I was cooking Adrienne’s lunch when I saw the notification on my phone. It was my Aunt Beth, the aunt with no respect for boundaries that I told you about last year. \I have her blocked nearly everywhere, but I forgot Instagram. I barely even post on Instagram, it’s just on my phone along with Facebook for some reason. I haven’t checked it in months. The last time my aunt talked to me it was to crash my Disqus comment... Read more
It was one of those days where the air is poison. The grass had started to go brown and itchy. The herbs in the front yard planters were falling over. When I went out in the late morning to check on both gardens, it felt like I was wading through a swamp– hard to breathe, hard stand up, hard to move forward. The only thing summer is good for is swimming, or finding a forest where you can hike... Read more
The past week or so has been difficult. I’ve been subjected to a barrage of comments from Catholic trolls over on Twitter, and they haven’t been nice. They’ve been accusing me of sodomy which, for the record, I’ve never committed or wanted to. They’ve been demanding I repent of whatever they think my sins are. I’ve been informed I’m having an affair with some mysterious woman. My husband has been mocked for having a “gay wife.” They tell me that... Read more
Today was the day for Adrienne’s test. We should have had her tested a year or two ago, but first the COVID pandemic threw everything into chaos, and then her pediatrician kept insisting she couldn’t be neuroatypical. He really seemed to think that if she was verbal and didn’t flap her hands in front of her face, she was typical and I just worried too much. I finally found out that public schools had psychologists who were legally required... Read more
The long weekend was an interesting one, from a blogging standpoint. I almost decided I could go back to Mass in spite of my panic attacks, and now I’m back to not knowing. My last post circulated as widely as the old post did, and I got a lot of positive feedback, and also a lot of anonymous trolls calling me a “sodomite.” I made liberal use of the block button. I’ll never understand why traditionalist Catholics are so obsessed... Read more
I both love and loathe it when an old post of mine gets new attention. Today, it was a post I wrote on queer Catholics: “To Those Who Gloat when LGBTQ People Leave the Church.” I tweeted it along with a long string of my favorite work on Twitter, and for some reason it caught on. People were retweeting and quote tweeting. My page views went way up and stayed there. I was flattered. But then I scrolled down... Read more
I guess I’d better say something about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. It’s ironic that this is the second time in a row I’ve written about nuns, of one sort of another. Yesterday I told you about a Catholic bishop who is being sued for allegedly persecuting some actual Catholic nuns. Today I’m going to try to talk about a group of queer performance artists that parody nuns. In case you haven’t heard, the LA Dodgers have been all over... Read more
You’ve no doubt heard about a small order of Carmelite nuns in Fort Worth, Texas, who are suing a bishop. That sentence reads like something out of a joke, but it’s real. The Discalced Carmelite Nuns of Arlington are suing Bishop Michael Olson and the Diocese of Fort Worth, and the allegations are explosive. The bishop is accused of forcing his way into the cloister and interrogating Mother Teresa Agnes Gerlach for hours, despite the fact that she was... Read more
I woke up at noon, still exhausted. Adrienne was sleeping in, as usual. Michael was in the kitchen, throwing away the coffee. We brew cold brew in a lemonade pitcher: a twelve-ounce bag of grounds soaked in water for twenty-four hours, then drain it all through a coffee filter and sieve. He’d fallen asleep when he should have been draining the coffee and then forgot about it. It was now forty-two hour cold brew, far too strong and sour... Read more
When I first met the cat, she was hiding in the foliage of that horrible maple sapling. My yard is full of attempts at maple trees. I don’t know where the original maple tree grew here, long before we moved in, but there must have been one. By the time we got here, there were two little maple saplings springing up too close to the porch, mixed in with the hiding trees. There are tiny maple shoots the size... Read more
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