Carleigh 🥀

Mom of Ziggy Stardust the Western Painted Turtle and Peewee Herman the Shorkie 🐢🧡🐶

[middleclassparty @middle_class_us]

You save for six months and finally get a 1,000 dollar emergency fund.

Then your check engine light comes on.

Or the dog gets sick.

Or two things hit in the same week.

One bad month and you are back to zero plus interest.

People are not bad with money.

The game is rigged to reset them.

[positivity moon @arrtnem]

On paper it is gorgeous. Two toothbrushes in one cup. Tiny socks on the radiator. Someone whose face you know in the dark reaching for you at 3:12 and not leaving. A small person with your eyes and their laugh eating cereal too slowly before school. It sounds like the closest thing to safety we have ever invented.

But a lot of people did not grow up watching love look like that. They grew up watching marriage be a war that never declared itself out loud. 19:40 on a Tuesday, plates not quite slammed, voices just quiet enough for the neighbors not to hear. A father sleeping on the couch for three years. A mother doing the emotional admin for five people and getting a wilted bouquet once a year as a receipt. The child learns quickly that forever can be a threat as easily as it is a promise.

You say mini mes. A lot of people hear smaller witnesses. Witnesses to debt. To screaming in the car park. To one parent disappearing for six months and calling it adjusting. Some bodies carry the memory of being the kid who held the camera and took the Christmas photo where nobody spoke to each other for two days after. They do not crave that house. They crave never putting anyone through it.

There is another layer no one likes talking about because it sounds too practical for a sacred topic. Mortgage rates that bite. Groceries that feel like a test. Friends burning out in two jobs and still wondering if they can afford a dentist, не те що дитину. Bodies that already wake tired. The idea of bringing in a small, breakable person is not just cute to them. It is a spreadsheet with red numbers and a nervous system that shakes.

And then there are the ones who were never told they were allowed to want something for themselves first. To them, choosing no partner and no kids for now is not selfishness. It is the first act of self parenting. It is finally learning to feed the part of them that was always the one doing the caretaking. They are not missing the desire. Sometimes they are surgically removing the compulsion put in them by a culture that treated women as wombs and men as wallets.

Some people hear spouse and feel warmth. Others hear spouse and feel a hand closing over their life. Some people look at a child and feel their chest widen. Others look at their own sleep schedule, their own untreated trauma, their own rage in traffic and think not yet, not like this. That is not nihilism. That is responsibility. The bravest thing some people will ever do is break the chain by not adding another link.

Marriage and children can be the most beautiful thing. They can also be the most efficient way to hide from yourself. It is easy to call it forever if you have never sat with your own loneliness without a witness. It is easy to say mini me if you have not yet met the parts of you that should not be replicated without serious editing. Many people want to arrive to that altar and that nursery with less unprocessed violence in their hands. That takes time. That looks from the outside like drifting.

If you are lucky enough to want it and still be soft when you picture it, hold that gently. Do not turn your hunger into a ruler you hit others with. The world has given plenty of reasons to be afraid of binding contracts and tiny hearts. Climate, war, courts, childhood bedrooms where love was conditional on performance. Not everyone has healed enough to gamble a child on their hope.

Ask people what they want under all the noise. Some will say a partner and kids. Some will say a room, a dog, three good friends and work that feels honest. Some will say I do not know yet, I was never given space to ask. The distance is not as far as it looks. Everyone is hunting the same thing under different packaging. A place where their nervous system can stop scanning the door. A hand that stays. A tomorrow that is not a threat.

You can stand in your dream of spouse and children without needing the whole planet to agree.

[Living with Trauma & Dissociation @RhiaCrewe]

💜 Still grieving 💜
#grief

[Stefan Moore ★ @2StefanMoore]

Grief feels like when you want to go home, but you can’t.

[Libriscent @libriscent]

Nobody talks about the stage of grief where you can't even talk about it to anyone anymore because everyone expects you to be getting over it but it still runs through your mind everyday.

[literally just a ghoulmom @TheGhoulestMom]

I find it funny when ppl say Canada’s health care system is actually worse because ER wait times are long and it takes months to see a specialist. As if ER wait times here are not also 8+ hours and I haven’t been waiting 8 months to see a thyroid specialist.

[lord crunkington III 🇵🇭 @postcrunk]

can't believe millennials had to smoke out of soda cans and apples then blow it all into a toilet paper roll filled with dryer sheets while gen z can just pull out a weed pen and hit it in the middle of target

[໊ @YETABOi]

Kids dont even call you a “doodoo head" no more they just straight up call you a b!tch

[• @WordsCocoon]

mood…

[Sydney @sydneyelainexo]

i don’t want to go into the new year on bad terms with anyone. if i hate you please die by january 1st

[Carleigh 🥀 @Was_and_When]

@bbypandaapril Hermie says hi 🐶

[mike drinks beer @mikehunnidproof]

our paul who blart in heaven

[Carleigh 🥀 @Was_and_When]

Hermie had a lil bedhead this morning lol

[Carleigh 🥀 @Was_and_When]

@bbypandaapril This is huge news, congratulations!! Wuv u

[Carleigh 🥀 @Was_and_When]

@bbypandaapril @kim_penn

[Ryan O'Connell @ryanoconnell79]

Sublime continues to be one of the more unique stories in music history. Band’s on the rise, frontman dies, band gets big, influences tons of bands & then 30 years later return w/ late frontman’s son filling it for his dad. #Sublime