Sweary Mommy: My Own Private Idaho

I'm Editing My Own Publication on Medium.

It's called Sweary Mommy.

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.

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.