about these triggering children

hello loves.

just a short human note.

this was dawn yesterday…..the sky over aotearoa being very frozen and enigmatic.

i wanted to say a word about all of the kid posts lately.

as many of you know, and certainly know if you saw my last show, i was deeply and excruciatingly ambivalent about having a child for many years.

i struggled hard, and i struggled mostly in private.

my friends knew my struggles, but social media and stage did not, since those were not places i felt i could safely bring the topic…and there’s nothing wrong with that.

and i remember watching my friends, family and colleagues’ social media feeds filling with faces of children, ice-cream drool and toothy grins and it feeling so confronting and even annoying. i remember that it felt especially awful during months when i was going through abortions, which happened twice after i got married.

i remember feeling shame about my own irritation.

i still feel traces of those weird feelings when i see happy, smiling families with two and three and four and five and six kids, knowing that that will never be me.

i know better than to feel that pang, but it still comes, that jealously, and my job is to lovingly recognize it and set it down again.

i have been a person who did not want to have children.

i have been a person who held interventions to protect my friends from abuse coming from those who demanded they procreate or face the inevitably unhappy consequences. (i thought that was insanity).

i have been a person who had a grisly miscarriage all alone in a hotel room.

i watched my parents lose a son, too young.

i have been a person who birthed a child.

i just want to say this: i am still all those people.

i can put myself in every skin…she: feet up in a clinic, she: holding a pregnancy stick with either happiness or horror at age 16 or 36, she: face down in a pile of dead blood in a bed.

i can say that when i post these pictures of ash, all those she-people come along for the ride; those she-women who went through indecision, peace, birth, hell.

and i guess this is my way of saying: don’t forget i see all of you.

espeically with the pandemic raging…and everything getting very wonky (i am still aware of this having read your comments about life over the past few months, with some people deciding not to conceive, while others are saying “fuck it let’s just go for it since the world is ending”….)

i see all of you. i see me in you, and you in me.

the accidental parents, those who wanted but couldn’t, those who did but lost, those who never wanted to. you’re all right. you’re alright, and you’re all right. here we are, in the fragile moment.

we have this moment, it is all what it is, and the sky hasn’t fallen.

i love you. ♥️

xxx

AFP

p.s. i’m cross-posting this to a thread on the shadowbox in case anyone wants to discuss with the community more deeply: https://forum.theshadowbox.net/t/about-all-those-triggering-images-of-children/5468