The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

by Tayé Foster Bradshaw It is New Year's Day, 2015. I just returned home from a cross-state-drive from a holiday trip that was not as we expected it would turn out. My initial travel plans were altered by the torrential rain that literally swept waves of water over the floodbanks with now entire highways and main parts of cities in this area under water. It has been epic, unexpected, and altering. The trip across the state included painful moments and times of deep reflection to decide what would be important to continue living a full and healthy life. Children and grandchild were a part of that contemplation and as I see the river water rising well into my neighborhood, with road closed signs and news reports of sandbag walls, I am reminded of some things to be resolved. Be it resolved that the past is the past, there is nothing that can be done about it. Be it resolved that life includes drama and sometimes that drama includes pain, pain will hurt. Be it resolved that...

The wind is howling outside my bedroom patio. The rain is coming in loud torrents. Rivers have been rushing over banks, flooding streets, closing highways. The last two days have been historic in Missouri with the Governor issuing a State of Emergency on the second day of rain, the second day after Christmas. Plans have been altered, travel was harrowing through Oklahoma and Texas.Missouri,  Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi have all been dealt nature's hand. This post-Christmas storm that has drenched the first and second days of Kwanzaa is like life. It may have been spoken of in passing, rain is supposed to come, but is unexpected in its delivery. This is more than rain, it is a torrent, washing away already fragile ground, met with gusts of unusually warm weather and an atmosphere that seems to not know the season. Life is a lot like the low visibility, high fog, pelting rain that is hitting the glass. When it comes, it comes full force, ...

The youngest son is on his way from Montgomery to Atlanta to take a flight home to St. Louis. The girls are finishing up projects and finals before school is out for winter break on Friday. The husband has his choral symphony performance tomorrow night. And I am sitting in my open floor plan townhouse wondering how I have these people with this much stuff. We haven't even unpacked the red and green boxes with the ornaments yet. Nevermind about the tree. To be fair, we sort of have a family rule that we don't do anything until after the December birthday is over. We are also super busy during the last sixty days of the year, so not having anything holiday up is fine with us. What hasn't been so fine is that we literally had construction going on for about the entire month of October and into early November. I still haven't put the things back in the hall storage closet because my husband put the boxes in the basement, somewhere. The holidays are here, Hannu...

When will this country value the lives of the littlest of her citizens more than some intentional domestic terrorist's attraction to weaponry that has no place on American streets? It is the holiday season, lots of toys are being purchased and placed for little ones just like the little six and seven year olds whose mass murder shocked the nation. Yet, just two years later and we have had more murders at the end of someone's perceived Second Amendment Rights to purchase courage his internal fear could not overcome. What did the babies ever do? We have had the rhetoric of hate coming from Presidential candidates, mass shootings at a church service, at an abortion clinic, and even at a company party. That is not including the policing killings of unarmed citizens and the domestic incidents involving guns. Will there be a holiday season where the citizens lost will not outnumber the days of the year? It makes no sense and the mothers continue to weep. Who will speak fo...

Rarely do I write two posts in one day. Tonight is an excpetion. I was going to retire for the night, sad about Joshua Williams getting eight years for the December Quik-Trip fire in Berkely. I was thinking about the injustice of in while the murderer of Michael Brown, Jr. is still free. The two things are connected. Daniel Holtzclaw, an Officer in Oklahoma, used his badge and place of privilege to brutally rape and sodomize twelve black women and a black teenager. The black girl, he raped her on her front porch, he also raped a black woman in her hospital bed. Mainstream media was intentionally quiet about this case. See, to them, black women don't matter, we are the mules of the world, the ones who deserve whatever disparate treatment they think they can unleash on us. We were raped by them during the period of enslavement from 1919-1865.  We were raped by them during the period of Jim Crow from 1865-1965. We were raped by them in the Civil Rights Era from 1965-2015...

It seemed as if the winter winds of hate and sheer racism couldn't get any worse than the Anti-Muslim spewing out of the hell-hole of Donald Trump's mouth. Then, the unusually warm weather in St. Louis and the light from Hanukkah were not enough to keep the evil of white idiocy from rearing its ugly head. Yesterday, while at local Rabbi was offering the message and blessing before lighting the White House Menorah, a quarter-century old white girl from Texas was again having a day at the highest court of the land where she took her millennial temper tantrum. She wasn't good enough. And that just didn't sit well with the rich white girl. If you dial back a few years, the case bubbled up because Abigal Fischer decided that surely she was better than the 168 rejected fellow white kids who were vying for a spot in UT-Austin's Class of 2012.  Somewhere in that dense brain of her's, she felt that it wasn't because they were truly smarter and have higher GPAs,...

by Tayé Foster Bradshaw I absolutely could not write. That is something hard to comprehend for one whose very existence is in words. The words were there and waiting to emerge to make sense of all that was happening around me. But I could not write. Reposted and shared on social media (mostly Facebook and a bit on Twitter), but not much commentary, definitely not a post. Tiredness. Just plain tired. After several years of writing, talking, warning, speaking, and generally raising awareness about the dangerous shift in the country, I just stood silent and wondered if it was making any difference. In the past few weeks, we've had more murders, mass shootings, another black man killed by the police, two mass shootings before we even had a chance to finish grieving over what happened in Paris, and the everyday slights that exist in black and brown skin. So I just did what any self-respecting introvert would do, I crawled into my bed to drown out the deafening silenc...