The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

 It dawned on me this morning that the country is in the vice grip of an abusive partner. It is almost paralyzing, numbing, defeating. Who will believe when oppression seeks redress? The abusive partner is a charmer, is charismatic, is connected. So of course no one will come to the aid of those most harmed by the one who claims to have all this power. In some sense, they are right. We have 500 years of those siding with that control. But here is the thing. They only have that ability because of fear. What will they do if? How much can they harm us if? Where will we go if? The paranoia is what has created this massive syndrome of this mindlessness, helplessness, just barely breathing state we are observing in the country. It doesn't have to be this way. Like most bully's, they are petrified, so they bolster and booster and blow hot air hoping that the force of their wind is enough to knock you down. Get up. Turn around. In an almost whisper, say No. Enough. Not anymore. And tak...

 I've been thinking a lot about the unnamed "Woman at the Well" of John 4. In my theological studies, I always contended with her story. Growing up in the Black church, the Black Baptist church, particularly, she was always presented as a wanton woman, held up as someone to avoid becoming. Being a young woman in ministry, she was held up again as the cautionary tale. But it was when I entered seminary that I wanted to give her some more thought. She was more than what society said about her. In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned and the American Taliban instituting their own versions of Sharia Law, I thought more of her liberating actions in the face of so much conformity to overreaching power. Back then, like now, women did not have a lot of rights. Rights over one's body was definitely not one that was common place. But she claimed her right to her own identity. After the systems that were supposed to take care of and support her failed over and over, she fina...

I do what I always do when I need to renew myself - I went to the water. My soul felt the weight of the U.S. Supreme Court Decision to Overturn Roe V. Wade. She felt it in ways I hadn't expected. Age and menopause has me well past the age of this impacting me. But my daughters are just beginning their life. At ages twenty and eighteen, respectively, their rights to themselves were wiped away by justices who lied under oath, one who has always tried to destroy freedoms for Black people, and a handmaid. Both of them will be in college in states that say a woman has no rights. Those same states where human beings were chattel and in another life, their wombs would have been used for commodity.  I felt the enormity of what happened. And as I mentioned during our times of Joys and Concerns at church on Sunday, if white women were just now concerned, they were not paying attention. This was never really about Roe. Roe was just the way to get the evangelical christians on board with the e...

 UPDATE:  They Just Overturned Roe V. Wade! They are the evil we knew them to be The handmaid did her job and in one fail swoop they eroded fifty years of the rights of women to have autonomy.  My daughers your daughters We are more than just a womb But that is what the U.S. Supreme Court just ruled. But yt boys with teenytinytimmies get to walk around with their rights on full display.                                                                                                                                                             I intentionally tried to guard my mind, heart, sou...

 there is always something promising when the dawning streams through my bedroom windows, beckoning me to nice her her. it is the bird chirping and when I reach over to grab my phone and notice the time it is 4:58am I remain nestled under the covers, looking out at the awakening unfolding in my backyard and ponder if I should slumber and rise As has been my nature since I was a young woman, I eventually rise, attend to the morning refreshing, and begin my fifteen minutes of stretching, attending to the sleeping parts of my body, waking her for the day. When I go downstairs, walking through my foyer to the dining room to the kitchen, I just listen. It is so silent, quiet. The entire house is asleep. The noise of my coffee grinder doesn't stir the summer slumber, neither does the banging of pots for my morning nourishment of fruit and boiled egg, my citrus mint water waiting on my consumption, and all the while, the birds singing their hello song. Long before most are awake in the be...

 I often wake up very early in the morning. This Saturday is no different. When the curtains are open, that early morning New England dawn comes at five o'clock when the rest of the world is slumbering. Maybe it is the signal for the farms near me or the chirping birds, or that still-and-yet-not part of the day when givers, servers, writers, artists, and Mothers, can have a moment to just be in the serene without the demands that will surely fill the day. One of the things I have been battling with leading up to and now, one week out, since my youngest daughter and last child graduated high school, is what do I do now? Eighteen years ago, I was relishing my first real summer as a "stay-at-home-mom." By then, my children were 17, 15, 10, and 2, and one baking. I had been living a high intensity corporate life since my first full-time job in 1984 when I was also going to college full-time.   Back then, a moment to just be in my big house with my big family was a welcome rel...

 My last child, second daughter, graduated high school on Friday. New state, new school, moved at the height of her notariety at her former school were she was a varsity cheerleader, a friend of many, a cellist, and a scholar. She was going to graduate almost to the day, a decade after her big brother walked in that signature robe But we moved in August 2020 and she started again. Watching her over the past two years has been a wonder to me. She not only embraced the move, but walked in and indeed followed her father's advice to "Claim Your Space™ In her former school, she had her "Haitian Trifecta" of fellow Smart Black Girls™ who were in the AP classes, either as the only or one of two or three who had to remind the anglophiles in the room that their privilege did not give them the monopoly on understanding history or calculus. When we moved, she started school online.   It wasn't until they were finally able to walk back into the building - masked of course - ...