As of this writing, your Bohemian Crip had planned for this to be a very different post, but Actual Mom started her day with a sink emergency this morning so things are a bit stressful here today. Household projects, even knowing that not every American woman, even now, can tinker with a sink, kind of make me feel as though I continue to be a little kid who’s in the way with her fingers in her mouth. (Which I probably was, in one of the zillions of fix-up specials that mostly made up my childhood homes. ) Even though vulnerability-as-strength is very hip to write about nowadays, at least if you are Brene Brown or Marianne Williamson, somehow, in both those ladies’ parts-of-them-are-quite-excellent books, don’t seem to have a chapter on coming with your mother to clean a house after the renter leaves, when you are maybe in first grade—fun fact, some of them are pissed and add to your budding vocabulary in ways your memory hides from you, and you are vulnerable enough to need help in the bathroom while you are there and mom has to help you clean up with a handi-wipe, and keeps saying stuff like “Why didn’t you tell me? The last place had toilet paper.” And, since I’m six, or whatever, I say, like every kid since toilets, “I didn’t have to go then.” But, maybe that fast, a budding control freak was born.
Vulnerability may be something of a superpower, but, my god, how much would I give it back? Especially since now, in middle age, being fluffy and cute and “helpable”{swear to god, I think most people are, on some level, right? But I’m also talking about that moment strangers look for with the cute crippled kid in the sundress and, like, the *suggestion* of sticky fingers that makes them walk away, like, “I’m just too good. I saved those people today.)” Basically, the money shot of “inspiration porn”. In theory, I could still do it, but much like a trophy wife’s body of a similar…vintage, I would know what I’m doing and it would be work. Not just me or her bopping along like nobody’s watching and just thinking people are just, you know, *so nice*. Also, as a disabled person who has to admit cellular-level vulnerability to get through any part of her life, ever, can we talk about some of the, well, bougie, “admissions” in those books. Like “Sometimes my house isn’t clean.”
Or “ I thought the guy I gave my speech for was Mr. Brown, not Mr. Green. Kill me Now.”(Really? Although I did have a man give me a hard time for not remembering his name, which might have really been Brown, after some of the most tumultuous years to date.)
