The Total Femme

Our adorable rescue doggie has a fabulous name and is a fabulous fellow. He’s a chihuahua mix and he came with all his vet records (unusual!) and the amazing name of Mannix Miller.

He loves Tex. He loves Tex sosososososo much.

Ol’ whats-er-name (moi) is ok in a pinch.

He really loves Tex.

When Tex abandons him (like by going out in the front yard to do a little weeding and not needing to supervise a canine) it is very painful to Manny. There’s a period where he motors around the house fussing. There’s a period where he’s all wah wah baby.  

Recently, I received a rejection from the Lambda Literary Emerging Writers Retreat. It’s the second time I’ve applied and this time around, I pretty much ripped my heart out and presented it to them. I mean, I was more honest and more open than I think I’ve ever been in an application. I told them why I need them, but I also told them why they might need me. Things like fostering intergenerational queer family and combatting ageism in the queer community (I’m 62 and often feel like I’m completely out of the running, over with, done for). I talked to them like they were my people, like they were on my side, like they might care.

The form rejection really hurt. I mean, I’ve been a writer my entire life and I’m used to rejections, but this one felt so personal, like their political nixed my personal like they think I’m an old white dyke with boring shit to say and probably a terf – in other words, I just went to the worst possible scenario. The nightmare one. The one I sososososo hope isn’t true but it worries me. Because my people! Who are my people if not the other queers who write? Why don’t they want me?

I am wah wah baby.

I am wicked wah wah baby.

There are disappointments that gut you. That get you right where you live. That you just have to wait until you’re breathing again and then allow things to settle back around you. To come back into color. To remind you that it really isn’t the worst the only the last the final the most fucked.

There’s nothing you can really do when you’re wah wah baby like that. I admit to unsubscribing to Lambda’s emails (they kept asking for money, it was annoying me), but I don’t want to get all bitter and messed up in the head and heart. Even though it’s a seriously low blow, I know perfectly well that I’m going to keep writing and connecting with other queer writers and eventually I hope my work will get out there. And of course, I wish every joy to the writers there. I just so would have liked to be among them.

Nothing really helps in these situations, my pumpkin pies, my darling glitter and lamé potatoes, my strawberries, my mangos, but we lean on our sweethearts and our friends and maybe we have a little fit where we have to stomp around the block or abscond somewhere for a little bit because we are not good company, but we come around and we come back and we don’t let the turkeys get us down, or at least not for long. Certainly not forever.

We call on our diabolical, our whimsical, our unbeatable.

We wah wah and we carry on.

Carry on with me, today, you fruity fruity beauties! Because I am not the only femme who has weathered soul disappointment. No, but we weather together.

In queer femme sisterhood, we weather.  

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com

Boston’s queer film fest, Wicked Queer, has throwback showings of films from previous decades – fun! Along those lines, Tex and I recently had our own little throwback viewing of the 2011 webseries “Unicorn Plan-It.”

We laughed our asses off at it back in the day, but would it stand the test of time? Yes! In spite of some extremely questionable one liners here and there, we still loved the goofy sweet lesbonic-ness of the Unicorn Plan-It world.

Harmony is a yoga gal, in love with her big dumb girlfriend, J, and just getting ready to launch her really tubular business, the Mobile Om. Things start to get a little dicey, though, and even a serene goddess like H might start to lose her shit a little.

And people, nobody says, “Love and light!” bitchier than Harmony.

Deep gratitude to the Unicorn Plan-It crew for the spot on femmetastic character of Harmony. May she live forever in lesbo media history!

Every Friday, I showcase a queer femme goddess. I want to feature you or someone you love! Write to me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com and let me shine a spotlight on your beautiful, unique, femme story! If you’ve written a femme story or poem or song, oh, please let me post it!

At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life prevents posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”) And…as I go life life life, I will post as I am able, Mabel.

Welcome Lovers!

That’s how the Cripping Up Sex website greets you – how cheerful, how welcoming! From a blog called “In Bed with Eva” where interviews with disability activists and more are posted, to workshops about sex, and classes like “Dating for Disabled Youth” and “How to Find Cool Sex Positive Queer Friendly Aides,” Cripping Up Sex is a truly beautiful resource:

At Cripping Up Sex, we provide a diverse range of workshops aimed at promoting education, empowerment, and inclusivity. From sessions focusing on pleasure anatomy to discussions about communication and consent, our workshops cover a wide spectrum of topics designed to enhance understanding and celebrate diversity. Whether you’re interested in exploring new ways to amplify pleasure or seeking information on accessible intimacy, our workshops offer a welcoming space for all individuals to learn, grow, and connect.

Cripping Up Sex, you get one pingy-dingy! Thank you for your healing work ensuring everyone who wants to can have all the sweet or dirty or anykindawhichway sex that we want!

https://crippingupsex.com

I’m a typewriter whompin’, card catalogue lovin’ white girl from back in the day, and I yearn for a time before the covers of trade paperbacks were all squidgy, so you can imagine that I don’t actually understand what a pingback is. I do know that it can in some way be part of spreading the love, and since that’s what I’m all about at The Total Femme… every Wednesday, I pay homage to the laughter, love, and inspiration to be had elsewhere online.

At the Total Femme, my intention is to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Rather than play catch-up in a stressful fashion on those weeks when life and pandemic prevent posting, I have decided to just move gaily forward: if I miss a Monday, the next post will be on Wednesday, and so on. Thank you, little bottle of antibiotics for inspiring me in this! (“…if it’s almost time for the next dose, skip the missed dose and continue your regular dosing schedule. Don’t take a double dose to make up for a missed one.”) And…as I go through life life life, I will post as I am able, Mabel.

 

Last night, just as we were settling down after the excitement of women’s college basketball, I got a call from my mom’s memory care facility. She was exhibiting signs of pneumonia and the nurse was worried. I heaved myself up from the couch and off I went, eventually accompanying my poor wheezy mom to the ER. She’s back at her facility now, and doing ok, but it was a worrisome moment.

She went in an ambulance and I went in the car (she can’t get into my car anymore), and I made the excellent decision to stop at home first to get snacks. This wouldn’t have been an issue before my diabetes diagnosis (latent, auto-immune diabetes, adult-onset, thank you very fucking much), but now I’m tethered. Gotta have snacks, gotta have my continuous glucose monitor (it’s stuck on my arm like a leech and sends a glucose reading to my phone ever five minutes), gotta have my finger poke glucometer jic, and if I’m going to have a meal out there (I haven’t ventured doing that yet), gotta have my insulin pen and all its little accoutrements. I can’t just launch myself into space anymore, trusting that if I get hungry, I can snag something from a vending machine, or just wait it out. Nope, can’t do that anymore. It’s a huge adjustment, to put it mildly, for someone who is used to knowing just how to take care of herself and now is on the steepest learning curve of her life (that would be MOI!!).

When I was thinking about this post, I was thinking about how I’m tethered to this app on my phone, the one that gets the reading from the leech, and how suck that is, but last night in the ER, sitting with my mom who I love so much and who needs me in ways she would never have imagined, I thought about how she and I have been tethered to each other since my conception, changing, branching out, growing, turning inwards, shifting. I could choose to untether, but I don’t want to. And because I’m tethered to the leech and the app and have been for a couple of months now, I felt able to do what I really needed and wanted to do, which was to go with her to the ER in the middle of the night and stay with her until they were getting ready to send her back home.

My daffodils, my darlings, we are all tethered, it seems to me, in so many ways, some voluntary and so so many others just luck of the draw. If I wasn’t tethered to insulin, I would get sicker and sicker until I died. Diabetes is absolutely awful, but I hear my dad’s voice saying, as I have perhaps mentioned before, “Consider the alternative!”

Consider the alternative, my fairies, my fine feathered, my fashionable femme beloveds. Tethered as we are, facing responsibilities, frustrations, joys, and the glorious mundane, don’t we open our arms wide? Don’t we say to ourselves, well, one more time, one more fucking time, or oh, this again, hurrah!?

Blessings on us all today for our hard work and for our brilliance.

Tethered and shining.

Tethered and bright as the sun.

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com

My 91-year old mother lives in a memory care unit. She used to have a big room to herself, but now she has a roommate, a much younger woman, let’s call her Eva. Eva has a kind of dementia where she doesn’t know who anyone is, but a lot of times she makes perfect sense.

The other day when I went in there, I asked Eva how she was doing.

“If I told you the whole story,” she answered cheerfully, “you wouldn’t believe it.”

My peaches, my plums, who among us wouldn’t be able to say that, if we sat very still and carefully, honestly mined the far reaches or our hearts and spirits? As George Eliot comments (yes, I’m finally reading Middlemarch and wherever my father is, he is smiling in satisfaction), “…anyone watching keenly the stealthy convergance of human lots sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference of the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”

I don’t suppose Eva ever thought she’d end up not knowing who even one member of her family is, spending her days wandering about trying to figure out what she should do next (it often has to do with going into other people’s closets, choosing a nice piece of clothing, folding it, and moving it somewhere interesting, like a bookshelf — or else she might put it on). How did she end up where she is? How did my mom?

George Eliot again, “And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”

We push and push to get where we think we want to go, and either we get there and are surprised and often angry, or we don’t get there and are surprised and often angry. Or at least, that’s been my experience. You, my goddesses? You?

On a webinar about Flourishing with Diabetes I recently attended, the presenter, who’s had diabetes her entire life, asked us to find one positive thing that diabetes has given us. Yeah, fuck that. It has given me zero positive things. So then my question is, can a person move forward positively without feeling bullied into putting frameworks of gratitude on everything? Like if you don’t you’re somehow not a good person? Like you’re causing harm somehow if you don’t, harm to yourself, harm to others?

Plus, who among us doesn’t want to god damn flourish?

Yeah, sometimes we can be all love and light and sometimes we just can’t. Some things just are a fucking drag or worse. Like right now I’m feeling weird so I’d better check my blood sugar to see if I’m going low. I mean, mother fucker!!

Ok, fine. I’m grateful I didn’t get this shit earlier in my life. Does that count??

It’s ok to feel your feelings, says my therapist. It’s ok to be angry.

I feel like if I skip over the angry because someone whose experience is very different from mine presents a gratitude exercise, well. That angry will just come back out and bite me or someone else quite handily in the butt.

I want us, me, you, to be able to move honestly through the memories, the every day happenstances, the big, the little, the personal, the global.

What are the things you hide because they make you angry but you just smile and nod? Where are you still nursing a grievance or twenty that periodically rear up and roar?

What is the whole story?

Tell me. I swear to you on my femme honor that I will believe you.

My blossoms: anger. Queer femme anger. Righteous, searing queer femme anger.

I hold it up today, yours and mine.

Are you fucking pissed off today? I know I am.

Let it burn.

Let it burn everything to the ground.

Sometimes, that’s the only way to make room for new things to grow.

Every Monday I offer a Meditation for Queer Femmes, in the spirit of my maternal grandmother, Mimi, who was fabulous, and from whom I inherited her Meditations for Women.

At the Total Femme, my intention has been to post three times a week: Meditations for Queer Femmes on Monday, Pingy-Dingy Wednesday on Wednesday, and Femme Friday on Friday. Lately, I’ve just been concentrating on Mondays. And sometimes weeks go by… I’m here, though. I’m here. Do you have a post you’d like to share? That would be fucking awesome! Contact me at thetotalfemme@gmail.com