my body is made of mountains, hills, and valleys that created and carried life, yet you'd like me to hide until I'm a little less broken and dirty. but I'm still growing wildflowers on this body made of mountains, hills, and valleys. I created and carried life. I will not hide.

-where she grows / still growing wildflowers -

Some quotes from this affirmation book my friend got me for my birthday. It’s by Becca Anderson.

You educate a man ~ @BYU

You educate a man; you educate a man.

woman, education, woman quotes, education quotes, man, man quotes, motherhood, motherhood quotes, generation, generation quotes, Brigham Young, Brigham Young quotes #PICTUREQUOTES, #QUOTES

Andrew McMillan, from Pandemonium; “swan”

[Text ID: “mother don’t eat me / mother I’m trying so hard / to get better”]

— Athena Farrokhzad, "My Mother Said"

on mothers

Nayyirah Waheed, Salt//Annie Ernaux, I Remain in Darkness//Ella Wilson, Take Care: Mothers, Daughters and Inheriting Self-Hatred//Sam Gordon, A Mother's Hate//Karl Brjullov, The Last Day of Pompeii//wych elm, Susan Smith//Lady Bird (2017)//@bitterl//Pheobe Bridgers, Kyoto//@filmnoirsbian,the killing grounds//Acacia, mommy//John Green, Turtles All the Way Down//?

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i mother it, the absence of her ii. i was hard to bear from the very start.’

[text id: my mother is an artist too. somehow, somewhere along the way, i forgot that we artists have some creations that we don’t like. the realization came late, almost like everything else in my life.]

I've been in a long process of trying to understand the difference between loneliness and solitude. Part of that is not being afraid of being alone, and then getting past that fear, and then starting to separate out what is loneliness, and what is solitude, and what is privacy, and what is secret? What is a natural separation of time and schedule, and what is abandonment—or rejection? What is rejection and abandonment, and what is just people taking space to do their own day or whatever? So, no. Now I don't feel lonely at all. It feels like a big injury that healed.

Jenny Slate, interviewed by Dana Schwartz for Marie Claire

"When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?"

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Raise your babies in nature 🦋🌷

what being a daughter means to me:

“Women are never allowed to publicly (or privately) discuss their regret at having children or becoming pregnant. They are supposed to accept every change to their body as a gift, whether it is damaged skin, damaged organs, damaged joints or damaged pelvic floors. The process of pregnancy and birth is one of the most dangerous and damaging a woman can go through, and yet, if she is anything but elated, she is likely to panic that there is something wrong with her. The same can be said for those days and weeks after giving birth, which are socially portrayed as some sort of perfect paradise – but are often filled with sleep deprivation, anxiety, aches and pains, heavy postpartum bleeding, the healing of stitches and internal and external injuries, bruising from injections, catheters and IV lines. Ultimately, women are expected to be completely selfless at the time of pregnancy and birth, they are not supposed to care what happens to their bodies and their lives, and only care for the baby they are carrying and giving birth to. No matter what goes wrong, or how many traumas the pregnancy or birth causes, they are supposed to feel that it was all worth it. And what if it wasn’t worth it? Would a woman dare even admit that?

The trauma surrounding pregnancy, birth and postpartum periods is obscured by the flowery, cute, fluffy, excited narratives of becoming a mother and ‘having a baby’. The ‘true calling’ of women. No matter what women have been put through, there seems to be no consideration for how likely it is that they have been abused or traumatised – and how triggering all of these experiences can be. Even for women without trauma histories, the experience can be a set of traumas in itself. The way this is all glossed over for pregnant women and girls sincerely irritates me. They are only ever told that pregnancy and birth will be an amazing, life-changing and beautiful experience in which all the fear, injury and illness will be worth it. When women tell them the horrors and experiences of birth and motherhood, they are scolded for ‘fearmongering’. What is clear, however, is that many women will never want to experience pregnancy or motherhood at all, and many more experience this time as terrifying, traumatic and, unfortunately for some, as a period of their lives in which they find themselves medicated and pathologised for being scared, unhappy, anxious or irritated.”

- Sexy But Psycho by Jessica Taylor

You educate a man ~ @BYU

You educate a man; you educate a man.

woman, education, woman quotes, education quotes, man, man quotes, motherhood, motherhood quotes, generation, generation quotes, Brigham Young, Brigham Young quotes #PICTUREQUOTES, #QUOTES

Erika L. Sánchez, from Lessons on Expulsion: Poems; “Amá”

[Text ID: “In One Hundred Years of Solitude, / Márquez wrote that we are birthed / by our mothers only once, but life obligates / us to give birth / to ourselves over and over.”]

musings on motherhood

Kyung-Sook Shin ("Please Look After Mom"), Nguyen Thanh Binh, Ocean Vuong ("Headfirst"), Ritika Jyala (excerpt from "The Flesh I Burned"), Gustav Klimt "Mother and Child" (detail from The Three Ages of Woman), Sue Zhao ("My mother texts me instructions to cook silken tofu")

buy me a coffee

Even before she'd been a wizard, waiting had been tough for her. Nothing happens fast enough – that had been the most basic motto of her short life. When she'd become a wizard, at first Dairine had thought that that would be the end of waiting, at last – that everything would begin happening at a speed that would suit her, and that the world would finally start working. Now, looking back at that early time, she had to laugh at herself. Dairine had discovered the hard way that even becoming a practitioner of the Art that sourced its power from the magic at the heart of the universe was not guarantee of protection against bureaucracy, accident, or failed expectations. Entropy was running, and in an environment conditioned by the never-ending battle against that ancient enemy and its inventor, not even wizardry could necessarily make your wishes come true.

There were other compensations, of course. On her Ordeal and after it, she had seen things that few other human beings have been privileged to see. She had watched the Sun rise through Saturn's rings, heard spring thunder in Jupiter's atmosphere, watched distant galaxies rise over alien landscapes; she had even officiated at the birth of a species. But none of these experiences had gone very far to make her any more patient. Maybe when I'm older, she thought. By the time I'm twenty I'll probably have it licked.

  —  Wizard’s Holiday (Diane Duane)