kiss the moon

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

He was a enjoyable cuss who didn’t care for war mongering.

Especially profitable war mongering and excuses for it!

He certainly didn’t like selfish husbands and fathers!

Politicians who turned on their words once they got theirs weren’t safe.

He said fuck the police!

He absolutely didn’t like people ruining little things for kids.

He stood up for foreigners. Especially those doing their best to communicate with limited second language knowledge.

He was not having any tomfoolery when it came to gun safety and laws. Especially with youth involved.

You had better not abuse a animal with him nearby. He’d right that wrong real quick!

And best of all him and his wife were both prickly cusses together. Relationship goals.

To bask in the glorious glow of recieving approving recognition from my superior/future bff whenever he makes it very clear that he appreciates my take-no-shit-and-make-them-regret-ever-trying-to-give-me-shit mentality

Poplar Street by Chen Chen (transcript under the cut)