Posts by amandamagee

I Never Wanted #MeToo But We Need It

Posted on May 9, 2018

I walked toward the office and tried to make sense of my emotions. I was able to smirk at the irony of the “Cosby Found Guilty” alert coming as I made my way across a parking lot where I feel unsafe. There is always a man smoking outside who leers at me, slowly taking in every inch of my body. It is an uncontested fact that my body is a visual buffet for men to sample on the street. When I say my body, I mean it for all women, we are involuntary dishes at a feast of insatiable appetites. It doesn’t matter what we wear. It doesn’t matter the time of day. The truth is sometimes it doesn’t bother me. I feel the…

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Categories: Roar

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Time Breaks & Starts Over

Posted on April 18, 2018

“Promise we’ll have another fort at the next house?” the girls asked. It was 2010 and we were moving to fit our growing family. Two years before we’d built a play structure for them, adapting it mid-way through as, the then-toddler, Avery broke her leg and needed larger stairs. “Sure, we’ll build another one,” we said. The girls gave the fort a fond farewell and whispered that they hoped the next family would enjoy it. The new house had a deep wooded lot and we decided to build the structure into the ring of trees. It took a lot of tinkering and reconfiguring as we anchored 4x4s into pine trees. “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be safe.” The girls…

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Categories: Mama Sap

Saying It Out Loud

Posted on April 7, 2018

My writing has always moved in cycles, propelled by the girls’ milestones, time’s passage, working through then and now, or by the seasons in marriage. Lately, it’s been a slow cycle, in part because the girls are getting older and where before it felt like one shared story, now it is many interlaced. Even my own story, whether about aging or marriage feels like it could intrude on the girls’ life. I come to the keyboard with a new mix of awareness, there is such power in what we share and what we reveal. I genuinely believe we each get to choose our path. I’ve been blogging for close to fifteen years, many of those years in near total anonymity. I’ve watched people I know…

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Categories: Random

Sooner

Posted on March 31, 2018

I’ve been thinking a lot about the in-betweens, whether it’s the grey between black and white, the yes behind no and never, and saying, “This is good” when the place I wanted to get to still seems miles away. As is almost always the case, I can attribute the considering to the girls and kids in general, their ability to live in a realm where it’s ok to want things, ok to imagine that anything can happen, and, most bitingly, their ability to see what we cannot. I want to take less time to relent; so much of what I resist is good for me and those around me. A couple of weeks ago I posted something on Instagram. There was something about the morning…

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Categories: Random

Another Story

Posted on March 15, 2018

Life has been hectic lately.       I’m just going to give that statement a little space, feel free to take a moment yourself to just push away from all the things you have to do and acknowledge all the things you have done, or the angry words you haven’t spoken, or the sweet recovery you made after saying an angry word. Whatever you need, I am sure your life is hectic too. Yesterday I felt a bit like I was in one of those carnival features where you sit on a wobbly seat over a vat of water. People through things at a target and if it connects you are dropped into the water—over and over and over again. I managed to…

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Categories: Me