The Silver Mother Diaries: episode 7

Wednesday

April 17th, 2019

9:57PM 

Trailer life has stabilized. My romantic and work life has not.

My work day has just ended. Spring has proven to be an incredibly activated and challenging time for my work in environmental justice. Not sure if it’s the moon, the sun, the universal energy, or the state of the world in flux, but…shit’s been hard lately.

Working in social justice movements is rewarding, and depleting. Each day feels like a battle, or a round in a boxing match. The bell dings, and I go home weary, sweaty, and exhausted. I clean myself up, tend to my wounds, sleep, and go back for more the next day.

Lately, I’ll come home, light a smelly candle, put some music on, and drink a beer. Sometimes I’ll cry a little. Other nights I’ll cook a good meal, and put an old movie on, and go for a late night walk with my dog, after the rain has stopped. Then there are nights where I will feel like I just want to drink all the beers in the world, the weight of being a woman of color doing social justice work in a white world feeling like a death grip clenching tighter and tighter. It’s not wrong to want fairness, equity, and mutual respect for marginalized people, but it’s a swimming upstream type of work.

I just took a hot shower in my finished bathroom, the trailer hasn’t smelled like propane in almost two weeks, and I’ve finally set the living room up so that I can sit, meditate, and pull some tarot cards once in a while.

Life is good, and I feel happy with my new home.

I’m not sure if its these long work days and nights that make me lonesome for a companion and lover again, but my heart feels tender as fuck, and I wonder how long this single streak will go on for. Loving myself, my work, and my life choices is in progress – each day, a chance to try harder, do better. But what about wanting someone to share the highs and lows with, and be embraced by during both? Sometimes being single makes me feel like I have to suffer through loneliness until I forget about being lonely, and then I’ll fall in love again. Dating is undesirable when you don’t want to waste time, and feel like you don’t have time to waste.

Crushes, rejections, let downs, embarrassments. They all happened this past month, and forgiving myself and letting them go is a lot, on top of trying to change the world into a better place. It’s all just a lot. I can see how people just avoid one area (work or love) and fall hard into the other, instead of exhaustively working to balance the two.

I don’t know what’s next, but I’ll continue to try and embrace myself in those achy, lonely, missing someone moments with my candlelit, beer drinking, record playing trailer nights. Hanging out with me ain’t so bad.