Two weeks ago, just four months after my Babcia passed, my Dziadek (grandfather) died. This time, I did not make it back in time to say goodbye to him in person. I did pack up my bags and my two boys, six and nine years old, and we made the trip to Warsaw for the funeral.

Before he died I had sent query letters out to a few more agents, but once in Poland I did not check my email with the same sense of urgency. There was a new hopelessness; I would never get to share the good news with them even if I did find an agent or a publisher. I wished I had tried harder to get it out in time, I wished they could have held the book, seen a dedication made out to them in print. I wished I could have won an award and thanked them in Polish for believing in me and seen their happy tears on FaceTime.

But the truth is they didn’t know or care about that stuff: the agents, the publishing deal, the actual book itself. The important thing to them was that I had written a book. I told the story of our family. And they were already so unreasonably proud, even of this Substack. They told their friends that I was writing for an important newspaper in AMERICA called SUBSTACK (they pronounced it Soob Stack). They bragged that I had a weekly column that was all mine called THE PATRIARCHY POLKA. It didn’t matter when I told them it was just a blog, that anyone could publish anything on here. They sent links to the articles I wrote to people in emails. It was as real to them as the rest of the internet.

When my Babcia died I sent the essay I wrote about her to my family. With my mom’s help I translated it into Polish, and she printed it out for my Dziadek. On the phone he wept and told me that he read it every morning and every night, like a prayer. “Such a gift you have.” he told me. “Such talent.”

I laughed, I thanked him, I told him I loved him and I said goodbye.

I see now how I didn’t let the bigness of that compliment really sink in. How instead, I let a few rejections overshadow one of the most meaningful endorsements of my work I have ever heard.

My Babcia and Dziadek loved me “nadzycie” which means more than life itself. My art and photographs are all over their apartment. Sharing the walls with posters of paintings by Picasso and Matisse and old Polish paintings of horses and farms and the city. I belonged up there with them and they were proud my work framed and spotlit along with the others.

In honor of my grandparents, I am going to recommit to this space and to myself, to my “important column on the internet that is all mine”. They believed it was great and that I was talented and I’ll need to learn how to believe that now too.

Special thanks to Ann Friedman from the Midwives of Invention for giving me just the actionable feedback I needed to press publish on this and dig back into my query letter. You can sign up for a 1 on 1 with her too for a limited time at https://www.midwivesofinvention.com/retreatsandworkshops

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It is in the pause before giving up and keeping going.

In my first Substack I explained how I wanted to tell a story that I felt had been holding me hostage. I hoped that by freeing the story from within me, I too would be free.

So I wrote that book.

I had a first draft which I felt good about not this time last year, but this time the year before that.

And then came the realization: just writing it did not free me. In fact, I was collecting a pretty solid amount of evidence from memoirists that this would NOT fix my life. Also a whiff of memoir regret.

I had hit a wall. I spent all these years trying to “get this out of my system” only to find that there it is still lodged in my system.

But I also wasn’t surprised. I have been here before.

When I first got sober and was in recovery there was a saying that was drilled into me at rehab and meetings. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The sans serif white words on a shiny blue background flash in my mind whenever I realize that I tried to escape myself again, but could not. You can switch schools, groups of friends, move to different countries, fall so in love with someone until you lose yourself, take up a diet or exercise or cleanse or whatever and none of that is going to FIX it.

The IT is being alive.

The IT is ways of finding relief from our suffering that aren’t self-destructive.

But I’d be lying if I didn’t say I started every new kick of mine with a sense of renewed hope. “Once I finish this book, I will feel much better, I’m sure of it.” I say to myself in full delulu gusto, every damn time.

When I started writing the book, the WHY behind it was a plea for relief.

“If I take this pain and grief and suffering and turn it into an equal amount of art and human connection that will fix it. Avoiding it didn’t work, so I’ll just go for it all the way instead!”

I expected some symmetry as to what I put in versus what I got out.

But my story, my past, was not something to be bottled up and contained and easily transformed into a healing elixir.

Enter stage right: Ego Death #1

I use the term ego-death lightly here, definitely inspired by Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams.

I think of ego in this sense as the story I tell myself about myself. There is a me, a whole ass person, who exists no matter what the story I yell you or me about myself is. It helps me clear my mind when I feel confused, and center myself and find that space where I am a body, or even better a creature, seeking some sort of comfort and can then access my self-compassion.

So two years ago, book finished, life not fixed, I interrogated my motivations: if it’s not enough to just write the book and share it with friends and family, what is the outcome I am chasing? And why?

Over the years, I have created multiple tricks to try to get myself out of these existential pickles. Some years it was a simple mantra I may have seen on Pinterest “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” Or “Are you afraid of what will happen if you fail or afraid of what will happen if you succeed?” Sometimes something as petty as “If that person can lead the free world I can do anything I fucking want.”

For this situation, I used a prompt I must have learned in a self-help book or art-class, and I’m sorry I can’t remember where. I have gone back to it time and time again as an artist and a writer, and is kind of my secret sauce in getting a project over the finish line just as I’m wondering what the point of it all is.

It is not very self-helpy at all.

It kind of takes my biggest fears, and insecurities and blows them up crystal clear for me to see.

The Prompt: But that’s MY thing! They stole MY thing!

So, imagine you subscribe to a print edition of your favorite newspaper.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and you start to get a bunch of messages and emails with a link to a story. “OMG this reminds me of you so much!” And “Have you seen this?” and “Big eyes emojis”.

Then you open the newspaper and on the front page is a rave review praising someone for doing exactly the thing that you desire most. Like deep in your core you want to be acknowledged for this.

What does that page look like?

What is the photograph and what is the honor received?

How does it feel as you furiously scan the text and cannot believe that someone copy pasted YOUR deepest dreams and desires? Does it bring it into focus? The thing that you want and why you want it?

I have felt glimmers of this before, and I used to be ashamed of it and shut it the fuck down. I’d try to assuage my simmering anger as I read an article that reminded me of what I was doing, but really it reminded me of what I was doing wrong. Why didn’t I think of saying it this way? Why am I not on this page?

That feeling of anger, and jealousy and desperately wanting to be seen; exposes a very tender and true thing. I have a need for me and this story to be seen. Which maybe would be obvious to a person writing a book about themselves. I can explain to myself why it doesn’t matter and I shouldn’t need other people’s validation to feel fulfilled. But my ambition rolls her eyes. Be for real, she says to me, You really want this.

And when I pay attention to that burn in my chest, to the clench in the jaw, I can follow the line to something I have denied myself. It’s an indication of the parts of me that I don’t feel confident about, the ways that I am afraid I don’t measure up. I don’t even want to admit that I care.

But I care so much that I have begun to get in my own way. Not a good enough writer. Not a healed enough person. Not a good representation of Polish people. Not a good representation of American people. Not a good enough story of addiction or trauma or resilience.

But I know what I want people to see.

And I’ll share that in my next post.

“Wars will always happen.” My Grandma (My Baba Jaga) always said to me. “Wars makes someone rich.”

When I first read one of those studies about generational trauma and how it affects your DNA, little bells went off all around my body, like, actual vibrations. That’s what I felt when she said that. I began to shake. I felt the generations of people controlled by bombs and fire flutter around in me, unleashed and warning me.

My grandma was five years old when the Nazi’s invaded Poland, and her first vision of the world ended. Her father lost his head to a cannonball on the first day of war in the battle for Wola. During the war she ran through fields of cabbage as war planes used her as target practice. She would occasionally remind me of this tip as if it would come in handy, in case I was ever being shot at, to zig and zag never run in a straight line.

For thirty years I rolled my eyes at her; there she goes again with the war. She is using coffee grounds twice to get more value out of them. Making coffee filters out of paper towels or cloth, saving every plastic bag and bottle and rubber band andlittle jars of bacon grease or schmaltz in the back of the fridge. Her fear of the next war never left her body and I always felt so bad for her. That she didn’t know what it was like to feel safe.

I can’t blame her. By the time I was born in 1985 in New York City she had spent the last forty-five years under occupation. But when I talk to her about those days there is no mention of the occupation or of the shortages. Instead her eyes filled with tears and she looks out the same window in Warszawa where she spent the entire occupation.

“Life is so beautiful Patrycja” she reminds me using my full Polish name. “The hardest times were the happiest times. They can never take your love from you.”

She passed away last month and her lessons and laughter have been with me since.

At a recent birthday party for one of my son’ friends, the desperation about the end of democracy oozed out of the grown ups in the form of sarcastic one liners and thin smiles. I imagine my Baba Jaga popping up and saying, Peace is an anamoly. Enjoy a moment of peace with the children playing in the sunlight and the oak trees.Every few minutes our conversation was interrupted by a sweaty kid digging in the cooler for a capri-sun before they ran back to the trees where the birthday boy’s dad corralled them all into a straight line to hit the Piñata.

The kids each looked back to see if we were watching before the blindfold was put on. We each met their gaze and took turns waving as if there was nothing to worry about, reassured them that we were there watching them. Watching out for them. Then we watch them swing in the wrong direction.

I felt the sudden but familiar bump of my younger son’s head as he leaned into me; a physical declaration of boredom. At five years old his face hit my hip, then I felt him slide behind my butt and peak out from behind me because he no longer wanted to participate in the grown up conversation and no longer wanted to play with the big-kids. His goodie bag was full of candy, it was time to go.

As we talked politics, we worried about them.

I cradled his head with my hands, and looked at the other parents. There were flecks of suffering, disappointment on their faces.

I imagined my grandma at her fifth birthday party in 1939.

I join hands in my mind with her mother, celebrating another year to live as I help my son find a lost candy in the ground. “Let me help you open this one, yes I know it’s your favorite” joining a chorus of worried mothers celebrating another year of life, every day until the end of the world. Afraid, protective and hopeful.

Behind us the San Francisco bay is glittering, the spot where the city meets the sea blurry behind a white haze.

It’s a most beautiful thing.

Perhaps it’s more rare than we thought. Perhaps more fleeting than we know.

This week I explore how much occurred below the surface of my awareness as a child. I explore the link between the emergence of a brood of cicadas in my childhood with the collapse of my family. There is a creepy-kismet to how my life story is so intertwined with the saga of these strange, ancient and sacred bugs. They emerged again this year, just as I completed processing and writing the aftermath of that family collapse and came back to New York to read parts of my manuscript with my Polish family.

I am watching a six year old version of me come in and out of focus, the horizontal blips of a VHS tape buzzing in and out like black lasers from one side of the screen to the other. In a jilted high-pitched Polish, wrung down with a heavy American accent, I am explaining to the table of grown ups assembled on our back porch what I had learned about the creature that was climbing up my forearm, its’ alien eyes frightening my mom and making my dad shudder in his seat. The men ignore me, begin to talk about something else, the ice cubes in their glasses rattling against the glass tumblers, an invitation for my mom to top up their jack and cokes. On the bottom left corner, the data is seared into the image, September 1 1991.

In the undertow of my dad’s alcoholism, we were dragged out of that house and my family was left in shambles. Much of the damage was below the surface; my dad was arrested but escaped and the police were looking for him. Below the surface, he wanted that family life, and he blamed my mom for taking it away from him. Tata thought he was being swept out to sea, when in fact, he was the wave.

The cicada that was walking on my hand was from a brood that had been buried underground for seventeen years, when my parents were just teenagers in Warsaw. It was a straggler from the springtime, when the trees were heavy with their molted shells and carcasses. I was showing off the cicada and what I had learned about it, and my parents were showing off a house they were about to lose. We would be gone by spring, our big house empty and the backyard full of molted cicada shells, the next brood of eggs hidden underground again for another seventeen years.

Below the surface my mom wondered if she should have tried harder to save the marriage. She could have learned how to manage the finances and helped him with his business. Below the surface, she resented that my dad got to keep partying, keep sleeping around doing drugs when she had to stop. Maybe she should have sent her parents away sooner, Janusz hated having them there always prying and watching. She gave him an ultimatum; if you think you can handle the mortgage payments on your own then fine, I’ll quit my job and be a homemaker. I’ll cook you dinner every night and make you breakfast and do all the cleaning and take care of Patka. They tried to make it work, and she remembers it as the best year of her life. He tried to stop doing coke, tried to become a family man, but it was too late. Again and again he failed her.

The crash of the surf was when we moved to a new town. I didn’t see my dad for years. My mother was inconsolable,and as I looked out for him in the audience at every school play, knowing he would never be there; I blamed myself. It’s amazing how much was under the surface. But understanding the ocean doesn’t make the impact of the wave softer. I’m still on that shore as a seven-year-old girl, taking wave after wave after wave knowing that the ocean does not bring back what it has taken.

The cicada walking on my hand in the video from 1991 marked the end of my family together. Across the ocean the Soviet Union fell apart that year too. The nymphs that hatched and burrowed into the ground of my childhood home emerged again in 2008. By then my family had transformed again. That generation of cicadas birthed the ones that emerged this year, 2025.

It is the year that this story which became a book is finally emerging. If the story has a shape and form it would be wrapped around the burrowed nymphs from 2008 who are emerging now as I write this in 2025. Ninety-nine percent of the story was in the quiet painful changes between people. In the times we left and the ones we stayed. This messy explosion of words is what it was all building towards. Sometimes we call them cycles, sometimes we call them generations. Because some things take a long time for a reason.

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Earlier this month, I got a call from my mom that my grandmother had been hospitalized after an emergency surgery. She had a serious infection and was not expected to survive the week. I live in the Bay Area and it’s a nine hour time difference.

My mom told me not to come, that I should remember her how she was when she was healthy. My grandpa told me not to come, that she would be fine. I thought about the busy week ahead, about the long flight from San Francisco to Warsaw and the jet-lag, about finding backup care for my kids and I almost didn’t go. I sensed that I was needed, even though my family said otherwise. But deep in my gut, in the place impervious to calendars and logic, there was the undeniable urge; I need to see her one more time.

I booked a flight for that evening, called in extra help for my kids and family and steeled myself for a brutal trip. My grandma has had Alseheimers and dementia for years, and her condition was becoming unmanageable for my grandfather and mom. She has been on the same five minute loop for years.

I called my Grandma my Baba Jaga, which made her cackle-laugh every time we spoke. She took an early retirement in her early fifties from being a Labor and Delivery nurse to come help my mom raise me in New York.

By the time I write my mom back and tell her I decided to come, it was already the middle of the night in Poland. Twenty Hours later I am sitting in her apartment, holding hands with my grandfather. I ask him how he is doing and he says he has hope.

Hope dies last, Dziadek says. Nadzieje Umiera Ostatnia.

I walked through the medical university compass to her building at three in the morning, unable to sleep, still stuck on California time. I felt strangely brave and beautiful as I walked to see her. The security guard was asleep in the booth, the cars were done drag racing on the main road. There was the buzz of street lights flickering on and off and ruffle of wind in the leaves.

As I walked through the wells of blackness between the lights, I felt no fear.I wasn’t scanning the horizon for stumbling figures, or shooting glances over my shoulder if I thought I heard steps in the grass or the jingle of keys. I walk-floated forward as if I had a sword drawn - a shield at ready. There was a smile on my face that didn’t match the darkness and the quiet of the night.

On the sides of the road grew wildflowers - all purple and blues and blacks casting shadows in three directions at once. I made a small bouquet of a few blossoms and branches. Usually I would get an app out to help me identify the plant and take a photo of it, then look up medicinal uses or folkloric meanings. But a strange intuition was guiding my hand forward, even though I didn’t know the names of the plants. I knew that the purple floof of a flower would heal, or that a branch of birch would comfort, and the feathery spread of yarrow and its creamy blossoms were going to be good together.

The sprig of birch I pulled from an old tree split in two and nearing death itself. Maybe as old as me. I think I remember hearing they do not live long. Not nearly as old as my Babcia. I stopped at an old linden tree. This one maybe was as old as her. I don’t know. I stopped and gave each one a hug. The trunk of the birch was me-sized, the linden required my full wingspan. The bark against my cheek and palms was rough, steady, real.

That morning I watched her almost leave us a few times. I created an altar for her from her drawer of treasures in her vanity; an evil eye to ward off evil spirits, a plaque of the matka boska cestohovska, a buddha statue and a picture of her mother.

If there are spirits, I thought they would like the window open.

I turned the handle and window opened sideways like a door, letting in the sound of the main road and the breeze and the swirls of outside conversations rushed in.

I brought a few boxes of her favorite chocolate wafer cookies to share with the nurses, because she was once one too, and a had a sweet tooth.

I brought her chamomile tea, rumaniek. When I was little (and even when I was a grown up a few times) she would wash my hair in the bath tub. She would do it twice, and after the second time she would rinse the shampoo out with chamomile tea. The feeling of her fingers sliding through my hair, the smell of the tea, the bath water cooling as the warm waterfall of tea cascaded down my face and back, my laugh gurgling through before she rushed me out of the bathtub and wrapped me in a bath towel.

I put the hot water in a thermos and filled it with a dozen chamomile tea bags. I put one bag on her eye. She sighed and I put one on her other eye. I wiped away the hardened salt path of tears. Her lips were dry and her tongue was dry so I pressed the chamomile tea against her lips and tongue and heard her moan, trying to press the top of her mouth. It looked like relief. I took a handkerchief and dipped it into the tea. I placed it on her forehead, and washed her face and her neck. She moaned, Oh God O Boze, O Boze. I washed her neck and her chest and her shoulders. I washed each of her fingers and arms. I skipped her torso, where she was hurt, and rinsed her feet and her legs.

They talk about this in the Bible. I thanked her feet for carrying her so far in life. Carrying my mother, who carried me. I thanked her for the thousdands of times she bathed me, fed me, hugged me and called me.

The head Doctor came in with a semicircle of nurses around him checking vitals, whispering about sepsis and kidneys. He seemed to notice the chamomile smell, the altar then the open window in that order. He said to me, “She is dying.”

“I know” I said. The group jostled out. One of the nurses stayed. She said that Babcia seemed to do better when my mom or me or her sister or my grandpa were around. It made me smile. It made me wonder. Was she holding on, so I would come back again?

I wondered if she needed my permission to leave, but since I kept coming back, I was in some way asking her to stay, even though I said goodbye each time.

After experiencing a few of those moments with our eyes locked, her trying to speak but not being able to, I decided that if I wanted her to let go and stop suffering, I needed to let go first.

It wasn’t her job to say our final goodbye, it was mine.

Under each of our past goodbyes, in each desperate clingy last hug, was that fear. Will this be the last time? As a child, at my wedding, with my own children, each time we would look at each other and together think What if this is the last time? Our blue eyes reflecting blue back at each other with so much love and so much fear that we would cry. And just like I did on the phone, since she often would cry telling me how much she missed me, I said “don’t cry” nie placz Babciu. And she would say she wasn’t lying through her tears Nie placze, nie placze. But this time I said it to myself. “Don’t cry Patti.” Nie placz patki. I took her hand, heavy and warm and wiped away my tears with it. I took my hand and wiped away hers. For the last time.

I said “You can go now Baba, I am going to leave, and I am not going to see you again.”

On the way back to the apartment I prayed to each tree that I passed, hugged it and looked up at the branches and listened, asking for forgiveness, grace. The sunshine was both cleansing and blinding. The campus was busy now with students and doctors and patients and people like me, visitors. I told the trees goodbye from her. I thanked them.

I went to her room back in the apartment and closed the door. I looked at her things. My baby socks from when I was born in 1985 hanging next to the bed. One infant sock for each of my sons which she slept with,hidden under a pillow. On my hands, her rings. One with five diamonds, as a gift from my mom for her fiftieth birthday just a few months before I was born.

We knew each other for forty years. What a marvel, what a gift.

Hope dies last Dziadek says.

I thought of my children, I thought that maybe I would pass the crown to them one day, the crown that comes with being the person who loved someone the most. To being the most loved.

In ten years I will be as old as she was when I was born. To think that the person she most loved wasn’t even born yet when she was my age. Hope dies last. Because I believe she is with me. I feel her in my hands and eyes and tummy, in my selfies with flowers, in the dessert menus I ask to see, the times I dance or times I close my eyes in revery as I rock back and forth, humming low to myself like she always did. You can’t always hear it but if you put your hand on our knees or press against our backs you can feel the vibrations, humming along to some melody that won’t leave our bodies, vibrating with sound and life.

I don’t know the story of when she was born, but I hope that in the story of her last day we will remember that she left after those she loved most said goodbye. She crossed to the other side with her mother and father, her beloved uncles and aunts, her girlfriends and favorite actors and musicians. It happened just after my mom went to see her one last time.

Babcia Basia is gone, forever, but since she died all I have felt is her presence.

It is unexpected, the warmth, the lack of grief. I’m not sad at all, instead I feel completely full of her love. To those who are sad that she is gone, and feel her absence, I promise you that she is with me. That the other side is here with us too.

She is moving my hair out of my face, patting me on the back. I feel brave like a siren, which is the symbol of Warsaw. A proudly bare chested mermaid with long flowing hair, sword and shield drawn— maybe floating in the water, maybe flying through the air, blessed by my Babcia Basia, and unafraid of the darkness.

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In this essay from 2017 I introduce the misogyny I observed in my family, and how it shaped my sense of self. It is the tender-truth at the center of my rage against the patriarchy: a longing to be loved and valued as I am, not as I should be.

When I wrote this essay my creative work was moving two different directions; one was using art to communicate to an entire system. Letters to the Patriarchy became Invoice the Patriarchy and then Fax the Patriarchy and then billthepatriarchy.com and online I became “artpatti”.

The other direction of my work wasn’t so visible. It was that hurt polka (polish girl in polish), the Patricia I was before I became Patti. In a web of documents a grieving daughter was reaching for memories of tenderness, for evidence and documentation of a time when she was in fact loved and valued; mining for the happy memories of her family before it fell apart.

Then in 2019 I had my second child, and in 2020 all my focus and energy went into keeping myself and my two children alive. The pandemic, several wildfire seasons and the disastrous political climate eclipsed my inner explorations.

If I had any creative time or effort the last few years, it went back into speaking to those systems, to deepening my understanding of how patriarchy and racism both benefitted from a silence and compliance which I deeply resisted.

But before that survival season, before those creative paths diverged, I wrote this essay. I see the versions of myself trying to find a voice when I go back and read it now. There’s a mother and a daughter and a siren and a philosopher and a radical and a little girl.

When I give presentations about my work and how I started billthepatriarchy.com I often start by reading from this work and asking students to respond.

Is there a system in your life which is hurting you? Is there a way you can communicate back to that system what your experience is?

One spoke to harmful immigration policies by creating their own customs forms that allowed for the inclusion of recipes. Some spoke back in prose and some with direct action protests or artworks or song. Some were broken by the question, and that was enough to open something else worth exploring.

For me, the prompt of addressing the patriarchy directly has fueled my art practice ever since writing these letters. It challenged me to imagine how I would send this message, and who I would send it to. This then opened up another level of fruitful exploration: what did I expect to achieve? How do systems listen, and how do they respond?

In 2016, I became a parent to a premature infant. I was overwhelmed, in love and unsure how I had never known the depths and details of what was involved with child-rearing. Like many people in duress, I was looking to point the figure, and I found the Patriarchy to blame for my suffering and confusion. Here is my correspondence with it.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ My Father

To blame the patriarchy is to point my finger at all the men, who intentionally or not, have made me feel invisible. It must begin, as all my stories seem to, with my own father. My father who I loved and who is gone, who was absent when I needed him most and who left the world before we got to fully articulate how we loved each other.

He was the perfect model of the imperfect patriarch. He was the most adept magician when it came to making me disappear. Meals appeared before him and dirty plates moved away from him in waves pushed along by the invisible hands of my mother, my grandmother and later his many young girlfriends. I learned to serve him invisibly enough to catch the occasional smile or pat on the head. In the kitchen we whispered of his moods and as a child I wavered around him, ready to hand a remote control or telephone.

When my mother met his mother for the first time, she was dumbfounded when she saw my father sit on the porch and watch his as his own mother carry two buckets full of water across the garden.

When he finally left us I folded within myself blame for their divorce. Inept at sports, clumsy with my hands, bad at chess. I was not a good son to my father, and perhaps that was my first experience of girlhood.

The echo of his booming voice and the pervasive fear that came with his comings and going, left our reformed household a cavernous outline of where he hurt us most. And in that space, we rebuilt ourselves, my mother and I. We held each other's hands, and moved each others hair out of one another's eyes.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ the people who don’t think there is one

A few of the things that you assume about a woman who writes a series of letters to the patriarchy are true; I don’t shave my legs or believe in God, I hate wearing makeup and heels, I am no fun at night time and I have opinions about things like different types of citrus and Terry Gross. And yet, I am also married to a man, I have been seen slinking around in sexy black dresses, have put sparkles on my eyelids and enjoyed what the sunlight does to my hair when it is swooping over one side of my face. I have liked luring men and toying with them, have felt desired and desire. I have sometimes made myself sweeter, dumber, skinnier and quieter. I have other times been defiant, annoying, shrill, bitchy and yes, bossy. I have agonized over which way the pendulum will swing almost every day of my life.

I have been a woman wrapped up tightly in my career, so tightly I have sneered at the round, pink person next to me as she rattled off reasons about day care closing early and left the office in the early afternoon. It was so easy in the gray room in my mid twenties, full of black buzzing machines and men, so many men, to hate her. To make a note to myself that when I became a mother, if I did, I wouldn’t let it make me leave work early.

So I can sense that hate, because it really is that, it’s a complete disapproval of somebody else being, I can sense it so clearly in the tone, in the lifted eyebrow, in the pause after I answer the question “What do you do?”

What do I do? The words tossed like rocks across a lake. Skip once or twice and then sink.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ My Son

Oh, Abraham. We named you after the father of all religions, the great patriarch! And yet here I am, trying to yell at the patriarchy. In this year of feeling crushed by the stupidity of men in power, I’m also eclipsed by the love that came with you into the world.

The patriarchy would have me be your servant, be your father’s servant. Millions of women are expected to cook, to clean, to soothe, to heal, to hold, to love the men in their lives before all else. Before themselves. In our house, you will see a mother with a partner who does his share of cleaning, cooking. A mother who does her share of dreaming, of having ambitions and providing for you.

In my dreams I buy a house for us made of my poems and paintings. It will be smaller and sweeter than the house I would have built for you with the cold hard cash earned from the marketing job I quit before you were born. You may have less things, but you will be raised by a complete woman, full of love for you and for herself. The walls of our home will be laid brick by brick with your father and I, equal partners like both the sun and the moon are equal partners in the sky.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ Myself

To blame the patriarchy is to point the finger at myself, at all the ways it has wrapped itself around my mind. It begins with how I second guess myself. It’s all the times I’ve said yes to things that made me uncomfortable, because I have learned to put other people’s needs before mine. The patriarchy is in a million mini-acts of self-erasure. I have performed them in classrooms, boardrooms, and living rooms.

It’s the professor who encouraged me to apply for a Fulbright Scholarship, but me deciding I wouldn’t get it anyway. It’s having twenty thousand words of a book and fifty pretty good poems, which have yet to be seen by more than a handful of people. It’s being too afraid to even propose the idea that they are worthy of being shared. It’s trembling every time I do share something at a writing group, on the internet, in email. It’s feeling terrified that people will hate it. It’s the actual trembling.

For me, being a woman has come with this tax. I often wake up in the middle of the night and am flooded by my shortcomings as a mother, as a partner. When I take stock of my last year, my stomach sinks. The yard is a mess. I barely cook anymore. I push dirty hair out of my face and feel the weight of a my own estranged body. It has swelled with life and many gallons of liquids pressing against each other through membranes of organs I would never think I would feel. (So this is what it’s like when my bladder and my stomach touch, or my heart and my lung?) I search for calm.

I imagine the Morskie Oko, a lake in the southern mountains of Poland, which means Eye of the Sea. I went for the first time just as my parents were separating, when I was seven years old. The lake is famous for how deep and cold it is, and I like to imagine the rocks at the bottom, catching just the slightest bit of daylight. The darkness and stillness comfort me. I try to find the part of me that is that pure. Is it in my gut? In the back of my throat? I feel a smooth black stone in my mouth, cold against my tongue.

This is where I go when I am afraid to speak, I go to the purity inside me. And I spit out the rock.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ My Unborn Daughter

When the ultrasound technician asked me if I wanted to know the gender, I already had her name and her hair color in mind. I squeezed her father’s hand before I answered with a smile, “I think we already know”. As our faces turned to the green light of the screen, and we saw the blue gloved finger pointing between the glowing little legs to a glowing little line, our little girl disappeared.

“Congratulations! How did y’all know it’d be a boy?” It hung in the air for a minute. In that liminal space between not knowing and knowing, in that infinite windfall of a moment, before I could turn and look at your father, before my lips even parted, appeared two concurrent emotions; relief and shame.

Yes, I was relieved that you weren’t a girl. I was relieved I wouldn’t have to explain how things would be harder for you, how to beware the condescension of men, how to stay away from their hands. How to navigate their world and defend your own desires and dreams with in the architecture of their desires and dreams. How to do it with shiny nails and glowing skin and a fake smile.

And then, the undertow of shame, dragged me just as hard for the very elation I felt. How can it be that the 21st century a woman feels relieved to not be having a girl? How can I call myself a feminist, when I carry in my womb what feels like the less complicated reality? It is the moment I realize the world was not ready for me, just as it is not yet ready for her the girl I didn’t have.

Attn: The Patriarchy ℅ The Media

We were perfect. Without makeup or the right lighting, just as women walking around a forest, we were perfect. And then you sold us impossible faces, with unreasonable hair. You put us in shoes that made it so we can’t run or sometimes walk. Then you told us to hurry up. Then to sit down. Finally, to stay home. I blame you for excluding women of all shapes, colors and sizes from your channels. I blame you for trying to program beauty and thinness and perfect skin and youth into our self-image. Show us smart, strong women. Ugly and fat women. Show us trans women and not women who also aren't men. Show us the beautiful in-betweens. Show us mothers. Show us what child care looks like, what breastfeeding looks like, what juggling work and family looks like. Let women be the heroes. Let the fur on our legs be there forever.