I’m a bit late in sharing this here due to Hurricane Irma, but I’m still smiling about having a short essay of mine called “Does It Matter If I Never Publish My Memoir?” published on the Brevity blog. Thank you, Allison Williams!
For those unfamiliar, Brevity is an online journal featuring flash creative nonfiction. Check out their recently published 20th anniversary issue.
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I’m participating in Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge. This is #15 of 52.
We are in the middle of a great struggle. These are historic times. No one knows when this period of struggle will end or how it will turn out. Too many changes seem to come too fast. We can’t keep up with it all. Some days, the challenge feels overwhelming and it’s difficult to focus enough to fight effectively.
I’ve spent a good portion of 2017 consumed with the fight to protect the ACA from being repealed. I currently purchase health insurance for myself and my kids via the ACA marketplace. Although my husband is retired, our household income is still fairly high, so I receive only a very modest tax credit and our insurance is not at all cheap. But we are guaranteed coverage for routine exams and immunizations, and we have some security knowing that we’ll get help paying for those unexpected illnesses and injuries that all parents of kids deal with. I have the security of knowing that I can’t be turned away or charged more due to chronic conditions I was diagnosed with twenty-some years ago. We have some security knowing that, even though our out-of-pocket responsibility is substantial, there is a limit to what we’d be expected to pay in a crisis year. And, we have the freedom to structure our life in the way that suits us best without needing for me to obtain a full time job solely to get health insurance. Continue reading “The GOP Is Our Health Care Disaster”
Too much is happening too quickly, and every day I feel sucked into the chaos. This is a bad time to be a worrier.
On Friday evening into Saturday as the effects of the new president’s travel ban became apparent, I could not force myself away from the news reports. I could not escape the sense that I was witnessing all that I so loved about my country slipping away. The laws we enacted to protect the vulnerable are proving to be much more tenuous than we assumed they’d be. It’s been too easy these first two weeks for the new administration to annihilate laws. And there seems to be no one with any power willing to be a hero of the people.
By the end of the day on Saturday, my joints ached and my chest felt tight. All I wanted to do was cover myself with a blanket, have a stiff drink, and detach. And I’m not an immigrant or a refugee. My skin color is the same as that of the men who penned our Constitution. I will not be personally violated by the ban or the wall. But I am a citizen of this country, and I care.
I am a person who often feels too much. When I read about people being put on planes and sent back to dangerous places where they have no home or resources, I cannot be neutral. When I read about children unable to be united with their parents, I am reading as a mother, and I know the pain I would feel if I was helpless to keep my children out of danger. I don’t understand how anyone hearing these stories cannot feel this pain, how anyone can turn their back while people are being treated this way. Continue reading “Combating Chaos”
There are things we do not discuss openly in every family I’m part of. Things that have happened, things that have been done, things that are going on now. There are whispers, meant to be confidential, then more whispers, until the whispers become sighs we all perceive but never mention out loud.
We hide things, because we fear the repercussions of revealing our secrets. Someone might be hurt. Someone might be exposed. Relationships might break down. We drift past each other in silence, too afraid to open our mouths, not wanting to cause pain. We cannot say what we actually feel, what we really mean, so we say less and less of any consequence to each other. We talk about how the job is going, what we watched on TV, how hot it’s been this year. We avoid words like angry, hurt, lonely, lost, afraid. We learn which questions never to ask.
The mention of a specific person can cause pain. The one in jail. The one who left. The one who died. The one who is sick now. A person becomes a secret. The utterance of a certain name carries shame.
The secret child who was given away. That’s me. I was that secret, and I am a secret now. Continue reading “Family Secrets”
The past ten days have been rough. I have never before cried because of an election result, but I have cried multiple times since Hillary Clinton conceded. My body aches from the stress it is now holding. It has been a very long time since I physically held this much stress, and I know how bad for my body this is, and I know I must take steps to relieve my body of this stress. Writing here is one of those steps.
I am more afraid for my country now than I was after 9/11. That was an attack from the outside, a threat I knew everyone here would unite against. This is different. This is a threat perpetrated from the inside by my own countrymen and countrywomen, a calling to dismantle the very systems that have made the U.S. the free and prosperous country it has been for so long.
People are ascending to power who believe that they should control what the press is allowed to say about them, that they should control who is or isn’t allowed to call themselves American, that they should control how U.S. citizens define their own identities, that they should control what U.S. citizens can or cannot do with their own bodies.
Let’s not pretend this isn’t happening. Continue reading “Election Aftermath”
