Whew! Now that I’ve gotten that out the way, let’s get to the good stuff.

When I was in my undergrad in 2008 I had this amazing long-haired hippie professor named Hank Jones. I loved Professor Jones. He was funny. He cussed. He wore jeans to class. And he had us read *the* BEST short stories in my Intro to Lit course. I loved participating in the discussions, I loved the paper writing, I loved the reading. Granted, I’m somewhat of a Hermione Granger, and at the time I was a smidge older than my classmates because I took a brief hiatus from college to live the American dream and get married and start a family (indeed, my first semester back in college I was pregnant with my first child). But you also have to understand, I grew up in a po-dunk town with one blinking light. I was raised by teenagers without a cent to their name in a house with a swamp cooler and gas heaters. Everybody knew everybody’s business and said “warsh” instead of “wash”. Our idea of a good time was street dances and hamburger suppers at the volunteer fire department and pasture parties and jumping off big rocks into the lake and hoping nobody died but not really caring enough not to do it anyway. I grew up in the farmhouse that my great grandfather built during the Great Depression. My bedroom was the room my Granny was born in. I went to the Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Church of Christ, and the other Baptist church because I had family and friends at all of them. I grew up in the SOUTH where sweet tea and Dr Pepper might as well be water. Going to college was me living out my country bumpkin childhood fantasies of being the small town girl in the big world in real life. It was the stuff of television, of all the books I had read, of the things my family had told me would make them proud of me, the things that would make me successful. It felt so sophisticated and fulfilling based on the narratives and comparisons of my upbringing.

I look back now and I think about a short story I read in Hank Jones’ class. It was about a young woman in the 60’s that had married and moved away from her small southern town to live in the city with her husband and raise her children as a homemaker while he was the breadwinner. In the story, she had gone home to visit her family and she felt so out of place and at home all at once, because she couldn’t explain to her husband how this was home, and her family couldn’t understand what her life was like apart from them because they had never experienced anything so aristocratic as metropolitan living.

Over the years, I have thought about that story a lot. And even now, when it is so drastically different from the life I lead, I can still relate. I am now that woman, giving her child a red balloon, whispering of birthday party cake and how Nanna is both home and a feeling you can never get back. Because once a person is stretched a certain way, they can never go back.

And so I am. Here. Being. Stretched in ways that can never be molded back into shape. Wanting to share a real look into the here and now of what it means to be a matriarch in the Modern Day South. Sure, there are a few romantic memoirs of the past. I still drink sweet tea (granted, these days I like herbal purple butterfly tea). I still have a little bit of a west Texas drawl and certain words slip past my lips in betrayal as I pronounce it as “genu-wine”. My kids call me “Mama” and the protective mamma bear I most certainly am. I know how to put on charms and rub elbows with men in cowboy hats and debutants. I love horses and the sound of cicadas. I know how to make funeral sandwiches and what a snipe is. But I also want the world to know, I’m not the stereotype. That some us exist outside of the media opinion that all southerners are all conservative mono-hetero-Christian-normative. Indeed, there are those of us who couldn’t be further from that sentiment, and some in between. So buckle up buttercups, you’re in for a wild ride in a way you probably didn’t expect.