Sara has been sober for 53 days. Matt & Jenna have date night
I’m on the farm
Playing records, wishing I wasn't on the farm
This song is about how simple it is to fall in love
Everyone has turned so adult. So I started exercising
Only it leaves me exhilarated. Which makes me crave tequila

Beck’s in bed already. Curt's got the kiddo this week
Maggie would but she’s awfully far away
I’ve got a new book of low cal recipes
and time enough to dissect the logic of the one navy in the white beans
​
I sit
half naked
on the counter
and laugh
I play with the dogs. Smoke dope in the tub.
The chorus: It never takes;
It never took
too long
I was;
I am
so charming

Do you gals want to get together two weeks from Wednesday?
After yoga, but before the girls go down

Excellent!

I can’t wait to see you
I Want to Talk About Womanhood

I wanna hash out this part that wasn’t taught in school. Because even in the world of studying gender we talk about women's roles in terms of child bearing & rearing. In the nurturing of aging parents. With a focus on invisible domestic and emotional labor. By linear milestones that still fit a feminized norm. But this wasn't covered.

This, the other way that is normal for me everyday. I'm 30, childless and single in the Midwest. I've missed some milestones. But I'm no career driven ice queen archetype either. Meaning, it seems, that I've also missed the mark of the scholarly 3rd wave. 

There are very few people to tell you what this will be like. 

I followed my head and did half of the things. I've disturbed the waters of each "pink collar" job I've had. I dumped the man who wouldn't do half the dishes. I remain vocal about my commitment to take very little shit. 

I followed my heart and some came out wrong. I never placed more worth on success than on loving others well. I got involved with a bad man and let big, bad shit happen and realized that the rest of the single scene....with it's endless partying and flippancy and levity …. didn't serve me so well. So I drew the wagons tighter, told myself I was creating a family in my own way, took up with stronger more genuine women. Women with focus and stability and husbands and babies and resources and easy love that they were willing to share.

But I will tell you what it is like. 

Time passes just fine this way. Years go by and you try new things on for size -mates, pets, apartments, friendships, careers. And all the while you show up. For superhero themed birthdays and first days of first grades, for couples dinners bc you genuinely love them both anyways, for movie nights on the couch because of course they are tired. And you don't mind, it's easier for you to come to them. You are just one person. 

It is a blissfully ignorant state of waiting. 

This singlehood, sister-mamas, is not the same kind we performed together before. This is not kissing evvverrry boy because it's fun. This is also the intentional building of a life. It's of a different varietal, but this grass is every bit as blue and then as green and then as blue but mostly green as it is on your side. You have more life, in quantity. Which is easy to honor because we studied it that way. It's political. It's not divided fairly for you by design.

I do not have less life, in legitimacy because it is unexplored. I have the messier pieces. The sideways stares of women I'd love to love but by default I can't be trusted. The delicate guardianship of other people's children, the controversial dusting off of second hand husbands. Things you see as burdensomely personal because you're too busy to widen the lens. 

It expires when it becomes apparent that I’m different.
It helped to picture herself on a dirt road.
An incline, where the precipice was always just beyond "those" trees. This road had tire grooves on either side to assure her that she was not the first, and on it she could just goddamned walk. Her slick double French braids could be stagnant in the breeze-less atmosphere. She was in no danger of any loco weeds noticing her as shapely or different. Which was, decidedly, too uncomfortable anymore.
On the road the edges were finite. This divot was where she could be human and fallible and that patch of grass was where married men went home to their wives. The two were always mutually exclusive at best. In this way it was never daunting. If rest was called for, she could lay in a 'x' shape, and touch it all. Digging her toes into a patch of mud, she could feel every strand of words, which she had ever heard formed, disconnect until they were all just tiny, manageable bits. Not that she had any desire to administer a thing. She only aimed to goddamn walk and walk.