The Total Femme

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