Search Results for: dad

“The Beauty of the Moments that Pass Each Day”

Autumn in the Ozarks / Getty Images

As writer and photographer Terra Fondriest notes in this stunningly beautiful photo essay over at The Bitter Southerner, her family is among the newest on their dirt road, having only lived in rural Arkansas for 11 years. In a series of intimate portraits called The Ozark Life project, she documents her neighbors and the bounty they share and preserve in land, family, livestock, hard work, and tradition.

This Ozark Life project is a lot of things for me: a way to get to know the people around us, a way to record this time and place from my perspective for the history books, and a way to pursue a personal challenge. But, perhaps the reason that motivates me the most is connecting the Ozark culture to the life I used to live in the Chicago suburbs. By seeing moments that are totally normal in the Ozarks, moments that make me smile, and realizing how quirky those would look to a person living outside this area, I can relate our mountain world to other people.

Often these are snippets in my own family’s everyday life, but lately I am spending time photographing others in my community. I am drawn to documenting people who work using their hands and ingenuity to make a living. Those who are following their passion and those who are making a living off of the land here. I love spending time with other families similar to my own, who are navigating life here, each with its own twist.

I am still the same introverted girl who grew up in the suburbs. Getting to know new people makes me more nervous photographing for this project. It’s a challenge that is daunting on most days, but the camaraderie built by pushing through that with my subjects yields the intimacy I strive for in my storytelling. Some of the folks I photograph are friends and neighbors, but others are people I meet through circumstance, whose everyday story I find interesting and a good piece for my Ozark Life story quilt. But I approach them. I might talk to them right away about my project, or I might let it simmer a bit and get to know them over days, months, even years before I bring up my project and my request to photograph them.

Time moves, everyone in their own rhythms and situations, yet it’s a cadence we all relate to. The difference between the Ozarks and the suburbs where I grew up are the ties people have to the land, which grow deeper with every generation. Will Norton can point to the soil under his feet and say his granddad’s dad farmed the same soil where he now raises both cattle and his family. There’s a respect and connection to these hills that’s hard to put into words; it’s almost like a heartbeat that the land infuses in you.

Read the story

A Long, Lonely Time

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Hannah Seidlitz | Longreads | March 2020 | 11 minutes (2,999 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

There was nothing better to do during the Sunday thunderstorm. I had never seen it, and my mother insisted. A slate of clouds had spooked the February sun from sight a few hours too early. New York dripped like Vancouver, where we had lived by the ocean when I was small. Tinny droplets thrummed the roof. We stretched out together on the olive-green sofa. Her fingers threaded through my dark curls. I remember little of the movie. I remember the warmth more than anything. The orangey glow haloing Demi Moore as she tracked a penny along the doorframe. Heat emanating off my mother’s chest. Embers sputtering in our fireplace. I don’t know where my father was. Moore’s amber eyes glittered, incandescent with awe, when her spectral beloved usurped her coin-pushing, the doorframe a Ouija board animated by yearning, devotion. I remember knowing then, with a certainty I have not felt since, that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold, ineluctable and everlasting, that awaits us.

* * *

A few months after my mother died, I asked my father about their wedding song. I had seen enough movies to expect any newly anointed couple to inaugurate the ballroom reception with a waltz.

My father gripped the wheel of our Honda Pilot with one hand, the other drumming the black driver’s door through the open window. We were singing along to a scratched-up Darkness on the Edge of Town CD, my favorite of Springsteen’s. My father insisted The River eclipsed it in emotional intelligence, that on The River Bruce howled and hummed a hunger so raw, unconquerably raw, that nothing that came before it could compare. But I held true. His guitar on Darkness, I felt, told the deeper story: Rumbling through this promised land, tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea, and wash these sins off our hands. 


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


“I want to get married to this song,” I said.

“No, no. It’s much too fast,” he said. “You need something to sway to.”

“‘Racing In The Street’ is kinda groovy?”  He shot me a sidelong glance.

“All right, all right,” I said, lowering the volume knob. “So what, instead?”

His brow furrowed. At once, together we realized the real question into which I had stumbled. We were quiet.

After a stretch of silent highway, I whispered in as steady a voice as I could muster, “What was you and Mom’s song?”

His eyes fixed on the road ahead of us. He sucked his upper lip through his teeth. “Unchained Melody,” he said. “From Ghost.”

* * *

My parents were married in June ’96, in the backyard of the yellow Dutch Colonial where my father grew up. She was beautiful and he still had all of his hair. In the framed photo on the dresser in my childhood bedroom, my mother leans against my father’s lapel with a sprawling bouquet of pale pink and white roses. Ivy spills out from beneath the satin bow that holds the stems. Her sweetheart gown is sleeveless, secured by a strip of organza encircling each arm; her chest bereft of jewelry, only her protrusive collarbones accessorize her décolletage. (She was 114 pounds on her wedding day, she made sure to remind me any time she bemoaned the weight that collects with age. I read in a magazine that you gain one pound every 10 years, she groused once, grimacing at the scale.) Her brown curls were swept off her face and gathered loosely beneath a beaded brooch which fastened her veil in place, exposing her Grace Kelly widow’s peak, dark eyebrows, and rosacea. All of which I inherited.     

So, they danced to “Unchained Melody.” Darkly funny, prescient. (What ruthless narrative parallelism!) It’s as though they had, paranoid or prophetic, preordained a soundtrack for grieving.

I often wonder how they came to select it. They would’ve been standing in the tiny kitchen of their cramped Greenwich apartment, staring at the pile of papers — drafted guest lists, caterers’ business cards, venue release forms — scattered across the dinner table. My father might say, Deb, no self-respecting man likes the Dixie Chicks. (This was, of course, pre-Iraq.) One hand on her hip, the other propped against the counter, she’d hiss, Sarah McLachlan is not a Dixie Chick. Whatever, he’d grunt. Let’s do “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” and call it a day, he’d say, slugging his Lagunitas. Probably she would mutter under her breath, I knew I should’ve done this with Karen, which would, understandably, really set him off. Your yuppie sister doesn’t know Lou Reed from a broken dishwasher. And they would be fighting already, even though they weren’t married yet, which is when domesticity really goes sour, I guess. At least she doesn’t listen to Blink-182 when she vacuums. It’s like living with a 17-year-old. Even without children to fight about, there are always living disputes. At least I vacuum, all you do is complain! and, realizing his gaffe, he’d gush, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Deborah. I love you, falling to his knees before her, taking her hands and cupping them against his cheeks. She’d sigh. She was always sighing. I love you, too. What about something from a movie? It would be immediate. Self-evident as if it were divinely sanctioned. In unison: Ghost?

I remember feeling certain then that love was the only thing in the universe warm enough to conquer the cold which awaits each of us, inevitable and everlasting.

Prior to Ghost’s popular ascription of mourning to its lyrics, “Unchained Melody,” I imagine, was romantic: about heartbreak among the living, about infatuation, about leaving girlfriends behind to go on tour, about a distance that is literal and bridgeable. It’s strange to think that the Righteous Brothers outlive my mother. Sometimes I pretend they are singing to her:

Oh, my love
My darling
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch
A long, lonely time

Their countertenor melodies permeating the soil over which her ashes have been spread, electrifying each scorched cell, piecing them back together the way I have often dreamed, resurrecting her.         

* * *

It occurs to me now that my father may have been onto something about The River, that perhaps “Racing in the Street” isn’t the ideal first dance song after all, but instead “Drive All Night.” Its revolving drumbeat, slow and certain, Bruce’s longing gravelly and bare. Baby, baby, baby, I swear I’ll drive all night again / just to buy you some shoes, and to taste your tender charms / and I just want to sleep tonight again in your arms.

My parents took me to see him when I was 7. I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music. To my dismay, Madison Square Garden’s pounding speakers and towering bleachers, which elevated around and above me tens of thousands of strange, middle-aged headbangers, proved too overwhelming; I spent the better part of the evening curled under the stadium seats with a tray of greasy chicken fingers, clinging to my mother’s legs and failing to stave off my first panic attack. I don’t remember if my parents held hands or murmured the E Street Band’s cloying refrains in unison or exchanged inside jokes regarding all the past shows they’d been to, decades before my time, when Bruce could still somersault across the stage. I can’t remember if they kissed or cried. I can’t remember if they ever touched at all.

In the desperate bowels of stagflation, Springsteen saw a dark fissure in our country’s consciousness and filled it with effervescent synthesizers, optimistic choruses, a new national anthem. Clarence Clemons’s bright sax buoyed bleaker tableaus on timeless chart-toppers like “Dancing in the Dark,” Danny Federici’s honky-tonk keys and organ on “Glory Days.” This sound, the sound of a better future, propelled the Boss to commercial success.

I’d been begging to tag along for years, desperate for a taste of the intimacy that adults seemed privy to, the urgent togetherness of live music.

This sound, the sound of a better future, is absent, achingly so, from the Righteous Brothers’ oeuvre. Their greatest hits are elegiac. They reminisce about the better times of yore with no eye toward proaction. Their songs about “glory days” lack Bruce’s cheeky irony. Bring back that lovin’ feelin’, they sing on “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.”

Cause it’s gone, gone, gone
And I can’t go on.

* * *

My mother died six years ago in October. She was struck and killed by a car crossing the street in front of a Mexican restaurant. I’d turned 15 two days before. At her funeral I sang “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” by Bob Dylan, the Jeff Buckley version. When Jeff sings Dylan’s song the words lose their edge; they bleed into something pulsing and vulnerable. The way Dylan’s relationship-dirges croak with characteristic gruffness safeguards them against that sort of frailty. Don’t get me wrong, of course Dylan feels, and he feels consumingly, gutturally, but he manages to expel his woe by growling. Rather than bowing, succumbing to anguish like Jeff seems to, he gnashes his poetry through his teeth like some animal. The hurt filters outward, not inward.

Blood On The Tracks, which is, in no uncertain terms, one of the desert-island greatest heartbreak records of all time, quakes with this grit throughout. The stories he tells, purported to illustrate the collapse of his marriage, would be almost unbearable if not for the way he barks to banish emotion. Each verse on “Simple Twist of Fate” is more agonizing than the last, cataloguing the gradual demise of an affair, and relies on the modulated last long vowel sound of every penultimate line for catharsis.

He woke up, the room was bare
He didn’t see her anywhere
He told himself he didn’t care
Pushed the window open wide
Felt an emptiness inside

Here his cadence breaks down into even more of a spoken drawl, then ascends the scale as he bellows: To which he just could not relate. He nearly yells the latter syllable of relate, as if he were an ancient funeral wailer. This purgation is absent from Jeff Buckley’s soft, wounded crooning. Dylan exorcises his woe; Jeff doesn’t seem quite as conquering.

“Mama, You Been on My Mind” opens, Perhaps it is the color of the sun cut flat and coverin’ …  and his voice wavers, cleaves as though he is about to cry. He continues in a whimper, the crossroads I’m standing at, or maybe it’s the weather or something like that / Oh, but Mama, you’ve been on my mind.

I sang Buckley’s version because I do like it better, but mostly I sang Buckley’s version because he sounds like he’s crying the whole time. I knew I would probably be crying the whole time.

You know I won’t be next to you you know I won’t be near
I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

* * *

A year after my mother’s funeral, insistently independent and 16, I spent Valentine’s Day at a friend’s house. Reclining against quilted throw pillows, I inhaled buttery crackers smeared with baked Brie, swipes of fig jam — effectively feigning epicurean sangfroid. If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth. Somehow the warm wheel of cheese made loneliness feel farther away. Jay’s TV room swelled with laughter and the warmth of sardined bodies all crowded against the arm of the couch closest to the screen. I sat beside Jay, admiring their resemblance to their mother, against whom they were nestled, who, equally striking, gave Jay their emerald eyes, the warmth in their auburn waves. The three of us were watching When Harry Met Sally.

Young Carrie Fisher lectured, All I’m saying is that somewhere out there is the man you are supposed to marry. And if you don’t get him first, somebody else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing that somebody else is married to your husband. I winced. I was entangled then in something that resembled a relationship, but the movie made me cry for the only boy I had ever really loved. It had been nearly a year since our last wistful, forbidden kiss, the sweet-sour ale taste of his tongue only teased by his breath during our hushed conversations, our faces always too near for ex-lovers. He had a girlfriend then, one whom, to my schadenfreudic surprise, he would proceed to date for only three apparently unspectacular months, before ex-post-facto-dumping her by publicly asking another girl to prom. 

If I could perform a coolness, an entitlement to luxury and contentment, I didn’t have to consider dearth.

Someone knocked at the front door, rousing me from my reverie, before entering. Jay’s father shuffled through the foyer, cane and newspaper in hand. Jay’s mother, his ex-wife, stood to greet him. Gingerly, he kissed her on the cheek. So stunned by the unlikely tenderness of their exchange, I nearly forgot myself, had to blink away inappropriate tears. That he could show affection to an old love even after they’d parted legally and domestically seemed unfair to me. Why my father couldn’t still touch my mother, couldn’t show her he loved her even after his affair, even after the years of therapy, after everything, wasn’t just. He could never atone; they could never overcome as Jay’s parents had, not even as friends. Recovery halted abruptly. Penance did not. 

* * *

My parents had never got around to formalizing their divorce. After my mother found out about his infidelity, my father slept in the guest room alone for six months.

He had been away, on a business trip in Phoenix, Arizona. She had called him in the morning from New York. The voice that answered was alien. Certainly it belonged to her husband, but it was constricted, fraught with something indiscernibly foreign. Before she could ask him if everything was alright, she heard another voice in the room — a woman. 

It’s on Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s anomalously inward-facing record, uncharacteristically centering disappointment over hope, which he released in 1987 after his separation from Julianne Phillips, that he sings of the doubts and estrangement of married life.

Now look at me baby
Struggling to do everything right
And then it all falls apart
When out go the lights
I’m just a lonely pilgrim

Perhaps my parents would have divorced had they had a few more years. They did not have a few more years. After the accident, my father began to screen the regular calls from their couple’s counselor, Cynthia, until finally the insurance company informed her that one of her clients had died. Cynthia stopped calling. My father never returned to therapy.

As I watched Jay’s father lower his lips to the rosy flush just beneath his old lover’s cheekbone, I couldn’t help but burn with envy.

Bruce continues: Tonight our bed is cold, lost in the darkness of our love. God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of.

Is Harry bringing anybody to the wedding? Meg Ryan’s query reminded me to check in on my father. He was home alone. I had deserted him in the drafty house he and my mother had designed together some decade earlier on his first single Valentine’s Day in 22 years. Not out of malice, but because I couldn’t stomach the burden of his grief atop my own. Because I was terrified to see him cry. Terrified to cry in front of him.

He was under the covers with a bottle of wine watching Schindler’s List on HBO, he told me. I thought of him in the spacious master bedroom. The cold side of the king-size bed. UNACCEPTABLE, I texted back.

Fifteen minutes later his BMW pulled in front of Jay’s house. I stormed down the porch steps, “Schindler’s List! Are you kidding?”

“Yeah I know,” he raised his hands in shame, surrender. “I know.”

“Dad, you can’t be that guy,” I spat, dropping into the passenger seat.“Well, you aren’t leaving to be with me,” he hazarded. “Right?”

“No.” I lowered my gaze to the floor. “No, of course not.”

Unable to reestablish eye contact, I switched on the radio.

Lonely rivers flow, to the sea, to the sea. “Unchained Melody” blared through the car stereo. Scarcely another beat played before I slammed the power button, slumping back into my seat.

“Hannah, why’d you shut it off?”

“For fuck’s sake, Dad,” I snarled.

Without another word, he revved the ignition and sewed us into the night.

On the sleepy freeway we drove in silence for a long time. Through the moon-blackened windshield I watched skeletal trees bend by, lanky brown smudges against the pitch dark. Brake lights splashed red against the glass. At long last, after steeling myself for confrontation, I spared a glance at my father. His knuckles, bound around the steering wheel, glowed white. He was like an owl, impossibly still, his head motionless between his shoulders. All of a sudden, a swell of tears freed themselves from his eyes. I had seen my father cry only once, at the funeral. The disloyal streams slipped across his cheekbones. Swiftly, he pawed at his face, clenched his jaw, returned his fist to the wheel as though nothing had happened.

I flipped open the center console and fumbled through it for a few moments before extracting what it was I went looking for. The plastic case bore cracks on the spine from a shelf life as old as I was. I fed the scratched treasure of a disc into the CD slot.

Track 10. Play.

Three triumphant piano keys, a G chord.

Well they’re still racing out at the trestles, but that blood it never burned in her veins. Without moving his head, the corners of my father’s mouth twitched. A smile. It was ours, he knew, this familiar anthem beating through the car. With our lives on the line where dreams are found and lost / I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost … The descending riff, the cymbal crash. He was grinning now. For wanting things that can only be found / in the darkness on the edge of town.

 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto
The Coastal Shelf, by June Amelia Rose

* * *

Hannah Seidlitz is an NYU MFA candidate and amateur semiotician living in Brooklyn. Her work appears in LitHub, Electric Literature, QZ, Entropy Mag, and elsewhere.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

The Coastal Shelf

Illustration by Homestead Studio

June Amelia Rose | Longreads | March 2020 | 17 minutes (4,495 words)

Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

I was getting ready for a kinky leather social mixer when I slipped my mother’s engagement ring onto my finger for the first time. I pulled on a flowing, gothic dress, then did my makeup, glancing at her most prized possession in the mirror as I penciled in my eyeliner. I don’t remember how, in the tumult after her death, I came into possession of the ring, but apparently I did. 

Out of morbid nostalgia, I decided to wear the ring out in the sticky Brooklyn summer air, to see if anyone noticed. 

I never want to get married. At that moment, I was playing matrimonial drag. 

On the bus, the diamond dug into my rugged pink Kathy Acker paperback. The ring fit loosely, a reminder of how much my mom told me she envied my slender fingers and healthy nails growing up. While seeing a secret gender therapist in high school, he told me that my small hands would help me pass as female, if I ever transitioned.

At the party, no one commented on the ring. My girlfriend didn’t seem to notice, and if she did, she didn’t ask. The dominatrixes were too busy relaxing as I cleaned their boots. Black shoe polish smeared across my long, red nails, eclipsing the shine of the chunky diamond like oil on a coastal shelf.

 

* * *

“When I was a little girl, the only thing I wanted in the entire world was a baby boy to call my own. Your father and I love your sister, but a baby boy was my dream.”

 So began my mother’s self-important recounting of my origin story, a tale she told me repeatedly as a child.

“Before you, we had three miscarriages. I was worried you wouldn’t survive too, but one night I dreamed an angel came down and touched my belly. That was when I knew you were going to be a perfectly healthy baby boy, a gift from God himself.”

These words swirled in my head, haunting me with guilt, as my hand trembled writing the letter. I was 15 years old. The year was 2007, the year I finally accepted that everything felt wrong, and that I needed to speak the new truth I’d found. I started with my girlfriend and therapist, then moved on to my family.

“Mom, Dad. I’m a girl. I feel like a girl. I’ve always been like a girl. I’m a transsexual. I think you know what they are, but please google it. It’s a thing. This is who I am. This is who I will always be.”


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


I stressed over the note for days, composing it in a fit of nervousness, trashing multiple copies. I was too young then to appreciate the humor of the situation, before the bitter salt had soaked into my pores. My mother was the woman who invented an immaculate conception story to give her life meaning, and in so doing, she implanted a mystical origin story in me that I never consented to, and that caused me so much harm.

* * *

Near the first anniversary of her death, I got her name tattooed on my back. I harbored so much resentment, but it felt right. Grief makes us do the strangest things. We had a troubled relationship, but her loss deeply affected my worldview and sense of self. 

I always wonder what my lovers think about it. 

Many years and hundreds of dollars later, I got my last name legally changed. A vivisection of the family. Still, her name on my back is a haunting of who I’ve been. The memory seeps into my veins like bitter tar, the same tar she smoked until the cancer took root in her lungs — dark, blooming petals underground. 

* * *

So much of my childhood is fantastical that the line between truth and fiction has become meaningless. Which are the myths and which are the repressed memories? Is it even possible to get an objective answer at this point? Though one of my parents is still living, I cannot trust his version of events. He was barely present, either an oblivious  fly on the wall or overflowing with a tense, fearful rage that shamed my emotions and needs. Because of this, I must doubt my memories while simultaneously going through the motions of acting out their consequences.

‘Mom, Dad. I’m a girl. I feel like a girl. I’ve always been like a girl. I’m a transsexual. I think you know what they are, but please google it. It’s a thing. This is who I am. This is who I will always be.’

My father worked nights, so I rarely saw him as a kid. Most of my parental time was spent with my mother. Since my parents were working-class, they worked two, sometimes three jobs to make ends meet and keep a roof over our heads as property taxes in our town continued to inflate. This meant that most of my time growing up was spent alone. My hyperactivity was so pronounced, my parents couldn’t keep a babysitter for more than a few weeks at a time. They all quit, driving my parents nuts. As time passes, I’m inclined to believe my acting out was compounded by a clear case of not enough attention, of a need not being met. I didn’t have the framework to articulate these early storms, until I found out years later that my disconnect was a symptom of my coercively gendered body. 

Recently, I read that this kind of behavior is a premonition of the bipolar disorder I would later be diagnosed with. I wonder what my life would’ve looked like if my family had taken this behavior seriously and not just as a permanent character flaw. Would I have been treated? Would specialists have noticed? Who would I be today?

My family has never asked how to love me. Later in life, the first time a friend asked, “What can I do for you right now?” when I was in emotional distress, it iced me to the core. I didn’t know how to ask for, give, or receive love. I was at a loss. How does this happen to a person? Where does this come from?

Shame and trauma, that’s where. I was pushed to fulfill the role of a person I never wanted to be, then shunned when I voiced my own path. Many years later, when the dust had settled and I had merged with my new womanly body and self, the damage had already been done. Nobody wanted to admit the wounds were inflicted in the first place. 

* * *

Looking at the symphony of jagged scars on my forearm in the present day, my therapist says, “You are acting out the pain that was inflicted on you in the past. It’s all you know, it’s what makes you feel comfortable. But it doesn’t have to be that way. You and your body are worthy of love.” 

Many years later, when the dust had settled and I had merged with my new womanly body and self, the damage had already been done.

I cry, rocking myself back and forth, wringing my palms on my thighs, because she’s right. 

* * *

School was a blessing and a curse. I wasn’t liked and didn’t fit in. Every movement and word came out with sandpaper sounds, scratching kids away from me. In my formative years my parents pushed me into sports I hated, where I was targeted and beaten by cruel children. So many hands harming my body, telling me it wasn’t mine. Poring over these memories with my therapist, I’ve found this is where my deeply ingrained self-hatred stems from. I left every time crying. My parents didn’t listen, they said it was simply what boys went through and that I’d have to toughen up. 

I loved learning but to do it I had to be tortured daily. I put up with the rejection and isolation because somehow I knew the things I was obsessively learning would be my exit from my labyrinth of a home life. Incredibly, that drive was how I began to develop the literary skills I’d utilize later in life. 

I taught myself to read when I got frustrated that I was being instructed too slow. I picked up books and video games on my own and glued myself to them, silently withdrawing from the rest of the world. I was ravenous, I had to know anything and everything. I would tape random facts around my desk at school so I could memorize them in my spare time. It was a lonely life, but it taught me everything I know today. I have spent the better part of my life alone, retreating away from personhood like an invisible mantra.

I developed suicidal tendencies at age 8. I would come home from school and tell my mother how much I wanted to die. One time, I tried to stop breathing, frustrated that my body wouldn’t allow it. Another time, I jumped off the highest thing I could find, a towering wooden deck in our backyard. Thankfully, I didn’t break any bones.

I have a firm, but probably fake memory of buzzing and electricity in a “dentist’s” office as a kid, screaming and leaving in tears. The story I’ve succumbed to is that my parents, to deal with my own onset of overdramatic paranoid delusions and exhausting hyperactivity, had me attend shock therapy to calm me down. It worked, pulverizing my memory and sapping me of dopamine for decades, implanting depression in me like a Faustian virus. But this may be fiction, like everything else. 

* * *

I am seated at an after-school program that babysits me until my mom gets off of work; a place where fun is outlawed, ruled over by a lady whose resting voice is a low, menacing yell of disapproval. One wrong move, one stray word, and she will punish you, taking away everything for the entire day, making you sit there and stare at the clock.

I am doing just that, sitting on a bench in the corner when my mother arrives. She sees that I am sitting with my legs crossed, slaps my leg, and leans in. “Don’t ever sit like that. That’s not what boys do.”

It was almost a decade before I sat cross-legged again.

* * *

My mother had an addiction to shopping at the mall. I have to admit, despite a disgust toward the monolithic, leeching nature of the capitalist edifice, going to the mall gives me strange feelings of home to this very day.

After a fast food dinner — we ate a lot of fast food in those days — we would head to the Bay Shore Mall, a colossal parking lot field wedged between highways. Her favorite store was Express. She would sit me down on a waiting bench in one of the stores and spend hours trying on different outfits. Shoes, pants, tops, skirts, anything she could get her hands on. She would come out of the dressing room and model it, ask for my opinion, shrug at herself in the mirror, then go and try on the next thing, then double back to the first one. Rinse and repeat. My poor mother swiped her credit card endlessly, and I could see her eyes glisten with regret as we headed home. Sometimes, she left me in the car and went back to return what she’d just bought, a walk of shame as she cried her way through the parking lot. Every month, the credit card bills piled up and the crying at the kitchen table got worse. These personal fashion shows are an obscured image in my mind, but they gave me hours of looking at women’s clothes. I would sometimes wander away and try on hats and bracelets, knowing that what I was doing was a forbidden act. Curiosity had piqued my interest.

I still fondly look back on these seeds of womanhood sewn in me. During the long hours when my parents weren’t home, I began to dig through her walk-in closet and try on those same clothes that had ruined her credit score. Each dress, each pair of high heels, each pair of her skinny jeans only further proved to me this thing I was starting to realize about myself, that I was a woman too. 

* * *

I was born with a dark brown birthmark on my left cheek, approximately the size of a United States quarter. Perhaps I am embellishing its size, but its impact was a mountain in the scars of traumatic memory. At school, children told me I should kill myself because I was so ugly and that the world would be better off without me.

When I told my mother I wanted to get the birthmark removed, she said, “The scar will be ugly, it will be too noticeable. God made you just the way you are, perfect in every way.”

“You don’t want to alter your body like that forever.”

“The removal will hurt a lot.”

“It’s a decision you can’t go back on.”

I can’t help but laugh as I recall these words, spoken to me out of love, but stifling me, padlocking my pain.

Each dress, each pair of high heels, each pair of her skinny jeans only further proved to me this thing I was starting to realize about myself, that I was a woman too.

I have been taking estrogen for more than three years now, three heavenly years. It is a chemical my body does not regularly produce in large quantities. First it was four blue pills a day, then it was a needle stuck into my leg every two weeks. Spironolactone, my testosterone blocker, makes my head foggy, gives me aches and pains, induces a constant state of dehydration, and causes me to constantly piss, not to mention poses the very real threat of hyperkalemia and osteoporosis. By agreeing to these bodily processes I have made myself infertile, negating any chance of conceiving a child from my genetics, as if I had ever wanted one. I have grown tits that will not go away if I stop medicating. They would have to be surgically removed.

I did this all on my own. I stomached my fear and rolled the dice on a decision I had been told would be social as well as personal suicide. I survived the alteration of my body with glamorous resilience. 

After my mother died, I finally had the birthmark removed my senior year of high school. The procedure was less than an hour of prodding on the numb skin of my face. For two days I walked around with black stitches going down the side of my face, drawing a line from my eyes to my mouth. I looked like a horror movie heroine, sewed up after a chance battle with death. I couldn’t stop running my fingers over the fresh scar tissue on my face, vainly gazing in the mirror.

* * *

I can handle anything, I have cut slabs of flesh off of my body to feel whole. BDSM has become the framework where I have learned to love my body, to connect with the bodies of others. I have engaged in the pleasure of sadomasochism with my lovers. I’ve been kicked, stepped on, slapped, whipped, and caned, all with a beautiful love. 

Has my mother seen how much pain I have gone on to choose and how much I love myself for it? Does she know the sense of finality her early death brought? She did not believe I could handle the pain or permanence of an altered body. At the end, she knew very little about me, and that is where the true, unintended pain creeps in.

* * *

Fifteen again, post-letter. I am the tranny freak of the family, frequently courting silence and darting whispers. I am the shameful family secret, though some of our relatives know. None of them steps in, none of them does anything to help.

My mother asks me into her room and locks the door, a simmering rage on her tongue.

“You’ve been drinking! You and your friends have fake IDs and that’s what you’re doing all the time, aren’t you?” My mother was accusing her straight-edge child of drinking. “Admit it!”

“No, I didn’t do that! I don’t drink!”

“LIAR! How dare you lie to me,” she screamed.

“You’re being fucking crazy.”

My ears rang from the slap, my eyes watered then grew heavy.

I couldn’t tell if my mother actually believed the bullshit she was saying, if the cancer had really burrowed that far into her brain, or if this was some manipulative abuse tactic to keep me under her control. I was a good kid. I wanted freedom but I behaved, I got good grades, I just wanted to live my life and not be interrogated for it.

I am the shameful family secret, though some of our relatives know.

Besides the point, is drinking a beer in your teens the worst thing a child can possibly do? Is that worse than slapping your child in the face in an accusatory outburst as you refuse to listen? Alcoholism is undoubtedly a stain on my legacy spreading out across my family through multiple generations and rotting the extended branches of my family tree. It nearly ruined my life much later, when I was drinking to cope with my mental illness and my failed repressed gender, but it didn’t then. I didn’t know what alcohol tasted like. A slap in the face for something I didn’t do certainly didn’t scare me out of it. In fact, it made me want it more. If I was going to be hated when not drinking, I might as well do it. And a few months after my mother’s death, I sure as hell started drinking, beginning a bender that didn’t stop for almost a decade, nearly killing me several times.

* * *

It was a year after I had confessed to my family that I was a woman. My grandfather’s funeral was the next day, yet nobody could understand why I dissociated the whole time as they forced me to be fitted for a suit. I refused to say I liked any of them, my silent protest drove my mother and father absolutely mad.

“Is this because you want to wear a dress?” my mother accused. “You know we can’t let you do that. Why do you always have to be so difficult?”

I cried in the backseat of the car, a box containing a suit sitting on my lap, as I listened to my mother tell me how the life I wanted wasn’t possible.

* * *

On Halloween that year, I dressed up as a girl. I looked so comfortable and natural in my role that I even convinced a few partygoers that I was a completely different person. My friends were talking about it and my mother overheard. After they left, she came up to me.

“Can I see the pictures? Please, can I see?”

“No,” I said, closed-off.

“Why? Why do you want to become this person I can’t even see? Why can’t you show me?”

The unspoken answer: Because I know you will not like what you see, and it very well may break your heart, and I can’t handle one more rejection from you.

* * *

Will I ever hear the words “My beautiful daughter?” At the point they do come, if ever, will I still care for the person who speaks them?

* * *

I remember taking the train into Manhattan with my mother, happy because I got to skip school for the day to gawk at the skyscrapers. For obscene pleasure, I was reading The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s novel where her hero, Howard Roark, designs buildings for a living, apart from being a crypto-fascist ubermensch in his spare time as he gushes emotionlessly about capitalism. As if capital has ever been the sole arbiter of good art and not a physical limitation of the medium.

I thought these excursions were nice. I got to listen to my iPod the whole time, staring out the train windows, riding in taxis for the first time in my life. I felt so special.

What I didn’t realize was that we were using taxis not because my working-class parents had suddenly become rich, but because my mother was beginning to lose mobility — she didn’t have the strength to stand up straight on the subway, to be on her feet all day, or to walk and still have breath to spare.

My mom didn’t take me along on these trips because she thought it would be fun to let me skip school. At this point, we were barely on speaking terms, and most conversations ended in screamed accusations and thrown dishes. The woman was dying. She pushed me away with anger and paranoia. As an introverted secretive teen, I was more than happy to push myself away. 

I still feel guilt for blaming her for these things, even though I know in my heart of hearts that it’s never an excuse. I’m the one who had to live with these mistakes after she was gone. She made sure she’d never be forgotten.

My mother took me along because she knew she was terminally ill, past the point of no return, and after these doctors gave her terrible news, she wanted to spend the day with her kid, perhaps knowing these were the last few chances she’d have an extended time to do so. She wanted to come out of each tragic death sentence meeting to her child in the waiting room, the baby boy she’d longed for all those years.

I couldn’t be that for her, and in front of her eyes, as my hair grew down to my waist and my outfits grew more feminine, I was living proof of the death of her greatest dream.

* * *

The NYU hospital overlooked the Manhattan skyline and the glistening water of the East River.

It was the middle of January. Even though it was the dead of winter, that day was particularly warm and sunny. The windows of the buildings reflected the light down into my overstimulated eyes, incubating me.

I held my mother’s hand and looked out the window as she took her last breaths. In all those years of sickness, it was the first time I actually realized she was dying, and I cried with embarrassment. 

In the room was her brother, the one I’d barely heard of until I came out. He too was a shameful secret. He was gay, and he knew my story, but we never got to talk about that. In a few years, he’d be dead too, cancer all the same. A decade later, I’d find out he created his own faction of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970. An erased legacy, kept obscured by my family’s shame.

When I think about death, I am usually thinking about the ocean. A body of water is like living proof of eternal return, the slick spinning of an ouroboros signifying truth.

When I die, I know my ashes will be scattered, as per my explicit requests, along Riis Beach, so I can be among every gay person we’ve lost. I will be scattered across the length of the sands I grew up on, bringing fertilizer to the beachgrass, little atoms of me carried across the planet to places unknown — every country I never had the time to visit. I’ll be trading a biological family that never understood me for the people who understood me more than anyone else: the drag queens, the black trans girls murdered before their time, the powerful femme dykes, the gay leatherdaddies who succumbed to AIDS before we even had a good grasp at what it was. We all will be together, forever.

* * *

Aside from at the funeral, I have never been to my mother’s grave.

Perhaps the final eternal hurt is that, because of my mother’s death, none of this can be resolved. I am condemned to overanalyze the past, as she rests in our family plot in a cemetery on Long Island. This lack of closure leaves me unsure, nursing the wounds of a bitter love that spoiled. My family life has eroded my trust, causing turmoil in my interpersonal relationships with friends and lovers. To this day, I’m not sure I understand what affection means, how much is too much and how little is too little. It seems like a distant language to me. I work on these things in therapy every week. I read books about transformative healing, about boundaries and resilience, about trauma and self-love and community. 

I will be scattered across the length of the sands I grew up on, bringing fertilizer to the beachgrass, little atoms of me carried across the planet to places unknown — every country I never had the time to visit.

I have to catch myself. I pull away from people, hard. I take too much power from the falsehood of self-reliance. The irony in my self-reliance is that I have become my own best friend, and yet we have both hated each other for so long, a hatred made worse by the abandonment I felt as a teen. I have lived the majority of my life in an abusive relationship with myself. 

In baring my truest self to my family, I was rejected. What that experience showed me was that I could never be honest about my emotions or desires, and that doing so would bring me and others around me pain. I lost any semblance of trust for anyone. I have carried these feelings into my relationships, and have spent the second half of my life unlearning what I was taught. It is only in the past few years that I have begun to feel any sort of progress, but the water runs deep. 

* * *

Philip Larkin has a famous poem, titled “This Be the Verse,” so beautiful I want it tattooed on my body.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

It is a tongue-in-cheek poetical dig at the way all parents fuck their children up by the sheer proliferation of legacy. I come back to it often, a reminder of the absurdity of family. Larkin doesn’t want us to get out of life as early as we can by killing ourselves, but instead to do everything we can to unlearn the crashing waves of the harm committed against us. As a trans woman, a femme lesbian, a leatherdyke, I know that my own legacy is whatever I choose it to be. 

My legacy is my body, my writing, my chosen family, the energy I put out into the world. My legacy will end with my transsexual body, a woman’s body with a Venus symbol tattooed onto her left arm, burned and scattered across Riis Beach, the gay coastal shelf where I will finally be free from pain, at home with my gay and trans siblings. My chosen family will honor and remember my writing, and in that way, lapping at the coastal shelf of my mother wound, I will live forever.

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir
Witness Mami Roar, by Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez
Leadership Academy, by Victor Yang
All Mom’s Friends, by Svetlana Kitto

* * *

June Amelia Rose is an anarchist leatherdyke fiction writer and proud transsexual living in Brooklyn. Her short story, “My Sweet Femme Nightmare,” was recently published in Best Lesbian Erotica Volume 4. She has a short novel awaiting publication, and is currently at work on another one.

Editor: Vanessa Mártir

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Albatross People

Arthur Morris / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Colin Daileda | Longreads | March 2020 | 7 minutes (2,000 words)

My wife told me she had at last booked a flight back to Bengaluru and so I should relax that evening at our apartment. There I opened a book I was reading about birds, called The Thing With Feathers, by Noah Strycker. I was toward the end, on a chapter about albatrosses.

The wandering albatross looks not much different from a seagull, except it’s enormous. Its wings span 12 feet, twice my height. Wanderers need wings like this because they spend a huge part of their lives floating over the open ocean, plucking fish and squid from the water. They do this away from their mates, because keeping track of each other would cost precious energy needed to stay aloft. Each partner goes about their own life until, once every two years, they flutter back home to the little bits of land in the Southern oceans on which they nest. They greet each other with a dance and quickly go about building that year’s home. Though it takes nine months for an albatross chick to leave its nest, the parents won’t see each other much during that time, either. The baby needs food, and so they fly out in search of it over different parts of the sea. All that time away, and yet albatrosses almost always remain faithful for life.

Read more…

All that Was Innocent and Violent: Girlhood in Post-Revolution Iran

Photo courtesy of the author, Mel Yates / Getty, iStock / Getty Images Plus, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Naz Riahi | Longreads | March 2020 | 29 minutes (7,251 words)

A few months after I was born, just a year after The Islamic Revolution, Shee Shee and Baba bought a house and moved, with my 12-year-old brother and me, to Karaj, a suburb of Tehran.

They moved to the suburb, in part, for the same reasons many young couples with children everywhere in the world, do — for space and a quiet place to raise their family. They moved also to get away from the chaos of Tehran, a city that was changing rapidly, seemingly overnight, after The Revolution — becoming overbearing with rules, regulations and unexpected dangers.

They found refuge in a private development called Dehkadeh. Built a few years before our move, in the mid ‘70s, Dehkadeh had a guarded entrance and a town square. Its streets, named after flowers, were lined with white birch — regal, gentle. Over the years, the birch grew tall, bending towards each other, creating a canopy. In the hot summers, they shaded us, letting just enough light stream through their leaves. In autumn those same leaves changed color and fell to the ground, turning our streets into rivers of reds and yellows. In the winters, their bare branches were covered in snow and icicles.

The town square had a sandwich shop, a grocery store and bakery. There was a fountain in the middle and a sit-down restaurant — which, shortly after we moved, was taken over by the government and turned into a mosque. All of the businesses, including the local bus line, were owned by people who lived in the community, comprising 700 or so houses. My pediatrician was a family friend who lived a few doors down from us, the elementary school I would eventually attend was at the end of our cul-de-sac and all of the teachers lived in Dehkadeh.

That was home. An hour’s drive to the city, but a different world, less hectic, safer (for a time) like a secret that protected us from all the bad, scary things happening in Iran — the war with Iraq, the new government that brutally enforced theocracy, the people whose allegiances weren’t known and who therefore couldn’t be trusted.

We lived on Niloufar Gharby (Water Lily West). Our tiny, single-story ranch-style house had a white metal gate that creaked open and shut and was surrounded by hedges thick with honeysuckle whose fragrance and nectar I’d lose myself in, daydreaming about all the happy lives I’d live someday. I’d become a writer like my grandfather, Baba Moeini, revered as he was. I’d travel the world like Shee Shee and Baba had done before The Revolution, before I was born. I’d be the hero of a real life story like my favorite superheroes, the ones I’d learned about on bootleg videos procured by my aunt’s husband on the post-Revoution black market, where everything from Corn Flakes to Michael Jackson tapes could still be found.

Our backyard was large and filled with fruit trees — peaches, nectarines, sour cherries, apples, and plums. A trellis ran down the middle, covered in grape leaves, and a white swing sat under an enormous weeping willow. There were rows and rows of strawberries in the field, and rose bushes beneath the windows.

Between the time I was a toddler and a child, my parents tore apart the back of our house to expand the living room and give me my own bedroom adjacent to theirs. I remember the excitement of getting a room of my own, but when construction ended and a big-girl bed arrived, I was horribly afraid to be alone at night. Though my parents’ room was just on the other side of my door, I felt abandoned. I remember Baba putting me to bed, tucking me in, and telling me to be brave.

For Baba, a helicopter pilot and soldier who was often away fighting in an actual war, bravery was a person’s greatest asset. His bedtime stories were rich with heroes fighting dangerous forces. I tried hard to be brave for him, but fell asleep each night a coward, hiding beneath my comforter from the night and its invisible dangers.

I took my first steps in the hallway in front of my older brother’s room. Shee Shee insists there is no way I could remember. But I do. I remember falling into an uncle’s arms. After that, the memories rush in.
Read more…

Bowen Yang is Simply Awesome

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 14: Bowen Yang (Photo by Tommaso Boddi / Getty Images for Viacom )

Bowen Yang joined Saturday Night Live in 2018 as a writer and quickly became a beloved part of the cast in the 2019-2020 season. (My personal favorite Bowen Yang character: “bitchy” Kim Jong-un.) In this all-too-brief profile at GQ, Bowen talks to Chris Gayomali about how the elder Yang’s insistence on conversion therapy ended up as bonding opportunities for father and son.

At one point during lunch, Bowen tells a story about how his parents found an “open chat window” on the family computer, which is how they learned that Bowen was gay. “I had never seen my dad cry before up until that point,” says Bowen. “And I was coming home from school every day to him sobbing.”

Soon, Dad pitches Bowen on the idea of conversion therapy to “fix” his queerness. It wasn’t that the family was religious or anything. It was more: “We solve problems in this house, and this feels like a solution,” explains Bowen. “We’re not really going to look into how it’s destructive or bad or terrible.” So a 17-year-old Bowen, perhaps implicitly understanding that his parents may be operating from a place of fear, opens up a little bit of space in his heart and goes, “Okay, if it means you’ll stop being this sad…then sure.”

Read the story

The Strange and Dangerous World of America’s Big Cat People

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Rachel Nuwer | Longreads | March 2020 | 28 minutes (7,033 words)

You can listen to our four-part “Cat People” podcast series on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s a gloomy April afternoon in rural Oklahoma, and I’m sitting on the floor of a fluorescent-lit room at a roadside zoo with Nova, a 12-week-old tiliger. She looks like a tiger cub, but she’s actually a crossbreed, an unnatural combination of a tiger father and a mother born of a tiger and a lion. That unique genetic makeup places a higher price tag on cubs like Nova, and makes it easier, legally speaking, to abuse and exploit them. Endangered species protections don’t apply to artificial breeds such as tiligers. Hybridization, however, has done nothing to quell Nova’s predatory instincts. For the umpteenth time during the past six minutes, she lunges at my face, claws splayed and mouth ajar — only to be halted mid-leap as her handler jerks her harness. Unphased, Nova gets right back to pouncing.

With her dusty blue eyes, sherbet-colored paws, and prominent black stripes, Nova is adorable. But she also weighs 30 pounds and has teeth like a Doberman’s and claws the size of jumbo shrimp. Nova’s handler, a woman with long brown hair who tells me she recently retired from her IT job at a South Dakota bank to live out her dream of working with exotic cats, scolds the rambunctious tiliger in a goo-goo-ga-ga voice: “Nooooo, nooooo, you calms down!” Nova is teething, the handler explains, so she just wants something to chew on. The handler reaches for one of the tatty stuffed animals strewn around the room — a substitute, I guess, for my limbs. In that moment of distraction, Nova lunges. She lands her mark, chomping into the bicep of my producer, Graham Lee Brewer.

“Ooo, she got me!” Lee Brewer grimaces as he attempts to pull away from the determined predator. Nova’s handler has to pry the tiliger’s jaws open to detach her. After the incident, the woman conveniently checks her watch: “OK, you guys, time is up!”

I paid $80 for the pleasure of spending 12 minutes with Nova, but I’m glad the experience, billed as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is over. On our way out, we pass more than a dozen adult tigers yowling and pacing cages the size of small classrooms. Nearby signs solicit donations. You are their only hope. Sponsor a cabin or compound today! In the safety of our car, Lee Brewer rolls up his sleeve, exposing a swollen red welt. “Look at my gnarly tiger bite,” he chuckles. “I tried to play it off but I was like, this fuckin’ hurts!”

It’s not the first time I’ve seen this world up-close; I spent the better part of eight years investigating wildlife trafficking around the world. During my travels, I visited farms in China and Laos where tigers are raised like pigs, examined traditional medicine in Vietnam, ate what I was told was tiger bone “cake,” and tracked some of the world’s last remaining wild tigers in India. Almost everywhere I went, tigers were suffering and their numbers were on the decline because of human behavior. Until recently, though, I had no idea the United States was part of the problem. Read more…

“I miss my body when it was ferocious” The Transfiguration of Paul Curreri

Paul Curreri -- All photos by Aaron Farrington

Brendan Fitzgerald | Longreads | March 2020 | 47 minutes (12,973 words)

I had seen Paul Curreri a few times around Charlottesville — pushing a cart around the local Wegmans grocery, drinking seltzer at the brewery, holding his young daughter and wearing a brace on one hand — before I worked up the nerve to write to him.

“I’m not sure if you know I’ve been fairly sidelined for the past five years via hand and vocal problems,” he wrote back. “I shouldn’t necessarily assume you know that. Perhaps you just thought I’ve been lazy as shit.” I told him I didn’t want much of his time; I had kids of my own now, too. “Truly,” he wrote back, “there is always time.”

Over a decade, Curreri had released a body of music that should have made him one of America’s most esteemed songwriters. “Paul Curreri gives what few songwriters can,” Matt Dellinger wrote in The New Yorker in 2002. “It hits you soon and hard that you’re hearing something exquisite.” His first albums, built on country blues foundations, shook with dexterous picking and a voice that keened and yipped and roared. A few early songs functioned like artist statements, little revelations of ethos bound up in the tension between the limits of Curreri’s body and the demands of his music. “If your work is shouting, deep-breasted, from sun-up to sundown, take care,” he sang on 2003’s Songs for Devon Sproule, named for the musician he’d marry a few years later. “In time, a shouter you’ll become.”

For years, Curreri’s work had shouted, and so he became a shouter of singular beauty. Then, he went quiet — slowly, at first, then all of a sudden.

Read more…

The Criminalization of the American Midwife

Illustration by Ellice Weaver

Jennifer Block  |  March 2020  |  32 minutes (8,025 words)

Elizabeth Catlin had just stepped out of the shower when she heard banging on the door. It was around 10 a.m. on a chilly November Wednesday in Penn Yan, New York, about an hour southeast of Rochester. She asked her youngest child, Keziah, age 9, to answer while she threw on jeans and a sweatshirt. “There’s a man at the door,” Keziah told her mom.

“He said, ‘I’d like to question you,” Caitlin tells me. A woman also stood near the steps leading up to her front door; neither were in uniform. “I said, ‘About what?’” The man flashed a badge, but she wasn’t sure who he was. “He said, ‘About you pretending to be a midwife.’”

Catlin, a home-birth midwife, was open about her increasingly busy practice. She’d send birth announcements for her Mennonite clientele to the local paper. When she was pulled over for speeding, she’d tell the cop she was on her way to a birth. “I’ve babysat half of the state troopers,” she says.

It was 30 degrees. Catlin, 53, was barefoot. Her hair was wet. “Can I get my coat?” she asked. No. Boots? She wasn’t allowed to go back inside. Her older daughter shoved an old pair of boots, two sizes too big, through the doorway; Catlin stepped into them and followed the officer and woman to the car. At the state trooper barracks, she sat on a bench with one arm chained to the wall. There were fingerprints, mug shots, a state-issue uniform, lock-up. At 7:30 p.m. she was finally arraigned in a hearing room next to the jail, her wrists and ankles in chains, on the charge of practicing midwifery without a license. Local news quoted a joint investigation by state police and the Office of Professional Discipline that Catlin had been “posing as a midwife” and “exploiting pregnant women within the Mennonite community, in and around the Penn Yan area.”

Catlin’s apparent connection with a local OB-GYN practice, through which she had opened a lab account, would prompt a second arrest in December, the Friday before Christmas, and more felony charges: identity theft, falsifying business records, and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. That time, she spent the night in jail watching the Hallmark Channel. When she walked into the hearing room at 8:00 a.m., again in chains, she was met by dozens of women in grey-and-blue dresses and white bonnets. The judge set bail at $15,000 (the state had asked for $30,000). Her supporters had it: Word of her arrest had quickly passed through the tech-free community, and in 12 hours they had collected nearly $8,000 for bail; Catlin’s mother made up the difference. She was free to go, but not free to be a midwife.

Several years back, a respected senior midwife faced felony charges in Indiana, and the county prosecutor allowed that although a baby she’d recently delivered had not survived, she had done nothing medically wrong — but she needed state approval for her work. The case, the New York Times wrote, “was not unlike one against a trucker caught driving without a license.” As prosecutor R. Kent Apsley told the paper, “He may be doing an awfully fine job of driving his truck. But the state requires him to go through training, have his license and be subject to review.”

But what if the state won’t recognize the training or grant a license? 

Catlin is a skilled, respected, credentialed midwife. She serves a rural, underserved, uninsured population. She’s everything the state would want in a care provider. But owing to a decades-old political fight over who can be licensed as a midwife, she’s breaking the law.  Read more…

Behind One of the Sketchiest Men, a Sketchy Woman

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 24: Adam Neumann and Rebekah Neumann attend the 2018 Time 100 Gala at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/FilmMagic)

For Bustle, Moe Tkacik takes a close look at the ways in which wealthy, new-agey Rebekah Paltrow Neumann — Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin, Adam Neumann’s wife — helped fuel WeWork’s rise and spectacular fall.

Not surprisingly in late-stage capitalism, many WeWork-adjacent faux-virtuous institutions came tumbling down right around the same time the co-working behemoth failed.

The Kabbalah Centre preaches that you can get what you want by willing or “manifesting” it to be. According to the former WeWork staffer, Adam believed that by the time the music stopped, so much important real estate would be annexed by WeWork that they’d be Too Big to Fail. Lofty marketing and lush amenities nearly got them there. “You can use the language of spirituality to revive a discredited idea,” [Rebekah’s yoga instructor and Uma Thurman’s brother Dechen] Thurman says. “And so, the yoga business is old-fashioned labor exploitation, and maybe WeWork was a Ponzi scheme.”

By the middle of the decade, Rebekah’s spiritual stomping grounds had come under fire for taking advantage of congregants. The Jivamukti yoga studio was sued for sexual harassment in 2016 and later settled; it closed its doors in New York City in December 2019. The Kabbalah Centre has faced multiple lawsuits from former members over misappropriated donations and sexual assault, and is currently being sued by seven former staffers who accuse the group of forcing them to sign “vows of poverty” and work essentially for free.

The junk mail company that had bankrolled Rebekah’s lavish childhood began to collapse, too, a few months before WeWork’s botched IPO. In March 2019, roughly 700 employees of a company factory in Ciudad Juárez were told to take a three-day weekend, only to return to an empty warehouse; in interviews, employees said the machinery had been driven back across the border. No one bothered leaving their last paychecks, so employees resorted to hanging “Wanted” posters outside the plant with photos of Rebekah’s brother-in-law, Nick Robinson, who had been running the company during Bob Paltrow’s tax evasion case and is accused in one lawsuit of looting its coffers.

Read the story