The Total Femme

Last night I dreamed that everyone in my life had spontaneously stopped wearing masks and that we were going about our pre-pandemic business just willy-nilly. Every so often I stopped to marvel that no one was wearing a mask, me included, and then I went back to whatever dreamy thing I was doing.

Even in the dream, though, I knew that what we’d decided to do was recklessly dangerous, and that’s the feeling I woke up with, despite how lovely and nostalgic it was to be going around sans face covering.

Last week, I suffered a great disappointment having to do with my writing career. When I got the news, I completely lost it and started sobbing, and the sobbing went on for days. I’m pretty tough when it comes to rejections – writers have to be — but this one broke me wide open. At some point, I realized that I was sobbing my heart out not just about this particular rejection, but also about everything that’s going on and has been going on, from the deeply personal family stuff to local to regional to national to world.

I’ve just been at capacity, and I think I really needed to let some of that grief go.

What do you do, sweet femme sisters, when you’re so full up with despair that you maybe don’t even realize it? Don’t realize it because we’re so good at carrying on, at getting the job done, whatever that might be, at showing up for others and sometimes forgetting to show up for ourselves?

Like so many towns, ours didn’t allow door to door trick or treating, so we missed the yearly fun of sharing information with Tex’s mom about costumes at the end of the night. (Last year, she got a Santa and we got a gumball machine.) Instead, we parceled out candy into 6 little bags, Tex whipped up some water color cards with mask-wearing pumpkins hollering Happy Halloween! and I put on my mask and delivered them to the 6 kids in our immediate neighborhood. Everyone was doing candy search inside, and I even got to wave at a couple of dressed up toddlers (a skunk and a cat, so cute!).

Reverse trick or treating: a quick little idea that we might have dismissed if we’d caved into the general angst. A quick little idea, but it brought a lot of joy. Is there some small connection you can make today, oh, my darlings? To pull you back into sweetness, laughter, love, and delight?

Even if it’s wee, a daily reminder of the positive side of being human can go a very long way. I am going to try and remember that, try to recognize those impulses in myself, and not be so quick to dismiss quirky ideas as silly or impractical. Sometimes silly is exactly right!

May you discover a pround, silly little idea today!

(I know I wasn’t going to post until I got my carpal tunnel sitch taken care of, but I’ve missed you and I’ve missed this practice, and we need each other right now, so I put on my splints and sent you some sugar! Might do it again sometime soon, too… MWAH!!!!)

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 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.”) As I recover from treatment for breast cancer, however, I’m just going to post whenever I can manage.