her in my first Writing Our Lives class, in the petri dish class. I’ve often thought that that class was a failure. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was still figuring it all out. You learn so much in the journey…

***

In her essay collection Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat writes: “All artists, writers among them, have several stories — one might call them creation myths — that haunt and obsess them.”

***

Imposter syndrome has been sinking its claws deep into me this week. It’s nothing new. The feelings of unworthiness have walked with me for most of my life. If I look at the root of it, at where it comes from, I know it comes from my mother. Here’s the thing: a part of me feels guilt over this, over this writing I’ve done about my mother, over calling myself unmothered, over not being able to tell people that I have a great relationship with my mom, that she is my foundation and my church, that all things go back to the altar of la madre.

We texted a few days ago. It ended like it usually does: I am left reeling and questioning and wondering: if so many people love me, why can’t you? Why can’t you love me, mom? Why?

I am tired of feeling that. This shit is exhausting…and yet, here I am. Writing it. Again.

***

In her forecast for this week’s Venus retrograde, Chani Nicholas writes for Sagittarius:

Get to know what you are capable of. Don’t back down from it. Refuse to diminish it. Own it without arrogance, but with an unwavering acknowledgement of its magnificence.

Consider all that you have learned about your creative, erotic energy over the past 8 years. Which love affairs were your greatest teachers then? What did you learn from them? How have you healed? How do you approach this aspect of your life differently now? What were you learning about your creative energy then? What projects were your biggest teachers? How did you approach them then? How do you approach your creative work now?

The last two weeks of Venus’s retrograde ask you to sink deep below the surface of things. They get to the root of why you feel worthy and unworthy. Desirable and undesirable. Connected and disconnected. They scour the base of your energetic reservoirs, your creative wells, your oceans of imagination for clues as to what may have entered your streams of consciousness, telling you that you aren’t what you are. They ask you to heal the old wounds. Flush out the poisons from childhood. Cleanse the systems that were put in place by familial patterns so that you can better honor the gifts that you have received from the gods. ~ChaniNicholas.com

***

Over the past two days, I’ve found found myself searching for unmothered womyn like me. I’ve searched their names, their stories, their poems. I’ve been looking to feel less alone in the world. I need to see words like mine. Words that dare to speak our truths about our mothers. Words that chip away at the mother myth with a sledgehammer.

I reached out to folks on FB: Emily Dickinson’s poem Chrysallis inspired the title of my memoir. My sister friend Elisabet told me the other day that Dickinson was very much unmothered like us. I did not know this. There’s something about knowing I’m not alone in this that has gifted me much solace. All this is to say that I want to know more about Dickinson’s relationship with her mother. And if there’s any other unmothered woman writer that you think I should know and read, please do share. Yes this is me searching for roots. I am willing to be vulnerable and share that. There is no shame in our wounds.

In my research, I discovered that I am indeed not alone. There is nothing like learning that you are not alone in your ghosts and obsessions…

In a letter to her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dickinson wrote: “Could you tell me what home is. I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.” http://classiclit.about.com/cs/articles/a/aa_emily.htm

Virginia Woolf’s mother died when she was thirteen years old. She writes in her autobiographical fragments Moments of Being: “Until I was in [my] forties”—until she’d written To the Lighthouse—“the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day’s doings. She was one of the invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life.”…

And once it was written, Woolf noticed, “I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” Why? The question haunted Woolf. “Why, because I described her and my feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of these days I shall hit on the reason.” Source: The Day Virginia Woolf Brought Her Mom Back to Life

Woolf would later call her mother’s death “the greatest disaster that could happen.”

***

They call us unmothered. There are those who are unmothered because their mothers died. Then there are those like me, whose mothers are alive and still don’t mother us.

Merriam-Webster’s defined unmothered as: deprived of a mother: motherless <adolescent gosling that, unmothered, attached itself to him — Della Lutes>

Dictionary.com takes you straight to the various definitions of “mother” as if unmothered couldn’t possibly exist. As if nature would not allow that. God wouldn’t. The universe wouldn’t. And yet, I exist—an unmothered woman. ~excerpt from “They Call Her Saint”, A Dim Capacity for Wings, a memoir by Vanessa Mártir

***

I remember finding the term unmothered and how shocked I was by it. More than anything I was shocked by the realization that I wasn’t alone in my suffering and there were other people out there like me, who walked unanchored in this life. I wanted to read more work by and for us. I’ve searched high and low for it. I’ve reached out to mentors and friends for suggestions and recommendations. What has this made me realize? That I want to, have to, will one day compile an anthology of work by and for us unmothered women. An anthology of poetry and fiction and essays. I will create this for womyn like me to see that they’re not alone. That we see them. That there is refuge. There is something about seeing yourself in literature that is so profound and comforting. This is also true for the unmothered who have been living with the mother myth for so long, who have been told “solo hay una madre,” who have seen people gasp and clutch their pearls when they dare to speak of their mothers honestly, to show that she is not what the myth said, she wasn’t loving, she wasn’t kind, she broke you in so many ways… And here we are picking up the pieces. Let me show you how this shard glints in the moonlight. Let me hold up that mirror, sis. Let me show you what solidarity looks like…

***

In his essay “Finding Abigail” Chris Abani write: “Ghosts leave their vestigial traces all over your work. Once they have decided to haunt you, that is. These ectoplasmic moments litter your work for years. They are both the veil and the revelation, the thing that leads you to the cusp of the transformational.”

***

To be clear, there is no pride in me saying I am unmothered. This is a wound I walk with. I just decided that there is no shame in it either. This is my truth. This is me coming to terms with my existence. This is me seeing you. This is me telling you that for far too long we have carried this, telling ourselves that there must be something wrong with us because how could a mother not want to mother and be tender to her child? Mother is earth. Mother is the world. And to say that mother is wrong or incapable is to say that the world is wrong and incapable, and how could that be? It can’t…right? Wrong. There is nothing wrong with you now as there was nothing wrong with you then, when you saw your mother sneer at you, hatred pulling at the corners of her eyes. This was her pain. This was her trauma. That is not yours. You, I, we are worthy of love. We are lovable. It has been a journey to see that and own it. And some days I still struggle to see it and be it. But today you saw me. You said, yes. You said, me too. This healing ain’t easy but you must name your ghosts before you can tackle them. Mother is not the enemy. She just is what the world made her. What are you going to do with that unmothered wound? Me? Imma make art and I’m gonna love and Imma mother in resistance to how I was mothered. This is what I have and it is everything.

***

Kintsugi (“golden joinery”) or kintsukuroi (“golden repair”) is the centuries-old Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. Beautiful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceramic ware, giving a unique appearance to the piece. This repair method celebrates the artifact’s unique history by emphasizing the fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. Kintsugi often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful than the original, revitalizing the artifact with new life. Kintsugi art dates back to the late 15th century, making it more than 500 years old. It is related to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which calls for finding beauty in the flawed or imperfect. The repair method was also born from the Japanese feeling of mottainai, which expresses regret when something is wasted. Source: My Modern Met

***

I started therapy a year ago. My first words to him were: “I am an unmothered woman.” I am still in therapy, still digging into that wound. What I’ve come to is this: there are people who have mothered me in ways my mother couldn’t and still can’t. I am grateful for those surrogate mothers every single day. I had my Millie and I had my brother and so many others who reminded me that I am loved and lovable. They taught me that I can be different. That I can use these scars to make something beautiful out of this life I was given, that I have made. And, no, I didn’t do it alone. And, yes, I can stop the cycle. And there is also the bittersweet realization that I wouldn’t be who I am nor would I be able to do what I do, see you and be with you and be the mother and writer and teacher and student that I am, had I been mothered. See, it’s true in many ways que solo hay una madre, and that’s why I am still wounded by this truth of being unmothered. So the decision is: be broken by it or let it be my fuel. I didn’t know that I made the decision when I left at 13 and didn’t look back. I didn’t have the language then but shit, that girl somehow knew she had to save her own life. I’ve been doing it ever since. Even when I fucked up. Even when I repeated the “love me, please love me” cycle I learned from my mother. I was then and now still trying to save my own life. I was trying to see the glint of the moon in these shards. Today I want to say thank you to that 13 year old Vanessa. You are my hero, nena. You be the illest.

***

I have family on my FB friends list who don’t get why I write what I write or why I do the work I do. I see you. You’ve had a different experience with my mother or you don’t want to look at your own wounds or you’d rather I stay silent because you’re more interested in protecting the family name and keeping these secrets that don’t protect any us. I get it in many ways. I still won’t be silent. Don’t ask me to be. I’ve thought this through. I know I may hurt some people in my journey to heal and free myself of these ghosts. Yes, I think it’s worth all of it. Why? Because the cycle stops here. It has to. Silence already killed my brother. There can be no more casualties.

***

A little a while ago, as if to remind me again, a post came across my FB. The article starts: “How did Marcia Butler, the distinguished oboist, save herself from a detached, withholding mother and a sexually abusive father?… But Marcia was also hooked on trying to understand her mother. ‘I cobbled together weekly rituals through which I might pretend to be close to her and imaginatively pierce her thick veneer,’ she writes.”

So many of us are broken by our wounds. Some of us have somehow found a way to overcome and be fed by them. This is one story. I am writing mine.

[Woolf] was shocked by her [mother’s] death, but then again Woolf believed it was her “shock-receiving capacity” that “makes me a writer.” She thought the productive thing to do with a shock was to “make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.” The Day Virginia Woolf Brought Her Mom Back to Life

Relentless Files — Week 61 (#52essays2017 Week 8) *An essay a week in 2017* Today I saw a video of a whale caught in a fishing net.