Three Things: Storytellers, Spies & Good Seating

 yo. my lil'warriors.

It's been a bit since we hung out here. Leave your shoes by the door and grab a drink. The cat will move as soon as you almost sit down on her. She'll move, I promise, just sit. I'm going to try harder to be a good communicator and maintain some peace in my heart believing that I'm doing everything I can to be a good enough grandma. (note the "Good Enough" part because I really don't want my expectations of being The Best Ever to smash my ceilings over here.)

I like to pretend that we've been meeting up here for almost sixteen (or ten) years. I pretend that you kinda know who I am and sometimes you wish I'd tell you something. While the brain part of me knows that's probably not true, the heart part is totally gonna play to that. It's super-weird that there really is no handbook on how to be a grandma when we have flying cars and whatnot. Ah, but I digress.

Soooo so much has changed, since you were born... since I decided I'd best write down the important stuff and fire up this little blog machine. When I was your age my grandparents were already pretty much mostly dead so I never got to know who they really were. I wasn't a big thinker at six and seven and, turns out - they weren't really big writers. Now that I'm older than the oceans - I have a bunch of questions that I won't ever get answered. Not a big deal, but I get The Curious ... like a virus. 

I'm optimistically clinging to a grain of hope that there's some small chance you'll find yourselves here sometime and you'll gain some deeper understanding into the meaning of life and why things are the way they are. I dunno. It's a total crap shoot. But I do know that if I don't try there's no way we'll know. It's just science.

From now on, the three things that I throw down once a week (oh please let me be that good) will be more than just manners and smash the patriarchy stuff. I'm gonna spill some tea that's way more real than a thousand tired memes.

one I offer this up so as to give you some insight into where I'm at lately. You should totally do a deep dive on Nellie Bly and then make a transfer and lay if on my world. Western medicine is so completely, dangerously broken and corrupt as to kill about 1300 people every day in America (I didn't link that because there is so much data and SO so much conflicting data and you gotta know fosho, the powers that be don't what us to wrap our brains around the truth but y'gotta trust me - Covid was childsplay comparitively.) 

But if you're on the marginalized fringes of this capitaistic life and death nightmare and you need nonscary healthcare - you might be hosed. I've played nice for a long long time in this arena and my compliance has amounted to support and endorsement. I've run clean outta ways to care about how I'm perceived so now I use recording devices and ... enough about me. What's blowing the wind up your skirt lately? I very much hope something is blowing the wind up your skirt, to be honest. And, Nellie Bly's story is fascinating enough to make me pretend like I'm part her, part Queen Victoria, part Lizzo/eilish/prine hybrid... you know what I'm talkin'bout. And, I very much hope you're deep into some powerful plans or deep thinks.

two I always deserved a seat at the table but I didn't believe it. I don't think I even fully understood the concept of that table till I was in my thirties, so there's that. No regrets and I still wish I'd gotten that memo a little sooner in the game. Dude. It was wicked hard to be taken seriously in business boysclubs when I was such a girl. I also didn't have to be the lifesaver every single.freaking.time. I was a cartoon of helpfulness and overachievement fantasy, and I give it zero stars. Do not recommend. I only share because this is a realization I have just recently come to and THAT trips me out. I'm way late to this party, man.

It looks like you guys are building lives with much better boundaries and tons of self-care, so I'm hopeful you'll take care of you and not settle for less than you deserve. Hopefully you'll be better able to separate your bliss from what you gotta do to survive. I'm pretty sure there can be an intersection of these two things and that you aren't building lives that make it necessary to hustle like I did. The hustle is not really great for long-term happiness and I could have hustled less if I'd realized my worth sooner. So, never forget that everybody should love you like I do. Grandma love is free range and so organic it makes you blush. 

three your great grandparents were freakin'crazy rock stars. They were also dangerously flawed humans and not actual rock stars, but way bright stars who got to get their sassy little fingerprints all over some great history. If you ever do a deep dive into epigenetics and start to look at the family lines and wonder how on earth this all worked out like it did, know this: Your ancestors were some ambitious hungry clever nuts.

Your Greatgrandpa Mueller told me that he invented the process by which they turn normal agate into carnelian agate and he gave me a couple stones that I wish I still had. He invented the process that made it possible for road signs to glitter in headlights by crushing up glass and including it in the paint mix. He also said he lived on the reservation and drove a Model A for the Indians in Oklahoma when he was only 12 years old. He joked that he was a runner (for illegal booze.) In the basement of their home he had an entire museums' worth of increidble stones and petrified wood and Indian artifacts that were all donated to the Smithsonian when he died. 

Papa Z was one of your other great grandfathers, and his highlight reel would be a clip of a laminated ID card because he swore up and down that he, singlehandedly with the Jesuit priests at St. Louis University, invented the laminated school ID and it just blew up from there and now we have topshelf AmEx black. Then he'd be on a ship headed to Japan where he took pictures and posed with Disney and wrote aviation stories for the press till magically he appeared and started the first global aviation information empire and publishing business. He was the craftiest of the legendary madmen sociopathic scientists. He turned keeping track of truths into a sweet life and crafted a personal world built on a bed of lies. Killer material for a story, there.

Both these dudes were emotionally unavailable at best and inattentive or abusive at worst, but they both did whatever it took to provide for their families and meet societal expectations. They weren't necessarily worse or better than their peers and when old people say "times were different, man" THIS Is what they're talkin'bout willis. Dads in the old days were not much like dads now (typically.hopefully) They couldn't have done it without the powerful fierceness of your great grandmas who were way too big to discuss here. They get their own three things on another day, and it'll be long. 

Freakin'creatives.

Creative endeavors, creative accounting, creative storytelling and painting and roadtripping and singing and playing and dancing and sitting under trees with people from other countries to watch the sun risings. We are a clever tribe and you're bound to wonder about that, at some point. So I leave breadcrumbs.

I'll just share everything I can remember and maybe someday when you're, like, fifty or so, you'll wonder something and then you'll remember, "OH yea! Snap! Momo left me an entire digital shitton of words over at that one place..." and you'll be glad that the internet got borned and I decided to not shut up.

I love you. 

If I didn't, we wouldn't be here.