What We Carry, What We Leave Behind

On mothers, daughters, music, and becoming yourself

I had the privilege of attending Daisy Chain Fields with my daughter last weekend, and something happened to me there.

I knew it while it was happening, although I couldn't have explained it yet at that moment.

I felt it while standing in a field surrounded by tens of thousands of women and girls. I felt it screaming lyrics I'd first screamed alone in my bedroom nearly 30 years ago. I felt it watching my daughter move through the crowd with her head held higher than I'd seen it in a long time. I felt it when music brought memories of my mother rushing back so vividly that grief and joy became almost impossible to distinguish from one another.

But it wasn't until the next morning that I understood the size of it.

I woke up, sighed, and lay in bed for a while.

Then I cried.

Not because I was sad.

Because somewhere between walking through those bright pink gates and coming home after midnight, I had set something down.

Actually, I'd set down a lot of things.

And for the first time, I was beginning to understand that the question I've been asking lately—

What are you carrying?

—might not only be about the things weighing us down.

Some things we carry because we have to.

Some because someone handed them to us and we never thought to ask whether they belonged to us.

Some because we love them.

Some because they are worth the weight.

And some things we carry for so long that we forget they are there at all.

I didn't know any of that when my daughter and I left home that Saturday.

I thought I was taking my almost-13-year-old daughter to see Olivia Rodrigo.

To understand why it became something much bigger, though, I have to go back to another almost-13-year-old girl.

And a Christmas present.

And a bedroom door.

And the summer she desperately wanted to go somewhere she couldn't.

The Girl Who Wanted to Go

Christmas of 1996, I was in seventh grade, three weeks away from turning 13, and I got my dream present: a boombox with a CD player.

The next day, I took my Christmas money to Tower Records and bought two albums that had come out the year before: Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill and Joan Osborne's Relish. I had been watching MTV religiously, waiting for their videos to come on, but these were different. These were the first CDs I bought with my own money. The first voices I chose entirely for myself.

That night, I put on my red Tweety Bird pajamas, shut my bedroom door, turned on Jagged Little Pill, and let my body move completely and totally free while I screamed every word Alanis sang like an angry adolescent prayer.

That girl was a rebel.

Or at least she desperately wanted to be.

She wanted to change the world. She followed politics and the news and cared about things most of the kids around her didn't seem to care about yet. She made art in her bedroom and wrote poetry. She loved music. She didn't understand yet that she was queer, but she understood the feeling of being different. Of being a square peg everyone seemed determined to fit into a round hole.

And she was learning early that there wasn't just one version of womanhood.

I was and at times still am that girl.

I was the very white daughter of a Mexican immigrant, growing up increasingly aware of colorism and the privilege afforded to me because of the way I looked. Many of the girls around me were joining National Charity League with their mothers while my own mother was still navigating her citizenship. I watched my abuelita, my tias, and my mom break their backs working in hotel laundry rooms and cleaning houses—the same kinds of houses some of my friends lived in and I could only dream about.

Life was hard for the women I knew.

But they were also strong. Proud. Resourceful. They worked for everything they had.

And somewhere between those two realities, and an identity I couldn’t reconcile, female artists became a refuge for me.

I heard things in their voices and lyrics that I couldn't articulate about myself yet. When I listened to them, I felt powerful. Rebellious. Seen.

More than anything, I felt safe inside myself.

Then came the summer of 1997.

The first Lilith Fair.

An entire festival built around women. Women making music. Women taking up space. Women who looked and sounded and believed differently from one another.

Every fiber of my 13-year-old self wanted to be there.

When Lilith Fair came to Irvine Meadows, it was happening practically in my backyard. But I was 13. My parents loved music—they were responsible for much of my deep appreciation for it—but by then they were also overworked and underpaid middle-class parents in Southern California. Music festivals weren't happening. And I don't think either of them understood what this particular one meant to me, or what it represented in the larger world.

So I watched news clips. I collected every magazine I could find that covered it.

And I stayed home.

I remember the particular powerlessness of knowing that something you desperately want to be part of is happening just a few miles away and having absolutely no way to get yourself there.

Nearly three decades later, my own daughter came to me excited about a music festival.

She was almost 13.

Olivia Rodrigo was already something we shared. My daughter had been the original fan; I became one through her—although somewhere during my divorce, "vampire" earned a permanent place on the single-mom playlist.

When she showed me Daisy Chain, I understood almost immediately what I was looking at.

This is her Lilith Fair.

And, maybe, it was mine too.

Here was another generation of women creating a space for women and girls—for the dolls and the gays and the queers—to be loud together at a moment when women's bodies, rights, healthcare, identities, and voices feel increasingly contested.

My daughter was practically vibrating with excitement.

I remembered exactly what that felt like.

We signed up for the presale code right there.

I wanted her to see what women could create when they came together. I wanted her to feel, on a grand scale, what I had felt alone in my bedroom at 13. I wanted her to know that her life, her body, and her voice belonged to her. That she was deserving of her dreams, her healthcare, her happiness, her success—and that no one else gets to define those things for her.

I wanted to give her a moment she could carry with her for the rest of her life.

What I didn't know yet was that I needed one too.

Because the woman who walked into Daisy Chain that day was tired.

She was overwhelmed, but strangely hopeful. Almost nervously so.

She was a single mother running a business and wondering how she was going to provide the future she wanted for her children. A solo parent constantly feeling pulled between two kids who both needed her. A daughter grieving the recent loss of her mother. A divorced woman still healing from a narcissistic marriage. A queer woman trying to live fully as herself while protecting the family she'd fought so hard to hold together.

She was 42 years old.

And somewhere inside her was still a 13-year-old girl in red Tweety Bird pajamas who had desperately wanted to go to Lilith Fair.

I didn't know it when we walked through those gates, but for the next several hours, all of those versions of me would stop feeling like separate identities—separate pieces of myself, separate plates I had to keep spinning.

For once, they would all get to exist at the same time.

I just didn't understand yet what that would mean.

Walking Through the Gates

The festival was less than 15 minutes from our house.

There was something almost absurd about that. Nearly 30 years after Lilith Fair had come to Irvine and felt impossibly out of reach to 13-year-old me, I was driving my own almost-13-year-old daughter down the road to something that already felt connected to it.

Just the two of us.

I'd prepaid for parking, and as soon as we got out of the car, we could see the back of the Marigold Stage. All around us, women and girls were climbing out of cars and spilling toward the entrance together.

It was hot and humid, but somehow no one seemed to care.

Everyone was smiling, skipping, laughing.

The entrance was bright pink against a perfectly blue Southern California sky and the green of the park, and walking toward it felt a little like walking toward magic.

Almost immediately, a group of girls offered to take a picture of Lennon and me. Then I took theirs.

It was such a small interaction, but it would repeat itself in different forms all day: women looking out for women they didn't know.

You could almost feel everyone setting something down as they walked through the gates.

And then there were women everywhere.

Babies strapped to bodies. Little girls covered in beads and glitter. Teenagers. Mothers and daughters. Sisters. Groups of friends. Older women who had lived through generations of the very fights the younger women around them were only beginning to understand.

Women of every race. Queer women. Trans people. Queer couples openly loving each other. People wearing whatever made them feel most like themselves.

There didn't seem to be one correct way to perform womanhood there.

There were no rules about what celebrating women and girls was supposed to look like.

You could just...be.

And you could feel that women hadn't simply been invited into the space. The space had been built with us in mind.

Women were working everywhere. Women were volunteering. Women's voices were already coming from the stages as we walked in.

It didn't feel like we'd entered a space designed for men where women had been given permission to participate.

It felt like ours.

And beside me, my daughter was practically electric.

She had planned her outfit for weeks: denim jorts, yellow Onitsuka Tigers, daisies in her hair, and a T-shirt that read:

HATING POP MUSIC DOESN'T MAKE YOU DEEP.

She bounced into the festival.

There really isn't another word for it.

She was giddy and confident and completely herself.

Throughout the day, I would watch her stand a few feet in front of me at the stages, independently taking everything in, singing her heart out. And everywhere we went, women complimented that damn shirt.

"I love your shirt!"

"Oh my God, your shirt!"

Every time, she lit up.

And I swear her head lifted a little higher.

I watched my daughter embrace her version of womanhood while thousands of women around her essentially said:

Yes. That. Keep going.

What a gift.

And it wasn't only the music.

There were organizations devoted to women's health and rights. There was art created by women. There were opportunities for girls like mine to learn that participating in the world doesn't begin someday when they're older.

At one point, I watched my 13-year-old write "fuck Trump" and "chinga la migra" on a wall.

And the thing that struck me wasn't the profanity.

It was that she knew what she was saying.

She understood why she was saying it.

She already understood that she had a voice, that her rights mattered, and that she was allowed to use one in defense of the other.

I kept thinking about how different I might have been if someone had handed 13-year-old me that kind of space.

Then there was the music.

Doechii was phenomenal, bringing an energy that seemed to move through the entire crowd. Shirley Manson of Garbage stood in front of another generation of girls delivering messages that had reached me when I was their age. Bikini Kill brought the lineage of riot grrrl and rebel girls into a space filled with young women still discovering what they might want to rebel against. Chappell Roan had thousands of people singing and dancing together, surrounded by an almost overwhelming amount of queer joy.

And Olivia Rodrigo—the reason we were all there—kept bringing these women together.

Then she brought out Sarah McLachlan.

They sang "Building a Mystery."

And suddenly I wasn't 42 anymore.

I was 13.

I sang with tears in my eyes alongside tens of thousands of other people, and something inside me cracked open.

Then Alanis Morissette appeared.

This time, what came out of me wasn't tears.

It was a scream.

A sound came from somewhere deep inside my body, from a place I hadn't heard from in a very long time.

I put my hands against my chest almost like a prayer and sang and moved to "Ironic" as though I were back in the bedroom of my childhood apartment, the door shut, Jagged Little Pill playing through my new boombox.

Except this time I wasn't alone.

My daughter was screaming too.

And somehow, even though these weren't her memories, she understood that she was witnessing something enormous for me.

The day kept offering moments like that.

We met people standing in lines. We sat on the lawn beside women and queer people we'd never seen before and sang and danced together as though we'd arrived as a group.

At one point I left Lennon to get water and struggled to find my way back through the crowd. Her phone had no service. The women around her noticed, took care of her, handed her one of their phones, and helped her call me.

Strangers.

They didn't know my daughter.

They simply saw a girl who needed help finding her mom and helped her.

Somewhere during all of this, it became clear that the thing happening around us was bigger than a concert.

When Melinda French Gates came onto the stage and announced additional funding that doubled what had been raised for the organizations represented at the festival, something shifted for me.

This wasn't only entertainment.

And it wasn't only my own healing.

There were tens of thousands of people gathered in one place, experiencing joy while simultaneously putting money, attention, and collective power behind women's lives.

We were celebrating.

We were healing.

And we were mobilizing.

Then, at the very end of the night, there was Stevie Nicks.

I have wanted to hear Stevie Nicks sing live since I was a little girl. Somewhere along the way, I'd accepted that it might simply be one of those things I never got to experience.

Then she walked onto that stage.

She and Olivia began singing "Landslide."

And I cried.

I swayed and sang and looked at my daughter beside me while something seemed to move across the entire crowd.

After a day that had been loud and rebellious and joyful and angry and political and queer and unapologetically female, tens of thousands of us seemed to soften together.

For a few minutes, it was just voices.

Women who had been girls.

Girls becoming women.

Mothers standing beside daughters.

Different generations singing the same song.

And then it was over.

How Much of Me Gets to Be Here?

Maybe the strangest thing about spending a day in a place where everyone seemed so free to be themselves was realizing how much of my life I had spent learning to contain myself.

At 13, I didn't really know what queer meant.

I just knew I was different.

Actually, I knew even earlier than that.

I was 11 when I saw Salma Hayek in Desperado, a movie I was definitely too young to be watching, and experienced the deeply confusing realization that I wasn't entirely sure whether I wanted to be Salma Hayek or kiss her.

It wasn't just attraction.

There had always been something about me that didn't seem to stay neatly inside the categories everyone else understood.

Even the way I dressed changed depending on how I felt that day. There was no single expression of femininity that seemed to fit me. As I got older, people began pointing that out.

My mom used to accuse me of wanting to be different.

So I tried to be normal.

Or, more accurately, I studied what everyone around me seemed to consider normal and tried to reproduce it.

But I didn't like the boys all the other girls liked.

I was in love with David Bowie and Tim Curry. I wanted to dance with the Goblin King and Dr. Frank-N-Furter. I wanted to go on a date with Angelina Jolie's character in Hackers and hold Neve Campbell's hand in The Craft.

Whenever I tried to say any of this out loud, the responses were some variation of:

Why?

Ewww.

That's gay.

Why do you try so hard to be different?

Except I didn't have to try to be different at all.

I just was.

Trying to be what everyone else expected me to be?

That was the hard work.

And it was a very heavy thing to carry.

Just before I turned 15, during my freshman year of high school, I tried to tell my mom I was bisexual.

She denied that part of me.

It would take almost 20 years for her to come to terms with it.

Later, when I became a mother myself, there were new reasons to compartmentalize my identity. My daughter's dance studio was conservative, and I was afraid that being open about who I was could somehow be used against her. I didn't want my child singled out or treated differently because she had a queer mom.

So once again, this part of me became something I carefully controlled.

Something I assessed before revealing.

Is it safe here?

Can I say this here?

How much of myself belongs in this room?

It has really only been during the last decade that I've begun reclaiming that part of myself and finding genuine comfort—and pride—in expressing it.

Which is why the queer joy at Daisy Chain affected me so deeply.

Everywhere I looked, young LGBTQIA+ people were simply being.

Dancing.

Kissing their partners.

Holding hands.

Dressing however the hell they wanted.

Loving each other openly.

Taking up space without appearing to ask whether everyone around them had granted permission first.

I couldn't have done that at their age.

And for one entire day, I noticed something extraordinary:

I wasn't assessing the room either.

I didn't hesitate before talking about the queer parts of my life. I didn't edit pronouns or stories or relationships. I didn't calculate whether some piece of myself needed to be put away to make someone else more comfortable.

I was simply queer.

And safe.

And happy.

There was something almost defiant about it.

The self-expression I'd once been taught to experience as something potentially shameful suddenly felt like armor.

Like protest.

Like a declarative statement:

This is me. And I love her.

But queerness wasn't the only part of myself I'd learned to put away.

By the time my marriage ended, there had been a long process of setting myself down piece by piece.

First went the wild, rebellious, fun, girly fashion.

Then the art.

Then the poetry and writing.

Then friends.

Music.

Books.

Magic.

Eventually, even my career.

There was always more work to do and somehow never enough money, no matter how much I worked. So I worked more.

And every time life demanded more from me, I found another piece of myself I could sacrifice to make room for it.

I became quieter.

Smaller.

Less visible.

Eventually I didn't feel particularly intelligent or creative or interesting anymore.

I didn't even feel much like a woman.

I felt functional.

Like a machine that existed to serve.

Motherhood complicated that story because, in many ways, motherhood also saved me.

I was 25 when I became pregnant with my son. My children gave me something worth fighting for when fighting for myself had become much harder.

I knew one thing with absolute certainty:

My fate would not become theirs.

Eventually, though, I realized that protecting them wasn't enough.

If I really wanted to show them that another kind of life was possible, they were going to have to watch me build one.

They needed to see me save myself.

When my marriage ended, I didn't yet understand that I was about to become not simply a single mother but a solo parent—responsible for two other human beings, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

There is a particular weight in knowing that your own survival isn't the only one depending on you.

If you falter, everything falters.

There is very little room for failure.

And that changes the way you move through the world.

Spontaneity becomes logistics. Pleasure gets scheduled after responsibilities. Creativity happens if there's anything left at the end of the day. Even when you deliberately choose something meant to fill your own cup, there is no guarantee you'll have enough energy left to lift it.

Still, after the divorce, pieces of me began coming back.

Books came quickly.

Writing.

Magic.

They became almost declarative acts of taking my life back.

Other things have been slower.

My career is still rebuilding. Friendship after divorce is complicated. Art sometimes feels difficult to access. Fashion is coming back, though, and strangely, every time it does, something else seems to come with it.

And then there are the parts I'm not actually reclaiming at all.

I was so young when my ex and I got together, and we were together for so long, that there are parts of myself I never had the opportunity to discover the first time around.

I'm not finding them again.

I'm meeting them for the first time.

That has been hard and healing and challenging and magical all at once.

And then, just as I was learning how to become this woman, my mother died.

Losing my mom somehow aged me overnight while simultaneously turning me into a little girl who wanted her mommy.

Our mothers are among our earliest definitions of womanhood. Suddenly mine wasn't physically here anymore, and I didn't know exactly how I was supposed to navigate being a woman without her.

But buried somewhere inside that loss was another realization:

Maybe I got to redefine it.

I felt my mom at Daisy Chain.

I thought about how much she would have loved it. If she'd still been alive, I could picture her there with Lennon and me—three generations experiencing it together.

For a moment, I missed her terribly.

I let the grief move through me.

And then I did something grief is slowly teaching me how to do.

I celebrated her by enjoying myself.

Maybe that's why I don't think Daisy Chain brought me back to life.

I was already coming back.

The divorce had begun that process. Every book I picked up, every word I wrote, every piece of magic I welcomed back, every outfit that felt like me, every boundary I established had been another small act of turning the volume up.

I already knew those parts of me weren't dead.

They had simply gone quiet.

My anger.

My rebellion.

My passion for causes.

My belief that I could set the world on fire.

My freedom.

My confidence.

My femininity and my softness.

My art.

My creativity.

My sensuality.

My desire to build something bigger than myself.

They were all still there.

Daisy Chain wasn't the moment I discovered them.

It was the moment I stopped asking them to whisper.

For one day, surrounded by tens of thousands of women and girls doing exactly the same thing, the last pieces of containment began to unravel.

And I let them.

The Weight of Becoming and Unbecoming

I've been thinking a lot lately about what we carry.

Some of what I've carried over the last several years has been obvious.

The weight of my children's futures.

The uncertainty of my own.

The responsibility that comes with knowing you are the only person there is to count on.

The fear.

How am I going to do this?

What happens in the long run?

Are we all going to be okay?

And anger.

So much anger.

Anger that this was how my story played out after I had worked so hard to build something different.

Anger that someone could leave me to raise these children on my own.

Anger at the universe for taking my mom when I still needed her so fucking much.

There has been the weight of survival and the weight of trauma. The weight of healing while still having to function. The weight of starting over while continuing to do all the things that couldn't simply be abandoned while I figured myself out.

The weight of becoming.

The weight of unbecoming.

The weight of needing and wanting and not always knowing how, where, or when I was supposed to fill those cups.

Because one of the cruelest things about having your world fall apart is discovering that most of the world doesn't stop while it happens.

I still had to be a mom while I was going through my divorce.

I still had to care for my mother while parts of my own life were crumbling.

I still had to work.

I still had to show up at dance-parent meetings.

Dinner still had to get on the table.

Rides still had to be given.

Bills still had to be paid.

There is no automatic pause button that appears when your life becomes too heavy to carry.

So you carry it.

Some of that weight, I knew was there.

But there were other things I didn't understand were heavy until Daisy Chain gave me permission to set them down.

The constant calculation around my queerness.

The instinct to protect it.

The armor I had built around my softness and femininity because somewhere along the way I'd learned that both could be mistaken for vulnerability.

I had carried those things for so long that they didn't even register as weight anymore.

Then I walked into a place where, for a few hours, I didn't need them.

And suddenly I understood how heavy they'd been.

Maybe that's part of why the joy felt so enormous.

I cried throughout that day.

Not because I was sad.

I cried while singing. I cried while dancing. I cried because something I had been holding tightly inside my body finally had somewhere to go.

They were tears of pure joy, but also of relief.

And I was ready for that joy.

Starting my life over had already forced me to grieve the life I thought I would have and the future I had spent years planning.

Then I spent nearly two years watching my mother live with stage IV pancreatic cancer.

My mom was in pain. She was uncomfortable. She knew what was happening to her.

And somehow, she still found joy.

Watching her do that fundamentally changed the way I understand it.

I don't think of joy anymore as something that arrives once everything is okay.

Joy is something I look for while things are not okay.

I've learned to notice the micro-moments.

Something beautiful.

A song.

A laugh.

A tiny experience that makes my body feel good for ten seconds.

None of them erase grief.

But they accumulate.

They fill something.

And after watching my mom find joy while dying, I don't want to postpone mine until I've earned some imaginary version of a life where nothing hurts.

Maybe that's also why I don't feel particularly interested anymore in the rules about what 42 is supposed to look like.

Strangely, I felt older in my twenties and thirties than I do now.

For years, "too old" was one of the narratives that kept me small.

Too old for that.

Too responsible for this.

That part of your life is over.

Be realistic.

Settle down.

Somewhere in completely dismantling and rebuilding my life, I stopped believing it.

At 42, I have very few expectations left about what my life is supposed to look like other than my own.

And if I occasionally feel too far removed from something I want, I've learned to pay attention to the wanting.

Because wanting it means some part of me still believes I can go after it.

That's what was so beautiful about Daisy Chain.

I didn't feel young.

I felt like myself.

Totally and wholly myself, inside my own body.

And there is an important difference.

I don't want to become the girl I was at 13 again.

I don't need her back.

She carried us a long way.

She carried rebellion and curiosity and hope. She carried the belief that the world could be changed. She carried creativity and softness and the stubborn certainty that beauty was worth looking for.

She did her job.

I don't need to go backward and become her again.

I want to bring her with me.

I want to integrate her into the woman I've become and introduce her to all the versions of us we haven't met yet.

Because maybe that's the part I've been getting wrong when I think about what life has taken from me.

Marriage didn't take my hope.

Divorce didn't take my ability to find beauty everywhere.

Motherhood didn't take my capacity to want.

Trauma didn't take my kindness.

Grief didn't take the way I love.

Age didn't take my strength.

Those things survived.

I survived.

Not unchanged.

Not returned to some earlier version of myself.

Integrated.

Still changing.

Still discovering.

Still wanting.

Still becoming.

I thought I had lost all the versions of myself that existed before my divorce.

What I realized that weekend was that they had been inside me all along, waiting for me to call on them.

Not because I'm supposed to become them again.

Because they're mine. And,

I am not yet done becoming myself.

The Girls We Were, the Women We Raise

I can't remember the last time I saw my daughter walk with her head that high.

I'm not sure it dropped once the entire day.

Her stride was confident. She smiled constantly. There was something almost electric about her, like all the excitement she'd carried into the festival had settled into her body as certainty.

She looked alive.

She looked hopeful.

And watching her, I couldn't help thinking about the girl I had been at almost exactly the same age.

There were things my daughter moved through that day as completely ordinary that would have felt revolutionary to me at 13.

Queerness is normal to her.

Queer relationships are normal to her.

She doesn't approach her identity as something she needs to explain or defend before she's even had the chance to understand it herself. And when she imagines her future, her desires don't automatically center men or marriage or children in the way girls of my generation were so often taught ours should.

Her desires center her.

I cannot overstate how extraordinary that is to me.

She also has a confidence in her own voice that I didn't possess at her age. If one of her friends crosses a boundary, she'll say so. If someone says something about women, LGBTQIA+ people, or history that she knows is wrong, she'll challenge them.

She doesn't always make herself more palatable before speaking.

She believes she is allowed to have an opinion.

She believes she is allowed to have boundaries.

She believes herself worthy of defending.

God, I wish I'd had that at 13.

But strangely, watching her didn't make me sad for the girl I had been.

It made me proud of her.

Because she didn't have what my daughter has.

She didn't have the language.

She didn't have the representation.

She didn't have thousands of women surrounding her and telling her that her voice mattered.

And somehow, she still found a way to be as much of a rebel girl as she could.

I found myself looking backward at her with more tenderness than grief.

Almost smiling at her.

You did pretty fucking well with what you had.

And now, somehow, I got to give my daughter more.

There were moments that day when that realization made me cry.

I got to give her this.

Not simply a festival ticket.

I got to stand beside her while she experienced a space that told her she belonged exactly as she was. I got to watch thousands of people reinforce things I have spent her entire life trying to teach her—that she matters, that her voice matters, that her body belongs to her, that her dreams are worthy, that she doesn't have to organize her life around anyone else's expectations of what a girl or woman should be.

I wanted so much more for her than I had.

I want so much more for all our girls than my generation of women had.

And there she was.

Having some of it.

Demanding some of it.

Already knowing she deserves it.

Fuck, that's a moment.

But something else was happening between us that day.

I am always her mother.

There is no place I go where I stop being her mother, and I don't want there to be.

But I think she saw me differently at Daisy Chain.

She saw me without some of the stress she is accustomed to seeing me carry.

She saw versions of me she had mostly heard about in stories.

She watched me dance.

She watched me sing.

She heard me scream when Alanis walked onto that stage.

She saw me cry because Sarah McLachlan was singing a song that meant something to me long before she existed.

She saw the queer woman.

The rebel girl.

The music lover.

The woman who existed before she became someone's mother.

Maybe, for the first time, she got to see that those aren't separate people.

Those are some of the pieces that made me the mother I am.

And because I wasn't hiding them, something shifted between us.

We had fun differently.

For a few hours, I wasn't only introducing my daughter to something.

She was meeting me there too.

And all day, there was another woman with us.

My mom.

I thought about her throughout the festival.

I thought about how much she would have loved it and how, if she were still alive, she would have been there with us.

Three generations.

I wanted to tell her everything.

In some ways, I did.

I still talk to my mom all the time. I still feel her around me. And when memories of her surfaced that day, I let them.

Some made me cry.

But they also made me smile.

I've sung Sarah McLachlan's "Angel" with my mom.

I've danced to Stevie Nicks with her in the kitchen of our Laguna Niguel apartment.

Those memories hurt now because she is gone.

But I refuse to let the fact that they hurt make me afraid of them.

I'm beginning to understand that grief can be beautiful too.

Grief can bring you to tears while simultaneously reminding you of laughter.

It can break your heart open and fill it with love at exactly the same time.

It can make someone's absence enormous while somehow making their presence undeniable.

She was there.

Not in a way I need to prove or explain.

She was there in me.

She was there in the music.

She was there in the woman I had become and the mother I had learned to be.

And looking at my daughter, I understood something else.

My mother had fought for this moment too.

She had been an immigrant mother navigating citizenship while raising a daughter who challenged her, confused her, and sometimes pushed against everything she understood. She didn't always get it right. There were parts of me it took her years to accept.

But she fought.

And I fought.

And now my daughter gets to begin somewhere further down the road than either of us did.

That doesn't mean the road ahead of her is easy.

In some ways, that scares the hell out of me.

My daughter is inheriting a world where she gets to be more fully herself right out of the gate. She has language and representation I didn't have. She is surrounded by millions of people willing to fight loudly for women, minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQIA+ people.

But the fact that we're still fighting is impossible to ignore.

And right now, some of those fights feel more urgent than they have in my lifetime.

I look at my daughter and feel enormous hope for the woman she is becoming.

And I am terrified of the world asking her to fight battles I desperately wish we'd already won.

I wish I could give her a world where our daughters don't have to fight for their bodies.

Their rights.

Their voices.

Their fucking peace.

I can't give her that.

Not yet.

But I can make sure she enters that world knowing she deserves all of those things.

And maybe that's part of what Daisy Chain gave both of us.

Sometimes the things we give our daughters really do become gifts to the girls we used to be.

I brought my daughter to the festival I couldn't attend at her age.

I watched her walk through it with her head held high.

And somewhere inside me, the girl who had watched Lilith Fair from a distance got to see it too.

Not because my daughter was there to heal something in me. That's not her job.

But because sometimes life gives you a full-circle moment so precise that you can't help but recognize it.

I gave my daughter an experience I hoped she would carry with her.

And she unknowingly gave me one too.

When we eventually left, I hoped she carried home hope.

I hoped she carried the belief that she matters simply because she exists.

That she doesn't have to earn her right to take up space.

That she is deserving because she is here.

What I carried home was harder to name.

Because it wasn't entirely about what I picked up that day.

It was about what I didn't pick back up.

Some of what I'd been carrying when I walked through those bright pink gates had been set down somewhere between the music and the dancing and the crying and the thousands of women reminding one another that we belonged there.

And when it was time to leave, I realized some of it didn't serve me anymore.

So I left it there.

I Don't Need Permission Anymore

The next morning, I woke up and sighed.

Not the exhausted kind.

It was more like my body finally understood the enormity of what had happened the day before.

I lay there for a while, smiling and crying, letting the whole thing move through me. And almost immediately, I knew I needed to write about it.

I needed to capture it somehow.

I needed to say:

I went to this thing, and it changed me.

It would take me a little longer to understand exactly how.

Because Daisy Chain hadn't given me something that wasn't already there.

It had unraveled something.

For most of my life, there has been some version of the question:

How much of me is allowed here?

How queer?

How feminine?

How angry?

How soft?

How loud?

How political?

How ambitious?

How strange?

How much space am I allowed to take up before someone decides I am too much?

Somewhere along the way, I stopped needing other people to answer those questions for me.

But I hadn't entirely stopped asking them.

That's what unraveled.

The idea that I still needed permission.

Permission to let all those parts of myself out.

Permission to stop apologizing for them.

Permission to stop containing myself.

I realized that some of what I'd mistaken for restraint was really just another mask.

And I was fucking tired of wearing it.

My softness loosened first.

For years, I had been afraid of allowing too much of it to show because softness can be read as vulnerability, and vulnerability hasn't always felt safe.

But something changed.

Let me be seen as vulnerable, then.

It doesn't change who I am.

And if it changes how someone else sees me?

Fuck them.

They don't get to write my story.

They don't have to sleep in my bed.

Maybe that's part of what it meant to experience my body as mine again.

For one entire day, my body wasn't primarily responsible for accomplishing something.

It wasn't serving.

Working.

Caretaking.

Protecting.

Enduring.

It was dancing.

Screaming.

Crying.

Singing.

Moving.

Feeling.

It was experiencing pleasure and music and joy without needing to justify any of it.

It felt like a cathartic release.

Like setting down things I'd carried for too long.

Like unraveling in the best possible way.

It felt like existing.

It felt like being alive.

And that feeling followed me home.

On my evening walk afterward, I noticed something almost ridiculously small.

My stride felt different.

More like mine.

Less managed. Less masked. Less concerned with presenting my body in whatever way I'd decided the world expected it to move.

There was something declarative about it.

This is how I walk.

This is the space I take up.

Yes, I take up space.

I get to.

My femininity felt loud.

My softness felt loud.

My passion and rebellion felt loud.

But the thing I hadn't expected was clarity.

I'd been in a waiting place for a while.

Starting over does that. Sometimes you're working so hard to rebuild that you can't quite see what you're building toward. You're moving, but the path ahead remains blurry.

Then Sunday came.

And suddenly, I knew.

I knew what my next steps were.

Not everything. I certainly didn't wake up with the rest of my life mapped out.

But the fog had lifted enough for me to see where I wanted to go next.

And I think part of that clarity came from finally allowing myself to feel everything—including my anger.

For too long, I believed anger was something I needed to contain.

Anger is unhealthy.

Don't hold onto anger.

Let it go.

And yes, anger can absolutely become destructive.

But you know what else is destructive?

Swallowing it.

Women are conditioned to swallow anger.

Minorities are conditioned to swallow anger.

Contain it.

Make it prettier.

Make it quieter.

Don't make anyone uncomfortable with it.

And every time we swallow it, it doesn't magically disappear.

It accumulates.

I'm not afraid of my anger anymore.

Anger is information.

It tells me something is happening in my body or my life that needs my attention.

What I do with my anger matters.

But I get to feel it.

I need to feel it.

I need safe places to express it.

And, as it turns out, screaming alongside 45,000 other people isn't a terrible way to get some of it out.

Some of my anger is also fuel now.

Fuel for rebuilding.

Fuel for writing.

Fuel for the work I want to do for women and girls.

Fuel for the things I want to say about single motherhood and the ways we fail women who are carrying families alone.

The rebel girl inside me still knows how to say:

Absolutely fucking not.

But I don't want rebellion without softness anymore.

That's another thing I'm beginning to understand.

Softness isn't the opposite of power.

My softness is power.

It's where my creativity lives.

It's where I find peace.

It's where I can hold space for other people.

And softness doesn't mean there isn't fight in me.

The woman who wants to set the world on fire can be the same woman who wants to hold space for the world to heal.

Strength and softness can occupy the same body.

So can femininity and rebellion.

So can grief and joy.

So can anger and love.

Maybe I don't have to keep choosing between the pieces of myself anymore.

That realization has followed me into my queerness too.

I've been wrestling with how much of myself belongs in the new spaces I'm entering. After eight years at the same dance studio, my daughter is somewhere new now—a much larger studio with many more people.

And that old question had started creeping back in.

How much of me gets to be here?

Daisy Chain answered it.

All of me.

I'm just being me.

I don't want to keep compartmentalizing myself according to who is in the room.

I'm 42 years old.

I'm tired of auditioning for permission to exist.

And the beautiful thing is that I don't actually know exactly who this version of me is going to become.

I'm in my Alice in Wonderland era.

I'm perfectly content to fall down the rabbit holes of myself and see where they lead.

I'm becoming a writer again.

I'm falling in love with myself.

I'm enjoying expressing myself.

I'm enjoying the freedom to go where I want to go and discover what I want when I get there.

And I'm excited that my children get to watch me become her.

Whoever she is.

For once, the undefined part doesn't scare me.

It feels like possibility.

What feels possible now that didn't before?

Me.

I feel possible.

And I want.

God, do I want.

When you spend decades serving other people, you can lose the ability to want.

Not to need.

There are always needs.

Groceries need to be bought. Bills need to be paid. Children need things. Work needs to be done.

But wanting something simply because you want it?

That muscle can atrophy.

I'm exercising it again.

And right now, wanting more feels like an act of rebellion against every message telling me I should simply be grateful for what I have.

I am grateful.

And I want more.

Both can be true.

I am Belle singing in the opening of Beauty and the Beast, forever looking beyond the edges of this provincial life and knowing there has to be something more.

I want more for myself.

More for my future.

More for my children.

More for my family.

More for the world.

More for my life.

I'm allowed to want more.

And more than anything, right now, I just want more.

Which brings me back to that girl in the red Tweety Bird pajamas.

If I could sit beside her now, I wouldn't rescue her.

I wouldn't tell her everything that's going to happen.

I wouldn't warn her about every person who will hurt her or every version of herself she's going to have to fight to recover.

I'd thank her.

I'd thank her for fighting for us.

I'd thank her for standing her ground when she could and hiding when hiding was the only way to keep us safe.

I'd thank her for protecting these pieces of us so well that I could still find them almost 30 years later.

Because she got us here.

She got us to 42.

She got us to the field where I stood beside my daughter and screamed Alanis Morissette lyrics into the Southern California sky.

She got us here, to me writing these words.

And I think if she could see me now—really see me—she'd look at the woman I've become and think:

Damn. That's a badass woman.

And maybe that's the most healing part of all.

I spent so much of my life believing freedom would eventually feel like ease.

Like one day everything would finally become uncomplicated and I would know I had arrived.

I don't think that's what freedom feels like anymore.

My life isn't easy.

I'm still grieving.

I'm still rebuilding.

I'm still raising children.

I'm still figuring out money and work and relationships and identity and what the hell the rest of my life is going to look like.

But I don't need permission anymore to exist.

I am allowed to want more.

My softness is power.

My anger is fuel.

My queerness is beautiful.

My body belongs to me.

I am still becoming something I don't have to define yet.

The woman I am now wants the world.

And for the first time in a very long time, that doesn't feel like too much to ask.

I thought freedom would feel like ease.

Instead, it feels like power.

What Are You Carrying Home?

It was close to 10 p.m. when we started walking out of Daisy Chain.

The sun was long gone, but the humidity hadn't gone anywhere. The Marigold Stage was at the back of the festival grounds, and we'd been close to the stage for the final set, so there was a long walk ahead of us.

I was exhausted.

Lennon was exhausted.

Everyone around us seemed exhausted.

And somehow, we were all still singing.

People laughed as we walked. We talked to strangers about what we were going to eat when we finally escaped the parking lot. Everyone seemed to be moving together in this strange combination of complete physical depletion and absolute joy.

Getting out of the parking lot was a nightmare.

And I didn't care.

I sat there in the dark with my daughter beside me and, for once, didn't feel an urgent need to get anywhere.

I just existed.

I let myself bask in the day we'd just had.

By the time we got home, it was nearly midnight. My teenage son had sweetly stayed awake waiting for us. I hugged him, went to bed, and almost immediately fell asleep.

I knew something had happened to me that day.

I just didn't understand the magnitude of it yet.

That came the next morning.

I woke up with a sigh.

I lay in bed smiling and crying while the day before moved through me, and I knew almost immediately that I needed to write about it.

Because something had shifted.

Not everything.

My mother was still dead.

I was still a solo parent.

There were still bills to pay and children to raise and a business to run and a life to rebuild.

The world outside that field hadn't magically become safer for women or queer people or immigrants or my children.

Nothing about my actual circumstances had become easier overnight.

But I had changed the way I wanted to occupy them.

I wanted to take up space differently.

More intentionally.

More visibly.

I felt compelled to.

And beneath that was something I hadn't expected:

clarity.

I'd been in a waiting place for a while.

I had been rebuilding, certainly. Moving forward. Working. Writing. Parenting. Healing. Trying.

But there were places where I was still holding myself back.

The morning after Daisy Chain, I could see them.

And suddenly, I didn't want to wait anymore.

I was ready to run.

I could almost hear Emmylou Harris singing "Born to Run" somewhere inside me.

For most of my career, I've helped people one at a time. In its own way, I have been trying to change the world that way for years.

One person.

One student.

One parent.

One family.

One life at a time.

And I still believe deeply in that work.

But something in me has started thinking bigger.

Bigger than individual clients.

Bigger than the rooms I've already occupied.

Bigger than the messages I've allowed myself to deliver so far.

There are things I want to say.

There are things I think women and girls need to hear.

There are things I think parents and young people and grieving people and people rebuilding lives need someone to say out loud.

And for the first time in a while, I don't feel like I'm waiting to figure out whether I'm allowed to be the person who says them.

Maybe that shouldn't surprise me.

After all, I come from women who broke chains.

My mother broke chains.

Not all of them.

There were things she couldn't break for me. Things she didn't understand about me. Ways we hurt each other. Parts of myself she struggled to accept.

But she did something perhaps even more important.

She gave me the tools to break the ones she couldn't.

I understand that differently now that she's gone.

I understand more about what it cost her to give my brother and me a life different from the one she'd been handed. I understand the weight she carried so her children could have more, and so someday her grandchildren could have more still.

And throughout my life, she returned to one belief again and again:

One person can make a difference.

One act of kindness matters.

One person choosing to do something differently matters.

Change doesn't become meaningless simply because you can't change everything.

Maybe that's part of what I'm carrying from her now.

And maybe that's part of what I'm trying to hand to my daughter.

Someday Lennon may read this when she's 25.

Or 35.

Maybe even 42.

I hope by then she has flown so high that the world she inhabits looks different from the one I'm trying to prepare her for now.

I hope she knows we made it.

I hope she understands that every success she has ever had—and every one still ahead of her—is celebrated by generations of women who came before her.

And I hope she knows something about the woman who stood behind her at Daisy Chain.

I hope she knows I was in absolute awe of her.

That every time another woman complimented her shirt, I beamed.

That I watched her walk around all day with her head held high and thought, Look at her.

And that when she eventually laid her head in my lap, I looked down at my daughter and somehow saw all the versions of the woman she might someday become.

I loved every one of them.

Before she'd even met them.

I hope she knows that one of the things I am proudest of as a woman is the woman she is becoming.

And I hope, someday, she understands that while she was becoming herself—

her mother was becoming herself too.

Maybe that's what I wish I could tell the girl in the red Tweety Bird pajamas.

Not what happens to her.

I wouldn't tell her about the marriage.

Or the divorce.

Or the people she'll lose.

I wouldn't warn her about the years when she'll make herself smaller or the parts of herself she'll put away.

I think I'd tell her something much simpler.

You do change the world.

Not all of it.

You don't save everyone.

It turns out you were never supposed to.

But you change it one person at a time.

I'd tell her that the rebel heart beating furiously inside her chest will eventually become an integrity she doesn't yet have the language to understand.

I'd tell her that the kindness she sometimes worries makes her weak becomes one of her greatest strengths.

I'd tell her that the strange way she sees the world—the thing that makes her feel so out of place—will someday become part of how she makes a living.

And then I'd thank her.

Because she gave me strength.

My mother gave me a path forward.

And now I hope I am giving my daughter the tools to fly.

Maybe that's what we do.

We carry what the women before us were able to give us.

We set down what never belonged to us.

And then we try to hand the next generation something a little lighter.

I used to think becoming whole would require leaving pieces of myself behind.

The angry parts.

The wounded parts.

The girl I used to be.

The woman I became to survive.

The softness that frightened me.

The grief.

The queerness I'd learned to compartmentalize.

The mother.

The daughter.

The rebel.

The caretaker.

The woman who wants more.

As though becoming whole meant finally deciding which one of them was the real me.

I don't believe that anymore.

Becoming whole means letting all of them belong.

They don't need separate boxes.

They don't need to take turns.

They don't need permission.

They are the integrated whole of my womanhood.

And that has changed the question I've been asking lately.

What are you carrying?

I used to hear that question almost exclusively as one about burden.

What hurts?

What's heavy?

What responsibility are you dragging behind you?

What can you put down?

Those questions still matter.

Some things are too heavy.

Some things were never ours to carry in the first place.

Shame that belongs to someone else.

Expectations we never agreed to.

Definitions of womanhood we didn't write.

Masks we learned to wear because they kept us safe.

Other people's ideas about how loud, queer, angry, soft, ambitious, feminine, strange, old, young, sexual, maternal or much we are allowed to be.

You can leave that here.

I left some of it in that field.

But carrying isn't only burden.

I carry my mother.

I carry the girl in the red Tweety Bird pajamas.

I carry the woman who survived my marriage.

I carry the mother I became because of my children.

I carry grief because I loved.

I carry anger because some things are worth being angry about.

I carry softness because it is part of my strength.

I carry queerness because it is beautiful.

I carry hope because somehow, after everything, the world has never managed to take it from me.

I carry the women who came before me.

And I will carry my children for as long as they need me to.

Not everything we carry needs to be put down.

Sometimes the question is simply whether the thing on our shoulders belongs there.

I went to Daisy Chain carrying the weight of 42 years.

I came home carrying hope and inspiration.

I left behind some masks and expectations that hadn't served me in a very long time.

But now, a few days later, I think I know what I'm really carrying forward.

Desire.

I want.

After years of survival and service and caregiving and grief, I fucking want.

I want more for my children.

I want more for women and girls.

I want more for the people whose voices are being threatened.

I want more from my work.

I want more from the world.

And I want more for myself.

Not because what I have isn't worthy of gratitude.

Because I am still alive.

Because there are still versions of me I haven't met.

Because there are still rabbit holes to fall down and things to create and people to help and places to go and music to scream from the center of my chest.

Because I am not yet done becoming myself.

Nearly 30 years ago, a 13-year-old girl shut her bedroom door, put on Jagged Little Pill, and screamed every word like an angry adolescent prayer.

She needed the door closed to feel that free.

Last weekend, I screamed those songs again.

Only this time, there was no bedroom door.

There were tens of thousands of people around me.

My daughter was beside me.

My mother was with me in all the ways she still is.

And every version of myself I had spent 42 years becoming was there too.

Maybe freedom was never about becoming lighter.

Maybe it was about finally knowing what was mine to carry.

And having the courage to leave the rest behind.

So maybe the question isn't only:

What are you carrying?

Maybe it's also:

What are you ready to leave here?

And underneath everything you've been carrying—

what do you still want?