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Multigenerational Mom Muses on Twin Toddlers & Twenty-Something Daughters

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women’s voice

on our mothers’ shelves

are many manuscripts 
just bursting at the seams,
many spellbound magic books
for healing broken things
aged, patinaed, patched and frayed,
still sitting on the shelf
some come loose, some pinned with twine
but all chock full of wealth.
with charms to gall an adder’s sting
to root out poison, rot
engendered by the canon always
leaning for its shot.
halfcocked, they aim their leather spines
at us, our Magic Place
that burns, bewitches, weakens them
they call us  a disgrace.
they disregard our wisdom
and our sage and studied views,
claim we know not what we say,
discount us as confused.
in truth, they're sore afraid of us,
our planet and our stars,
our bodies, hearts, and most, our minds,
our endless reservoirs.
our mother's shelves hold manuscripts
some old and well-worn songs
to rattle out the many truths
and right the many wrongs.
so light the fire, put pots to boil,
then toil and twist and throw
a list of all the loathsome trolls
make thick their gruel of woe
remind them there’s a place for us,
we have the right and might
to bring them down to rubble dust
we've just begun to fight.

Heather Peters Candela

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We Need Women Writers

for honeyed light,
and fuzzy blossoms,
warmer breezes,
brighter days
daffodil and
cricket whispers
Mary Oliver
songs of praise.

calmer seasons,
softer reasons,
searching, finding
helping ways,
words of wisdom,
sanguine answers,
Barbara Kingsolver
takeaways.

calm reserves
and ample courage,
understanding
of the mess,
fortitude
to band together,
Margaret Atwood
cleverness.

Mary Shelley’s
flip the monster,
Virginia Woolf’s
collective views,
Madeline Miller’s
new perspective,
Alice Walker’s
use the bruise.

Perkins Gilman’s
righteous anger,
Angelou’s
escape the cage,
Angela Carter’s
dark and twisty,
Hansberry’s
take center stage.

Women Writers
came before us,
Women Writers
writing still.
may we read them,
may we be them,
grab our quills,
exert free will.

do some damage.
wreak some carnage.
sound the gongs,
and right the wrongs.
strong solutions
and ablutions,
lead the way
to brighter days.








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What Next?

                              1

On either side, the forest stood, pallor gray in winter wood–

timber guards of maidenhood, keystone for the common good,

in times soon best forgot.

And where the mist wove and crept, where the light drowned and wept,

where the moonbeams never slept, the women bore their lot.

In four gray walls, in high-flung towers, hermetically sealed like hothouse flowers,

protection from themselves and others, resided Eve’s ancestral daughters,

in times soon best forgot.

And in those walls the women lay, so privileged their livelong day,

no work, no fear, no joy, had they; childbearing was their lot.

                              2

As in the tower’s hidden might, they wove and knit, as only right,

inside their wombs, so round and tight, the future of the kingdom bright,

               in times soon best forgot.

Wordlessly, they wove away, fearfully trusting, and obeyed;

a curse was on them if they stayed; submission was their lot.

But moonbeams have a certain slant that conjures up subversive chant,

and daughter, mother, matron aunt grew alchemized, recalcitrant

                in the land time best forgot.

Inside the marble masonry the daughters knit most seamlessly,

plots they hatched most shamelessly. Wallflowers, they are not.         

                              3

Each petal, thorn, each bud and fruit, each piston and each new-sprung shoot,

hemlock, wolfsbane, jessamine root with burning ache construct their soup,

a deadly broth to give the boot

to times now best forgot.

Bubble double toil and trouble, hurly-burly, then redouble,

bring it down to stub and rubble,

               this lot that men begot.

Eye of newt and adder’s sting baboon’s hair like orange string

in the charm, then watch it bring all the good trouble, they sing

               in a land that’s now beset

with ache inside the tower base that rises up, begins to rage,

to caterwaul and loose the cage and crack each parapet.

                              4

‘til brick by brick, women dismantle the mandible and tooth enamel,

the clenching jaw, the instrument panel

hissing and fizzing and snuffing the candle,

               watching it all fall away              

until…

Grim harvest resting at the base

head in basket, sore disgraced,

lies —

some claim –

a devil’s orange face.

But we’re too busy planning more.                       Instead, we say,             

                              5

               What next?

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Scriptural Limitations and the SBC Vote

Well, I thought (knew) it would happen. And now it has. Church has officially attacked IVF via the preacher men at the Southern Baptist Convention. (How long ’til government follows suit?) The measure states: “Couples who experience the searing pain of infertility can turn to God, look to Scripture for numerous examples of infertility, and know that their lament is heard by the Lord, who offers compassion and grace to those deeply afflicted by such realities.”

Look to scripture.

The Old Testament discusses infertility (in terms of barrenness) far more often than the New. And as I recall, a couple times, it involves handmaids – which maybe wasn’t quite the way the intended children were to be supplied, but the Lord works in mysterious ways, isn’t that the saying? And the sons of those handmaids were blessed many times over in the bible.

Barrenness is explored in the New Testament, too. In this one instance (unless I’ve missed more), an angel appears, and promises the man a son. Always, a son. This time, John the Baptist.

So, the Baptists these days will say that children are granted if you desire them enough, pray for them enough, rely on your dreams and your prophets and your handmaids enough, maybe then, you’ll conceive.

But here’s my question: when the desire is there, but it wanes (like in fizzles and flops) then what?

Will these preacher men at the SBC also “look to scripture” when they and the men of the fold suffer erectile disfunction? Will Viagra likewise be opposed?

But then, there’s no male version of infertility in scripture. No male version of a handmaid for women to bed either. So surely Viagra’s fair game. It’s an answer to prayers, after all.

I mean, whatever it takes if you’re a man.

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Here in the Apple-Picking Fall

I’m a big believer in The Great Pumpkin. In nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.

In golden light and golden hours. In seizing sunsets as the days grow shorter, when the coolness creeps in…

It’s the best time to live.

Get rid of the bullshit, the hypocrisy, the shifting, shiftless, gossiping gangs with curled lips and flapping tongues,

and motives materializing in the mist behind every “Hello.” (If they even say hello before the “Can you…?”)

Nope. 

Give me real women, with liberal amounts of authenticity. With spice, and spitfire, and gumption and ample amounts of wine (but no whine).

And definitely no fall in line.

Obedience is overrated.

If we’re gonna fall, fall free.

With wills of our own.

Feisty Witches. 

Apple-picking Eves. 

We know what we want and get it for our selves.

And the men we choose, if we choose them, snag apples too. Freely with fervor.

So drop the fig leaves and pretenses.

Celebrate your charms, cast your spells

Seize your solstice and make your mark.

Invite starry nights and moonshine into your life. Mushrooms and a touch of madness— even a hint of melancholy, too — to fully appreciate life

Here in the Apple Picking Fall.

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Until Then

Picture this… Mothers and Daughters

Their procreative powers celebrated and valued

Along with

Their minds and voices, acknowledged and revered

— whether child-bearing, child-rearing, bread-winning, globe-setting or game-changing.

Women, not relegated to house and home, but women, free to regulate themselves.

Free to roam. 

It could happen. It still could.

Picture so many women, Mothers and Daughters, 

set to tell their stories. Mothers and Daughters

with stories like mine and hers and theirs. 

Stories ready to be sung out, loud and proud. 

Ready to upset the maelstrom of men and their spheres of control, 

their spears of control,

manipulating stories.

controlling bodies, 

codifying minds. 

Women set to tell their stories unhobbled by laws, unhanged with stigma, unsacrificed on altars, no longer denigrated and diminished.

Picture Mothers and Daughters unlabeled.

Unlabeled as virgins, ladies, cock-teases, cougars, sluts, spinsters, trophy wives, whores, hags. Frigid or loose. Nasty or pure.

Unlabeled. Unhysterical, Unfat, Unskinny, Unugly, Unhot.

Unused and Unabused. 

But no longer UnSung. Singing so many stories.

It could happen. It will. 

That’s where me and my kind come in. The writers, the poets, the instigators.

The storytellers.

We play a fundamental role in the histories of Her Stories. 

We keep the home fires burning, 

Fostering and fueling far more than fires in hearths.

Feeding fires in hearts.

Encouraging stargazing, fire eating, and drops of Jupiter in our hair. 

It’s in our dna, and has been, since the wheel first whetted the knife. Caves first oxidized hands.

And we’ll keep doing it until the reach of our arms and the span of our hips, and the stride of our steps no longer fits the limits of their boxes.

Until our potential is so great, vibrates so powerfully, wells and swells so phenomenally, that their spheres all burst and new worlds are all birthed, new galaxies unfold…

And we all find a place. 

Our place –

– for ourselves and our daughters. 

Until then.

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I Am Not JUST A Woman

My Advance Comp students have been writing counter-narrative poems this week — poems about how they are so much more than what people judge them and stereotype them as. I wrote one right along with them — one that if you know me, you know I feel quite passionate about…

“I Am not JUST a Woman”

I do have all the girl parts and love to play the girl parts – fix my hair, wear my makeup, get dressed up to go out on the weekends,

But I am not JUST a woman.

I do know my way around a kitchen, and I love to don my apron and bake up batch after batch of cookies,

But I am not JUST a woman.

I do love my children, and being pregnant were some of the most fulfilling and awe-inspiring times of my life,

and I do love to kick off my shoes go barefoot through the clover and feel the chill of the hardwood floors on the soles of my feet,

but I am not JUST a woman.

I do get emotional sometimes. I cry at Publix commercials and when the guy gets the girl at the end of the film, and at some point (or twelve) in the classroom when I’m proud;

I get hormonal and hangry and chocolate and ice cream are my favorite go-to craving cures,

But I am not JUST a woman.

I might struggle to bench (just-barely) the bar; I might lose at arm-wrestling matches 10 out of 10 times, but don’t mistake me for weak and don’t mistake me for soft and don’t call me pushover and lady-part names.

I am not JUST a woman (and those parts are fiercer and stronger and more pain-tolerant and flexible than any part the opposing team has EVER possessed.)

I may be quiet, not speak very loud. I may be shy and not look you too long in the eyes. I may take care with just how I interact,

But I say what I mean and I mean what I say; I have opinions and a voice and I give both the light of day. I fight for my rights and for others each day, especially the ones whose lives get foul play.

I am not JUST a woman.

I’m a baker and scholar, a nurturer and warrior, outspoken and introverted, emotional and rational, I’m female and fierce.

I drive a minivan. And my kids crazy. The ones at home and the ones in my classroom.

I am quirky and classic, passionate and calm, powerful and tender, tough and tired.

I’m tired of seeing people labeled and dismissed for their skin and their clothes and their gender and their build and their address and their hair, their sexuality, their politics, their country of origin, their faith.

II am a human and a humanitarian.

I am so much more than the sum of my parts, and I am so much more than JUST a woman.

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Carpe Diem and the Soggy Bits

I woke up this morning at 4:14. I didn’t want to. I wanted to sleep. I’m beyond exhausted. I feel like the soggy bits at the bottom of a garbage disposal… all churned up and left to be washed away. But I couldn’t go back to sleep. I lay there tossing and turning, trying to quiet my mind. My mushy, damp, mushroom filled mind. 

It wallows in darkness all the time now. After all, this is the year of living with mortality. From the five hundred thousand and counting deaths due to Covid, to the traumatic cardiac event that cost my father his life, to the long-suffering, slow loss of  my aunt, it has been a tough year. 

I was going try to fight through the wakefulness this morning. Try to lie there, mind churning, stirring and slicing my thoughts, leaving me anxious and exasperated. But then I remembered the article I read this week… about how we need quiet time, Me Time. Time with no interruptions, no pressing obligations (well, they’re there… but nothing can really be done about them at 4 AM), and how those simple solitary hours can be some of the most important, and most difficult, to find. Especially for a 54 year- old grieving daughter and niece, who is also the mother of twin soon-to-be-seven year old sons, as well as adult daughters, who still pull at the strings of my heart and the thoughts in my mind, no matter how grown they get. Plus, I’m the wife of a coach getting geared up for spring ball, and the teacher of 160-plus students. In a pandemic year. All of this. In a pandemic year. 

Let me say, this year has shown me why teachers retire after 30 years. I get how if you start your career straight out of college, a dew-skinned, wide-eyed, tenderfoot, that by the time you hit 52, you’re spent. You’ve developed thick skin, side-eyes, and calloused heart. (Let it be known I work hard every single day not to let my heart grow hard. My conscience is a pumice stone, grinding away the calcium deposits and thick skin. But also let it be known that tenderness makes my job way harder. It leaves me wide open to wounds and weeping.) 

But alas for me, I was never a 22 year old teacher. I am a product of a nontraditional trajectory: back to school at 32, graduated at 34, 20 years a teacher, and way beyond spent. Emotionally and mentally. 

And I know it’s not all teaching that’s done it to me — because my nontraditional trajectory didn’t stop at my late-blooming career path. I also decided to have a second set of children, twin boys no less, at 48. Boys who didn’t sleep for sixteen months – which may be partly why (nearly seven years later) I still can’t seem to catch up… and why waking this morning at the ass crack of day’s beginnings was so incredibly insulting.

And I know it’s not all parenting primary-school twin boys that’s exhausted me.  Because the pandemic has saddled me with all sorts of extra weight too… the five-to-ten pounds worth of stress eating because, hell, carpe diem, for tomorrow we may… well, you know. I mean, after all, 500,000 have, plus my father and aunt. And then there’s the return of teenaged acne from the fabric masks I wear faithfully, and the lack of smiles from my students (maybe just because I can’t see them under their own faithfully-worn masks or maybe because they aren’t smiling either). And the continual waves of students leaving for quarantine and returning from quarantine. And my asynchronous classroom adaptations so hopefully they don’t feel as lost and forlorn as I do. But they do…

And I know it’s not all pandemic. Because I’m also executor to my father’s estate. Which means I haven’t had time to truly mourn because I’m dealing with the load and stress and anxiety of dealing with finances and legal matters that are completely alien to my being. It’s like handing a toddler a buzzing chainsaw and telling her to clean out the underbrush. It’s too heavy. There’s way too much room for error. There’ so much I could do wrong. Chop down the ancient oak or the beautiful dogwoods, get tangled up in poison ivy, raze my legs right out from under me.

I need supervision every step of the way. And thank heavens I’ve had it. I have a family of experts in various arenas and they’ve all lent a hand. Me, all I’m good at is the grunt work. The clearing of the debris. I guess that’s why I have the chainsaw, after all. But, have mercy!

So here I am, typing away my innermost thoughts on my computer (at now, 6 AM), the warm glow of a lamp next to me, warm coffee in my favorite mug,and nothing to keep me company but the quiet hum of the boys’ white noise machines and the keyboard recording my inner-most thoughts. 

And not gonna lie, it’s kinda nice. (Not saying nice enough to attempt on a daily basis because, by GOD, I’m running on dregs.) But still, kinda nice. Like the distinct pleasure of low tide. There are tiny, sparkling bits of peace unearthed or deposited there in the newborn damp.

I guess there are gems to be found in the soggy bits once the churning has paused after all. 

So, right now, I’m actively searching for them. I’m using these newborn, wet moments of my day to write my memoir, to chase my future. To birth yet another nontraditional career inside the trajectory of my nontraditional life. 

I’m believing in myself. For at least a hot minute — before the sun comes up and the boys wake up and the day’s demands start rising again… leaving me fighting for life. Not just my life, but all life. My boys’, husbands’, girls’, students’, society’s. 

It makes for an exhausted life. But a worthy one. So carpe diem it is.

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I Escaped a Cult Once, Can our Country do the Same?

The happenings in the world have sent me toppling backwards — years backwards — into the fear and frustrations and seemingly inescapable situation of my past. Of the cult I grew up in and the people who were taken prisoner by its promises and leadership.

I know what a cult can do. I know the appeal of a leader who focuses on your innermost desires and vows to put an end to your most paralyzing fears. I know what that kind of leader can do.

I know how his testimonies speak to good people with legitimate concerns. I know how his scripture touting soothes, how his pulpit pounding activates, how his charisma intoxicates.

How his promises to carry you, save you, deliver you from evil are so very welcome in our dark world. How the traits he embodies (or at least professes) — strength, charisma, Godliness — are just what you’ve been looking for to bring you — to bring everyone — into the promised land.

But he’s no Moses.

Nor is he the chosen one to lead anyone out of darkness — despite the genuine hopes behind those who support him.

But be wary of the “Hope” this man holds aloft with his dazzling promises.

I’ve lived among false promises such as he proports. I’ve watched my family — and countless others — fall under the weight of sincere hope, falsely met.

I was speaking recently with a friend of mine who shares my past and also overcame it — and is as equally worried (and furious) about what she sees unfolding as I.

In her own words, “The exploitation of a good heart is the vilest of crimes.”

And I agree.

I’ve seen far too many good hearts (then and now) used as ammunition; I’ve seen too much real hope twisted to poison. I’ve seen too many rational heads uprooted, unhinged, and made ready to destroy others — and themselves. United with him, it becomes “Us vs Them,” and the fallout is deadly. Families torn apart. Friendships. Self worth. So many lives destroyed.

And the motivations I see now are the same as the motivations of the good hearts who found themselves entangled in my childhood cult: To align more closely with God’s commandments and Christ’s teachings and traditional family values. At least that’s what so many of those who follow Trump are seeking. Despite the fact that his promises resemble nothing of Christ’s promises. Nothing of true Christianity.

White nationalism is not Christian. Prejudice and pride is not Christian. Political power over moral duty is not Christian.

Christ asked that we protect the weak, include the marginalized, serve the downtrodden. We are supposed to be good stewards of this earth, not blatantly ignore — or participate — in its destruction.

Trump’s platform is the reverse of Christ’s message. But the lambs have laid down with the wolf by the millions.

Half our country has fallen victim to a leader whose ability to bend and break wills is mind-blowing in its potency. And the fallout has already begun.

And, sadly, I’ve seen it all before.

But this time, it’s not the hearts and lives and futures of a (relatively speaking) small congregation in Texas at stake. It is the vast population of these United States. And it is not only our freedom that is threatened, it is the very soul of decency.

Yes, the happenings of this past week — and throughout the past four years — have sent me toppling backwards into a time and place in my life where my freedom was nonexistent, my future bleak and seemingly out of my control, my frustrations at those who couldn’t see the truth, overwhelming.

But this isn’t my past. It is my present. And I am terrified about what my future might hold.

I was able to escape a cult like this one once before. It took courage, unmitigated strength, and a willful refusal (every single day) to listen to the sugar-coated lies of those who would eagerly lead me astray. I had to guard myself at every angle, lest they slip the Kool Aid into my mouth, lest they place the blinders over my eyes.

I pray our country can now do the same.

But, y’all… I’m really, really scared.

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