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I believe every person is a poem written by God. The people in charge right now have no appreciation for poetry.

We’re all poems. We’re all music and dance; we’re all art. Jeff Bezos is art, but so is my friend Willie who repeated everything I said back to me with a smile because he needed extra help with social communication. J. D. Vance is art, but so is my friend Deonte who was sitting in the cool down room because he’d been through 3 foster homes—one of them a group home, by God—in the past 3 years and no, staying seated in his chair was not at the top of his list of priorities when he hadn’t had his mood stabilizer that morning. Donald Trump himself is even art, but so was my friend Sariah who had an alphabet soup of diagnoses at the age of 14 and was having a very loud and angry conversation with God about how she was pregnant and couldn’t handle it in the bathroom, so loud that the two other girls who had been in there vaping ran straight past security and out the back doors of the school.

I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding like some sort of Christian asshole. This language is co-opted all the time by people who protect the rights of fetii over grown women, and I hate that. If you have your own children, or have loved other people’s children with any depth, you know in your bones it’s true. You know that DNA has a soul and that the world aches with beauty, and these assholes take that idea from you and use it to hold individual women accountable for their biology’s mistakes.

Meanwhile, these same people are talking about fiscal responsibility and how important it is to tighten the national budget in the name of discipline. Collectively, we can understand. We know that there are some months we just can’t afford a new iPhone. We know that bills come out of our income, and if we want a better income then we need another job or we just need to make do.

We are taught from childhood that money implies a choice. And it’s easy to believe that on a national level that we are being too free with our choices and therefore we need to cut back.

But that’s not how government budgets work. Governments print the money. Governments create the numbers that support the programs that keep God’s poems in living, breathing bodies.

When we start looking at our government priorities and choosing which poem gets to be in which body, we start going down a slope that bodes not well for all of us. Not one of us is a perfect poem, and none of us are in perfect bodies. When we start acting from a place of lack, of tightening our belts, of making difficult choices, something’s got to give.

I know that everyone thinks money is real, but it’s really not. It’s not attached to the gold standard any more. Money is just a number assigned a value, and it’s done by banks. It’s a metaphor.

Banks are not some sort of neutral computer. Banks are made up of individual people who make decisions about value and worth. Each dollar is not a piece of paper, each dollar is math. It’s an idea, not an actual object.

The greatest con ever pulled was people with unlimited resources convincing people without resources that this paper token represents something real. This quarter is equal to one gumball, for example. This hundred dollar bill is equal to one month of electricity. But the problem is that the people in power can change the value of the gumball to 35 cents. You can use more electricity in the summer because it’s 90 degrees outside and you’re running an air conditioner in your bedroom window so you can sleep and therefore go to work rested. Your electricity bill is no longer equal to a $100 bill.

Yes, values can shift, and the market determines the prices for goods and services. But no one really talks about who chooses the value of the tokens.

It’s people that you’ve never met–while you’re still trying to buy a gumball for a quarter. They use this ability to determine the value of the tokens in order to manipulate the economy itself. In an ideal world, they do this to encourage growth so there’s more tokens for everyone.

But things have gotten a little off the rails lately.

Congress just passed an absolutely terrible budget bill. There is a legitimate argument that I’ve seen repeated over and over again that it’s just cutting services for poor people in order to give billionaires bigger tax cuts. But I don’t think anyone understands: billionaires have so many resources that the value of the tokens is completely irrelevant. What does adding a billion dollars to $236 billion dollars do? You still have more money than God. You just have more of it.

That value of the token means something completely different to people who rely on the government for health care. These are people for whom even $100 being taken away means they can’t pay for the electricity that month, and for many others it gets even worse.

If these people don’t have the money for health care, they’re not going to go to the doctor. I know this intimately. Moms are going to skip prenatal appointments, young men are going to just live with that hernia for another month and—and this is the one we really have to pay attention to—people are going to skip their psychiatric drugs.

People who skip their psychiatric drugs aren’t predictable. They are confused and sometimes in literal pain. And people in that space have a tendency to not pay very close attention to things. Their impulse control is down, so they may do things that they don’t normally do. And if they’re brown or black and under extra surveillance anyway due to systemic racism, the people in charge are more likely to notice when they do things that aren’t too kosher. And when they get noticed by the people in charge, they’re more likely to be put in a holding cell. And when they can’t defend themselves because they’re mentally and physically disoriented, they go from a holding cell to a detention center.

Do you see where I’m going?

For people with disabilities, if they don’t get their medication, the same things happen. I saw it in special education all of the time. They get put in a holding cell, and if they can’t defend themselves because they can’t put one thought in front of the other, they go from a holding cell to a detention center.

Please, do you understand?

When you have no problem accessing resources, you never know what it’s like to be in that space because all of your needs are being taken care of. Someone at some bank, or someone in some government, decided that for some reason your poem is more important than the poems who do not have $236 billion dollars and can’t afford their electricity this month because they wanted to sleep at night and show up work the next morning.

I don’t know what your poem sounds like. I don’t know what alliteration it has, if it rhymes, if it’s an epic saga about the battles between the gods or a haiku about a soap bubble in the kitchen sink. I don’t know if your music has a meter or if it’s just the reverberation of one hit on a snare drum.

No poems deserve to go away because the cost of paper that they’re written on went up. No music deserves to stop because the closet it’s being made in could be better used for storing toilet paper.

We are not on the right side of history currently. And I will not stand by while poems and sheet music are shredded for fuel.

Get in touch. Contact me here.

I grew up next to one of the most tightly guarded chemical plants in America. I’ve spent my life knowing what a direct hit means.

The United States bombed nuclear sites in Iran last night. No one died.

I’m not a military strategist, but my childhood was deeply tied to a defense contractor. I grew up next to Dow Chemical—once the home of Union Carbide, briefly merged with DuPont, now fractured again into three entities. The corporate structure is by design. It’s the old story of repackaging global trauma into financial products.

The money is important, but what’s more important is that both of my parents worked at a defense contractor that was described to children as a manufacturer of consumer goods. My dad was a chemical engineer. My mom was an assistant to the outside board of directors. In high school, we went to the company store and were amazed at all of the things “made by Dow” but really made by its subsidiaries, that is, until Dow started selling off its consumer divisions. Suddenly it did not make Scrubbing Bubbles. Then Sudafed. Then the cheap toothbrushes.

Now it’s just chemicals that are mostly unnamed or too confusing for people not in the chemical industry to understand. But we kids knew.

We knew something else, too. We knew that in the late 1980s we weren’t allowed to visit our parents inside the plant anymore, and that if they forgot their IDs–even if they’d worked there for over 20 years and saw the same security guards every day–they’d have to come home and get them before they could get through the two security gates. This was over 20 years before 9/11 shut everything down. We knew that we were on a nuclear bombing list in the 1980s–I not only was conscious of the Cold War in middle school, but would lay in my front yard with my best friend when I was 10 and we would imagine what we would do if a bomb fell from the sky, right then.

That was the reality.

The plant was lit up night and day—one of the best places to go make out in your dad’s car was Overlook Park, which overlooked the cooling ponds. It was lit up like the stars. The metal tubes of chemicals that you could drive a Honda Civic through glowed in their off-white and pale blue, always freshly painted with their hazard symbols clear.

The engineers all worked shift work, so almost everyone had a dad doing night shift at any time. There were always people in the plant. Even in the middle of the night. Hell, you’d make 2 1/2 overtime if you worked on Christmas. There was always security not only at the gates but patrolling the buffer zone between the two 25-foot electric fences with razor wire on the top in small white trucks with the Dow diamond logo on the side.

Dow was not a nuclear plant; it was a chemical plant. But if it had been bombed, dozens if not hundreds of people would have died, even in the middle of the night. And Iran is saying that no one died when three nuclear plants were bombed with Tomahawk missiles from B-2 bombers.

Thank God for international spy networks. We are very, very lucky.

For continuing updates, you can follow Al Jazeera’s latest coverage.

Get in touch. Contact me here.

My son is graduating from high school this Saturday. We had a video chat last night, talking about our dumb Autistic looping thoughts and how hard they are to explain. How lonely it is when no one else seems to get it. Every word he said felt like it had come out of my own head.

I’m the mom. I’m supposed to have things figured out.
But I don’t.
What I do know is that neither of us have any idea what we’re doing with our lives right now.

Grace has been hard to come by lately.
It showed up last night in that conversation, when I realized he was saying things I’d already thought four times that day.

He’s scared he’s going to do everything wrong and end up with something he never planned on—something worse than anything he can imagine.

I get it. That feeling never really goes away.
Even when you’re almost 50.
Even when you’ve lived a whole life, burned it down, and started again.
More than once.

Unfortunately, we fuck up sometimes. Not because we want to hurt people, but because we’re hurting. Or scared. Or miserable.
Sometimes we blow up the good things because we don’t recognize them for what they are until the smoke clears.

That doesn’t make us evil.
It just makes us human.
And humans need grace.

So this is for anyone who thinks they fucked up.
Anyone who blew up their life and is now looking in the ashes and seeing body parts instead of gold nuggets.
Who thinks they’re a piece of shit—and might even be right—
but also needs to know that being a piece of shit doesn’t disqualify you from grace.

I see you.

The misery won’t last forever.
That’s not what we’re built for.
We are built to heal.
Slowly.
Awkwardly.
In fits and starts.
But always, always with the chance to open again.
To try again.

Even if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I didn’t know what to tell my son yesterday. So I told him the truth—that everything he was feeling, I’d felt too.
He said he just wanted to find the right words and maybe people would understand.
I told him I knew exactly what he meant.
I have a goddamn English degree because of this.

But maybe the right words aren’t the clever ones.
Maybe they’re just the real ones.

So, to the person reading this who needs the grace I always forget I have too—
I’m going to tell you exactly what I told my son:

No matter what you do or say, no matter how bad you think it is,
I’m here.
Come sit by me.
We can be fucked up together.

I woke up with a creak this morning. Almost a groan.

I’d slept enough—actually, I’d slept for a very long time—but I could feel my age. For the first time, I felt old.

I apologized to the dogs I’m sitting while making their breakfast, told them we wouldn’t be walking until after dinner, made coffee, and sat at the table. I thought about my dreams. I thought about people I’ve known. I thought about what the hell I’m going to do with the rest of my life.

I thought that maybe I’d been a little too intense with the yoga yesterday—it was the first time I’d actually put my intention on my breath. And I thought about how I’ve expected everyone else to take care of me in ways they never could have known I needed.

And I put that shit to bed.

---

I realized this morning that I’m old enough to be a grandmother.

If I’d had a child at 24, they’d be 24 now. They could easily have a child of their own. Forty-eight is not shockingly young for a grandmother. Ideally, your kid’s a little older—because the older you get, the more you realize that 24 is basically a brilliant disaster—but it’s possible, and in many communities, expected.

My reproductive years ended abruptly at 42 with a full hysterectomy, and the HRT gave me pulmonary embolisms. So I’ve been without estrogen for at least five years. Things are mostly going well—but I still thought I was young. I thought if I lost enough weight, drank enough water, and used enough retinol, I’d stay 25 forever.

And to be fair, thanks to sunscreen, vitamin C serum, and copious hydration both inside and out, my face doesn’t look my age.

But this morning, I felt it.

Yes, the yoga helps. I can still get on the floor with kids and get out of chairs without grunting, but this body is not a machine that generates infinite energy. (What is the name for that lie, by the way? The one that tells us we’re not allowed to run out?)

---

I’ve been sober since 2012, which is amazing. But I’ve still been chasing things like I’m drunk. Hustling. Proving. Craving the rush of getting it right.

I love playing the angles. I love walking into the cave full of dragons and emerging without a scratch. I love living for the story. I love having a life that makes a great memoir.

But I’m tired.

I think I’m done with that.

I think I want to teach little kids English. Help them exist in their weird little brains. I think I want to live somewhere quiet, where nobody knows what I’ve been through. I want to drink good coffee. I want to stop working 60 hours a week on paperwork no one will read, written to satisfy laws that won’t matter by fall.

I want to stop thinking that carrying other people’s burdens is holy. I want to put them all down and creak along, following my heart—and taking the time to figure out what it even wants.

---

I hate saying this. But I’ve done so much. I’ve had to push through and power on, and… I’m tired.

I’ve earned some peace.

I’ve earned my age. I’ve earned respect, and I’ve earned a little wisdom. I’ve earned the right to let other people be. I’ve earned the right to be choosy about who I spend time with. I’ve earned the right to live and let live.

My entire life, I thought if I just followed the rules, everything would turn out fine. That I’d have a good life. But the rules? They don’t mean shit.

I just want to be left alone. Probably with one—or preferably both—of my sons. I want to do what I need to do. I don’t want to live up to anyone’s expectations anymore.

I’m tired.

---

So this is what I’m going to do:

I’m going to ride out this in-between place I’m in.

I’m going to build a plan for wherever I end up next. I’m going to leave other people to their games. I’m going to let myself feel old—but solid. So, so solid.

I’m going to let myself be slow.

I’m going to put down the to-do list. I’m going to trash the bucket list. I’m going to move forward in the knowledge that we only get so much time on this earth—no matter how chipper or magical or manifest-y we think we are.

I’m going to rest in the knowledge that the hurry leads to mental illness. It leads to poor decisions—or worse, decisions you never wanted to make.

I’m going to release everyone from whatever role I thought they should play. I’m going to let them be who they are. I’m not going to resent them for not being what I needed them to be.

I’m going to sit here and release, and see what stays.

Schedules are artificial. Social obligations, even more so.

---

I’m tired.

If you’re tired too, come sit with me.

I’ll put on some ancient flute music. We can color in my bird coloring book. We can read. I can make tea. The coffee’s kind of cold, but I’ll brew a fresh pot. Later, I need to go to the store for dinner stuff, but you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.

Just, please—don’t tell me who I am. Don’t tell me what to do. I don’t fucking care.

I’m going to be slow now.

I’m going to let my insides move like molasses while I sit on a sun-warm rock.

I’ve been through the wars.

Let me be.

I don’t have an address right now. But I did have halfhearted mole enchiladas delivered a few hours ago.

I’m back in the United States. I don’t want to be here—reentry felt like whiplash. Immediately after crossing the border into upstate New York, a rented delivery van rode my ass for over 50 miles. Frustrated and starving, I stopped at a gas station and bought a chicken salad sandwich that tasted like tuna and a carrot cake cupcake with cream cheese frosting that defined its own state of matter.

After a few days avoiding Appalachian spirits I ended up here, close but not too close to the nation’s capital, in a quiet condo in a pleasant neighborhood with two dogs that I didn’t know that my soul was aching for. Something in me is finally not running.

Everything I own fits in my car again. I was like this before I got married; when I came back east after getting my English degree it all fit in a 1992 Saturn. Back then I couldn’t stop the spiral: I drank until I didn’t know how much I’d consumed, ended up dead on a table, coughing up the dead parts of my lungs, and somehow ended up creating two people at the same time. When I slammed into the bottom of the spiral, stunned, I built my way back to being human by cleaving to what other people said was true. I followed the rules. I anticipated the results.

And I lost myself.

Now my things fill a larger, newer car, and I’m pretty sure that everyone I know is deeply worried. The past is looping through the present like static under my skin; everything feels familiar and fragile, like it might break the same way twice. When I talk to people, there are weird silences that I try to fill by trying to explain a perspective on my own life that cannot possibly make sense to anyone who has not lived it.

I’m not trying to create my own originality. I’m not trying to consciously create a distance between myself and the people that I love–and I hope love me in return. I’m just no longer trying to twist myself into something legible. I’m trying to remember how to be honest. I’m trying to understand my own life. I’m trying to create space around the stories that have already been told, to try and remember what was there before the narrative went wildly off the tracks.

The PTA secretary and Girl Scout leader can go in this Sterilite tub over here. The annoyed middle-aged college student can slide into this hanging file. The desperate sci-fi novelist who typed out 38,000 words when she wasn’t copyediting the church newsletter or figuring out if she’s supposed to be a priest can finally take a nap between the pages of that pile of journals stacked next to the bed. The second career teacher trying to both rescue kids destined to be forgotten and change the system so that it never happens again can close her laptop and listen to the birds on the porch.

I can’t remember who I was. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be her again. But I do want to carry the parts that kept glowing, even when everything else burned down.

I promise that someday I’ll have an address again. I’ll set up an altar with a Roth IRA and a lease contract. But right now I have a Toyota RAV4 and a walking appointment with a couple of borrowed senior dogs named Basil and Siena.

And for the first time in a long time, I’m not afraid of the quiet. If you need me, I’ll be learning the language of the birds.

It’s hard right now.
I’m out of the country, but yesterday I heard about a list being compiled by the U.S. government—people diagnosed, in their medical records, as being on the Autism Spectrum. My son is on that list.

The realization carved out a hollow space in my chest. People are already speculating about what comes next, drawing comparisons to history too terrible to name. I woke up in a panic, wondering how to get him out of the country.

Then I spoke with someone far more connected to the divine than I felt in that moment. She asked me what I feel when I’m grounded—when I move beyond panic. I took a deep breath and told her this story.

---

My son was diagnosed with Autism when he was three.
There was a poem circulating back then about how having a child with special needs was like planning a trip to Italy and landing in Holland instead. For me, it wasn’t Holland—it was Bangladesh. I didn’t know the language. Everything felt too close, too loud, too crowded. I wasn’t anywhere near Kansas anymore, and suddenly there was a list—an endless list—of things I had to adjust to.

The 16-page evaluation from the university’s psychology department placed him in the moderate to severe range—what we’d now call higher needs. He barely spoke—maybe three words, one of which was “train.” The string of deficits detailed in that report was terrifying. I enrolled him in a social communication study immediately. I read everything I could find.

For the first time in my life, reading made it worse.

A few months later, exhausted and paranoid, I went to a family reunion in Northern Michigan. Fifteen of us packed into a big house on a lake. My grandfather and his sons—scientists, all of them—sat discussing how to fix the world through engineering. My grandmother, who’d raised ten children, chatted with those of us wrangling kids.

As the day wound down, the kids wandered to the dock to fish. One pontoon boat sat idle—it wouldn’t start. My son climbed into the captain’s chair, playing with the throttle, pretending to drive. He was smiling, chattering in his own language, lost in the joy of a machine he didn’t need words to understand.

My grandparents came to stand beside me, watching him quietly. They knew about his diagnosis—it was early in the days when Autism was entering public awareness. We stood there, the breeze rustling through the trees, saying nothing.

After a moment, my grandfather spoke:
“That kid’s going to be fine.”

Then they walked back toward the house. I stood there, tears streaming down my face—not from sadness, but because it was exactly what I needed to hear. My fear didn’t vanish, but it softened—from red alert to a cautious yellow.

I held onto those words for years.
Through therapies, through preschool, through the Autism program, through mainstreaming, through the shift from special ed to a 504 plan. Now he’s graduating—top 10 in his class. The kid isn’t just fine. He’s thriving.

I always joke that I’m the worst special ed teacher because I tell everyone—parents, teachers, and most importantly, the kids—there’s nothing wrong with them. There’s nothing to fear.

That doesn’t mean we don’t do the work.
I did all of it—read the books, attended every meeting, stayed in constant communication with his teachers, questioned every expert. I finished that study and was so inspired by the advocates around me that I made special education my career.

But really?
The kid was always going to be fine.

---

Right now, things are scary.
My son’s name is on a list—alongside hundreds of thousands of other sons and daughters. That means hundreds of thousands of parents with the same hollow space in their chests. The same rising panic. It’s easy to believe that all we can do is run.

But that wise woman helped me drop beneath the fear—back into the ground, where truth lives.

The kid’s going to be fine.
And so is yours.
And so is yours.

We can do this.
We can fight this.
We just have to do the work.

Yesterday, I was given the gift of perspective.

Some friends have been kind enough to let me stay at their cabin for the month of April. It’s beautiful—on a lake, in the mountains, in the middle of nowhere. I don’t know if I’ve ever known such peace. The ice on lake is melting. The robins are back.

I go for walks in the evenings before dinner and scare the deer with my footsteps on the gravel road, their tails flashing white as they retreat into the brush. I learned what a red-winged blackbird’s song sounds like a couple days ago and realized that not only was the one above me trying to tell me something—he was talking shit about me with a dozen other blackbirds across the rolling farmland. I’m still trying to figure out what they’re saying. When I do, I’ll get back to you.

Anyway. As one does in a cabin in the woods, I’ve been pondering. I’ve been settling into my body, integrating, and trying to figure out what the hell actually happened in my life—as opposed to what other people told me was happening.

Last night, before bed, I had this sort of vision. I pulled out from inside my life and saw it from above—like the view of a landscape from an airplane. I saw woods, and bogs, and winding roads. And I realized those places, those tough moments, were just part of a whole. While I was in them, it was like being trapped in a haunted house where every moment was terrifying. I walked through it in fits and starts, keeping my children close, but inside I was trying to predict when the clowns would jump out of the corners or when the undead woman in the white dress would come at me with the bloody knife.

I was breathing carefully. I was memorizing patterns. I was just trying to get through it.

The only difference is: the haunted house was real.

But from above—it sucked, yes. But it wasn’t everything. It was just part of the whole. And I got a little, tiny bit angry.

It is very easy to label what happened. And I admit: I took on the label of abuse like a life vest after I was finally able to get away. It was comforting. It gave shape to the experience. It made it real—after years of being told, or telling myself, that it wasn’t.

But I thought back to another time, another bog. I was walking home when a man grabbed me from behind, threw me to the ground, and shoved a gun in my face less than a block from my apartment. My parents came to town that weekend from the quiet place they lived—where this supposedly never happened. My mother said, in awe, “This is the kind of thing that makes men crazy and live on the street.”

Her words weren’t prophetic, thank God. I didn’t end up living on the street in that particular way. But her label didn’t help. It didn’t describe the experience. And even calling it a “mugging” now flattens what happened.

I experienced the fear and helplessness of being on the wrong end of a gun held by a teenager who had no other way to survive. I experienced the consequences of having the mistaken identity of someone who had resources I didn’t have.

The haunted house I lived through years later was far more complex than anything the word abuse could hold. Sure—some parts of it meet the definition. But the lived experience of terror, hypervigilance, disassociation, and strategy—it went far beyond that.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the label abuse was created and defined by institutions largely built by men—men trying to name the mistreatment of women, children, and sometimes other men. I think it came from an honest place. I think they were trying to apply the logic of Linnaeus to something wild and bleeding. But that’s the problem.

Labels like this imply there’s a method. A system. That if you name it correctly, if you follow the steps, if you do the right paperwork or tell the right story, everything will be okay.

That’s not how it works when you’ve just left the haunted house.

These labels, and the protocols attached to them, were built by people who mostly have not walked through the wild. In fact, a lot of the time, those people helped build the haunted house—whether they knew it or not.

And I’m sure, from their perspective, it all looks very different. If it was so bad, I should’ve spoken up. If it really hurt, I should’ve named it. If the person running the haunted house didn’t know, how could they be responsible?

Something that terrified me can be perceived as an honest mistake. I know that. I know people—experts, even—can look at every part of my life and chalk it all up to miscommunication, bad luck, unfortunate timing. They can slice it up and explain it away.

That’s fine.

They can keep justifying their systems. They can preserve the illusion that everything makes sense, that every haunted house is really just a poorly lit hallway.

But they—and the systems they operate in—do not get to name my terror.
They do not get to name my pain.

That forest. That murk. That thing that, from above, has no real name—they’ll never know it. They’ll know their name for it. But they’ll never know me.

This is an ancient story. It just keeps changing names.

I lived the story. I made it through the wild.

They’ll never understand, and their expertise—fought for, published, defended—means nothing.

When I was in the depths of my marriage, I went back to college to become a special education teacher. 

At the end of two long years of classes, I had my Internship Year, which is known everywhere else as student teaching. My first semester was my special education placement, and I was in a school with a woman who was famous in the urban district in which I’d previously worked. When I told my former colleagues that I was working with Katie, they just sighed while looking into the middle distance.

Katie was divorced–loudly and unapologetically. She was also high-energy brilliant, but we all know which of these is more important. I felt a kind of fear around her, like if I didn’t hold my ground my feet would slip out from under me. One day, she was talking about her hot mess of teenaged children, her condo, and the minivan that served as a relic of her marriage to “that asshole”. While I was politely listening and wondering when we were going to get to the teaching, a voice from my reptilian brain said, clear as a bell, “She just didn’t try hard enough.”

In the midst of the rage after my own divorce was finalized, this came back to haunt me. I was pacing the downstairs of my crappy, expensive rental house while my kids were at their father’s when it flooded back. My hands flew to my face as my eyes started to burn with the coming tears. I realized that I had been a fucking cunt.

I took a lot of philosophy classes in college and I’d never been comfortable with Plato. The idea of soldiers only seeing the shadows of reality on the wall of a cave seemed reductive and kind of lazy. However, as an older and wiser woman I know that sometimes this is devastatingly true. 

When I was married, I had been looking at the shadow on the wall of what I was supposed to be as a wife and mother and defining my entire life around being of service to men and children, when really all I was seeing was a shadow. And now that I’ve turned around, seen the truth, and exited the cave altogether, I have to admit that Plato was right.

If you’d asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had been raised in a tradition of powerful women who just happened to have large numbers of children. They commanded the room and were considered brash, their laughs were too loud and they were comically delusional in thinking that they knew the ways of men. How could they? They’d been in a house raising children their whole lives. 

At the same time, they were revered for their amazing brains: my paternal grandmother had been the third woman to graduate from a major polytechnical university in New England and the first to graduate from its architecture program. My grandmother on my mother’s side knew the stats of the Detroit Tigers like the back of her hand.

However, neither of these women, even my brilliant, visionary, trailblazing architect grandmother, served any real economic purpose. When they married, they were strictly mothers. Their purpose and contribution to society was their children. This was more important than anything else and was the crux of their value, to the point that they weren’t allowed to work outside the home. The children were more important than any money they could bring in. 

I’d like to say that it was just the times, but it continues to a certain extent today. I know. I stayed home with my children under the guise that we couldn’t afford child care. 

This tradition of service, in the shadows of the cave, looks like the responsibility of mothers in a gauzy haze of love for their children since the beginning of time. Their devotion looks like a potent combination of hormones and duty that is built on sacrifice but is worth it for the love and connection. 

However, the reality is that the structure of the American family balances on the fact that we have reduced children to resources that are so valuable that the primary function of their mothers is to ensure they become contributing members of society. Children, whether we’re able to admit it or not, are potential economic units that in the future will produce the labor–and therefore dollars–to keep the future economy running as smoothly as possible. Ultimately, it is hoped that they will continue its inevitable expansion as America retains its economic primacy. 

It all falls apart, however, when this family structure evaporates. What happens if a woman is brave enough to go against the primary economic provider for the family–the children’s father–and go out on her own? 

They’re called custody battles for a reason. Assets are divided, and that includes the children. Attorneys must determine not only the value of the house, cars, and the 401k, but they also have to quantify and balance out time with the kids. Who owns these precious, potential means of production? 

The end run of associating the family with capitalism is that when the family breaks down, it is the woman who suffers. The reason a family dissolves is usually associated with morality, because that’s what we’ve been led to believe that a family is based on. But in the end, in the final quantifying, it turns out that the economic value of the unit of production is greater than the moral, somewhat romantic shadows created by the fire in the cave. And this is where it can get ugly.

Consider the women after the contract is officially broken by the court and they’re left alone in a house with children who are a little bit lost and definitely unmoored. If a woman dares to be proud of what she’s done, and dares to create a new type of family instead of pining away for what she’s lost in depression, substance abuse, shame, or a combination of all three, there are definite consequences. 

She’s creating something for these young economic units outside of the realm of to whom they really belong. She’s sneaking around outside of the purview of not only men in general but, more importantly, out of the realm of the man who owned them. The children are resources that belong to the man who was kind enough to put her in charge of maintaining the children. In the shadow of the cave, this kindness was duty. When you turn around and look at the objects in the fire, the kindness turns out to have teeth.

This woman has forgotten that she does not own them. They are resources that she has stolen. She is brashly claiming something as her own that she has no right to, that does not belong to her, and is nurturing and training them outside of the male gaze. 

The act of creating something beautiful out of change makes her a dissident, to be sure. But in the eyes of those in charge, she is a thief. 

I left a marriage, a country, and—maybe most of all—a version of myself I had to believe in to survive.

I left safety that wasn’t safe. Roles that didn’t fit. Apologies I didn’t owe. Expectations I never agreed to but still carried like debt. I left spaces where I was constantly translating myself into something more palatable, more helpful, more silent.

What I’m writing now is what I couldn’t say then.

I’m writing the edges—of grief, of reinvention, of rage that became clarity. I’m writing what it means to escape both a life and a narrative and to rebuild something that actually fits. I’m writing about leaving a country that promised purpose but delivered sickness. I’m writing about women and systems and the lies we have to peel off just to breathe.

This isn’t a blog about healing, exactly. Healing is too polite. This is about aftermath and freedom. It’s about the messy, gorgeous middle—when you’ve jumped but haven’t landed yet, and the wind is the only thing keeping you upright.

If you’re here, I hope something in this speaks to the place in you that’s also standing at the edge—wondering what would happen if you took the breath they always tell you to take, but instead of looking inward, jump.