Guest Poster

You’re gonna have to pry the straws from my cold dead hands

Today’s post is a guest contribution from BGIM friend and fellow writer Liz Henry.
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First they came for my cigarettes and I said, alright, makes sense. Then, they came for my smoking outside and I said, you know, this seems like a little much but I rolled with the inconvenience of other people policing the freaking air. And then they came for my Diet Coke with a tax on sugary drinks in Philadelphia even though Diet Coke is full of not even sugar but aspartame so fine, whatever, the chilwran diabeetus. Then, they came for the straws and I knew all bets were off, the turtles were just gonna have to die.

I like beverages and I love them with straws and if that means turtles have to eat it, well then the turtles need to eat it. Even if those turtles are Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo.

Look, maybe this is making you uncomfortable. There are many moments I’ve been uncomfortable in the past few weeks when straw-banning went from low-key, under-the-radar cause to full-blown self-righteous plague. Like, for instance, the moment I came across a growing list of companies in the process of banning straws and I saw McDonald’s on that list.

I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE—the turtles had come for me and won. My eyes couldn’t move fast enough through the sentence and by the time I got there and it said, “shareholders struck down a ban” I’ve never been more proud of capitalism in my life.

I raised my Diet Coke and I toasted the motherfucking shit outta those rich white men for holding it down for straws.

So, yeah, it’s been an uncomfortable few weeks for me, too.

I’ve had conversations where we whisper to each other “team straw” because we’re in a group and unsure of the company we keep and once the whispers go around and the eyes have darted and the nods have been reciprocated we let it out that paper straws ain’t shit.

I’ve had people tell me I’m “sad” like I need saving and I want to tell them they can come to my door with that kind of attitude and ring my doorbell so I can ignore them.

I’ve gone the Jurassic Park route and doubled down on evolution: “If turtles beat out dinosaurs, I’m pretty sure they can beat straws.” And, if they can’t, well who sold us “slow and steady.” Maybe turtles shouldn’t been liars.

I’ve also thought FINE, BAN THE STRAWS. I’ll create straw speakeasies and I’ll be rich and you’ll be stuck with adult sippy cups at Starbucks with no whip but Crush from Finding Nemo as your overlord just like you wanted. COOL DUDE.

I need you to know that I stared down the totalitarian talk points of crusading do-gooders, looked them in their profile photos and said, I LOVE STRAWS, and lived to see another day.

I want you to know that when I get a fountain beverage, and put that single-serving plastic straw into my cup, I look at the person next to me and say, “I’m making a political choice and the hate makes it taste better.”

Honestly, I’m having an Allen Iverson “TALKIN ‘BOUT PRACTICE, flashback but with straws, people. STRAWS.

The strawsistence will not be played by fake news. The 500 million plastic straws Americans allegedly consume per day? That number was arrived at by a then nine-year-old conducting phone surveys of straw manufacturers in 2011. How he arrived at that number? I dunno, go pound a calculator.

According to Bloomberg, if all the alleged 8.3 billion tons of plastic straws found on global coastlines washed into the sea, they’d “account for .03 percent of the 8 million metric tons of plastic estimated to enter the oceans in a given year.”

The greatest threat to marine life and our oceans isn’t plastic straws, Bloomberg reports, but fishing nets and other abandoned fishing gear.

Which leaves me so freaking pumped right now that we’re making the lives of people with disabilities that much harder because Johnny Jackoff filmed a video of one turtle with a straw booger and then everyone else was like BAN STRAWS!!!

So how many straw boogers would it take for women to get some rights up in this bitch? Just spitballing here.

And that’s why, you’re gonna have to pry the straws from my cold, dead hands. Which, if that even happens, I will haunt you with a glitter plague on your home and paper cuts on your person with Melania pumped through some Bose giving Michelle’s speech ad infinitum.

WE’RE TALKIN’ ‘BOUT STRAWS, MAYNE.

BIO:
Liz Henry writes good stories and makes bad choices. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post and the anthology, The Good Mother Myth. She lives in Philadelphia and marks her territory in Diet Coke.

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Photo by David McEachan from Pexels

On being the Black friend

Today’s post is written by special contributor “Aya,” a Black Millennial making her way in Maine’s most populous city. 

Even before moving to Maine, I’ve spent most of my life in primarily white spaces. I’ve learned to accept that if I want to be surrounded by people who look like me, I have to deliberately seek those spaces out. I’ve come to live with the constant underlying discomfort of knowing that everyone is aware that I don’t quite fit in. It’s become my norm, to the point where I hardly recognize it anymore. And I’m used to people being “polite” enough to pretend they don’t notice it either. Which is why I was taken aback when a colleague interrupted a spiritual breakfast sandwich experience to proudly share a story where she used my existence as a Black person in the periphery of her life to one-up a friend in a game of Who Is More Open-Minded.

She’d gone with her friend to see “Get Out,” a movie I’d deliberately avoided discussing with non-POC, and one they only considered worth seeing when it was being shown for free at a rooftop bar. Over post-movie beers, the friend conceded that she kind of gets it; there are places where she feels uncomfortable too. To which my colleague apparently angrily replied “No you do not! I have a coworker who comes to work every day knowing she’ll be the only Black person in every room!” After telling me this story, my colleague looked at me, seemingly with the expectation that I will commend her for so bravely standing up for Black people everywhere. Instead I took another bite of my breakfast sandwich (seriously, don’t interrupt my meals, particularly pre-coffee, especially with nonsense) and told her I had a lot of work to get to.

First of all, we already know how rude it is to expect Black people to be happy to drop whatever they’re doing and take up the emotional burden of discussing race with you. Second, you don’t get any cookies for not being racist. It’s the correct way to be. If that is the sole purpose of you engaging in a conversation with me, don’t bother; you won’t get what you’re looking for. Now third, let’s talk about tokenism.

It’s bad enough when people assume all Black people share one collective brain. Whenever I’m asked to be the voice of all melanated people, I’m quick to reply with a “I have no way of knowing what any other individual thinks, but here’s what I think and why.” Normally people get it, and reply with an embarrassed “Oh, I mean you keep up to date with facebook/blogs/think pieces so you know what people are saying out there; I didn’t mean that.” And we generally leave it, both knowing they meant exactly that. I won’t even get into how I respond to people who claim colorblindness. But what I find especially frustrating lately is the people who use me, without my permission and often even without my knowledge, to make a point about themselves.

Here’s the thing: there’s a difference between the friend who happens to be Black and The Black Friend. Usually, I have an idea of which I am to someone. A friend who happens to be Black is someone you regularly interact with in a way that that does not center around their blackness AND has nothing to do with commitment to work/church/family/etc. You know what is going on in their life and they know what’s in yours. Maybe they’ve presented themselves as a resource for you to educate yourself, but even then, you’re respectful of the emotional labor they’re investing in you. The Black Friend is the person you apologize to for other people’s racism; the one to whom you make a point to prove how “woke” you are. They are the person you think of when the news is full of reports of another person unjustly victimized, and desperate to separate yourself from “those people,” you send them a meaningless text that you’ve got their back, before you change the channel to GoT and move on with your life. The Black Friend is not really a friend at all, or maybe more accurately, you’re not really a friend to them.

In that moment at work, as my breakfast sandwich grew colder with every wasted moment, my colleague made it clear: To her, I am someone who exists solely as a symbol of how not-racist she is.

If this piece or this blog resonates with you, please consider a one-time “tip” or become a monthly “patron”…this space runs on love and reader support. Want more BGIM? Consider booking me to speak with your group or organization.

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Two sides of the same coin with a different value: a son’s perspective of Mother’s Day

Yesterday I wrote a post reflecting on what it means to be motherless as I grow older. My brother wrote his own reflections on being a motherless son and man and asked if he could share them in this space. Often we hear women discuss their feelings but far too often we don’t hear from men, so I am honored to share this space with him on a days that heavily weighted for both of us.
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First off I would like to thank Shay Stewart-Bouley for allowing me to write in her space. For those that don’t know I’m her brother.  She normally calls me “little” brother, and she doesn’t know i seriously abhor the title but today I will let her have it because i am in her space.

The reason for writing today…Mothers Day.

If you follow her…you know how the loss of Marilyn has been a dramatic impact on her. I can only imagine the impact of what that is like of losing the parent of the same sex. My vantage point is that of the brother…

14 years ago, life was moving for me…just graduated with a Bachelor’s degree…on my way to grad school in another country, engaged…and it was like the last episode of the Cosby show…as when Theo was headed out to school…then the nightmare came…the details I wont bore you with but lets say there were moments were Guantanamo Bay would have been welcomed.

In her passing, in my sister’s case at 31 in my case 23, there was a forced maturity that I wouldn’t wished on anyone. The first year of everything was brutal, so much so in my case that in the first 18 months, after her passing I couldn’t eat a home cooked meal without literally breaking down into tears (To this day I don’t eat macaroni and cheese because it can stir those emotions.  Don’t judge me, if you had her mac and cheese, you’d cry too lol)

As well 18 months later, Granny aka my mom’s mom passed. So what did that mean for me as “Lil brother?” Well if death wasn’t enough, it came with learning lessons about a deceased love one you couldn’t elaborate on. Also in death as a young man it was realization that there was no fall back. At the time I was engaged (of which that situation didn’t work out) and there was no “going back home to mom”. Our father, was dealing with things that well we can NEVER imagine himself in losing his life partner, partner in crime, helpmate and every other term of 32 years and learning to live in a world that frankly, my sister and I were versed in already.

Over the years, unbeknownst to her, this moment in time destroyed my optimism and brought about some serious darkness in my life. Not just the obvious in the form of depression (which I was diagnosed with in 2007, the mild kind), but a certain lack of emotion that has played well for me professionally but not so much personally. The loss of our mom, has created three perspectives that now exist in three different sections of the country as we live in different places and has created a different impact. (Father, sister, and brother respectively)

14 years later, as the son of Marilyn, the youngest I reflect and it is in these moments the sting comes back anew. Why now? Life changes…my evolution as a man, as an artist and more is traced to that moment in time. In many moments i miss her wit and insight.  My sister valiantly attempts to be the matriarch, but in many ways that’s not fair to her, as the researcher in me observes her struggle, yet I empathize with her attempts to be better. Truth is, if you have not been made a motherless child, you can only imagine how it rewires you as a person. In my travels, since her transition, I myself have done things that she would be proud of and some well, not so much. Over the years i have sought counseling, positive and negative replacements and well nothing compares to the original O.G. I have had the pleasure of watching her impact and her legacy grown through my nephew and now his family, my niece, the work of our father who can bring tears to your eyes, when he says I am STILL married. (Fighting tears at the thought just writing that) and well if you know Marilyn’s kids, you know her.

If you wanted to know Marilyn Stewart, look in her kids eyes.  Its a fire to us…if your wanted to know her, watch our tenacity. We are both super stubborn lol.  Our  mom was a fighter to the end, and a person that would make things happen out of nothing. I learned more about her in death than in life. I learned why family was important to her so much as someone instrumental to her discarded her. I learned of the decisions she made that as her youngest i definitely didn’t agree with, but I empathize and understand. If you want to he know her, look at her children’s accomplishments. 2 kids, with a total of 5 degrees (3 master’s and one working on a PhD, because education was important to her). But if you REALLY want to know Marilyn’s kids, watch our smiles.. She had a way of disarming people even in the midst of the darkest situations and could make a true friend out of an enemy in a way that diplomats would envy.

So year 14, and we are at Mother’s Day. When folks sit in church all day, take mom’s to get cheddar biscuits and get cards…I am in the distant, pursuing my goals in one part of the country, my sister being a mom and now Grandmother in another, and Pops in the homeland in yet another, probably listening to Kenny Roger’s Lady (You’d have to know him to get that one)

Truth is, as a member of the motherless child clan, these moments provide a sting, and yet we know she lives on in us, and generations to follow. We grieve at painful and happy moments because she doesnt inhabit this space, yet inside she is with us. Somewhere in heaven she is sipping some good champagne, with her legs crossed shaking her food listening to Maurice White from EWF or having the angels play some steppers music.

To those with a mother….be thankful,…if you she is on this plane, and you don’t talk, kill the bs…because there are those that would give every accolade back to have a convo with her…I’m one of em… to those that share in the grief of the day, you are not alone. We cry and we laugh together in the memories of our mothers. To my sister, life has come full circle from a daughter who lost her mother to a grandmother with generations that seek your wisdom and guidance. I pray that their wisdom is with you as much as their ability to cook (you still owe me that recipe book too I AIN’T FORGOT WOMAN lol)

Respectfully submitted
“Lil” brother
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If you enjoyed this piece or this blog resonates with you, please consider a one-time “tip” or become a monthly “patron”…this space runs on love and reader support. Want more BGIM? Consider booking me to speak with your group or organization.