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Audio, Current Events, hope chest, Nonfiction, Parenting, podcasting, Pop Culture, Race
Hope Chest: Ep. 8
November 15, 2018 slb2018 midterm elections, politics, voting, Voting Rights Act Leave a comment
Hope Chest is a collection of deeply personal audio-essays written mother-to-daughter. Listen to every episode at Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud.
Below is the text for Episode 8: As for Me and This House (And Senate). Listen along here.
Courtesy of the US National Archives
In nearly every election held since you were born, I've brought you into the voting booth with me. This election was the first in which you seemed even marginally engaged with where we were and what we might be doing there. Even a few months ago, when we walked into this same space to vote in the midterm primaries, you followed me wordlessly, more interested in the interior design of a real live middle school than in the political process playing out in its cafeteria.
I understand this wholeheartedly. My experience of 1980s childhood and '90s adolescence was working-class but suburban, insular and naive in ironic and dangerous ways. Though it was only true for a faction of us, there was a contingent of Black kids living in predominantly Black cities in this country, who believed our parents had weathered the worst of white supremacy, that we were approaching something akin to equity, a Huxtablication of our educational and professional ideals.
Because a few more of our peers had college-educated and advance-degree-holding parents than in generations past, it was easy for an inkling of entitlement to creep in. We were children being raised 20 years after desegregation, living in decent, if nondescript, neighborhoods that were clean, safe, affordable, and Black. We presumed that our dreams—even the wildest ones—were attainable at only moderate cost. We might've been well aware that other Black neighborhoods were suffering, neighborhoods to which we all had the close connections of cousins, co-parents, friends, or church affiliations. It was the height of the crack era, after all, followed by zero-tolerance legislation that kept robbing us of people we cared about. Still we toggled between the ignorance that our own families were fewer than four paychecks from similar fates and the idealistic belief that any success we attained as grownups would eventually be able to eradicate generational poverty.
I am not sure how I came to belong to this faction of dreamy-eyed Black kids. I was raised an apartment-dweller, born to a single-parent household. Little beyond my mom's biweekly pay and her acquired adeptness at making payment arrangements on our bills stood between us and a series of shut-off notices or an eviction. In the event that I would grow up to graduate from a four-year college, I'd be the first in our immediate family to do so. I do not quite know where I got all my optimism. But I think it was because we did well enough without homeownership or college degrees for me not to realize them as the markers of generational stability they were.
For 30 years, my grandmother worked as a stenographer in Baltimore City Circuit Court. My mother worked in medical billing, sensible, if unfulfilling, jobs that kept situational poverty at bay. I took their holding that wall for granted, believing the rhetoric of the day about how endless opportunity had become for kids growing up Black and not-quite-broke in America. Neither of my nana nor my mom dissuaded me from becoming an artist. They might've believed, as I did, that the sacrifices of their pragmatism had given me the wiggle room of whimsy so many white kids accept as their birthright.
I also watched a lot of TV, during a time when depictions of suburban Black family life shared enough cultural similarity with my own home experience to convince me that no social harm could befall me that would be too great for me to overcome.
I fear that I am raising you with an inherited insularity. But I will not have you perpetuating all my childhood delusions.
I was taught that voting held particular import for Black Americans, because the right to do so had been withheld from us for so long. My mother, born in 1960, is five years older than the Voting Rights Act. My grandmother, who would not have been of legal voting age until my mother was one year old, could not cast a ballot when she turned 18.
In the 1980s, our rhetoric around voting was not only about honoring the bloody sacrifices of our long-departed ancestors. Voting was still new enough to us then that the novelty had yet to wear off.
Even during those Reagan years, optimism about our country's collective racial future felt easier than it is nearly 40 years later. We had not elected a Black president then. We had not witnessed the depth to which the country could backslide after clearing what then seemed an improbable zenith. We had grown hesitant to believe, with so many newly-minted anti-discrimination laws in place, laws it had taken the country centuries to implement, that they could be ignored, rescinded and violated with such staggering impunity. Voting seemed less a matter of survival than ceremony. As a kid, the idea of it felt the same to me as observing Martin Luther King Day—probably because I failed to realize that I was older than Martin Luther King Day, that it existed because of a bill it taken many people years to bring to the ballot, a bill enough white Americans opposed that it could have been ousted with far more ease than it was passed.
I voted on ceremony for many years, straight-ticket Democratic for most, though I was registered as an independent. And I did so cynically, because the popular vote does not determine all. And it's disheartening when, despite a larger share of layperson support, the electoral college appoints the candidate a majority of voters opposes. For a time, in my early 20s, it didn't matter much to me who was in office. They were all white and thereby largely disinterested in my community's specific interests.
I didn't canvas for anyone until 2008, when I walked residential neighborhoods in Grand Rapids, Michigan, armed with clipboards and pamphlets, making sure people were registered and that they intended to support Obama. But even that was a detached engagement. I felt confident he would win, for one, and secondly, I was not yet your mother. We knew relative political peace for the first six years of your life. You were born in a midterm year, 2010. You were two when Obama was re-elected. You are 8 now that his legacy feels distant, 8 while our future as a republic feels indeterminate, 8 as new test for the first time in recent history the sturdiness of the most fundamental components of our constitution. I can tell you now what no one had a precedent for telling me when I was your age: if America elects someone who has no intention of being president and every intention of establishing a dictatorship, voting is less a coronation scepter than a prison shiv, the sticker we receive afterward less a corsage than a bandoleer. If America elects someone who intends to obstruct justice, the hard-won tool of justice that is the vote, this tool Black families like ours have only been able to hold for some 60+ years, provides us too little protection. But it is one of our only protections. So we must wield it as ferociously as we can.
In 2018, there is evidence of this everywhere. Despite broken ballot scanners, vote-switching, hours-long lines, stacks of unprocessed voter registration forms, races declared prematurely, and other forms of suppression too insidious to know, the Democratic Party reclaimed the House of Representatives, and the recklessness of this president's first two years will at least be met with former opposition. Because he is an avowed racist and misogynist, a record number of women, particularly women of color, campaigned and won seats in that House, powered by the votes of women like me, interested in guarding the futures of girls like you.
I'll be honest: I am still afraid. I do not believe this election has done enough to protect the country from collapse before the next one. I am not confident that we'll gain enough momentum to oust our current president from his post in 2020. That wariness is warranted. When the time comes, I encourage you to wield a bit of it yourself at the ballot box. But there are braver women than I in office now. And you will be raised with the scores of them as pillars of reference. Though it remains to be seen what will come of their efforts, I will match their work with my own. I finally understand why I must.
Audio, hope chest, Nonfiction, Parenting
October 13, 2018 slb Leave a comment
Hope Chest is a personal essay podcast written mother-to-daughter. Listen to every episode at Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud.
Below is the text for Episode 7: Something Borrowed, Overdue. Listen along here.
It is not that I believe it would be easier if I were the one preparing to marry. On the contrary. It would not be easier — not for me and especially not for you. If I had prioritized romantic partnership with the intent to move a man into the idea of home I've spent the first eight years of your life defining, I would have also needed to become a tightrope walker, an artful mediator, a sentient balance beam. It would not just have been a negotiation of new love, but also an implosion of the family dynamic it has taken us all this time to build and an intricate assembly of a life unlike any you've known.
I know this because I've been through it. My mother married for the first time when I was 10, just two years older than you are now. Because I was always with her, because even if she would've preferred to share custody with my father, she couldn't have, distance and a lack of either parent's deep desire to do so being significant barriers, I was, by necessity, a part of my mother's courtship process.
This was only true if the relationship was serious. I spent most summers away from her, bouncing between family homes a few hundred miles north of where we lived in Baltimore. She did her casual dating during those dog days. By the time I returned for school, all evidence of any men had usually been cleared.
But the man she would eventually marry was someone I saw twice a week, school-year-round. He was at Wednesday night bible study and Sunday morning service. Sometimes he arrived in uniform, fresh off a patrol shift. The other kids in children's church thought his squad car was cool. The boys paid particular attention to his holstered pistol. I hadn't registered any of those details about him. Before he started dating my mother, he was just one of the many men who ushered or preached or otherwise served at our church. I suppose I distinguished him best by his heavy Jamaican accent; I didn't know anyone else from Jamaica then, and they way he spoke, so distinct at times from the way I did, always tended to catch my attention.
Then they became an item and during the mere six months they dated, I accompanied them on the occasional outing. They'd buy me ice cream and I tagged along on their nighttime strolls. I'd fall asleep across the backseat of his car as they took drives along winding suburban roads. I didn't mind it at all. I was 10 with limited experience interacting with husbands or fathers; I would not have known enough about them to mind. I just wanted my mother to be happy and, from what I'd observed and overheard, I assumed that if she married, she would be.
I had no way of knowing how drastically the cadences of my home life would shift when she did.
Any parent's marriage to someone new marks an era of change for the child. But it is the custodial parent's marriage that has more immediate implications. Overnight, my mother's home had been infiltrated, the House of Brown — one woman, one girl — became the House of Brown-Higgins, headed up by a man who expected both women and girls to submit to his supposedly superior leadership. I was suddenly the resident of a home where at least one room was always off-limits, where I could no longer walk around in varying states of undress, where a pistol was now kept in a closet, where rules that were never well-explained to begin with were swiftly enforced, where the environment was a bit too restrictive for comfort.
That the shift felt so drastic to me was not entirely his fault. A mother and child left to their own devices long enough forge bonds that are nearly impenetrable, even for a biological father. How much harder, then, must it be for a stepfather, especially if no one involved in the family has the emotional toolkit necessary to be intentional about including him?
I wasn't always miserable while my mother was married. My stepfather wasn't cruel to me. He wasn't even often unkind. He was just a foreign entity infringing on my friendship with my mother, forcing her to declare her allegiance during any conflict, and accusing us of conspiring to exclude or usurp him, if she ever took what he considered to be my side. He remained that way for the 11 years that he lived with us.
When he left he did so after months of failure to pay the mortgage. Eight weeks after I graduated from college, my mother received the first letter of foreclosure.
The only marriage I've ever inhabited was theirs. As a member of their household, I saw and overheard and internalized the entire arc of their union. And it was, by far, the most bewildering experience of my childhood. Their relationship dissolved the year I turned 21. I have been in no hurry to replicate or to attempt to improve upon it in any partnership of my own. Even now, a full 18 years later, finding a husband holds no particular appeal to me.
It can all shift too fast.
My mother lived with a man for 11 years but it took fewer than 11 months for the life she'd built as his wife to unravel. I was as entangled in the rapidly loosening threads as I'd been in the ties that bound. This is the nature of being an only daughter, and it can be as difficult to negotiate as being anyone's mother, though few people ever admit it.
I am telling you this because it remains to be seen whether you will be a wife or a mother, but you were born a daughter. It is the role you are likely to embody the longest. I would not have you ignorant of its obligations.
I got to know your father amid the dissolution of my mother's marriage. We'd been dating nearly three months when the foreclosure notice arrived. Six months later, my mother and I were one night away from eviction, with a half-packed house around us and no home ahead, awaiting us.
You cannot determine compatibility in crisis. Well, you can, but you shouldn't. This may sound counterintuitive, for it would seem that it is only through hardship that you learn who will stand alongside you and help you stay your course. But that is only true if you have also experienced joy. It is only true if you've found at least your early love unfettered. Otherwise, you can never be certain if your relationship is built on romance or rescue, on dates or on desperation.
I'd known your father less than a year when he carried my family's mattresses on his back. I was embarrassed about their stains. He helped us pack. I was ashamed that he had to. Under the cover of night, we hauled, wholesale, the contents of closets and cabinets and corners to curbs in other families' housing complexes. I cried and he pretended not to notice, pretended that racing the clock to beat the county sheriff to morning was normal.
I think that was the night I first allowed myself to consider him a partner. I think that's when I knew I would yield a long stretch of years to loving him — too long a stretch, on the strength of this one selfless gesture. But whenever I felt unsteady after that, whenever I doubted the viability of our relationship, the memory of that night resuscitated it.
There are only so many times you can revive what it would be more merciful to euthanize. This is what always scared me about marriage — that it would mean a lifetime of clapping the paddles together and willing what's left of my energy into a partner whose heart has stopped pounding for me.
It is your father who is preparing to marry. In many ways, this is easier. In a few key ways, it is not.
When this was all still hypothetical, before you were born and then in the years afterward when your father and I were still single, I had a clear vision of how I wanted our coparenting dynamic to expand, whenever new partners would need to be folded into it.
Try as I might — and I did try, though not urgently or with ardor; your father did, too, though not very compellingly — I could not imagine the two of us marrying. This was true before you. It remained so after. We only get along well when we are not responsible for one another. And marriage is nothing if not the assumption of responsibility for lives other than your own.
It always stood to reason that one or both of us would bring someone new into your family. I used to imagine that when day came, we would approach the prospect communally, the lot of us frolicking in some incense soaked fusion of familial bliss — symbiosis of the type that can only be attained when hurt is forgotten and grace reigns supreme. I modeled that fantasy on the only family I know of who seems to have mastered it: the Kravitz-Bonet-Momoas.
When I was your age, there was a real live pixie who played a role on a popular television show, one of the few in the 1980s with an all-Black cast. Here name was Lisa Bonet, and a host of little Black girls thought she was impossibly cool, too cool to be entirely human. She must've been, in addition to Jewish and Black, part-faerie, half-elf, and entirely ethereal. Everything about her was both eccentric and accessible. Her hair and her clothes and the languid, wistful way her words rolled out of her in a cadence akin to song: it all felt experimental and otherworldly. But her choices, both onscreen and off, were what tethered her to earth. Choices like marrying a rock star, bearing his child, shirking the shackles of stardom in the wake of it, and divorcing him all in a matter of a few years. The legend of Lenny and Lisa appealed to me so as an adolescent. I devoured all interviews I could find about how they shared custody, rebuilt their relationship as friends, and parents after their breakup, and willed themselves beyond the halting awkwardness of moving on. They learned the dance, apart, together.
Years later, when Lisa Bonet remarried and bore two more children with another inordinately gorgeous celebrity, Jason Momoa, Lisa, Lenny, and their daughter Zoe simply widened the family circle and left it unbroken. Both Lisa and Jason had been raised by single mothers. Zoe had been raised by intermittently single parents. They'd all found, in this careful configuration of modern family, a recipe for remaining whole.
This is is the life I have wanted for you: an unconventional closeness born of trial and error; parents who are constantly forgiving themselves and each other; a life beyond the quotidian.
We will not become like the Kravitz-Bonet-Momoas. As parents, our temperaments don't lend themselves to it. If it is up to me alone to reach for this, I am not sure we will grasp it. Though I can support what your father is doing, because we were once something to each other that seemed predicated not as much on love as on on survival, and you must always root for the person who emerges from trauma, less haunted, I still have the hardest time admitting to myself that I want to spend my life with anyone other than you. It is hard because I am not sure I really do want that. It scares me. You cannot commune with a couple who's mustered the courage to love anew when you are still contending with your cowardice.
The part of myself that allows for romantic love is the part I have least developed. It's the only area of my life where I have not been fully committed to growth. To the extent that marriage is one of my desires, it is not one I am willing to give voice. I am too proud to set my intentions on anything I am not certain I can have, anything I do not trust myself to handle. But in the small of heart, in the hollows, there is at least a tiny curiosity about what kind of wife I would be and what kind of husband I might someday attract. Would we survive each other? Would the family dynamic already evolving then simply expand to include him? Would the lot of us leave the country together? Would we toast on the ship deck at dusk then retreat to our cabins, trading off caretaking of all of our kids on alternating nights? What would it mean to open our separate silos and let all the love we've pile high inside them pour out in the clearing?
These questions are not kept in a roomy place. They remain in the hollows. Perhaps I will explore them for you later, when I have grown slightly braver. Until then, I am mostly content to remain alone, at least for now. I have known enough of togetherness, of forcing forward a failing concept of family, to know that I find it more exhausting than exhilarating. I only want the love the rises. I have only known the love that causes me to fall.
I do not believe you will inherit such aversion to marriage. I do not believe you will know so intimately the kind of love pulls you under. I am hopeful you will have your father and his fiancee to thank for that.
I do not know how I will spend the day that your father gets married. It is not a day to which I've devoted much imagination. Now that it is imminent, I suppose I should. He says that he will pick you up the night before, so I imagine that you will be part of the full experience. I imagine that you will be happy. The woman you have come to know as a caring, encouraging friend will now become your stepmother. You have had ample time to adjust to this and, for you, this has been my only wish: a seamless transition from having a single, dating father to having a married one. I have done work around supporting this transition: the work, mostly, of conversation.
We have talked so much about what stepparenting means. We have whispered about what to expect of a wedding. I have fielded a forest of whys. To do so, I had to refocus my gaze, away from the trees.
Until recently, I still possessed a slip of bark your father had given me on our first Valentine's Day together. I'd asked him to carve our names into a tree. And when the day arrived, he brought me the actual tree: a sawed bit of branch about four inches wide and one inch thick. On the flat of its surface, he'd soldered our names, a small plus sign between them.
In those early years, he tried hardest on holidays. It was as though the gift, if properly chosen and presented with the right sort of flair, would carry the work of relationship-building we'd failed at the rest of the year.
I do not remember much of anything I ever gave him. They were boring, forgettable gifts: clothing, electronics, store credits. He was far better at gifts than I. I tried to be thoughtful in other ways. I tried to be honest.
When you are with someone for several years and live as transient a life as I, there is always some vestige of a past left to unearth. It crops up in your grandmother's spare room closet; the side pocket of a bag in your rented storage unit; the dustier, unopened boxes, kept behind the ones out of which you live, the ones left neglected until you finally find time to rifle through and discover there is nothing there you need to salvage.
I had gotten rid of almost everything: old diaries we'd co-written our tiny handwriting inked on adjacent pages, photo strips produced behind the curtains of booths at any number of malls, crescent moon earrings whittled of wood. Whenever I've come across anything from the period of years your father and I spent as a couple, I purge it. The tree bark was harder to part with. But even it has been misplaced now.
Even sentimental value should depreciate, in situations like ours.
This seems the most appropriate wedding gift: to long for nothing, to let go of everything.
Nonfiction, Parenting, Resisting Motherhood
Your Mothering Mileage May Vary.
July 17, 2018 slb 10 Comments
Suppose every year is a pearl. We add the year to the slowly unspooling thread that is our lives. The strand looks like nothing you'd find under glass, nothing worthy of sale or display. The strand has no uniformity and little discernible beauty. Most of the pearls are pebbled or bulbous, gritty or oddly marbled, misshapen, under-formed. Cracked.
Then you live a pristine year, one in which you do not experience unimaginable loss or a betrayal deep enough to stagger you, one mercifully devoid of grief and plentiful in unanticipated joy. You receive an opportunity much greater than the one you pined for during the pebble year, and you stumble upon the love you prayed for during the year you cracked. None of the tears that milked up the marbled year appear during this one. And before long, 12 delicious months have passed. They yield you a pearl that emerges spectacularly whole. It is spherical and opaline, as pearls are intended to be. And you cannot help but twirl it endlessly between your fingers until you can feel the heat that such methodical friction generates. This pearl could cause momentum, other pristine years to follow. Whatever you did right could become a replicable formula. You could be entering an entire decade of such faultless years, uniformly gorgeous enough to display under glass, worthy of protecting with lock and key.
Or you could find yourself flailing mere months into the formation of the next pearl. You could feel every necessary irritant acutely. You will empathize with the oyster and finally understand the world. You've been holding it all this time, after all, cradling it in your palm, piercing and prying and wresting free what it holds for you each year. The world has opened itself to you so achingly and you have taken from it, hungrily, since you were born. Now that you can comprehend the pain you must inflict, and not only endure, to add every year to your life, the oyster itself is much harder to hold.
The world is a writhing thing. It is harder to handle.
I have learned a lot in the past 18 months. 2016 was the year of the pristine pearl. 2017 and 2018, at least till now, have been harder to hold. Both have contained moments at which my grasp of the world came close to slipping. I have learned more in this fidgety discomfort than I did in the year of plenty. But the toll that learning has exacted is silence.
The page, expecting as always to be filled with lovely sentiments about the rewards of mothering, even under inopportune circumstances — and perhaps, especially because of them — must remain blank for awhile.
For the last year and a half, after seven years of insisting that I was fine parenting a child without much hands-on help from her dad, pretending that I was fine with the contribution he did make, because, perhaps, it was the best he could do, I finally confessed the con. I was never okay; I'd just had a lot to prove. He'd walked away from our relationship on the same day we found out I was carrying his child then decided that he wanted to "co-parent," first from 3,000 miles away and a few years later, once a week (or so) from an hour away. It seemed important for me to do everything he was opting not to do, competently enough to make him feel like he wasn't missed. It didn't occur to me that he'd respond to that by starting a different family with someone else. I thought he'd respond by making himself indispensable.
It was temporarily unfathomable that he'd be capable of buying a home, proposing marriage, and family-planning with someone else, when getting him to tell me when he's about to pick our kid up, in further advance than two hours of arrival seemed too taxing a request. But it wasn't just possible. It was easy.
In the end, I think that's what drove me to confess that I had never entirely given up on him. Though too few of our years had been happy ones, there were 16 of them in all. We'd met at 21, had a child at 30. We were 37 then. It was too long a time to let pass as though none of it had mattered. It had all mattered, and I'd been too proud to admit it.
You do not, after all, admit to someone who abandoned you that you should've accepted his apologies earlier. You do not say to the person who does too little parenting that you would rather him do too little with you than watch him do more, with someone else. You do not admit how much it kills you that there are now several people in this world whose only frame of reference for your daughter's family are him and a woman you have only seen once.
I now know firsthand how humiliating all of that is to say, even if it must be said, even when it changes nothing.
Love is not what you profess in the interest of self-preservation. Love is not what settles at the bottom of desperation.
Love is letting go. More specifically: Love is letting go of everything that he was not, for you, so that he can be everything he has become, with someone else, for your daughter.
Do not be fooled, however: as obvious and inevitable as that may sound: the process of achieving it is artless.
It has taken me longer than other women to let go of who I was before becoming a parent. Some impulse knitted deep within stubbornly twists against what motherhood demands. There is much that I've grown to love, but I have never fully settled into the sacrifice of it. Though more radical moms than I will tell you that you do not need to sacrifice too much of yourself to mother, I have, unfortunately, not found that to be so. The truth of that assertion would depend on how adaptable you are to begin with — wouldn't it? — on how easily you could fold family into who you already were or how thoroughly it would upend your former sense of yourself?
More than boogers and bowels and homework battles and public tantrums, more than sleeplessness or clinginess, more than random emissions of gas or liquid, more than eight years of daily tears over trifles for which she rarely offers timely explanation, more than fears about an adolescent future spent contentiously, it's the idea that I have to relinquish my right to rage, quiet my recurring resentment, and pretend that my innate impulsiveness simply ceased to exist when I became a parent that bothers me most of all.
These were all traits I could keep in check as an only child. There had always been room to express them; I could do so in moderation. But a mother who is always in the presence of her child does not have room to rage; it sets too poor an example. It alienates the child. A mother who receives anything from the father of her child cannot admit frustration with the many things she does not receive; it appears too ungrateful. It alienates the father of the child. A mother cannot extemporaneously purchase a single plane ticket to an international destination — because she can only afford one and it's too good a flash deal to pass up. There is no one who will watch her child when she is away and she should not expect anyone to do so.
I am not an unselfish person. That is what being unable to write anything decent in the past year and a half has taught me. I am mean when I feel most creatively unfulfilled. I turn feral when I feel abandoned. And under either circumstance, spending time in my company is ill-advised.
My daughter does not seem to mind this. I am quick to apologize to most people, but I reconcile with her fastest of all. When I can help it, I do not create cause for such reconciliation. I attune myself to a frequency where annoyances rarely find purchase. I seem most patient with all of it, then. I seem like the picture of calm.
Because none of this actually matters, does it? Not if we're honest with ourselves. Not really.
My aunt, the clinical therapist, tells me quite often that parents need only be adequate. A child does not need nearly as much to thrive as we insist children do. And some will not fare well, no matter how much effort their parents exert. Anguish is baked into all existence; everyone bears their share and the distribution of shares isn't fair.
As true as I imagine this must be, a mother must already feel adequate to be comforted by it. I only feel adequate on the odd days, and even on some of those, I am skeptical.
My daughter does not seem to mind this, either, though she has reached a stage, at nearly 8, when she confuses my getting upset with her with me disliking her as a person.
"I thought you liked me," she'll say. Or worse, when she's teary, "I thought you loved me."
"You were happy this morning," she'll accuse. "You hugged me then."
"I'll hug you now," I might respond. "But you still need to do what I've asked."
She knows that I love her. It's obvious. But she knows that I'm ill-tempered, too. Mercurial and silent and sad. And she does not yet understand how many things we are allowed to feel at once. Her eight little pearls are like baby teeth, all small and white, all falling, so far, onto her life's strand, just as they should be.
Still, she wants touchstones of affirmation: Of course, I love you. I'm not mad at you; I just need you to stop interrupting me and raising your voice when I'm telling you something. There is no one I like more than you. But please get off of me now. I need a little space to breathe.
I knew I would not be the type of mother for whom sacrifice would be easy. I would never have confessed it before my daughter was born — I am not sure I even realized it then — but I have always been my own favorite person. Before I became a parent, I could let anyone go, if I needed to; I had me. Motherhood rendered me unrecognizable to myself for awhile. It was a long performance for which the curtain never went down and there was always a need both for improvisation and improvement.
I've been thrown a few curves I could not account for, in the past year and a half. It forced me to cancel the show. The curtain wasn't just down; for awhile it was a shroud. I am no longer someone who wants to prove anything to anyone else, not in parenting or any other area of my life. I am simply committed to better understanding who I have become. I do not want to offer her to anyone else, not as a writer or a woman or a mother, until I have a better handle on who she is. I am more unsteady on my feet these days. And because unlike my daughter, I did not grow up believing I could ask the people around me, "Do you like me?" without fearing or disbelieving the answer, I understand why she so often needs to hear it these days. She needn't worry. Now, she's my favorite person.
Do I like me? is the more challenging question.
I wrote all of this because I was worried.
One week from today, my daughter and I will be at a writing residency in Putnam County, NY. I need to warm up in advance of the journey. As much as I've longed for and dreamed about having a full week to write without feeling any guilt over leaving my daughter behind in order to attain it, I'm nervous about how productive I'll be. I've been trying not to put much pressure on output, but I want to maximize the time (especially since a number of people contributed to my last-minute crowdfunding campaign to make it easier for us to get there. I want to be a worthy investment).
It has not been the most emotionally healthy time in my post-parenting life and by extension, it's been the least creatively productive time in my post-parenting life. I've found it difficult to muster the will to write or the belief that anyone wants to read about this (or anything else on which I have an opinion. I've also found it difficult to develop cogent opinions, as in case you haven't noticed, the country is in more intense shambles than usual). I've been writing about this stuff for a long time now, and living it is even less interesting than writing about it. Fortunately, I'll be working on a novel draft and Hope Chest stuff while I'm there.
I'm not presumptuous enough to expect that anything I post anywhere will resonate with anyone else. But I am always hopeful that something will, with someone. Life is hard. No matter how difficult yours is, no one else's is enviable. Protect your own pearls. They're priceless.
Audio, hope chest, Nonfiction, Parenting, podcasting, Resisting Motherhood
Woman to (Will-Be) Woman.
March 28, 2017 slb 3 Comments
Episode 4 of my new, indie podcast Hope Chest is available for streaming and downloading now. I've decided to suspend the practice of posting the whole text of an audio essay here, because I'm trying very hard to shape up an essay collection for publication and it just makes sense to hold the written content in reserve. But here's a little backstory on the piece in advance of listening: in December of last year, I was hit with this sort of double-slap romantic reality check.
It's a long story. Like, a dates-back-16-years-to-when-I-was-21 long. But I'll try to keep this relatively brief, because the whole point here is for me to compel you to listen, not to bog you down with a long read.
Suffice it to say, there's "alone" and there's alone. "Alone" is being unattached, noncommittal, and by yourself, romantically, but with partners — or the idea of partners — that you're secretly (and perhaps it's even a secret to you) holding in mental and emotional reserve. In my case? There were two. In-case-of-emergency-men. I'll-call-you-when-I-need-you men. You-may-not-answer-the-call men. I-have-all-the-time-in-the-world men. Car-advice men. Comfortable-silence men. Uncomfortable-silence men. This-will-never-be-what-I-want-or-need-it-to-be-but-it's-still-chill men.
One was my co-parent. The other was a friend I dated for a blink-and-you-missed-it few months a few years ago. In December, I had to give them both up — like, for real, for real, cold turkey — simultaneously. I don't yet know how to describe what that felt like. They both already felt so distant; I'd thought I'd already seared all the edges off of any romantic notions for one of them long ago, and I'd been going through an interminable, years-long process of doing the same with the other. Imagine the shock I felt, then, when I felt an inverse of the emotions I assumed I would about both of them, whenever I used to envision "letting go." It was… a lot messier than I'd presumed. A flash of heat for the guy for whom my heart had gone cold. An ambivalence about the other, who had long set me aflame. No one was more startled than I.
I'm still fairly inarticulate about how emotionally scattered I felt for the first three months of this year. I was breadcrumbs in the woods. I was swallowing myself. There was no path.
That probably won't be what you get from this essay at all, actually, but that was the motivation for it. It's about women taking the very necessary time to understand themselves. Our selves are constantly changing. Here's the thing. I may have been languishing in the same stale feelings for far too long, but I didn't recognize it, because my circumstances kept changing. What would make me store in-case-of-emergency company as a younger, childless woman and what would compel me to do the same at 37 with a school-aged kid was dissimilar enough to fool me.
I had taken for granted that I was being honest with myself about my feelings (or lack thereof), "checking in with myself" and repeating mantras (and outright lies) to train myself out of negative emotions or pretending not to have positive ones, if I thought they'd be a burden to whomever I might express them to. But all the while, despite all the years I've spent single, despite all the time I spend literally at a physical remove from my exes, it hadn't occurred to me that I was still viewing myself and processing the events of my life, through some prism that considered them and their feelings their potential reactions and all the hypothetical ways I might process them moving on with their lives.
When the time came for all of us to actually move on with our emotional lives, with some sense of finality, I didn't do anything I thought I would. I spent the first quarter of 2017 like an amnesiac, looking at the simplest things and wondering what I thought of them. Eating foods and surprising myself at my enthusiasm about its flavor. (Turns out I'm really partial to biscotti with anise seeds baked into it and falafel makes me smile really widely. I am not as into curry as I thought I was.) And then there were all the selfies. A crazy number of selfies. Because I needed to figure out again what makes me feel attractive or interesting or mysterious or desirable and I'd finally, finally decided not to gauge that against what I perceived as other people's interests and preferences.
I'm still sorting it.
These months contained a thorough undoing. But they (and it) were quiet. I guess "Woman to (Will-Be) Woman" is part of what I continue to take away from how I've spent them.
Audio, Current Events, Nonfiction, Parenting, podcasting, Pop Culture
(Don't) Forget Paris.
February 19, 2017 slb 1 Comment
(Listen to the audio version of this essay via my new podcast, https://soundcloud.com/hopechestpodcast/ep-3-dont-forget-paris. Subscribe at iTunes and please rate and review!)
I do not have many romantic stories to tell you. Even the yarn about how your father and I managed to spend four days traipsing the cobblestoned arrondissements of Paris is an unsentimental one. I do not suppose that you'll swoon. But, because we did not remain a couple after you were born, because you will likely grow up knowing our relationship simply as an amicable one, this is, perhaps, a tale worth telling you.
For a certain kind of Black American, several generations U.S.-born, but without many relatives who have left this country of their own volition, rather than because of an obligatory military deployment, international travel can be a vague, lofty, often elusive, ideal. We want to go. These days, far more of us do. But leisure travel abroad can require an intentionality, a precision of thought and planning that can prove somewhat prohibitive.
For the barely middle-class among us, it is a desire close enough to fathom attaining. If corners are cut or we have sudden financial windfalls or we fashion ourselves into spendthrifts, seeing the world becomes quite possible. This does not, however, mean the attainment will be easy.
I have only left the country once. It took me 28 years. And even after such an interminable wait, I could only afford four days and nights abroad. I chose Paris, but given the circumstances, I could just as easily have chosen Milan or Accra or Dubai. I chose it because of a sudden flight deal that, as serendipity would have it, coincided with the delivery of my tax refund, which combined with my post-graduate, crashing-on-my-aunt-and-uncle's couch as an adjunct savings, to create a bit of a travel budget. I also chose it because I had recently read about a series of walking tours that traced the Black American experience in the early- to mid-20th century through the streets of present-day Paris.
For reasons both obvious and ineffable, this seemed a trek worth taking.
Sometimes I feel pinned to the contiguous United States by forces far beyond my control, forces that far predate me. I have never felt alone in this. It is the kind of tethering one feels when she knows for certain that at some point in her not-so-distant lineage, members of her family were chained to this land and forbidden from leaving it, first by centuries of enslavement and then by generations of bureaucratic policies extensive and dense and obtuse enough to feel all but unnavigable for a people who have had to fight through reams of red tape and a bottomless pit of administrative fees just to be able to vote or uphold even a pretense of property ownership.
In truth, if you have the means and an unbesmirched public record, the passport process is relatively easy. Because I left the country in haste, the way one does when she isn't sure how long she'll still be able to afford to, I paid the expedited fee and was able to feel the gold embossed navy blue vinyl beneath my fingertips in just three weeks.
I did not initially plan to include your father. I thought instead that I might go with my aunt and, failing that, I might just go alone. I may have planned the journey hastily but it could not have been more important to me. It was a milestone so many of us Black U.S.-born descendants of slaves do not reach. It was an opportunity I may never have seen again. I knew just one year removed from graduate school that I had chosen a discipline and career that would never render me financially solvent, let alone flush enough for frequent globetrotting. And, in fact, 10 years later, that remains true.
Your father, then a fellow non-corporate artist (meaning: intermittently broke, like me), had always longed for Paris. It was not a whim for him and I will have to let him tell you why. I don't remember. What I recall is that it seemed to pain him to hear about the trip without being included it in it.
So we went together. And it nearly broke us up.
With just four days to spend, I wanted to rush through everything: museums and tours and cafes and monuments, wanted to lay eyes on as much as my mind could store. He was, as he often is, unhurried. He wanted to meander, to spend literal hours looking for small-cut European clothing and shoes that would fit his 6'5" frame. He wanted to talk to people, many of whom pretended not to speak English, even though between the two of us, we knew only ten phrases of French. By the third day, our second-to-last full day, as I waited for him to exit several stores in a mall that looked exactly like one we could find in his city of residence — Los Angeles — or mine, Grand Rapids, MI, I began to wish I had come alone, wished I were wandering the Louvre (where we never did find time to go) or returning to that cafe in the 14th with the incredible pain de chocolat and the bitter but perfectly foamed cappuccino.
I was as I have often, unfairly, been with him: resentful. We had finally escaped the confines of our own country. But I still felt confined by him. This is, perhaps, the moral of the story: you do not arrive at freedom. It is not a travel destination. You do not find it in the companionship of fellow meanderers. Freedom, if you are ever able to feel it, must be worked out within. Freedom, when you believe you have found it, must be taken with you.
My devotion to the country is an uneasy one, and perhaps as dotted with scorn as any ill-fated love affair. Even as long as we've been together — America and I — I remain unconvinced that what matters to me matters to it or that my needs, regardless of how clearly or loudly I voice them, will ever be met.
I am never sure how much I owe for citizenship. My citizenship and the supposed range of benefits attendant to it have never felt full.
To wit, I told you that the process of obtaining a passport was an easy one. But when the time came for a Parisian official to stamp it, I felt just as nervous as I do at the entrances of stores in every American mall. I know full well that I haven't stolen anything but I still worry that the theft alarm will sound as I cross the threshold. That is to say, the first and only time that I traveled abroad, I did not entirely trust my American passport to protect me. I did not trust your father's to protect him, either. We are Black. We traveled from entirely different origin airports, he from LAX and I from Gerald R. Ford. We are Black. His connection was in Germany, while my flight was direct to Paris. We are Black.
At Charles de Gaulle, it took us hours to find each other. We did not know that we had landed in separate buildings. We did not know we would have had to make special arrangements with our cell phone carriers for our phones to have functioned overseas. We did not speak the language.
And in those intervening hours, I did wonder if he had been detained. I wondered what I would do if he were. Keep going? Wander out into the unfamiliar city without him? Turn back? Try to pin down his whereabouts, wait for his safe release from wherever he was being held, for whatever reason?
It's been nearly ten years since that trip. It was as uncomplicated an excursion as it possibly could've been, for both of us. But it could just as easily have been a nightmare. Our skin makes all the world potentially transgressive terrain. We carry that awareness with us as surely as we do our shoulder bags.
We did not know it then, not with our walking tour stories about Black American expatriates who remained fond enough of Paris to live out their remaining days and be buried there, not with every gift shop's J'adore Barack and Michelle souvenirs, but France is neither safer nor more welcoming of black and brown women and men than America is. White men proposition and assault Black women walking alone in metro terminals and on sidewalks. And, as in America, police in Paris disproportionately brutalize black men.
I remember, at the end of our four-day excursion, feeling ready to abandon my own country and to live in the clichéd France I'd fashioned in such a short time, one of baguettes and fromage, a river of wine. I was sure that I would miss America no more than it would miss me.
There is an expression for this: no love lost. And there may truly have been none. But I cannot imagine that French discrimination would've felt any finer for its foreignness. I do not believe that, over time, that country's reception of me would have been very different than my own's.
There are worse things to lose than love.
at a souvenir shop circa st. michel fountain
Your father flew back into L.A. and I returned to Michigan. For days afterward, I felt the phantom taste of clementines and Leffe Blonde, of tart cheeses and cheap red wine and the Newports he'd ducked into a half-dozen corner shops to find (and for which he had to pay an astounding 8 francs). I felt closer to him and infinitely farther. I felt a roof raised and lifted, adjusting my worldview.
I also felt relief. It was nice to be alone. I would never again be a woman who knew nothing of the land that lay beyond the borders of home. Neither would I travel so far from home again, unless I could be sure that I would feel free upon arrival.
These days, it is much harder to reassure myself of that possibility. Our home has chosen a new patriarch — and he is not a liberating type. In fewer than 50 days in office, he has tried to render VISAs as meaningless as freedom papers were in the woods and wilds of 19th-century slave states. He has alienated several of our international allies, stoked hostilities between nations that had barely been concealing their contempt for this one, and shown little respect for the processes that have, for generations, enabled us to cross into new countries and welcomed those desirous of entry into ours to make their way in, undeterred.
Paris may well be my only parable. I do not believe it will be yours. I am willing you a far more wayfaring life. I am instilling in you the belief that, in the end, you are your own nation. Your freedom will not be outwardly governed; your Blackness will not render you the same reticence as mine. When I am gone and I bequeath to you this home, I hope it will no longer be broken. I hope you will not be treated like a squatter, but that you will instead feel the full weight of its keys — and that, for as long as you are able, you will open its doors to whomever will come.
Audio, Current Events, Nonfiction, Parenting, podcasting
Hope Chest: A New Podcast by Stacia Brown.
February 6, 2017 slbaudio production, audio storytelling, black podcasts, hope chest, hope chest podcast, motherhood, podcasts, podcasts in color, Stacia Brown 2 Comments
Hope chest (n.) : a young woman's accumulation of clothes and domestic furnishings (as silver and linen) kept in anticipation of her marriage; also : a chest for such an accumulation, Merriam-Webster.com
My mother first told me what a hope chest was when I was a teenager. She said women who wanted to marry sometimes stored things in a footlocker or some smaller treasure-chest like storage box. Lingerie and sachets, needlepoint embroidery, scrapes of lace that could later be fashioned into some accent meant to make a house homier, and for the more romantic among the future wives, love letters sealed and bound together for future presentation to an as-yet-unknown spouse.
I've never much wanted to marry — or perhaps more accurately, I've never been confident that it was a possibility for me. But I've always liked the idea of storing up dreams, visions, goals, and love to be shared with a trusted someone, when the time has come. It's something I've been doing for my daughter since I was expecting her and I'll probably continue that trend until she's old enough to start reading the work and to tell me whether or not she wants to continue receiving more of it.
When I fell in love with audio production last year, I knew about halfway through the first season of The Rise of Charm City that I'd also want to start an indie podcast that adapted blog posts here. The sort of prose-poetry style of writing I do here lends itself fairly well to audio adaptation, and I wanted to challenge myself to produce a project all on my own. I've been learning audio editing in Audition since Summer 2016; it's what WEAA, where The Rise of Charm City airs, uses. But it wasn't until spending nearly a week at The Center for Documentary Studies in Durham, NC last August, that I ever produced a draft all on my own, start-to-finish). That piece, "Prince, Philando, and Futures Untold," which later aired as part of John Biewen and CDC's gorgeous podcast, "Scene on Radio " (some John did some additional mixing and polishing in Hindenburg), was the first audio adapted from one of my blog posts. As soon as I finished it, I knew I'd want to make more pieces like it.
Hope Chest is the podcast I've created for that purpose. It's a place for me to store scraps of music and interviews and found sound and singing, woven together with lovingly-penned prose, to be shared with whomever wants to listen. If I were more business-minded and/or marketing-savvy, I would've had a more strategic roll-out. But here it is. I'd love it if you subscribed and/or gave the first two episodes a listen. I'm aiming for at least one new episode per month, so be on the lookout. Please rate and review it, if you're subscribing via iTunes, and if you enjoy it, let me know either here or via some social media space where we follow each other. Thanks!
Episode 1, adapted from this, is here:
You can subscribe at SoundCloud or iTunes (although, for reasons I have yet to figure out, the iTunes feed doesn't currently include Episode 1).
Current Events, Nonfiction, Parenting, Race, Resisting Motherhood
Private Black Motherhood and Public White Protest.
January 31, 2017 slb 5 Comments
Mother: What is a woman?
Child: A woman is… um… hmm…
It is a trick question. The definition will always differ, depending on the person being asked to provide it. You will define womanhood differently than I, for instance. It will mean something else by the time you become one than it meant almost 20 years ago, when I did. But I will still ask you this question often anyway. I will ask it, in part, because we are Black and this means that even though you are six, there are many adults — even some in positions of authority — who will begin insisting on your womanhood in just a few fleeting years. Depending on your height and when your curves come in to assert themselves, pressing upon all the previously flat and straight plains of your body, those adults may ogle you. They may reach for you on the street and curse at you as you run away. (While you are still a girl, always run away.) They may accuse you of something, then try convincing the judicial system to see adulthood in your still soft cheeks, your brace-bedecked teeth, the hair you're still only allowed to straighten on special occasions. They did this to Catherine Jones in 1999. They tried to do it with Bresha Meadows just last year. You should know that some adults begin to treat at black girls like women as early as age 10 or 12 or 14. It has happened to other little black girls as early as 7 and 8. Countless ones, whose names we may never know, but whose disappearances Black mothers quite feel acutely as we look down into the faces of our own daughters and implore them, admonish them: Don't be in no hurry. Take your time getting grown.
You must figure out for yourself what a woman is. You must never lose sight of yourself as the girl that you are and be certain that you are ready to molt girlhood when the time comes. It cannot come late enough for me. If I could, I would certainly postpone it. But it is not for me to decide. My prayer is that you will be the only person who will have a say in deciding it.
You did not speak a language I could clearly understand until the middle of your fourth year. Before that, when you spoke at all, you added -en suffixes to words where I would not have guessed they could belong. On your tongue, water became wah-den. Granny became Go-den. And for a while, without any reason I could decipher, you called Nana, your great-grandmother, Morning.
When you were two-and-a-half, I had you assessed. You weren't talking much at all then. The women who came into our home with their folders and tote bags, jotting across their clipboard pages when you could complete a puzzle, scribbling furiously along their carbon triplicate forms when you could not, suggested that I take you to an audiologist. Within six months you were being fitted for hearing aids, with an estimated mild to moderate loss in both ears.
I believe that, the way that you hear greatly informs the way you interact with the world. It's what led you to the language you developed. It's what keeps you locked in to your vivid imagination, with its cast of unseen characters and its action that only plays inside your mind. And sometimes, I've felt that it's kept me locked out. You have been attending school for nearly four years now but this is the first year when asking you what happened there is an action I can expect to be met with a descriptive, decipherable answer.
I have had to learn that you are on your own time. We have always been on a road where I have had to trust you to indicate when you are ready for us to pull over and ready for us to move on.
I think I am a better parent for it, at least I hope that I am. You are not a child who would benefit most from having my will imposed upon you. You are not a child whose ideas I want to mold so that they mimic mine. I am not even sure that, with you, such a task would be possible.
You did not have much time here before the core of American civilization found itself deeply compromised. You did not point to television screens and cry out, "There's Obama!" until his very last year in office. Nana told you who he was. She made you practice saying his name. O. Bah. Ma. You seemed to like repeating it, seemed to relish the ease with which the vowels swept through your throat. Like speaking out was easy.
I know you will ask me when you are older and finally see photos of other children, hoisted upon their parents shoulders or tucked safely between chest and arm: Why didn't we carry signs? Why didn't we go picket injustice? Cry loud, spare not, wear pink. Cuss without blushing. Why didn't we find ourselves in the company of all those other women? Washington is so close, after all. We could've.
It is impossible to know if you will ever be satisfied with my answer. I am still quite unsure of decisions like these, concerning you, myself.
In truth, it may have been better for you to go. Perhaps you would have understood, on a visceral or emotional level if not yet an intellectual one, that something is amiss with all the world, and now, what has long been so is finally affecting our centuries-insulated country in ways White people no longer feel safe ignoring. Women have volunteered to lead the charge of dissent because women have far more to immediately lose than men, now that this man and his cronies have assumed the national seat of power.
Maybe, at six, that would have been useful for you to intuit, if not yet truly know.
But if I may be entirely honest — and with you, this is ever my aim — I do not much feel like being a warrior. I want to remain the mother I've already fought so hard to become. And she is soft-edged, yielding, and kind. She spends her weekends wrapped in a hot pink Snuggie with her child, staving off her constant financial woes, silently keeping her existential inner conflict — about housing or untimely death or co-parenting or politics or the romance she sometimes pines for but has not yet found — in check. She frequently dissolves into giggles. She hugs hard and delivers smatterings of kisses to every inch of exposed skin. She is not carefree, neither is she careless. But she is about the business of preserving the sanctity of her domestic life. And for her, this is its own resistance. She remembers the Black women who fought in generations before her, who were forced to have children they did not want or plan, who were unknowingly sterilized or implanted with unregulated birth control without consent, or denied clean, safe, affordable housing for children they were shamed into delivering but could not afford to raise. I think of what they must have been fighting for — and it was the hope and the freedom my generation thought it had finally achieved in the eight years that the First Family was black and the Black mother in the White House declared herself a mother first and a freedom-fighting advocate second.
I am not yet finished pretending I can afford myself the same luxury. I, too, want to be the mother I have fashioned myself to be, first. I want to fold my activism into this existing model. For me, this means figuring out how best to support the other mothers who feel so far removed from the idea that a poster and a chant will reunite airport detainees or close the miles between them and their stranded, visa-less children. It means thinking of and praying for them in a somber and meditative space. It means writing and writing and writing, because for me, writing is more effective than marching at making my efforts feel less futile. I would rather teach you what's at stake by explaining that your school, with its large percentage of students from immigrant families, is filled with classmates who are facing a far different set of challenges and odds than you.
But so far, I haven't told you anything. Nana no longer beckons you to the television when the president begins to speak. She has not taught you to recognize him, has never encouraged you to utter his name. For now, I wish to keep it this way.
My wish for you is that you will stay right where you are, so often locked in, by your unique way of hearing, the vestiges of that language you invented when you were a toddler, the lingering barriers of communication only those who love and protect you can currently breach. At present, I believe you are safest there. And as in all things, I will look to you for my cues. You will tell me when you need to know more.
You will have so, so long to be a woman. And, for as long as men like this president and his mostly male team hold political sway, fighting for your basic rights — human, racial, gendered, reproductive — will be as disheartening as it is essential. If you are like me, you will grow weary of demanding what should have been yours by right of birth.
I am more than happy to do this for you. I will defend you, myself, and others in the ways I hope I can be most effective. As a woman, I know how important it is for a woman to lift her own voice. As your mother, I know how vital it is for your to find yours. I can imagine how much time it will take and how distinct it will sound. This is not a process I intend to rush. I suspect that there will be plenty left for you to fight, when your time has come; and I believe we will find ourselves in highly capable hands, however you choose to do so.


This is the official application of the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) as authored by the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP), the National Emergency Nurses' Affiliation and other partner organizations.
This application is in English or French, depending on the language set on your device. (Non-English and French Devices will show the English Version only). Proceeds from the sale of this App supports future development of the CTAS and its educational materials.
This application walks the user through patient complaints in assisting nurses and physicians to assign acuity levels using the complaint oriented triage lists and modifiers. All lists and modifier definitions and data are within the application and therefore no data connection is required.
By using the official application, nurses and physicians can be assured that they are using the most current and accurate scale as developed and revised by the National Working Group.
Triage accurately! It helps patients receive the care and measures your acuity and volume against other facilities with reliability. The CTAS is used in many countries around the world for setting patient priority.
The triage level assigned using the CTAS criteria is a mandatory data element to be used in all Canadian Hospital Emergency Departments for reporting to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).
Training in the use of the CTAS in the clinical context is recommended before using this application to assist in clinical decision-making.


The concept of divine Will flowing through humans is an ancient one and has a place in almost all major religions. Thelema ("Will" in Greek) is the first religion, however, to place individual human Will at the center of its system. Around this center are principles that support the apprehension and expression of Will, including tolerance, harmony, liberty, engagement, self-reliance, critical thinking, and personal excellence as embodied in courage, integrity, beneficence, and openness. Further, the highest expression of Will is Love—the universal spiritual force whose goal is creation through union.
Thelema 101 My own basic introduction to Thelema.
Aleisterianism An exploration of the set of ideas, beliefs, and practices derived from the life and works of Aleister Crowley.
Aleister and Me My own relationship with Aleisterianism.
A Guide to the Study of Aleisterian Thelema A detailed guide to the various aspects of Thelema, including brief introductions and suggested readings on Aleister Crowley, antecedents, the Qabalah, organizations, beliefs and the Holy Books, Yoga, and Magick.
Occultism and Apophenia Finding meaningful connections or creating illusory patterns?
Psychography and Liber Legis An essay on texts that have been written by disembodied spirits or beings.
An Analogy A model for Thelemic denominations.
Love and Will Love is the acceptance for the object of desire to be only exactly what it is.
A Transcription of Liber Legis An attempt to transcribe the original manuscript of AL, including errors, corrections, and additions.
A Comment on the Comment The Tunis Comment serves Crowley, not Thelema.
Liber Legis and the !Kung Are they doomed to live a True Will-less life?
Thelema is not a political ideology To reduce Thelema to any political ideology is both to demean it and to fundamentally misunderstand it.
Thelema is larger than Crowley We are not "moving beyond" Crowley, we are integrating him.
My Path (so far) A brief foray into my Thelemic history.
The Book of Ash A brief summation of my Thelemic worldview.
Will A very brief summary of my mystical journey.
One System Among Many An exploration of Crowley's admission that the A∴A∴ is not the only valid system for Thelemic attainment.


text:
Chicago man jumps into Lake Michigan for 365th straight day
Dan O'Conor, the "Great Lake Jumper," shares a "High-5" with one of his well-wishers after his 365th leap into Lake Michigan, Saturday, June 12, 2021, in Chicago's Montrose Point. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
Dan O'Conor said he started jumping into the lake at Montrose Harbor on the city's North Side last year to relieve stress.
"It was during the pandemic, it was during the protest, it was during an election year. … So it was somewhere where I could come down here and block all that noise out and kind of be totally present with me in the lake, and find some moments of Zen," said the father of three.
Dan O'Conor, the "Great Lake Jumper," reacts after making his 365th leap into Lake Michigan, Saturday, June 12, 2021, in Chicago's Montrose Point. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
He continued jumping into the lake through the fall before the hard part: Hacking a hole in the ice on the frozen lake that was big enough for him to jump through during the winter. He said when he got home after one such jump, he found about 20 scrapes and cuts on his body.
He was encouraged by the response he got for his undertaking.
Dan O'Conor, the "Great Lake Jumper," makes his way through a tunnel for his 365th leap into Lake Michigan, Saturday, June 12, 2021, in Chicago's Montrose Point. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
"People started asking me what this was benefiting and how they could support — and when I say people, I'm talking strangers online, you know. When I started posting the videos on Twitter and Instagram … I got more wind in my sails there because people started commenting like, 'This makes my day, it's nice to see this,'" he said.
Dan O'Conor, the "Great Lake Jumper," makes his 365th leap into Lake Michigan, Saturday, June 12, 2021, in Chicago's Montrose Point. (AP Photo/Shafkat Anowar)
Saturday was special because it was the culmination of doing it for a full year.
"I just wanted to celebrate just that drive to dive for 365," O'Conor said.
Seahawks' Russell Wilson speaks out for first time on trade rumors: 'I've always wanted to play here'
GPD Win 3 maker leaks customer emails in another major blunder

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Balance your ph levels with these wonderful foods in your diet and say good-bye to low energy, poor digestion, extra pounds, aches and pains, and diseases.
Instead, find renewed vigor, better over-all health, mental clarity, and a leaner body.
This entry was posted in Easy All Natural Fixes, For Better Health, Pain Relief, Weight Loss and tagged alkaline foods, avocado, broccoli, celery, cucumbers, kale, mental clarity, Pain Relief, peppers, ph balance, spinach, wellness. Bookmark the permalink.


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Driver In Fatal Drunk Driving Crash Ordered To Pay $37K
Filed Under:Crash, Drunk Driving, Judge, Paul Wickenhauser, Prison, Restitution, Sentence, Willmar
(credit: Kandiyohi County)
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A Cokato man has been ordered to pay more than $37,000 after drunkenly causing a car crash that killed three generations of a family last year in Kandiyohi County.
Paul Wickenhauser was previously sentenced to serve 67 months in prison – about 5 1/2 years – after pleading guilty to three counts of criminal vehicular homicide. A judge ordered him to pay restitution in the amount of $37,366.96 to the surviving family members on Dec. 10.
The victims' families helped agree upon the length of the sentence, which occurred Aug. 9.
According to the complaint, Wickenhauser, who was 21 at the time of the August 2012 incident, had drank "five 12 oz. beers" before his vehicle crossed the centerline of Highway 12, east of Willmar, and crashed head-on with another car.
Michelle Hoffman, 40, her 8-year-old daughter Julia and her mother-in-law, 68-year-old Marta Stoffers, died. Hoffman's 5-year-old son Jason was seriously injured, after the vehicle went into the ditch and caught on fire.
Police said there was a broken alcohol container on the roadway, and a bottle of rum in the cab of Wickenhauser's pickup. A cooler with a case of beer in the cargo area of the pickup was also found by police, and Wickenhauser vomited several times in front of police after the crash, according to the complaint.
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The exchange of goods from the "Old World" to the "New World" that included diseases, wiped out a large chunk of the Native American populations.
Person who exchanged their labor for passage to the New World. Usually worked for about 7 years.
Religious group from England that wanted to "purify" the Church of England. Colonized Massachusetts (Boston). Responsible for the Salem Witch Trials.
Economic system used by England to grow rich off colonial trade. Colonies sent raw materials to England and were forced to purchase manufactured good from England.
The first agreement for self-government in America. It was signed by the 41 men on the Mayflower and set up a government for the Plymouth colony in 1620.
First constitution in the colonies drafted that stated a government's authority rests upon the consent of the governed and expressed the will of the majority.
1619. First elected legilative assembly in the New World established in the Colony of Virginia. Served as an early model of elected government in the New World.
A Puritan woman who was well learned that disagreed with the Puritan Church in Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her actions resulted in her banishment from the colony, and later took part in the formation of Rhode Island. She displayed the importance of questioning authority.
New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. It had fertile soil moderate winters warm summers and a good growing season and economy was based on farming "Breadbasket"
Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia. Warm climate and rich soil = agriculture. Large plantations of tobacco, rice, and indigo. African slaves arrived in VA in 1619.
England's law-making body and the colonies model for representative governement.
Helped found and govern Jamestown. His leadership and strict discipline helped the Virginia colony get through the difficult first winter.
A dissenter, Roger Williams clashed with Massachusetts Puritans over the issue of separation of church and state. After being banished from Massachusetts in 1636, he traveled south, where he founded the colony of Rhode Island, which granted full religious freedom to its inhabitants.


Collect an enchanting set of 99¢ books for your Valentine's delight 😉 from Jesi Lea Ryan, Clare London, Dev Bentham and me. I've been eager to try writing a paranormal rom-com, and this was the perfect venue. I love what I came up with! The Bad Valentine collection is currently available for preorder, and it … Continue reading Collect them all!


The AMY Project eOne Film Program is an annual program established in 2015. The program teaches participants the basics of on-camera acting using materials from current film and television projects. Once these basics have been established, participants will adapt their own writing into on-camera scenes, using the camera as a tool to aid them in discovering and developing the emotional truth and subtlety of their own writing. Participants also engage in film screenings and talkback with AMY artists about gender and representation in movies.
In 2017, the AMY eOne Film Program linked up with the AMY Theatre Creation Program to generate video and projections that were used as part of the AMY Project's 2017 production, Almeida (the Glorious). The projections were designed by 2017 Film Program assistant director and AMY alumnus Jamie Milay.
The AMY Project's programming is for young women and gender-non-conforming/non-binary youth ages 14-22 in Toronto. We welcome applicants of all abilities and all cultural backgrounds, we welcome queer and trans youth, we welcome those with little or no previous experience in the arts, we welcome YOU!
The program is FREE. We provide participants with TTC tickets/tokens for travel, as well as snacks at each session. The program will be held at Jumblies Theatre's The Ground Floor studio at Fort York Boulevard and Bathurst, which is a physically accessible venue. If there's something else you need for this program to be accessible to you, send an email to nikki@theamyproject.com!
Nicole Stamp is a Toronto Arts Award-winning actor, television host, and director.
Her screen credits include Orphan Black, Carmilla, The Code, Degrassi, The Next Step, The Ron James Show, and Remedy. Nicole also hosted and directed 6 seasons of Reach For The Top and 6 seasons of TVOKids, where segments she hosted won 2 Gemini Awards among 6 nominations; and she has covered the Toronto Film Festival as the Red Carpet Host for Alliance Films and Tribute Media. Nicole has lent her voice to animated characters on Teletoon's Ridonculous Race, Disney's Fangbone! and CBC's Razzberry Jazzberry Jam, and her stage credits include critically-acclaimed work in The Mofo With The Hat, Avenue Q, The Dream in High Park, two years improvising with Second City's Canadian National Touring Company, and directing 30 new Canadian plays, including her own solo show, BETTER PARTS, which has played to critical acclaim in Canada, the US, and England. Nicole has taught at University of Toronto, Sheridan College, Robert Morris University, and The Banff Centre, among others. She has been an AMY Project Mentor since AMY's very first year, and she is committed to using the performing arts to nurture communication skills and self-esteem in outstanding young people.
This program is generously sponsored by Entertainment One, with additional support from Jumblies Theatre. The AMY Project is grateful to all of the supporters who make our programming possible.


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NikaSalttsDIRTYLOVERxxxAnnyAuroraLiannaRivers .ExquisiteMovesTereniyaZefirInChocolateShiniingstarr .MillenialBABYRosseMillerrMelissaShyKingFoot .ShiniingstarrKateSweettPierreimperiaTenderKimberly .SharonLust1HarlleyDiamondPierreimperiaMarilynRouge .artmaaxxJackAndToygirlNikaSaltPetitMilfy2 .JaffarExoticLiaDollAshleyHazeCamMillenialBABY .ExquisiteMovesAlekMillsNikaSaltLuxuryOLIVIA .MickeySkyJaffarExoticLovelyLexi4ULiannaRivers .TenderKimberlyJackAndToygirlLuxuryOLIVIAzsomoka .KateSweettRosseMillerrSkarlettHot1StunningAlin .
a0AdorableArtiUrsullahExquisiteYolandaLiaDoll .JadeBeeLikeAlluringAnnexxcristalmaneaterLadyLikeLife .ExquisiteYolandaLadyLikeLifeSusanHollandcristalmaneater .PicassoStyleThreeSexHardLatiJackAndToygirlShiniingstarr .KarynMoonSexCommanderXjboyjn1993chrystinne .SandyWhiteXRosseMillerrAnnyAuroraAdrianStark .UrsullahSexCommanderXAshleyHazeCamMAXpleasureBOY .kassandramillerPetitMilfy2SusanHollanda0AdorableArti .AlluringAnnexxa0AdorableArtiChristianGPetitMilfy2 .jboyjn1993PetitMilfy2PhoebeGrandHotGirlRita .RaynaKayAlluringAnnexxSweetDanielleVPoppyShy .


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Q: KVM Virtual GPU passthrough to real gpu multiple monitors I have a tesla m40 passed to windows 10 and another GPU that I wanted to use as a display output for the tesla m40 but if I pass it directly to windows it doesn't use the m40 for any application and the build where you can select the GPU have the certificates that are expired.
I wanted to do something similar to looking glass, but with a dual monitor, like having a virtual display driver that creates 2 screens on windows, but in reality, it's the other GPU (Radeon HD 6670/7670) so all the GPU computation are done with the tesla m40 but I can have a double screen for windows.
the Radeon is hooked up to 2 screens, I could try to fake it for windows but I don't have any experience with the windows display drivers.
The problem with looking glass is that i can't find a way to create another virtual display.
The best could be that windows sees a virtualgpu while kvm uses the real one. it's like spoofing the capabilities of the gpu
Do you have any idea how can i achieve this?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
require 'test_helper'
require 'models'

class OneAssociationTest < Test::Unit::TestCase
  include MongoMapper::Plugins::Associations

  context "type_key_name" do
    should "be _type" do
      OneAssociation.new(:foo).type_key_name.should == '_type'
    end
  end

  context "embeddable?" do
    should "be true if class is embeddable" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:media)
      base.embeddable?.should be_true
    end

    should "be false if class is not embeddable" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:project)
      base.embeddable?.should be_false
    end
  end

  context "proxy_class" do
    should "be OneProxy for one" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:status)
      base.proxy_class.should == OneProxy
    end

    should "be OneAsProxy for one with :as option" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:message, :as => :messagable)
      base.proxy_class.should == OneAsProxy
    end

    should "be OneEmbeddedProxy for one embedded" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:media)
      base.proxy_class.should == OneEmbeddedProxy
    end

    should "be OneEmbeddedPolymorphicProxy for polymorphic one embedded" do
      base = OneAssociation.new(:media, :polymorphic => true)
      base.proxy_class.should == OneEmbeddedPolymorphicProxy
    end
  end

end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


OUT OF STOCK: Sorry, we are currently sold out of the 'Twin Wedding Bells Heart Soap Favor Box*'. If you have further questions, please call our customer loyalty team at 1-800-793-3924.
Celebrate the beginning of a new life together with this beautifully decorated heart soap favor box. Each box is adorned with your color choice of satin ribbon, a metallic net, and 2 adorable wedding bells (available in gold or silver) to symbolize the union of the bride and groom.
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The 2-in-1 wedding bells heart soap favor is a great treat because of its dual purposes. It's a great idea to utilize the lovely decorated favor box to adorn tabletops at your wedding reception. Stack a couple of the boxes together in a pyramid fashion and observe friends and guests marvel at the beauty you've created. Coordinate the main colors at your event by choosing a matching ribbon color.
Make a lasting impression at your event by adding our personalized tags with the couple's names and event date.


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Ali Siddiq (Special Event)
Select Show: Select Wednesday, Apr 8, 2020 8:00 PM Thursday, Apr 9, 2020 8:00 PM Friday, Apr 10, 2020 8:00 PM Friday, Apr 10, 2020 10:15 PM
Ali headlines multiple comedy clubs around the US and comedy festivals around the world proving his ability to engage audiences of every demographic while leaving them laughing hysterically.
Recently, he attended the world famous 'Just For Laughs' Comedy Festival in Montreal for the first time where he completed a string of shows as a headliner; a prestigious accomplishment. He has also been a headlining act on
The Tom Joyner Foundation Cruise four times and counting. During The New York Comedy Festival, Siddiq was named winner of Comedy Central's "Up Next" competition, where he earned a spot on Comedy Central Stand-up Series: The Half Hour being named their 'fan favorite'. Ali recorded an album with Comedy Central called
"Damaged Goods", and has also been an on air talent for The Foxxhole on Sirius XM since 2011.
Ali has appeared on BET's One Mic Stand, Bill Bellamy's Ladies Night Out Tour on HBO, and the season finale of HBO's Def Comedy Jam. Being no stranger to television, Ali Siddiq has made appearances on Showtime, HBO, BET, AXS, Comedy Central's critically acclaimed storytelling show "This is Not Happening", and also shared his perspective of social and political issues on TV One's Washington Watch with host Roland Martin.
He released his hour special "It's Bigger than These Bars" on Comedy Central in February 2018.


Enter for a chance to win tickets to see The LEGO® Movie 2™ in theaters, LEGO® E-Gift cards, and brick sets with Chiquita Banana!
To play, you'll need to enter either one of these free codes 665317 or 822341 and complete a short puzzle.
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The Business Finance Loan Program provides gap financing assistance to the owners of expanding small and medium enterprises that are unable to meet the terms of traditional banks. The program provides loans ranging from $25,000 - $500,000.
The Loan Applicant Screening Tool allows business owners to determine if they are eligible to apply.


Last Words: Deal 3 damage to all enemy followers.
I am Balor. To behold my eyes is to face calamity most dire!
With these eyes I'll transform this battlefield into a hell on earth! Those who face me will shed tears of blood until they perish!


PORTLAND, Ore. — Some 50 minutes before tipoff, Paul George walked onto the floor at the Moda Center on Sunday with black tape canvasing both shoulders and picked up two basketballs. As is his pregame routine, standing on the baseline, he pounded both balls into the floor, shifting them between hands. He moved up, dribbling up to the 3-point line and back, and then flipped one to the side. He turned, looking at the basket, and took a 15-footer.
It was, apparently, the first time George had shot a basketball in five days. Prior to Game 1, the last shot he took was the game winner against the Houston Rockets on April 9. He entered Sunday's game officially listed as questionable because of right shoulder soreness, but there was never really any question if he would play or not. He said as much after the team's practice on Friday, noting it's the playoffs: You play through pain.
It wasn't a physical issue, though, he said.
If there's something to be hopeful from for the Thunder, though, it's that George might have started to catch a rhythm in the fourth quarter. He hit 2 of 4 from deep in the fourth, including one that cut Portland's lead to one with 2:44 left. Lillard answered it straightaway with his own 31-foot missile from distance, and that was the prevailing theme of Game 1: The Trail Blazers made shots when they needed to; the Thunder didn't.
And so much of that falls to George. The Thunder have other quality pieces and are at their best when there's balance, but George is the fulcrum of their offense. Russell Westbrook is the engine, George is the accelerator. It's no secret the Thunder aren't a great shooting team, but George can single-handedly elevate them to being one. Westbrook was relentless and admirably stubborn in the way he hunted shots for George on Sunday, and at some point, the Thunder have to believe they will fall.
There were moments when it felt like Westbrook might click over into fine-I'll-just-do-it-myself mode, but he largely resisted. He took two shots in the fourth quarter, one from 3. A criticism of Westbrook is his tendency to go rogue, especially when things start to go sideways. This season, he has shown a new conviction to sticking with it and trusting open teammates even when they aren't making shots. But Westbrook can't set up a teammate and make the shot for him, too.
George's shoulder issues have played a part in the Thunder's second half drop-off, with him first hurting his right shoulder on Feb. 26 against the Nuggets. He missed three games and then returned only to hurt his left shoulder a few days later. With him needing some time to rediscover his rhythm then, the Thunder struggled. He came around, and so did OKC.
George said after the game the soreness had relented and, physically, everything was "good" during the game. He has acknowledged before that one hit in the wrong spot can cause a setback, but he's not feeling any problems with his mechanics or anything.
It's all about settling back in and finding his shot. Because in so many ways, the Thunder's season rests on Paul George's shoulders.


There's something about springtime with blooming flowers and nature awakening after a winter season that can make us want to spruce up our homes. Or maybe even make a move to a new dream home in a community with amenities aplenty and energy efficient construction. Our Tampa Bay-area, award-winning Waterset community helps those new home buying fence sitters decide that now is the time to move.
Read the full article, "5 Signs It May Be Time to Move" on Waterset By Newland.


Internal medicine deals with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases that affect adults. It's not the same as family medicine, which is often the assumption.
Dragon® Medical Practice Edition 4 and Dragon® Medical One understand this important difference and the variations in medical terminology specific to internal medicine. From wellness education on women's health and substance abuse, to the treatment of common problems of the eyes, ears, skin, and reproductive organs, Dragon Medical recognizes the unique language of internists. With the right support, your Dragon Medical speech recognition profits can be aligned with the full scope of internal medicine subspecialties, which include allergy and immunology, cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, hepatology, geriatrics, hematology, infectious disease, nephrology, oncology, pulmonology, and rheumatology.
Dragon Medical speech recognition knows the differences between internal medicine and family medicine. Subspecialty vocabularies allow internists to speak in their own words when documenting notes on the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of adult health issues and diseases.
When it comes to speech recognition, Dragon Medical One and Dragon Medical Practice Edition 4 set the standard for progressive technology with intuitive capabilities. Dragon Medical technology is more than 99% accurate, allowing physicians to create patient records three times faster than typing. The software learns unique pronunciations, registers regional accents, and is programmed for specific dictation preferences that produce transcribed documents more quickly and accurately with each use. More and more internal medicine physicians are adding Dragon Medical Speech Recognition to their practice and realizing the tremendous ROI it provides in terms of time and money saved, as well as increased reimbursements and higher productivity overall. Give your business a boost by reaching out to the specialty physician market today.


So what is wattage? Put simply, wattage is a measurement of the amount of work electricity is doing. It is used to quantify the energy used or needed for an electronic device to function. Now lets look at a few examples to help explain wattage.
Many times I have seen posts on the forums that start like "My new charger says it can do 10A but it only seems to be charging at 3A ..." or "I can charge my 3s pack at 4A but when I put on a 6s pack, it won't go any higher that 2.2A ...". The simple answer is that you have to take into account the maximum wattage.
Many times this limitation is due to the maximum wattage of your charger. Many smaller chargers are limited to 50W or 80W. I know that number has no basis in reality to most, so below is how to understand how it effects your charging.
How do we use it? As it turns out I learn best by example so here comes some examples.
Say you want to charge a 2200mAh 3s pack at 1C. How many watts does that require? We know the voltage of the battery and we know that C for the pack is 2.2A, so that makes the 1C charge rate 2.2A. Now we plug them in.
So the charger will be outputting at most 27.7W. We say most because the voltage of the battery is changing the whole charge cycle. It will likely start in the mid 11V range and will finish at 12.6V. So in order to calculate the max wattage needed, we use the max voltage involved.
Now lets look at what it would take to charge a big pack quickly, a 5000mAh 6s pack at 2C. The charger will need to be set to 25.2V (6s) and 10A.
As you can see it takes nearly 10 times the wattage to charge this pack than the first example pack.
Now we plug in numbers. Lets start with a 3s pack. We will use the maximum voltage for 3s.
Now for a 6s pack.
As you can see, there is a reason new chargers have more than 50W of output. With the average user charging 6s lipos, some as large as 5800mAh, more wattage is needed to allow the packs to be charged in a reasonable amount of time.
A common question on the forums from is "How can I charge my battery at 20A if my wall outlet is only rated at 15A?" Well the simple answer is that you can not compare amps, you have to compare watts.
Now lets compare that to a charger charging a 6s lipo at 20A.
Even charging at this high rate on a relatively large lipo, we see it is using a less than 1/3 of what the wall outlet is capable of outputting. There are of course other considerations such as efficiency losses but even with those calculated in, it is very apparent that the standard wall outlet is capable of powering any normal charging needs.
Wattage plays a crucial role in charging. Don't forget to take it into account as you choose chargers, choose power supplies and even plug into the wall.
Now that we know what wattage is and how to calculate it, lets put to work to help choose a charger.
The best way to start is to take a survey of your needs. Figure out what battery sizes you plan on using and how you plan to charge them. Then do some simple math to figure out the how much wattage you would like to have available. Let me use my requirements as an example.
I have 3 sizes of lipos that I use. I have some 800mAh 3s packs for my 250, some 2100mAh 3s packs for my 450 and some 2600mAh 6s packs for my 500. I plan to charge all these packs at up to 3C, so that will need to be taken into account. I like to parallel charge (see Parallel Charging) all my packs, so I need to account for that also. Here is the math I would need to figure out how much output wattage the charger I choose needs to have.
Let me start with the 800mAh packs. The C for these packs is .8A and lets say I plan to charge them at up to 3C.
That will cover the small packs, now lets do the same calculation for the 2100mAh packs.
And now for the biggest packs I use, a 2600mAh 6s pack.
So those simple calculations have shown me that my minimum wattage requirement for what I want to accomplish is just under 200W. Now to take my parallel charging into account. When you place packs in parallel, you are creating a larger logical pack that is the sum of the capacities but retains the cell count of the individual packs. As such we can calculate the wattage require to charge multiple packs by adding the wattage required by the individual packs together.
Let me calculate the wattage required for charging a pair of 2200mAh 3s together at 1C.
Maybe it would be nice to be able to charge the same pair of packs at 3C. What would that take?
Ok now for the big one, what would it take to charge a pair of 2600mAh 6s packs at 1C and 3C?
Now you have probably noticed that all I really needed to do was calculate my maximum wattage by using my highest capacity pack. That is true in my situation but may not always be true. For example a 10s 2500mAh pack charged at 1C requires much more wattage than a 3s 5000mAh pack charged at 1C. This is because wattage is a product of both voltage and amperage. So don't forget to take the pack cell counts into account.
There are literally 100s of different chargers out there. Some are small and some are very powerful. In order for you to decide which will cover your needs, you need to do a little math. The good news is that the math is very simple. Also remember that times change and needs change. So put some thought into both what you need now and also what you might need in the future.


The feed benchmark reports are an estimate of the feeding value of dry peas and faba beans in Western Canada, based on the value of competing feed ingredients in swine rations. Models have been updated to reflect the latest nutrient compositions of feed ingredients, which is done periodically. For the latest benchmark values for Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba click here.