I Feel Like Society Normalizing Mothers Screaming And Being Angry At Their Children As Long As They Dont

I feel like society normalizing mothers screaming and being angry at their children as long as they don’t beat them because ‘mothers love you more than anyone else’ should stop. It hurts victims of emotional and verbal abuse because they are told to keep loving their mothers since they “don’t abandon you, give you a roof, food, and clothing” and it makes them unable to identify if they’re being abused or try to fight back because “she still loves me.” Such things really have to stop.

And speaking of Sophia Tolstoy, her diaries are just so depressing. 

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence “There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

A few years before her husband’s death, she published a cycle of prose poems titled “Groans”, under the pseudonym “A Tired Woman”.

My Asexual Story, 2018.

Another little autobiographical comic I whipped together (this was drawn in like two hours tops so don’t judge the drawings lmao). To clarify, I am in a happy long-term committed relationship with a non-ace girl and we’re both very happy with our relationship, and I have never had bad experiences with relationships because of my asexuality. Being ace isn’t a big deal to me - I barely think about it - but asexuality is something that a lot of people seem to have trouble fully understanding, so I wanted to take some time to describe it the way I see it in my life and from my perspective. Every story is different - here’s mine.

THIS IS THE HARDEST I HAVE LAUGHED IN SO LONG YOU HAVE CURED MY DEPRESSION

Can you tell us about your favorite writers and books, please? Your writing is the light!

Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi

Two sisters, separated before they even have a chance to remember the other. One is sold into slavery, the other becomes a slave-owner’s wife. Every chapter is written from the perspective of one of their descendants, spanning three generations and hundreds of years, crossing continents, beginning in Africa at the onset of slavery and taking us all the way to modern day America. The true glory of this book is that you only hear from each character once and yet you are no less emotionally invested in them. The writing is mesmerising, brutal; full of softness, and of spit. Fire and water - as the book references - fire and water, come together.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland - Alice Walker

Everyone reads The Color Purple (and rightfully so), but in my opinion, this is Walker’s better book. It follows three generations of a poor black family in the American South. It’s set after the abolition of slavery, when it was no longer legal, but the effects of it were still felt by black men and the black women they often took their feelings of powerlessness out on. It gives us ugly, brutal, abusive black male characters and without asking us to forgive them, makes us understand the cycle that made them so callous. Brilliant.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride

Gutting. Like being suffocated within the narrator’s head. Written in an off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness type style. It follows the life of a young woman who experiences a myriad of traumas. I have never felt such stifling second-hand grief, and for a fictional character at that. Devastating, perverse, and hard to stomach, but one of the most worthwhile reads in recent years.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers - Max Porter

A book without a genre. A mix of poetry, prose, and even drama. A semi-autobiographical account of a man left to struggle with his grief after his wife passes, leaving him to raise their two young sons. The most original format I’ve ever seen in a book. Heart-rending, darkly comic, and entirely absurd at times.

White Oleander - Janet Fitch

One of the most poetic novels I’ve ever read. A young girl navigates a series of foster homes while her mother is in prison for having killed her partner. Something about this book feels like leaving candy floss to melt on your tongue. The character of the mother manages to be simultaneously alluring and disgusting. As a reader, we buy into the enigma of her; we desire her; we almost forgive her. And we watch as Astrid, the daughter, emulates some of her mother’s mistakes, and makes some of her own. We watch her suffer, grieve, fuck, and start to bite back.

 ✸ Tyene Sand

↳we could kill him, to be sure, but then we would need to kill the rest of his party too, even those sweet young squires. that would be… oh so messy.