Entanglement

Did I ever tell you about the time my ex husband tried to jump out of our speeding car in dramatic fashion because he’s basically a whiny little titty baby? Yeah, the memory surfaced recently when I was thinking about how much I miss driving a stick. It was a really nice car, stopped on a dime before he could hurl himself into a ditch. You may be wondering what would drive (no pun intended) a grown man to do such a thing. Well, turns out the asshole who would drive HIS stick into any willing participant, was jealous that I had the nerve to dance with someone who didn’t look like Elaine from Seinfeld on the dance floor. He started a good old fashioned bar brawl over it and nearly got arrested—over me dancing with another man, not over his inability to move his body fluidly to music, although it was an arrestable offense. So, I managed to get us outta there before the cops arrived. Long story short, on the way home, he was so drunk that he unbuckled his seatbelt, opened the passenger car...

My great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee. I don’t know her name. I wish I did. What I do know, is that before she was forced from her home in the Tennessee hills to walk the Trail of Tears, she did the hardest, bravest thing a woman, a mother, could possibly do—she placed her infant daughter, my great-great grandmother, into the care of a local family, sparing the baby from certain death. I have no idea if my great-great-great grandmother survived the Trail of Tears, but roughly one-fifth of the Cherokee population died during the brutal march west. Inherited trauma, generational trauma, intergenerational trauma—however you choose to phrase it, the meaning has been diluted because of over-saturation on socials. From spiritual narcissists seeking followers, to influencers fishing for sympathy and attention, trauma is trendy. Am I wrong? Maybe I just feel things too deeply. Maybe I’m really taking it all in for the first time in my life, that the blood of my Cherokee ancest...

Four hours. Four hours of pacing, panting and panic. We sat with her in a dark closet, sat with her when she crawled under the bed, tried to calm her when she wanted to climb into the cabinet under the bathroom sink and when she tried to wedge herself between a bookshelf and a plant stand—I fucking HATE fireworks. She’s seven years old, so of course we go through this every year, twice a year, for New Year’s Eve and the 4th of July. We’ve tried calming meds. We’ve tried natural supplements and CBD. We’ve tried the thunder coat. We’ve had every TV on to try and drown out the noise. We’ve done ALL the things, okay and nothing helps. Nothing helps when three houses down, people are in the middle of the road launching fireworks that crackle and BOOM through the air, reverbs slamming into the house over and over like a war zone until well after midnight. And we get to go through it all again tonight. Bet. I miss the days of old, when explosives weren’t legal in the hands of drunken (o...