The Differences Between Womyn

Changed my mind last night and didn't want to. Fell asleep in Adonis' arms. Woke up with my bare back chilled from an unblanketed night of sleep. Looked at the alarm clock. Threw some clothes on. Took my journal to the window and made a list of goals I want to accomplish. Adonis wakes up, kiss goodmorning. I rip off a page of paper and ask him to write his visionary goals. Silence as we both work. We share our goals, laugh over our similarities. MHM! over the new ideas we exchange. Talk about tomorrow's OSU/Michigan game.

Call my sister. Talk about her date. Dish the dirt about Tom. Laugh over how he asked if our family plays board games. Crawl back in bed while we giggle about the impending family stres around the holidays. Check my email. Create a plan for one of my supervisees who is struggling. Send it to my supervisor for edits. Unroll my yoga mat. Stretch.

Eat red berries and Kellogs with vanilla soy. Check my and other blogs. Watch the last 25 minutes of Ocean's 11 on TNT. Send work emails. Throw half of a leftover chicken sandwich on the George Foreman. Fix Adonis a salad while I watch him do laundry.

This is my life for the past 5 hours. I wonder on any given morning, what did you do? What did other womyn do? Every sentence I just wrote is laden with privilege, beauty, and pleasure. That is the morning I have had. Not every morning is like this. Some are worse, some are better. But these are the differences between womyn, the details in our lives. These are the details that shape our feminism, shape our perspective. There are a thousand things I did not list - the events that took place last night and the things I know I will do in 2 hours. The differences lie in the details.

The complexities of the feminist voice are rarely acknowledged to the details. Feminism takes on hard tackles like welfare, rape, racism, immigration, repro rights, etc. But the details of how those issues affect womyn, womyn of color specifically, are rarely told in detail. The womyn who woke up with another womyn. The womyn who didn't wake up. The womyn who never slept. The womyn who can't sleep. The womyn who sleeps too much from depression, medication, sickness, abuse...the differences are in the details.

These details shape our perspective which ultimately shape our feminism. It is indeed an unjust reality that the details that mark the differences between womyn become the lines that divide them. The line influences whose voices are heard, whose details are better to note and easier to read, and whose story is worth more praise.

What did you do this morning? What's your feminist morning?