Necessary Magic is a semi-regular column in the Santa Fe Reporter wherein writer and artist Jacks McNamara explores queer issues, liberatory politics, magical creatures and other relevant topics.
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I'm a sucker for those rags to riches stories about regular people with big talents who get discovered and burn bright. Maybe it's because I love to sing and my 1988 kid self always wanted to get discovered and become the next Tiffany (good thing that didn't happen, though, 'cause she didn't last long), or maybe it's just the intoxication of a well-built crescendo as you fall in love with a character and watch the world fall for them, too.
Either way, that song "Shallow" from A Star is Born has been running endlessly through my head lately, so I decided to rewatch the film... I lay in bed afterwards trying to sort out the source of the heartache and realized it's a larger, more prevalent grief—grief for the parts of being fully alive that this pandemic and parenting a toddler have taken away.
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1. Saturn and Pluto don't fuck around. Nor does Jupiter in Capricorn. In January, back before we knew about the impending doom of coronavirus, catastrophic wildfires, heightened police oppression, and every other calamity 2020 would bring, astrologers were warning us that this would be a humdinger year of reckoning. They weren't kidding.
2. "Relentless" is a more powerful word than I ever understood. Can you raise a toddler without a village during the era of social distancing? Yes. Do I recommend it? No. Can you work in mental health during a pandemic and be glad you have job security? Yes. But are you ready to be totally exhausted by a job where everyone's in escalating cycles of crisis? No.
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I once had a mentor define forgiveness as offering someone else the opportunity to make amends. Her definition opened a window in my mind; up to that point, I had mostly heard forgiveness discussed as forgiving and forgetting. That felt neither healing nor possible. I was young, pissed and not so interested in "letting go of the past" in order to make folks who'd traumatized me more comfortable.
The idea of offering someone else the opportunity to make amends centers their accountability in the process. I will forgive you when you show up. It offers the option of rebuilding trust, not compartmentalizing and pretending. It invites relationship rather than rupture.
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I'm not going to lie—current events have me pretty bummed out.
Between the resurgence of coronavirus, the looming threat of more shutdowns, the criminal incompetence of our national leadership, the fascist violence of President Voldemort, the rising global temperatures and all the rest of it, I'm on a serious roller coaster, feeling alive with summer one day and utterly depressed the next.
So I wanted to write this column about some things that are giving me hope, or at least bringing me humor, in these turbulent times. Some of these items are super personal, and some are much more collective, but I hope they're all amusing or uplifting in ways that help you get through the day.
If you're involved in the current movements for change, it's a heady and overwhelming time. The feeling of urgency is inescapable. For the first time since my daughter's birth, I am diving back into organizing white folks to show up in support of BIPOC-led movements for racial justice, and trying to figure out how to maintain some kind of life/work/health/activism balance while doing so...
Lately I've been deeply moved by the work of Tricia Hersey, a Black artist, activist, theologian and founder of The Nap Ministry, who is doing a brilliant job articulating why rest can actually be a form of resistance...
Wedding season is upon us, although right now it's mostly Zoom weddings, drive-by weddings and postponed weddings. I feel for you if you are currently reimagining your ceremony in a coronavirus world. These are some trying times.
My wife and I got gay married four years ago in front of 50 friends and family at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden. It's funny to think how foreign the word "wife" sounded to us then, and how not entirely adequate it felt—at least for me. "Wife" connotes women in a way that doesn't quite fit either of our genderqueer selves. But "spouse" felt differently awkward (too clinical? Too beige?), so we decided to embrace "wife." Now it rolls automatically off my tongue.
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It's week 6 of sheltering in place during the coronavirus crisis, and I've been reflecting on what I'm learning and how my experience of this strange period of history is changing over time.
In the beginning, like so many of us, I was flabbergasted and overwhelmed by the shocking changes to daily life: the orders to stay at home and see no friends; my toddler's daycare closing and the daunting prospect of trying to work from home for an unknown duration with a tiny tornado on the loose; the cancellation of every gathering I looked forward to and every class I was supposed to teach; and the newly ubiquitous clouds of fear and sinister illness hovering over every sunny day.
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I'll tell you what this column is not going to be: It's not going to be an inspiring video of people singing out their windows in Italy to connect while they're quarantined, or another uplifting poem about how coronavirus is here to teach us all to slow down and recognize our interdependence... None of us are actually holed up in a cozy corner writing that novel we've been meaning to finish for three years. We're obsessively trolling the news and trying not to lose our shit....
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Though I planned to be one of those parents who didn't show my toddler any screens, parenting has turned out to be more relentless than I expected, and my daughter gets a fairly regular dose of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It's been kind of fascinating to watch the terrible third-generation copies of ancient episodes on YouTube, because I watched a lot of Mister Rogers when I was little and I can't help wondering how it shaped me.
I got a great piece of advice when my infant daughter's "four month sleep regression" felt like it was ruining my life. I had written one of those desperate 3 am parenting posts you find in family Facebook groups, the kind where parents ask total strangers how high a fever needs to be to schlep your baby into the emergency room, or whether this rash looks like bed bugs, or how to win a nasty custody battle. My post was a plea for advice about how to get my kid sleeping and stop the daily hemorrhaging of my sanity.
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The day my last column came out I was diagnosed with pneumonia—and my daughter's stomach flu. After two weeks of caring for my sick child, I succumbed. It was kind of ironic: The last column was about the isolation of nuclear families and the stresses of parenting under late stage capitalism. Among other things, I wrote about wondering if I would lose my job, which offered no paid sick leave, if I had to take any more time off work to care for my daughter, my wife, or myself.
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In my 20s, I always imagined that if I had kids, I would raise them in a collective. Over the years these dreams took on various forms: an intentional community with yurts and goats and one central kitchen; an anarchist collective house in Oakland; a communal farm in New York. I never planned to raise kids in a nuclear family. I grew up in a nuclear family, and it was an isolating, frequently toxic place. Given, our family had some extra challenges, like severe alcoholism, Reaganite Republicans and chronic illness, but still—the basic structure seemed insufficient.
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Allusions to magic and witches are everywhere these days. The number of rainbow unicorns and clothing with slogans about being magical I saw at Target last weekend was astounding (or nauseating, depending on your point of view). Netflix, meanwhile, has reissued Sabrina the Teenage Witch and a prequel to The Dark Crystal. Our politicians endlessly frame people they don't like as witches and various campaigns they don't like as witchhunts.
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My name is Jacks. Yes, it's my real name, and no, it's not the name my parents gave me.
My birth name was a super feminine one that's popular in the American South, where I grew up. It's a name for the kind of nice straight girl my parents hoped I would become, not the genderqueer misfit I turned out to be. In the queer and trans world, it would be called my "deadname," and like most gender non-conforming folks, I don't like it when people use or request my deadname.
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I identify as genderqueer or non-binary. That means not exactly fitting on either end of the gender spectrum. I don't particularly identify with the word "woman," and I definitely don't identify with "man." I identify as something more creative and fluid, with aspects of both and aspects of neither.
Third gender? Unicorn? Sparkly thing?
I prefer that people use the gender pronouns "they" and "them" when talking about me. As in, "I saw them walking down the street and they looked fabulous!" or the way you refer to a person whose gender you don't know: "Someone left their tiara behind."
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