It is a sacred rite It is a sacred right It is a maddening career It is a controversial choosing It is an extension of your woman-hood It is a teaching of the totality of Life in too few semesters It is a heart-wrenching loss of control It is a seething curse of protective urges It is a withering of hope with age It is a longing for timelessness It is a longing for less time It is unsettling It is grounding It is everything It is separate It is pain It is grief It is light It is life It is love It is hurt It is silent It is deafening It is hard It is hardening It is softening It is soft It is. Mothering is mine. -Moni Padula copyright 2016

                   (My proposal to a local school board near my town) I am a woman who is a descendant of the Saginaw, Swan Creek, and Black River tribes of Ojibwe. I am a mother of five children, I have a college education, including a graduate degree. I work professionally in the community in a role that adds diversity to the institutions I occupy. I am a self-professed lover of urban culture, coffee, popular music, dancing, and an information and book-collecting nerd. One thing I am not, however, is a mascot. I am also not a redskin. I belong to a racial and ethnic group who was admittedly, by the US government, an experiment for forced assimilation, which enabled Hitler to gain inspiration from America for the disgusting self-declared supremacy that resulted in the annihilation of innumerable Jewish people. I am a member of a group of racial and ethnic people who were forcibly removed from their lands, the lands that still bear indigenous names, the lands of Kalamazoo, Matta