There’s a dream I had when I was young, and if I could, I’d have that dream again.

In it, my mother is a girlbird, and she’s moving upward through the sky, a feathered streak of silver, and the sky is sun-dipped clouds in all directions, and she’s moving toward me, always toward me, and I can hear her singing.

Every time I open up my mouth to join her song, all my makeshift fathers leave a feather in my throat.

How radical a world in which our voices are our voices.

*

There’s a writing contest in my hometown, “New Words on Women.” If I win, I get to read my work at a staged performance in June. However, I’ll need to come up with something to write, first, and then hopefully, maybe, win.

I’m a woman. I’ll write about that, easy. Except, it’s not easy. It’s the opposite of easy. I don’t know what it means to be a woman. In this age of undulant unknowing, I wonder about knowing much of anything, ever.

I know I like my water with no ice and a lemon at the restaurant. I know how to spell “prestidigitation” from watching Akeelah and the B on repeat in the fifth grade. I know the taste of rejection, that handsome brine. I know the entirety of “Harry Potter in 99 Seconds.” I know I have never seen my mother cry.

*

The more woman I become, the more disgusted I am with the world. If I were to ever meet god, the first question I’d ask is, What did we ever do to you? And don’t give me that Eve shit.

I imagine she would answer with something along the lines of, Woman can handle it. If I gave men the same problems women have, your species would be long gone.

To which I would answer, Well, yes, I could see that.

*

There is a slight hiccup in submitting to this “New Words on Women” contest: the sponsoring theater is the West Side Show Room, the theater where I saw Eurydice with R—. The R— who bought me eucalyptus lotion at a Bath and Body Works while we waited for his turn at Verizon; who called me late one night from Huai’an to show me his tofu options at a corner market; who kissed me in his parents’ garage after watching Parts Unknown on the loveseat of his basement apartment; who brought me cubed watermelon in a Ziploc bag the day I quit my job; who held me under the waterlogged awning of a bookstore in Minneapolis while we waited for an Uber. The R— who told me there was no one else he’d rather be with.

The R— who changed his mind in an evening coated crimson, lowlight metallic.

*

In my high school health class, our teacher told us to pass around an unwrapped Nutter Butter and do whatever we wanted to it: breathe on it, lick it, bite it. When the bar had gone around the whole room and returned to her, she held it up and asked, Now, who wants to eat this? Nobody raised their hand. She asked, Why? Someone said, It has everyone’s germs on it. She said, Precisely.

*

Maybe being a woman is like the flicker in a flame. Not the flame itself, but the near-invisible airspace between one side of the wick and the other, breathing and changing even when a room is perfectly still.

*

My mother raised my sister and me alone. She was my mother and my father. She taught me how to change the oil in my car, put in a tampon, balance a checkbook, do laundry, start a lawn mower, cook dinner, shoot a layup, apply mascara.

In an Ulta the other day, she gave the employee a hard time for not being able to return a bottle of lotion because the seal had been broken. She used that tone I hated growing up — the one she used with an employee at ToysRUs that made me attach to a stranger; the one she used in a car lot when the salesman asked if there was a husband he could speak to; the one she used with the insurance agent on a phone call about a recent billing that should have been covered. The tone I know makes people bristle.

But I have come to love it. Because it is her way of saying:

“I am here.”

In a space where she is not.

I sometimes recognize this tone in myself. And it tastes of skybound tang.

*

“New Words on Women.” How ironic. Cages don’t come with a key for the inside. In Shakespeare’s era, if a husband thought his wife to be too full of words, he could lock her in an iron helmet with a rod stuck in her mouth and parade her around town. He too could lock her in a chastity belt to contain her corrupt flesh.

How deep these women’s trenches must run.

*

About a month ago I hung out with a guy I’d met through a mutual friend. We watched Punch- Drunk Love on a translucent wall projection. His roommate was showering to Lil Peep in the adjacent bathroom. He complimented the music in the film. I said, I agree, I said, I sing. He said, Do you wanna be on my album (I have 31 followers on SoundCloud and counting)? I said, Um, of course.

We started making out. It was kind of okay. Nothing like R—. But nothing was okay was like R—. When he asked for a blowjob I said I was uncomfortable. He called me a prude. I said that was offensive. He said I had led him on. I said that wasn’t true. He said why are you so weird about sex. I said I’ve been branded by rulers held to skirts held to knees. He said you are making all of this about yourself.

I tried to say, No I’m not; I tried to say, Your expectations are misogynistic; I tried to say, I deserve to have my boundaries respected; I tried to say, this is only the second time we’re hanging out you fucking asshole; but instead I said, I’m sorry. And then I left. Rage trapped throat-ward in coats of melted iron.

*

Fabric unravels at an alarming rate if it isn’t hemmed. Shreds of a whole hang there phantom-like in separatist flight. Maybe this is what it is to be a woman.

*

Many indigenous societies were traditionally matrilineal. Decisions were made by women. Clans were determined by women. Men spent most days out hunting, so it carried that women would be in charge of tribal matters.

This set-up seems to have worked fairly well. After all, Native peoples managed to survive on their own for thousands of years as it were. After all, it wasn’t until the arrival of Anglo-European Christian-stamped patriarchy that colonialism and alcohol and pillaging began to leave footprints the size of cemeteries. After all, it wasn’t until the white man showed up that Indigenous women started disappearing left and right, no blink, stories stopped mid-flight.

*

I have this burning, lunging drive to write. But not only to write. To write well. To write to be read. To write to be read by others who need the words they are reading to touch them in an impossible way. This comes mostly from an artistic sensibility I’ve had since childhood. But it comes also from watching my mother hold back tears while trying and failing to set mouse traps in the basement; from rubbing sleep from my eyes to her words of “It’s Daddy” and two years later “It’s Grandma”; from her leaf-raking admission to missing a balance of parental authority in the house; from saying goodbye to my sister, our pH 7, when she went away to college; from a rain-soaked horseback ride across family farmland in western Kansas; from our screaming fights in the kitchen about dishes or dustings or attitude or absolutely nothing, nothing at all. From her undying belief in my art, my dream, my geometric spirit. From weak coffee stains on slippers padding always and forever forward.

Let me gift you words, poetic and preserved, for all of this and more.

*

Today I saw R—’s sister at a hotel coffee shop downtown. I was sitting at a window-side table trying to write a piece for the contest. So far I had written, “New Words on Women Submission_K.Childs.” It was not going super well.

I didn’t see her until she sat at a table diagonal from mine. A swig of my sugar cookie latte made a tiny clot somewhere in my intestines. I scanned the interior to see if he was there. He wasn’t. I waved to her. I wrote:

“woman = cordial”

*

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her essay “About Anger”:

“One view of clinical depression explains it as sourced in suppressed anger. Anger turned, perhaps, against the self, because fear — fear of being harmed, and fear of doing harm —

prevents the anger from turning against the people or circumstances causing it. If so, no wonder a lot of people are depressed, and no wonder so many of them are women. They are living with an unexploded bomb.”

My bomb is made of gossip regarding my grandmother’s character at the church ladies’ luncheon.

Of complaints about my mother’s basketball coaching after a significant loss.
Of soap on my tongue after expressing my truth.
Of the Cheese-Ball Chic’s chapel message about the evils of body.
Of being told “You’re a wonderful woman” in the same breath as “I’m not interested.”
Of “is it your time of the month”
Of “why are you so angry”
Of “loosen up”
Of —

When a people is told over and over that they are worthless, this lie becomes a belief set deeper than the iron folds of dress, of brow wet with the sweat of expectancy. This shame is my grandmother’s, is my mother’s, is my mine.

No wonder I find it impossible to go a day without apologizing for existing.

*

Iron is a metal. It is also a component of hemoglobin, which carries oxygen from our lungs to all parts of the body. It is also an adjective meaning “inflexible.”

So that which cages is releasing is caged.

Like those snakes who smell the odor of their prey on their own bodies and start eating themselves.

*

Punch-Drunk Love guy texted me recently. He said, im tryna see u. I said, I’m not interested in seeing you. He said, do u still wanna be on my album tho? I said, I don’t think so.

I don’t know why I said that. What I really meant was No. What I really meant was You hurt me. He didn’t respond, and I deleted his number. Then I cried.

The tears were because of him, but they also had nothing to do with him. They came from a four- square rugburn scar in the shape of folded hands, the Lord’s Prayer etched faintly, like a ubiquitous birthmark, beneath fingernails on fire.

*

I saw a cardinal this morning outside my kitchen window. He was perched on a tree limb straddling two bushes. His head was jerking around the way they do. I wondered what he was looking for. I thought maybe he was lost. I thought maybe he was looking for his family. I thought maybe they used to live there, in that tree, and his wife had had to move while he was away, she and the kids had to move because of an unexpected snowstorm, and they moved to a more heavily covered tree for shelter, and their new home was just around the corner, and she had left a trail of their trek so that when he returned he would be able to find them, but the snow had turned the trail to ruins, and here he was now, back from a week of work, and his family was gone, and he couldn’t find them anywhere, and he never did, and they forever thought he had abandoned them for some younger, prettier cardinal he met during his travels, and he was forever trapped in the tacet of their song.

*

Maybe womanhood is night snowfall under a streetlamp: beheld only in the faint afterglow of another.

* I wonder if I have such a hard time defining womanhood because I do not have a consistent representation of its comparison.

It’s like trying to sew a hem with only one side of the fabric. No matter how many times you go in with the needle, the thread will come out on the other side untethered.

*

R—: You’re a square hole, and I’m a round peg.
Me: That doesn’t make any sense.
R—: We aren’t going to work.
Me: But we have an amazing connection.
R—: Maybe that connection is supposed to be just that, and nothing more.
Me: What?
R—: Maybe we are supposed to simply see one another and have that be enough.
Me: But our mutual sight is nearly impossible to find.
R—: Why can’t you be grateful for what we’ve had thus far and accept detachment?
Me [thinking]: You’re psychotic. Also [still thinking], I love you.

*

Last night I dreamt I was standing on a sidewalk, in a fury from being ignored and misheard by those around me. I was trying to speak but my words came out muted and dull and everyone continued to talk over me, at me. No matter how hard I tried to scream, all that came forth were the remnants of mothers falling heavy like molten feathers. Airspace in my throat forever catching.

*

It’s spring break now, and I’m at my mom’s for the week. In past years I’ve taken the opportunity to travel, but lately the only traveling I’m inclined to do is from the couch to the toilet and back.

I’ve spent maybe ten minutes out of the total 72 hours of break thus far working on what I need to, that is, the “New Words on Women” submission. So far, I’ve written more in this non-diary about how I don’t know what to write than actually writing anything. I’m beginning to think maybe I will never finish the submission. There is a part of me that is fine with that. But there is also a part of me that is not, in any sense, fine with that.

My mom and I spent this afternoon watching Lanuna: A Yak in the Classroom, a Bhutanese film about a young teacher from the city who is sent to teach in the most remote village in the world. He gets to the village and immediately wants to leave. Then over time he grows to love the people and land as home.

Becoming a woman is like this. In the beginning it is inconvenient and isolating and infuriating— the growing awareness of eyes upon your body, the duality of loose or uptight, the constant repeating of words to be heard — but in time we learn to appreciate its ruggedness. And its landscape begins to look like home. I think maybe there are no “New Words on Women.” I think maybe the only words on women are those of our sister who is tied to a mule, iron rod in mouth, her silence a girlbird’s song.

*

Tomorrow, my mother and I will go to a book fair. My sister will join us from Chicago. I will buy a book, probably one involving tragedy and relational agony, and I will fantasize about a book of my own making the shelf.

We will eat dinner in the recessed lights of our kitchen. We will talk about work and school and the in-between world news. We will not mention my sister’s divorce or my invirginity or my mother’s dwindling years. We will not speak of my father; we will discuss the purity of rain and cannibalistic snakes.