One dreary winter day, nearly two years into dating, he ended things rather oddly: “I don’t think you’ll be okay if we break up,” he explained, “which is why we have to break up.” Though confounding, I suppose it was not surprising—he often resented how much I seemed to need him.

A mass of white caps on a disheveled sea crisscrosses the horizon, the aftermath of a hurricane that skidded up the western face of Baja from Cabo past Punta Hughes. The storm made a westerly turn on its northern trajectory, just far enough off the coast to send a small amount of rain and mountainous surf to our small pueblo. Wave after wave, a tight fetch. a disorganized army of marching swell lines with little space between them, and out the far points, close-out walls of water.

Midlife doesn’t announce itself with milestones — it arrives in contrasts. One moment, you’re lighting candles for a graduation. The next, you’re watching your mother shrink into a hospital gown.

When I was a kid, my gender and race lived together, tightly tied in a braid on top of my head. My brothers and I share a skin tone that is pale in the winter, and cinnamon in the summer. Our father was the only black person in our rural town, and as far as we knew, we were the only mixed-race kids on Earth.

“Any requests?” my daughter asks from the backseat of the car. I’m driving up Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway to drop her off for her first year of college. She plays DJ while my husband and younger daughter count passing Teslas. Through New Jersey and over the GW Bridge, we listen to their mix of Phoebe Bridgers, Kimya Dawson, and Big Thief. We’re all a little nervous, unsure about what life will be like once we say goodbye.

"Don't you think it's kinda weird, not showing your face for like, 229 months?" Bunnie, an anthropomorphic rabbit, lightly chided me. She wasn't wrong. I hadn’t booted up Nintendo’s original Animal Crossing game in nearly twenty years. 

She opens the cupboard above the sink and stretches her body as far as it can go. The glasses and bowls have moved closer to the edge of the shelves since I was here last. 

This is about my mama because I’m too stubborn, too proud, too self-conscious to tell these things to her in person. I’ll backpack around with luggage until I gain enough substance to face it head-on. For now, I’m simply going to make excuses and say that I’m too green to face this— pride(?) Perhaps sheepish-ness is a more suited term. English doesn’t wield such a single term that encases this feeling to its extent.

I met you by the river the first time while the mist rose from the banks like it was trying to change elements. You were more fun to run from the cops with than anyone else I’d met, and man you made me reckless. I never had to test my legs though, the minivan did it for us while Jerry blasted through the blown speakers in the cornfield. You walked 2,000 miles up the country on trail and wrote me letters back home while I watched, sidelined. I could have walked myself from Georgia to Maine with you, but it was your own pilgrimage to undertake, your season spending nights under a green tarp.

I attended AWP for the first time this year. In my memory now, it is a fluorescent lit blur of searching for faces I recognize, of endless flyers and stacks of books and a lanyard around my neck. And the men. I can’t stop thinking about the men.

Just after the pandemic, I went to New York City with my aunt Mimi. We had planned the trip as a way for me to learn everything I could about my mother, who died thirty-five years ago from an aggressive form of breast cancer. It was the hottest day on record for the month of May and we sat in an air-conditioned restaurant in Greenwich Village.

Mimi listed things my mother loved: dancing, parties, fashion, Bailey’s Irish Cream.

There is a feeling I get when I travel alone. The moment I get to my destination—a hotel or Airbnb—when I walk in the room, roll my suitcase into a corner, and close the door, it hits me. I am hopeful on every trip that I won’t feel it this time, but I always do. My chest and stomach get tight. I can’t catch a full breath. There is a sense of dread and impending doom. And emptiness so loud one might think it is the thing I’ve come to visit. As if it lives right there in that room and has been waiting for me since the last time we saw each other. 

I should have heard the warning growl before pulling open the dresser drawer in the garage. It had been twenty years since my husband and I had done any cleaning out here beyond superficial tidying. We’d plunked down his scratched childhood dresser in the garage when we first bought the house. Since there wasn’t enough room for the old dresser inside our new home, it never traveled any farther. The top of the dresser became a landing station for stray gardening tools, rafts of paper towels, and a box of Hannukah decorations.

Before she died, Nancy compiled a list of appropriate women she thought could be a good partner for me, which I told her was ridiculous. I was doing everything I could to keep her alive, nor did I like the women she had chosen for me. I had loved her for twenty-seven years. She would never be replaceable. My everything wasn’t enough; all I had of Nancy were her ashes. At sixty-one, I had vaulted into old age overnight, with grey roots grown inches during Nancy’s last months of hospice. I was the solo parent of two grieving teenage daughters, one who was depressed, the other defiant. My eros was exhausted, maybe dead even. But Nancy was not five months into her grave when I hooked up with Tami.

My last child has just turned three. I want another child—a fourth child. The number of children that gets you stares at the supermarket, that makes your mom and sister say, “You’re fucking crazy.” I want this child so badly I can feel it close by, as if it is hiding within me, not to be eventually expelled from my body, but a shadow—a ghost child. 

Josh and I sat in the waiting room, an office building with a view of the Manhattan skyline. I stared at the other women, wondering what they were getting done. I wondered how many of them were here not by choice. How many of them had never contemplated getting fake breasts before they learned they had breast cancer. I couldn’t have been the only one. But I was definitely the only pregnant woman getting a boob job in the crowd.

On Sundays, I take my grandmother to the cemetery to visit her mother. With her is a straw broom, small enough to carry in a reusable bag. When I was young, I would pull from that broom, break its straw to pieces, and throw them, watching as they spun to the ground like helicopter seeds. Now, in my grandmother’s hands, the broom brushes away dirt and moss and leaves from a headstone that shares my name.

I locked myself in the bathroom. Even though I made myself untouchable, unreachable, all I wanted was to be saved. As I laid down on the tiles, facing up towards the dangling florescent light, I craved death. I don’t mean absence of living—quite the opposite actually. What I really wanted was death to what was inside of me, to the illness that spread from my brain into my entire body, the illness at the core of all the pain and torture I put upon myself. I craved death because I wanted a life, a different life.

When I was small, the line where the grain fields met the sky through my bedroom window was the edge of the world. I stood on my tiptoes at that window, little fingers pressed hard into the scarred wood of the sill, nose pressed to the window screen that smelled of thunderstorm and dirt.

The slumbering house cradles the echo of your footsteps as you wander its sleepy halls.  Sleep should have come for you hours ago, but your anticipation has successfully warded off any chances.  The contractions come so lightly and irregular that you wonder if it’s even labor.  Perhaps it is the Braxton-Hicks you read about.

The NICU carried a low, steady hum that seemed to live inside the walls. Machines breathed in rhythm. Monitors blinked in soft pulses. My daughter, Charlie, lay beneath a warmer that cast a pale glow across her skin. She was six weeks early and small enough for my hands to meet around her torso.

I am a mother and a daughter. But I was not mothered—at least not in any traditional sense. Five months after they met, my parents were married: She’d just turned twenty-one; he was six months younger. They bought a house with red stairs, a half-block from the beach in Santa Monica. Five years later, in 1970, they had me. But in March 1973 my mother divorced my father, and a few months later, she called to tell him that she was leaving me at her parents’ house in Berkeley. The next day, my maternal grandmother met my father at the Oakland airport with me in her arms. My mother cut off all communication with her family and friends.

I found out I was pregnant at three in the morning after the Spring Equinox Witches’ Market. Spring still felt very far away, I was still in my big Canadian coat, still wearing rubber gloves under my winter cycling gloves to break the wind, which the man in the Leith Walk bike shop taught me to do. Before I accepted the new job in Edinburgh, my husband and I talked endlessly about the weather. Was it really as bad as we imagined? Could we really live up there?

Four days after the passing of my father-in-law, my wife and I welcomed our foster son. He came to us at five months old, barely sitting up on his own, and deliciously full of baby rolls. Twenty months later, he left our home and went to live with his biological mother for the first time in his life. We were parents for almost two years, but that title was taken from us.

Not all transitions come with clarity.
Some arrive as quiet unraveling.

The day he left for graduate school, the air in the house felt different.
Not heavy. Not sad. Just…suspended. Like everything was still waiting for something to happen, even though it already had.

 The first time I saw a circus, I was fascinated by the clowns. They roared into the ring in a tiny car then jumped out one after another after another, falling over each other and leaping up to perform juggling and feats of magic. One white-faced clown in a top hat came up to me and pulled a coin from my ear. That did it. I told my mom I was going to run off with them and become a clown. But, the next day, when we drove past the lot where the circus had been, I saw my dream had been betrayed. They were gone.

There is a cabin in the woods of Nisswa, Minnesota that smells like lake water and wet dog. The odor seeps into everything it touches: the well-worn carpet, littered with stray crumbs; the padded porch swing, streaked with dog hair; the tiny hand towels, damp and limp in the narrow kitchen and miniature bathroom. Held together by faded yellow siding and cobweb-covered windows, the stooped building hovers above Lake Hubert, where every August six families gather for three days of outdoors, heavy carbs, and shared identity.

In fifth grade, our lunch periods were at different times. My best friend Samantha—Sam—ate while I had Social Studies. One day, I slipped out of class on a bathroom pass and into the cafeteria, where sound and color collided. I scanned the crowded room until the blur resolved into Sam—her thick black braid ending in a baby-pink scrunchie at the small of her back, a whole head shorter than everyone else at the long table. She squealed when she saw me, as if it had been years, not hours, since we’d last been together. Sam nudged the girl beside her, who slid over without question. I squeezed in, the other kids at the table shielding me from the lunchroom monitor as Sam and I whispered, knees pressed together. Having different lunch periods once felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Appreciators of Sex and the City deep cuts might recognize Suffern, New York, as the fictional setting for Aidan’s country house, where bonafide city-girl Carrie Bradshaw sees a squirrel and declares she is “suffering in Suffern.” Why Carrie—written to originally be from Connecticut—was so distraught over a squirrel, I’m not sure. But the sentiment of Suffering in Suffern was one I understood immediately.

I am sixteen. He is thirty-four, tall and thin, a dynamic instructor who has been known to jump on his desk when acting out the murder of Polonius in Hamlet, a man whose narrow ties against his starched white shirts look like stained-glass windows. A man who just this year returned from teaching English in Orleans (which, until he says it, I don’t know is pronounced without the s), France and Frankfurt, Germany. A man who drives a two-seater with the steering wheel on the right-hand side. My high school English teacher.

A few months after my mom’s cancer diagnosis, I was having trouble inserting a tampon. I had never really used them, since I was still pretty young and unfamiliar with exploring that area of my body. I had gotten my period earlier than most in my grade, around the age of nine. An avid pad user at fourteen, I figured the real way to become a woman was to use a tampon. Unfortunately, when I finally mustered up the courage to try, I couldn’t figure out how to insert it in a way that wasn’t painful. I talked to my mom about it through the bathroom door, as she laid in bed after her most recent chemotherapy. The stairs had become difficult for her, and she rarely left her room. Days when I came home from school and found her on the living room couch were good days.

Yet my mom’s soft voice floated under the door: I want to help. She was crying.

I used to believe risk would announce itself with fanfare—a cliff edge, a trembling ultimatum, something you could point to as the hinge on which your life turned.

In childhood I imagined risk as a sort of mythic test: a figure standing in the threshold, asking if I was brave enough to continue. I thought it would feel loud. Definite. Something that glowed red at the edges and warned me, Pay attention—this is important.

Being a mother is difficult. I have always believed with enough unconditional love everything would turn out great for my own kids. So, when Lou, my youngest child, called and told us about their upcoming surgery, I felt honoured when they asked me to come and help them through their recovery. The long drive to Vancouver from Canmore gave me time alone to consider what was about to happen to my beloved child. That’s when the negative thoughts began to creep in about the risks of major surgery. I pushed them back, reminding myself this is Lou’s decision and I loved them enough to help them through no matter what.

It took seven years of therapy for me to recognize that the gaping wound in my heart is not the child of grief or exhaustion, but of a life un-lived. I have made no great mistakes or spoken the silent, shamed words of “I should not have done that.” I have not done anything. My emotional destruction has been predicated on loss, trauma, and frustration. I wish it was the result of having my heart broken by someone I was in love with, or being stuck in a cycle of taking drugs that will damage my brain by thirty, or spending money under the false notion that I have a six-figure salary. At least I would have proof I could endure risk and confront it with confident uncertainty.

In her final Amplify, both of the year 2022 and on HerStry, Joycelyn sits down with the original Amplify columnist Ashlee Zillmer. They discuss Amplify, amazing womxn, and more!

Welcome to our second-to-last piece of Amplify of the year and our final Amplify InBetween for 2022! We hope you enjoyed learning about the fantastic womxn we shared this year. To end the year, we’re doing something a little different. By now, everyone’s a little burnt out for the year, so instead of an entire article, we decided to switch it up. This piece will give you some resources and recommendations, a short article on a womxn you should know, and what’s to come from Amplify in the future.

Welcome to the final edition of the Amplify series: Shapers of a Movement. In this edition of Shapers of a Movement, we’ll meet #MovementShaper Vi Subversa, a radical feminist punk musician from the United Kingdom.

Welcome to the September edition of the Amplify series: Shapers of a Movement. In the second to last edition of Shapers of a Movement, we’ll meet #MovementShaper Dorothy Stopford Price, an Irish doctor who introduced the BCG vaccination to Ireland.

Welcome to the August edition of the Amplify series: Shapers of a Movement. In this edition, we decided to do something different. We decided to talk to someone actively organizing to improve their community. What did we talk about? Well, the impact women of color and nonbinary folx have in organizing movements, and how they create spaces, fight to enact better policies for the community at large, and continue to fight and manage in an area that is often dominated by cisgender, white, and male people.

In this Amplify InBetween, we will share about three Asian American and Pacific Islander amplifiers who made, and continue to make, an impact on the lives of others, and how their influence has positively impacted the way we view activism, art, and storytelling.

April is about new beginnings. Our theme for this month, Breasts, can be a touchy subject. Our Amplify has chosen to talk about the untold struggles and triumphs of Activist, Feminist, and poet Pat Parker, a woman who made it her life mission to enhance the lives of those in her community, embrace her identity, and foster self-love.

Maya Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

It’s true; home is supposed to be a safe space where you feel that love and warmth. Home is a place to go when you lose your way. But what happens when your home becomes a battlefield? Or what if the people of your homeland are the ones committing the atrocities? Will you choose to fight, to protect your home or expose an injustice, even at the cost of your life and livelihood?

Sex workers have been at the forefront of abolitionist movements for centuries. Many have spent their lives fighting to be seen, heard, and taken seriously. As a collective, sex workers continue to fight against the church, politicians, police, and a society that doesn’t value them or their work. It’s no surprise that the event that marked the beginning of the modern sex workers movement happened while occupying a church—the Holy Cross Church, to be exact.

HerStry’s monthly theme for January, “The Rest of The Story,” connects with our Amplify of the Month. Learn about the extraordinary life of Anna Julia Cooper, a famous scholar in social science circles, also known as “the Mother of Black Feminism.” Check out how she spent her life advocating for equal education for Black women, and how she changed the course of history and HerStry.

Welcome to Amplify InBetween, where you give you samples with a bit of herstory and a little bit of fun. In our final Amplify piece for 2021, we will look at the first Amplifiers in their class. These ladies were the first to fly, teach, create, disrupt, bring new perspectives and innovation, and inspire generations.

Do you believe your words have the power to move and heal a community?

In our last WarriHERS piece, we’ll meet a warrior who used her words to address the horrors of war and bondage, and who advocated for equality. This WarriHer was a crusader for the people; she spoke up against institutional racism and helped communities express their traumas and heal through words. As a poet, she wrote about issues affecting marginalized communities around the world, not only inspiring others to share their stories, but also healing from the battles she fought throughout her youth.

Welcome to Amplify InBetween, where you give you samples with a bit of herstory and a little bit of fun.

In this Amplify InBetween WarriHER Edition, we give you facts and resources, and answer the question of what makes a warriHER. Can you be a revolutionary warriHER off the battlefield?

Have you ever thought about how great it would be if specific historical figures had met, how they’d probably have been best friends or allies if they had lived in the same country or time? Or maybe you have a list of historical figures who had the same background or goal, and you thought it would be great if you could just put them in a room together and talk with them about saving the world? No? Maybe that’s just me.

Learn about the Revolutionary WarriHERS the Trưng sisters and Laskarina Bouboulina in this edition of Amplify!

Announcement: Hello! Welcome to the first Amplify InBetween post! What is an InBetween post? It’s a post where we share multiple posts or people at once, in between our main stories.

Since the Revolutionary WarriHERs series is from July to October, we realized we couldn’t share all the Revolutionary WarriHER women that we want; so, we decided to write an InBetween post and share a list of four Revolutionary WarriHERs you should know.

Have you ever heard the story of the lead strategist and propaganda creator who helped lead an uprising against colonizers in Peru in the late 1700s? Who united multiethnic groups in the name of freedom and resistance against tyranny? She recruited not only Indians, but also mestizos, Blacks, Creoles, and “good” Spaniards, something unheard of in eighteenth-century Peru. Famously known as the wife of rebel leader Túpac Amaru II, Micaela Bastidas Puyucahua was second-in-command of the most significant uprising in Spanish colonial history.

When I was young, I used to pretend to be Xena, the Warrior Princess. I would wear my mother’s leather jacket, grab the removable stove ring, and run around the apartment screaming Xena-esque dialogue. After ten minutes, my mother would tell me to stop and read a book. Instead of reading, I’d become the great Maa Yaa Asantewaa. She was the queen mother of Ejisu in the Ashanti Empire (modern-day Ghana); she led her people into battle with the British in 1900.

The great socialist, feminist, and community activist Grace Lee Boggs once said, “You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.”

What’s your ideal camping trip? Does it involve about 250 of your closest girlfriends, some in witch's costumes and military gear? What about a 36-woman-human chain surrounding an army base, a couple of arrests, fights with the UK government and police, and disarming nuclear missiles? If your answer is yes, you'd fit in with the Women of Greenham Common Camp.

What happens when an anarcha-feminist creates an organization, or even two, in the middle of the Spanish civil war? You get a movement of 30,000 members fighting for women’s liberation, with some working-class empowerment thrown in! Breaking tradition, demanding independence and freedom from the patriarchy, and fighting for equality, is what Soledad Estorach was all about.

This month’s AMPLIFY is about the Lavender Menace action during the second wave of the feminism movement in the 1970s. The Lesbian members felt, or rather they were excluded from many of the feminist movement activities. They started the Lavender Menace action and fought for their voices to be heard. They made sure they were heard as well not only their issues but the issues of the WOC and lower SES women issues.

This month’s AMPLIFY features Dr. Sigird Phyllis Stearner, a scientist who revolutionized not just the field of radiation biology, but science’s relationship with disability inclusivity.

This month’s AMPLIFY features six Black women in 1881 that suffered from injustice, wage theft and opression, who came together to fight against it all. They formed The Women of the Atlanta Washerwomen Coalition and conducted a two week-strike that transformed American employer/consumer behavior.

This month’s AMPLIFY features scholar and social justice and reproductive justice advocate/activist Dorothy Roberts. Dorothy Roberts is a Critical Race Sociologist, and the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor with joint appointments in the Departments of Africana Studies and Sociology and Law School at the University of Pennsylvania. Her studies and work focus on the intersection of race, gender, and socioeconomic status through a policy lens.

Reiko Okuyama was born in Japan c.1936. As a child, she developed an interest in drawing while being confined to her bed due to an ongoing childhood illness. Okuyama entered the world of animation by accident. She applied for what she believed was a designer position for children’s books at Toei Doga (doga meaning picture book) but ended up in the animation department.

Hello sweet HerStry babes! How are we doing? Holding up? Holed in? I hope you are all protecting yourselves the best you can and taking care of your heads and hearts. As you may have noticed, there was no March Amplify and we’re picking up in April. If you’re a frequent reader of Amplify, you know I’m no stranger to skipping a month here and there when it comes to the column, but usually I do this with a great amount of guilt. This time, though, I offered myself a bit of grace because we are all, collectively, living through a pandemic. So today, in addition to learning about Dr. Ruby Sakae Hirose, I want to remind each reader that you should always offer yourself grace.

Alright folks, I’m two for two on the year for articles, so let’s hope I keep on this positive trajectory. Thanks for meeting me back here on HerStry for the next installment of Amplify. This month, we’re talking about Winona LaDuke.

Happy New Year, HerStry Babes! This month marks the start of the third year of Amplify, a column meant to highlight different women throughout history whose names we should know, but usually don’t. Watching HerStry grow and change in the past two years has been nothing short of inspiring. I am so excited to be on board for the next year as we watch HerStry only continue to grow and to see our fearless founder, Julia, embark on her journey into motherhood.