“What day is it?” one of my students asked in class last week, twirling his pencil.

“The 87th of January,” another quipped back, without looking up. Exactly, I thought. What other month does time slog its snowshoes through, leaving long slashes of slow footprints, like em dashes running through us?

This feeling of slog, of internal snow, is further compounded if you are grieving. If you have death anniversaries that lift their bone-sharp faces and resonate throughout winter, through the naked birch and dead ivy, the live oak and wild fennel. The totemizing nature of my love of planting tulips has never escaped me; with bulbs, you sit with the secret knowledge that a fully-formed, beautiful thing is under the soil, a little bastion of Better And Warmer times ahead.

The tulips in my yard are starting to poke through. Only one more month.

It has been years since I’ve intentionally born witness to the largess of January — as previously mentioned, I often go away, to some hotter clime, some place with friends who are good at the stick-shift of levity, a place where a cold glass sweats with your want of it.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a prolonged moonmoon state—the full terror and beauty of knowing that I'll eventually disperse.
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But here I am. Sitting in the thoughtful shadow period that comes after losing loved ones. If you think losing grandmothers, especially both at the same time, is a kinder grief because of their longevity then you’re mistaken. Rather—and especially because I am a person who has also lost a mother (the Januaryist of all January anniversaries)—it feels like loss in triplicate, a kind of loss that secretly underscores and seeps; it becomes more compositional and embodied as the world continues its overwhelming ballet.

I am a person who obsesses; this has always been true. Rather than suffering from depression, I suffer from manic hyper-focusing, wherein I zoom in on something and fixate wholly. Right now, it’s embroidery and textile art, a revelation that is hardly a revelation, considering that both of my grandmothers and my mother, respectively, loved to craft. One year, when my grandma Sagert was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she spent an entire year embroidering hummingbirds.

Everyone she knew received at least one ornament, made from scrap fabric, embroidered all over its small and powerful body. I even received a thick white quilt, covered in needle-pointed birds, too beautiful to use everyday.

When she died, my friend Michelle sent me an article about hummingbirds and their incredible hearts. I asked her how she knew and she hugged me. It’s the powerful language of matrilineage. It’s the powerful language of our own collective inwardness, an eternal January.

Did you know that moons have moons themselves? That little submoons orbit the larger moons, pulled in and taxonomized as just another satellite in the gravitational pull of that celestial body. These submoons are called moonmoons (Incidentally, I’m working on a chapbook with the same name, forthcoming).

Moonmoons don’t have a long shelf life; they become engrossed in the larger bodies, or they drift off eventually and break apart. More often than not, they turn to energy that surrounds the larger moon itself.

Another thing: the (moonmoons) cannot stay in orbit around the Moon indefinitely because of tides.

Last week, I received an envelope of photographs that once belonged to one of my grandmothers. When I opened it I discovered that it was full of photos of me as a baby, sometimes with my grandparents, but often with my mother.

My mom died in a January in 1992, and the date has always been a hard one. This year felt particularly brutal, because of the legacy of archemom-types who had just died the month before—those who had been connections to this elusive woman I have loved, and known in the hazy aftermath of death more than in life. I spent the day sending care packages to friends, reading and rereading Meghan O’Rourke’s The Night Where You No Longer Live, and being quietly alone.

The thing about moonmoons is that they never get to be big moons. They eventually lose the groove of their orbit, the speed of their path in a predetermined direction. They fade away, become something larger than themselves. And perhaps that’s a better metaphor for childhood than simply saying that a human child eventually becomes an adult human. Children themselves don’t become moons anymore than adults are fully-conceived moons. Those bodies and ways of moving are temporary, but resonant.

When I look at these photos, I see the largeness of the adults around me—their outward shyness and joy, the way they tilt and move with grace, and observe a kind of order that butts against the senseless things they have, are currently, or will have to navigate outside of the space of these photographs. It’s hard to believe that I am now one of them, and that nearly all of the adults in that photo have fallen from orbit, become absorbed by the darkness of a universe we know very little about.

Every January, I feel the full breadth and severity of a kind of prolonged moonmoon state—the maddening circling of an elusively larger entity, the full terror and beauty of knowing that I’ll eventually disperse. That’s the kind of heavenly torture of grief, the slog and winter of it, the bulb before the tulip. There is, admittedly, something lovely about it—after all, we are rarely graceful at sitting in the same space as mortality and staying quiet.

Do you intend to come back
Do you hear the world’s keening
Will you stay the night
— Meghan O’Rourke

Happy New Year. Happy first walk around whatever body of water is closest to you, first meditation, book read, friend hugged—happy first everything. I know as well as you do that time occupies an elastic-ly arbitrary shape in the world, but I am not about to deny myself the deeply satisfying reward of closing up one year and beginning a fresh one. And if you’ve got similar neurosis around organization, I empower you to do the same.

“Ooooh, I’m being empowered!” P—my partner—always jokes when I say this. “Thank you for empowering me!”

Still, it’s challenging, isn’t it? The way we come face-to-face with the things we’d like to leave in the last calendar year, the things we expect ourselves to be able to cleanly cut away from just because we scrawled that we would in 2019?

For me, this has been apparent in the savagely unpredictable landscape that grief occupies. It’s truly a wild ride. Even as a person who has experienced a good deal of loss in my life, I find myself caught in the Mariana Trench of it: darkness that abounds and about which we know nothing.

This month, I lost both of my grandmothers. In the same week. I also lost a friend. The details of my friend’s death are still being sorted through, so I won’t publicly talk about them, but I will talk to you a little about my grandmothers.

For those of you who have read my work at The Establishment, you know that I lost my parents at a young age. I was adopted by my maternal aunt, and raised by her, her husband, and my maternal grandparents. We all lived in the same trailer park. My stepdad’s family—the man who had still been married to my mother when she died—I have also stayed close with, including and especially his mother.

My grandmothers were of the Silent Generation, though that is the only thing they had in common: the way their movements were informed by a kind of careful attentiveness and disgust with waste that only economic scarcity can instill. My maternal grandmother, Donleita, was a diva who loved leopard print, fanfare, and Jesus. My step-grandmother, Marjorie, was a dressmaker who out-earned her husband (but never talked about it), couldn’t cook to save her life, and had grown up on a farm in rural Oregon where they kept things cold in a hole dug in the dirt. Her father drove Greyhound buses. Her brothers helped load pianos off ships coming from South America. Both women taught me grace, the love of a good cup of coffee, how to sew, how to use lipstick as rouge, and how to survive in a world full of callousness.

I feel strange around my friends—bone-tired, unable to make small talk, monitor my intonation appropriately, or respond quickly enough to jokes. As I walk them to the door, I know that our visit was not one that included me at my best. That I took too long in moments when I needed to be faster, or was too swift in moments that required reflection.

If you’ve been witness to that, it’s not you, it’s deeply me. Please be patient. Please keep being kind. I am hopeful that it will pass quickly, and I also know that healing takes whatever time it needs, no matter what boundaries I try to enforce upon it.

P and I have an annual tradition that we are unable to make happen this year due to the events that unfolded in December: in January, we go someplace hot. We leave behind the wet, gray sog of the Bay Area in January, trading it in for Joan Didion on the beach in the Yucatan, or a cooking class in Bangkok. We save all year so we can circumnavigate not only the drear of post-holiday come-down, but also so that I, specifically, can hide from ghosts; nearly all of my major death anniversaries occur in January. This is some kind of mercy or some kind of sadism, I haven’t quite decided. The slew of deaths last year, however, happened in December, and the funerals themselves are in January.

As such, we’re home. Wearing forty layers of clothing in our 19th century house that leaks hot air (original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful, original windows are beautiful).

Still, we managed to go to Los Angeles for two brief days this last weekend, to meet family for a short trip that brought some levity and kindness to the month. P, always the adventurer, took us to the Marciano Arts Foundation to be blown away by art—Ai Weiwei’s ballooning sculptures of bamboo and silk, namely, that intersect ideas of ancient legend, kite-making, and the refugee crisis. While wandering through the huge, brutalist modernist halls of the Marciano, we encountered work by Bunny Rogers, the 27-year-old who’s making waves in the art community with her work around Columbine.

The piece of hers that we saw was immersive; you are invited to walk into two rooms that are full of falling snow made of paper. Projected on the wall is an animated video of a girl playing piano on a stage. The description of the piece said the following:

Rogers relies on corrupted memories to piece together a narrative that both mourns its origins and begs for resolution. Her videos, A Very Special Holiday Performance in Columbine Auditorium (2017) and Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) depict rehearsals of ceremonies for mourning.

My mind went wild at this concept of corrupted memory—what is that, I wondered from my required two-foot distance. A security guard eyed me, looking wary.

In Rogers’ case, it seems to be about the intersection between mourning (a public/private thing) and popular culture/media/cartoon. After all, the reason the pieces are so resonant is because the animated videos reek of after-school-special, and yet are heavy-hitting in their emotional resonance: Columbine. Columbine is a beautiful, pansy-like flower that needs special care, yet the first Google search of its name produces articles upon articles about the school shooting. You need to clarify—”Columbine flower”—in order to get results for the thing that came far before 1999.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized. I know that we tend to take the fractured pieces of our grief and try to hold them up to everything and everyone to see where they fit — to the sky, to see how or if the light shines through. To the face of another, to see if they match the color of their pupils. To the work we do in the world, to see how our own mortality serves us—if we’re doing this living thing right, or paying appropriate homage to those who have gone.

The reason the idea of corrupted memory is so fascinating to me—and potentially a new lens for looking at the way public and private intersect—is because of the way it relates to the identities of marginalized people. I thought, for example, immediately of Elizabeth Marston saying that femme identity is “an unauthorized copy of femininity.” Disallowed.

The fact of the matter, too, is that public and private lines are even more blurred than they once were; social media knows when I’ve been talking to my friends about menstruation, or celery juice cleanses, or that I’m sad my niece and nephew are growing older. I regularly spill my guts on Twitter, unconcerned with being too much. I write thinkpieces, for heaven’s sake. And while I do believe that visible vulnerability is an evolved strength, I also believe it’s because my concept of myself and the internet have both become less defined as opposite of one another—and in that sense, they’ve corrupted.

We position ourselves as opposites of the virtual world, and that is important, somehow, to maintaining autonomy from the internet. But as free media begins to look more and more like personal narratives (which are nothing new — personal journalism really took off in the seventies, thank you Queen Joan Didion), our information becomes, as Bunny Rogers gestures to, pixelated.

I know that both collective and personal grief become totemized.
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What does it look like for us to embrace this corruption, at least in times of grief? To allow the soft, shape-shifting of these entities to create for us a kind of collective consciousness that we can pull from in order to enhance our experiences of feeling?  

The fact of the matter is that we need more complicated ways of thinking about our reactions, responses, and selves as individuals—and especially how we as individuals become parts of a whole (community/family/nation). We readily offer that kind of generosity of mindfulness to art, but we rarely do that for ourselves.

Perhaps I should think of myself as an exhibit more frequently—one that depicts provocatively and image-istically, and has a juxtaposed title.

Say, Self Inside Self Inside the Tomb of Marie Laveau

Woman in Flannel, Head in Hands, Stonewall Inn

A Portrait of a Dinner Party at Pearl Harbor

How would you title you?

In New York, I imagine it’s Christmastime. My uncle hunched over the counter making homemade pasta noodles for lasagna, my aunt stealing a few slices of salami of her freshly made antipasto, and the smell of penne alla vodka permeating throughout the air. I was nostalgic for my aunt’s famous rainbow cookies, and not just because they were better than any bakery, but because I had learned how to make them with her, side by side with my little cousin.

I am not Italian. But my family is.

In Honduras, I wake up slowly to lazy roosters singing their morning anthem. I spend a good part of the day cleaning and then I go across the street to have lunch. Suyapa is in her beachfront restaurant listening to the news on her radio. Her two girls are sharing a hammock. One is reading, the other is vigorously texting. I greet everyone and then I order my usual: pescado frito con tajadas. I sit at my favorite table where the sand meets the sea and wait for my order to be ready.

I am Honduran; they are not my family. But they look like they could be.

My earliest memory of food is eating oatmeal and drinking agua de sandía (watermelon water). With legs sprawled out on the hotel couch and curious eyes, I anxiously awaited each morning for room service to bring my breakfast. I ate a variation of this meal for the next 40 days. My mom and I were in Tegucigalpa waiting in a hotel across the park from where our lawyer was finalizing the adoption papers. At two and a half years old I didn’t know that my life was about to dramatically change, but I knew that this woman was taking care of me and I felt loved.

My second earliest memory of food is hiding it. When I got to my new home in the United States, I still hadn’t kicked the habit I’d picked up in the orphanage of hiding leftovers to make sure I had enough to eat. It didn’t take long to see that this behavior wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t afraid my mom wasn’t going to feed me.

As I grew up, my mom made sure I maintained a relationship to the food of my birth country. She learned how to make arroz con pollo, enchiladas, and other different kinds of Latin American food. I didn’t know that she wouldn’t always use the exact ingredients and would improvise. Later, when I traveled in Honduras, I could taste the difference from my mom’s arroz con pollo. But at the time, I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.

I grew up with homemade meals, meticulously customized birthday cakes (as per my request), and I learned how to cook early. I felt at home in the kitchen. Each recipe either came from the Joy of Cooking or my mom’s treasured wooden box of family recipes. Each night I would roll up my sleeves and stand side by side with my mom, making lasagna, stuffed mushrooms, and minestrone soup and meatballs (my mom put raisins in hers and marked them with X’s with a knife so I didn’t accidentally eat any. Raisins weren’t my favorite.) This was my food.

I didn’t remember what food from my country tasted like.
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It wasn’t until I was told I was different from classmates (in less than nice words) that I felt different. How could I tell my mom that kids at school told me that she wasn’t my real mom and my family wasn’t my real family and my real family didn’t want me?

Instead, I spent the majority of my childhood feeling bad and embarrassed for being adopted.

Each time I looked at a family picture, I could see I looked different than everyone else. I hid them all. I even shoved the screen printed pillow cover of my three cousins and I in the back of my closet. I loved that pillowcase; I loved my cousins; we had gotten it done when we went to Storyland one summer. I only kept my yearbook photos and one of me and my mom hung up on the wall above my piano. At least when I was in a picture with just my mom, I could have a reason as to why I looked different. It would be a lot easier than explaining why all of my family members were white and I wasn’t.

Our family tradition was to go to New York for Christmas. I was always so excited to go to New York because I grew up in Maine and never had experienced seeing so many people of color. In grocery stores, I’d trail behind Spanish speaking families and wish they knew me somehow. I’d peer into their carts, searching for Latin American food, in hopes that would give me a clue as to who I was and where I came from.

In high school I asked my mom if we could eat food from Central America. I wasn’t expecting to find Honduran food where I grew up, but to our amazement we found an authentic El Salvadorian restaurant in downtown Portland, Maine. They welcomed me with warm eyes, but when they caught a glimpse of my mom trailing behind me they treated me less warmly and didn’t give my mom the time of day. I didn’t ask to go again.

Finally, I graduated high school early and left to study abroad. Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.

I did not travel to Honduras at first. I wasn’t ready. I spent time in Costa Rica through an exchange program but I wanted to experience more. My mom’s best friend hosted a Peruvian woman and asked if I could stay with her family once she returned to Peru. I didn’t end up staying with that host family, but instead found a girl in my class whose family hosted students regularly. They had two daughters around my age and a son who was a few years younger. Our connection was instantaneous. We enjoyed the same music, laughed at the same things and found joy in each other’s company. I grew up as an only child and I found something I had always wanted: Siblings and a family that looked like me. Well, kinda. And food that I would have eaten if I grew up in my own country. Well, kinda.

I learned how to cook la comida de la selva side by side with my Mamita, a woman I met through a girl I went to school with, whose family would become my family. I remember one morning waking up to the smell of juane de arroz. The kitchen was joyfully flooded with rows and rows of hojas de bijao (banana leaves), waiting to be filled with rice and tied with string. I tied for hours with my brothers and sisters. I had never been so happy to do such a monotonous task.

I am not Peruvian. But they are more than my host family. They are my family.

After graduating from college I traveled to Asia. I learned how to order food in each country I lived in. I devoured the sizzling street food of Bangkok. I eagerly awaited to have Pad Thai in On Nut Market and finished my meal with mango sticky rice. In Seoul, I shared Korean BBQ with coworkers and filled up on pork buns at least three times a week. On visa runs I would go to Vietnam and eat fresh Bánh mì in a trance and have the same expression on my face when I had my daily serving of Bai Sach Chrouk in Cambodia.

I didn’t grow up with any of these foods. I am not Thai. I am not Korean. I am not Vietnamese or Cambodian, but I saw how food brought people together. I felt how I was welcomed into their culture, and into their homes. I was gracefully cocooned within a culture of food and with people who shared the love of food and people.

Despite my mom’s attempt to cook Latin American foods, and my attempts to find Latin American culture in my hometown, I had lost my birth culture’s identity. I wanted to reclaim it.
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Eventually I made it back to Honduras. I wanted to remember the food of my motherland. I wanted to smell baleadas from blocks away and instinctively know that that was the food of my homeland; that it was mine. That I belonged to Honduras and Honduras belonged to me. I had seen first hand how food seamlessly brought a culture together—I wanted to be woven back into my own culture.

But unfortunately, I didn’t have a magical moment. I didn’t taste something that flooded my brain with memories of my birth family and culture.

Nothing tasted familiar.

My taste buds didn’t invite me to dance or throw a homecoming party for me.

I didn’t even like baleadas.

That was until I saw on the menu that they served agua de sandia and arroz con pollo.

In that moment I was not Honduran or Italian. In that moment I was me. A collection of my lived experiences.

My feeling of home comes from the people I surround myself with and the food that unites us. Home is not a place on a map, where I grew up, or even where I was born. Home is a feeling.

And food, was another language of love.

In Pakistan, and in my native language Urdu, woman translates into Aurat, which comes from the Persian Awrah, meaning “parts to be protected.” Literally, too, in my present Muslim, closed-knit, patriarchal society, women like me are guided—by their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons—to be protected from threats against their body and family honor.

While these men encourage “Western” trends to an extent—like education at reputable schools, recreational sports, or even temporary employment—cultural traditions halt these prospects after marriage. You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.

Because culture is reinforced by practice, and because most girls in my family and neighborhood were married off at nineteen or twenty, naturally I grew up understanding that my life would turn out to be largely the same.

And like most families around us, my family was also wary of sending their daughters abroad for higher studies. Local education until we reached marriageable age seemed sufficient. My sister and I were taught that there were enough boys in the house to look after the family distribution business; thus, for us, a long-term career wasn’t a priority. I would, instead, have to marry well, and learn how to manage my in-laws’ household.

My father, Baba, maintained from my birth that our culture was different from the “West’s.” He was adamant that we both expand our horizons and maintain our own set of traditional values. While our family travelled every summer, to Europe or the U.K., my parents were their own Pakistani selves there. At eight, I shuffled awkwardly behind Mama, who wore a traditional, full-length shalwar kameez, while Baba—his trousers religiously hitched above his ankles—stood in line to buy tickets at Disneyland Paris.

Baba never reacted to the half-naked foreigners around us. He took it as a means to educate his daughters. “People dress and live differently here,” he’d explain. “They value independence over family. We don’t. See everything, Mehreen. Gain exposure. But always stay true to your culture.”

I was fully clad under his protection, yet embarrassed. A part of me was enchanted by the liberation around me, by how the women we met—at somber restaurants, glittering hotel receptions, crowded tours—could have the authority to choose what to wear, where to work, how to live, all by themselves. Baba didn’t notice when, in our rented car trips around Germany and France, I’d roll my pants up into shorts and sit smugly on my seat. Or at least, with his eyes in the rear-view mirror, he pretended not to.

You are born, our men tell us, to marry fast, and vouchsafe both yourselves and your future daughters under our protection.
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Baba’s “exposure” showed me that there were opportunities for women in cultures different from ours. As we visited bookstores abroad, my mother, beautiful and passive, introduced me to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton’s works, books she had reveled in herself throughout childhood. On car trips around the glittering lakes of Lugano and Lucerne, I read about Matilda’s victory over Ms. Trunchbull, Sophie’s adventures with the BFG, Anne and George’s explorations of Kirrin Island in The Famous Five, and this new, literary world seemed to unravel before me.

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl. Still, to my eight-year-old self, societal boundaries seemed malleable and time-bound, and I continued my readings in the hope that when I grew up, I’d have equal opportunities to pursue my dreams as the boys my age would have too.

Funnily enough, my resolution didn’t waver with time, and three years ago, at eighteen, with my reasonable grades and no marriage proposals, I began to think of a career as a writer. On a high after finishing A Hundred Years of Solitude one night at 4 a.m., I decided what the hell—I wanted to write well, with expertise and precision. But first, I wanted to study great literary works in depth, maybe at a good university, maybe even…abroad (Pakistani universities don’t offer a degree in English).

My mind began to spin wildly. Why not apply abroad to the best institute, maybe to Oxford or Cambridge? You won’t get in anyway, I told myself. But the vertigo continued. What was the harm in trying?

I was captivated, and yet saddened by the realization that, unlike these characters, I wouldn’t ever get to have the same liberties as a Muslim, Pakistani girl.
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So a week later, when everyone was fast asleep, I switched my computer on, dimmed the study lights, and hastily applied to Cambridge. A month later, when I got the call that they’d like to interview me, my eyes nearly popped out. I asked Baba to take me to Cambridge for the interview. He downright refused, but he didn’t reprimand me for secretly applying, or punish me for it. Baba was relatively open-minded compared to the System. After seeing the tears in my eyes and my relentless persistence, he agreed—with a condition: if I did get in, there was no guarantee that I’d actually go.

We trod the Cambridge grounds in a cold December wind amid rustling fallen leaves. There were six other girls for the interview—from Paris, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.K. We discussed The Weeknd’s latest music, and Netflix’s Stranger Things. I was excited, confident, and thoroughly comfortable. The interviews, each thirty minutes long, turned into more of a literary chat. Two interviewers sat opposite me on mahogany chairs. We discussed my personal statement, analyzed Mansfield and Keats, made jokes about how the lack of sunlight affected our literary mood. When I was free to go, I felt satiated. Content. I knew I’d tried.

Two months later, while browsing through my junk email, I opened one that confirmed my unconditional offer from Cambridge. I fell off my chair howling. I was ecstatic, dumbfounded, but at the same time there was a touch of melancholy: I remembered Baba’s condition.

I approached Baba, whose eyes glittered with pride at the sight of my admission letter, while his head shook into a firm, “no.”

I felt crushed, ashamed, angry. I’d hoped that maybe Baba would, by some miracle, relent. I’d come too far this time, for my writing career to remain intangible—a mere dream left unlived. “Don’t you know it’s CAMBRIDGE?” I argued. “People don’t go for financial reasons, and you’re stopping me because of what the people in our community will think?” Baba’s response was always, “I supported you as much as I could, Mehreen, and I’ll continue to do so of course, but every culture has its conventions.” With a glance at Mama who stood silently in the bedroom corner, never intervening, I wailed that he was enforcing obsolete, draconian values on his daughters, and burst into tears.

After numerous arguments, I discovered Baba was more stubborn than I’d expected him to be. At times, I felt desperate enough to imagine myself grabbing my passport and running away. I envisioned Baba’s voice breaking on the other end when I’d eventually call him from Cambridge. In my mind, he’d take it on himself for exposing us to that “Western” culture, and would finally give me his blessing (and the university’s tuition fees).

Yet I admit, I’m glad I didn’t run away. Cambridge or not, it wasn’t worth leaving my family. Baba tried to make amends with hugs and gifts, which I accepted. He was still my father after all.

Four months after I’d received the Cambridge offer, a “good” proposal came. His name was Ali. He was well-established, twenty-six (six years older than I was), and according to my family, a genuine guy. Knowing I wouldn’t go to Cambridge, and still bitter with my family for their treatment of me, I hesitantly accepted. I wanted a new start, a different environment, some time to heal—even if it was under the “protection” of another man. Two years later, last August, Ali and I entered an arranged marriage.

Every culture has its conventions.
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Post-marriage, I learned to love and respect Ali for his easygoing nature and his unwavering care for me. He was open-minded, more so than Baba, and was comfortable with my having a writing career, even if I were to attend fiction writing workshops both locally and abroad. Inevitably, we discussed the Cambridge topic, and I confided how big of a blow that was to my career. “Why so?” he replied, his gentle brown eyes unfazed and soothing. “You want to be a writer, and you can be. Cambridge isn’t the end game.”

“But…but the networking—” I spluttered. The contacts! The teaching! How could I be a writer without all that?

Ali insisted that I was making it about Cambridge, not about my writing, which is what really mattered. As he spoke, I tried to listen. Virginia Woolf didn’t go to Cambridge. Shakespeare wasn’t well educated either. Maybe I would have to work harder than other people, put in more years, enroll in a local university…but that didn’t mean I couldn’t be a writer.

With time, I learned to empathize with my family and their decision, accepting that Baba was only a product of his environment. Both he and Mama were firm in their orthodox beliefs. Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard their own culture in an alien world.

Yet I can feel hot winds of change around me. Pakistani society is learning and developing from the globalized importance of education and independence. With events like Malala’s Educate Girls campaigns, and #timesup, the current generations—including myself and Ali—yearn to give space and independence to each other and teach our offspring the same.

But of course, Cambridge is an opportunity lost that I still regret. Sometimes when I’m staring at the computer blankly during writing sessions, I long for the warmth of ancient fireplaces, the rusty smells of centuries-old libraries, the meandering and brilliant discussions with tutors, communal meals with my peers…

Keeping their girls home was a plea to help safeguard my parents' own culture in an alien world.
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Then, I look at pictures of Ali and me, hand in hand at our wedding, while Baba stands with an unabashed smile in the background. I tell myself that Cambridge was my road not taken, and life deals you cards that you to learn to manage instead of getting depressed over. In my case, my gender and cultural values obstructed me from having the same opportunities as boys my age did. I can either hate it and run from it or confront it and hope for change.

Still, I realize that in this time and society, I need the blessings of men around me in order to establish myself. These men might be supportive and kind-hearted—like Baba, and Ali—but I yearn for the freedom, the authority, and independence that women like Jane Eyre, Jo March and Hester Prynne craved, albeit in different shades and tones than my own longings. And, every time I pick up my pen, I take on these societal structures can only be altered by awareness and exposure, which come from lots and lots of reading. And writing.

For now, as students my age savor their goodbye hugs and farewell parties before leaving for universities abroad, I glance at a crisp, white letter on my right—my Cambridge acceptance—then at the wedding ring on my left hand.

And I know I won’t be among them.

When she was seven years old, Nike Davies-Okundaye lost both her mother and her grandmother. It was left to her great-grandmother—the head of the craftswomen in a village in Ogidi in southwest Nigeria—to bring her up and teach her the craft of adire. Ogidi is one of the major centers of adire production in the entirety of the country.

Adire is a resist-dyed fabric which is created by applying wax, string or rubber bands to keep the dye from penetrating the exposed, open areas. Traditionally worn and produced by Yoruba women of southwest Nigeria, adire is a delicate and time-consuming process that can be traced back to the nineteenth century.

Primarily a female domestic craft, adire derived from two Yoruba words—adi (to tie) and re (to dye). It’s not unlike the methods used by its hippie-modern sister-fabric known as tie-dye. But unlike it’s psychedelic brethren, producing just five yards of adire is painstaking work and can take up to three weeks or more.

Every day after school, Okundaye’s great-grandmother would teach her how to separate the cotton from the seed, how to make cassava paste—called adire elekois—and using a chicken feather, apply that paste onto the fabric to create the intricate patterns of Adire that are passed down from one generation to the next.

Adire was originally produced to make use of old hand-woven materials (kijipa); when a garment or wrapper grew faded, it could be redyed. When the missionaries came to Africa, they brought imported calico and it was used for adire, explains Professor Dele Layiwola in their book, Adire Cloth in Nigeria. These days craftsmen buy (mostly imported) cotton and apply the adire patterns onto the existing fabric.

“But no one wants to do it anymore,” sighs Okundaye—now 67 years old—on a sunny weekend afternoon. She is sitting across from me at her gallery, which is located on a peninsula close to the lagoon in the bustling city of Lagos.

“It’s just too much work and the money is too small.” Hailed as the “Queen of Adire” Okundaye is the most famous proponent of this Nigerian textile tradition, credited for making it known—and celebrated—by the outside world. But despite its creeping popularity in the West, its future remains uncertain. 

In the afternoons, Nike Art Gallery—West Africa’s largest gallery and a center of Lagos’s buzzy art scene—spreads quietly across four floors, boasting more than 15,000 paintings, sculptures and textiles all crammed together; it’s more a museum than a gallery.

But by evening, a steady stream of visitors, tourists, artists, and her protégés come to learn the art of adire from “Mama Nike” and the space thrums with voices and laughter. Weekends at Nike Art Gallery are unique and draw people from all over the city.

With Mama Nike presiding, young artists from Lagos and surrounding towns share stories of their work over food and drinks; it’s a way of dipping into Nigerian art and culture, with performances of music, dance and masquerades unfolding throughout the evening in the large gallery.     

“I was born into this tradition,” says Yemisi, a 25-year old adire artist from Lagos whose grandmother is a master artisan. “It was easy for me to pick up the technique, but I’m also training in painting as I can’t sustain myself on adire alone.”

Though the history of the craft is difficult to trace, adire—originally prepared only with locally grown indigo—is thought to have started in the 1800s. The tradition of using indigo for dyeing cloth however is thought to be at least a thousand years old in West Africa, according to scholar Jane Barbour whose book from 1971, Adire Cloth in Nigeria, remains an authoritative text on the craft.

While adire flourished in the first half of the twentieth century, it started to decline in the 1950s along with Nigeria’s indigenous textile industry, which was wiped out when cheaper imported cloth flooded the market.

The decline of adire is often linked to the rise of ankara, the hugely popular, brightly colored wax prints that have come to symbolize African fabric around the world. Ankara has a troubled colonial legacy, and ironically is not African at all.

The wax prints came into the African continent from the Netherlands in the nineteenth century, when the Dutch created a mass-produced version of Indonesian batik. These days, cheap copies of ankara are primarily produced in China.

Okundaye is warm and energetic, and always dressed head to toe in wrappers and headscarves emblazoned with the exquisite and striking adire patterns created by her own hand. A vital part of her craft she explains, is the sharing of its methods.

Okundaye has trained thousands of people in the art of adire by holding free community workshops at her art centers in Oshogbo, Ogidi, Abuja and Lagos, for the last two decades.

“I see it as a way of saving the art, so it’s not something our grandmothers once did,” she says.  “I also think of it a means of solving poverty. People who have no means of livelihood can be taught adire to make a living for themselves.”

But all of this is not possible, she explains, without creating proper infrastructure to support the industry; the government needs to actively invest in its future.

Despite Okundaye’s dedication to passing along the adire artform and its burgeoning presence on the more conventional fashion scene, she remains skeptical about the future of the textile tradition and has slowly modernized her methods to accommodate the lagging interest.  “When I saw that people weren’t buying adire fabric anymore, I started transferring the patterns on the fabric to the canvas, using pen to make the same designs that we used to paint with feathers.”

While adire is largely a forgotten and dying form in its country of origin, the ancient craft from Nigeria is making itself known in Western fashion spheres. In April this year, noted author and feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was invited to address graduating seniors at Harvard College, and she boasted her adire excitement on Instagram, heralding a newfound cache for this Nigerian handiwork:

“Honored to be the Harvard University Class Day Speaker 2018. And I felt fully like myself in this lovely Adire dress by The Ladymaker.”

For Adichie, wearing adire is a conscious choice and part and parcel of her activism; she launched “Wear Nigerian” last year to support local designers from her homeland.

Until just a few years ago, not many had heard of adire outside of Nigeria, but that’s slowly changing. Today adire is enjoying a coming out moment and boasts global icon enthusiasts including Michelle Obama, Lady Gaga, and Lupita Nyong’o.

For a clutch of young Nigerian designers catering to the fashion conscious around the world, adire’s rich history is a compelling selling point to consumers; the craft is indigenous, difficult to produce, rare, and every pattern is a unique form of storytelling.

“Adire was once dying out due to the cheap textile alternatives coming from the east,” says Niyi Okuboyejo, founder of the menswear label Post-Imperial. “But many young Nigerian designers are now embracing it. The method appeals to several global markets as we have several retail doors in Japan, France, England and the US.” 

Okuboyejo is of Nigerian-descent and based out of the United States, where he has found a following for his adire-inspired formal and office wear.

“A lot of the symbols in adire have meaning and when put together could serve as a platform for storytelling,” he writes me in an email. The patterns in adire are a tapestry of the rich old stories of Yoruba culture, the myths, the history, the folklore, and the rituals.

“It is just one of the many traditional textiles that we still have. As it has done for Post-Imperial, it can serve as a tool to create narratives for the Black designer (especially one of Nigerian descent). Africa is the last frontier of new ideas due to so much untapped concepts and narratives within it, and adire is part of that.”

For designers like Okuboyejo and Amaka Osakwe (named “West Africa’s Most Daring Designer” in a New Yorker profile)—her label Maki Oh is entirely inspired by adire and a favorite with celebrities—the fabric represents pride in African and black heritage.   

Okundaye, meanwhile, is planning for the future in case adire’s current en vogue moment begins to fade like so many fashion trends tend to do. She plans to open a textile museum in Lagos later this year; she has already collected all the fabrics she wants to exhibit. “It will be the first of its kind,” she says, “a place to see all the textiles of Africa.”

She pointed towards her adire paintings.

“You can put this on your wall and remember the vanishing art.”

My mother and I came for the salted caramel budino. That, and I like that the restaurant uses one big ice cube for their Old Fashioned. It’s the type of place that requires an Open Table reservation two months in advance. My mother and I entered the narrow space on a whim, with the knowledge that we’d likely turn around and go to a less popular, less packed restaurant with no salted caramel budino and no good ice, but there they were: two vacant bar stools. It was one of those gifts from the universe, like having just enough milk or just enough toilet paper or just enough gas or just enough of really anything.

As we waited for our dessert – layers of Oreo cookies, caramel pudding, crème fraiche whipped cream, and sea salt served in a trendy mason jar – my mother said she had something to tell me. Shoulders back and glint in her eye, she looked like a child moments away from blurting out a big secret. 

And here it was: My mother, who had recently begun working at a prominent city hospital, had officially signed the paperwork exempting her from assisting on abortion procedures. She was so proud of her decision. I sat staring into my Old Fashioned.

In theory, I support my mother’s right to religious freedom and her right to refuse participating in any activity opposing her religious beliefs. In theory, I believe no nurse should assist in abortion operations if they are morally opposed to the procedure. But in practice it’s so much more complicated when my mother and I are on two different sides of an issue, especially when she delivers the news with this expectant expression, as if we’d high five over it. As if I’d ever said anything that would have given her that impression. 

In theory, I believe no nurse should assist in abortion operations if they are morally opposed to the procedure. But in practice it’s so much more complicated.
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My mother is anti-choice and I’m pro-choice, and both of our stances are unlikely to ever change. I know that because we’ve spent years trying to sway the other. Debates, mostly in the cramped spaces of different cars throughout the years, usually ended the same: I’m mean and condescending and she’s narrow-minded and too religious. Nothing ever changes, except maybe the car.

Since the setting, this particular time, was the popular restaurant with the good ice cubes, I tried to avoid being mean or condescending. I didn’t ask what the point of signing such a document was, since she worked as an ENT nurse and abortions weren’t normally performed via ear, nose, or throat. I didn’t even launch into a speech about stigmatizing abortion because yes, yes, religious freedom. I reminded myself that my mother has a right to religious freedom, but I still felt betrayed by her decision.

Instead, I asked my mother if the paperwork was limited to women who had chosen to terminate their pregnancy for personal reasons or if it included women who were terminating their pregnancy for medical reasons. My mother told me she was excused from all abortions. Even those performed when the fetus has no chance of survival. Even those performed to save the life of the mother.

No, My Right To Abortion Did Not Cost Hillary The Election
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So logically, I asked my mother if she thought women who had abortions at the direction of a medical professional were, in fact, sinning. Because that’s what her religious disapproval comes down to—that it’s a sin—right? My mother is an intelligent, practical woman. She graduated first in her nursing class and supported our family while putting herself through nursing school. I thought this woman must know that it definitely isn’t a sin to terminate a pregnancy when a doctor tells you that you’ll likely suffer medical complications otherwise.

As I write this, I’m aware that my mother may sometimes apply a similar rationale to me. She must think of how I’m the same law-abiding girl who wouldn’t even sneak candy into movie theaters. She must think that I’m the sweet girl who she sent to Catholic school for twelve years. And that girl, my mother may think, must logically know that it’s always a sin to have an abortion, no matter what. Or perhaps, it’s the opposite. Perhaps my mother hears my pro-choice arguments and secretly knows I’ve been evil ever since that one time in the third grade when I found out Mary is the Queen of Heaven. I was eight years old and I wanted to be the Queen of Heaven when I died, so I said I hated Mary. My mother told me to say ten Hail Marys to repent, but I never did.

My mother and I are of the same blood and flesh, yet separated by this issue, and also our religious faith, and also our brands of logic. We’re two different radio stations playing the same exact song just a few beats off. We are so much of the same, but we are never the same.

My mother sidestepped the question. She said she didn’t want to aid in abortions, period. I could have asked hypothetical questions, like what if my mother was the only nurse in the whole hospital who could help, and the patient was going to die unless she terminated her pregnancy? Wouldn’t God think letting a woman die was just as serious an offense as an abortion?

But instead of the hypothetical questions, I ordered another Old Fashioned with a big ice cube and thought about my abortion.

I’ve never written about having an abortion before because I feared becoming “that girl who wrote about her abortion that one time.” I feared the story would become the first thing that popped up when someone Googled me and it would become all of me. I feared what someone from my biology or algebra or world history class would think if they read that essay. Or what about all the boys I had ever kissed, what would they think if they read that essay? I feared that my experience would be discussed and ridiculed and dissected on Twitter and Reddit and conservative websites. I feared Donald Trump and Kevin Williamson and Retribution. I feared, so I never wrote. But there are worse things to be in the world than the girl who wrote about the abortion she had one time.

But instead of the hypothetical questions, I ordered another Old Fashioned with a big ice cube and thought about my abortion.
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 My abortion story isn’t very special or different or significant. I had sex with a boy, and we were both irresponsible. The pregnancy test was positive, but I was in college and had taken out student loans and graduating was important to me. After a predictable chain of events and one awkward phone call later, I sat in stirrups much like I had done during my run of the mill trips to the gynecologist, only it was in the basement of Planned Parenthood, and before entering I was patted down by a security guard with a visible gun on his hip.

I had been called back several times: the psychological exam, the payment, and the ultrasound which I asked to see, partially out of curiosity and partially out of a sense of responsibility. If I was going to have an abortion, I was going to look at what I was aborting. I reasoned that I owed that much to whatever it was inside of me. And it was something—a blob, a ball of cells, a dark splotch in the ultrasound version of my body. It wasn’t a baby with a foot with toes I would one day call little piggies. But there was a distinct matter in my body. Seeing this made me feel both better and worse. It didn’t have little piggies, but it was also there and it soon wouldn’t be.

Finally, I was called back and given a gown. The nurse knocked, waited for the customary okay from me, and entered the room. She managed to achieve the ideal tone,neither cheery nor somber nor cold. She was professional, yet also personal. More than anything else, she seemed to understand that I was a real person in a less than desirable situation. I was making a choice I would have rather not have had to make, and this medical procedure may be something difficult for me. But she also made no assumptions in the matter. She was perfect. She told me that the doctor was male and she’d be in the room the entire time. She also told me the doctor usually narrates the procedure so his patients know what he’s doing to them while he’s doing it, would I like that? I nodded.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
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When the doctor entered, he was already wearing a surgical mask, so I never actually saw his face. For so long, this felt like a personal slight—it’s only now, as I type this, that I realize this man may have simply not wanted the risk. He provided my autonomy, but he demanded his anonymity. Years later, I’m okay with that. But sitting in stirrups that day, I wanted to see that he was a person, too.

The doctor didn’t make eye contact with me. He simply sat in the stool and asked if he could begin. I said yes and spiraled with the certainty that he was judging me as he parted my legs wider and disappeared into the tent of my hospital gown. I didn’t take into consideration that this was his job, which was likely exhausting and largely thankless and demonized by a whole group of citizens. And maybe he was sick of the cold weather we were having, I don’t know. There were so many possible reasons for his curt bedside manner, none of which had to do with me, but I took it personally. It was my abortion; I was taking everything personally. And why wasn’t he saying what he was doing to me? 

My face must have lit up with all these thoughts because the nurse stepped into the space next to me, held my hand, and narrated the procedure as the doctor silently worked. She explained every detail with language I can’t distinctly remember now, but I do remember her voice was calm and even. And she didn’t complain when I squeezed her hand from the pain. 

When the doctor needed assistance, the nurse politely asked if she could let go of my hand. It wasn’t a question, not really, but the fact that she phrased it that way was especially kind. We unlaced our fingers and I lost her to my lower hemisphere, but she kept narrating what was being done to my body and asking if I felt okay. That nurse’s compassion was the only bright spot of the procedure. 

I could get into the pain of the procedure, the tears my dog licked off my cheeks later that night, and the months of getting drunk and, one by one, telling my close girlfriends, some of which confessed their abortions to me, too. But, it’s all really pretty standard. 

I thought of telling my mother on several occasions, including over our fancy dessert. But if I told her in that crowded restaurant with people to either side of us, she would have likely had thoughts about my posture and my expression. She would have to remind herself that I have a right to reproductive freedom, but she’d still feel betrayed by my decision, as I did hers. And we’d both sit there in our betrayal, and the big ice cubes, dessert in the mason jar, and good fortune of those two open seats would be all for naught.

For a long time, I felt like I owed my mother an admission of my abortion because, if nothing else, she had gotten pregnant once, hadn’t had an abortion, and ta-da here I am. But there are also so many things that mothers and daughters don’t tell each other. I once went into the bathroom after my mother had showered and found that she had left behind a vibrator. I never told her I knew what she did during her showers and she never told me she liked to masturbate after shampooing. My sophomore year of high school, my mother had to pick me up from school because I bled through my tampon, through my underwear, and through my uniform. She knew the reason the school nurse had called her and she cleaned the large butterfly-shaped bloodstain from my skirt, but we never spoke of it.

She would have to remind herself that I have a right to reproductive freedom, but she'd still feel betrayed by my decision, as I did hers.
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And there were those quiet morning drives to school, during which we passed an abortion clinic. Even before 8 am, protestors would be outside with their chants and their signs and their rosaries. I’d wordlessly watch them from the window while my mother stared ahead. She was too tired from last night’s restaurant shift to discuss the protest, or maybe too tired to even notice.

Pregnancies seem to be marked by food. Women can recall with such specificity what they craved, what they missed eating, and what made them sick. My abortion, too, is marked by food. There was the sushi dinner I threw up, which was, in retrospect, likely the first sign of my pregnancy. There was the pizza I ate after my abortion, which went on to become my favorite pizza in the city. But every time I’ve ever eaten a slice, I remembered the first time I had this pizza was when I was wearing a jumbo pad and watching Rosemary’s Baby (an admittedly strange choice for post-abortion entertainment).

The salted caramel budino, too, has gone on to mark a moment in my story about my abortion. Between my mother and me were our vaginas we don’t talk about, religious freedom and reproductive freedom, decisions to or to not become mothers, and the nurse who never signed a paper exempting her from my abortion and who held my hand when I needed to hold someone’s hand. Between us there were no answers to be found, but there was dessert. And we split it. 

“I do, but I’d rather hear about what you remember,” I said, turning down the heady beats of the Wu-Tang Clan I’d been introducing him to. (“Auntie! he’d exclaimed, “This is so much better than Drake!”)

Folded up beside me like a blue heron, or an oil rig, my nephew is a coltish six feet tall, and nearly all legs; he took a long time to respond.

“I remember the dinosaur stickers on my bed,” he finally said, softly. When I followed his gaze out the window, I saw the cranes of the Oakland Port, looking themselves like ancient, industrial beasts. I saw the externalized thought, the making-adult of a childhood memory, the attempt to make contact. He startled me by continuing, “—before I knew they were dinosaurs. When you’re that little, you have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.”

Long after I dropped him off, his revelation boomed inside me.  

You have no memory of learning a thing. You just know it, and that’s it.

I see evidence of this everywhere: sensing danger before it’s visibly apparent, reading a room, attraction (to another body, to an object that shines just right). Those of us who are able-bodied walk around without really thinking about walking around. We’re repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.

Where, I marveled, did he learn that?

My nephew was talking about linguistics, mostly, and motor skills. He was talking about world-building concepts, like space and time. Things you learn through a kind of osmosis. However, my own first responses—how to sense danger, how to read a room, how to tell if I’m attracted to someone or something or not (and immediately after, if I think the attraction is a good idea or a potentially harmful one)—shows a lot about me as a person. That I learned at a young age how to intuit threat, and how to defuse, defend, or otherwise navigate it.

Today I woke up and I noticed this: a tomato plant in my backyard has grown around a brick.

As the tomatoes start showing their bashful faces, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this muscle memory. A few weeks ago, someone threw a brick through my front window in Oakland. Yesterday, a man made a gun of his hands and pretended to shoot me with it. Down the street, MacArthur Bart is still sewed up with yellow police tape, and Nia Wilson has officially been gone for a week. Down the other side of the street, tent cities bloom and die, bloom and die. Civilians and cops circle one another warily.

Humans are repositories of composite knowledge, learned by rote because of necessity or habit, much of which sits below, glacially submerged.
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And it’s the twentieth anniversary of the release of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, which reminds us that this systemic racism, this cyclical grief, is not even remotely new.

Even if we didn’t cognitively know that to be true, we feel it. The muscle memory of collective trauma prompts us to slide into unconscious action and movement during times like these. We check in with each other more. We shut down ICE facilities. We write, we draw, we archive, we connect.

“There are many ways to show up for a revolution,” my very wise friend Ste once told me. “Jesus and Gloria Anzaldua feed people. Holding a sign is just one way.”

Do you ever feel uncomfortable with how comfortable we can go from zero to 60, and quickly? As if our lives depended upon it (they do). This response is an infinitely helpful one, of course, but it implies a world that is rife with disaster and destruction, one in which an emergency kit must always be at the ready.

I recognize that not everyone feels this way. In fact, it seems to me that the majority of the burden of showing up, educating, and emotional labor falls on marginalized communities, even within liberal and artistic spaces. I understand that the disenfranchised have a more robust understanding of how to handle crisis—for obvious reasons—but our collective inability to have difficult conversations and engage in difficult labor is what landed us with the president and administration we have now.

#MeToo is perhaps a relevant and ongoing example I can point to. While I feel grateful and slain by those in my community (and those in positions of power outside my community) who came forward and told their own harrowing stories, a little part of myself felt distraught: why is it the responsibility of victims to shock the world into caring? Why doesn’t the world just believe people when they claim they’ve been abused? And, even more upsetting, why hasn’t the movement gone farther? What will it take to end rape culture in our country?

Still, some changes are palpable. Holding people publicly accountable is pretty effective. As I enter into the film and television industry—I’m currently taking my first screenwriting course—I can detect the ways in which Hollywood is trying to change its tune.

Nia Wilson’s killer has been apprehended, and folks are still unsure if it was racially motivated, and doesn’t that say something about the ways in which the baseline holds up? That white men can still get away with being assumed not racist until proven otherwise, even when they kill people of color in front of dozens of onlookers?

I feel proud of Oakland for showing up. I also feel sad for Oakland.

I feel proud because I love a city that knows how to handle itself with aplomb in a crisis. I feel sad because the hard truth is that the marginalized and traumatized are always taxed and overburdened with responding—with grace and empathy—to ride or die situations. Individually, and systemically.

We’re seeing an appalling display of what unchecked privilege and power can do. Everyday, hundreds of examples: a man going on a spree with a knife on public transportation, our president taunting entire nations over Twitter, Oakland cops taking advantage of underage women.

For all our unconscious super power—for all our psychological spidey-sense of self-protection against impending violence—how do we know when we are in a Reckoning? I’m so ready for the meek to inherit the Earth. I’m so ready for those who instinctively have a realistic understanding of the danger and beauty and tenuousness and finiteness of our world to have some power in deciding how to run it.

My nephew is right, but is also too young (I think, but what do I know?) to fully understand the additional layer of this fraught knowledge, the one that comes with time and experience and, unfortunately, getting roughed up a bit: the things we have no memory of learning as individuals, the things we hold to be the dearest of knowledge—these are very, very different than the things we collectively know as a society.

The overlap in the Venn diagram of understanding what is wrong with the world on an individual versus a systemic level—well. It’s tiny. As a society we don’t share that baseline. And that’s terrifying.

Walking through the streets of my city and seeing it fall all around me really does make me feel like my basement should be stocked with water and canned beans. And it is (thanks to my Virgo sweetheart).

But I’m mostly stocked up with myself: my muscle memory of how to move in a world that feels like a war-zone. I’m stocked up with my phone tree, my books, my plants that grow around evidence of industrialization. I’m stocked up with my capacity for listening, with my compassion, with my chosen family. I’m stocked up with you.

Keep fighting. I love you.

If there is a name for the feeling when you’re waiting for the floor to drop out from beneath you, when you’re lying awake at night wondering whether you’ve done enough today, when you’re walking home from work and you wonder if you should buy groceries this week or pay rent on time, that word is capitalism.

Under a capitalist system, there is no safety net. There is no innate support system. There is no benefit to the capitalist mission of competition by supporting one another. The capitalist reality is that not everyone can afford to meet their basic needs and where basic needs can be afforded, emotional intelligence cannot.

Capitalism makes no room for emotional intelligence because the entire concept of capitalism comes from an inherent subscription to social Darwinism — that is, only the strongest (and the most willing to exploit and hoard the most money) survive, while everyone else is left to suffer in desperation. Capitalist ideology de-prioritizes mental health, mindfulness and conscious communication as necessary resources so they’re ultimately reserved for the richest and the whitest, forcing healthy relationships to the fringes. With healthy relationships coming at great personal expense,abuse and toxicity are permitted to run rampant — unchecked.

My family was not unlike many others when it came to the toxicity of my upbringing. One of my earliest and clearest childhood memories is of my mother hammering my father’s skull with the receiver part of the cream-colored corded phone that hung in our kitchen years after it stopped working. In my memory it seems like it was only a few days later that my parents were fighting, my mother in the driver’s seat of her 10-year-old minivan, and my father standing in the grass with the passenger’s side door ajar, my younger sister and me in the backseat — when my mother decided it made the most sense to end the disagreement by flooring the minivan into reverse, knocking my father to the ground with that door and breaking so hard that the door shut.

I don’t remember if my mother offered any kind of explanation for the events that transpired that day, but I grew up being told my father was an abuser and that my mother’s reactions were a normal response to the stresses our family endured, solely as a result of my father’s ineptitude.

My father with his compulsive gambling, alcoholism, and long history of addiction had left my mother isolated for much of their marriage. Throughout my childhood and into adulthood, my father has found comfort in being absentee.

Typical of what capitalism demands of a man via gender roles, he’s always understood his role as going to work, earning an income, and giving it freely to his family as a stand-in for actually showing up. When his one business didn’t meet his expectations of living, he sought to gamble ferociously, hoping to win big and transcend the class of the working man. After losing one business to his compulsive gambling, he was able to get sober in his divorce and become a partner in a well-known Italian grocery store. While having never been to one of my swim meets, being late to my actual birth, and seldom having been home when I went to bed, my father has never notprovided on the financial end of things.

Islamophobia Informed My Mother’s Silence On Domestic Abuse — And Mine
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But even though he was able to fulfill that ultimate goal of capitalism, there were issues roiling.

It only took my mother six years to realize my father wasn’t what she had bargained for, and five more after that for her to divorce him. My father’s inactive role in the day-to-day functions of our family inevitably left him uninvolved in any of the decision making and childrearing process before and after their divorce. It’s not to place the blame of our particular brand of familial toxicity squarely on my father, but had he been around, things may have gone a little differently. My father’s absenteeism empowered my mother as the sole disciplinarian and her preferred method of discipline was physical, verbal, financial, and ultimately spiritual abuse.

My first punch to the mouth came no more than a month after my father had left our house. The beating worsened in the days, weeks, and years after that, and my self-esteem, or lack thereof — so shattered by puberty and abuse — only served as further justification for why I deserved it. I remember sobbing on my bed, thinking back to the many times I bore witness to my mother doing to the same things to my father, desperate to find a reason for why my mother wanted to hurt us so bad and so often. I blamed him, and I blamed myself. I figured that — because I was told this — if my father had made different decisions then my mother wouldn’t be so stressed out.

And for most of my childhood that’s how I justified the abuse. I felt that if my mother had access to more resources to be both a working mother and a present parent, that the abuse wouldn’t have happened. I began to see myself as a burden on my mother’s finances and on her well-being because, again, that’s what I was told. Unfortunately, this wasn’t inaccurate.

My mother had a 15-year gap in her resume from marriage and parenting, so it wasn’t easy for her to get back out there to earn a living for her family the way she had hoped. Of this notable pattern in the women’s workforce, Julie Torrant writes:

“This role [as a full-time parent] has structurally blocked women from full and equal participation in the wage-labor force. It has, in other words, made women ‘bad’ competitors in the labor-market. At a time when a ‘family-wage’ was the norm (that is, when the norm was that the husband would be the breadwinner and his wage would support the entire family and thus women did not ‘have to’ compete on the market to sell their labor), a system of social welfare was put in place that worked to (at least) alleviate the hardship this norm placed on women who did not have access to such a male wage.”

Dealing with the debt of divorce, my mother had negative funds to raise us and desperately needed a career change if she had any hope of independently providing. She applied for welfare, but the cost of education plunged her further into debt. When she went back to school, she stopped parenting altogether. The only time I saw her was when she came home to lock herself in her bedroom, where she did homework and came out only to beat me for knocking on the door asking about dinner.

Tasked with the decision between parenting and breadwinning, my mother decided to go absentee and chose neglect — an impossible sacrifice many single mothers in America are forced to make.

But sourcing the causes for my mother’s toxicity does nothing for the weight of trauma on my shoulders. I know my mother, like my father, an addict, would likely still be an abuser regardless of her life’s circumstances. But I also know that capitalism gave her all the tools.

Tasked with the decision between parenting and breadwinning, my mother decided to go absentee.
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Teetering on a cliff of survival or not, the inherent stress of having a family under capitalism allows families to become isolated and violent institutions. In February 2015’s Socialist Review, Susan Rosenthal’s indictment of the capitalist family says exactly what I’ve been trying to say for the last 1,200 words:

“Today’s perpetrators are yesterday’s victims. While only a small minority of child victims become adult perpetrators, studies of those who do perpetrate reveal that almost all were traumatised as children. Capitalism cannot acknowledge that most perpetrators are former victims because it cannot admit that families transmit trauma from one generation to the next.”

Both my parents came from blue-collar immigrant families in which the mother was left at home with the children and the father was rarely seen. Both my parents came from families that didn’t meet their needs and were able to rationalize their neglect as just.

The wounded child in my parents never had a chance to heal, and so they went on to wound their children.

In late May, the Visit Las Vegas Campaign released “Now and Then,” a glossy vye for queer tourism depicting the marriage of two women. The ad has since reached over 7.8 million YouTube views and the reception is overwhelmingly positive. At first glance, this might seem like a win for a culture unfamiliar with mainstream depictions of women loving women. Yet as I watched, my stomach sank. The ad felt like a cheap, performative grab for my queer attention. Ultimately — and regardless of the many rainbow emojis brightening the comments section — my feminist killjoy alarm went off.

Here’s the down and dirty overview: Beautiful Lesbians A and B are deeply in love and vacationing in Vegas. A wants to get married. B does too, but she’s tormented at the thought of her parents’ disapproval. A cajoles B while they both enjoy Las Vegas’ various amenities, until finally surprising B with a gorgeous ceremony. All the couple’s friends are there, but B is going to shut the whole thing down until she realizes her parents are in attendance. B lets out a high-pitched, “Let’s get married!” then moves towards a beaming mom and dad.

“Now and Then” is shamelessly soap, moving in for every queer person’s soft spot with heat-seeking precision: the homophobic parents, the shame, the emotional release of seeing accepted the little dyke we all root for. It seems like an important step for lesbian visibility in popular culture. So what’s the problem?

Dear Straight Allies, Please Don’t Forget The Harassment Of Queer Women
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The problem is that tolerance is a trap, and the Visit Las Vegas Campaign wants to sell it to you.

Suzanna Walters’ book The Tolerance Trap exemplifies how media like “Now and Then” — with its liberal attitudes towards gay tolerance, depictions of gay marriage, and rainbow capitalism — actually sabotage gay equality while seeming to advance it. Though the high-sheen production value can mask this, the plot of “Now and Then” is clear: If queer folks conform to heterosexual norms like marriage and wait around for societal approval, we’ll be rewarded, Vegas-style. Walters points to the sinister nature of (eventual) acceptance when she writes:

“The tolerance mindset offers up a liberal, ‘gay-positive’ version of homosexuality that lets the mainstream tolerate gayness. Its chief tactic is the plea for acceptance. Acceptance is the handmaiden of tolerance, and both are inadequate and even dangerous modes for accessing real social inclusion and change… The ‘accept us’ agenda shows up both in everyday forms of popular culture and in the broader national discourse on rights and belonging.

‘Accept us’ themes run the gamut: accept us because we’re just like you; accept us because we’re all God’s children; accept us because we’re born with it;…The ‘accept us’ trope pushes outside the charmed circle of acceptance those gays and other gender and sexual minorities, such as [transgender] folks and gays of color, who don’t fit the poster-boy image of nonstraight people and who can’t be — or don’t want to be — assimilated.”

“Now and Then” exemplifies the performative tolerance politics that the straight and cis majority thrives on. By capitalizing on classic — yet very real — tropes of disownment, rejection, and secrecy, the commercial asserts that queer happiness is achieved by hinging your actions on heterosexual opinions and values. B clearly orients her self worth to her parent’s unwillingness to tolerate her. “My parents aren’t proud of me,” B tells A, who feigns incomprehension:

A: “But you’re so beautiful, successful, funny!”

B: “I don’t think it’s my sense of humor they have an issue with…”

Then later,

B: “We can’t get married today, my parents will never forgive me.”

A: “For getting married without them, or for who you’re getting married to?”

Both scenes cut away, leaving unnamed not only the validity of B’s fears, but also the clipped-wing desire to finally have the legal right to marry and feel unable to because of intolerance. Note that the edited version of the commercial (rather than the full length version discussed here) is purged of this dialogue. Instead, the edits imply the parent’s issue is with elopement, not B marrying a woman. With this, Las Vegas give queer people two, and only two, impossible options: Hinge your life to hetero acceptance, or pretend the trauma of being queer never happened.

The dialogue is haunted by B’s apprehension. But with the sound off, “Now and Then” tells a completely different story. Strategic cinematography distracts from the lovers’ conflict, instead panning the best of Las Vegas’ attractions. The women laugh in the gorgeous Nevada dessert, take in the bustling nightlife, kiss in a neon-lit hotel pool. It’s all G-rated and aggressively cliché, but “Now and Then” offers up a rare moment of visibility to lesbian viewers starving for the scraps of representation.

Why ‘Tolerating’ Your Queer Loved Ones Is Dangerous
theestablishment.co

When A leads B to the surprise wedding, the venue is candle-lit, elegant, but not ostentatious enough to annoy. This is supposed to be the emotional climax of the story, but instead “Now and Then” proves its own disconnection with queer lives by revealing that B’s perceptions of intolerance are baseless — her parents are there, smiling and happy. Surrounded by supportive friends, family, and — here’s the important part — the city of Las Vegas, the commercial seems to say See, aren’t you silly for thinking homophobia still exists? The irony of “Now and Then” is that it tries to signal the end of intolerance when in fact its star is driven by the fear of it.

Visit Las Vegas’ commercial is dangerous because it “short circuits the march toward full equality and deprives us all of the transformative possibilities of full integration,” by depicting fully-realized queer joy as dependent on heterosexual acceptance. Even more alarming, “Now and Then” offers convenient vindication for any homophobic person ever. B’s parents are not held accountable for their prior actions; when they enter the wedding venue they are absolved of any wrongdoing. Given that B’s parents are brown-ish, and that both women have foreign accents, the commercial reinforces racist perceptions of foreigners as regressive. The ceremony is a racially-coded, apology-free mess.

Whatever the good intentions Visit Las Vegas had, “Now and Then” is a money-driven advertisement, released at a time when Vegas has nothing to lose from marketing to gay people. Note how it’s taken them until 2018, when a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, to make an ad like this, rather than tout Vegas as a destination for tolerance and fun in the ‘90s. Make no mistake, the motivation behind all “queer-friendly” media is to profit from, not defend, our community. “Now and Then” targeted a market, and now eagerly awaits the pink money and gay tourism that will surely follow. Don’t let the thrill of seeing yourself represented mask this.

Here and now, it’s 2018 and I’m not satisfied with lesbian representations in mainstream media. Even the commercial’s title, “Now and Then,” implies a degree of separation from the bigotry “then” and the tolerance “now.” The commercial is a joke its creators don’t seem to get. Supposedly “post-gay,” “Now and Then” can’t even imagine a present unburdened by the “air kiss of faux familiarity” that defines mainstream understandings of queer people.

Show me the queer love that’s hard to look at, the kind that makes its own rules and does what it wants regardless of approval or pride. Show me the most intolerable among us front and center: trans folks, gender deviants, queers of color, the undocumented, the deeply transgressive. Show me two fat, middle-aged bull-dykes madly in love, deeply amused by the ironies of gay marriage, and getting hitched anyway. Then maybe I’ll visit your damn city.

By July Westhale

The Est. collected open letters on Sessions, familial separation and the current administration’s response to asylum seekers and immigrants — good grief our collective heart! — to publish on a dedicated landing page as a kind of evolving pastiche of opinions and concerns, anger and empathy. Resistance is vital.

Dear you,

When I was 4, my mom drew me a bath.

“Watch the water,” she said, “and come get me when it’s full.”

I’ve replayed this scene thousands of times — her piano fingers on the rusted faucet, the bathmat an inky-gray, like a fingerprinting. I remember the water filling, filling, the plastic toy boat rising victorious in the swells. I remember calling for her, and hearing only silence. I remember the water overflowing, soaking the mat, leaking down the hallway linoleum, past my sick and sleeping mother.

I don’t remember the moment the water reached our neighbor’s apartment next door, but I do remember that when Child Protective Services was called, I put my body between them and my mom.

“She was sleeping,” I said. “It’s my fault.”

I was taken to a children’s home and, screaming, dunked into a bathtub of ice water.

No one gave me information about what was happening. No one offered comfort. It seemed to me, even at the time, that those in charge thought that silence and isolation was a better solution than explanation and solace.

I had it so so so much better than any of these children in the news.

I’m so proud of my community for standing up and staying compassionate and tender. Of the radical empathy you’re showing to each other and yourselves. I’m so proud of your hand-lettered signs and your fundraising and your yelling and your insistence on better behavior, a better world.

And your stories. I’m most proud of your stories.

For those of you scared to act, or feeling dissociated, or overwhelmed —

hear my story. Take it as a place that helps creates space for whatever you’re going through. That’s what narrative can do in times like these. Take it moment by moment. In this moment, you’re listening, and that’s massive.