clown mother

I love to wear dresses. aprons, too. I fill their pockets up with rocks and herbs from the garden. I want to bake bread, have babies, sew buttons, mend socks, bring my family’s clothes outside in a great big basket and hang them on the line to dry.

but please, do not mistake my appreciation for the old ways of living for a desire to return to a time when the non-white and/or non-male population didn’t have rights.

lately I have been getting an influx of followers and/or suggested posts which look, at first, similar to me and mine… but when you look closely, they are rife with anti-choice and thinly veiled misogyny under the guise of “cottagecore” and “simple living” and all that.

I am not one of you. I would kindly ask that you please not reblog pictures of my body, my gardens, my home, or my poetry to a blog that is centered around the romanticization and glorification of oppression. this is a body that desires freedom and autonomy. these gardens nourish that body, in our home with two heads. my observations about my life are my own - I am happy to share them, but they were never meant to be statements about the way anyone else ought to live.

*regular people who live off the land because it’s what humans have done for millennia

**christian nationalists and tradwives who are dominating so much of the self-reliance and sustainability conversations with their nasty ass agenda that people are just handing the whole lifestyle over

i would say “let’s take this lifestyle back!” but it was literally never theirs, dammit. they’re just the loudest mfers in the room because they’re so gross that the rest of us don’t even want to admit that we also want to live in a more self-reliant, sustainable, conscious way. we just, you know, don’t want anyone’s rights relinquished about it.

please keep making sourdough, keep breaking ground, keep planting and saving seeds, keep making jelly. these are HUMAN THINGS and they are the things that are going to keep us going in times of scarcity. 

I’m tired of worrying that I might be mistaken for a Mormon when half of these goofballs on the internet aren’t even doing half the work they say they are. I’m going to go ahead and let those people put on a show for their followers, who really just want something to dream about, and while they’re setting up their cameras so they can pretend to gather storebought eggs I’m going to just….keep working hard, keep crocheting, keep learning how to make clothes, continue to mouth off and talk back, and i’m gonna do all of that in a dress and apron if i fucking want to because they do not own those concepts either. 

my grandmother would call homegrown & home cooked meals and preserves and jellies and handsewn this-and-that “making do” because to her, that is just what life is. and no, she doesn’t *have* to do it anymore, but (with the exception of her daily Pepsi which isn’t very Ballerina Farm of her) she lives pretty much the same way she always has. this is a way of life. when did we decide it belongs to the millennial maga girlies on instagram? 

this is so all over the place and i’m sure you’ve stopped reading by now if you ever even started in the first place but essentially, as someone who is a mother with a very strong identity outside of motherhood and enjoys self reliance and sustainability please can we not just hand over the one thing that humans all over the world, every culture, every language have in common straight into the hands of the people who want to use it to maintain and gain power over women, LGBTQIA folks, and anyone who isn’t white? 

my love is unconditional. my company is not.

i will never not love you. i will always do what is necessary to keep myself/my family safe.

August, by Mary Oliver

When the blackberries hang

swollen in the woods, in the brambles

nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high

branches, reaching

my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming

the black honey of summer

into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark

creeks that run by there is

this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is