The wildest things

We live in a suburb surrounded by a rural area. This means we can get McDonald's or local free-range eggs in three minutes, depending on which direction we turn out of our subdivision. Living, as we do, on the threshold of all things soul-crushing and toxic and all things verdant and purifying, can make one feel mighty schizophrenic at times. Like when we mow the dandelions we'd rather be eating so we won't get letters from the city, which are mailed when our neighbors call and lodge complaints. Or when we find ourselves lost and anxious in the maze of the local Wal-Mart, which we whisper when we are home again, huddled in our bed, that we will never ever go back to ever as long as we live, but we end up back there, crazy in our heads from the lighting and the sprawl and the weirdness, because they have the best price we have ever been able to find on fair-trade coffee and organic maple syrup.

I hope you're laughing right now, because we are. It's hilarious. We careen between meals of organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and gorging ourselves on Taco Bell, wiping the last remnants of that delicious horrifying neon cheese out of its plastic cup with the edges of our burritos, and it makes my head spin. It's contradiction, it's celebration, it's laziness, it's self-acceptance. Radical, radical self-acceptance.

This duality is not new to me. A woman who loves women, who has babies with men. A person who wants to free Mumia (is Mumia passe now, all you armchair anarchists?), who almost married a cop. Not just any cop. A Fed. For serious. For real. My two favorite cookbooks are The Voluptuous Vegan and Nourishing Traditions. I am an inveterate feeder of both wolves, and they fight and fight while my children grow in this strange doorway between worlds. They are doomed, my poor babies, to this undefinable life, to their Gemini dads, to their shameless water mama who refuses to freeze.

I hope they won't hate us. And I hope they build homes where nobody gives a fuck what they do with their dandelions.