1. You wake up when you want, at different times throughout the week…
6:35am
8:05am
11:00am
2. You go to bed when you feel like it.
3am
9pm
11pm
Not at all.
3. You walk random dogs.
4. You run away from boys (who chase you more than when you were in your 20s).
5. You try to be a synchronized swimmer.
6. You manage web sites in your pajamas.
7. You go to nerd tech meetings and laugh when the Brobots don’t believe you worked at a dot.com in the late 90s.
8. You build a startup with your friends and colleagues who you knew before 9/11.
9. You write letters to the Center for a New Economy in Puerto Rico with ideas for paying down the island’s $73B debt…and hope you’re onto something even though you still owe your own student loan debt.
10. You create silly animated videos with your nieces and nephews, who aren’t sure if you are an adult or a kid like them.
11. You text stupid animated gifs to your friends from high school…as if no time has passed and heartbreak and disappointment and mortgages do not yet exist.
12. You watch Pitchfork’s compilation of best YouTube videos of 2018 to see what kids these days are listening to (and watching) and feel sad because they’re all half naked and tatting up their faces and just as depressed as we were when Cobain and Tupac and Fiona defined us and Janis and Jimmy defined our parents and Ella Fitz….bla bla bla…
A broken record of Human Stupidity, Stupid Humanity
We don’t need more songs about heartbreak
We don’t need more romance
We don’t need more babies
We need more solutions
How can we break free
When we’re caught over and over in a
Westworld fantasy?
13. You decide, because you’re not a mother,
But your sisters are,
That you will think about the things they don’t have time for
Like…
14. Teaching their babies to swim among the sharks cuz climate change isn’t a hoax
15. Writing new episodes of The Femmebots to teach their preteens to code because more than Chinese, it’s the language of the future
16. Recording the stories of our grandparents before they fade away into page 20 of everyone’s Google search results…
Wow. I’m so righteous. I’m so useful. The world is a better place because of women sans kids. And when the work is done, we don’t have second and third jobs to feed the extra mouths that didn’t come out of our vaginas.
17. We relish in our freedom, that we are the end of the family line…
The decision is mine
…and till death we can dance around the house to more Pitchfork music videos that remind us this planet continues to turn with or without our DNA on it:
ASAP Rocky’s throwback to Moby as he prays to God he doesn’t overdose on Xanax like the rest of his generation.
Janelle Monae’s Pynk Pussy Power backlash to this farce of an administration
Kali Uchi’s “In My Dreams” like the Cranberries but different and still an anthem to the way I dream and float through life, never grounding down long enough to make anything real
Cardi B’s “Be Careful” which makes me laugh out loud as she slaps her childhood dreams around with a wild west wedding in a church and lyrics that incite my feminist rage against the B-O-Y machine that brought us to this state of motherless middle age…
18. Pffffft. Now that the rage is cleaned from my system
I can move forward
Gotta take this freedom
And do something different wit it.
Why did I write/create this piece? Because I am a Christian who rarely feels good at church.
“In a Western society that idolizes sex and romance, a Christian who chooses singleness—not because they fail at dating, but because they desire their personal calling more than sex, romance or companionship—has done something entirely foreign.” – The church needs to see single people as they are.
While I love my pastor and his well-researched sermons that capture a media savvy generation, he falls into the trap of so many pastors: that people who excel at their work and “fail” at marriage and parenthood have chosen sin over righteousness.
My stance as a woman who has “failed” seven times at courtship but “wins” beautifully at work and service, is that God had called me long ago to singleness but I couldn’t hear Him because the church was screaming so loudly that a woman like me could only choose marriage.
Well. The confusion is all over now. I am truly FREE from the bondage of the fairy tale and can now live my life in TRUE PEACE! Yay!!!