Search Results for: health

A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

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The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
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‘To Be Well’: An Unmothered Woman’s Search for Real Love

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Vanessa Mártir | Longreads | November 2019 | 17 minutes (4,435 words)

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

* * *

In one of my earliest memories, my mother is leaning on the washing machine in our kitchen smoking a cigarette. She is watching her butch partner, Millie, who is on the other side of the room. Their eyes are locked. My mother smirks and takes a long drag of her cigarette. Millie walks toward her, leans her weight on my mother’s body, and kisses her. The smoke seeps out of their open mouths. I giggle and look away, blushing. 

We never talked about who Millie was to Mom or to her children. As a kid, I made Millie Father’s Day cards, complete with cardboard collar and tie. At some point, we started referring to Millie as our aunt when people asked who she was or how we were related. I was too young to understand what this meant. 

I met my now wife Katia in August 2015 at a women’s music festival in Michigan. We fell in love quickly, and when my mother heard whisperings of my relationship, she sent me cruel text messages, criticizing me for being a bad daughter and mother. 

She didn’t ask me who Katia was or if she was good to me. 

“Les di un mal ejemplo,” she said.  

I deleted her messages without responding and blocked her when they got to be too much. 

I married Katia on May 10th of this year. My mother was not there. I didn’t invite her, but she wouldn’t have come even if I had.

My relationship with Katia is the first where I am not clawing for the love of an emotionally unavailable person, like I’ve done so many times in the past, repeating the “love me, please love me” cycle I learned from my relationship with my mother. This doesn’t matter to my mother. It doesn’t matter that Katia shows up for me, is supportive, kind, and reliable. It doesn’t matter that Katia loves my daughter, so much so that she included her in her wedding vows, turning to her and promising to love her and be there for her like her own. 

All that matters to my mother is that Katia is a woman. 

* * *

My mother and I have never been close. She was abusive and harsh when I was growing up, and I learned early on that no one could protect me from her. Not even Millie, though she tried. I left to attend boarding school at 13 and never returned. 

Boarding school was my way out. At 13 I had to leave to save my own life. 

She’s been in and out of my life since. Whenever I disobey her or don’t live my life the way she thinks I should, which is often, she punishes me by denying me her love. 

She’s done this so many times, leaving me longing for her love. A friend asked me recently, “How many times have you lost your mother?” The question connotes that I had her love at some point. It pains me to say it, and I feel so much guilt writing this, but the truth is I’ve never felt like I had my mother’s consistent love. Not as a child. Not as an adult. But nothing exists in a vacuum. I know my mother is unable to mother me because of her own trauma. 

* * *

My mother was raised in Honduras in the kind of poverty we only see in Save the Children commercials. She once told me a story of when she was 11 years old. She’s sitting on the latrine. It looks like the one I used on my first trip to Honduras when I was 9. I was a spoiled Americana who had only used a toilet that flushed so I didn’t have to look at where the stuff went. The toilets at home were white and eddied the business away. This thing was a black, bottomless hole where I imagined all sorts of vermin squirmed, waiting for an unsuspecting child like me for them to grab and chew on. The wooden planks of the shack were old and splintered, black in parts where the moisture had seeped into the grain, which was now growing mold. You could peek out in spots where the wood had warped. Mom is sitting on the wooden top, no toilet seat to protect her rear, but by this time she knew how to sit so the splinters didn’t dig into her. She’s grown immune to the stench and the frightening thoughts of what’s festering in that hole. She’s swinging her skinny legs, elbows propped on her knees, face in her hands. She’s scarred from mosquito bites and so many falls. She picks at a scab and wonders what they’ll eat that night. Tortillas y frijoles, for sure. The staple diet de los pobres. She hopes her abuelita Tinita has scrounged enough to buy at least a piece of meat. Un pollito o una carnesita de res dripping in fat and juices. It’s been so long since Mom ate meat. That’s when she feels the shudder in her stomach, like something is moving, slithering. Then she starts to choke. Something has lodged in her throat so she can’t breathe in or out. She kicks the flimsy wooden door of the latrine. Her worn-too-many-times panties and shorts are still around her ankles. Her T-shirt is still rolled up above her belly button. Abuelita, who is sitting on a stool in the patio shelling beans, runs to her and shoves her hand into Mom’s mouth. Mom gags but nothing comes up. Tinita shoves her fingers deeper until she feels it. She grabs hold and yanks, pulls out a tapeworm two feet long. Mom falls back onto the dirt, sweating and heaving.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it. When she was calling me ungrateful. Stories about how she ran barefoot to school in the morning because shoes were a luxury so the one pair she had were saved for special occasions. If she was late, she would have no milk for the day. It was powdered and tasted like chalk, and bugs floated on the top of the yellow liquid. But they drank it because it was the only milk they had.

Mom told me stories of her childhood when she wanted to me to see how good I had it.

Then there was the story of her muñequita. The Catholic Church up the road gave Christmas gifts to the children in the barrio. They were donated by charities from overseas, but by the time the load reached the barrio, the rich had taken their pick from the lot. So one year, Mom was given just a doll’s head. She had a mass of brown curls and big blue eyes. It was the only doll Mom had.

A few days later, Mom woke to find that Abuelita had fashioned a body for the doll using rags she sewed together and stuffed with leaves and dirt. She made the doll a dress out of one Mom had outgrown. Mom slept with that doll for years. She cried every single time she told that story.

We were poor growing up, but for us poverty meant living in Bushwick, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that was a pile of rubble, in an apartment with walls that chipped and flaked in chunks, giving me asthma and my brother lead poisoning. Poverty for us meant not having the latest kicks and not being able to go on school trips that cost money. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger. It meant watching her baby sister have seizures and die because they didn’t have access to adequate health care. When my mother told me this story, she clawed her hands and flailed her arms to show me como le brincaba el cuerpo a la niña, who was not yet a year old. 

Poverty for my mother meant hunger and being unmothered. 

My grandmother started working at 5 years old. When she had her children, she worked as a maid for wealthy families who lived in gated mansions surrounded by the shacks of the poor. Three of Abuela’s children died as a result of poverty. Six months after one of her daughters died, the infant my mother saw convulse, she left Honduras for good. She moved to Puerto Rico with the Turkish family she was working for. My mother, who was then 9, was left with her grandmother Tinita. My mother has said: Tinita fue mi madre. She didn’t see her birth mother for five years. 

Hunger taught Mom that life was brutal but she didn’t imagine it could be worse in this country. Nothing could have prepared her.

* * *

My mother was 15 when she arrived to the U.S. She hadn’t been here two days before her mother’s husband started molesting her. She still had Honduran soil under her fingernails. 

My brother was conceived in that rape. My grandmother blamed my mother. My mother has never gotten over what happened to her. I know that’s why she couldn’t and still can’t mother me. 

I am unmothered because my mother was unmothered. 

* * *

 

As a kid, when I watched Claire Huxtable and Elyse Keaton on TV and saw the mothers and their children in my neighborhood, I often wondered why my mother wasn’t like them. Yes, she fed and clothed me, and made sure I had a roof over my head, but she wasn’t tender or affectionate. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. “Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?” That memory still makes me wince. 

* * *

 

Months into my relationship with Katia, my aunt had a dinner for the family. I decided not to attend because I knew my mother would be there, but my daughter begged to go. 

I saw my mother standing in front of the building as soon as we turned the corner. I told Katia to park behind a large van so my mother couldn’t see us. Moments after my daughter got out of the car, I heard my mother. 

“Where’s your mother? Tell her to come. Tell her to come.” The bass in her voice increased with each “Tell her to come.” I couldn’t see her face, but I know that roar. As a kid it would send me running up into the plum tree in our backyard. 

I told Katia to hit the gas. I watched my mother yell and flail her arms in the rearview mirror. I later found out she cornered my daughter to interrogate her. 

This is how Katia met my mother. She drove us to a nearby park where I sobbed into her chest. 

* * *

I spent much of my life trying to win my mother’s love. I know now that she did the best she could with what she had, but the little girl I was didn’t get what she needed, and the young woman I was still suffered for that love well into adulthood. 

Once when I was 5 or 6, I went with her to El Faro, the supermarket on the corner. I reached up for her hand to cross the street and she swatted me away. ‘Porque siempre tienes que estar encima de mi?’ That memory still makes me wince.

I repeated the “love me, please love me” cycle for a long time after leaving my mother’s house. I broke my heart countless times as a result, falling for people who were emotionally unavailable like my mother. I even repeated the cycle in my friendships. 

It wasn’t until my college graduation that I finally saw it: Nothing I did would ever be enough for her. 

I was still wearing the blue gown with the Columbia University crown stitched onto the lapel. I’d asked my drug dealer then-boyfriend, one of a string of terrible decisions, not to come because I didn’t want to incite my mother. We went to an Italian restaurant not far from campus. Most of my family was there — my aunt, grandmother, sister, cousins. We were eating when I told them that I’d decided not to go to law school, a decision I’ve never regretted. I was going to take a year off to work and figure out my next move. My mother slammed her fork so hard, the entire table shook. She glared at me and said: “Yo sabía que tú no ibas a ‘cer ni mierda con tu vida.” 

I’d like to say that this was the moment I stopped trying to please her, but that would be a lie. That wound walks with me always.

* * *

When my brother died in 2013, I reeled into the darkest place of my life. People say that the death of a loved one is the greatest loss. No one tells you about the griefs that grief will uncover. No one tells you how those griefs will suffocate you. 

The grief that came hurtling at me was my mother wound. I had to face it. I had to give it a name: I am an unmothered woman. You can’t take on or heal what you haven’t named. This was the beginning of my healing journey. 

I dedicated myself to my healing: I went to therapy, I wrote, I hiked, I worked out, I created art, I did what I needed to be well. It was two years and three months later that I met Katia. I realize now that I was finally ready for a love that I’d never known. A reliable, supportive, I-gotchu love. I’m still learning how to receive it and nurture it. The image of love I’d been taught is so very different from the real thing. 

* * *

The next time I saw my mother was a year later at my cousin’s baby shower. I knew she would be there but I decided to go anyway, with my daughter and Katia. 

At first she ignored me and pretended not to care, but once I ran into her alone in the stairwell, she fell apart. My mother is a tiny woman who’s been dealt a hard hand in life. That doesn’t give her a pass. 

In that moment, the angry woman was gone, replaced by a frail, broken child. 

“I miss my daughter,” she said, smoothing her hand on my cheek. It was the most tender she’d been with me for years. My chest caved. “What happened, Vanessa?”

“I can’t let you hurt me anymore, ma,” I said. I didn’t try to explain myself or defend my partner and our love. It was devastating to see her so broken. I’ve had to remind myself many times since that choosing me was and still is the right thing to do. 

She refused to let me introduce her to Katia. “I’m not ready,” she said. Katia was unfazed. She’s been out since she was 16 and doesn’t need my mother’s approval. It’s me who still wants it, though I know that may never happen. 

Later, my mother started downing shots of tequila. I watched her, knowing what happens when she does this. When she asked me to take her to the bathroom, she had a crazed, faraway look in her eyes. She was slurring her words and bumping into people. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror and splashed water on her face. Before long, she was back in that space I remember from childhood, what I’ve learned is a psychotic episode. 

She doesn’t remember any of it — how she cried and talked about the man who raped her, “ese degracia’o.” She sobbed when she spoke of my brother. “I miss my son,” she said over and over. Her pain raw and palpable. 

Katia held her hair while she threw up. “You remind me so much of Millie,” she said, looking up at Katia, bits of half digested food on her chin.

“But I’m not her,” Katia responded as she held my mother up so she wouldn’t fall into her own vomit. 

It’s been three years since that day. I’ve seen my mother only a handful of times since. 

* * *

My mother was a Jehovah’s Witness when she met Millie. She went to the apartment of the sister of an elder, and there was Millie. Mom says she was sitting in a living room filled with women talking and drinking and dancing, when Millie sat next to her. “Do you know what’s going on here?” Millie asked. 

I imagine my mother, all of 23 with three children. She had gone through so much in the few years since she’d been in the U.S. She found community, hope, and maybe even redemption in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but she was still very naive about the world. Millie saw this and started pursuing her. 

She’d roll up on her bike when we were walking in the street. We’d come home to find Millie hanging out on the stoop of our building. My brother, who was 5, remembered Millie inviting herself in one day. A short while later, she moved in and that December we celebrated our first Christmas. This was Brooklyn, 1978. I was 3 years old. 

* * *

Though my mother and Millie were together throughout my childhood, my mother remained conflicted. I know this because when I was in sixth grade, she put me in Jehovah’s Witness Bible studies classes. 

At first, I was ever the serious student. I did all the assignments, read the biblical stories and scriptures, answered the questions, reflected on the lessons, and went to the Kingdom Hall on Sundays. God became my everything. So much so that my sixth grade writing teacher took me aside once and said, “It’s beautiful that you have such a great love for God, Vanessa, but you have to write about something else.” 

I kept at it. I imagine that somewhere in my mind, I thought: Maybe this will make Mom love me. 

It was all good until I started questioning the teachings. I hadn’t admitted to anyone that my moms were in a lesbian relationship. I didn’t realize it myself until I was in fifth grade and a student told me butch means lesbian. 

I think I knew. I think I just didn’t want to know. 

When Caroline, the sister who gave us the Bible studies classes, started talking about love and relationships, I asked: “What does the Bible say about love between women?”

Caroline raised her eyebrows. “The Bible says we should all love one another.”

I pushed. “But what does the Bible say about women who love each other like a man and woman love each other?”

Caroline looked around our small living room at the pictures on the walls. Pictures of my family. Pictures of me and Millie and my sister and brother and my mom. “The Bible says it’s a sin.” For homework she had me read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

That’s when I started to rebel. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie. When I became obsessed with basketball when I was 9, she nailed a bike rim to a splintered board and put it up in the backyard. Then she went out and bought me an official Spalding basketball. When I wanted a bike when I was 10, she went around the neighborhood junkyards and built me a bike out of the pieces she gathered. The body was sparkling purple, one wheel was yellow, the other blue, the seat was a cracked white leather, and the grips, which were peeling away, were a pretty aqua blue. The kids made fun of me and called it Rainbow Bike, but I rode it like it was a king’s chariot. 

I was too young to understand the complexities of queerness and what it meant to be gender nonconforming, so when Caroline said what she said about love between women, it was Millie I thought of. Millie was the one who would grab the brim of her Kangol cap and say, “Yo soy butch.” The way she said it, it was like she was dancing salsa but just with her shoulders. 

See, the one who loved me, who showed me tenderness, who held me up, who whispered in my ear that I was going to be somebody, was Millie.

But I couldn’t accept that Millie was sinful. She was the one who loved me. 

I started questioning everything Caroline said. If she tried to teach me another portion of the Bible, I went back to Sodom and Gomorrah. I demanded that she explain. When she showed me the scriptures, I shook my head and said, “No. I don’t believe it.” 

One day, frustrated and hurt, I yelled, “Well, who wrote the bible and who says God told them to write it?”

Caroline looked at me, her eyes sad and resigned. Without another word, she packed her things and never came back. 

Mom beat me that night. She didn’t say why, but I knew. 

* * *

Mom told me once about how Abuela confronted her about being with a woman. They were in a train station when my mother stood up to Abuela. Abuela who didn’t mother her. Abuela who accused her of seducing her husband. “Me ganó la cara,” Mom said. In the scene I imagined, they are in the Wilson Street L train station near where we lived then in Bushwick. They are standing in the turnstile, the wooden bar between them. I hear the roar of the train and I see my mother’s face. The red handprint on her cheek. She is glaring at her mother. That was the day my mother decided to stay with Millie, “por rebeldía.”

My mother thinks I am with Katia to be rebellious. To spite her. 

* * *

“I was never gay, m’ija,” she once told me. “It’s just that Millie was there for me.” 

Theirs was a violent and tumultuous relationship, but my mother agrees, “Of all my children, Millie loved you.” So, it’s not completely surprising that once I embraced my queerness, I fell in love with a butch.

* * *

I saw my mother this past March. I invited her to my house for the first time since Katia and I moved in together three and a half years ago. It was my turn to host the monthly family brunch, a tradition my aunt started a while back. 

A few weeks before, Mom hosted the brunch in her house and called to invite me. When we hung up, she texted, “you can invite your friend.” I laughed but didn’t address it. By then she knew Katia and I were engaged and had talked a lot of shit that I ultimately ignored. 

That’s the thing about the mother wound, even when you know it’s dangerous, you still hold out hope that the relationship will change. That your mother will one day mother you. 

We had a good time at the brunch in her house. My mother was decent, even kind. She and Katia talked and joked. Katia was sick with a bad cold and had to leave early. Mom sent me home with Tupperware full of food for Katia. The next day, Mom texted to ask how Katia was doing. 

It was progress. So when it was my turn to host brunch, I invited my mother. 

The day started with drama. She said she lost her keys and couldn’t come. I was distraught. I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval. 

I woke up super early to cook a lavish meal. We bought steaks to grill on the deck. I had Katia buy champagne and gallons of orange juice to make mimosas. 

Mom came in hours late, after we’d all eaten and had several drinks. She walked in criticizing. She didn’t like that I lived on a hill. She didn’t like where I live because you have to walk down a path at the side of the house to get to the entryway then up a narrow set of stairs to get to our apartment on the third floor. She said I pay way too much rent. “Why don’t you buy a house already?” She told me to close my writing room door because she didn’t like the pictures I had posted. This was the room I cleaned the deepest, that I was most excited to show her. I shook my head. “You can move,” I said and kept talking to the family. 

I had doña cleaned my house the week leading up to it. Mopping and wiping and moving furniture and ensuring my house was in tip-top condition. I didn’t say this aloud but I know why — I wanted my mother’s approval.

She said my plants needed watering. I needed to change the soil. She was surprised I had a bag of soil on hand. She showed me how to repot one of them. The plant has thrived since she put her hands on it. 

She wasn’t there two hours before it happened. The topic of the wedding came up and I started talking excitedly about our plans when she demanded that I stop. She said it was disrespectful of me to discuss it in front of her. She called me malcriada. It was then that I saw in real time all the healing I’ve done over the past few years. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t flip out. “You cannot take away my joy,” I said. 

She stormed out. I haven’t seen or spoken to her much since. 

I married Katia on May 10th, surrounded by the people who love and support us — Katia’s family, her mom, siblings, a few cousins; my chosen family including my sister friends. my mother’s sister and brother, and my abuela. 

Yes, I wish my mother was there. 

Yes, I wish my mother would accept my relationship. 

Yes, I wish she could mother me, but the fact is that she can’t, and though it pains me, I’ve gone no-contact for now. 

It hurts to not have her in my life, but it hurts more when she’s present and in my life. 

Thankfully, I’ve learned that I can make something beautiful out of my suffering: I can start the Writing the Mother Wound Movement, and I can help people write and publish their stories about their fraught relationships with their mothers. 

The greatest thing that has come out of this work, however, is this: My daughter is not unmothered. She walked me down the aisle, though she made it clear: “I’m not giving you away, but I’m willing to share you.” 

This is the love I’m reclaiming. This is how I’ve learned to mother myself. 

* * *

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

* * *

Vanessa Mártir is a NYC based writer and educator. She has been widely published, including in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Bitch Magazine, and the NYTimes Bestseller Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay. She is the creator of the Writing Our Lives Workshop, which she teaches online and in NYC, and the Writing the Mother Wound Movement. 

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

Downsizing in the Shadow of Disaster

Ghost Ship warehouse fire memorial mural
Local artist Norman Vogue works on a mural dedicated to the victims of the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland, California. The mural includes the names of the 36 people killed in the fire. (Anda Chu / Bay Area News Group / Getty Images)

In Harper’s Magazine, Wes Enzinna writes about living in a 32-square-foot shack behind a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s house in Oakland in 2016, the year of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire. Struggling to find personal solutions they can afford amidst the country’s worst housing crisis, Enzinna and his friends try to live within their means by downsizing what they need to live and dwelling in dangerous makeshift spaces that threaten their health, well-being, and, when disaster strikes, their lives.

“It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out,” George Orwell wrote in Down and Out in Paris and London. “You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

The powerful thing about smallness, it occurred to me, isn’t actually smallness for its own sake—the point, instead, is a matter of scale. If you reduce the size of your life enough, then the smallest change can be a profound improvement. Yet the hardest thing is to recognize your smallness without being diminished by it. In my shack I was always balancing that tension—I didn’t want to become so small that I disappeared, I just wanted to hide for a little while.

Everyone was sick with sadness following the fire. I saw survivors at bars, their eyebrows singed off. I chatted with old pals at parties and realized they were talking about their girlfriends or boyfriends in the past tense, as if they were ghosts, because they were. There was talk of suicide, songs about suicide, attempts at suicide that failed and attempts that succeeded. Jenny cried every time we hung out.

In the end, I lived in the shack for eleven months. It shrank to the size of a cage. Living like an animal was no longer liberating. I grew tired of waking up in damp, soiled T-shirts. The weeds by my bed grew head-high. The skunk birthed a litter and left me. My mind a fog, I kept accidentally kicking over my pee jar. Living on so little had exacted a heavy toll.

Being down-and-out is cheap, sure, but the things you do to stand it become expensive, whether drink, drugs, or whatever other vice gets you through the night.

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Let Me Show You the World

aladdin's magic lamp with human figures sharing stories in the background
Illustration by Cat Finnie

Iman Sultan | Longreads | November 2019 | 16 minutes (4,062 words)

 

In Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, released back in May, Princess Jasmine finds herself in the clutches of the palace guards after Jafar has taken over the throne and stripped her father, the rightful Sultan, of his majestic turban. Trapped in a moment of doe-eyed silence and unable to reverse her situation, Jasmine is dragged away in a dreamlike sequence. Then, in a striking departure from the 1992 animated film of the same name, she suddenly breaks out into song.

“Written in stone, every rule, every word,” she sings. “Centuries old and unbending. Stay in your place, better seen and not heard. But now that story is ending…”

In the age of Disney live-action remakes, Aladdin has shattered the box office and proven the commercial viability of the genre. Bringing in a little over a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales, and with a sequel already under discussion, Aladdin revealed to the public that a diverse cast, strong female leads, and a reformed Disney isn’t just good for the culture. It’s also — if not primarily — good for business.

A dizzying, colorful, and high-budget romp, 21st-century Aladdin tries to do it all: the leads are of Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian descent. Will Smith plays a genie who yearns for freedom. Naomi Scott reimagines Jasmine as an unbending, dignified princess who claims political agency and saves her kingdom from the impending doom of the evil Jafar.

“I saw her as a young woman, not a teenager, with a mature strength that can cut you down,” the British-Gujarati actress told British Vogue. “So I said to them, ‘Just to let you know, I want to play her strong, and if that’s not what you’re looking for, that’s okay, but it’s not for me.’”

Aladdin is seemingly designed to transcend feminist or antiracist criticism by embodying diversity and “strong” womanhood itself. The filmmakers created a near-identical copy of the animated film with tweaks that, in the words of producer Dan Lin, proved Disney “could create a movie that was both diverse and inclusive” as well as “wildly commercial.” Arabic interjections like yalla are casually heard in the background; the Genie seems to riff his dance moves off of Bollywood choreography; elaborate costumes echo elements from South Asian, Kurdish, and Turkish clothing; and the controversial lyrics of the opening song, “Arabian Nights,” shift from “barbaric” (in the 1992 version) to “chaotic.”

And yet, despite these touches, the essence of the remake remains near-identical: it blends cultures together, distorts the source material, and uses “Arabian Nights” as a song title that sets the atmosphere of a film that ultimately takes place in a fictional world. But the world of Aladdin, the storytelling behind it, and the rich tradition of orally passing down tales across generations in Southwest Asia are not fictional — they’re real.

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Gimme Shelter

Longreads Pick

Wes Enzinna writes about living in a 32-square-foot shack behind a friend’s ex-boyfriend’s house in Oakland in 2016, the year of the Ghost Ship warehouse fire. Struggling to find personal solutions they can afford amidst the country’s worst housing crisis, Enzinna and his friends try to live within their means by downsizing what they need to live, dwelling in dangerous makeshift spaces that threaten their health, well-being, and, when disaster strikes, their lives.

Published: Dec 1, 2019
Length: 32 minutes (8,100 words)

Borrowed Babies

Archival photographs courtesy of the New York State College of Home Economics records, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, NY.

Jill Christman | Iron Horse Literary Review | Spring 2013 | 41 minutes (8,219 words)

 

Cooking, the science of foods, budget-making, house beautifying, dressmaking and a knowledge of textiles, all of these subjects have been considered essential to the teaching of home economics but the art of babies has until this late date been left to theory, and Providence. Now, however, schools of home economics are adding a new branch of study to their curriculum—practical mothercraft. —“Apprenticing for Motherhood,” Today’s Housewife (July 1924)

 

Just weeks after the level-two ultrasound, almost five months pregnant, I booked a ticket to Syracuse, New York, where I was to pick up a rental at the airport and drive up to Ithaca. I had a grant to do research in the human ecology archives of the Cornell library, and I was scheduled to be there for three weeks. Alone. Ithaca is lovely in the summer, I told myself, and archives are like treasure hunts for nerdy people.

I should have been giddy with anticipation, but I was not. I was miserable and terrified and lonely. I didn’t want to go. Now, I recognize this as one of the most unstable times of my life, hormonally speaking, and with all of the chemical changes happening inside my body, I couldn’t cope with change on the outside. I wanted to hunker down. I wanted a box of Wheat Thins, some lemonade with fizzy water, my couch, my dogs, my husband Mark, and another episode of The Baby Story. 

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‘By Choice, and Not By Choice…Time Is Going To Change You.’

Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, c. 1470-80. Oil on panel. (VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Zan Romanoff  | Longreads | November 2019 | 13 minutes (3,494 words)

 

I first encountered Nina MacLaughlin on Tumblr: at some point around 2010, I stumbled onto her blog, Carpentrix, in which she was chronicling the transition from working as a full-time journalist to doing carpentry in and around her native Massachusetts.

I fell in love with the physicality of her writing, the force and attention with which she inhabited the world, and for years, I watched from across the internet (and the country) as she renovated countless kitchens and bathrooms for strangers, hand-built tables for her brothers, and, more recently, got into making spoons.

MacLaughlin published a memoir, Hammer Head, about her career transition in 2015; as it happens, we met in real life that same year — when my best friend married one of those brothers on a bright, cold Boston afternoon.

Wake, Siren is MacLaughlin’s first work of book-length fiction; it re-tells the stories of the female characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, reimagining a cast of mostly silent women as a chorus of voices who have plenty to say about the ways that they’ve been (mis)treated and (mis)represented throughout history. Read more…

The Speaking Length

Illustration by Fabio Consoli

Josh Roiland | Longreads | November, 2019 | 10 minutes (2,622 words)

I once lived in Delaware for two days. I had moved there under the pretext of graduate school, but soon fled back to Minnesota amidst the clanging static of a panic attack.

The morning of the move my car had a flat. Once the tire was patched, I headed east with an atlas and not much of a plan. After 15 hours, I stopped in a Walmart parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, and tried to sleep in my overstuffed car. At dawn, I pushed through the Ohio River Valley and emerged in Newark, Delaware, seven hours later.

It was my first time outside the Midwest.

I had booked my apartment online, and when I arrived, I saw that it sat next to a fire station. Inside, there was a woman painting my walls and singing songs from The Wizard of Oz. I unloaded my car as she packed up and left. My only furniture was an air mattress with a hand pump whose nozzle was too small for its opening.

Once my car was empty, and my apartment slightly less so, I stood surrounded by wet paint and cried. I scared myself by the force of everything pouring from me. I didn’t know where it was coming from, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

I tried to stay busy, distract myself from everything that was to come — whatever that may be. I went to Kmart. Because I was traveling, I thought I needed traveler’s checks. I paid for my home supplies with 15 10-dollar notes. The cashier had to call an 800-number to verify each one. The line grew while his patience shrank. My chest tightened. I fled back to my apartment where I plugged a random coaxial cable into my 13” television. I watched the Food Network until I passed out. In the morning, I awoke on the floor with the air mattress folded up around me.

***

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the “speaking length.” Preconscious, my feet knock together like boxers’ gloves. I lay there shimmering as pulses push me up off the bed, where I hover and tremble. Stretched tight across the bridge, I glint and wink like a snap of sunlight.

There are, today, mornings when I wake up and my body vibrates like a piano string struck by a hammer. The musical term for the section of string that experiences these tremors is the ‘speaking length.’

Or at least that’s what it feels like to wake up in the thrall of anxiety. I crackle and can’t communicate what’s going on, where these vibrations are coming from.

***

Day two in Delaware began with the rounded whine of fire trucks. I showered behind my new vinyl shower curtain then left for the grocery store where the briny stench of fresh seafood shocked my Midwestern sensitivity. I found a bank and set up an account. I went to the post office and bought stamps.

But the truth is that I was already plotting my escape.

That afternoon I went to campus and stood in front of my English department mailbox. Having seen what I would leave, I left. I went back to my apartment, which had transmogrified from alien to comforting. Everything was shape-shifting.


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The evening stretched and sprinted. I circled through my apartment, too afraid to leave but desperate not to stay. With everything unfamiliar and nothing certain, I didn’t know what to do. What were my options? Once again, I stood with my arms wrapped around myself, digging my fingernails into my triceps.

I called my dad. My sobs scared him, and he wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Well,” he finally said. “You can always come home.”

My car was packed before I hung up the phone.

Then, just before I left Delaware forever, my phone rang. A returning grad student called to welcome me and invite me out for a beer. I stood there in my again-empty living room, holding the phone, not knowing what to say.

***

The stories we tell are never wholly our own. Words, and the stories they create, have their own history, and we all work within their limits. Writers and speakers, all of us, constantly reorder and encode new meaning in what has already been said. Our words, as the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin put it, are always “half someone else’s.” This phenomenon came to be known as “metadiscourse.”

One reason we tell stories is so others can understand what we are seeing, thinking, and feeling. But often we misunderstand a basic premise, believing that the communicative norm is transparency when, in fact, it’s opacity. What is meant never fully transmits into what is understood. Linguists call this false belief the myth of perfect understanding.

The stories we tell are never wholly our own.

As much as we may desire to control both the narrative and its reception, meaning is always contingent and never inherent. There is no such thing, Bahktin says, as “neutral and impersonal language.” We merely offer, in the words of Bahktin scholars, “endless redescriptions of the world.”

***

I first saw a therapist early in my second bout with a Ph.D. There’d been break-ups, and I once again felt dislodged from everything I thought I knew. But the counselor and I had a great rapport to the point where he questioned why I was even there. He thought my hyperventilating about certain regrets and uncertainties was overmuch. Though I shared and shared, I could not get him to understand exactly what was going on inside of me.

Nearly every session, in an effort to make me feel better, he’d joke: “So what’s wrong with you again?”

Nonetheless, I went on to see a psychiatrist, and then another, in an effort to better explain myself. Or have myself explained to me. OCD? Bipolar? Plain old depression? Who could tell? Regardless, medications were prescribed and ingested. Klonopin for acute anxiety. Zoloft for depression. Then Effexor when the Zoloft didn’t work.

There was little oversight with these scripts, and I experienced all the ignominious side effects without much psychic relief. When I told the doctor that the Klonopin didn’t seem to quell any sudden panic, she said it was because of my high metabolism and urged me to up the dosage until I felt OK.

Then one night, I was carried out of a bar.

***

A few years ago, I gave a public talk about my mental health. Its title, “Almost Aloud,” was a line clipped from the short story “Good Old Neon,” by David Foster Wallace. For years I had researched and written about the history of Wallace’s nonfiction, and the talk’s nominal hook was describing what it was like to work in his archive.

My first-ever publication argued that Wallace’s journalism lacked what Nietzsche called “oblivion” — the psychic ability to filter good self-consciousness from bad. The piece somehow ended up wedged between some famous authors in an anthology. Essentially, though, I just mapped my own experience onto Wallace’s work, and it happened they overlapped.

And so it was that six months into a tenure-track job, I nervously told an audience of colleagues, neighbors, and friends how working on Wallace activated my own anxiety. Or was it that my already-activated anxiety was an a priori factor in my interest in Wallace’s work? How to tell?

I began the talk:

For me the sound of anxiety is silence. It’s an empty room where I sit, alone, and all I can hear are my thoughts, which quietly insist themselves upon me, both unbidden and unwanted. And after a time, a time when I get up and walk through other empty rooms, only to return, and get up and return, those thoughts begin to take the same shape as that recursive path through my apartment. Looping endlessly, relentlessly.

For six minutes I guided the audience through these seemingly overlapping maps. When I mentioned Wallace’s suicide — an act he himself described in Infinite Jest as “eliminating your map” — there was an audible gasp, then dead silence for several minutes.

I ended the talk darkly. I wanted to convey a desperation, even a resignation at the whole intellectual endeavor. At the absurdity of speaking and writing and teaching. Where did all that thinking, all those words get you anyhow? I closed with the last sentence from “Good Old Neon” — the only way, it seemed to me, to control a feral mind: “Not another word.”

Looking back, I misread that story completely.

***

I haven’t slept through the night in decades. Melatonin, meditation, booze, Benadryl — they’ve all pulled me under, but invariably my mind burns through the restraints and I surface. When I’m marooned in the middle of the night, legs scissoring and feet belting back and forth, I turn to all manner of sleep apps and ambient music. The song I come back to over and over again is “DLP 3,” by the avant-garde musician William Basinski. It is one of nine songs on his five-hour, four-record album The Disintegration Loops.

Writing in Pitchfork, Mark Richardson tells the album’s origin story:

In the 1980s, [Basinski] constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle.

The Disintegration Loops are literally disintegrating loops. They erode as you listen to them. The change from one revolution to the next is imperceptible, but the tape is falling apart. Each pass, a redescription of the past.

“DLP 3” is 42 minutes long. The loop, a three-note horn fugue that pushes forward over a ghost march before sucking back in on itself, is only eight seconds long. It repeats 310 times. My fibrillating mind trains on its respiratory rhythm.

Turning and turning, the song softly transforms from hypnotic to unsettling. The gradations are subtle, but the crackles widen and a buzzy silence fills the perforations. If I don’t fall asleep during its first half, I’m worse off than when I laid down. My mind catches on the crepitates and recollects all that I tried to cast off, like a needle dredging dust with each revolution of a record.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

***

A decade after my first foray into therapy, I tried it again. Academia had drawn me back to the East Coast and all of its familiar dislocations. Soon, a much more substantial break-up left me unmoored. My therapist gave me language to understand these upheavals, but when those words miscarried, she suggested medication.

The longer I listen, the harder it is to hear.

I met with a psych nurse and explained how meds hadn’t worked for me in the past. She suggested a genetic test. While I awaited the results of my cheek swabs, I started Lexapro. It did nothing. Six weeks later my GeneSight results came in. It sorted drugs into three categories: 1. Use As Directed; 2. Moderate Gene-Drug Interaction; and 3. Significant Gene-Drug Interaction. Many of my previously prescribed psychotropic medications were listed under the third category — meaning they were essentially incompatible. Below the drug columns were numbered notes headlined, “Clinical Considerations.” One referenced a high metabolic rate; another read: “Serum level may be too low, higher doses may be required.”

I was encouraged by these explanations.

My university health insurance, however, wouldn’t cover the test. The American Psychiatric Association says the science behind using biomarkers as a diagnostic tool is inconclusive. GeneSight’s website itself acknowledges these interpretive limits: “Psychiatric pharmacogenomics does not have an individual genetic marker or causative gene like is often typical in molecular diagnostic testing. … Instead of diagnosing the bimodal presence or absence of a disease state, the GeneSight test predicts patient response to medication.”

A year after starting Cymbalta, I finally felt I had a floor when I fell. But it did not eliminate the worry and doubt. I tried explaining to a friend the difference between my outward appearance and inward feeling; the incongruity between medication and the persistence of depressive symptoms.

“I guess that’s what makes it difficult to understand,” she said. “Because you have so many relationships and people to lean on and care about, and who care for you. But it’s so deeply seeded inside of you. I’m very sad about that, Josh.”

***

My life has nearly doubled since Delaware. The tenure track job’s gone. As are those colleagues and friends. Health insurance, medication, my retirement—none of it’s left. All stories too difficult to tell, yet harder still not to explain.

I now live in a camper, parked in the same driveway I departed two decades ago. The future feels weightier today than then, carrying everything that once was and the understanding of what can never again be. The strings still vibrate, louder sometimes than others, but I’ve learned, if not wholly accepted, that this is life. Or my life anyway.

A few weeks after I came home again, my dad nearly died in front of me. He’d recently been diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and one day after lunch I followed him as he walked to his bedroom to take a nap. Climbing into bed he looked at me and said, “Here it comes.” His heart slowed to a near-stop, and he began gasping for breath.

Since then, my dad, sister, and I have spent countless hours in hospital rooms genuflecting to doctors as they dispense diagnoses, which stirs complicated feelings for an unemployed Ph.D. whose own work never resonated with his father.

I’ve filled my reporter’s notebook with words I never thought I’d know: Ejection fraction. Asystole. Metoprolol. Amiodarone. Cardioversion. As I sit there asking questions and taking notes — grasping for agency — I worry that someone is going to ask me what I do for a living.

No one, of course, does, preferring instead to lightly fill in the blanks themselves. During our third visit to the heart clinic, a two-hour drive away, my dad’s cardiologist again observed my constant scribbling and said, “Josh is writing a novel over here with all his notes.” Everyone laughed. Then he doubled down: “Josh is like a historian!”

As misbegotten as faith ever is, hospitals can engender hope with their clear-eyed promise of science to diagnose, explain, and treat. They can offer a map. In my dad’s case, recovery has meant a CRT-D implant, a suite of medication, and cardiac rehabilitation.

Three days a week I drive him, in his pickup, to a rehab clinic where he pedals on an elliptical bike for 40 minutes, while I sit in the back of the room and record his weight and blood pressures. The nurses and other patients regard me benignly. They think I’m a college student, home for the summer.

It takes us a half hour to get to the clinic, and we don’t really say much on the way there or back. Sometimes, on the way home, we stop for ice cream.

My dad is months removed from the fainting spells and physical restrictions that catalyzed my chauffeuring in the first place. He’s returned to his routine drives by himself every afternoon and evening to look at crops, talk to friends, and go fishing. But every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 8:50 a.m. we head out to the truck, and he climbs into the passenger seat.

Sometimes I want to ask him why he still has me drive him to these sessions. But then, what really could he say?

* * *

Josh Roiland is a writer living in western Minnesota. He last wrote about Jonathan Richman’s mid-career hiatus to Maine for Popula.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Fact checker: Steven Cohen
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

The Living Nightmare of Homeownership

House obscured by fog
Toomas Tuul/FOCUS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Katy Kelleher, whose work readers will recognize from her popular Longreads series on the ugly history of beautiful things, has a new piece in Curbed on the ugly history of homeownership — and why the manmade dream of owning a home haunts so many prospective homebuyers.

A 30-year time horizon seems almost impossible to imagine anywhere now, but I did once live out the anachronism of coming home to the same house for more than a quarter of a century. The specter of security that I associate with my since-demolished childhood home follows me from apartment to apartment, dangling the emotional logic of future homeownership over most of the choices I make. I ask myself daily, almost unconsciously, what it might take to reconstruct that feeling, whether any home can fill the role that house played in comforting me as a child. A decade after the housing crisis, the idea of accessing emotional stability through homeownership still sounds like so much marketing copy.

Despite years of setbacks and disappointments, my husband and I haven’t wholly abandoned our mission to escape the rental market, but we’re still millennials. We’re both self-employed in precarious industries that do not look good on paper. The size of the downpayment we’d need continues to rise while ballooning rents and healthcare costs erode our ability to save. And like so many of our peers, our vision of homeownership has permanently shifted to accommodate the warnings from the scientific community. Over time, regional housing markets are destined to undergo painful, unpredictable adjustments to climate-driven migration. That beachfront property actually isn’t going to appreciate, no matter what Miami real estate agents may say.

Emotionally, I still imagine living out the length of another mortgage with my family. But I can also read the writing on the proverbial seawall. My generation’s housing choices are necessarily limited; we all need to take far more into account than just our own private emotions, means, and finances. We can hardly afford to let the built environment stand, as it is. Most homes weren’t constructed to weather ahistorical climate conditions. The majority of our buildings were not constructed to support nature; to protect the health, safety, or welfare of people; to generate energy; or to sustain life. Until the construction of ecological housing is put within reach of everyone, previous generations’ outsized monuments to privacy will continue to threaten global health, haunting would-be buyers who can’t even afford to set foot inside them.

If the filmic nightmare of homeownership has looked, so far, like the claustrophobic fear of being trapped, the living nightmare of homeownership is shapeshifting to confirm the childhood terror of being forever locked out.

There are two different tales we tell ourselves about houses. The primary story is not about ghosts or demons or red rooms or ghouls, but rather about bright futures, long lives, children, grandchildren, and hard-earned success. The second story, the darker story, is about the horror of being trapped. Throughout American history, these stories have existed side by side. For people with the resources to buy in, one once felt more “real” than the other, but as we learned after the real estate crash of 2008, there’s truth to be found in both of them, especially for members of the cash-poor, dream-rich millennial generation.

…most of our desires are culturally rooted, shaped by a set of factors beyond our control. They don’t spring into being organically. I own a house in the woods for reasons other than my husband’s dreams or my own vision of myself as a future radical homemaker. I own out here because I can’t own in Portland, because the market is rising too quickly in the city, because I couldn’t buy in Boston, because I watched the real estate crash decimate my mother’s savings, because I feel the same anxieties as my peers. I’m afraid that a more expensive house in a more convenient area would put me into debt should the market experience another massive failure. I’m afraid that I could become trapped in one place, unable to sell, unable to move, haunting my own home and dreaming of mobility.

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