are you there, dog? It's me, kerensa

I was a different girl once. I suppose we all are like the layers of an onion, and maybe we end up with the brittle skin as we age, a shell from the tender fruit of our youth. But I sometimes like to gently peel back the layers to remember the girl I was. As a child, I was a voracious reader. I would forego the outside play during a snowstorm to huddle by a candle with a mystery, gnawing it like a bone. I was an on the fringe girl, watching the other girls on the playground as they all seemed to inherently understand the ways of the American pre-teen. I was hopelessly boy crazy, falling in love at the drop of a dime- first with a boy in kindergarten who called me Cinderella. Later, an all consuming crush on a neighbor boy who put his books down on a puddle for me to sit on the bus. Despite all of my eager puppy loves, I didn't begin to date until the end of ninth grade, a time when we are all at our most angst ridden, our most self-doubting. He looked at me like I had hung the moo...

On December 1, 1955, a young woman in Montgomery, Alabama sat down. And like the flap of a butterfly's wings, the ripples began and have continued throughout the decades. She has been revered for her protest, silent as it was. Along with Dr. King, Malcolm X, WEB DuBois, Nelson Mandela and scores of other African Americans, she paved a road often riddled with potholes, toward civil rights. But let's go back in time before Rosa Parks sat. Let us go back to 1501, when Africans began to be enslaved. Today, we would call this human trafficking, and if we found even one of our friends guilty of being involved, would disentangle ourselves from them faster than one could say Knockoff Purses. (But that is a story for another time).           We know from our history books the abuse dealt to the slaves- the beatings, the rapes, the death by illness and neglect, the starvation. We know that they often had no one to cling to but the families they made in the fields and in...

I am really tired of seeing the blogs written by complacent women in their suburban homes, self-righteously shitting on the women who took to the streets for the march on Washington last week. We can pussyfoot around the subject and take care with our words, because as women, we have been taught to be non-confrontational, to be demure. But I am taking back those silly notions and raising a big fat middle finger to the people who deride others for defending the very rights that have brought them to their complacency in their suburban homes. If you chose not to march, that is absolutely your decision, and I will not criticize you for it, for we each have to be comfortable in the ways we raise our voices. But if you are a female who has ever voted, who has ever held a job in the workforce, who has ever used birth control, had an abortion, been assaulted, been harassed, bought a home, owned a credit card, or given birth, then for you to tell the women and men who marched on our behalf th...

"Mommy, you look as pretty as a picture", he said, his three year old arms enfolding me, as I tried to leave the house. "I don't know what I would do without you", he said, his twelve year old arms enfolding me, as I tried to decipher all the mysteries of our family's future. It's funny, with all of the books they write, the articles in magazines, the blogs by mommies, they don't touch on the period of mourning you will endure. They talk about the best rocking chairs (none of them, by the way. The kid doesn't want to rock, they want to suck on your boobs. 24/7. They don't give a shit if it is in a rocking chair, a folding chair, or an electric chair in a lightning storm. They especially don't care if it is a Pottery Barn rocker made from organic free range goose feathers. Boob- it's pretty simple.) They don't tell you how you will blink a handful of times, and that baby who was once content to just lay on your chest, with the...

When I was nineteen years old, only a year into adulthood, and only hesitantly an adult, a man sexually assaulted me. We had met in our apartment complex one night, at the community pool. He was good looking, a military man, cocky and confident, and I was going through the end of my first relationship away from my small hometown. I invited him into my home. I kissed him. I let him into my bedroom. That was where my permission ended. When I told him no, he proceeded to try to shove his genitalia up the leg of my shorts, and when I began to cry and told him to stop or I would scream, he told me I was a tease. And I felt guilt. I am going to say that again- I felt GUILT. As a girl, I had been preconditioned to believe that I could feel bad for getting a guy "worked up", and I didn't kick him out. I slept on the floor next to my bed, while he slept in my bed, and I woke to him trying to do the same thing, only to my face. That time, I was done. Typing these words out makes ...

I am going to preface this with the fact that this story may or may not contain anecdotes about poop. If you have never pooped, you may want to opt out. That's the last warning I will give. Like a prairie dog, it will pop its head out without notice. In June, I took a spectacularly large fall down some spectacularly hard stairs. The sound I made upon landing most certainly broke some sound barriers, and the fuckity fucking fucks that I howled reverberated through our neighborhood of old people. Luckily, they are mostly all old and can't hear that well anymore. The hematoma that decided to grow out of my ass, like an alien in a Sigourney Weaver movie, made my one side look Kardashian-esque. The other side stayed firmly in the middle age mom jean category. Needless to say, my workout routine, scant as it was, was put on the back burner. I gained a good fifteen pounds in two months. I am pretty sure the hematoma weighed at least ten. The other five was sympathy wine. Pinot Grig...

We have all been there, in the throes of self- flagellation, our children leaving hurricanes of crumbs and syrup, our spouses closing a door on us, either literally or figuratively, and we make the ultimate mistake. We open up Facebook. We do it in search of validation, or friendship, and we end up falling deeper into the spiral of self doubt, and I am angry. I am angry that women are already told how high the bar is set from an early age. We should be this thin, this smart, this athletic, this strong. We must be domestic, but not too domestic, as our feminist foremothers would have fought for naught. We must work, but not too much, or our children will suffer. We must live for our kids, and our spouses, but always remember to put ourselves first. The lists of suggestions on how we should be better mothers, better wives, better females is endless, and the pieces of advice seem to contradict each other so fast and so furious, that we realize we must make up our own rules. What we see ...