Welcome to Dakotawitch Speaks (or The Dakotawitch Doctrine). Sit back and listen to a little SR-71 for your standard disclaimer...

( SR-71....Video )

Just keeping track for me...my first book review is up here.

1. Write These Laws on Your Children  by Robert Kunzman
2. The Captive Queen by Alison Weir
3. The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir
4. Lady of the Rivers by Philippa Gregory
5. To the Tower Born  by Robin Maxwell
6. A'rnt I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
7. The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent
8. Unequal Childhoods by Annette Lareau
9. Drown by Junot Diaz
10. The Brief, Wonderous LIfe of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Because I've missed the last two weeks, here's a mega-edition. Let's get to it, shall we?

21(!) Things I Love Right Now

1) My finals being done. I've proctored the final one, I've handed in my last paper. Grading still to come, but I'm done with the semester as far as in-class tasks.

2) My new tea bowl. One of my students, a ceramics major, made me the most lovely tea bowl as an end of semester gift. Pics to come. It's such a beautiful object, and the sentiment behind it so sweet.

3) My new haircut. Pics to come. Super short and super sassy.

4) Weekend visits from friends. Two friends are unexpectedly coming to Dallas this weekend! Yay!

5) One of my oldest friends getting her Ph.D. The lovely M, my first Wiccan friend and one of my dearest and oldest friends, gets hooded tomorrow. So proud of her.

6) Stephanie. Simply because she is. The fact that we have long geeky conversations about the Shakers, the body politics in Glee, and feminist science fiction is just a bonus.

7) Cool, damp air coming through the open porch doors. Mmmmm, smells like spring out there.

8) Landon Winery's Yellow Rose wine. Locally made in Greenville, sweet with notes of peach and pear and all around goodness. Get you a bottle.

9) Getting thank you notes from my students. One of my students wrote me the sweetest note (on handmade paper) and gave it to me after her final today. Very touching. I love knowing that I've made a difference for them.

10) My students. Even when they frustrate me, I've gotten to see them grow so much and it's an honor to be part of it.

11) Random road trips. Took a trip to Austin last weekend to see Sarah Jaffe and spend the evening with friends. Awesomeness.

12) Sarah Jaffe. Her new album is a departure, but I'm digging the confessional lyrics and electronic sound.

13) Dove's rosewood and cocoa butter body wash. Sounds funny coming from a soapmaker, I know, but I love trying and using rich bath products. Plus, trying to duplicate this fragrance :)

14) The Tudors. Historically themed (though not always accurate) soft core p0rn for the win. Actually, I love Jonathan Rhys Myers as Henry VIII.

15) Finishing up my last grades of the semester for TWU. As a TA, I don't have to do final grades. Just did my last discussion board grades. Done, done, done!

16) Being asked to teach summer classes. Three of them, to be exact. Sociology of Religion, Gender in Cross Cultural Perspective, and Sociology of Sex. Busy, yes. Financially lucrative, mostly. Fun and rewarding, I think it'll be a yes.

17) My colleagues. They are wonderful and supportive and smart and funny. I really hope I get to keep this job.

18) My pets. They make me smile. They make me laugh. This more than makes up for poop duty.

19)  My new kyanite pendant. Pics to come. Found it in a little fancy shop in McKinney. Probably paid too much for it but it was love at first sight.

20) Having enough money in the bank to treat myself to things like said pendant. Anyone who's been following this space for any amount of time knows how huge that is.

21) Having so much in my life to be grateful for.  

Setting a new record for lateness with this one, but I'm determined to do one every week, so let's get to it, shall we?

Seven things I love right now.

1) Cadbury minieggs, bought at a discount. Only thing better than chocolate is chocolate bought at 50% off original price, people.

2) Twisted Root's Wing Style Burger. I paid for the mega butt load of beef and the wing sauce today, but it was SO. Worth. It.

3) Dental insurance. Having my teeth cleaned wasn't fun, but I'm sure glad I could go get it done. This new gig where I write questions for the dental hygienist boards has me ultra paranoid about gum disease.

4) Sleep. I am so f-ing exhausted by my teaching schedule, as much as I love my job. I love sleep. Sleeping in's even better.

5) My cats. They make me laugh so much, and they are so nice to snuggle with at the end of the day. Even Sir BooBoo, with all his angst.

6) Spring weather! Rain! And Tornado-pocalypse didn't happen.

7) My bed...which I am about to climb into.

Only a little late this week, so let's get to it, shall we?

Seven Things I Love Right Now

1) Job Interviews. It's only the first round screening, but that's an important step. I go do this thing in 15 minutes. Good thoughts, please.

2) Going to bed before midnight for the first time in two months. Sleeeep.

3) My students. They amaze, they frustrate, they amuse, they touch. I got to see some really adult behavior from some students that had been problematic all semester, and it made me proud that they did what they did. (Longer story coming under a Flocked post.) I will miss this batch when the semester is done.

4) Seeing my name in print. My latest review in Sagewoman showed up in the mail. And while the proofreader didn't catch a couple typos (or the layout person inserted a couple), it's still pretty cool to see myself in print. And the review isn't half bad.

5) Spring weather. Tornadoes nonwithstanding, I love the spring rains in North Texas.

6) BLUEBONNETS. You'll see this one every week for a while, people. They are just so lush and gorgeous. I wish it weren't illegal to pick them. I want some in a bowl in my house. But I'll content myself with the swathes of blue I get to see as I  move along the highways of North Texas.

7) Stephanie. I can't even begin to describe what this relationship does for me -- not just the romantic partnership, but the deep and abiding friendship we've found in one another. I am so very, very blessed.  

Conference Thursday and Friday, driving yesterday. So let's get to it, shall we?

Seven things I love right now...

1) The Nissan Versa I drove to Austin and back. So cute, so peppy. It's gonna be hard to go back to my truck this week, people.

2) Stephanie. I was so glad to get home to her and snuggle and talk and sleep.

3) Pinot Grigio. I may or may not have been responsible for the partial destruction of two bottles of this lovely elixir with the lovely Kate this weekend in Austin.

4) Springtime weather. Nuff said.

5) Bluebonnets. Waves and waves of blue, all along the highways, in the fields near my apartment. One of the best parts of living in Texas.

6) I got to feed a squirrel! He came up and took a little piece of scone right out of my hand!

7) Sweet Tomatoes' peanut butter chocolate chip bars. Sometimes it's the simple things.  

The truth will set you free. But first, it will shatter the safe, sweet way that you live -- Sue Monk Kidd

I'm not really sure when it started to happen, when fear and the need for self-protection started to close around me like walls, like thick curtains shutting out the light. When I began the subtle withdrawing, the throwing up of shields, the girding of psychic and emotional armor. It might have been when I was small, almost too small to have coherent memories, and the only way to keep myself safe from the abuse I could not fend off was to wall up a place inside myself and go there when things got too hard, too frightening, to horrific. It might have been when I sought an escape from my mother's manic rages as an older child, when I desperately grasped for a refuge from the terror she instilled with her words and her silences. It might have been on any number of the nights when, as a young woman, I endured the verbal volleys from the man that was my fiance and then my husband, tirades that kept me crying until the bile rose in my throat and I begged for him to stop, stop, while I crouched, vomiting mucus and pain into the cool porcelain refuge of the toilet. It might have been when I found myself on my hands and knees, combing the carpet for change so that I could put enough gas in my car to get to work, so that I could earn the paycheck that would then be gone as soon as it came. It might have been any of the countless sleepless nights I lay awake, wishing myself anywhere but where I was.

It doesn't really matter when it started. What matters is that it did. This careful walling off of anyplace that hurt, this posting of guards that would keep anyone or anything from getting too close, this mental preparation for battle -- this feeling of some measure of safety -- it became as natural as breathing.

When I was guarded, I felt strong. When I was able to swallow my tears or silently endure the fear and the poverty and the deprivation, I felt that I was growing tough. When I was able to stare unflinchingly into the face of anger, of ugliness I felt as though I were made of steel. When I withstood another onslaught of names, of insults, of threats, I came away feeling as though I had survived, as though I were invincible.

What I couldn't know at the time is that the walls that keep the invaders out also keep the allies at bay. That when we shut up the parts of us that feel pain, we shut up the parts of us that feel love, that feel joy, that feel bliss. When we stifle our screams, we stifle our laughter and our songs. When we guard ourselves from being hurt, we shut out so many opportunities to love, to grow, to thrive, to know.

It doesn't matter when it started. Because I remember the exact moment when it began to end.

I am in the passenger seat of my truck, with boxes and baskets of my belongings in the backseat, my cat on my lap, and the woman who became my lover in the driver's seat. I am looking back as we pull out of the parking lot and onto the street. My eyes are full of tears -- that's why I'm not driving -- and I take a long last look at the front door of my apartment. And then we make that right turn, and the apartment is out of sight. And something in me began to crumble.

It began to end at that moment...began to end, I say, because the armor and walls of a lifetime don't come down in one moment. They come down in a series of moments, just as they are built in a series of moments. They don't crash down all at once, because that would consume you. Instead they come apart bit by bit, like stones pushed aside by growing vines, like rusted hinges slowly beginning to creak open as oil is dripped onto their hardened surfaces.

The thing about fear and self-protection is that it closes you tight, like a fist. And a fist cannot grasp anything, cannot accept anything, cannot take another hand. All it can do is be hard. It feels safer, it feels like you are ready to fight. But you cannot take, and you cannot give, with your hand clenched tight.

You cannot love, you cannot feel, you cannot live with your soul clenched tight.

Clenching myself around my wounded spirit, my wounded heart, my wounded soul, felt like keeping the bruised places safe. But wounds need air, they need light, they need care if they are to heal.

When slowly, bit by bit, I began to open, I will not lie -- the pain was at times intense. But it's like the pain of lancing a boil or removing an infected tooth. The momentary tearing is agony, but the relief from the dull and constant hurt is nearly instantaneous.

I am learning to be open. Open to the love that was around me even during the times when I huddled in the dark, believing myself alone. Open to the new love that flows into my life like a gentle river. Open to experiences, to things that I could never have even imagined myself doing only a few short years ago. Open to pain -- to letting myself truly feel and then open to release things that I had pretended couldn't touch me for so long. Open to learning, open to creating, open to dancing and laughing and writing and singing.

I am learning to be open. Open to living.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. -- Anais Nin   

It's a slightly grey day in North Texas. Let's get to it, shall we?

Seven things I love right now...

1) Spring break. Hasn't been as restful as I might have liked, with errands and catching up on projects, but it's been a nice break. And the naps have been needed.

2) Vegetarian Reubens. Stephanie made these for St. Patty's day and they were awesome. She seasoned the tofu like corned beef, then we piled it on Whole Foods pumpernickel with high-quality sauerkraut and Emmentaler cheese, with Thousand Island. Oh.My.Goddess. Didn't even miss the meat.

3) Spring weather. We had a hellacious series of storms on Monday night and into Tuesday morning, which marked the Equinox. It's cooler and wetter than it's been the last weeks, and the bluebonnets have started to come up along the highways. It's spring.

4) Getting little stuff done. Today I ran a bunch of small errands up in Denton that had been niggling at me. I'm glad to have them off my plate.

5) My new haircut. It's a little different than the past ones, because I had another stylist pinch-hit for my regular stylist, who was out of the salon yesterday. I feel about 15 pounds lighter just having a trim!

6) Zola Jesus. Listened to an interview and performance with this amazing woman (that's her stage name, if you didn't guess) on World Cafe last night and was blown away. Gothy, ethereal, with shades of electronica and punk. Check it out, for real.

7) Being on the downward slide of the semester. The next five or so weeks are gonna go so fast, but it feels good to know that we're headed towards the end. I love my job, I love my students, but it still feels good to know that the semester is wrapping up. Of course, I'm teaching all summer, too....  

You are about to find out who your friends are, Susan.

That's what my boss told me on the terrible December morning after I left my ex-husband. When I came into work looking drawn and exhausted, when I told him that I had fled the previous afternoon with just what would fit in my truck, my cat, and little else. When I told him that I was afraid for my life.

You are about to find out who your friends are.

For days, weeks, I did not tell anyone I had left. Just as I had not told most of my friends about the abuse, about how the verbal and emotional brutality was steadily worsening, was steadily becoming more than I thought my mind and my spirit could bear up under. I avoided phone calls, avoided emails, hid out in the tiny apartment I was sharing, where I was sleeping with a knife under my pillow and one ear always out for the rattle of the front door chain.

I didn't tell because I was afraid. Because he'd told me that my friends would all hate me for leaving him, for hurting him, for what I'd put him through.

I didn't tell because when I turned to my sister for help, placing a call while I cowered in my bathtub because the door was the only one with a lock on it in the house, while he raged outside, she said, "This is 100% your fault. You go out there and you take whatever he dishes out, Susan, because you brought this on yourself. You have it coming."

I didn't tell because that phone call had been the only one I'd placed asking for help, to the one person I thought would never turn her back on me, and instead of a hug I got a slap.

When I finally got up the courage to tell my sisters that I had left, that I wasn't planning on going back, I did it via email. I couldn't face telling them over the phone. I labored over that email, trembling as I pushed send. And in return, I got two messages. One saying, "Our parents are surely crying in Heaven because you've brought this chaos into your life. How could you?" The other saying, "How do you know he was threatening to kill you? Perhaps he was threatening suicide because life with you is so stressful. How could you do this to such a good man?"

It would be nearly a year before any of my sisters spoke to me over the phone. I would later find out that they were emailing and calling my ex regularly, expressing their support, checking in with him, while I cowered in fear and self-hate and isolation.

You are about to find out who your friends are.

When I finally got up the courage to email my best friend, all she said in return was, "I can't support you through this."

For more than three months after I left, after I fled, I turned down invitations, I dodged phone calls, I isolated myself. The shame was too debilitating. The fear of losing the friends I'd spent more than a decade cultivating and sharing my life with was too gripping. There was no way I could go among those people -- people who had seen me at my best and my worst -- and admit what I had done. What I had done. The terrible thing that I had done.

I could only imagine the shocked looks, the "how could you"s, the "well, you had it coming"s that would be directed at me when I finally broke the silence.

And in the depths of my shame, I forgot the desperate nights I had sat on my friend's -- my adopted brother's -- couch drinking port and crying while he rubbed my back. Had forgotten him grabbing me by the shoulders and saying "Jump. I promise we'll catch you." Had forgotten how he held my hands and told me that I was an Amazon, the bravest woman he knew, and that he knew I had the courage to get away. How he never once shamed me, never once told me that I had this coming, but only told me he loved me and supported me and that I deserved so much better.

I forgot the way in which my friend L had opened her home to me on a day the previous summer when my ex had thrown me out of the house. How I had called her, after months of not seeing each other, and she had said, "Come over."  How she had listened to me sob, given me bloodstone to ground, given me water, and let me stay there as long as I needed. Had told me that if I needed to run, there was a space for me in her duplex.

I forgot how the woman that would become my lover, the woman who had led me to question whether the treatment I was enduring was normal, had left a rose on my car one afternoon while I taught, with a note telling me to be brave and strong.

I forgot that I was loved. I forgot that I was supported. I forgot that I was not alone.

All that I knew in those months was the fear, the shame, the self-loathing, and the isolation.

You must imagine my terror as I pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant one night in May, after months of hiding out. I hadn't been planning to go to this birthday dinner. But the friend whose birthday we were celebrating had emailed to ask me specially, had told me how much it would mean if I would be there. She missed me, hadn't seen me in months. And so I steeled myself, said I would be there. And I had to take a few deep breaths in order to push that door open, to not just get back in my truck and run home.

You must imagine the sinking feeling as I walked back to the party room they'd reserved, into that room full of couples, alone at a gathering for the first time in a decade.

You must imagine the way my mouth dried out and my throat closed when someone asked, "Where's your other half?"

You must imagine the absolute force of will it took for me to say, "We're no longer together. There's....a long story."

And you must imagine all the things that flew through my head as my friend -- the birthday girl -- and two other girlfriends asked me to go to the bar with them. You must imagine how scared I was when K asked me, "Ok, what's going on."

And you must imagine my relief when I told her. Told her, told them, that I had had to leave. That I had been afraid that if I didn't run, I'd be carried out. That my marriage was over. That I was living a different life now. That my entire family had abandoned me when they found out.

And you must imagine the feeling in my heart when she touched my hand and said, "No, we didn't."

You are about to find out who your friends are.

If I have learned nothing else over the last four years, I have learned that love and support sometimes come in the most unexpected and curious guises. That sometimes, the ones you hope will protect you with their shields are the ones who stab you in the back. And that the ones you least expect are the ones who catch you when you jump -- or when you fall.