Some people collect nail polish, or rare vinyl records, or old concert ticket stubs.
I collect three-way kisses.
A rare romantic act, somewhere between first base and a fowl ball, the three-way kiss is cheeky, sloppy, and silly. Not a three-person make out of poly passion, nor a filler act during a threesome, the 3WK is just one kiss, shared between three (or more) people. Three heads gently congregate, get lost in the mess of noses, cheeks, and mouths, and then separate victorious, having completed the least sexy sexual act.
My journey began at the tender, sexually confused age of 17. I was nervously drunk at a small party that would end with puke in the sink and an infamous who-kissed-who chart. Anxious about all the other people hooking up in various studies and bedrooms, I was chatting with my two best friends and current romantic interest in a secluded corner. I can’t remember whose idea it was (probably mine), but we stopped talking about concert band and converged in a sloppy four-way peck. And with a grin on my face, and my friend’s noseprints on my glasses, I had made my group kiss debut.
I don’t keep a logbook of kisses with the date, location, and participants, but I keep them in the corner of my mind, a cheeky secret to revisit during a conversation lull, or boring history lecture. I can look across the library and think “yes, I once accidentally licked her nose during a tipsy five-way maneuver”.
No matter how skilled the participants are, the 3WK cannot be sensual. There is no sensuality in the 3WK; it’s a fleshy mess of noses, chapstick flavors, and the surprise tongue in the unexpected mouth. I pride myself on being a good kisser (it’s all body-language and fresh breath), and personally have never had a suave ‘n sexy group kiss. But this is its beauty.
I’m won’t lie and say I’ve ever had a completely sober three-way kiss, as the fun usually relies on the lowering of inhibitions; how else would you get two straight kinda-homophobic male best friends to one-third kiss each other?! Obviously, every participant must be willing and able, which excludes overly drunk people, and capable of appreciating the fleeting beauty of a group kiss.
Part of the beauty of the three-way kiss is its unnaturalness. First, there’s the awkward proposition: “do you guys wanna three way kiss right now?” Then there’s the silence as all other potential kissers contemplate the mechanics of such an act. Then the kiss. The finally, the immediate bonding that occurs when you’ve accidentally licked someone’s chin.
I’ve three-way kissed my best friends. I’ve three-way kissed people I’d never see again. I’ve three-way kissed potential suitors, former flames, eskimo sisters, classmates, bandmates, soulmates. Three way kisses are silly. Three way kisses remind me not to take kissing too seriously. They’re sloppy, saliva-y, and a beacon of unsexiness in a sex-obsessed college culture.
An Interview of Romey Pittman, by her daughter Anna Droege
Romey Pittman: Okey doke!
Anna Droege: Okey doke! How would you define passion?
RP: How would I define passion?
AD: Yeah!
RP: I would define passion as a combination of desire and some sense of mission or fate - something that makes it not just about what you want but about a sense of destiny.
AD: Do you have a passion?
RP: I do! I have a passion around education - for poor kids in particular, urban poor kids without access to a good education or an education that affirms their humanity and being - and trying to address that problem. I also have a passion for a certain kind of lifestyle that includes my family and the way that I relate to my family and my partner and how we spend our time together.
AD: Wait hold on I can hear a violin - can you move to a different room?
RP: Is the reception good in your room? I can go up there.
AD: Yeah I think so. So for each of those, could describe what your desire is and what your mission is, based off your previous definition of passion?
RP: Yeah! Well I think that the thing that I desire - huh it’s funny, like in terms of my work it’s much about the mission part than about the desire part for me, which maybe makes it less of a true passion than sort of a calling.
I think for some people, a passion for something means that they can’t get enough of it and that they hunger for it in a visceral kind of way and I definitely have felt that kind of passion in my life too but I feel like the passion that’s most enduring and resonant for me is the kind that has to do with a sense of destiny. It’s like “this is what I’m on this planet to do and this is why I’m here.” I’ve felt that kind of passion in a love relationship but I’ve felt that in my work and I’ve felt that in building the house, building our cabin. I think that for some people what they want or the “I need this to feel happy” feeling is the driving thing and I think for me it’s not as much the “I need this to feel happy” as much as “I’m meant to do this.” I don’t know if that makes any sense.
AD: You’ve talked before in our relationship about how retroactively you can see where your passion came from, but can you describe figuring out that sense of destiny and how you figured out what it really meant for you? Like how did you know your destiny?
RP: How did I know it was my destiny?
AD: Yeah, or when did you get that feeling that this really is the thing you were meant to do with your life?
RP: I don’t know! I think there were elements of it that I felt really early on, and then other parts of it that felt like they got clarified or narrowed or more focused over time, but I think every time and every point in that journey there was a sense of an aligned vibrational frequency or an internal sense of “Yeah, this feels like the right thing.” There’s an actual physical response that I get sometimes when I feel passionate about something in a mission-driven sense. I’m not sure that this is necessarily a good thing but my ears burn and I get heat down the side of my neck from my ears down to my chest and it’s this feeling of incredible intensity. It’s not an emotion I can name but it’s a sense of intensity. I get that feeling when something resonates with me in a really powerful way. I’ve gotten it when I’ve gone to the visionary art museum because it’s a sense of this is creative beauty and this matters and this is right and this is what I want for me too. And I’ve gotten it when I’ve fallen in love with a person and thought “God, I want more of this person. I wanna drink this in as fully as I possibly can.” And I’ve gotten it in my work when I’m working with a kid or a group of teachers and feeling like there’s been a breakthrough or a sense of somebody getting really empowered and I think “Yes! This is what I want! I want more of this!”
AD: I like that.
RP: It’s a physical sensation that I get that lets me know this is it! I’ve tapped into the core stuff here.
AD: I like that the indicator of something being really right with who you are or what you want is physical because I get that too but I get it very differently though. I don’t get this burning sensation but everything inside my chest expands a lot and it’s very full of air and I need to shake it out so I need to shake around and jump around. I get really buoyant and jumpy, not like anxious jumpy, but like I need to go up. I need to stand up and jump up and I need to move and it’s an involuntary thing. And it’s happiness too and excitement but I’m not able to contain it so it’s a little bit scary sometimes but in a great way. It’s intense.
RP: I wonder if everybody gets that or if it’s something that’s unique to our little—
AD: Clan.
RP: Yeah but I think it is pretty universal.
AD: I think so too! But I wonder if the types of physical reactions are more unique. Because you’re getting this burning thing and I’m getting this inside out pressure and like something is crawling up my spine really fast. I wonder how different they are or if we’re just interpreting them differently or if it’s what’s driving us, the emotion that’s driving us. I look for excitement and I look for beauty and inspiration and these sort of airy things and I think for you you often look for things that you can fix, bigger problems like the way that fashion manifests itself, as more of this determination to fight back.
RP: I think that’s true.
AD: What do you do when the passion isn’t there that day?
RP: I think that I have pretty well honed automatic pilot skills.
AD: That’s good! I don’t.
RP: It’s sometimes sort of sad that I’ve gotten really good at “okay, what’s next on the list? What’s next on the list? Check that off, what’s next on the list?” I remember Grandma Droege after some kind of event that felt meaningful like a baptism saying “Well, check it off!” I had this sense that that was sad because we just had this thing that was supposed to be meaningful and all she saw it as was something to check off her list. That was when I was 24 or something and I thought back on my horror at that and felt like “Oh god, I can totally see it now!” I spend so much of my life in that zone of “Check it off, check it off” and very little time in the passion mode. Often when that passion comes up, it’s dissonance. It’s not like “yeah! I’m doing it!” It’s like “here it is and I’m not doing it!” It slaps me in the face and gets me to realign which is a good thing but not a fun thing either! So the presence in passion in my daily life is not entirely where I want it to be at all.
AD: What do you think is the benefit and the purpose of passion for you? Or the opposite of a benefit?
RP: Yeah I don’t even know if I see it as something that has a benefit or something that I have a lot of control over. It feels like something that I can listen to or not listen to, but it comes and goes almost like it has its own will and own life. I interact with it and engage with it as much as I can. But I think as you get older, and I think this is true for a lot of people and not just me, the more responsibility you take on and the more that the daily role of work plays, you get pulled out of a passion groove and into the things that need to get done. So often when you feel the passion again it’s like a reminder and sometimes it’s like a regret of “I missed that track! What if that was it?” There are also times when it’s incredibly affirming and you feel full of gratitude that the work you do and the people you’re with and the life you live do have passion in it and fill you with a sense of meaning and deep feeling. That’s amazing when it happens but it’s this constant swing back and forth between that and all the sort of daily shit that you have to go through. It’s hard to talk about this in the abstract.
AD: It seems as though the role that passion plays changes as you age because as you get older you have more things that you need to do and less time to follow your passion or whatnot. Do you have any knowledge to impart? Any wisdom?
RP: Be gentle with yourself in relation to passion. Passion is a pretty harsh and powerful force and it’s like playing with fire. It can lead you to anger and bitterness and it can lead you to joy and wildly passionate action and not having enough of it can make you feel like life doesn’t matter. Passion is really complicated! My friends and I spend a lot of time now thinking about who we ended up with and how we live our lives and the work we do and did we do the right thing and so the expectation of passion can be kind of brutal. So I think being gentle with yourself both in terms of expecting yourself to follow your passion and being okay when it’s not there. I don’t know! It’s something to handle with care.
AD: That makes sense! I like that. I think that’s good advice. This is nice!
RP: I want to tell you that since I’ve been up in your room for this I’ve been holding this picture in my hand of you walking on the beam with me holding your hand and you’re carrying Nunu upside down in your arms. I love this picture so much! You were such an intense kid, you know. You were all passion!
AD: How did that picture remind you of that?
RP: I don’t know! You’re wearing rubber boots and a dress with your really short hair and you’re carrying this baby upside down and standing on something dangerous and there’s just all these ways that your intensity is showing up. Your face is really deep! It’s not just a happy little pudgy baby face. There’s a lot going on in there. And I’m standing there holding your hand like it’s not about me but it’s about you and I’m giving you the space to fall or figure out where you’re going.
My parents always said I picked a particularly expensive “hobby” when talking about going into the film industry. In both senses of the word, it’s taxing. At Prague Film School, my good friend, Rushil stopped me mid millionth “Thank you,” after a long shoot and told me, “If we keep thanking each other that would be all we said the entire semester.” We were constantly working for each other. No one was getting paid, or leaving famous from this program. Grades didn’t matter. There was no professor chastising you for being late. The motivation lay somewhere else. It was the constant feeling that you needed to get things done, and you needed the help of others in order to do that. You had to be confident in things that didn’t feel certain to you while being open to constant change and revision. As a director and as a woman I learned to be sympathetic but also unapologetically stern. It was always about trying to strike a balance while also trying to do it all. My projects were just as important as my peers’. I was making things for myself and for others. I asked a lot from people and yet I had to learn that that’s okay. Say thank you, say sorry, but I learned that I was not asking for any more than my peers were asking for or could handle. I spent four months truly learning at Prague Film School. I did not find myself while backpacking beyond Prague, discover true love abroad, or become more euro-chic (despite the fantasies). For me, it was even better. I was creating with people who were passionate. They were passionate about my work and I about theirs. We were passionate about each other and it was really good. — Maya Elany
my favorite poem as a kid was "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
not because I liked the poem or appreciated its meaning but because I thought it was
so /// goddamn /// funny
to listen to some old dude who was hired by the publishing company to voice their audiobook
somberly say "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"
twice in a row
think about it. it's funny for an 8-year-old.
Genius says that "the rigid form - two end rhymes, a pattern of repeating lines and five three-line stanzas with a four-line stanza at the end - suggests the poet's attempts to control his passionate emotions".
____________
I have listened to men on CDs and the radio
- Garrison Keillor, Leonard Cohen, Ira Glass -
my whole life.
Men Telling Me Stories
embracing the femininity of storytelling
of song
of passion
inhabiting the spaces that were once ours.
A Passionate Man is sensitive, smart, understanding.
A Passionate Woman is a stereotypical mess.
they will try to kill your passions
and they will try to take your spaces
but
you must rage, rage against the dying of your light
______________________________
EPILOGUE
so when a 22-year old girl
asks for an hour of your air waves
to host a show
about women doing something rad
something that women have been PUSHED_OUT_OF_DOING.JPG
I hate WOBC rn and I'm #really #upset #about #this because it sucks!!! I loved my show! I was passionate about it! It had a really high listenership! It was really fucking cool! ughh wtf.
Imagine me, at seventeen, in the moment my life was changed forever. I was sitting in the audience of Satirikon Theater’s King Lear, in Moscow, and had spent the previous three hours understanding roughly 35% of the Russian Shakespearean text being hurled at me. I was unshowered and tired and desperately trying to grapple with Shakespeare and Russian simultaneously from the back of the house. And then it happened: one of those incredible moments of live theater, one of those incredible moments in art, that makes you feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach and you’ll never be able to fully breathe again. Like after this moment, you’ll never actually be the same.
I have an obsessive personality, especially when it comes to the things I’m passionate about. When I was a kid, I ruined my parent’s VCR by repeatedly playing my prized possession: a claymation version of Twelfth Night. In high school I fanatically collected every piece of recorded music, every b-side, from my then favorite band, Voxtrot, and referred to the lead singer as if we were on a first name basis. I have an Anton Chekhov quote tattooed on my body. I don’t love lightly. I commit. The objects of my obsessive affection are joined together by a common thread: that feeling. Through my teenage years, it was a euphoric high I chased through art. I didn’t know what or why it was, but I knew I got it from the local university’s production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (that I saw four times), and that it came two minutes and thirteen seconds into that Peter Vronsky song that had already surpassed two hundred plays in itunes. A beautiful shot in a movie, a key change, the last line of a poem: these were the reasons I loved movies or music or books. I was searching for more and more things that made me feel that way, that moved me so intensely that I couldn’t get them out of my mind for weeks or months afterwards.
But that moment, as the lights faded at the end of King Lear, I was overcome in a way I never had been before. For the first time in my life, I understood what this feeling was. I was moved by theater, sure, but this wasn’t some cosmic coincidence or the magic of theatrical performance. This was a story being told. This was someone’s idea of how to tell that story. How had he felt when he came up with it? How had he felt when he put it on stage? Could I do that to? Could I make people feel this way too?
Sometimes I think I’m a director for selfish reasons; that my pursuit of an incredibly difficult and evasive art form is just to tailor that feeling specifically to myself, to create moments I know will give me a delicious artistic bellyflop. But even if that is true, creating that feeling is hard. I mean really, really hard. In becoming a director myself, I have discovered that the moments I cherished as a teenager were the product of the real work of a director: a deep understanding of text and characters, an emotional understanding, and an intense analysis. In other words, it’s what makes it so difficult and sometimes impossible, to create good theater and film. The feelings I blindly chased unknowingly became my education, informing me how to approach theater, how many different ways you can tell a story, and how powerful art can be.
If you were to ask me now what gave me the feeling, I’d do my best to explain to it to you. I’d tell you how the camera work was connected to the anxiety of a movie, how the combination of three words changes the perspective of a whole poem, or how the end of King Lear refocused the whole play to be about the tragedy of family. But what’s spectacular about art is that the emotions it produces are inexplicable. That feeling was never connected to rational thinking, but to the strange way my heart works. I’ll never know completely what gives me that beautiful feeling, but the never-ending search for it has given me what I want to do with my life. I’m a director. I’m a director because I love stories. I’m a director because I love to analyze and create and feel. I’m a director because of all those little moments that made my stomach flip and that I couldn’t shake from myself. I’m a director because there’s nothing cooler or weirder or more difficult to explain than emotions. Especially my own.
Early in our friendship, we bonded in one beautifully dramatic, drunken moment. It was the end of our sophomore year, and the frustration and heartbreak that had been building up for months inspired us to journey to the college tennis courts and let out carnal screams, stomping our angst out onto the asphalt. We yelled and swore and jumped up and down, railing against the bullshit in ways that weren’t, you know, acceptable in most social settings. Everything we were feeling tumbled out in cathartic surge, and we left the courts arm in arm, feeling a little lighter than before.
This is all to say that we might get a little intense sometimes, or maybe feel “too much.” But we think that—aside from giving us spectacularly dramatic emotional lives—that can be a good thing. We tend to throw ourselves head first into things we care about and trust that it will work out, and we know so many others who do the same.
Our passions as young women are not just romantic, as they’re often emphasized to be: they are professional, social, obsessive, and eccentric. Sometimes they conflict. Sometimes they confuse us. We’re still figuring it all out, but that’s okay.
So think of this issue as your metaphorical tennis court. We wanted to provide the space for you to shout whatever’s on your mind, to release your frustrations and uplift your accomplishments. Passion takes many forms—zeal, angst, drive, and desire—and Issue 3 is meant to showcase what happens when you follow those feelings.
In late January, a friend told us they’d seen UGH on a popular Youtube vlog. Thrilled that our passion project was reaching audiences beyond our immediate social circle, we eagerly looked for the video. Unfortunately, the coverage was less than adulatory, as the hosts mocked our mission statement, articles, and existence. We can take a joke, but even so, seeing UGH as a punchline was a little hard to swallow. We posted wounded Facebook statuses, vented to our friends and moms, and got back to work, focusing on expanding our social media presence and promoting the magazine.
For the first time, we received unsolicited submissions from several different countries—Argentina, Germany, Australia, and the Philipphines. Passion flowed in unprecedented amounts, and we are so grateful that you decided to share it with us. What you have contributed truly proves that there is no limit to the interests, imagination, and determination of young feminists around the world.
Let’s all admit that television is actually good for you. Forget what your parents said as you stared like a zombie at Spongebob trying to make his way from Rock Bottom back to Bikini Bottom. “You’re rotting your brains away,” your mom would say. “Go read a book.” “Hell no, this is important,” you would say. Or “Five more minutes.” Whichever. Your eyes widened with hope when a red lobster shaped bus came into view for rescue (was that a lobster?). Your heart plummeted into your stomach when SpongeBob missed the bus because he was trying to get a candy bar (but also, you understood). You laughed with glee when his knight-in-shining-weird-fish-lamp-head ended up speaking English the whole time! This show had you on the edge of your seat. Or maybe that was just me.
My love for TV started around the age of 0 and has blossomed throughout the years into a healthy relationship akin to that of crack and any human who has done crack more than ten times. Television is more than just entertainment for me. I fall in love with fictional places, plot lines, and characters. I even find myself taking on their personalities, and have been told on multiple occasions that I remind people of Michael Scott, Phil Dunphy, and Gary the Snail. TV acts as a blanket of comfort and vehicle for adventure.
I can lose myself in the drama of vampires, cartoon burger chefs, or office paper suppliers, and their problems become my problems. They’re just a click away on Netflix or Hulu or Amazon. They’re the families that never leave me. People say that home is where the heart is. Well, my heart must be stuck in a television, and I have no intention of getting it out.
I’ve taken television with me across the globe. I can make any place my home as long as I’ve got a computer with internet, or at least a computer with a disc drive and all 10 seasons of Friends. I’ve lived in villages in China, dorm rooms in Northern California, “Centers for Education” in Rome, ovens disguised as houses in Washington D.C., and my real home in Los Angeles. Each place I associate with a television show that I wasted my nights and early mornings watching. In China it was New Girl, last quarter at college it was The Mindy Project, in Rome it was Ugly Betty, and this summer it’s been American Horror Story. I’ve watched too many shows in my twenty-one years of existence at home to count, but I associate Los Angeles with all of them. Do I regret spending my time in these amazing places blinding myself with a bright computer screen? Yes. Would I do it again? Probably.
I found myself in the characters I watched. I witnessed my complete lack of social ability as Nick Miller moon-walked himself out of awkward encounters. I saw my adolescent desire to be white and skinny and my eventual appreciation of being brown and curvy in almost every word Mindy Lahiri spoke. I found ambition to follow my dreams in NYC through Ugly Betty, and most importantly I found a boy whose face I wanted to make out with in American Horror Story (shout out Evan Peters). People often come to me with concern, saying I’m not spending enough time with friends. I look at them with a confused stare. “What do you think I’m watching?!”
But the real point is that TV doesn’t ruin your life, despite what your parents wanted you to believe when you were ten. It understands us more than anyone. It comforted me when I left the US alone for the first time and felt homesickness every day like a kick to the stomach. It understood and made me laugh when I experienced heartache for the first time at college. And again abroad in Rome. And again when I came back to college. It’s a source of relief in any new place you explore, and gives you the courage to explore new places. Like a warm hug at the end of the day, it makes any place feel like a home.
When I think of home, I think of driving. More specifically, I think of going into tree-covered mountains, seeing them appear indistinct on the horizon and eventually meeting them head-on, impossibly verdant in the spring and summer, yellow-gold in the fall, and snowy white in the winter.
Growing up in New York’s Capital Region, this landscape captured my imagination. They mountains and hills surrounded me, and I felt their safe, constant presence even in my suburban neighborhood, but the best place to get a sense of their scope was always the road.
Over the years I learned that these mountains extended in three directions, cradling the river valley where I grew up. To the north are the Adirondacks, home to the country’s largest state park, where I learned to hike and camp and peed in the woods for the first time. To the south are the Catskills, cut through by the Hudson River and dotted with farmland, where family friends milk cows and grow produce of all kinds. Driving east, I go into the Berkshires, where on one wintry day, I was overcome with emotion upon hearing a particular line of “Sweet Baby James.” It’s only driving west, to college, to my extended family, that the ground is relatively flat and bare – unsurprising then that this stretch of road seems more like a no-man’s land, an empty stretch between two familiar places.
But before I went to college or listened to James Taylor or even knew the name of these mountain ranges, I visited them on various family drives. With my one of my parents at the wheel I would fall asleep in the backseat and awake to the sight of them, the great leafy guardians that, more than my parents assurances or road signs saying “X miles to Schenectady,” told me that I was where I belonged and home was close by.
For a long time I didn’t think any place would ever feel more like home than where I grew up. Where else could I find a landscape that felt like a companion? Where else could I feel stable and oriented even in motion? Then about a year ago, I fell asleep on a bus, coming back from a weekend trip to Berlin. I woke up from my nap, looked to my left, and tried to process the forest rising up beside me. In my sleepy confusion, I wondered if I was back in Upstate New York. I turned to my right, and saw my friend, still sleeping in her seat. I pulled out my phone and opened Google Maps, hoping it could remind me where I was. In the minute it took my phone to tell me I was in Thuringia, “The Green Heart of Germany,” I had completely woken up and solved the mystery myself. I was on my way to Munich, where I’d been living for over half a year, nestled in the mountains, going home.
I loved suburbia for a long time. It was all I knew—falling asleep to crickets chirping outside my window, helping my mom hang up shirts on the clothesline, waiting for the yellow school bus each morning.
When I went to college, I became slightly embarrassed about my upbringing—one that felt sheltered and stiff compared to the cosmopolitan lives of my counterparts. But I still maintained a love for my hometown, looking forward to coming home and feeling the wind in my hair as I biked past farmers markets and public libraries.
The last few years have been a process of unlearning, especially as I have pursued an interest in housing policy. To me, housing is a natural manifestation of injustice, and working on policy is an avenue to address racial and economic segregation, the increasing domination of business interests, and an overall fracturing of society. In school, I learned about the exclusionary policies of the suburbs pushed by federal, state, and local governments. Historically, government subsidies for suburban developments lured white Americans out of cities into privileged and exclusionary enclaves. Suburbs adopted restrictive covenants or contracts that legally prohibited African Americans from white areas. Redlining and block busting preyed upon racial stereotypes to promote segregation.
I tried desperately to hold onto the virtues of the suburbs from my own upbringing. There is no doubt that the disturbing history of suburbia is inexplicably tied to American “values” and culture. However, I argued to myself that my New Jersey town, which hovers around 50% non-white, was different. And anyways, I lived on the edge of town, surrounded by cornfields, far from the classic image of conformity.
When I began working at a public interest law firm dedicated to fair housing in New Jersey, my bosses mentioned their fight for developing affordable housing in my hometown. Again, I was forced to confront my conceptions of home and suburbia. I vaguely recalled proposals for a rental-unit complex in high school. At the time, a close friend told me that this would bring crime and overcrowding to our high-performing schools, a sentiment that has proven to be untrue when affordable housing is constructed thoughtfully.
The exclusion that occurs in New Jersey is preposterous and largely invisible. Serving to preserve affluent communities, New Jersey housing policies prioritize zoning for large, single-family homes, which makes it nearly impossible to accommodate for a mix of housing types and residents. This falls along racial lines, but is typically veiled by inaccessible and technical rhetoric gaining little attention. In the rare occasions when it is not, it is clear what lies beneath the veil; last year a councilman warned that re-zoning for mixed uses and incomes “could totally change the complexion” of his town.
“Isn’t our town so nice?” my mom asks me on a recent visit home as we drive past vast swaths of cornfields. My mind turns to the values of naturalism and individualism that suburban homeowners often purport. Can they really be separated from the stereotypes, stigmas, and fears that fostered earlier housing decisions and development patterns? I think about my friend telling me that welcoming renters would make my town a “bad area.” I think about the mayor who proposed fulfilling the town’s affordable housing obligations in Trenton where he says there is more need, an argument incongruent with the fact that the town’s new Amazon warehouse buses workers in from Trenton each day.
It is uncomfortable to change your conceptions of something you are raised to take for granted, especially something as close to home as home itself. Behind the bucolic landscape, I see the town I grew up in as part of a larger system, one that is explicitly designed to exclude deserving members of our society. It is only when we challenge our deep-seated views and thoroughly investigate troubling histories that we can begin to wake from the slumbers of complacency.
Home is a big idea made up of little moments. My daughter and I eat a lunch of mac and cheese in our underwear on the floor of the kitchen. We steal bites of each other’s candy bars, which are our dinner, as we are hours into a bad sci-fi movie marathon. We hold each other before drifting off to sleep, treasuring those last moments together before we wake up to do it all over again.
For my daughter, I know what home is. Home is a good boob. I am absolutely positive that there is nothing that pleases her more in the world than my boobs.
For many people, home could be described as the place you have your Amazon packages sent to automatically. In my case, however, this would be my mother’s house, and that statement would be horrifically untrue.
This leads me to ponder what exactly “home” means to me as a woman and as a mother.
There is a home within my daughter’s words; the way she deliberately sounds out “mama” when she is excited, devastated, terrified, or just remembers that she has the wonderful ability to make loud noises. It is those two small syllables that I crawl into when I am feeling worthless. The relationship between “mama” and myself is irrefutable. I am her mama. This is a fact. And in that fact I purge my sadness and bury it until there is nothing left but that bouncing, bright word reminding me of all that is good. That is home.
There is a kind of home sitting in a pile of clean laundry that you know you need to fold, that you tell yourself you need to fold, but you damn well know you are not going to fold. Surrounded by the warmth and cleanliness, I sit there some days in the eye of the laundry storm, like a poor Sylvia Plath metaphor.
There is home on the floor of the YMCA, where many women have knocked me on my ass during roller derby practice. That home is a necessary one: finding something you love and fiercely throwing yourself into it with no hesitation.
Home is knowing you can work a screwdriver, rock a tutu, and do anything you could dream of. I watch my daughter play with both very often, never favoring one over the other. There is beauty in strength and strength in beauty. Her body and her mind are powerful, and I will make sure she knows this forever.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes is home. They are green, like my own, but a whole different shade and depth, completely personal and unique to her. She will have far greater and different ambitions than I will, she will do bigger things than I ever could, and that is the true goal of parenting: to raise someone who is better than yourself.
There is a home in my daughter’s two bottom teeth, which are the only ones she has right now. She smiles bigger and brighter than anyone I have met, and she has only been on this earth for a year. I do not think that is coincidence; the world has a way of making us forget how to smile like our whole head is going to split in half. I pray she never loses that smile.
There is a home spread out in this newfound patience I have with myself and with my daughter. From it pours love and acceptance that I never thought possible, and it either laid dormant within me until her birth, or grew softly and steadily alongside her. I will never know, and it does not matter anymore. That love, acceptance, and patience are here now forever, and for that I am eternally grateful.
Home is in the way my daughter’s body, tensed like an adult’s, melts into my shoulder, relaxing the way that only I can make her by warbling “Hey Jude” softly into her hair, until she is ready to be laid down to sleep.
There are days where I feel like a planet, slowly rotating while the world moves around me, with a tiny blonde moon revolving around me faster than humanly possible, making weird animal sounds, trailing drool in her wake. And then I realize what is actually happening: she and I are both planets.We are steadily and silently revolving around each other. We are in sync, forever and permanently connected. It is indescribable, being a mom. I was not planning on writing about my daughter for this piece. But every time I saw my daughter after beginning to write, the words exploded out of my mind faster than I could type. She is a continuing source of inspiration and frustration.
Ultimately, I cannot even say that my daughter is “home” to me. Home is within myself. I am home. And she is my moon; always there, always spinning, like a ballerina with her tutu on, screwdriver in hand.
In high school, the song “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes pervaded teen girl culture. Justine sang it in the shower; Hazel pretended to despise it in public, but privately scoured YouTube for bootleg versions from when Alex Ebert and Jade Castrinos’s romance was real. Love it or hate it (love it), we couldn’t get the ubiquitous line “Home is wherever I’m with you” out of our heads.
As we’ve grown, we’ve expanded our conceptions of home. We’ve made new homes by going to college, traveling, branching out in new states and countries, and finding people who, yes, feel like home whenever we’re with them. Both of us have spent the bulk of 2015 away from the places we grew up in, across countries and continents, and chose this theme as an outlet for the complicated feelings that arise from aging out of our old surroundings. In this issue, our contributors explore their own interpretations of home, and how those change as we age.
We dedicate this issue to our families, friends, and everyone we tell “Ugh, I miss you so much.”
It can be a grunt of frustration or an irrepressible expression of excitement; a shorthand way to voice our grievances, anticipation or enthusiasm. “UGH” is what we say when we slam the front door shut and realize we left our keys in our room, or when another white Republican male says that the Fallopian tubes are in a woman’s butt or something. “UGH” is what we say when someone on the metro is so hot we LITERALLY cannot take it, or when we’re about to see our best friend for the first time in months, or when Ilana Glazer rocks her newest crop top/mini skirt ensemble on an episode of Broad City. Sometimes things are so terrible or wonderful that we can’t begin to express ourselves articulately in traditional English, and so a message of “ughhhghghhghhghggh” encompasses all we could possibly say and more.
In short, “UGH” represents all the highs and lows of young adult life. It’s miserable and magical, oh yeah.
We were inspired to create this magazine because we realized that we are surrounded by a unique, expansive, and powerful pool of talent: our friends. Writers, artists, thinkers, feelers—we wanted to use their voices and skills to create a collection of the beautiful, nuanced, and powerful feelings that surround womxnhood. We welcome contributors of all identities to submit stories, articles, observations and art addressing this topic.
The theme of our first issue is “Beginners”: coming of age stories, transitions, new discoveries and false starts. We additionally sought to spotlight women in traditionally male-dominated fields—trailblazers young and old. This theme also very much describes us as a publication, and we are incredibly thankful to everyone who contributed to this issue and helped make it a reality. We hope to include even more varied voices and perspectives in the future.
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