Let me tell you what it is like to be a modern mother in America, twenty twenty one, fam.

Let me tell you what it is like to set an alarm clock for five am because they will start stealing our hours before they wake. To set an alarm clock and then wake twenty minutes before it, twenty twenty one, fam. Awake twenty minutes before to run a list of emotional energy you’ll extend and expend trying to keep afloat a home or a child’s life or the bed of a man or the hope of a generation or the…

It took me until I was thirty five to
love my body enough to listen
and Believe her when
she told me "no" with her smallest voice
in her biggest time
to let her unfold and fold
wrinkled and rolled
sober
into fits of laughter
to hold her gently when she
cried
to imagine uninhibition

Ravishing
in the beauty of enough
large and containing
multitudes I stopped biting my
fingernails to the quick
catching blood drops on my tongue
while smiling
I let the skin stretched home of my
infants breathe all the way in
until she is full

I…

Happy 13th Birthday

As I start my van this morning, The Waterboys “The Whole of the Moon,” floods the speakers. He looks at me, dimple catching the light, eyes sparkling, and launches into the lyrics with me, lungs open, windows cracked.

“I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands,”

For thirteen years, this morning, nearly every morning, I’ve woke to his cries or his laughter, his voice in my ears. It’s happened, this morning, I am caught up in the great race of his childhood. How are we thirteen?

“You stretched for the stars And you know how…

Two different men. Same monster.

200 or more photos of naked women, many very young, found on personal devices. Five massage therapists, under his employment, reported that he had touched or rubbed them inappropriately, and four said he would touch his own genitals or ask them to touch him. Eight said he would either start the massage completely nude or remove the draping sheets during the treatment. “Don’t tell,” he’d remind them. “My downfall would cost millions of souls a chance at eternity.”

Women are great at don’t tell.

Different stories from different women, many very young, spanning the length…

I don’t remember growing up entrenched in politics but I remember that I said the Pledge of Allegiance just before the pledge to the Christian flag. I don’t remember knowing anyone who wasn’t a Christian, didn’t appreciate traditional family values, didn’t believe in taking the message of Jesus to the world, and didn’t vote Republican because after all, in homeschool culture in rural Kentucky, these are all one and the same.

I don’t remember being told about the electoral college but I do remember being told that God Himself ordained the President and that we should pray endlessly for His…