Month: April 2024

Love, Peace and All of That

The world is full of pain, ills and wrongs, and I am far from naive. The suffering could consume me, the anger that swells deep in the gut, and I have been in desperate agony and rampant with rage from what I’ve experienced and witnessed. This world is full of sharp edges. It can be ruthless and cruel more often than not. But that cannot and shouldn’t make a home inside the soul. At least not for long. It has to be managed, processed and let the fuck go. We’re only here for a little while. It simmers down to choice. Today, what do you choose?

Lead with love.

I have no right to judge you.

You have no right to judge me.

We don’t need to understand to accept.

Lead with love, not hate.

Lead with an open mind, not a closed one.

Lead with peace, not war.

Lead with love always.

Broken Home

This term was mentioned to me when my kids’ father and I split up. I knew it would come up but I’ve considered it a lot since. Honestly, I considered it many times before that. Here are my thoughts:

‘Broken Home’ when used as a label towards kids that don’t grow up with birth parents who are in a relationship or married to one another is mostly bullshit. I’ve experienced and know of many far more broken homes where the parents remain unhappily together. They stay together with sticky notes of excuses, ‘for the kids’, ‘for the vows of better and worse’, to ‘prove a point’, to not ‘disappoint family’, because they’ve become unhealthily co-dependent. They stay together for fear of loneliness, judgment, the unknown, financial reasons, practical excuses, and lies they tell themselves that it ‘might get better’ and ‘things will change’. They trap themselves and their kids into true broken homes. Even though I knew better, I did that too for a time. Kids see that. They feel it, even if they don’t say it to their parents, though, sometimes they do. And when they do, it hurts hard.

My kids are not of a broken home—we fixed that when we chose to raise them in two happy homes instead of one unhappy one.

Break those toxic fucking cycles and fuck those ignorant labels.

Geese Overhead

I’ve recently become painfully aware of patterns I need to destroy. Upon this realisation, I am vulnerable. I hate that. Even as my muscles twist into firmer roots, I’m dwelling in absences between the letters. Sidestepping silences in the peace. I’ve lost my logical mind to other neglected pieces. I swapped suffocation for drowning. The dry field of broken branches and trampled flowers is filling up with rain. A swamp will be made of this ill witch of ill wishes. It’s soul-shattering to consider. The pieces I tried to squash down deep, bury, ignore, I was a party in their neglect; my neglect.

“Hurt me.” That’s what I told each of them with my eyes. “I exist for you to take and never give.” “Use me up.” “Suck me dry.” I meant to say, “protect me”, “hold me”, “let me go”, “love me”.

The bones are rising from beneath the dirt, the undergrowth is thinning. And I cannot pretend not to see them. The gouged-out skulls at the corner of my eye. Did that one furnish me with a wink? Don’t make eye-socket contact. I shiver, bat off the midgies catching in my hair. I shake it off and turn up the volume. It’s a trick. It did wink. And the record spins again—this is a trick.

I’m shrinking. I watch the horizon rise. The trees are getting taller. Paper-death limbs elongate with the shadows; books that I’ll never read. I sink. Mud envelopes my boots, the thick brown goop sticks to my skin, moulds itself around my calves and sucks me down. Geese honk overhead as the mud invades my nostrils.