I'm Editing My Own Publication on Medium.
It's called Sweary Mommy.
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My budget for designing an avatar is nonexistent, so... |
So far it only has two followers--me and a lady named Sally. (Shoutout to Sally N. Miller! I love you, girrrrrl)
Here's a blurb.
This all happened because I've tried to write some stuff for the original gangster of millennial mom pop-parenting blogs, Scary Mommy, and they're not even taking submissions anymore.
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Scary Mommy in 2022 be like. |
I am super stoked to still be writing stuff for Nameberry, Pregnant Chicken, this bloggity blog right here, and Frazzled Parents.
There's also a piece I've been working on for kind of a long while--"Time Out of Mind: The Lonely Struggle to Reconnect With My Six Kids and Husband After a Manic Episode."
Here's an excerpt--
"There's a triage now, a strict chronology. There's a literal to-do list for helping others after all forms of empathy are spent. This means that before I am able to tend to my kids' souls I must first be the source of my own comfort. Breathe...Take stock of my reactivity and whatever scene the disaster has wrought.
I can level up to the feelings-of-others phase only after having felt my own.
Then I turn my gaze my family members' faces. Do they look scared? (Spoilers: probably.) Do they appear to be stressed and sad? (Almost certainly.) Do they seem nervous about which version of me will respond to them--regular Mom or rage Mom? (Absolutely.)
Disarming rage Mom requires a circular system of sorts. Bipolar disorder is a dismal injury for which I am trying to be my own first-responder. My "best caregiver self" has also come to know to prioritize loving the family over leading it, but in order to do that I must pause and sip the stockpile's soup before ladling it out to others. The caregiver and the first-responder are often at odds, yet without one, the other cannot effectively function in a healthy system. And the caregiver, first-responder, and children often need the exact same things from me at the very same moment."
But nobody has wanted that one, yet, and it's long as hell for a personal essay (1500+ words). Plus, it's trying too godd@mn hard at whatever stupid metaphor I am mangling there. Whatever. Back to the key-ing board.
My long-term goal is to write a memoir. Working title: The Bridges of Santa Cruz County. It'll be a story with harrowing poop stories, dark humor, forgiveness, and redemption. And skidmarks.