treehugginglibrarian

[treehugginglibrarian]

Yes. Cows are definitely pasture puppies. The best little pasture puppies.

Do you think cows are like grass puppies

They learn to bark when they are a little bit older.

[treehugginglibrarian]

The Lady of Lessons

A year ago today my Nana was put into hospice, where she died six days later. This followed a massive right hemisphere stroke that, had she been kept alive, would have rendered her wholly dependent on medical staff for absolutely everything. This was a fate she refused to abide, and ensured that fact was well documented in writing. Her gift of clear and concise instructions at the end of her life is something I’ve written about in the past, as are the silly stories and inside jokes that I will always carry with me. 

Contemplating my Nana’s death, and coming to terms with that death, was a process made harder by the fact that many of the memories I have of her actually are not grand or spectacular. She was an unconventional woman. An unconventional mother. An unconventional grandmother. All of which would have led to occasional disagreements and confusions on their own. She was also, for better or worse, an alcoholic. In mixed company we referred to her as a wino. Except, a wino enjoys their wine. My Nana required her wine. She was wholly sober exactly twice in my lifetime. Once when she had her gallbladder out, and once when she lay in hospice. Was she a functional alcoholic? Absolutely. But she was an alcoholic. 

When someone with substance abuse issues and an unconventional approach to their entire existence is a vital and important part of your life, you learn a lot. Some of what you learn is good. Some of what you learn is bad. All of it is useful and worthwhile. All of it will shape your view of the world and the manner in which you interact with the other people you encounter on this journey. To that end, I give you some of the lessons I learned from my Nana over the years. I warn you, these aren’t all happy stories filled with bunny rabbits and unicorns or some such shit. She was an amazing and stupendous woman who loved fiercely and was loyal to a fault. She was also mean as a rattlesnake at times. The lessons I learned from her are a reflection of this. 

Do not squander the love that others have for you

My Nana was both intensely good at squandering love and intensely good at giving it, which is a weird dichotomy to experience. She loved her friends fiercely and was loyal almost to a fault, making the fall-outs she did occasionally have (usually not of her doing) painful for everyone to see. 

Conversely, she had a noxious habit of treating the love of her family as though it was something she was due. Something she was owed. She had birthed her children and, as such, they owed her their affection. I’m uncertain if this is actually how she felt, but it’s certainly the attitude she projected. This meant that the sheer amount of love both my mother and my uncle had for her often seemed to go unrecognized.

I’m not discounting the love one has for friends, as friends can become your family. In my Nana’s case that was absolutely true. However, the expectation that family should love you with no work on your part, no return on that investment in the slightest, is a pile of horseshit that is perpetuated by way too many abusive parents who think shared DNA is sufficient reason to maintain a relationship. 

If you have people in your life who love you, seemingly unconditionally, don’t cast aspersions on that love by acting like it doesn’t matter. Don’t treat them like shit just because you know you can. Because you know, absolutely, that nothing you do will ever really be bad enough to chase them away entirely. Will you likely get away with it if you do treat these loving people in that fashion? Unfortunately, yes, you probably will. Those of us with harder hearts will see you for you are though: an occasionally horrible human being. 

Unconditional love shouldn’t exist as an emotion to be pilfered, squandered, and weaponized. It should exist as a blanket to keep you warm. A pillow to cushion your head. A net to catch you if you fall off course. It should exist as the knowledge that someone loves you enough that if you fuck up your life, they’ll still love you. If you’re giving that kind of love to someone and they’re responding in any other way, it may be time to make your love a little more conditional.

Don’t be afraid to have boundaries

My Nana didn’t teach me this one in a way that is pleasant. There are no rainbows and unicorns here. There is only a drunk woman who frequently emotionally and verbally abused her daughter, often in the presence of her grandkids, and one granddaughter’s refusal to abide by that kind of utter and unnecessary horse shit. My Nana has always been an alcoholic. Always. Usually functional, but never far from a wine bottle (or bourbon. Or scotch). Drunk or not, she was never the nicest person on the planet. She wasn’t going to be baking you cookies. That wasn’t the type of grandmother she was. 

The “kids” have known since we were actual kids that my Nana had a problem with alcohol. My mom did what she could to shield us, but alcoholism is hard to hide entirely. Eventually it rears its ugly head. She’d get belligerent. She’d get so drunk we had to pour her into bed. There were sometimes two or three year stretches where some of us didn’t see her, because we just couldn’t cope with the emotional exhaustion that followed a visit with someone like that. 

Even sober, my Nana had a way of treating my mother that often sets my mom’s own children on edge. She’d nag, belittle, or just generally treat her like she was too stupid to understand even basic shit. I was always baffled by the fact that my mother tolerated it. That she rarely, if ever, fought back. She would simply throw her hands up and walk out, disappearing to pace the neighborhood for an hour or more before reappearing and, often, going about her business as though nothing had happened. I found it both admirable that she had that level of self-control, and maddening that she refused to give her mom the reckoning that woman deserved. 

So, I toed a line somewhere in between. As I got old enough to spend time with my Nana by myself, an activity my mother didn’t much encourage but was unable to prevent as I was a grown-ass adult living on my own and capable of booking plane tickets without her permission, I drew much firmer boundaries than my mother ever had. I once sat on a curb and informed her, “No, I’m not getting in that car with you until you give me the keys. I didn’t survive a fucking war zone just to have a crazy damned loon hopped up on four glasses of noontime wine kill me in the five miles between this restaurant and her condo. Give me the fucking keys or I call a cab. And my mother.” My grandmother, embarrassed as hell by the ‘adult temper tantrum’ that was drawing attention from other restaurant goers, gave me the keys and toddled her way to the passenger seat. 

She never drove if I was around again. And she never once attempted to drive after drinking again. The boundary was clear. My ability to defend myself, to the point of personal humiliation if necessary, was obvious. I was a formidable opponent and she respected that, even as she’d occasionally call me a bitch and tell me I was being a child. 

I also never wrote her off entirely, though I’m not wholly certain she’d have been undeserving of it if I did. I sometimes went years without seeing her. Months without speaking to her. Knowing that I needed to cool off, after she’d said something awful about my mother, implied something terrible about my father, or been generally awful to my partner. She gave me no shortage of reasons to write her out of my life entirely. My mother seemed to find her important, though, and my mother is immeasurably important to me. 

So I drew harsh boundaries to which I stuck. I refused to let her cross them and slammed her back into her place when she did. But I didn’t write her off. 

In later years, I’ve realized that having a grandmother with whom serious boundaries are necessary has probably saved me from a multitude of uncomfortable situations. Boyfriends who didn’t understand “no,” so they got dumped. Workplaces that didn’t properly take care of their employees, so I just quit. Friends that were prone to emotional or verbal abuse, so I walked away. I learned very early on that boundaries are not a negative thing and they are not a means by which we say, “I don’t love you.” 

In some instances, boundaries that we stick to are how we get to love a person at all. 

Be kind. Mean people suck, so don’t be one of them 

My Nana was that person who was rude to shopkeepers and waitresses. Who would say, loudly enough for others to hear, “Why would she do that to her hair?” or “Does she not realize she’d be prettier in clothing that fit her better?” 

I was that obnoxious granddaughter who would tell the waitress, in earshot of my Nana, “you have been brilliant, love. Brilliant. You ignore the cranky old bat I’m dining with. She’s malcontent with her lot in life and has decided to take it out on you.” Then I’d tip her 40% of the bill and tell her manager how amazing she was. My Nana found it infuriating and embarrassing. I found her meanness unnecessary in a world that is often cold and callous without the active input of other people. 

Don’t be mean. It’s not needed. Bring beauty and joy where you can. Bring light where you can. If you ever find yourself wondering if someone would feel compelled to tell a manager that the person you’ve just spoken to has done brilliantly as a means by which to repair the conversation you had with that person, you have strayed from the path.  

Doing what is right and/or needed is sometimes really hard

Keeping my Nana in my life was the right thing to do. On every level. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t occasionally hard, though. Watching her be mean to my mom was hard. Watching her upset my sister was hard. Watching my brother be baffled that our mother came from this human was hard. Having to learn how to set hard and inflexible boundaries with an adult who was supposed to be setting an example for me, was hard. 

The flip side of that was that, strangely enough, staying the hell away from her was really hard, too. Yet it was sometimes necessary. To make a point. To spare my own mental health. To illustrate to my siblings that abuse doesn’t have to be tolerated. I loved her immensely though, and I knew that staying away hurt her. Which meant that, even as the distance was a requirement so I could lick my wounds and recuperate, it was sometimes really hard. 

In my life, a multitude of things have been right but also really hard. Getting divorced was right, but kind of hard. Leaving the Army was right, but kind of hard. Leaving libraries last year was right, but really hard. My current marriage is most assuredly right, but also sometimes a little hard. Life is filled with things that are right, but varying degrees of hard. The hard must be tolerated, embraced even, so that we can better ourselves as humans, and our circumstances. 

“I love you” should never be skipped. Never.

In all the years I’ve known my Nana, I don’t know that she’s ever ended a phone call, a letter, a card, or a voice mail without telling me she loves me. In a lot of families this may seem unremarkable but, in my own, “I love you” are words that actually aren’t used. Ever. I hear the words “I love you” from my friends with far more regularity than I hear them from my parents or my siblings. If I’m honest, I hear them from my friends more often than I hear them from my spouse. That’s not to say that my family doesn’t love me, because they do. With the exception of my Nana and my late grandmother, however, none of them are overly prone to verbal expressions of this love.  

In mentioning this to my mother, she confided that my Nana didn’t use the words with many people. While that serves as an explanation for why my own mother never says “I love you,” and rarely even says “I love you, too,” it’s not the whole story. Particularly since, like her own mother, she apparently does use the words with some people. I haven’t the foggiest why my father’s expressions of love are rarely if ever verbal, though I’m assuming the fact that this is the case for both of my parents is why neither of the siblings I was raised with are effusive with verbal affection, either. 

Admittedly, all of them have love languages that veer away from “words.” All of the family in my life fall squarely in the “actions” and “time” category, with “gifts” ranking even higher than words do. This is a problem when, for me, the words are important. Yes, the actions tell me you love me. Yes, your desire to spend time with me tells me I must matter. Like most humans, I enjoy gifts. However, the inability to use the words is an action, in and of itself. Speaking, or not, is an action. It is an action with power, as all of us are taught from a rather young age. 

We are told to “use our words and not our fists.” We are taught that words have consequences. We are taught that how we speak to and about people matters. We are, in effect, taught from the time we are taught to speak that words ARE a form of action. An important and consequential form of action. Unless, of course, the words in question are, “I love you.” At which point we routinely tell people who question the absence of those words that, “actions speak louder than words.”

Words are the answer instead of a fist. Words are the answer instead of a fight. The pen is mightier than the sword. Therapists deal almost exclusively in mental repair conducted via language. Mental repair that is, on occasion, wholly necessary because of language we have been exposed to. Speaking, the selection of your words and how they are delivered, is not only an action, it’s an immensely powerful action.   

But, somehow, actions convey our love for one another better than, “I love you,” does. Actions, we are told, matter more than those particular words. Actions, we are told, can exist in the place of those three words. 

I’m not advocating for the use of hollow words. And I’m not advocating for the notion that abused children whose parents said (or still say), “I love you,” should forgive their actions. What I’m saying is that, when you love someone, remember that telling them is an ACTION. Telling them is an act of service. Telling them is a gift that you are being given and that you can give. A gift that you won’t be able to give or get forever. And if, by chance, the person to whom you’re saying it is one whose primary means of expression is words, it’s a gift that will matter to them.  

Tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. Fuck, five minutes from now isn’t guaranteed. Tell the people you love, that you love them. It’s not cheap. It’s not pointless. It’s not “just words that don’t matter.” It’s an act of love.     

Hugs. Always.

I gave my Nana a hug every time I saw her. Even if I left in anger. I will never regret a single one of them. Particularly the ones I gave her in the last month that I saw her. 

When in doubt, hugs. Always hugs. (Yes, I know, consent and all that jazz). You never know when you won’t get the opportunity to hug someone again. So hug them, dammit.

Do not live in a land populated by your mistakes. It won’t undo them. Learn from them and move on. 

As alcoholics are want to do, my Nana made a LOT of mistakes. Some of them she’d own. Many of them she wouldn’t. All of them had the distinction of being entities in a rearview mirror she basically never looked through, at least not until much later in life. I’m not saying that some semblance of self-reflection is a bad thing, as growth should be a part of everybody’s life. An approach that allows you to mutter, “yup, fucked that up,” and then just move on, might not be the worst thing in the world, though.

My Nana had an interesting relationship with mistakes. She’d have a knock-down verbal brawl with my mother that resulted in tears, and think nothing of it. No apologies. No serious self-reflection. If she processed anything she said as a mistake, she seemed incapable of vocalizing that fact to other people. More often than not, however, it was a fight she had caused and doing so was definitely a mistake. She’d fret next to nothing over it and just move on. 

This seemed to be a basic routine for her. Fuck something up, piss someone off, be an asshole in the name of living her life, and then just proceed as though it hadn’t happened. 

Historically, I’m the exact opposite. I dwell excessively on mistakes, convinced that they say far more about my character and my personality than they actually do. While I’d never want to go the route that my Nana went, seemingly dismissing the damage I do in my quest to just put it behind me, there is merit to the idea that dwelling over much on our mistakes is a bit of a waste. 

I cannot change them. I cannot undo them. I cannot make the present a reflection of a past where that mistake did not happen. The best I can do is somewhere between my Nana and my standard reaction: learn from it, apologize if necessary, and move the fuck on. 

You have one life. Live it for yourself. 

I don’t want to imply that my Nana was a wholly irresponsible human, because she wasn’t. Yes, she was a functional alcoholic. But she also held rather well-paying jobs for… forever. She retired far later than the standard retirement age and, while some of it was a need for money, much of it was a need to be and feel useful. She loved people, loved socializing, and loved having an office to go to everyday. 

What my Nana taught me is that, ultimately, my happiness is far more important than abiding by any sort of convention or expectation that anyone has placed upon me.

When I joined the ROTC, an unconventional route for a liberal woman to take, it was my Nana who routinely reminded me that militaries needed brain as much as they needed brawn. She was right. I flourished in uniform and left only because our Armed Services has yet to find a way to train the misogyny out of the men they recruit. 

When I got divorced, my Nana was who helped me through it. She’d already been there. More than once. She understood what it was to look at a human you’d pledged your life to and realize, “this human does not spark joy. My life will not be all that great if I stay tied to him.” Even as my parents swayed between questioning my life choices and desperately trying not to mutter, “I told you so,” my Nana proffered only encouragement to do what I felt was right and necessary, and to not be swayed in my decision by outside forces. 

It was my life. I had to live with these decisions and their consequences. Which meant how other people felt about them ultimately didn’t matter.

My parents have never been unsupportive of my decision not to have children, but for years I hid that decision behind kind platitudes; my genetics aren’t great, the world is falling apart, I don’t have the money, I don’t have the time, and on and on. A litany of excuses that childfree women everywhere are exceedingly familiar with because the simple truth, I don’t have children because I don’t desire motherhood, is so anathema to the human condition that it’s understood that it needs to remain unspoken. 

Except with my Nana. The first time she asked me about children I was in college. Without even thinking about it, I told her the truth. “I don’t want them. That’s it. That’s the only reason. I just don’t want to be a mom. It’s not for me.” She advised only that I ensure every man I was ever with understood how serious I was about this fact. Advice that was well heeded but ultimately failed to convey the unfortunate fact that many men genuinely think their penis and their last name will change a woman’s mind on this facet. 

I have one life to live. I’ve broken a lot of foolish hearts who thought they could change how I want to live it over the years. My divorce? Ultimately caused because he thought, by his own admission, that once we were married I’d realize I wanted kids after all. 

Maybe I should feel badly for the pain I’ve left in my past, but my Nana made it pretty clear that if I tell people who I am, and they fail to listen, that mistake’s on them. I get to do this once. As long as I’m doing it honestly, it’s not my job to protect other people from their inability to take me and my desires seriously.   

Even sincere apologies can be sincerely shit

I honestly don’t know if my mother ever received any apologies for the fucked up treatment she was occasionally subjected to by my Nana. I know I did. Some of them were clearly sincere and heartfelt. Some of them were given out of obligation and a general concern that if she didn’t apologize my mom might finally lose it or, possibly worse yet, I might finally walk. With very rare exception, all of them were tied to something stupid she said or did while drunk. Alcoholics are a hoot that way! 

Over a lifetime of apologies, if I had to guess I’d say more of them than not were sincere, but more of them than not were also delivered by a woman who was confused as to why she was apologizing. I’m uncertain if my Nana’s predilection towards confusion when faced with the task of apologizing stemmed from the fact that much of what she apologized for she did when she was drunk, or if it was more complex than that. It’s quite possible she didn’t understand why we “let” ourselves be hurt by the things she said and, though sorry that we felt badly, she wasn’t necessarily sorry she was the reason we felt badly. She apologized not because she made us feel like shit, but because she didn’t like seeing us feel like shit. She apologized for treating us like crap in the same way you’d apologize after a death. “That shit sucks, I’m sorry you’re going through that,” with the understanding that the person apologizing cannot actually influence it at all. They’re apologizing as a form of empathetic commiseration. 

Except, my Nana could have prevented many of the things she apologized for. To do so, she’d have to give up her wine, or at least maintain better control over her mouth while hopped up on it, and neither of those things were ever going to happen. So, we faced a litany of apologies for things she didn’t really think she needed to apologize for, but she was at least sincere in her desire for us not to feel terrible, even if she was utterly clueless that she was the reason we felt that way. 

Late in my Nana’s life, probably the last five years or so, she started to lose her memory a bit. As my dad’s father had begun having memory issues and promptly become a bear of a human who was difficult to be around, this was concerning. I already had one demon-possessed grandparent to contend with, I didn’t need another. My Nana went a completely different route, though. 

The more she forgot, the more contrite she became. Acutely aware of her older age and her mind’s decline, she’d write down everything, ask us if we’d already discussed something, and try with sincerity to avoid making us all crazy. She succeeded and failed in equal measure, often telling us the same stories repeatedly and asking us the same questions five times in an hour. Those last few years were nonetheless precious, though, because they exposed us to a version of my Nana I’d not met. 

I once sat on the couch with her while we sipped wine, her holding my hand and giving me a coherent if lengthy soliloquy about how much she loved my mother. How grateful she was that I spent so much time with her. How happy she was that my uncle and I are such good friends. How lucky she was to have family and friends that loved her so much. Even as her mind became clouded by age and, as always, wine, she was at times the most clear I’ve ever seen her. She understood things in a way she hadn’t before; or maybe she simply let herself see things she hadn’t before. 

Whatever the reason, the last 5 or 6 six years of her life saw no apologies from my Nana, sincere or otherwise, because she rarely did anything requiring one. She wasn’t sober, by any stretch, but she was also less drunk than previously. Moreover, she was far less intent on aiming barbs in our direction, having found herself more amused by puzzles, Girl Scout cookies, and hugs. All of which are much better pastimes than being mean, and none of which typically require an apology. 

Just being there can be enough

The pandemic is not what killed my Nana, but it almost certainly contributed to a hastening of her death. For those with memory issues, being alone all the time is a surefire way to ensure those issues get worse. With everything posing a risk of illness, my Nana was confined to her condo. A social butterfly whose wings were clipped when she most needed them to keep her afloat. 

This lack of access to people left her alone and adrift, and made it that much harder for any of us to know how she was really doing. Which meant when she forgot why she had to take all of her medication, and thus stopped taking it, no one was there regularly enough to realize it had happened. 

Don’t fret and think I blame myself or anyone else for my Nana’s death. I do not. Had anyone of us gone to visit her and gotten her ill, it almost certainly would have killed her and we never would have forgiven ourselves. Abiding by protocols was necessary and the right thing to do. I recognize, however, that the physical presence of her family or friends may have better ensured she stayed on her medication. Would it mean she was still here today? Who’s to say. Given the types of medication she was on, and what ultimately killed her, I have a hunch we’d have gotten another year or two if she’d seen people with enough regularity for someone to realize she wasn’t taking her medicine. 

Which is to say, being there is sometimes enough. Just existing in a fashion that lets you notice someone, is sometimes enough. We’re prone to assuming that in order to be present for each other, we have to fully invest in each other’s lives at all times. Sometimes, though, just being there is enough. Taking up the same space as someone else is sometimes all that’s necessary to be of help. 

My mother and I spent a month in Florida just before my Nana died. I saw her less than a week before she had the stroke that ultimately killed her. Much of our time with her that trip was ultimately spent just existing. We occasionally did puzzles or ate dinner or sipped white wine out of pink glasses, but we were ultimately just existing. Telling her she mattered by giving her our time. It was all we could do right then, and it was enough. 

Don’t discount the act of existing with someone else. Allow yourself to just be there, without placing any expectations on how you will be there. You’d be surprised how frequently that action alone is sufficient. 

My Nana was a beauty and a beast. A complicated, complex, woman who could inspire fury and love in equal measure. She was sent into hospice a year ago today, and my life hasn’t ever quite been the same. Though I’ve traversed the year with far more grace and aplomb than I’d have thought possible six months before her passing, the reality is that she took a part of me with her when she left us. A part that I’ll never really get back. Maybe that’s how it is every time someone leaves us behind. They leave a tiny hole, that we’ll spend a lifetime trying to fill with memories and chocolate. 

And maybe a little wine. 

[treehugginglibrarian]

My Nana is Why I’m Like This

Writing about my Nana is hard, because our relationship was at times hard. I think anyone with an alcoholic or an addict in the family can relate to that. I learned a fair many lessons from her over the years, all of them useful even if not all of them were lessons that were learned in an enjoyable manner. That said, lessons are not what I want to think about just yet. Yes, she was flawed. When she was in a good place, though, and at her best, she was a truly wonderful human. For now, at least, for the few minutes it takes to write each of these pieces, I’m going to let myself pretend that this lovely person is all that ever existed of my Nana. To that, I offer some of her more poignant, thoughtful, or generally amusing moments.

Blankie

When I was a baby, basically everyone in my life lived in Massachusetts, as did I. My Nana lived in a nice house in Richmond with her husband at the time. Whenever we would visit, my mother would put a blanket down on the couch so as to ensure that if I puked, or drooled, or spit up, or just did baby-things in my sleep, my Nana’s couch would be safe. Apparently, after so many months of this, I eventually decided the blanket I was laying on was “mine.”

My mother found this out when she tucked it into a closet after we got home one evening, and I started to cry. She opened the closet and I stopped. Close: Cry. Open: Stop. When she walked me into the closet, I apparently pulled the blanket in question off the shelf, stuck my thumb in my mouth, and settled down. I had a blankie. While this was fine for sleeping and such, my mother was a little concerned. Not because blankets are inherently bad, as even back then there were psychological studies showing that children with comfort toys were actually better adjusted than those without. No, she was worried about more practical matters. Such as laundry day. Or if the damned thing should happen to go missing.

Enter my Nana, to save the day.

My Nana had not found the “original” blankie, but she was who found the “spare” that, excepting the overall color, was exactly identical to the one I used every night. So it was that on most days and nights I could be found dragging around a pink and white gingham and flower print blankie, as though it was a fifth limb. On occasion, however, this blanket would be replaced with one that was yellow. So that the pink one could get washed. Until, at the age of 13 or so, an age at which most normal humans would have long since stopped carting a blanket anywhere, I did something crazy: I retired the pink blankie. Torn to bits and more patchwork than blanket, it was time.

My yellow blanket took over, full time, moving into the task like the champ that it was. Sporting little more wear or tear than a grey foot print from a porch painting incident, this blanket has incidentally been a fair many places with me. It went away to college with me. It moved to Israel with me. It deployed to Iraq with me. It is the blanket I have cried into over failed relationships, fucked up friendships, and fights with my mom. And, yes, it was the blanket I sobbed into when I fully realized that I was never going to see my Nana again.

As for how this came to be… My mother watched a young boy have his comfort object taken away when it was done to one of her babysitting charges. She swore that, even if his parents didn’t realize it, he was never completely the same. Comfort objects are constants. Present when distance, disagreements, or death separate us from the people who matter most. She swore then and there, well before she’d ever read any research reinforcing her opinion, that she would never do that to her child. Which is how I was a 24-year-old Army Officer who ended up taking a blanket to Iraq with me. It’s also probably why I have a stuffed cow that’s been to more countries than most humans I know.

Shirley Temples

I have an absurd fondness for Shirley Temples. That’s not a typo in which I pluralized a child actress, nor is it a reference to a rather fun tap dance step. No, it’s a reference to a non-alcoholic mixed drink typically made with Sprite or 7-Up, grenadine, and cherries. Mind you, I don’t much care for Sprite, 7-Up, or maraschino cherries on their own. But mixed with grenadine and presented to me on a special occasion, my brain is convinced it is the best thing ever.

This is completely my Nana’s fault.

As a child, I was fascinated by the glasses that my Nana’s drinks came in. I was disinterested in the drinks themselves, as they smelled funny, but I liked the glasses. They were so fancy and grown up, and everything you said seemed more important if you were holding one. To that end, my Nana took to ordering me a Shirley Temple in a martini glass whenever we were out for a special occasion, that way I could feel important and profound just like the grown ups.

It didn’t take long for special occasions with my Nana to translate into special occasions of all sorts, and for the glass shape to stop mattering quite so much. As I got older, Shirley Temples became my go-to drink if I was out with friends, out for a celebration, or at a wedding, and I knew I should’t be drinking alcohol. Yes, yes, I have been introduced to the “Dirty Shirley” and, while I find the drink amusing, I prefer wine, whiskey, or bourbon if I want actual alcohol.

At a bar after a car accident a few years ago, I asked the bartender if he could make me a Shirley Temple (I was on concussion protocol, no alcohol for at least two weeks), and he found the request so endearing he refused to charge me for it. And, no, he actually wasn’t hitting on me. When I asked him how much it was, his response was, “No charge. That’s the cutest drink I’ve made in weeks. The chance to be a kid at work doesn’t have a price tag attached.”  

Courtesy of my Nana’s desire to include me when I was a small child, a simple drink now has dozens of happy memories attached to it and has become a tradition so ingrained that I genuinely cannot think of the word “celebration” without thinking of Shirley Temples. Someday, when my nieces or nephews get married, I’m gonna be that eccentric 50-some-year old woman sitting there with my rainbow hair and my excessive glitter, sipping a bright pink drink.

My Nana would approve.

Scotland

When I was nearly 7, my Nana whisked me away on a near empty flight to a beautiful land of greenery, castles, and grey skies, so we could celebrate my birthday. It was October, so the British Isles weren’t exactly a cheery place to be. It was of no matter to me, though. Every part of the trip, from the passport to the money to the fact that my Scottish great aunt and uncle did not understand the purpose of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, was fascinating to my tiny little brain.

From the moment we landed, I found the “strangeness” of Scotland to be intensely intriguing. I was amused by the fact that my great uncle’s car had the steering wheel on the “wrong” side. I was baffled by the idea that buildings as old as the castles we toured could possibly be standing still. I was mesmerized by the sheer amount of red hair, something I almost never saw back home unless I was looking in a mirror or looking at my mom.

My great aunt Nan was in the beginning stages of what would eventually become dementia, which meant I was eternally referred to as Tammy (my mom’s nickname) and often asked about memories of a childhood I hadn’t lived. I eventually stopped correcting her and, instead, goaded her into telling me about these memories. It’s a sneaky way to learn about your mother’s childhood that only a child can cheekily get away with!

On my birthday, she made me a giant fluffy cake that was covered in bright pink, strawberry icing, and put zero limitations on how much of it I could eat. There was always tea, always, which went a long way towards explaining how my mother had ended up passionately obsessed with the stuff. Presented to me with honey and cream in it, I came home with a new appreciation for my mother’s preferred beverage.

At a tea shop, having no idea what any of the desserts or cakes were, I asked the person taking our order to bring me their favorite. Thus, at the age of 7, I was introduced to scones. Which I described as “cookie biscuits,” because they were too fluffy to be one and too sweet to be the other. I still enjoy them immensely, but only with tea, and I still think they’re technically “cookie biscuits.”

My Nana taught me at a young age that it was not only okay to be curious about the things you didn’t understand, it was okay to go explore them. To ask questions. To try new things. Nearly 30 years after this first adventure overseas, I still travel in much the same way. With a curiosity that is intent on learning about the country and the culture I’m momentarily immersing myself in, a desire to find out what the locals like best, and a fondness for trying all of the hot beverages and desserts humanly possible while there.  

Glow-in-the-Dark

Me: Nana, do you remember that time Aunt Anita asked me about blowjobs? Nana: *snort of laughter* Yes, of course I do. You were 14 and you were mortified.

This recollection, gifted to a darkened bedroom in my step-great-grandmother’s house in Montauk, called to mind an event two year’s prior. While visiting relatives in Cape Cod, my great Aunt Anita had asked me if I put condoms on men before giving them blowjobs. Before anyone freaks out, she was on the older side, had never met me before, and probably had no idea that I was only 14 at the time.

My mother was somewhere between mortified, furious, and amused. My Nana laughed and explained that, as her granddaughter was only 14, it was actually pretty unlikely I had given all that many blowjobs in my life. My great aunt looked at me expectantly  and, when I nodded the affirmation that my Nana was correct, she sighed and patted my hip. “Child,” she said, “don’t make them wear them.” She raised a finger in the air to emphasize her next point, “it’s not about them, mind you. It’s just that the only thing that tastes worse than a dick, is lubricated latex.”

The more you know, I suppose.

(It is worth noting that I have no idea how this conversation started. I walked downstairs for a glass of water and simply found myself being asked about blowjobs. I like to imagine my great aunt would be entertained to know I’ve given up on dicks entirely.)

Anyway, lying in the dark in Montauk two years later, still having never given a blowjob, I offered my Nana this tidbit: I found out they make flavored condoms. That would solve Aunt Anita’s problem! Nana: *hilarious laughter* I’ll be sure to tell her that the next time I talk to her! Me: They also make glow-in-the-dark ones. Though I feel like that would be a little too much like turning a penis into a lightsaber. Nana: *contemplative silence* Sweetheart, if you need it to glow in the dark, you need more than just a condom I think.

I offer no wisdom or insight gleaned from this exchange. I know only that for years to come afterwards, if either of us noticed something truly absurd while out and about together, we’d point at it and just mutter “look, a glow-in-the-dark condom,” and the other would know exactly what we meant.

Charming the ROTC

“We’re going to Daytona Beach. You should come. We’re gonna stop in Fort Meyers so George can see her great aunt or something.”

So began my spring break trip my sophomore year of college. The only year that I went on what most would consider a “typical” spring break trip, as the two years after that I traveled via the geography department on my campus. Since my Nana lived quite close to Fort Meyers, we figured it only appropriate to stop in and say ‘hi’ to her while we were in the area. Which is how she ended up with 8 or 10 ROTC cadets showing up on her doorstep crazy early in the morning on an April day.

We had set out quite early the day prior intending to drive all the way through. The end state was that we ended up arriving at like 6am or something. Blessedly my Nana was still an early riser, so she welcomed us all in and got us settled with showers and naps. She stuck around much of the afternoon, keeping us company while we splashed in the pool, getting to know the boy I was dating at the time, and peppering my college friends with questions about pretty much anything she wanted.

They were wholly charmed, with at least one of them threatening to steal her away and make her an honest woman. Again.

Come evening, not wanting to witness the debauchery or “get in the way,” she headed a couple doors down to stay with a friend. She’d pointed us in the direction of the wine bottles and the glasses, asking only that we not ransack the expensive stuff, and making a remark about the cleaner being in the day after tomorrow.

I’m not certain what she’d expected to find when she came back the next day, early afternoon, but I don’t think a nearly spotless apartment was it. I had awoken to one of my friends vacuuming. Someone else was scrubbing a bathroom. A third person was unloading a dishwasher that I’d drunkenly loaded and run the night prior. I began stripping beds and doing laundry. By noon or so that day, when she came back over intending to say goodbye as we made our way a touch up the coast to George’s great aunt, the apartment was cleaner than when we’d gotten there.

Naturally, my Army buddies were welcome to come back to visit her any time they wanted. Though O’Dell did get warned that if he asked her to marry him again she was probably going to say yes and that would make things super awkward for me!

I think we’d all have been that polite and respectful of anyone we were visiting. I also think that my Nana made it easier, though, just by being herself. She was the type of person you wanted to be good to. Exuberant from the moment we walked in the door, ever the charmer, ever the entertainer, and wanting only for everyone around her to have fun. It was a simple task to want to repay that kind of energy, even if only in the form of a super clean apartment.

Swimming with Dolphins

Have you ever gotten sun poisoning?

No? You’re a sane and normal human for whom sunscreen is sufficient protection against the big orange ball in the sky? Fuck you and your melanin, I hate you both.

I have gotten sun poisoning.

In Key West.

When my Nana took me to swim with the dolphins.

Stop laughing, I’m not fucking joking!

The day started out fantastic. Obviously. There were dolphins! Does any day that starts with dolphins start out badly? No. Of course not. As I was with my over-protective Nana, I was slathered in SPF five million. Apparently that was no match for the Florida sun in open water, though. Around 3am the next morning I woke up to projectile vomit basically everything I’d consumed after my dolphin adventure. This continued. And continued. And continued. Until, around 7am, it was decided I needed a doctor.

There was basically no one in the waiting room at the hospital in Key West. Despite this fact, after waiting for over an hour, we left. Unsurprisingly, we actually had much better luck at a local family doctor who, despite having a waiting room full of people, was able to see me within 30 minutes or so. He prescribed a suppository which my Nana took me to pick up at a local pharmacy, and then I got to have happy fun times trying to shove drugs up my ass.

By late afternoon the puking had mostly subsided. My Nana had ordered Chinese food as she knew doing so would afford her the ability to order me way too much rice, which I ate tentatively but gratefully. We then got dressed in something resembling normal clothes and decided to salvage the afternoon with a trip down to the shore/board walk/shopping area. At some point I puked in a trash can. At another point my Nana convinced me a popsicle would probably be a good idea since I really needed electrolytes. At one point we walked past a jeweler that was selling gemstone globes and I lamented the fact that I was not feeling well enough to go in and look properly.

As the sun set, we found ourselves sitting on a bench watching buskers, my Nana eating some sort of street food and me eating soup of some sort, having managed to almost salvage 60% of our last day in Key West. I apologized for having ruined our weekend and my Nana kissed my cheek and told me any weekend with me would never be ruined.  

The next morning, I felt almost right as rain, though insanely hungry. So we went back down to the shops and such and got pancakes and french toast and all those other things that are delicious but terrible for upset tummies. She then detoured us passed the jewelry store, where we ducked inside and I bought my first gemstone globe. An expense I couldn’t afford, but that I’m insanely grateful I spent the money on. I love that sparkly orb so very much!

Half-way across the bridge back to the mainland, the flashing lights of an annoyed police officer showed up in the rearview mirror. When he walked up to the car and realized the young one was the passenger, I couldn’t tell if he was amused or miffed.

“I’m so sorry, Officer,” I said, leaning across my Nana and smiling as big as I could. “She brought me down here to swim with the dolphins, and wouldn’t you know I got sick and spent yesterday in the hospital. She’s just trying to get me home to a familiar bed and some soup. We’ll slow down.”

The Officer studied me for a minute before telling me to feel better, and letting us off with a warning.

“Out,” I said, pointing out of the car, as soon as he’d driven away. “You cannot be trusted with the keys, out!”

My Nana looked sheepish as we switched sides and I got us back to Naples, sans accidents or speeding tickets.

A month later, I called my Nana laughing hysterically. “They billed me,” I said, unable to control myself. “They billed me as though I saw a doctor. 1800 dollars! They billed me at the hospital.”

My Nana gasped, “They charged you that much to check your fucking blood pressure? You called and yelled at them, right?”

“Of course I did,” I said. “I told them they couldn’t have my money until they treated me, and they voided the bill. But still,” I sighed, still chuckling, “they fucking billed me.”

The family doctor that actually treated me? Still don’t know what I owe him. Either he figured out how to bill Tricare, or he decided an Army Officer puking her brains out was on the house. My guts thank him, either way.

Surprise!

In what had to be the strangest quirk about my Nana, she was probably the only grandmother I know of who didn’t like it when her grandchildren came to stay with her. Admittedly, she didn’t seem to like it all that much when anyone came to stay with her. Everything about our visits stressed her out. Having to plan for our arrival stressed her out. Feeling like she had to entertain us stressed her out. Having us interrupt her perfectly ordered living environment stressed her out. It wasn’t uncommon to feel like you were being shoved out the door by the time a visit was over because, in all honesty, you probably were.

This was helped immeasurably when my Uncle got his own place about 30 minutes from my Nana. Unlike her, he is not an overly ordered individual who likes his living arrangement “just so” and feels compelled to plan for someone’s visit. He really doesn’t care who’s there or not, he’s probably doing his thing no matter what. I started staying with him when I would visit my Nana, eliminating the major stressor of “human interrupting stable environment.”

I eliminated her compulsion to plan for my visit by simply showing up. Unannounced. Like a next door neighbor asking for sugar or milk.

The first time I did this I hadn’t seen my Nana in over a year or so. The visit prior had been… unpleasant… and I had needed some space to recover and recoup. My Nana, though one of my favorite humans, was an alcoholic. This meant visits, or parts of them, could occasionally be volatile. Initially, I had planned to go to Florida just to see my Uncle. He said he’d feel awful if he saw me and my Nana didn’t, though, and insisted I at least see her while I was down. I agreed, but only under the condition that he didn’t tell her I was coming. I didn’t want any of the nonsense and fuss that often led to her stressing herself sick (read: drunk) and, ultimately, wishing none of us were there.

So it was that on a warm February evening I arrived for a “condo  complex party” at my Nana’s, and tappity-tapped on her lanai door  while calling in a sing-song voice, “Nana, Nana, I’m coming in. I want a hug! And some wine!”

To say she was shocked to see me would be the understatement of the century. I was slightly worried I’d induced a heart attack at first. Shortly after the shock, however, came sheer and unadulterated delight. Possibly the first time I’d seen her be that delighted to see me since I was in high school. Five minutes later, when her friend Cornel arrived and I opened the door he went through the same series of emotions before saying, accusingly, “Ruth! You didn’t tell me Lyndsey was coming to town.”

“Well, I didn’t know!” she said, laughing. “She just showed up on my lanai, saying she wanted a hug and a glass of wine. Isn’t it the greatest surprise ever!”

I stayed with my Uncle the entire visit, and every visit thereafter, allowing her to keep her space as she liked it. We’d go to lunch, go to the zoo, go to the botanical garden, and sip coffee after my long bike rides. I had cracked the code. I had figured out how to visit my Nana, without stressing her out. Because she wasn’t stressed out, she didn’t get snippy or testy or nasty. On the occasion she drank too much alcohol, she mostly laughed a lot or talked about how much she loved us, rather than getting mean.

In the years that followed, I showed up at restaurants to surprise her, showed up at her boyfriend’s condo during a party, and walked into her place in the middle of the afternoon, wearing my swimsuit, to demand she come float on pool noodles with me. It wasn’t unusual for everyone in her social circle to know I was coming, except for her. After all, I had to plan to see them while I was down there, and I couldn’t do that if I didn’t tell them when I’d be in town! Everyone loved the joy she took out of my “just showing up” so much, though, that it was the general habit not to tell her.

The pandemic killed my ability to surprise her, because everything had to be so meticulously planned. Which is why, the last visit I made without my mother, I brought my wife as the surprise. My Uncle knew Lesia was coming with me, but my Nana did not. She was delighted, particularly since she’d picked up an obsession with puzzles and Lesia happens to be very good at them. We’d drive down in the evenings after work, have dinner with her, and Lesia and she would puzzle for a while as I scratched my head and glared at a singular piece with no intention of finding its home.

Of all of my visits, that very first surprise one will reign forever as my favorite one ever made. The look of delight on her face as I came into her living room demanding a hug, the sheer glee with which she told all of her neighbors, “This is my granddaughter. She came all the way from Ohio without telling me. She gave me herself as a surprise! Isn’t it wonderful!” was all the evidence one could ever need of just how much she loved me. 

(Even if she didn’t want me sleeping under the same roof as her!)

Wheel Chairs at Zoos

In 2018, my Nana made the last trip to my parents’ house that she would make in her lifetime. It was a trip that was made largely on accident. A year or so prior, we had all decided my Nana needed to get the hell out of dodge before Irene hit, since it looked like that bitch was going to make a bee-line for Naples. Though her condo was generally unscathed, Irene did hit Naples harder than most hurricanes, flooding entire regions of the city and uprooting hundreds of trees. My Nana rode it out with her boyfriend, at his summer place in Maine.

My mother had booked the ticket and had borne the brunt of the airlines’ desire to make big bucks by gouging the shit out of every purchaser trying to get out of the region before the storm hit. They then got harshly reprimanded by the federal government for that bullshit, and found themselves gifting basically anyone who had paid more than they should have with a free plane ticket. My Nana used it to visit my parents. Who tucked her into a car for the two hour drive to Cleveland so that she could see her granddaughter’s house.

My Nana had lived independently for basically forever. She was divorced before it was acceptable to be such and while she remarried a couple times, I don’t know that she ever took any of them all that seriously. Because of the era, there were certain things she’d simply been unable to do. Like buy her own car. Or buy a house. Or have a fucking credit card. So to her, the fact that I owned my own car AND my own house was a remarkable feat signifying how far we had come since she was my age.

Humorously, she ended up visiting us the weekend that our basement flooded, which meant she got to see what the worst parts of homeownership are like. It also meant that simply hanging out at our house wasn’t really an option, since the fans in the basement were so loud it made it difficult to think. As we’d had a hunch we’d want to do something, anyway, we settled on the zoo. It was an idea that made my Nana nervous, as she wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk the entire thing, but Lesia and I were unconcerned.

For $20 bucks, we rented a wheelchair, plopped my Nana in it, and promptly ran around the place like we were little kids pushing a shopping cart. We got running starts to go up hills, popped wheelies on stairs, and shrieked “weeeeeeee!” as we raced down ramps. My Nana was thoroughly delighted, my brother was both amused and embarrassed, and my mom was just happy her mom was smiling ear to ear the entire day. I think my father is now concerned this is how we’re going to treat him in his old age. He’s right to be concerned, we absolutely are.

Two years later, visiting her at her place during a global pandemic in which she had not left her condo in six months, I suggested that she, myself, and Lesia go to the local zoo. I had already looked it up, and we could rent a wheelchair for her so she wouldn’t have to worry about walking. There were a couple different animal shows we could see while we were there and everything. Wouldn’t it be nice to get out of the house for a bit?

“Are you going to say ‘weeeeee!’ when we go down the hills?” she asked, with a mischievous grin. 

Indeed, we did.

Pink Wine Glasses

“It’s pink!”

Such was my squeal of delight when, after an exceptionally long workday, my Nana proffered a glass of white wine in a piece of stemware that was, indeed, pink. Though I’m weirdly neutral on pink clothing, I’m a huge fan of random things that shouldn’t be pink, being pink. Pink wine glasses are basically the most perfect wine glasses ever.

To that end, I was delighted when she said, “Oh good, you like them? Take them with you when you go home!”

Which I did. On my very last trip to my Nana’s condo, she packed up those pink wine glasses and made sure they made it into the car with me. I gave her a hug, and told her I loved her, and thanked her for my pink stemware. Two days later, before meeting her and some friends for dinner, my mother and I began the arduous task of packing a months worth of stuff and those wine glasses got lovingly wrapped in t-shirts, underwear, socks, and pajamas. All four made the journey home in one piece.

There isn’t really much of a story to tell here, except that the very last gift that my Nana personally gave me were pink wine glasses. Glasses that I will cherish forever. Glasses that I will use as often as I can, because every time I use them I think of her. Glasses that make everything you drink look just a little pinker. Just a little brighter. Just a little happier.

It was a fitting final present, I think, as my Nana often strove to make my life a little brighter and a little happier. Now, each time I sip her favorite drink, I can capture some of that lightness, courtesy of a gleefully pink piece of stemware.

[treehugginglibrarian]

“Hey Bins, it’s Nana.”

So begins a voicemail from my mother’s mother, dated sometime in June of 2020, thanking me for having sent her a card and telling me that she loves me. I’ve listened to it about half a dozen times since Thursday morning, when my mother called me to begin the process of shattering my universe.

My Nana, the human to whom almost every personality trait I possess that cannot be traced to my father can be traced, had suffered a massive right hemisphere stroke. Her friend Jim had found her when picking her up for a doctor’s appointment. The paramedics were on the way. It wasn’t good, as far as he could tell.

He was right. It wasn’t good. At all. She’s completely paralyzed on the entire left side. Effectively paralyzed from the waist down on the right. She cannot see out of her left eye. She cannot swallow. She cannot speak. She has no peripheral vision. Momentarily, at least, she is alive. She is no longer really living, though.

My pandemic experience has now been bookended by the deaths of my grandmothers, with my father’s mother having passed a year ago in February. 

I always imagined trying to articulate what my Nana meant to me would be impossible and, unsurprisingly, I was right. There are no words to describe how much I love this woman. How close to her I am. There are no words to describe the amount of pain, set upon me in waves, her death is bringing. My wife would say it’s described as a sound, an inhuman howl unlike anything she’s ever heard rip through me.

I warned her years ago that my Nana’s death would be messy. That I would be changed. That she is so much a fiber of my being a part of me would die with her. She’s handled this with so much more grace and love than I ever thought possible and I am certain I would not be standing if she was not here. When I screamed, in agony, that I didn’t know how to exist in a universe in which my Nana no longer existed, her comment was, “We’ll learn how to do it together, then.” I don’t deserve this human, my friends. 

(She followed this up by reminding me that I would never exist without my Nana because, “You’ve inherited all her sass. All of it.” She’s not wrong. My wife is in for a wild ride, if my Nana is any indication).  

That said, I’m not writing an ode to one of my favorite people to ever exist, because I have no words adequate to describe her or her influence on my life. Instead, I’m going to do something she would approve of far more, and use her slow and disquieting death as a reminder to my friends and their parents.

My Nana’s quality of life has been on the decline for some time. I visited her a LOT in the last decade or so. In fact, I got back from visiting her for a month, a mere week before this stroke occurred. In each of my visits over the past few years, we’ve inevitably had conversations about what’s coming next. Though they’re tough for those of staying behind to hear, they’re necessary. Both because the people we love need to know they can talk to us about this, and because we need to know how they feel about death. Are they scared? Are they nervous? Or, as my Nana has been for some time, are they ready? Content with the life that they’ve lived and the mark that they’ve made on the world, and thus ready to leave behind the body that has become frail and the mind that has become forgetful?

My Nana had this conversation with me, my mother, my Uncle, and my father. We all knew she was ready. We all knew she had lived a life she considered full and “enough.” We all knew that, when the time came, we weren’t to do anything outlandish to keep her here beyond her due. We were to let her go, cremate her, and send her out to sea upon the waves. Which is precisely what we will do.

In a nation that rarely views death as the more dignified option, and often views the request for life-sustaining measures to be foregone or withheld with great suspicion, merely knowing how my Nana felt was not enough. Blessedly, she’s a smart-as-fuck and independent-as-hell little cookie who knew we’d have that problem, so she got her paperwork in order literally decades ago.

Paperwork that stipulated she was not to be resuscitated. She was not to be put on life support. She was not to be fed artificially, or forcibly hydrated. Paperwork that said that, if her literal worst fear came to pass and she was incapacitated and at the mercy of medicine, that medicine was required to let her go as peaceably as possible into the warm Florida evening. No interruptions for feeding tubes or breathing machines. Let her rest, so that she may truly rest much sooner and with more dignity.

My Nana was transferred over to hospice today and, courtesy of this paperwork, there were no fights. There were no discussions. There was no “are you sure?” followed by questions designed to  make sure my mother and my uncle aren’t seeking to end their mother’s life sooner for unsavory reasons. My Nana’s desires were crystal clear. She had written them down and had them notarized and, in case there was any confusion on the part of her loved ones, she had told us, quite plainly, what she wanted.

There is no artificial food. She is no longer being hydrated. She’ll receive pain meds via injection and visits from whomever wants to stop by, but she will otherwise be granted the ability to do exactly as she desires. Pass on. Out of a frail body and away from a forgetful mind.

There are no words to describe how happy I am that I have taken the time over the years to get to know her. To make sure I tell her how much I love her. To visit. To drink wine with her. To hug her every chance I had. And there are no words to describe the inconsolable sadness that descends when I realize I will never hear her voice again, beyond a voicemail that begins, “Hey Bins, it’s Nana.” Even as a part of me is screaming in agony, though,  I know her final act is a vital lesson that far too many learn far too late.

She will get to die as close to “on her terms” as a nation that treats dogs with more empathy than we do the elderly possibly can. And she will get to do that because she wasn’t scared to plan for the inevitable. She wasn’t scared to have hard conversations. She wasn’t scared to make people listen to what she wanted, not just from her life, but from her death.

Get your paperwork in order, my friends. Have hard conversations. And spend time with the people who matter. You never really know when that time will be up.

My Nana, chilling with Waffles the Corgi, druing one of my mom’s recent trips down. 

[treehugginglibrarian]

You Don’t Get to Kill My Friends

There are 2,234 students in the South Butler County Public School District, encompassing the middle and high schools I went to, and the elementary schools that feed into them. Assuming an outbreak in the school district would infect roughly 80% of the district, and a fatality rate of .05% for children, the school district will lose nine children to COVID. If it turns out that the speculation regarding children's mortality rates- that they are artificially low because children were some of the first to go into quarantine and, unlike adults, haven't had to leave it yet- you can up the number of dead kids to 16.

There are 147 teachers, give or take, in SBCSD right now. Assuming a 1.5% mortality rate to account for the fact that some of those teachers are over the age of 60 and others have underlying health conditions, we'll assume we'll lose two teachers to this disease if the district reopens as normal.

Why the interest in this school district? Because a lot of my high school classmates never left the area, which means their kids are now in the same school district we graduated from. A lot of those same high school classmates really "need" schools to open next month. Their kids really "need" schools to open next month.

So, which children are you ready to sacrifice? Which two teachers are you ready to sacrifice? Baring in mind, of course, that many of the teachers most at risk are ones that taught us when we were students there. If you can't provide the names of 9-16 students and 2 teachers that you're ready, and willing, to lose to this virus, I don't think the fact that you "need" schools to reopen is particularly relevant. If you're not ready to have a sincere conversation about the sacrifice of students and teachers, because that is what will happen, for the sake of your convenience, you're not ready for schools to reopen. Full stop.

You don't need schools to reopen, you want them to because you want your kids out of the house. You want to deal with your Zoom calls in silence, you want to have your afternoon glass of wine, and in some cases you may actually need to physically go back to work. Absolutely no one owes you their life so that you can go back to work, though. In telling teachers they have to take your kids, in person, you're effectively telling them their lives are worth less than your job.

Your kids don't need schools to reopen, either. They may want them to reopen, but I guarantee that once they see what school will be like if it's going to actually be safe enough to reopen and prevent an 80% infection rate, they'll lose interest. No congregating in the hallways to talk. No working together in groups. No reading time on the floor. School will really just be an instructor overseeing what has, more recently, been overseen by a parent or a computer, but with other kids in the same room. Kids they cannot really talk to, cannot play with, cannot get close to. Is that really what your kids want? Because I don't think it is. Your kids want what existed in March, pre-quarantine, and that's solidly living in the "not a fucking option" territory. Particularly if y’all keep screaming about how masks are a violation of your freedoms or some such nonsense. 

People keeping talking about schools reopening like it's a hard conversation to have, except it's not. They cannot reopen yet. The end. I don't care if it's inconvenient because parents need childcare. I don't care if it sets kids back. I don't care that parents are tired. Teachers and administrators are not sacrificial lambs to be dedicated at the altar of your convenience. It's not a school district’s job to figure out your childcare crisis and, when they can't, willingly sacrifice their educators just so you can go back to work. If the job is that important, find a way to figure it out that doesn't involve the spread of a possible deadly disease. Educational benchmarks can be shifted as necessary, to ensure kids ultimately learn what they need to when they need to, once it is safe to do. Parenting is an exhausting job, which is why so many of us (at least 45% of women of child baring age) have noped the fuck out of that shit. No one owes your child their life just because you're fucking exhausted from the execution of a conscious choice you made.

This isn’t a difficult conversation at all. Either you’re on the side of “no teacher should have to die to do a thankless job they’re not paid enough for just because parents are cranky and need free childcare,” or you’re the selfish prat who thinks that risking those teachers lives is worth it. There is no middle ground here. You can argue about single parents, you can argue about roofs over heads, you can argue about kids needing food, blah blah blah, NO. Those are ALL the same fucking argument- that teachers are childcare providers who should be forced to do their jobs under hazardous conditions so that parents of their students will stop being inconvenienced. Educators do not owe this nation their lives. They already give you, and your children, significantly more than either of you probably realize. You do not get to demand they risk their health, and the health of their family, to make your own life easier. That’s a bridge way too fucking far and, yes, it is the COVID hill I will happily slay your ass upon.

[treehugginglibrarian]

“I love you, honey”

“You don’t have to worry about the house, grandma. It’ll be taken care of.” 

“I mean, I’m sure it will. The next owners will do what they have to do.” 

“No grandma, it won’t have ‘next owners.’ Its next owner is going to be me. And Lesia. It’s all been decided already. Eric and Rana are both completely okay with it. And obviously my dad is okay with it.”

“You want the house? But… but why do you want the house?”

“Because it’s the only serious constant I’ve ever known. Throughout every part of my life I have visited my grandparents in that house. It’s in a beautiful part of the country where Lesia and I can live happily and still have space. And it’s big enough that the whole family can congregate there if they want. And they will. It’s the homestead. I want it.” 

My grandmother tried not to make it obvious she was nearly crying. But sitting in a Friendly’s, barely eating her food as her appetite had long since disappeared, she was quite clearly touched by my desire to inherit the house my father had done most of his growing up in. 

When I told my dad I wanted the house, he was just relieved because it meant him and my Uncle Eric wouldn’t have to scramble to get it sell-worthy. We can take our time emptying it. Figuring out what needs to be kept, either in the house or with other people. We can take our time completely remaking it into a home befitting a couple with no children, too many animals, and a fondness for guest rooms. 

My father wouldn’t have to say goodbye to his childhood home even as he said goodbye to his parents, because his own child was going to take it. 

To my grandmother, my desire for her house was a sign that she had successfully made it a home not just for her own children, but for generations to come. My keeping it would ensure that all of us will congregate in it long after she is no longer watching tv in the basement, petting a cat, and diligently working on her cross-stitch. 

This wasn’t the last time I saw my grandmother, but it was the last time I had a truly meaningful conversation with her. By the next time I saw her, a time that would be the last, she had suffered a stroke that left her extremely tired and often uninterested or unable to carry on conversations of any real length. At that point, my grandfather had gotten so mean and nasty that my father had basically told the “kids” to say their goodbyes, because he wanted to spare us any further contact with his dad. Such is the curse of old age, I suppose. 

This last conversation with my grandmother followed the last time she ever set foot in one of her favorite spaces, Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. My grandmother was obsessed with nature for basically her entire life. In an alternate universe where women her age were encouraged to do things other than teach and raise children, she was an environmental scientist who would have made quite a stink about the state of the planet. That’s not to say that the path that she took was any less impressive. 

She married young. At 18. To a man she had been dating for four years already. My grandfather joined the military pretty quickly, working with computers at a time when “computer” was a terrifying and hushed word that most people didn’t understand. They traveled a lot in those first years, and while my grandmother finished a degree in history and attempted teaching, in the end she found the profession rather loathsome for many of the same reasons today’s teachers often find it loathsome. 

She worked for intelligence agencies and was a member of the Women’s Army Corps, never giving much consideration to the fact that women weren’t supposed to work for intelligence agencies at that time. She raised three children, watched the family go through times of crisis and calm, and all the while she volunteered to help take care of the nature parks in her area. The woods were her refuge. To me, she always seemed happiest when she was watching birds and she was, for reasons that will always confound me, the type of lunatic who would wander onto her back porch to take photos of the black bear in the backyard. I’m still baffled that she never got eaten! 

So it was that, on every occasion possible, I would kidnap her and take her back to a place she had made my own stomping grounds when I was a child. Pleasant Valley. 

We walked that day. A lot. Particularly for someone who was in her 80s and had not-great knees. We talked about life. About my dad. About my grandfather’s forgetfulness. About my job. We talked about the bullfrogs we heard and she laughed at me for continuing my never-ending tree hugging spree. I think a part of me suspected it would be one of the last good days I would get with her, but the stroke that she had a few months later made me that much happier that I had that last day. 

I love my grandmother immensely. I will miss her with every fiber of my being. Her exasperated “LYNDSEY” when I’ve said something foolish, her frustrated “Well, what do you want?” when I’ve refused to tell her what we should have for dinner, and her quiet but firm “I love you, honey” said into the nape of my neck each time she hugged me goodbye. Her small but legible handwriting that is, to me, just a neater version of my father’s own messy scribbles.  

My relationship with my grandmother was fraught, though, and to pretend otherwise would be to lie. She was a complex woman and her relationships with most of us were, at times, complex. When I was around 16 years old, she looked at me wistfully and told me how lucky I was to be as pretty as I was. “Everything is so much easier for pretty people.” My grandmother was no slouch in her youth, sporting a trim figure, a curly bob, and a cupid’s bow that she continued to decorate with electric pink lipstick up until she stopped doing her make-up. 

Despite this fact, I took the comment to heart. It took YEARS for me to accept that I had, in fact, made it through anything successfully on my own merits. Even in my early relationships, I often found myself questioning what the interest or the intent was. Did they like me because they liked me, or because getting a partner was simply easier when you were pretty? What my grandmother likely meant as a one-off, half-assed, compliment, turned out to be an emotional scar that took a literal decade to shake. 

She was also the only member of my immediate family to ever put pressure on me to have children and, for some time, I resented visits with her because of this. My grandfather was indifferent, but my grandmother was quite insistent that the genetic line needed to continue. Apparently, I was the mandatory continuer of that line. Her nagging never brought this to fruition and I know, as she told my mother as much, that she died at least a little bitter about this fact. 

Yet, despite an inability to accept the modern notion of a child-free woman, she had no trouble accepting the idea that I was marrying a woman. My grandparents both met my spouse rather early on in our relationship, with my grandmother concluding quite rightly, “Wait? You can’t be gay. You would never waste your time on men just to please society. That’s not you. Do you like both? You must like both. Oh. To have such options!” My grandmother, jealous of bisexuals, even if she did think we all needed to have children! 

Intensely well traveled, it’s safe to say my grandparents are probably where I got my fondness for world exploration, even if the traveling I did with them was limited to the general regions our family lived in at various points in time. She died having never made it to Australia, something she regretted up until she lost interest in regretting such things. Perhaps this is one of the reasons my father had such an intense interest in the nation that, ten years ago, I dragged him there with me. I will forever remain grateful that she made it to the Galapagos, and I can only hope my own dreams of Antarctica can be as well fulfilled. 

My grandmother was someone with whom I had everything and nothing in common. I am very similar in personality to my father, her oldest son, a fact that has become ever more apparent as I have gotten older. She loved my dad a nearly irrational amount, which in many ways likely drove her love for me, and her tolerance of my eternal shenanigans. She was always intrigued by whatever new ink or piercings I had acquired since our last visit, and sincerely wished that it was “acceptable” for “old people” to get tattoos. I’ve no idea what she would have gotten, but I tried to talk her into it at least a dozen times! 

During my time in the military, my grandparents were my rocks in every single way. They constantly mailed me care packages in which tootsie rolls were used as packing peanuts (remarkably effective) and I have quite a collection of cards and letters from both my grandmother and their friends. It is quite possible their never ending supply of Ding Dongs and Yankee Doodles single-handedly added inches to some of my troops’ waistlines! 

They lived only three hours from Fort Drum, so whether I needed to escape an unsavory personal situation or just wanted to get away from work for a long weekend, I had a built in bed-and-breakfast complete with a side of grandmother-that-spoils-me-rotten a short jaunt from my home. My boss while I was at Brigade was so amused by my visits to their house that she would often kick me out of work early on those evenings, saying “you only have your grandparents for so long. Go enjoy them while they’re here, dammit.” 

One particularly memorable trip saw my drive there interrupted by a call to my grandmother, with me in hysterics. I had passed a veal farm on the drive and the little bitty cow shelters were significantly more than I could handle. I completely broke down and called their house both so they would know I was running late and so my grandmother could calm me down. When I arrived, she told me she’d called Hancock Shaker Village and arranged for me to go pet the baby cows there the next day. That was the type of grandmother she was- you were never too old to be scooped up and treated like you were still her baby.

One of my last trips down there while I was living Upstate, it was my grandmother who made me see the light regarding an emotionally abusive boyfriend. “Honey, you don’t have to be with someone just to be with someone. I know I tell you I want you to find someone because I think it will make you happy. And that’s true. But someone who makes you unhappy is a significantly worse idea than happiness by yourself.” Less than a month later I dumped him and never looked back. 

My wardrobe is populated by vintage items I have inherited from her, my jewelry is speckled with the sparkles she has given me over the years, and my kitchen is eternally rainbow colored because she and my grandfather are who ensured I eventually received the Fiesta Ware I had wanted since I was a child. I routinely eat off actual silverware that I liberated from their kitchen during one visit and polished to a proper shine. I know, I’m a terrible Millennial. 

My grandmother died on February 6 and a little bit of light left the world with her. I know, though, that she got the ending she wanted. She wasn’t in a nursing home. She hadn’t spent the last year of her life, following a stroke at the end of 2018, cooped up and surrounded by doctors and nurses. She had lived the remainder of her months on her terms, or as close to it as she could. By the time she left us, she was tired. She was routinely in pain. She was having trouble staying awake for any length of time or eating any real amount of food. It was time for her to go. 

I’m glad she’s at peace, and intensely happy that I was given the opportunity to make as many memories with her as I was, well into my adulthood. I haven’t the foggiest what happens to people after they leave us, and won’t pretend that I really think it’s all that much. My grandmother, though, will live for me forever. Larger than life, loudly screaming at my grandfather “PERC! Will you turn that down!” and eternally telling me, “I love you, honey.”  

Dawn Marie Williams, somewhere in Minnesota, circa 1991. Fiercely loved by her granddaughter then, now, and always. Rest easy, grandma. You taught us well.  

[treehugginglibrarian]

The Crossroads of Race and Sexuality

A Public and Political Example of Blatant Social Hypocrisy

Recently, Pete Buttigieg, democratic candidate for President and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, found himself the butt of an uncomfortable Washington Post headline that seemed to imply that he equated the queer struggle with the black struggle, and thus thought his being gay would help him relate to black voters. As often happens with newspaper headlines, the truth was buried in the article and the headline was an argument-inducing form of clickbait designed to frustrate the masses on Facebook and Twitter. In truth, the mayor didn’t equate the two at all. What he said, during a debate, was “While I do not have the experience of ever having been discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I do have the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country, turning on the news and seeing my own rights come up for debate, and seeing my rights expanded by a coalition of people like me and people not at all like me.”

Kamala Harris was the first to take issue with this, arguing that it was a naive viewpoint. As a queer woman, I could equally argue that Harris’ assessment that, essentially, queer people don’t experience discrimination is, in itself, incredibly naive. If white people, no matter their other stripes, are required to stay silent on the matter of racial discrimination, I think it’s only fair that straight people be held to the same standard. Al Sharpton argued that Pete had some growing to do on the topic, which I find incredibly amusing since I don’t remember any of the gays laying claim to the notion that Barack Obama had growing to do when he was running in 2008. This despite the fact that he was, at the time, openly against gay marriage. There is an incredible double standard where white, male, politicians are concerned. We want them to be “woke” and to be understanding, while simultaneously wanting them to be willing to admit that they don’t understand. Which becomes a problem when, in fact, they actually do understand. 

As a queer woman I understand the desire to look at a white man and roll my eyes when he says he “gets it.” I really do. Male privilege has insulated him from basically every major disadvantage that accompanies being a woman. White privilege has insulated him, as it has me, from the impact that being born black in America can have on a person. The problem is that privilege does not stop at race and sex. There are dozens of ways, big and small, that one can be privileged in this country, and until we get serious about acknowledging them we’re going to continue to be pretty easily divided by people bent on using our differences against us. 

When asked to clarify his remarks during the debate, remarks that really don’t need any clarification at all if you’re capable of objectively reading the English language, Buttigieg did. Stating “It was people like me and people not like me who came together — starting before I was born and through my lifetime — who have made it possible for things like my marriage to exist, or honestly for somebody like me to even be taken seriously as a candidate for president. Having seen that, having seen how that alliance can make an impact, makes me reflect on how I can turn around and make myself useful, not only to the LGBT community but to people whose life experiences are very different.” 

It is difficult to see a person who has been historically viewed as the oppressor, a white man, and be asked to think of him in terms of the oppressed. The reality, however, is that the disenfranchisement of queer people (primarily legal, at this point) does not cease simply because the disenfranchised was born white or male. One’s maleness generally guarantees a person will not be judged as harshly as they would if they were a woman. Their gender will not be something they will have to overcome. Likewise, one’s whiteness ensures that racial inequity will not be the reason they face hardships in life. Neither of these traits are guarantees of an inherently easy life, and they’re certainly not guarantees that other forms of disenfranchisement or oppression will simply cease. 

To argue that a white man is incapable of feeling disenfranchised for reasons unrelated to his sex or race is to argue that sex or race are the only two metrics by which disenfranchisement can be measured. If that’s the case, I think we need to at least be consistent. We can no longer have conversations about how queer women of color have it harder than men of color, because queerness is apparently not a relevant form of disenfranchisement. Their lives are simply harder because they’re women. More to the point, queer people of color can no longer argue that their lives are harder than straight people of color, because somehow sex and race became the only two metrics by which discrimination or oppression are measured. To argue that a white man who is queer cannot have experienced oppression or a feeling of othering simply because he is white and male is to argue that queerness does not matter in this country. 

Except, the two are not comparable, as is shouted at white, queer, people every time we have the audacity to point out that, despite our pale skin, we do have experience in being othered. As this most recent debacle with Mayor Pete illustrates, it doesn’t matter how carefully you choose your words, if you attempt to empathize with a disenfranchised group of people on the basis that you belong to a different, but nonetheless, disenfranchised group, you will be told the comparison is high-handed and ineffectual. You will be told you do not know what you are talking about. You will be told that it is not the same, it is not comparable, you should be quiet. A judgement that, when passed in the absence of actual comparison, does little more than make it clear that the speaker actually thinks they are comparable and has simply deemed your oppression less worthy of discussion.    

Is it, though? Is Buttigieg’s status as a queer American less worthy of discussion? Is America at a point where queer issues no longer need to be discussed? Have we reached a level of equality at which it’s no longer accurate to make the assessment that we have experience being “othered” in this country? I’m not sure it’s safe to say these things. 

As recently as 2008, President Obama ran for office on a platform that treated LGBTQ individuals as people, but didn’t grant us full rights under the law. He was vocally against same-sex marriage, a position he has since “evolved” on, though the credit he gets for the passage of same-sex marriage in the Supreme Court is misplaced. That was Anthony Kennedy’s doing, not the President’s. He made limited to no mention of the lack of federal protections for queer individuals and, really, why would he? When he was elected, it was still illegal for queer individuals to serve openly in the U.S. military. We talk about gay rights in this country as though they are something that have been won and are now done, completely forgetting that it was only a decade ago that the military formally let us in. In the decade since then, the culture has changed but most of the laws surrounding our lives have not. 

While it is legal for queer individuals to get married, there are still no federal civil rights protections for individuals based on sexual orientation or gender presentation. This means it’s legal to discriminate against us in work, housing, federal assistance, and credit. We can be denied housing not because we are ineligible, but because we are gay. We can be fired not because we did something wrong, but because we are gay. The Equality Act, which passed the House earlier this year and will undoubtedly die in the Senate, would change this, even as many people claim the protections it would add are redundant because this type of discrimination is almost never reported. But then, of course it’s not. 

Fewer than half the States in this country have statewide legislation that protects people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender presentation. Within those States that lack it, certain cities have protections, but those protections will stop at city limits. If I work in a city that lacks protections, in a State that lacks protections, and I’m fired following unceasing abuse regarding my sexual orientation, it’s pretty obvious why I was let go. There’s also nothing I can do about it. To contest the firing would require I have the time and the money to mount not just a legal challenge, but a full scale battle to change the laws. The average person doesn’t have the resources necessary to do these things, which means the average firing resulting from someone’s sexual orientation is unlikely to be reported. Who would we report it to? The EEOC? They cannot, legally, do anything about it. 

Culturally, the LGBTQ population has made more progress than it has legally. Over 70% of the population is generally in favor of ensuring queer people have equal rights under the law, which is a massive improvement over where we stood just a decade ago. The biggest issue is that our primary detractors, conservative religious movements, tend to have a decent amount of backing in the political sphere, are Constitutionally protected, and often have support even amongst those who disagree with their treatment of queer people. This has made it so that, even as support for queer individuals climbs, the number of Religious Freedom Acts being enacted has climbed, as well. 

When we think about “religious freedom” and “gay people” we usually think about them in terms of wedding chapels, cake, and photographers, since that’s the scenario that has been cast. It’s a little more intense than just coffee shop owners who think the gays don’t need caffeine, though. Religious freedom referendums allow individuals to opt out of participation in basically anything they would otherwise be legally compelled to do, if that compulsion is a violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs. So, yes, it grants people the right to avoid making us cake. But it also grants them the right to avoid giving us medical care or psychological help. This is a problem if you live in a small town where your options are limited, or if you find yourself in an emergency room being treated by a doctor or nurse who thinks that allowing your spouse to act like your spouse is a violation of their sincerely held beliefs. 

We are getting there. We are making progress. But we are not there yet. And, more often than not, the people standing in our way are doing so because they feel that allowing us to live our lives is somehow a hindrance to their ability to live their own lives. When white supremacists make the argument that business owners should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of skin tone, pretty much everyone who isn’t a white supremacist decries that notion as utter bullshit. When Christians make the argument that business owners should be allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, the number of people who decry the notion is significantly less. After all, they do have a right to practice their faith however they’d like, don’t they? Are they really hurting anyone by refusing to make them a cake or serve them coffee? I don’t know. But I do know if anyone worth anything asked that question about people of color, they’d be the next thing on the internet that was cancelled. Bigotry on the basis of one’s faith is still remarkably acceptable in today’s America, and that bigotry is overwhelmingly pointed at the queer population.  

Even when you can manage to make it clear that the LGBTQ population is, in fact, disenfranchised, the idea that this marginalization may be something worth talking about is met with a scoff should it be mentioned in the same conversation as race based marginalization, as Buttigieg did on the debate stage. “Oliver Davis, a black council member in South Bend, Ind., where Buttigieg is mayor, said that African Americans, unlike gay people, don’t have the option of ‘coming out’ at their chosen moment — as did Buttigieg, who disclosed his sexual orientation after he had been elected mayor. ‘When you see me, you would know that I’m African American from day one,’ said Davis, who has endorsed former vice president Joe Biden. ‘When someone is gay or a lesbian, unless they tell or they are seen in certain situations, then no one is going to know that. They are able to build their résumés and build their career.’”

Putting aside the fact that Davis is endorsing someone from an even more privileged background than Buttigieg, the idea that queer people are somehow not oppressed or, at the very least, less oppressed, is a “hot take” so lacking in understanding of the queer experience it actually reads as homophobic. Anyone who thinks that homosexuality is something that can just be taken off and left at home has never, not in their life, had to comprehend how intrinsic their sexuality is to the way they live their lives. They also, quite clearly, think that gay people’s differences from them are a function only of who we want to have sex with, and that having sex is quite literally all we will do with those people. 

Trying to explain this is like beating my head upon a brick wall, however. So, let me illustrate what I mean, instead. 

Let’s pretend that instead of working where I do, I work somewhere that doesn’t offer protections based on sexual orientation, and my boss is pretty homophobic. Because of this, I make the decision not to be out at work. I would, sadly, not be in the minority of queer individuals since, even today, over half of all LGBTQ people are closeted to some degree at work. This decision comes with consequences beyond just pretending my spouse is a different person, though. My emergency contact is annotated as my “roommate” or my “best friend,” instead of my wife. Because my spouse’s sex would have to be noted on the paperwork, we make the decision not to put her on my health insurance. The thousands of dollars she’s racked up in dental bills? Those are now coming out of pocket. Since I cannot take sick time off work for the illnesses or surgeries of a roommate or friend, I now have to make up a masculine name for my spouse and hope that actual medical documentation isn’t needed. Alternatively, I can use my vacation time anytime my spouse needs me to take time off work for medical reasons. 

Socially, my work life would be uncomfortable and awkward. Try talking about your home, your weekend plans, your holidays, or your hobbies without mentioning your relationships and, thus, your sexual orientation. I suppose this is a little bit easier if you’re single but, even then, things get tricky. Single queers go out to bars and go on dates, things you can’t talk about at work if you work somewhere that it could get you fired. And before you say that we shouldn’t be talking about our personal lives anyway, I’d challenge you to try that first. For years on end. Despite knowing and seeing and being with the same coworkers every single day. The expectation that queer people hide at work is absurd, for the same reason it would be absurd to expect heterosexuals to hide their orientation at work. Unless you work in a cubicle where you never see another human, this isn’t a plausible solution to discrimination. 

The list of things that gets pretty complicated if you’re actively trying to ensure that no one ever finds out about your relationship, is pretty long actually. For starters, you’re probably not ever getting married. Even if you can get away with not telling your employer about a new marriage, if you’re already married there’s no real way you can hide it, since so many employers demand to do a background check before you start work. A marriage certificate will show up. This is the same reason that at least one of you won’t be able to lay legal claim to your children. But then, only one of you would be able to be listed as their parent or guardian at school, anyway. The part where you’re not married means that, should your spouse find themselves in medical trauma, you won’t be much help or have much say. And while a large ream of paperwork could, theoretically, ensure that you’re able to take care of each other if you need to, it’s also a verifiable paper trail that could disclose a relationship you’d rather keep secret. 

Your friends are going to be eternally confused about your personal lives, because you’ll either always be single and hanging out with your roommate or always be taken by a person who they’re not allowed to meet. This may seem like normal behavior with coworkers, but it’s going to start to get really weird really fast when it involves people who you’re close to. You and your significant other will always be spending holidays separately, with your respective families, or together but lying about it. Sure, you’ve taken the most lovely European trip over Christmas, but your family and friends all think you had to stay home by yourself because you have the flu.

In a world as interconnected as our’s is, the cost of “hiding” at work is no longer just a more guarded work life. It’s effectively a life in which you let no one in and tell no one anything. The fact that some people think that queer peoples’ “ability” to hide like this is privilege says a significant amount about the level of respect that person has for queer lives and queer relationships, and the level of understanding that person has regarding queer history. 

There was a time, not too terribly long ago, when hiding wasn’t just a privileged option queer individuals had, it was the expectation placed upon us. Homosexuality was a shameful thing that disgraced everyone around you, thus there was an expectation that it be hidden. This expectation is why AIDS ran rampant for years before it was acknowledged. This expectation is why it took until 1987 for the DSM to stop listing homosexuality as a form of mental illness. This expectation is why suicide rates in queer communities were then, and remain, higher than in their straight counterparts. This expectation is, still today, one of the primary reasons that LGBTQ teens have the highest rates of homelessness in the country. If I had to guess, I’d say this expectation that our gayness be hidden from the world is also why, in well over half the states in this country, conversion therapy is considered a perfectly acceptable thing to expose a child to.

The marginalization faced by queer individuals in this country is absolutely nothing like that faced by people of color. As I am only one of these things, I cannot tell you which is worse and, frankly, neither can straight people of color because they, too, are only one of these things. Attempts to discern which is “worse” really don’t solve either problem, though. They don’t eradicate race-based violence. They don’t pass the Equality Act, thus ensuring LGBTQ individuals actually have fair and equitable access to things like housing and job opportunities. They don’t convince people that the systemic racism faced by people of color in this country is not only real, but a real source of disenfranchisement that keeps black Americans from reaching their full potential, doing permanent damage to the entire American economy.They don’t convince people that my desire to live my life- to have medical access, buy a house, or get a cup of coffee- is not an inherent violation of someone else’s religious liberties, and thus should not be infringed upon on the basis of those religious liberties. 

Saying “I know how you feel” to someone who’s just lost a parent, if you’d recently lost a good friend, is inaccurate. You don’t know, unless you’ve also lost a parent at some point. Saying “I’m sorry. I know that losing someone important to you fucking sucks,” is a statement of empathy that is steeped in truth. A queer person saying, “I know that disinfranchisement sucks because I have been disinfranchised myself,” is not the same thing as a queer person saying, “I know how black people feel.” One of these things is true, one is absolutely not unless that queer person also happens to be black. Anyone, black or white, who honestly thinks queer people cannot have experienced bias because they can hide who they are, should be challenged to say exactly that to a queer person of color. I question the sincerity of someone willing to argue that queer people have is easy because we can “hide,” but only if the queer people they are accusing are white. To me, it seems like an obvious showing of their hand. They have placed a value upon queerness such that, as long as it is effecting a white person, it is not a challenge to be faced after all. They have done precisely what Buttigieg has not- assessed their own struggle as worse and, thus, more worth discussing. 

Hypocrisy is a terrible way to start a conversation, but an excellent way to end it.    

[treehugginglibrarian]

Social Justice Bedroom Warriors

Social Justice Warriors need to stay out of people’s intimate lives, unless they’re personally invited in, because they’re starting to sound a bit like incels.  

Recently, a member of one of my childfree on-line forums posed a question regarding dating and mental health, being unsure whether it was acceptable for her to bow out of a potential relationship because the gentleman in question suffered from depression and anxiety. While most people, including those with one or both of those health issues, were quick to reassure her that she never has to date anyone she doesn’t want to, and she owes no one an explanation, others were less supportive. One entire sub-thread of this mess ended up dedicated to the notion that, if she did not date this man, she was an “ableist cunt.” That’s not how this works. THAT’S NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS. This also isn’t the first time I’ve seen this argument made.

As a population, we’ve gotten pretty good at reminding straight, white, men (and black men, on occasion) that women do not owe them anything. We don’t owe them our time, our phone number, a date, or sex. We do not owe them anything simply because they were born with a dick and took a fancy to us. It’s becoming increasingly clear, however, that the only people who don’t appear to be owed sex or relationships are straight, white, men. 

On multiple occasions during the course of my adult life, I have been called a “racist” by a black man who wanted my phone number and to whom I did not want to give it. Sometimes I didn’t want to give it to him because it was obvious he wasn’t my type. Sometimes I was just disinterested. Sometimes I was taken. In all instances, my rejection was not met merely with annoyance, but with a charge of “racism.” As though their blackness entitled them to my time, even if their maleness left me disinterested. As though a failure to be interested on my part could only be attributed to an aversion to brown skin, rather than an aversion to them, as an individual. I never thought much of these instances because I have, in fact, dated men of color before. As a child, my first Hollywood crush was on a black man. As an adult, about the only human I would consider leaving my wife for is a black woman (I jest. I would never leave my wife. But if I did it would be for Jessica Williams). My disinterest in these men was not because I am incapable of attraction to black bodies. I just wasn’t interested in those men; a fact they were quite offended by and quite willing to project over.  

Shortly after coming off of active duty, I got called “fat phobic” for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last time and, despite the general definition of oppressive hatred, at no time has this name been lobbed at me because I’ve been treating those who are overweight as though they are “less than.” I’m not scared of fat people. I don’t hate fat people. In fact, unless you are an overweight person with whom I am personally acquainted, I probably have effectively zero feeling about you or your excess weight. If you’re a fat person with whom I’m personally acquainted, my feelings towards you will have little to do with your weight and significantly more to do with your personality and your work ethic. You do you, boo, just don’t be a mean person or a shitty coworker along the way. That said, I acknowledge a lack of physical attraction on my part when it comes to overweight people. Part of it is that I’m just not attracted to the body type. Part of it is that I am an insanely active person, and I do make certain assumptions about other people’s lives and activity levels based upon their body types. I am going to assume that someone who is 150 pounds overweight is not going to be compatible with who I am as a person. My unwillingness to date people who fit this criteria, my disinterest in having sex with a body type that does not appeal to me, is apparently rooted in a deep and unacknowledged phobia of fat people. I got told by multiple women that unless I’m willing to force an attraction to fat people, I am fat phobic. How I treat these people out of the sheets is completely irrelevant. 

A little research showed that fatphobia was hardly the only politically correct pile of shite making its way into bedrooms. White people who won’t date outside their race are, with some level of regularity, told they’re racist. Refusing to date someone from another country, culture, or religious sect is now deemed xenophobic. Even refusing to date someone who had children or wildly different political views than your own was, somehow, deemed inappropriate. Even as society has been trying to drill into people’s heads that no one, NO ONE, is owed a relationship, that same society is doing an excellent job of telling us that we’re not allowed to say “no” to certain people. Saying “no” to marginalized or “othered” individuals is no longer a simple declination of sex, and is now an act of discrimination. Their marginalization, apparently, entitles them to both my time and my body. 

Through it all, sexism is a charge that has largely gone underutilized amongst most groups. Gay men are never called sexist for refusing to fuck women, and straight people are never called sexist or homophobic for not being queer. Lesbians, however, haven’t been granted this same dignity. (As usual, bisexuality is ignored. For once, the bi’s of the world are pleased about this). Probably because the idea that sexual pleasure can exist outside the scope of a penis is, for many, wildly inconceivable.     

For as long as lesbianism has been a thing, people with penises attempting to convince lesbians that said lesbians do, in fact, enjoy dicks have been a thing. For most of history, those people have been humans presenting as straight men, who apparently can’t conceive of a woman not wanting any dick at all, let alone their dick. In more recent years however, a vocal cohort of trans women, many pre-operative and still possessing intact penises, have taken to outing lesbians who refuse to date them as “transphobic.” As though one’s bedroom is an arena in which our efforts at establishing equality for all can be adequately assessed. 

Here’s the thing, a lack of attraction to a particular characteristic or a disinterest in having a particular characteristic in your bed or yourself, is not a form of discrimination. Why? Because absolutely no one, no matter how disenfranchised they may be by the rest of society, is ever owed personal time, relationships, or sexual intimacy from or by anyone else. They’re just not. Lesbians don’t owe transwomen sex or relationships, and they don’t owe them an explanation for why they’re not interested in these things. They are not suffering from a case of discriminatory genital preferences, because sexual proclivities are not preferences- they are ingrained parts of our beings. 

Do you really think straight women wouldn’t make the transition to vaginas if it was as simple as changing their genital preferences? The existence of straight women is proof positive that basically everything about our sexual attractions are beyond the scope of our control. 

While we can control whether or not we act on these attractions, control over what we are attracted to is pretty fucking limited. Do you really think pedophiles enjoy being pedophiles? If you do, I’d recommend reading an interview with one. It’s pretty eye-opening, if you can get past the part where you’re reading an interview with a pedophile. And all of them make quite clear that acting on their attraction to children is within their control, but the attraction itself is not. A fact that tends to leave them shunned by society whether they act on them or not, and pretty fucking miserable for obvious reasons. The list of things I’m not attracted to is relatively long and, while the list itself is mutable because additions have been made over the years, I have never found myself attracted to something that had once previously repulsed me. 

You will not change someone’s attractions simply by couching their sexual disinterest in social justice warrior language and attempting to shame them into being attracted to you. 

All you’ll do is piss them off and lose an ally. If you don’t want to date someone who is black, white, or purple, you don’t have to. If you don’t want to date someone with a particular set of genitalia, you don’t have, no matter what their external presentation is. If you don’t want to date a particular gender, you don’t have to. You don’t have to date people with mental illness, with food restrictions, with terminal cancer, or with webbed feet. You don’t have to date fat people, skinny people, or exercise obsessed people. You don’t have to date rich people or poor people, the fashion forward or the fashion oblivious. You don’t have to let anything other than your attraction to that particular person, or lack thereof, determine whether you date another person. And if you don’t want to date anybody, at all, you don’t have to. And you never, ever, ever owe them any explanation for why you are not interested. In fact, an argument could be made that you’re better off not giving them a reason.  

Get your shamey social justice warrior bullshit out of our bedrooms. NOW. 

No one owes you anything. 

[treehugginglibrarian]

Life in Library Land

Anecdotes from the cardigan pocket of an angry, bespectacled, librarian 

I’m a librarian. You know, the slightly eccentric person in a long skirt and big glasses with a bun atop her head, who hands you books when you walk into an ancient looking building that houses quiet and the world’s knowledge? Yeah. That person. Except that’s not who I am and that’s not really what I do. 

So, let’s set the record straight, shall we? 

First, librarians look like the rest of the world. Neither the image of us as the miserly grandmother shushing the world, nor the image of us as a pencil-skirted porn star waiting to be bent over a reference desk, are particularly accurate. While there are those of us who fit those descriptions, we also walk the entire line between them and, shockingly, we have men amongst our ranks. We also come from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds. For some, librarianship is a second, third, or fourth career. Others go into it straight from grad school, which they entered straight out of college. Our undergraduate degrees span basically every conceivable major. What individual librarians will end up doing as librarians is pretty varied, as well. Our actual day jobs find themselves affected by the type of library we work in, the location of the library, and the hours we work. 

I’m an ex-military Officer with an undergraduate degree in archaeology. I work in a main branch of a large public library system. The branch I work in, being the heart of the system, is pretty enormous. I’ve been here for almost two years and there are people in my building who I still don’t know because I only ever meet them on our All Staff Days. The branch I am in is located in the inner-city downtown area of a smaller to mid-sized city in North East Ohio. It’s a region that has been pretty hard hit by poverty, having failed to properly recover from the 2008 collapse, and absolutely decimated by the opiate epidemic. The experience I have on a daily basis will be dramatically different even from the experiences had by some of my colleagues in the same system, as some of our branches are in wealthier, more suburban, areas. 

Given all those “caveats,” what is librarianship like for me? 

Honestly? 

A fucking nightmare. 

Dispel with the notion that libraries are quiet. Even as I type this, there is some sort of band performance going on in the auditorium located on our second floor. While the music isn’t unpleasant, it’s loud as hell for a structure that’s historically been associated with silence. Patrons talk on the phone, loudly, often with the phones on speaker, basically wherever they would like in the building. We have a recording studio on the floor I work on that is supposed to be soundproof, but is absolutely not. It tends to be a rotating gamut of podcasts, terrible singing, and cursing hip hop, depending on the day. We get to hear basically all of it. Sometimes the patrons have long and drawn out conversations with each other. Sometimes they have long and drawn out shouting matches. Sometimes they have long and drawn out fights for which security and the local authorities need to be called. Sometimes they just decide the entire world needs to listen to their music. It’s NEVER quiet in this building. Never. If we say “it’s been quiet,” we don’t mean it literally. We mean “it’s been uneventful.” 

Patrons tend to come in three flavors: the ones we like, the ones we hate because they’re raging fucking twat waffles that no sane human ever wants to have contact with, and the ones we dislike because they’re just plain difficult. 

Being a patron your local librarians will like isn’t actually that difficult. Be nice, be polite, say “thank you,” don’t yell at us, don’t call us names, clean up after yourself if you’re actually in the building, don’t curse at us if we “shush” you or remind you that you can’t eat in the library, and try to avoid asking us the exact same question every single day just because you’re too lazy to write down the answer. Being a patron your local librarians will like is, honestly, no more difficult than passing a fair number of kindergarten classes. Easier, even, since we won’t demand you know your ABC’s or be able to count. We really only ask that you queue properly, push in your damn chair when you stand up, don’t be a slob, and mind your basic manners. 

If my job is any indication, the entire fucking world needs to go back to kindergarten at least once a year and relearn how to human properly. Because we’re failing. Epically. 

One of our more basic and commonplace tasks is simply roving through the department with varying levels of frequency. It lets us keep an eye on the patrons in our vicinity and police up any materials left lying around. It also lets us push in chairs, throw out trash, and call the janitor on the occasion a patron has left such a mess a paper towel and bleach is insufficient to fix the matter. While I don’t find myself scrubbing tables on a daily basis, I don’t rove without pushing in chairs. It’s the most basic of tasks, taught to five-year-olds on their first day of school, yet grown-ass adults visiting a public library can’t be bothered to push in their chairs when they get up and leave a table. My record so far is 18 chairs in one rove. 18 grown humans who couldn’t figure out how to nudge a chair until it was back under a table and no longer clogging an aisle. The level of maturity is absolutely no better over the phone. 

From an energy standpoint, 10% of our patrons absorb at least 95% of our energy. This is especially true when dealing with patrons who have placed a phone receiver between themselves and the live human they are screaming at. The overwhelming majority of the patrons who call us on the phone are perfectly pleasant, perfectly reasonable, perfectly sane humans. They’re patrons we “like,” because they haven’t given us a reason not to. About 10% of our patrons, predominantly those on the phone, are either frustrating beyond measure or diagnosable lunatics who have clearly been let out of an asylum recently. 

They will call and yell at us, literally screaming and shouting. They’ll call and tell us we’re stupid. They’ll call and refuse to let us answer the question in the best way possible, particularly if that means using a resource they don’t like or transferring them to a division they don’t want to talk to, forcing us to give them subpar answers to questions we literally don’t have the answers to. They’ll call and refuse to believe the answer we give them, even when we offer to email them proof of the answer. They’ll call and demand to speak to certain librarians, or call and hang up when they recognize a voice they don’t want to talk to. Sometimes they’ll just hang up because they’re bored or don’t like the answer we’ve given. In general, the “raging fucking twat waffles” seem to thrive not on utilizing the services the library offers, but on abusing the personnel the library employs. 

Others will call and ask us the same questions over, and over, and over again. The same phone numbers, the same addresses, the same computer problems, the same magazine articles, they want only a half-dozen things from us and they will call us, repeatedly, for those half-dozen things. These individuals often aren’t rude or mean, they’re just immensely frustrating and, frankly, feel like they’re wasting our time. Write the fucking number down, for the love of God. I did not get a masters degree so I could provide you with phone numbers to the same three stores every single fucking day for two straight years. Get a pen, write it down. Still others call with questions so strange, they force you to abandon an age old adage that we are taught as young children and generally make it into adulthood believing: There’s no such thing as a stupid question.

No. There absolutely are really fucking stupid questions. And I have heard A LOT of them. 

“What is the force and how can I harness it?”

“The force from Star Wars? You can’t harness it. Star Wars is made up.” 

“What do you mean it’s made up? No it’s not. I need a book about the force!”

“Ok. I’ll transfer you to fiction now.” 

“How often do I have to change my underwear?”

*crickets*

“Do I have to change them every day.”

*crickets*

“Because I don’t want to have to do laundry that often.” 

“Let me see what I can find for you.” 

*internal screaming*

“Can I feed my dog white chocolate?”

“No. Don’t feed your dog white chocolate.” 

“But it’s not real chocolate.” 

“Don’t feed your dog white chocolate.” 

“Where do unicorns live?”

*in my head, ‘Scotland, duh’*

“Unicorns aren’t real, Sir.” 

*crickets*

“They’re not?!”

“How can I get to the island with the dinosaurs?”

“Excuse me?”

“The island. With the dinosaurs. And the park. With the dinosaurs.” 

“Jurassic Park?”

“YEAH!”

“Jurassic Park isn’t real. Dinosaurs are extinct.” 

*expletive* “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” 

“My penis isn’t working.” 

“I hate to use these words, but you’ll have to be more specific. Are you having problems urinating or problems with something else?” 

“Something else. Maybe if you talk to me that’ll fix the problem.” 

“Right. That’s not a service we offer here, sir. Good bye.” 

“Do you have a piano?”

“You realize you called the library?”

“What are you wearing?”

“Do you have any books on spanking?”

“For corporal punishment or sexual gratification?”

“Just… books on spanking.” 

“Right. Okay.”

*lists titles*

*two weeks later*

“Do you have any books on spanking?”

“Only the ones we had the last time you asked.”

This is a sampling of the weird, awkward, and often fucking stupid shit we get asked over the phone by people who are likely a few screws short of something. On any given day we also get asked dozens of perfectly logical questions regarding health, astronomy, mathematics, books in our division, or phone numbers that people need. The weird ones don’t necessarily outnumber the normal, they just tend to be quite difficult to ignore or forget as they tend to be really fucking weird. 

I know, absolutely, that not all libraries are like this. I once worked in a smaller library that came with its own set of quirks, but with far fewer questions that made me scratch my head and wonder what the patron was smoking. While we got verbally abused less frequently, I did get hit on more often, which is its own level of head-scratching what-the-fuckery that often makes me want to grab the patron in question and beat them senseless upon the reference desk. Here’s a suggestion- don’t ever, ever, ever hit on someone who is at work and whose job hinges, at least in part, on their being nice to you. I think men (and yes, it’s always been men) often think that because I’m being nice to them I’m inevitably going to say “yes.” Or, perhaps, they mistakenly believe that my job hinging upon my “niceness” means that I simply cannot say “no.” They’re wrong on both accounts. While I can’t be rude about my “no” until they get pushy, I absolutely can use that word. And I do. Don’t hit on your librarian unless you’re looking to experience rejection.  

And do not, under any circumstances, touch us. While a fair number, possibly the majority even, are unlikely to react negatively to being touched, most won’t like it. Particularly if it’s a touch that’s been rendered after you’ve expressed an unreturned interested in us. I’ve been touched by patrons who wanted my attention on three different occasions. Only once was it someone who was trying to get me to give them a phone number. On no occasion did it go well. The assumption that a librarian, being small and frail and likely female, won’t fight back isn’t always a safe bet. Occasionally you’ll meet the likes of me and, after grabbing my arm to prevent me from walking away, you’ll leave the library without my phone number, with a bruise on your chest, and with the knowledge that there’s nothing you can do about it because you started it when you touched me. Don’t. Be. That. Guy. EVER. 

Absolutely one of the most disconcerting aspects of working in libraries, at least the type I work in right now, is the degree to which I am, effectively, an employee at a very fancy day-time homeless shelter. We’re not the only library with this problem, as many urban or inner city libraries find themselves utilized as heating shelters, cooling shelters, and entertainment gateways for the homeless population, during the hours when said population is not authorized in the local homeless housing. As we absorb many, if not most, of the homeless people from surrounding areas, we have an unusually high homeless population for a city our size.  This makes the problem both exceptionally noticeable working here, and significantly more frustrating, though some of that frustration owes its existence to the policies of our administration team as much as the patrons, themselves.

The director in place prior to our current one was so dedicated to the issue of homelessness he not only cultivated an environment in the downtown main branch that was conducive to behavior run amok, he literally changed the library’s hours to ensure the population had somewhere to go when the local shelter was closed. While the situation has improved some since then, with the floor most prone to homeless persons concentration having been rearranged to cut down on the chaos, the damage to library usage was done. Those coming to the library seeking a quiet place to study, or books on particular topics, or even just a computer to use, are not going to come to a space that is dirty, smells bad, and is covered in men who are sacked out and snoring. As that was the case in my library for a multitude of years, that is the image now associated with it. In trying, desperately, to make it into a daytime shelter, the old director effectively told the tax payers funding the structure that  they weren’t welcome. No surprise that a levy failed at least once under his tenure… 

Libraries should be safe spaces for the homeless, but they shouldn’t be any safer for the homeless than they are for anyone else. If we wouldn’t change the hours the library is open to accommodate housed patrons, we shouldn’t be doing it to accommodate those in shelters. The same general rules and standards should apply no matter the housing situation of the patron, yet in libraries with high homeless populations this often isn’t the case. Homeless patrons are often given a pass when it comes to sleeping, eating, disrespect, and generally inappropriate behavior that housed patrons would never be given. Our quest to treat them with the additional empathy and compassion we think they deserve isn’t really helping them, as it’s chasing away the very patrons who make the library possible in the first place. 

That’s not to say that the homeless are the only problem patrons we have, since many of them aren’t problem patrons at all. In fact, most of them aren’t problem patrons. It’s just that the ones that are troublemakers are impossible to shake. Other impossible-to-shake troublemakers include those recently released from prison and those with mental illnesses and/or their guardians. Because both of these populations are often times just as vulnerable as the homeless, the fact that they, like the homeless, are capable of being intensely abusive is often overlooked. I’ve been cursed at by a woman with Alzheimers, all but stalked by a man who probably had autism (alternatively he may have just been that incapable of understanding “NO”), verbally abused by a young man with down syndrome, and spent three weeks dodging a patron who decided that he “knew” me despite having never actually met me. It was eventually determined he was a recent release who had taken a shining to me. All of these are people who would ordinarily be told to “knock it off or be gone,” but because they belong to populations that are often underserved, we’re expected to take it with a smile. 

I’m sure a big part of the problem surrounding these vulnerable populations is that librarians, for the most part, are not adequately trained to deal with them. The list of necessary skill sets we don’t acquire in library school is about a mile long. Most librarians don’t take formal classes in education or large group instruction, yet a fair many of us will spend at least some of our lives doing it. We don’t get classes in dealing with the special education population, yet we’re expected to be experts in dealing with our more unique patrons. We get absolutely no classes in anger de-escalation, social work, or care of the elderly, but we spend a lot of our daily lives assisting with these tasks. I’ve lost track of the number of people between the ages of 40 and 90 that I’ve taught how to use their tablets or their phones, despite the fact that formally educating people is nowhere on my masters. Libraries are considered information spaces, where patrons are supposed to be going to find and consume said information. To that end, librarians are typically formally trained to assist in the locating and assessing of information and resources. We’re not even trained in event planning, yet it’s a staple of our jobs. 

The list of jobs I could be doing with the experience I now have, many of which would pay a lot more than what I currently make, is both remarkably long and remarkably varied. 

The solution to all these problems is likely bound up in changing the direction that libraries are going. From information resource hubs to generalized community centers that employ not just researchers, but social workers, educators, therapists, and possibly even lawyers. The idea of these services being located at libraries sounds crazy to those who haven’t been in one recently, but for those who frequent these buildings it’s not a nutty concept at all. Librarians already serve, formally, as prothonotaries and notaries, in addition to our jobs as researchers, basic info finders, educators, and large-scale party planners. We host accountants every year who assist with taxes for low income patrons. We circulate dozens of types of technologies, almost every form of entertainment out there, artwork, kitchen gadgets, toys, board games, and even clothing in some spaces. We are already one-stop-shopping for a great many citizens, and thus viewed as one-stop-shopping by a great many others for whom we’re not quite there. Yet. 

Crossing that bridge won’t just help our patrons. It will make me, and a great many librarians like myself, many holding onto their sanity by a mere filament, better at our jobs and better able to assist people with the things we’re actually trained to assist them with. I’d love to spend my days helping people find information or do research. Until the great day of the all-encompassing library dawns, however, I’ll be here passing out phone numbers, being harassed for not passing out my number, pushing in chairs, and occasionally telling someone what the square root of 2,564.81 is. 

Wish me luck. I’m gonna need it. 

[treehugginglibrarian]

“But what about.”

A tale of liberal elitist assholery, what-about-isms, and people just generally failing to ever be satisfied by the internet or each other. Ever. 

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire. We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn.

At least, if they’re being honest, that’s what a lot of liberals would be saying regarding the recent burning of la Cathedrale de Notre Dame in Paris. Instead, they’re going with a refrain that’s old and familiar among more socially liberal subsets of the online community whenever something that they deem “unimportant” or “less than” is damaged, destroyed, or otherwise harmed.

What-About-Isms! (Weird, because we’re so fucking good at calling out conservatives when they “what-about-ism” us… huh… funny how that works…)

“How are people donating money to this problem when there’s a war in Syria and a famine in Yemen?”

“So glad how many tourists a place gets makes it more important than war, famine, or poverty.”

“If the billionaires can fix this problem, why can’t they fix world hunger? The economic inequality in the world?”

“Really? Flint still doesn’t have drinking water and this is what people are spending their money on?”

And so on. And on. And on. But not really, because liberal what-about-isms are exactly as creative as conservative ones, which means they’re really all just a variation of those four. Come on, guys. If we’re gonna dicks, too, we should at least be more creative at it. 

While I have a read a couple of elegant albeit clearly privileged rants, most of the complaints, memes, and crappy cartoons are being drawn by normal, though well-educated, liberal folks who think they mean well.

You’re not doing “well.” You sound like a bunch of educated, elitist, assholes telling the rest of America (and the world, since many of y’all are lecturing billionaires in France now) what should or should not be important to them, what is or is not worth spending money on, and what individual people should or should not be sad about. You’re also, effectively, telling people what news they should be consuming and what media they should be watching. Which means, not even inadvertently, you’re telling people how they should spend their spare time and, often, their spare change. I’m a librarian and I don’t even pull that shit, because intellectual freedom is sort of important and coercive learning isn’t a particularly useful educational tool.  

Just stop. No seriously. Stop. You’re not helping your cause. You’re not making people more interested in Syria, or Libya, or Lebanon, or Palestine, or Israel, or the Philippines, or the south of Thailand, or Myanmar, or Russia, or Kenya, or South Africa, or Ukraine, or, or, or. See, I can play that game, too. I bet that some of my uber liberal, supposedly well-read friends, can’t tell you what’s going on in some of those countries. What about Guatemala? El Salvador? Ecuador? Mexico, Puerto Rico, Italy, France (aside from their Cathedral), the UK, Northern Ireland specifically, India, Kashmir, Pakistan, or Iraq? Who are the Kurds? Where are the Kurds? What are they up to right now? Are you bored yet? Do you know about the famines in Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia, or only the one in Yemen? Are you tired of being told how ill-informed you are? Do you feel foolish for not knowing what’s going on in every single one of those countries?

Don’t. Don’t feel foolish. You’re human. No human can, or should, know every bad thing that is going on everywhere in the world. It’s not feasible and it’s emotionally exhausting. Those are just the countries I’ve read about in the news during the course of the last six months or so. Some are at war. Some are experiencing internal strife. Some are committing genocide or something that resembles it. Many are just in the midst of famine or suffering poverty so extreme it makes the homelessness crisis in America look non-existent. I am sure there are hundreds of issues the world over besides just these, and I’m sure many of them are as severe or more than the ones I’ve mentioned above. Which means, in many ways, the what-about-isms surrounding the burning of a Cathedral aren’t just elitist, they’re hypocritical.

“How are people donating to this when there’s a war in Syria and a famine in Yemen?”

Okay, but there’s also wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are basically perpetual incursions in the Kashmir region between Pakistan and India. There are effectively genocides going on in various countries in Africa. Depending on how Brexit breaks, violence may well break out in Northern Ireland, again. Russia is occupying parts of Ukraine, still. Venezuela is in such a great state of upheaval, other countries are considering intervention. At least three nations in Africa are in the midst of a horrible famine. Hell, our own state of California just crawled out of a drought that it had been in for years. A drought that led to wildfires that caused the destruction of thousands of homes, many of which still haven’t been rebuilt and likely won’t be rebuilt for decades. And absolutely none of that will matter if we don’t stop climate change and save the fucking bees. But your focus is Syria and Yemen specifically? What makes them important? Why are they special? And why should they be more important and more special than every other conflict or food-oriented crisis on the planet? I can most definitely what-about-ism your what-about-ism until the cows come home, because there’s almost certainly something horrible going on somewhere else that I can toss in your face as being just as important as your bullshit what-about-ism.

“So glad how many tourists a place gets makes it more important than war or famine.”

Not necessarily more important, just more well known. When we threw 59 missiles at an airbase in Syria, it made the front page of one of the newspapers sitting behind the reference desk where I work. Sure, it was in the local newspaper, but it wasn’t deemed interesting enough for front page news. Notre Dame burned and it was on the front page of every fucking paper on the planet the next day. Hell, it’s on the front page of all four papers sitting behind my reference desk today. Three out of four them it is, for the second day, the obvious front page story. Why? Because people know what and where that Cathedral is. Seeing a story about a recognizable object or place is going to make someone pick up the newspaper and read it. Media centers know that, and they plan their layouts accordingly. People will only know about the items and entities that are placed before them for their intellectual consumption. A place having a lot of tourists doesn’t make it inherently more important, but it does make it inherently more well-known, and thus a better story.

Before anyone says “seek out better news sources,” it’s worth considering the fact that better news sources require both access and time. These are not two commodities that everyone has. Money, or a local library, are necessary to make access to things like the New York Times or the Washington Post possible. Things like NPR, the BBC, and PBS are all free access, but they still require broadband or wireless access, via internet or a data plan. The number of people without ready access to the digital world is literally unknown in this country, because it’s not a question that’s ever been asked on a census and the few times the government has tried to do a conclusive count it’s come up stymied. Assuming that the entire country has ready access to any news they want at the touch of a finger is an intensely privileged assumption to make. Don’t believe me? Work a library reference desk for a day and count how many people call for phone numbers because they lack a means by which to look them up. Then tell me again that ready, and immediate, access to “acceptable” news sources is something they’re probably overly concerned about. 

Even for those with ready internet access, financial means, or access to a library, time is still a constraint. We can only consume so much media in a day. We can only fit so much, full stop, in a single day. I know more about what’s up than most people, because I work a job that allows me to read the news while at work. One of my many tasks is literally clipping relevant news articles from the local paper so I am, in effect, paid to stay “in the know.” How are we going to tell a single mother who works insane hours that, after she’s finally gotten her kids to bed, she should be reading up on the crisis in Syria rather than catching up with her friends on Facebook? Her life is not abnormal, which means her lack of insight into the world, existing not because of a lack of caring but because of a lack of time, is not abnormal. How are we going to tell the couple with sick parents and an overdue mortgage that their concern for a Cathedral, the one piece of news they were able to catch up on in between hospice visits and work, speaks to their character?

The fact that so many people are so concerned about a damned church is not cause for alarm, it’s actually cause for a sigh of relief. It means people haven’t completely tuned out. It means people are, in fact, paying attention to what’s going on in other parts of the world. Even people who genuinely lack the time or money to dedicate to “adequate” intellectual pursuits are still, on occasion, tuning in to the rest of the world. Do not discourage that with your snarky elitist “you’re paying attention to the wrong things” bullshit.  

“If the billionaires can fix this problem, why can’t they fix world hunger? The economic inequality in the world?”

First, how do you know what the billionaires are spending their money on? Do you disclose everything you spend your money on? Am I allowed to start approving your philanthropic pursuits and telling you what you can/should donate to? Bill and Melinda Gates all but single-handedly (or rather, single-walletedly) eliminated certain diseases via vaccinations. Oprah is educating young girls in multiple countries. Elon Musk is trying to get us to Mars, for fucks sake. Billionaires, like all humans, are capable of super shitty things. They’re also capable of super awesome things. They’re not capable of fixing all of the problems in the world and, honestly, they shouldn’t be expected to. While billionaires in the United States rarely pay their “fair share” of taxes, those in other countries often do. Which means that the billionaires in France who have pledged (read: started a fierce and ridiculous competition, but whatever) to help rebuild the Cathedral have likely already donated to the French coiffeurs and are now doing what they consider to be “their part” (read: are now competing to prove they’re the best rich Frenchman of them all) to help ensure the government doesn’t have to rebuild a national monument. Because that’s what Notre Dame is.

While it may hold Catholic services, it’s not owned by the Catholic church. Which means the church is, in no way, required to repair it. If France wants to guarantee its maintenance for future generations, it’s not something that can be left to the church. A couple of billionaires are making sure the dent it puts in the available tax base is relatively minimal, even if that’s not necessarily their intent. You don’t have to commend them for it, but I’d recommend not lambasting them for it, since the Cathedral is getting fixed one way or another. The more billionaires “waste” their money on it, the less tax payers will feel it.

But “why” is it getting fixed? Why does it matter? Why can’t they spend the money on something else? It was started in the 1100s. It is one of the oldest, largest, standing examples of French Gothic architecture in the world. Some of the most important events in French history have happened in or at that Cathedral. History is important, as liberals who call for reparations are well aware. Those who do not remember their history are doomed to repeat it, as liberals who scream that we should be punching Nazis cannot have forgotten. There is essentially nothing in our country so important to us, so fundamental to the fabric of our being as a nation, that we would be willing to dedicate millions of dollars to repairing it if it was damaged. Part of this is that we’re a very new nation still. Part of this is that much of our history is tarnished, some horribly so. Much of this is that America, for all its “pride,” lacks an overarching sense of identity.

We are, and have for some time been, quite fractured. By politics, by religion, by skin tone, by the fact that we have always been an imperialist melting pot founded upon a land that we stole from another people. There are few structures or places in this country that hold a significance large enough to all of us that they would be overwhelmingly viewed as worth saving. While France is seeing some internal strife, they are a nation that largely possesses a sense of identity. I can’t really tell you what it means to be American, and I am one. Fuck, I wore our uniform for eight years and I still can’t really tell you what it means to be American. I have never met a French person who couldn’t tell you what it means to be French. That Cathedral lies at the heart of their capital city and, in many ways, at the heart of their nation. The French people would never allow it lie fallow and turn to dust, and it’s pretty deplorable that a country of people who all but lack a unified identity think we have the cultural savvy to dictate to another nation what should become of a structure that is four times older than our entire being. We cannot comprehend why the French would pay millions to fix a church that old, in part because we literally cannot comprehend what it means to have a national history that old. If we could, the donations of billionaires would probably make a lot more sense to us.

“Really? Flint still doesn’t have drinking water and this is what people are spending their money on?”

I live in Cleveland. The lead levels in certain neighborhoods in my city are exponentially higher than those in Flint. If you’re using Flint as an excuse to avoid spending money on other things, you’re showing your own bias and overall lack of knowledge on a topic that is much bigger than the buzzword you’ve turned the city of Flint into. My city is not the only one like this, either. There are dozens (probably hundreds) of cities in this country that have lead levels higher than those in Flint. We just don’t have an exceptionally annoying movie producer named Michael Moore capable of throwing an international temper tantrum about the situation. I’m thrilled that he got the attention that he did and that he forced Flint’s officials to at least admit wrong doing, even if they still haven’t fixed the problem. Pretending that the water in Flint is as bad as it gets, though, is seriously disingenuous and shows just how thoroughly even some of the most obnoxious elitists don’t understand their own talking points. Come on guys. Do your research.

In the end, telling people what they can be upset about isn’t just bad politics, it’s bad interpersonal dialogue. It presumes that the person you’re talking to is incapable of considering multiple major world issues as important at the same time. It presumes that the person you’re accusing of not caring “properly” has access to the same time and resources that you do, and presumes that your own personal international interests are the most important ones out there. Yes, the war in Syria is important. So is the famine in Yemen. But so are five million other things going on right now, and you are not the arbiter of that which is “most” important.

There will come a day when something big, and important, will happen to you. Maybe it’ll be a car accident. Maybe it’ll be a birth. Maybe it’ll be a deployment. Maybe it’ll be an explosion that leaves half a city block leveled. It will be the center point of your existence for as long as you need it to be. Maybe people from outside of your town will care, maybe they won’t. That doesn’t matter, though, because the event in question is important to you. Now imagine how disheartening it would be if you got online and hundreds of thousands of people were discussing the fact that whatever happened in your corner of the planet was irrelevant because of all the other things happening in other parts of the planet. Just as we went back to ignoring Syria a couple weeks after each bombing run, just as we’ve long since forgotten that the war in Iraq ever even happened or that the one in Afghanistan is still on-going, just as we’ve forgotten that Puerto Rico is still rebuilding and that Venezuela is still falling apart, in a couple of weeks we will forget about Notre Dame. And then each of us, as individuals, will be free to go back to our separate corners of the internet and focus on the things that we find important.

Until then, calm down. Get off the net if you have to. Liberals have enough problems without a subsection of our own deciding they’re solely and singularly qualified to determine what major world events are actually worth talking about and giving money to. You don’t know everything. None of us do. So how about if we just don’t act like a bunch of elitist dicks and let people care about whatever the hell they want to care about.

Including the fact that the stain glass windows survived that fucking fire. Props to 13th century artisans.  

[treehugginglibrarian]

We Don’t Need Maternity Leave, We Need Caregiving Leave

As is wont to happen every couple of years, my online world is again awash in articles and arguments shouting in favor of and for fully paid maternity leave in the United States. Not one to think that women should be denied full rights to further their career, or that mothers should necessarily be punished for the act of having a child, I have always avoided extended comment on the topic in the past. After the year I have had, however, I cannot avoid it anymore. The United States does need a more comprehensive leave program, but targeting it at mothers and/or fathers completely ignores the needs of those who lack children and drastically underscores the importance of family members we are not likely to be potty training.

Family leave policies in the United States are, right now, pretty slap-shod. Some corporations offer insanely generous policies affording new parents a year or more off at fully paid wages. Others allow you to take little more than a week off and pay you nothing while you are gone. The federal standard, guaranteed under the Family Medical Leave Act for those employees that work in eligible positions, is 12 weeks long and unpaid. For the purposes of this piece, I’m going to utilize the policy at my place of employment as that’s the policy that I know best and, frankly, it will work really well to illustrate the issues that could come to pass if a parental-leave-only policy were put into place.

Where I work, employees accrue both sick time and vacation time based upon the pay-step they are working at and the number of hours they work. A higher pay grade affords you more time off, in both categories, per hour worked and, obviously, working more hours will afford you more time off, as well. We do not have a paid parental leave program. A full time, mid level, professional employee can expect to earn about 2.6 sick hours per 37.5 hours worked. A year will earn them about 135 hours, or a little more than 18 paid sick days. For most healthy humans, it’s more than a sufficient amount, particularly since sick time accrues with no maximum cap. This means my hypothetical employee would have roughly 90 sick days after working for three years. Throw in the roughly three years worth of vacation time you are allowed to store before it becomes “use or lose,” and you add on another 60 days. 150 days, divided by approximately 20 actual working days per month, affords a new parent 7.5 months of paid time off.

Of course, those 7.5 months can only be achieved if the parent in question has taken no sick time and no vacation time in the three years leading up to the birth of their child. Clearly, this isn’t an ideal situation. What it lacks in idealism, however, it makes up for in “fairness.” Yes, that’s right, this policy may suck for new parents, but it sucks just as much for the woman whose husband has cancer, the man whose mother is dying, or the woman whose brother is on life support after overdosing (I work basically in the heroin capital of the country, it’s not really an unheard of situation). In all cases, they are restricted only by the amount of time off they are able to accrue and save. For better or worse, it’s fair to everyone, whether they are parents or not.

Okay, let’s back up a minute. To sometime in 2010. I was working in a logistics shop for an Infantry Brigade, and one of the multitude of tasks assigned to me was the review and approval of military travel requests within the Brigade. Someone gets sent somewhere, uses their car and their credit card to get themselves there, and now they wanna be paid back. Makes sense. I was the last stop this request made before being sent to Division finance for final dispensation of their check. These reviews usually took little more than ten minutes apiece and I very rarely had more than three or four to handle at a time. At most, it was an hour of my day.

This was, in large part, because the bulk of the work was done by a Sergeant on the other side of the building. Initial requests would get sent to her, and she was who then had to hunt down the Soldiers in question and demand any missing paperwork or any additional proof of expenditure. Moreover, for those travel arrangements being made by the Brigade, she was the one who played travel agent. She booked the flights, booked the rental cars, and ensured everyone knew where they were going and how they were getting there. While this was not her only tasking within the Brigade, it was one of her larger ones. It occupied a significant amount of her time.

Until she went on maternity leave at the end of 2010. At which point, it occupied a significant amount of my time. Time that I really didn’t have to dedicate to it, unless I stayed late or did the work from home. Such was my introduction to the idea of comprehensive paid maternity leave, a type of leave for which there was no non-parental equivalent and thus, of which, I would never take advantage. Despite this fact, a frenzied and harried spurt of 50 hour weeks spent doing almost two complete jobs was not the last time I have had to pick up the slack in a work place because a mama bear somewhere has been taking care of their kids. The coworkers left to pick up this slack don’t get paid more for doing it, don’t get extra time off afterwards, and often aren’t even thanked for their extra input. It’s just expected that, be it three weeks, three months, or a year, we’ll step in and handle it. Kids are important, after all.

Kids ARE important. Which is why I would never argue against a comprehensive leave program of some sort. I would argue, though, that kids are not necessarily the ONLY important thing for which one might need to take extended leave at some point.

A couple of years ago, my grandfather got sick. Or rather, my grandfather started to lose his marbles. My grandmother has been sick for awhile, but her health has also gotten progressively worse. Just before Christmas this past year, my grandmother ended up in the hospital following a stroke. Getting time off to see her wasn’t hard at all, as I have an awesome boss and amazing coworkers. I also have a sick time policy that includes grandparental care in its stipulations, so I didn’t have to eat up my vacation time. While I only utilized a couple of days to go out east, check on everyone, and then head home, I could likely take more time to assist if I needed to. The amount of time would overwhelmingly be determined by the amount of sick time and vacation time I have saved, as tending to sick relatives is a valid reason to be out of work per our policies. In short, our leave time, though seemingly shitty to parents, treats all employees the same. Which is to say, parents are not put on a pedestal that the childfree don’t have equal access to.  

One of the staples of individual work places, cities, states, or whole countries that have comprehensive family leave programs is that the program isn’t actually “family” oriented. It is “child” oriented. Sure, a new mother can take 18 months off to tend to her newborn baby. But more often than not, someone wanting to take six months to help their mother through breast cancer is going to run afoul of work place regulations, since that kind of family is often not covered by long-term-leave programs. Hell, someone needing to take a year off because they, personally, are battling cancer may well find that doing so while getting paid is nearly impossible. In this country, FMLA covers all qualifying family members equally, but is completely unpaid unless the company chooses otherwise. Most corporations with paid long-term-leave programs offer only parental leave, not actual family, caregiving, or long-term medical leave. If I am going to be expected to cover down on a new mother’s daily taskings for upwards of a year or more, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that I be able to help a family member through an illness without obliterating my vacation time. Particularly since I can already assure my own coworkers that I will never be leaving them because I’ve had a baby.  

I have no issues with mothers or fathers, biological or adoptive, taking time off after their newborn nuggets have arrived. I do have issue when that time off comes not only at my expense, often tethering me to tasks and hours that are not usually my own, but comes with absolutely no equitable compensation recognizing that parental leave affects significantly more than just parents. As I’ve already said, kids are important. So important, in fact, that the childfree routinely pay monetarily for them, despite not having them. We pay property taxes that go to school systems we will never send our children to. We watch as our friends with children are routinely granted tax breaks, sometimes in the thousands of dollars, that we will never be granted. The usual excuse given when, and if, we have the audacity to complain about the financial burden that children place on those who don’t have them, is that children are our future and it’s society’s job to tend to them.

Fuck that. Children aren’t OUR future. Children are the future of the people who have them. And that’s fine. Expecting children to be the future, in some grand and great way, is placing an awfully unfair burden on them well before their brains have even begun to develop. I don’t want them to be anything other than whatever they are supposed to be when they grow up- whether that’s President, a teacher, a stay-at-home parent, or a caregiver for old farts who didn’t have kids of their own, like me. Those kids who do grow up to take care of old farts who didn’t have their own kids are, I’m sure, amazing people who were raised by wonderful humans. Humans who did not have those kids thinking to themselves, “someday, my noble child is going to take care of selfish childfree people who didn’t have kids of their own.” No, they had their kids thinking, “I want a kid,” or “I need someone to take care of me when I get old.”

Yes, some children will grow up to be the future. They will care for humanity and the planet and make everyone’s lives better places. Just as many will grow up to be average people whose only serious influence will be on their friends and family. That’s okay, it doesn’t make them bad people. But it also doesn’t make them people I should have to worship from the moment they are born. Yet that is precisely how society is set up. From parental tax breaks to property tax to calls for parental leave to the expectation that the childfree will be willing to take the vacation days that don’t correspond with summer break, children are to be treated with an odd sense of reverence by absolutely everyone. Including the people they don’t belong to.

It’s a concept that is rapidly losing tenability in a country where roughly half of all young women are living without a spouse or partner and only 54% of women of childbearing age have actually had a child. Of the ones who haven’t, only about half actually want to. You cannot ostracize a full quarter of the women of a population and expect to get much changed in the way of policies. Particularly when that quarter of the female population is likely going to be overly represented in the workforce and in leadership roles, owing to the fact that they’ve never taken time off for children. If we’re serious about comprehensive parental leave policies, at a federal level, we need to have a real conversation about the fact that those policies come at a detriment to an outsized chunk of the working population, and they dramatically minimize the definition of “family” in this country.

Parents need time off when a baby is born. But so do people whose spouses are sick. So do people whose grandparents are dying. So do people whose siblings are struggling after rehab. So do parents whose adult children are struggling after an accident. So do people who are battling brain tumors that take more than 12 weeks to conquer. Caregiving is no easy task, no matter the age of the human you are caring for, and the idea that the only people deserving of “special” time off to give care to those who matter to them are new parents, is completely absurd. If we want paid parental leave in this country it’s time to reframe the argument. This isn’t about parents needing time to take care of new babies.

This is about humans needing time to take care of other humans.

[treehugginglibrarian]

October is LGBTQ History Month.

Because of generations of activists who came before us, we have made incredible strides toward justice.

Because of unconscionable hate in the White House and beyond, we have so much farther to go.

Because of brilliant, dedicated people fighting all over the world for what’s right, we will get there.

[treehugginglibrarian]

Now is the Time for #NOTALLMEN

Under ordinary circumstances, I would probably be reacting to our current news cycle by screaming my detestation for men everywhere from every rooftop I could find to climb upon. It occurs to me, though, that in this instance that would fall on deaf ears and would probably be counterproductive. In light of this fact, I’m going to take a different approach and I’m going to say:

#NOTALLMEN

#NOTALLMEN do the things that Brett Kavanaugh is accused of doing. Not all men assault a girl in high school. Not all men attempt to rape anyone, ever. Not all men will, at some point in the course of their lives, physically hurt and permanently scar the psyche of a woman in their lives. Not all men are completely awful, and those men that aren’t awful should be wildly fucking offended by the implication that Brett Kavanaugh’s guilt or innocence doesn’t matter, because even if he did do it he’s not doing anything that every other man before him hasn’t already done. Because, #NOTALLMEN are incapable of treating women like they are whole, sentient, beings worthy of respect.

As evidence of this fact, I give you the multitude of times in my own life that a man could have harmed me, could have done serious damage, possibly could have killed me, and didn’t. Though I claim a general dislike for the male species, I know a LOT of men. I am friends with a LOT of men. And the overwhelming majority of them are pretty fucking amazing. The ones I keep close to me are all really fucking amazing. To start, let’s take it back. WAAAAAAAAY back. To an age at which Brett Kavanaugh may, or may not, have been assaulting people, an age at which we are being led to believe “boys will be boys” and we should just shrug this shit off.  

I spent high school hanging out with a pretty mixed bag of people. I was super bad at falling into any one clique, though my sophomore year I attached myself to a crew of gents that were two years older than me and sort of just latched on leech style. Zach, Randy, Bubba, and Jeff were staples of my sophomore year of high school. I spent literal hours with them after school for stage crew shit (I was a band geek and a musical geek), after marching band gigs, and just hanging out. Weirdly, despite spending hours upon hours together, sometimes on darkened school buses, none of them ever assaulted me. #NOTALLMEN

The summer after they graduated, Jeff and I started dating. This brought me up to his college campus pretty frequently where I met his friend and roomie Abe. At no point while we were together, despite us often spending the night alone in his dorm room, did Jeff ever assault me. At no point in our time together did Abe ever assault me. In fact, Abe and I have gotten together since then just to catch up on old times and you know what we did? We ate dinner. And talked about our lives. He didn’t assault me. #NOTALLMEN

Through all four years of high school, there were three constants within my own graduating class with whom I seemed to spend a fair bit of time and of whom I have consistently fond memories. Two of these people were boys. Despite spending lots of time together in the hallways before school or between classes, despite going to parties together, despite the fact that one of them was even on the football team *gasp*, neither Lee nor Dean ever assaulted me. We helped each other with school work, talked about politics and religion, reminded one another that high school is only temporary, and generally just did what we could to make one another smile. We had history class together almost every year and, courtesy of our teacher and our friendship, we laughed a lot during that class. #NOTALLMEN

Either the summer before I went away to school or the summer after my freshman year, I had the first of what would be multiple (though not nearly as many as some of my other Army buddies) pretty fucking drunk experiences. I had gotten reasonably drunk on a couple of occasions in high school, but this was my first fall-down, black-out, what-the-fuck-was-I-thinking, experience. I was out with my friend Rob and some of his buddies, at a barn party in the middle of nowhere. I was completely blitzed. The type of drunk where Rob wasn’t comfortable taking me back to my house (he didn’t know at the time that my dad would have laughed), so he instead took us to our friend James’ house, since James’ parents were well-versed in the art of coping with teens being stupid. Rob did not sexually assault me. None of his friends or the other party goers sexually assaulted me. I also managed to spend the night on the couch at a house that wasn’t my own, without being sexually assaulted. #NOTALLMEN

Speaking of James’ house, I spent a fair bit of time there. His parents were firm believers that teens were going to be stupid, so at least if they gave us a place to be stupid they could keep an eye on us. They’d collect car keys, keep us from fornicating in cars, make sure we didn’t accidentally fall in the fire pit, and feed us breakfast the next morning. I didn’t realize at the time how insanely, incredibly, unspeakably lucky I was to have a friend like James who had parents like he had, thus allowing me to have ridiculous amounts of fun with my friends. We’d pass out where ever we fell, on couches, on beds, in piles outside. In all of the years that I spent getting drunk at their farmhouse and waking up to an amazing breakfast the next day, I was never sexually assaulted. Not even once. Not even close. Hugged, cuddled (it was acceptable), fed, and handed bunny rabbits. But never sexually assaulted. #NOTALLMEN

In case you couldn’t tell, I made it through high school without ever being sexually assaulted. Despite spending TONS of time with boys in LOTS of situations in which they absolutely could have done serious harm to me, I came out of high school thinking guys were just like girls but built a little differently. I treated them the same. I talked to them the same. I had just as many guy friends as gal friends. #NOTALLBOYS will sexually assault someone in high school, or my high school years would have been horrific.

I was less lucky in college, but this isn’t about the unlucky spots. This is about the the fact that #NOTALLMEN are raging shit weasels. I joined the ROTC my sophomore year of college. By my junior year, I was tucked into a commissioning crew of a whopping seven people. Six dudes, and me. We did basically everything together. Jason, Jim, John, Nathan, Sean, Elias, and little ol’ me. We spent time in the field together. We spent time in hotels together. We spent time on road trips, in bars, at house parties, and doing our homework together. Had you told me when I was in college that a decade later I would be besties with none of these men and that I would only be in nominal contact with one or two, I would have thought you crazy. These men were my heart and soul. Life is a fickle fuck, though, and we eventually went our separate ways. At no time before this occurred, however, did any one of them ever sexually assault me. #NOTALLMEN

My ex-husband, though a stubborn man who apparently refused to believe he couldn’t turn me into a baby-wanting Catholic, never sexually assaulted me. #NOTALLMEN 

During the multiple training rounds the ROTC put me through, I usually found myself spending time with dudes. We’d camp together in the field, dine together, and if there was time, inevitably get shit faced together at some point in time. We’d fall asleep in piles outside the barracks, pick each other up when it was time to get moving, and remind each other that water was necessary. No matter how drunk we got, or how alone we seemed, I was never sexually assaulted. #NOTALLMEN

I moved to Israel where I was sexually assaulted with some regularity by the Palestinian men living there but, again, this isn’t about them. This about the fact that #NOTALLMEN are goddamned fuck nuggets. I spent more time with my friends Bill, Dave, and Matt then I think I could ever properly tabulate. I literally took to calling Dave my older brother because he was older than me and he was exactly as I pictured an older brother of mine would be (interesting factoid, I have since found my actual older brother and I wasn’t too far off. Tim and Dave are VERY, VERY similar creatures). I greeted them with unsolicited hugs, fell asleep on their shoulders during movie nights or on long car trips, and was generally convinced they were my own, personal, human teddy bears. If they were bothered by this overabundance of affection on my part, they didn’t show it. And they definitely didn’t sexually assault me for it. #NOTALLMEN

During deployment, I was one of fewer than ten women in my company of over 100 people. Though I believe they might have beaten up someone from another company who they overheard say inappropriate things about me, and I watched one of my NCOs threaten a Warrant Officer who was making me super uncomfortable (an Officer who was chaptered out for rape and sexual assault as I was coming off of active duty), no one in my company ever harmed me. They picked on me, they teased me, they kept me safe, they trained me, they demanded more of me and demanded better of me, and they put me back together every time the higher ups tried to break me. They never sexually assaulted me. #NOTALLMEN

Later, while going through a particularly rough patch involving a man who wasn’t all that stellar, a Warrant Officer we fondly called “Uncle” Rick basically adopted me. He kept me safe in a completely non-paternalistic way, ensuring that the bad guy stayed at bay and that, if he wasn’t on a completely different universe, he was at least nowhere near me. He once told me that if said bad guy ever showed up trying to hurt me, to call him first. He’d make it there before the cops would. I never doubted for a second that if I needed him, he’d be there. The vast majority of the men I met while in uniform were good humans who never sexually assaulted me. #NOTALLMEN    

One of my very best friends I acquired courtesy of my time on the Brigade staff. I have spent quite a bit of time with my friend Scott, running, talking, exploring breakfast spots in Alexandria, and just generally doing the things you do when you’re with one of your favorite people. I have stayed up until 1am with him, sitting on his couch and drinking tea, and you know what happened when we finally went to bed? He hugged me, told me how happy he was I was visiting, and told me to sleep well. He didn’t sexually assault me, because he’s one of my best friends and that’s a shitty fucking thing to do to anyone so it’s a super shitty thing to do to one of your best friends. #NOTALLMEN because some men are fanfuckingtastic.

Speaking of fanfuckingtastic men, my more local bestie Eric has never sexually assaulted me, either. HOURS upon HOURS spent out on the trails, or eating ice cream, or in his bike shop. Many of these hours spent alone. He’s bigger than me. He’s stronger than me. The woods are a scary and lonely place. But, like Scott, he’s never sexually assaulted me. I can’t say for certain, but I think that, like Scott, it’s because he’s too fond of me to hurt me and he knows that sexually assaulting me would hurt me. Also, like Scott, he’s just not inclined to sexually assault anyone. Because #NOTALLMEN. I know this, for a fact, because two of my dearest friends are men who have never, and will never, hurt me. Or anyone. 

No worries. We’re almost done. I’m almost out of men in my life to call out for their awesome ability to not rape and/or assault people.

I joined a CrossFit gym a little over two years ago. On day one, I was the only person in the gym with my coach, Adam. Just me. And a dude who’s built like a Greek god and could pick me up and break me. You know what happened? The same thing that’s happened every single time I’ve been the only person in class since then. He taught me how to lift shit and corrected my form. The longer I’ve been there the more we’ve taken to bullshitting about life while I’m lifting, but he’s never hurt me. In fact, none of the men in the gym have ever hurt me. I’ve been in the gym alone with my other coach as well, and though we give Jeff innate amounts of shit for basically being everyone’s disappointed dad at all times, he’d never actively seek to hurt any of his athletes. I have showed up for classes where I was the only woman in a room with a male coach and five or six male athletes. And all we did was work out. No sexual assault took place. #NOTALLMEN Even when they’re absolutely strong enough.

The idea that what Kavanaugh may have done should be brushed aside as an excusable indiscretion because “all men” will do something of that nature at some point in their lives is complete and utter horse shit. Indefensible, wildly offensive, horse shit. The only way men would ever believe this is if they, themselves, are abusers. The only way women would believe it is if they have been abused far too many times. #NOTALLMEN are human shit stains, so why the hell are we inventing a narrative that says they are?  

[treehugginglibrarian]

RAWR! Things That Make Me Angry

It’s been a long couple of days/weeks/months. To that end, the number of things that seem to be infuriating me and/or generally making me crazy has gotten pretty high. I thought about doing a series of posts, and then realized it would be so much more fun to just get it all out there in one fell swoop. I’ll attempt some semblance of order in the chaos that is my angry thoughts, but I make no promises. Feel free to pitch your own anger out there as well. I’d hate to be the only one to find this post cathartic.

Anger at My Profession (and its Organizations) Recently I did a presentation for the Ohio Library Council’s Youth Services Conference. It went pretty well, the topic was well-received, and those who attended that session seemed happy they had chosen to do so. I’m not disappointed that I went. I am disappointed by the way organizations like the OLC, ALA (the American Library Association), PLA (the Public Library Association), and so forth have taken to treating those who agree to speak at their events. 

When I first received my speaker’s agreement for this event, I was a little bit shocked to see that I was being charged a fee to attend. That’s right- not only were they not paying me for my time, thus necessitating that my library pay me for my time even though I wasn’t even going to be at work that day, they had the audacity to attempt to charge me and/or my employer for the use of my time. They wanted me to pay them to spread knowledge and information. They want me to pay them to make their conference possible. 

Well, that’s a load of steaming fucking horse shit if ever I’ve encountered it, and it turns out library councils and associations all over the country are now doing this. So much for being an actual profession where our skill sets and capabilities are respected. We are, as individuals, so completely disrespected by the very organizations that are supposed to be fighting for us, that we’re now required to pay to pass our know-how onto our peers. 

I got the fee waived on the basis that I am not now, and likely never will be, a youth services librarian and thus wasn’t staying for the entire conference or for lunch. The principle of the entire thing is just maddening, though. They don’t pay mileage. They don’t pay for handouts. They don’t even provide all of the electronic devices needed to make the conference possible. And, to boot, they expect you to pay them to work.

To add insult to injury, I’m already a member of a committee that is part of the OLC. So I’m already doing work for them on the regular, as a committee member. Work that I’ve already paid them to do, because despite being a committee member who ends up speaking with a weird sense of regularity I am required to pay my annual dues. So they want me to pay them, more than once, to do work for them.  

Get the fuck outta here with that. My time, my energy, and my knowledge is something for which I should be paid. So the least you can do is avoid charging me to share it.  

Suffice to say, it’ll be the last conference of that nature that I’ll be doing. Thankfully, the committee I’m a member of seems to do just as much work at individual libraries, which don’t charge you to come speak, as they do at conferences. I’ve also already presented and/or created presentations for three or four different events this year, and I’m not done yet. 

Any other librarians out there right fucking sick of being treated like we’re not worthwhile professionals by the very organizations that are supposed to be helping us, as professionals? Don’t answer that. It’s rhetorical. I’ve had this conversation with dozens of them and, so far, they have all found the practice to be a steaming pile of cow manure. 

Get your shit together, library land. We deserve better.

Anger at My House Okay. I’m not actually angry at my house. I’m just really over contractors who can’t fucking communicate. If you say you’re going to call a homeowner, pick up the damn phone and call. The contractors working on our basement have a pretty spotty attendance record and basically no ability to utilize a phone. This was especially fun when we arrived home on day one and found no keys in the house, no lock box on the door, no note explaining these absences, and neither of us had a voicemail or missed call from them. 

If a homeowner is having to chase you down to find out when you’ll be in next, or where their keys are, you’re doing it wrong. 

In the end, it took them two more days to get our keys into a lock box on our door and, at the paltry rate at which they are moving we are genuinely questioning whether these idiots will be done by the time we leave for Spain. I am absolutely certain we could have gotten this work done faster, and likely for less money than our deductible is going to be, just by doing it ourselves. 

There’s also just so much shit all over my house right now. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just a product of having a basement that is completely out of commission, and some stuff that really can’t be stored in the garage. It’s a little exhausting being surrounded by stuff constantly, though. We’re trying to keep the clutter to a minimum in the spaces we really spend a lot of time in, but basically anywhere else it’s become a free for all. We’re going on over a month since the “Great Flood of 2018,” and I’m ready for it to be over. And I know it won’t be, not completely, not for a while yet, since we’re still looking at having to dig up an entire pipe in the front yard. Because we really needed the “Big Dig of 2018” to go with the great flood, right?

Anger Over Animals There’s a giant, wheelable, privacy fence over my driveway. My dad built it and, once it’s painted absurd rainbow colors, I’m sure it’ll look awesome and annoy the neighbors. It’s not there for aesthetics, though. It’s there because a neighbor complained about the fact that we have a pit bull. So, my dog crashed at my folks house for a week or two while we figured out how to deal with the nosy neighbor problem, and now we have a privacy fence over our driveway so that the only people who can see into our backyard are the next door neighbors who have met our pibble and know he’s a sweetie pie.

Here’s the thing about pits- you may think you know one on sight, but there’s a really good chance you don’t. If you mix a lab and a boxer, you’re liable to get a head with a pretty boxy shape but an actual nose, and you know what it’s going to look like? A pit bull. Even though it’s not one. In fact, this experiment could be repeated, successfully, by mixing a boxer with a number of different dog breeds. All of them would come out with the tell-tale boxy head of a pit bull, and none of them would be pit bulls. The idea that a dog should be banned, taken away, or put down based on the say-so of anyone other than a geneticist, particularly when the dog has done nothing wrong, is fucking absurd. 

How about this- leave my dog alone and I won’t call the police on your screaming crotch goblins when you forget to drag their asses back inside at 9pm. Goodness knows my dog is far less obnoxious than your kids are.

Anger at Doctors and/or the VA This one is sort of perpetual and may well be unnecessary, since so few veterans aren’t mad at the VA about something. In my case, I just really wish my wife’s doctors would both listen to her and cooperate with each other. Even as they are refusing to prescribe her the things that she knows will work, they seem equally determined to force her to take medications that aren’t really helping or that are actively hurting her. I can’t say for certain, but I think it might stem in part from the fact that she has four psychiatrists, none of whom want to agree with each other about a damn fucking thing. 

So. We talk in circles with each of them, arriving at a conclusion, only to have that conclusion thrown out the next day when one of the other psychs decides they don’t like that plan. It’s a vicious and pointless cycle that serves to do little more than mandate an irrational amount of time off of work for me, and an absurd feeling of frustration and hopelessness for both of us. Anyone who wonders how we can have as many vets killing themselves each day as we do has clearly never attempted to get anything done with the doctors at the VA. It’s an exhausting, demoralizing, process that leaves the patient and their family completely beaten down and generally ready to throw in the towel. So, it does basically the exact opposite of what a medical system should do. Good job, guys.

Anger at the Gays An acquaintance/coworker/human I’m loosely associated with through work posted a meme on that dastardly devil that is social media basically demanding that all those who are not strictly gay or lesbian stop using the term “gay” to describe themselves. I mean, I get it. No one likes to feel erased. Here’s the thing, though. If you’re going to demand that people stop erasing you, you have to do it from a position of marginalization and you have to do it in a fashion that doesn’t erase other people in the process.

While gays are definitely marginalized compared to the straight folk of our world, the reality is those on the binary ends of the sexuality spectrum really are the most privileged among us. They have an easier time defining themselves, an easier time finding their identities, and the likelihood that anyone is going to tell them they don’t exist is pretty slim. Bisexuals and asexuals, for example, basically get told we don’t exist from the minute we walk out of the closet. 

The insult is all the worse for bisexuals, since so many gay people actually lay claim to our sexuality for at least a little while, as they test the water outside of their closets. Eventually they paddle their way out and cast off the mantle of bi, thereby adding to the pervasive notion that all bisexuals are little more than straight women who want attention or gay people who are scared to come out. So demanding that your sexuality descriptor remain completely untouched by anyone other than you and yours’ is hypocritical as fuck, to start.  

It’s also insanely transphobic. And the one argument presented to me in an attempt to illustrate the lack of transphobia in this demand of word purity did nothing more than effectively eradicate trans people’s self-perceived identities completely. See, here’s the thing, sexuality is an internally experienced concept, even if it is externally perceived. This means that perception is sometimes completely wrong. And like anything else having to do with our persons, our bodies, and our own identities, the rest of the world doesn’t get to tell us how we are going to identify. 

While it’s fun to mock seemingly straight men who call themselves lesbians because it’s a notion that is pretty comical, the reality is there are humans on this planet who would look, to us, like straight men but who would actually be lesbians. How is this crazy gender-bending nonsense possible? Because sometimes men who like men are actually women who look like men, and they just haven’t started presenting in a fashion that makes who they truly are completely apparent to those around them. You don’t get to tell them that they aren’t who they are just because your perception of them doesn’t match their reality. 

I had one woman attempt to accuse me of homophobia while telling me that trans people are covered under “genderality” rather than “sexuality.” No, it’s not a made-up word, though I was confused at first, too. Genderality is apparently to gender what sexuality is to sex. Well, sort of. Strictly speaking it has to do with gender presentation rather than gender actual, which is a pretty big difference if you ask most trans individuals. Beyond being unnecessarily confusing as fuck, this sort of reinforces the notion that gender, as a construct, is based not on how we perceive ourselves and interpret these perceptions, but instead upon how those around us perceive our gender. Hello bathroom laws. 

“But, but, genderality assessments made based on a person’s chosen gender aren’t transphobic!” Except yes, they are. All you have to do to realize this is look at things from the perspective of a transgender person’s partner. 

First, it’s necessary to understand that in a world where genderality is a thing that exists, sexuality is based completely upon sex organs and/or chromosomes. Since gender is a perceived construct and one’s attraction to various genders would be described via words such as gynophilic or androphilic, sexuality becomes something that is effectively impossible to know for certain based upon your perception. A couple that consists of a feminine woman and a feminine woman *might* be a lesbian couple in which both parties are gynophilic in nature and, based upon the usual constructs us pedants use to describe the couplings we see around us merely describing them as lesbians if we’re not told any differently would probably make sense. BUT- if one of those women is actually transgender and has not yet undergone surgery, then a world in which genderality and sexuality are completely separate concepts would have you believe this is a heterosexual relationship and that calling themselves lesbians would actually be inappropriate. 

Depending on the nature of the couple, they might, indeed, agree with you. If the transwoman was presenting as a man when the couple got married, and she is the only woman her wife has ever been with or will ever be with, they may well agree that the cis woman, at least, is generally straight. The cis woman’s ability to maintain her identity as straight should not, in any way, hinge upon the genitals that her spouse has now or may well have in the future, if for no other reason than the fact that those genitals are absolutely none of our business. Those genitals don’t suddenly become the business of other people just because the cis woman is now a lesbian in a seemingly straight relationship. A lesbian married to a transman owes you no more explanation for why they call themselves a lesbian, than a straight woman married to a transwoman does. Their identities are compositions of where they have come from, the experiences they have had, the way they feel about sex, and how they experience attraction. None of these things are any of our business. They are the business of the person laying claim to the identity and that person’s partner.    

The introduction of ‘genderality’ vs ‘sexuality’ has actually, effectively, nullified the argument that only certain individuals should be allowed to use the words gay and lesbian. If a lesbian in a straight-presenting relationship would, theoretically, be encouraged to remain a lesbian on the basis of her partner’s genitals or chromosomes, completely regardless of how they are perceived by the rest of the world, there’s really no reason to be having this conversation since there’s really no way for any gay or lesbian in a tiff about this shit to ever really know *why* any given couple is identifying the way they are. Unless we’re just going to start checking everyone’s genitals and/or demanding chromosomal proof that they are who their sexuality designator says they are. The argument in the original meme had nothing to do with genitals, though, and everything to do with perceived sexuality based on the gender presentations of those involved in any given relationship. Gender presentations that might not be accurate or that may well tell an incomplete story.  

Until lesbians and gays are comfortable with the rest of the queer community assigning them roles in their relationships (man, woman, top, bottom, mother, father, so forth) based upon their outward presentation, and not upon their own, personal, lived experience and their own, personal, sex lives, I really think they need to get the fuck out of everyone else’s bedrooms. How anyone else on this lovely planet identifies is absolutely not something you have any say in. Unless you’re comfortable with me calling you, the butch but comfortably female half of your relationship, the “man” from now on. After all, perception from the outside is all that matters, right? 

I don’t know if that’s everything I’m mad at right now, but it’s definitely the ones occupying the most space in my brain. Feel free to let me know if you have anything you’d like me to be angry about on your behalf. I apparently have enough of it to spread around right now, for some reason!

[treehugginglibrarian]

Bob & Sally Are Not Friends

There have been a lot of calls on social media lately, in the form of blogs, memes, videos, and status updates, demanding that Trump supporters and not-Trump supporters put aside our pitch forks and learn to get along. Given the current political climate, and the fact that the more liberal sections of society are the ones doing the loudest protesting, it’s safe to say that most of these memes et al are probably not aimed at those supporting the President. Since many make references to “snowflakes” or encourage one side to “grow up,” two insults pretty routinely flung at minority factions who are busy stomping the streets attempting to ensure we don’t start losing rights we’ve worked literally decades to attain, it’s safe to assume that most of these memes are aimed at making the anti-Trump team get over their anger.

Here’s the thing, your memes aren’t working. You can shove stick figure Bob and Sally up your ass. If you voted for our current President, I may well tolerate you, but I’ll never accept you- a stance many Trump supporters should be quite comfortable with, since they’ve been applying it to minority populations their entire lives. I don’t forgive you. I probably never will. And for those of us who are suffering, or stand to suffer, under the current administration’s practices, your memes are doing nothing more than illustrating the same privilege that let you vote for him in the first place.

It’s super easy to look at a hostile political climate and scream “can’t everyone just get alone” when you stand to lose absolutely nothing. If you are a white, straight, cisgender, Christian human, this administration is going to take almost nothing from you. If you are male, on top of that, they are going to literally take nothing from you (except your healthcare, some of your finances, and possibly your job. Sucker). If you are not these things, there is a good chance that at some point during the duration of this administration, you are going to lose a right that has already been given to you, or you are going to find yourself staring down an extra decade without a right that you felt you were pretty close to securing.

Since I’m queer, I will use my queerness as an example to illustrate the overwhelming frustration that minority populations feel when Trump voters, or generally privileged populations, whine loudly that we need to just all get along.

All things considered, I’m a pretty privileged queer person. I live in a city that has anti-discrimination ordinances on the books. I work in a city with the same. Our capital is the second largest gay mecca in the country. My employer has incredibly stringent anti-discrimination policies that include sexual orientation and gender presentation, and everyone at my place of employment is either very accepting or completely silent regarding their homophobia. My neighbors don’t harass my wife and I for being queer. I am, in general, pretty safe. I know how lucky I am, because I know how unfriendly spaces can be to queer people. Some of those spaces exist in my state which, despite locally granted protections, does not have a single state-wide protection granted to LGBTQ persons.

In my state, the state Constitution stipulated that marriage was for only a man and a woman up until three years ago, when the Supreme Court rule that this wasn’t okay. Because of that ruling, queers in my state are entitled to get married and are entitled to all the rights that come with that marriage, but they are entitled to absolutely nothing else. We can be fired for being queer. We can be denied housing, denied promotions, or asked to leave a business or public space, because we are queer. We can be told which bathrooms we are allowed to use, we can be denied the right to adopt just because we’re gay and, at times, we can even be denied medical treatment or other basic services. Since there are also absolutely no protections for sexual orientation built into federal law, excepting the right to marry, we have no recourse if we do not live in a space that has incorporated these rights and protections into their local laws or ordinances.

Thankfully, my state is one where cities and towns have been allowed to create their own local protections for queer people, since not all states are quite so… “kind.” North Carolina, for instance, all but went to war with itself when individual cities attempted to rebel against the hatred often espoused at the state level. The end result was a statewide “bathroom bill” that isn’t really abided by in a lot of more liberal spaces, but does a great job of making homophobes and transphobes feel like their views are valid and worthwhile. Indiana has had similar issues with Mike Pence’s religious freedom bill.

Telling a queer or trans person to suck it up and get along with a Trump supporter is, effectively, telling them to suck it up and get along with someone who is comfortable stripping them of their rights or allowing them to continue living in an environment where they have fewer rights than those who are straight or cisgender. Admittedly, not all Trump supporters voted for him because they hate gay people or because they want to see gay people oppressed or treated like shit. A vote for him, however, is an admittance that they don’t really care if gay people are oppressed or treated like shit, though. Trump told us exactly how he felt about the LGBTQ community when he selected Pence, possibly the most anti-LGBTQ politician in the country right now, as his Vice President. He told us how he felt about us when he acknowledged that, though he would be unlikely to work to overturn the Supreme Court decision allowing us to marry, he would have no trouble signing a national religious freedom bill, ensuring that those with a moral opposition to who I am as a human, never have to actually treat me like a human.

Bills like that are more than just “cake” and “flowers,” as anyone who is actually queer can tell you. A bill of that nature would guarantee that full rights under the law, for LBGTQ individuals, would never exist. All anyone who didn’t like us would ever have to do to legally discriminate against us, is claim that serving us is a violation of their sincerely held religious beliefs. Don’t want to serve gay people at your coffee shop? Claim we violate your religious beliefs. Don’t want us to go clothes shopping there? Claim our shopping method violates your religious beliefs. Don’t want to have to treat us in the emergency room? Claim that doing so violates your religious beliefs and, just like that, you’ve contributed to the death of yet another queer or trans person in America. Fuck the cake. Fuck the flowers. I want to know that if my house is on fire, the local fire department isn’t going to let it burn down because, “Ew, lesbians are  yucky,” and actually get away with that response.

If you voted for Trump, you might not personally light my house on fire, or kick me out of a coffee shop, or refuse to treat me if I’m sick, but you’re admitting that you don’t really care that much if these things happen to me. Because it was stated, clearly and repeatedly, that things like this were a possibility if he won, which meant you voted for him knowing that his election to office would probably hurt me and others like me. You don’t get to passively allow injury to another party out of some espoused indifference to their well-being, only to then get angry when the party in question decides that maybe you’re not actually their friend after all.

Now take this is and multiply it by every minority group in this country that is being negatively effected by this administration’s quest to do precisely what they said they would do while they were campaigning. Racism is rampant, with crosses being burned in yards and white supremacist rallies taking place all over the nation. There are literal Nazis in the streets, as evidenced by the fact that they are carrying Nazi flags and sporting Nazi regalia. Our nation is locking small immigrant children into detention centers and, even after swearing that they will get them back together with their parents, routinely failing to make that happen. Women may well lose the right to abortion and certain types of birth control with the inevitable appointment of another far-right, anti-Roe v. Wade, justice to the Supreme Court.

If you voted for Trump, you helped make this happen.

I’m not going to be mean to you about it. I’m not going to taunt you about the fact that you might not have healthcare anymore and, if you work in manufacturing or agriculture, there’s a real chance he’s going to kill your job instead of make you more money. I’m not going to point at you in public spaces and taunt “look everyone! A Trump supporter! Look upon the face of stupidity and evil!” But I’m also not going to make myself be friends with you and I’m not going to forgive you. It won’t matter how many times you call me childish. It won’t matter how many stupid fucking memes you make about Bob and Sally and their stick figure friendship.

At the end of the day, my well-being was not a factor in your overall decision making when you went to the polls. To that end, your well-being, specifically your desire to feel liked and appreciated, is of absolutely no concern to me. If you wanted me to like you, perhaps you should have cast a vote that implied that you like me. I deserve better from my friends. So do the black people in this country. So do the immigrants in this country. So do the young children this country is keeping in cages. I can’t make you realize that you need to care about other people, but until you figure out how I think you need to stop bitching that the very people you don’t care about, don’t really care about you, either.

So, no. Bob and Sally aren’t friends. And Bob’s just gonna have to get over it. It’s a concept he should be familiar with, since he probably spent the first six months after the election telling Sally precisely that. It sort of sucks when people you thought were your friends make it apparent that they don’t really like you, doesn’t it?

Now imagine that “sort of sucks” coming with a side of “no more civil rights.”

Fuck you, Bob.  

[treehugginglibrarian]

But, I’m Not Racist!

Let’s conduct a thought experiment. First, the rules: A thought experiment, by design, should make you think. In this case I’m not trying to make you think about the future or the past, I’m trying to make you think about the here and now, and the lives being led by many Americans right this minute. I’m going to do this by not-so-arbitrarily fucking with the demographics in the nation, and attempt to force you out of your comfort zone and into someone else’s shoes. I’m not saying that this is how things will play out in the future. In the event that we find ourselves in a future where the demographics do look like this, I’m not saying that the population I have put in “power” in this thought experiment would ever truly act like this. This is a giant hypothetical designed to make straight white people think “fuck, that would suck.” To that end, complaints about inaccuracies regarding the demographics will ignored. And, unfortunately, complaints about my treatment of minorities I’m putting in “power” also have to be ignored. I trust that they’ll forgive me this grievance in the hopes that maybe this illustration will make a couple white folks get it.

The year is 2068. You are 80 years old. Your children are grown. Your grandchildren are well on their way, with one of them pregnant with your first great-grandchild. You are retired, having lived a successful, productive, and generally enjoyable life. Despite your success, however, you are worried. You are worried about your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, because the world they are stepping into seems unkind, uncaring, and often times completely dangerous. While it all started well before you were even born, your 20s and 30s seemed to be when things began to truly spiral out of control. And you’re not positive, but you think it was the fault of white women. At least, that’s who you’re going to blame. After all, they’re the ones who stopped having babies, dammit.

As it should happen, white women were typically more educated than most men, and they wanted the ability to use that education. Living in a society that placed no real premium on allowing women to both work and be a mother, it didn’t take long for these women to realize a choice would have to be made. At first, women seemed to be split on that choice. By the second year of the Trump Presidency, roughly 50% of women of childbearing age had made the conscious choice not to have children, with a record number stating that this was a choice they intended to stick to. With the crash of the healthcare system, making children all the more expensive to raise, it took fewer than 15 years before that number had dropped to 40%. By 2050, it wasn’t uncommon for fewer than 25% of white women of childbearing age to have children.

And really, who could blame them? Despite bringing in at least half the household income by the time birthrates took their final nose dive, many straight married women routinely reported doing well over half of the housework and childcare oriented duties, on top of their full-time jobs. While it’s true that universal healthcare eventually made an appearance, as did a minimum wage that hit $15 an hour, neither of these things successfully made up for corporations that couldn’t be forced to provide maternity leave or career fields that, intentionally or not, often contained a “mommy ceiling” of sorts, effectively preventing the advancement of women after they had given birth. While these were all things that also decreased the birth rates of well-educated women of color, women of color simply hadn’t had access to education at the same rates that white women had.

It took the nation far longer than was acceptable, until at least 20 years after the crash of the ACA, to establish a more socialized healthcare system. Until then, access to affordable healthcare and contraceptives did little more than exacerbate the problem, as it ensured that white women were also the women most able to avoid unwanted pregnancies. While the establishment of a socialized healthcare system ensured that all women had easy access to birth control, successfully allowing all women to better control their reproductive health and bringing the teen pregnancy rate back down to an Obama-era rate, the “damage” was done. White babies had long since fallen into decline compared to babies of all other, glorious, colors. The nation was well on its way towards a complete demographic turn around.

Now, as you sit here watching your last grand baby graduate from high school, marveling at the growing belly on your first grand baby, you worry whether the changing demographics spell a troubled future for your blood. Your grandson has been handed rejection letters from three universities, two of them state schools. While he wasn’t the best student, you once got into college with grades that were no where near as good as his. The last two Presidents have been women, one white and one black, and the most recent one didn’t even run with a male vice. And she still won! Not that you would ever argue that women have no place at the table, the world is just so different now.

Boys named Johnathan are having trouble finding work, while those named Juan seem to have little issue getting an interview. Bilingualism is all but necessary to work in many American cities, despite English being the language of the nation. Even as these bilingual cities are thriving ports of color, chaos, light, and hubbub, federal officials are desperately worried about the suburbs, where crime seems to run rampant lately. While many of the inner cities and Appalachian regions saw issues with opiates and meth during the teens and twenties, the cities were largely cleaned up by the mid thirties. Most had come roaring back to life by the forties, driven by a public works administration bill that called for the rebuild of highways, bridges, and historical structures, and a removal of dilapidated neighborhoods. Places like Detroit, Cleveland, Toledo, and Chicago were now bright neighborhoods strung together with patches of parks where old, empty, slums had once been.

They were lovely, and completely unaffordable for much of the white population.

See, when the vast majority of the population isn’t white, it’s a lot harder for the white population to have control over the vast majority of the population. Sure, white control continued for a time owing largely to the passing on of money. But it wasn’t long before the number of qualified people of color outnumbered qualified white people, just because white people were outnumbered in general. As white people will gladly tell you when you get them drunk enough, it’s just so hard to trust someone who looks nothing like you. Which is how board rooms, school boards, and police forces that were once overwhelmingly white, rather suddenly weren’t. I mean, it wasn’t THAT sudden. Unless you’re an 80 year old person sitting at a graduation and realizing that your family is one of only a handful of white families in the room, owing to the fact that you were willing to finance your grandson’s education at this upper class high school in the hopes that doing so would get him into college. A hope that, so far, has proven fruitless.

In truth, you’d rather he go to school in Canada or the UK, anyway. Both of them have whiter populations and you think he might be safer there. Not to say that people of color are inherently unsafe, no no, that’s not it. It’s just that being a white man seems to have become inherently unsafe. There is no presumption of innocence for white men. The suburbs where so many live are an overwhelmingly under policed space and, when the cops do bother to show up, they have a habit of asking questions after the shots have already been fired. The cops don’t have guns in the UK, and the cops are mostly white in Canada. School in those countries would definitely be safer for your grandson.

After graduation is over, your grandson heads out to celebrate with some friends. “Just be careful,” you tell him. You don’t want to be paranoid, but already two of your close friends have had their children or grandchildren shot by gang members or by the police. You dread the day your daughter has the police arrive on her doorstep to tell her that your grandson has been taken. That his time is up. That a world riddled by racism and hatred of his skin tone has let his life fall short. You dread it so thoroughly you’re completely unprepared for what actually happens.

Because in the end, it’s not your grandson who gets killed, running from the cops or some such nonsense. In the end, it’s your grandson-in-law who gets killed. At a routine traffic stop on the way home from your grandson’s graduation. As it should happen, he had a taillight that had died. Just before the city limits, he and your pregnant granddaughter got stopped. When retrieving his registration from the glove box, his pistol fell onto the floor. What came next was, according to your granddaughter, very fast and very slow simultaneously. Both were forced out of the car and onto the ground. Your grandson-in-law attempted to explain that the gun was legal and the license was with it, in the glove box, but the police would hear none of it. Upon hearing your granddaughter cry out in pain, your grandson-in-law attempted to get to her.

And was promptly shot six times in the back, for resisting arrest. He was unarmed. He was barely off the ground. He was breaking no laws for which death would have been a just sentence. Yet. Here you sit. At his funeral. Holding your granddaughter’s hand. Knowing her baby will be raised without its daddy. Knowing that absolutely nothing will be done to the black cop that shot him because, in our society nothing is ever done to black or latino men who hurt white people. All because, sometime around Generation Y, white women decided to stop having kids. At least, that’s what you’ll tell yourself.

You’ll tell yourself that this all started with white women not having babies, never giving consideration to the breadth and scope of bullshit that precluded their lack of reproduction. The idea that white women might have kept reproducing if straight men had held their own at home, or healthcare had been more readily available, or childcare had been more affordable, or maternity leave had been a thing, will never cross your mind. The idea that had your generation done more to prevent the needless death of hundreds upon hundreds of black and latino men (and some women) at the hands of predominantly white police officers, for crimes as varied as “running away” and “getting a speeding ticket” perhaps the bitterness wouldn’t have been so high when those communities found themselves in positions of power, will never cross your mind. The idea that had countless generations done something more to ensure the full inclusion of people of color into our society, perhaps the bitterness would have been non-existent. Hell, perhaps they would have had the same wealth level as the white women who stopped having babies and, as such, would have contributed to a generally declining population rather than a population that only declined markedly within one color bracket. The notion that maybe, just maybe, ushering in a second era of relative naziism in the teens, and keeping it in place until the mid-twenties when the nation’s economy finally buckled under the pressure of a multi-faceted trade war, might have been a bad idea, will never occur to you.

No, no. The idea that you, an innocent white person who has never shot a person of color and would never dream of doing so, might have anything to do with the funeral you are sitting at right now, will never cross your mind.

[treehugginglibrarian]

What the Hell is a ‘Mombie’?

I don’t have kids. For those who know me, this proclamation is no surprise. This state of affairs is also no accident, as I have never wanted kids. My disinterest in children has broken up at least three relationships, to include a marriage. I’m invested in my decision not to have kids. I’ve known since I was a child that I didn’t want kids and, when my ex-husband explained that he thought I’d change my mind once we were married, I told him he was right. I’d changed my mind about wanting to be married to him. Kids are not my thing.

My peers are overwhelmingly not in the same place as me. They do have kids. One, two, three, five, sometimes even six kids, despite being under the age of 40. I try not to judge since it is, after all, their life and their body. In point of fact, online and in person, I never judge. I hold their babies, play with their toddlers, and shower everyone in dinosaurs. I like the photos and the videos, share the text messaged pictures with my coworkers while cooing “look at what so-and-so sent, isn’t he/she cute?!” and commiserate when their children are ill, having a bad day, or in trouble.

For those that I call my friends, I am a spectacular child-free aunt. I take a vested interest in their progression, am more than happy to babysit, don’t hand them back just because they’re crying or they’ve pooped, and I will spoil them rotten for you. I have LOTS of make-shift aunts who either had children later than my mother, never had children, or simply made space for “nieces” and “nephews” over the years. From these women, I have learned the art of loving those that are not yours basically unconditionally. I have been known to visit my mothers friends without my mother, and it is my sincere hope that someday my “nieces” and “nephews” will feel comfortable in the same way. If I love you and you have a kid, I fucking love your kid.

All that said, being child-free in this society is completely exhausting. While I have done everything in my power to avoid being a judgey bitch to those around me who have opted to reproduce, the degree to which this favor is not returned is pretty astounding. I knew as a child that I didn’t want children. While my parents never doubted this conviction, basically everyone else around me has. Even now, on my second marriage at 33 years old, I occasionally have people remind me that I’m not too old to change my mind and that I would feel differently if they were my children. I’m sure they think they’re being helpful, but really, all their doing is being judgmental fucks who have deemed their chosen lifestyle so all-important that those of opting to live differently are doing it wrong and must be convinced of such.

And before you say “But, but, but, they mean no harm!” I have heard ALL of the excuses and the questions over the years. Literally every single one, I have heard them. And ALL of these questions, when turned around and applied to a person who has or wants children, are considered wildly offensive and inappropriate. When asked of a person who neither has nor wants children, however, they are completely fair game. Reproduction is a completely private matter that is not to be spoken of… unless, of course, you’ve chosen not to reproduce. Then, brace yourself, because you WILL be expected to talk about it. Ad nauseam. For literal years of your life.

A sampling of the questions I have gotten as a child-free person: You don’t want children? But… why? - Because I don’t. Assuming I don’t know you, the reasons are absolutely none of your business. Assuming I do know you, you probably already know that those answers range from “I don’t have the money” to “my genes are complete shite.” People who don’t want children don’t owe you any more explanations than people who don’t want dogs do. Sometimes you just don’t want something in your life. How would you like it if a relative stranger asked you why you wanted children? Or, phrased another way, why you think you’re so god damn special that the world needs more of your genetic material in it?    

How are you going to meet a man? Most men want children, you know. - True story. They do. For years my answer to this was “Whatever” or some such derivative. Then I met and married woman. Problem solved, motherfuckers. It’s never crossed my mind to ask single mothers whether or not they think they’ll be able to date as parents or whether or not they think they’re worthy of dating as parents. And it’s never crossed my mind to ask prospective parents what they’re going to do if their partners decide to leave them in the future, as frequently happens. Yet, I have been asked about hypothetical, nonexistent, men more times than I care count.

You’ll never know real love until you have a child! - Okay. Technically not a question, but too bad. Here’s the thing, there’s no guarantee you’ll know real love even after you have a child, because a child is a human which means you can’t make it love you. Unless, of course, you’re talking about the love that I will supposedly feel for my hypothetical child. In which case, I call bullshit. I have plenty of love in my life, and while all of it may be different than what a mother feels for their child, there’s no quantitative way to determine that the love in my life is qualitatively worth less than the love a mother has in her life. This is an argument rooted in subjectivity and designed to disguise a form of condescending pity that parents often feel when presented with the childfree. It’s insulting and is an emotional waste of time on behalf of the parent. We don’t want your pity. Moreover, this sentence is a great way to kill a friendship.

What if you change your mind? - Alternatively, phrased as a statement, “you’ll change your mind.” Is there a bet going around a water cooler somewhere as to how old I’m going to be before I decide I want children? If so, put me down for $1000 banked on “not gonna happen.” If, however, I DID change my mind, I fail to see why this is an issue. People change their mind about shit all the god damn time, and no one ever makes a big deal about it. Hell, people change their mind about wanting to be married and our society hardly blinks. I think, in this question and statement is an unspoken fear on behalf of the childfree person, “what if you change your mind and it’s too late?” Here’s the thing, though, it might be too late even when someone’s only 18. Or 20. Or 25. If it turns out they’re infertile or they’re bound to have massive fertility issues, it won’t matter if or when they try, they’re unlikely to succeed. Alternatively, if I changed my mind at 42 I could find myself pregnant first time go. No one really knows what the world of fertility will present to them until or unless they decide to try walking that path. And if my wife and I change our minds at 50? We’ll adopt. Duh.

Who’s going to take care of you when you’re old? - Really? And people say those of us who are child free are the selfish ones! If you’re having kids just so you have an old-age insurance plan, I’m here to be the bearer of bad news: there’s no guarantee they’ll take care of you. They will grow up to be fully autonomous adults who may well decide that dealing with a mentally addled mother who they can’t stand anymore just isn’t high on their priority list. And there’s absolutely nothing you’ll be able to do about it. Stop asking this question. It makes parents everywhere look really fucking selfish and naive.

Don’t you want to give your parents grandchildren? - No. Because my parents aren’t selfish prats who think I exist just to carry on the genetic line. My parents love me, as I am, and would never dare suggest that I even consider having children I don’t want. Also, they don’t really want any more grandchildren than the two they have. While all of their friends are being hit up for monetary assistance from their children, most of whom are now raising children, my parents are busy traveling the world. Because they’re not contributing to the raising of a half-dozen grandchildren. They like being “selfish” and spending all their money on them. As they should! (PS, guys, go back to Ireland. I’m out of whiskey! Love you!) They have phenomenal relationships with all three of their kids, rather good relationships with their biological nieces and nephews, and quite good relationships with a number of nieces and nephews they’ve adopted along the way. I gave them a wonderful daughter-in-law when I married Lesia, which was far more than they ever would have asked of me. My parents had children because they wanted children, not because they wanted grandchildren some day. If you’ve had children to appease your parents, I feel sorry for you. Your parents were horribly selfish and you probably deserved better.  

Ok. That’s not ALL the questions I have gotten over the years about my child free status. But it’s definitely the bulk of them, and it’s absolutely a complete listing of the ones that have become reasonably routine. On top of the compendium of questions I have gotten, however, are the insults that have been lobbed my way over the years. They are many and, largely speaking, unremarkable and droll. - Selfish. Which is ironic, because the decision to reproduce is a decision that creates another being that will someday be sentient but has no decision what-so-ever surrounding its creation. It’s also a decision that assumes your genetic material is worth being passed down. It’s a decision that increases your carbon footprint incalculably and automatically makes you a bigger drain on a nation’s resources. Statistically, childfree individuals are getting far less from the world and the government than they are putting into it. But sure, call me selfish. - Failing to fulfill my womanly duties. No comment. Mostly because I’m not even sure what that means, but it sounds like some straight incel shit. Down with the fucking patriarchy! - My life lacks meaning. Tell that to my parents, my siblings, my friends, the kids who love me even though they aren’t mine, and the many animals who know I help feed them and that I will pet their soft ears. Also, I enjoy my life which means it is inherently valuable and thus meaningful. - Child hater, kid hater, monster, and a number of derivatives therein. Whatevs. I don’t hate them, but if you thinking that I hate them decreases the likelihood that I have to deal with yours, I’m good with it.

My life right now is basically filled with children all the time. Or so it often seems. I work in a public library, many of my coworkers have kids, some of my coworkers have grandkids, and I am of an age where my social media feed looks like a fucking kindergarten class erupted all over it at basically all times. Most of my friends are straight and married, which means most of my friends have kids. Hell… a lot of my friends who are neither straight nor married still have managed to have kids! Suffice to say, I’m exhausted from playing the “ohmygod little Charlie is so fucking cute” game basically every time I log onto any platform, because saying anything other than that is simply verboten.

Hoping to find a space that had fewer little Charlies and more grown-ass adults (and possibly dogs) I joined one of the larger childfree groups on Facebook. I won’t namedrop them both because it would be a violation of group policies and because the name isn’t really relevant to the lessons I learned in the month to six weeks that I was heavily active in the group. A four to six week chunk of my life in which I, effectively, traveled to a country I didn’t know existed and engaged with a subset of the population that makes me laugh uncontrollably while also making me exceedingly uncomfortable.

There are two kinds of childfree individuals on the planet. Those that are casually childfree and those that are militantly childfree. I had never considered myself merely casually childfree until exposed to those who are militant in this lifestyle choice. I mean, being childfree has always been a conscious and intentional decision for me. I have been presented, on multiple occasions, with the ability to take a road that would have led to children. On each occasion, I have broken up with him and gone the other way. It was never done with malice or out of a hatred of children or the notion of parenting, it just wasn’t what I wanted.

I assumed this is how all childfree people are. It is what it is, a decision we’ve made and then we’ve moved on.

I was wrong.

I was so very, very wrong.

There is an entire subset of the childfree movement that hates children. It’s a hatred that is passionate, intense, and rivaled only by their hatred for parents. Largely speaking, I can actually understand this. Children are remarkably detestable creatures, particularly if you lack a mothering instinct. They’re noisy, they’re often smelly, they don’t take direction well, and they are all encompassing attention whores. Without a mothering instinct to make you naturally inclined towards liking them, liking them is sometimes actually hard. 

Some parents aren’t really any better much of the time. Over bearing, territorial, and impossible to please, they’re often painful to talk to. They demand your help while demanding you stay silent and not get involved. They’ll question your sanity regarding your decision not to have children, all while finding ways to tell you that you likely would be an unfit mother anyway. I have had conversations with parents in which absolutely no word spoken, by either of us, has anything to do with any part of life that isn’t their child. It’s like talking to a fucking robot that’s permanently tuned to one station, and it makes it really easy to dislike them. These parents, though sounding extreme, are common enough that I have met them on multiple occasions. They are common enough that I have ceased being friends with people who have turned into these parents.    

And that is where I and my more militant childfree brethren seem to part ways. Where as I respond to insane children and ridiculous parents by walking away- not my circus, not my monkeys- they responded with the creation of a demented subculture so devoted to the hatred of children they probably spend even more time talking about children than most parents do. I wish I was exaggerating. But I’m not.

This is a strange haven of people who, though claiming a hatred of children and parents unrivaled even by the hatred seen amongst various political factions, devote so much emotional energy to the very children they hate that I’m forced to conclude much of their pleasure in life is actually derived from this hatred. I mean, truly, sane people would never spend this much time on something that they hated as much as they profess to hate children and parents, would they? I can’t write them all off as insane, because the number of them is simply too large. Besides, to do that would require I also write off the parents who genuinely believe that childfree individuals lead lives that are worth less than their own, in every way, as insane as well. And I don’t think those parents are insane. I think they’re rude. And I know they’re wrong. But I don’t think they’re insane. So, no, I don’t think the child-hating, parent-hating, child free cohort is nuts, I simply think they take genuine pleasure in hating these things.

And depending on how bad the abuse has been, I’m not certain I can completely blame them.

The page is riddled with stories of near daily “bingos,” whereby someone is called out for their lack of children in a very specific manner, or reminded that they’ll change their mind. Many of these women are just barely on speaking terms with their parents because, unlike my own folks, their parents insist on being given grandchildren and it has become the only topic they are interested in. Almost all of them have had serious relationships broken up over children and many, like myself, are divorced because their spouse refused to believe them prior to marriage and, after the paperwork was signed, insisted they be given children. The number of women who have tried, sometimes for a decade or more, to be permanently sterilized and been told “you don’t know what’s good for you or what you really want” by a paternalizing healthcare system that doesn’t actually care about women’s wants or needs and desires only to use us as incubators, is actually kind of devastating. All of the ones who have succeeded have succeeded because they are now over 30, or because a husband or father has signed off on the procedure for them. This despite the fact that a married man whose wife does want children can get a vasectomy behind her back, thus rendering her childless without her permission.

Childfree women aren’t just viewed as an anomaly or an oddity, we are viewed and treated as aberrations, useless creatures who are abdicating the one part of our body and being that would actually render us worthwhile to society. The level of scorn with which we are treated increases ten-fold if we have the audacity to admit that we are childfree because we want to be and that, no, we don’t need to spend time with a stranger’s children to feel whole. Women who feel whole unto themselves, who do not require a child’s chaos or love to accomplish this fact, are selfish monsters and are to be reminded of this fact at every single turn.

Two of my best friends have kid(s), and the only expectation placed on me is that I will appreciate them in whatever fashion I am able to. I’m uncertain if the fact that these friends are men plays into their ability to “get over” my lack of children. I know it isn’t an “amount of time spent parenting” situation, as one of them has primary custody and still has never saw fit to ask me if I feel like my life is lacking. The only female friend I have who has children is my best friend from high school. Our relationship has always been very “fall out of touch for three to six months and then pick up exactly where we left off,” and a baby being born hasn’t changed that. Except now I hear from her a little more often because she sends me photos of his adorableness basically any time he’s near anything dinosaur related. Every other woman in my life who has had children, has fallen out of contact. In fact, most of the women in my life who are even trying for children, some of whom had once been best friends of mine, have fallen out of contact. The message is clear: you don’t want children, so we don’t want you.

In a world where “you don’t want children, so we don’t want you” is often all but projected onto billboards, I can understand the bitter hatred that some childfree women feel towards “breeders.” I have better things to expend my energy on, personally. But at the very least, it’s nice knowing there’s a community somewhere to whom I can bitch when my dinner is ruined by irresponsible parents who don’t realize it’s not my job to make little Charlie stop crying uncontrollably, and who also don’t realize it’s actually their job to do that. It’s nice knowing that, somewhere on the great wide internet, I can vent that frustration and, instead of being called an evil bitch, I’ll be met with a chorus of “I am so sorry” and “fucking parents! They can’t even do their ‘most important’ job right!” It’s nice knowing that, even if I don’t understand everything about these women, I am no longer even remotely alone in my desire to be anything and everything but a mother.  

And there are an awful lot of dog pictures.