Two More Weeks or So

 I think a lot in the early morning.

I woke up to the house still and a yearning to just muse.

I picked up my copy of The Strong Black Women: How a Myth Endangers the Physical and Mental Health of Black Women by Marita Golden and read the imagined thoughts of the late Fannie Lou Hamer. In it, she wrote about her body broken by the systems of hatred, racism, and sexism that sadly haven't gone away since her days organizing with SNCC.

Women have had a tough year.

Black women and women of the Global Majority have had a near impossible year.

So, I woke up thinking about them, us, me, this morning.

A bit of me is exhausted. Perhaps it is because I am an early riser and daylight savings time means nothing to me.

Maybe it is because my youngest son is bringing his girlfriend home for Christmas because Covid cancelled family plans back home for her, and my house is a wreck.

Ok, maybe wreck is too strong a word, but it is different when company comes.

Tired because I haven't wrapped a present yet or decorated or planned the menu or anything else that would probably have been in the works with the final days of Christmas a a week from today is Kwanzaa.

Two more weeks.

But what do I want to happen in two more weeks that will make a difference in my life and the lives of so many women at the cusp of a moment?

I want the mothers who lost children to gun violence to have presents to wrap and arms to hug, but that isn't so for so many.

I want young people in the last days before finals to not have to worry about a copycat nut threatening their school on Tik Tok.

I want to breathe.

For them to breathe.

To not be afraid of some sexistracisthomophobicguntotingmisognisticxenophobe to live out his fantasies and fears by imagining himself free like that pimplyfacedchubbymassmurdererwhogotawaywithit.

Or to not fall victim to the capitalist structure that considers human beings just cogs on the wheel and breakfast has changed for everyone.

To not have to get their magazine glorifying a Trillionaire - a word now in our possibilities - and a wannabe Trillionaire - who played with his phallyic symbolic dreams and shot up into space instead of paying people fairly or eradicating poverty or a deadly pandemic. 

I want promises to be kept to really Build it Back Better and not succumb to the whims of a OWM in a state that almost literally no one wants to go to.

I want Black women's dreams and Brown women's labor to not be appropriated and pit against each other.

I want to talk about books and reading and not have some man be afraid of words on paper.

Two more weeks, could that be possible in this time when lights twinkle and we see the endless movies promising joy and wonder, candy cane and hot cocoa, and all the world's problems solved in two hours.

We can hope.

We can dream.

Like so many of us who have shared it on IG or TikTok or subscribed to the need for our emotional, mental, spiritual, financial, and physical health as a priority. We have named what it is that is for the second holiday season. 

Perhaps that is the gift of this time of anticipation, if one follows the Advent season, this coming, this waiting, this hoping, this wondering, this looking to the stars for a sign.

Two more weeks.

Maybe the world really can change before the calendar turns.