Lyz Lenz Quotes

don’t know what my kids’ lives will look like, but I think that at least I’ve offered them glimpses at new ways of seeing themselves. I threw a party in the spring of 2022. It had been a long, cold pandemic. But my children were finally vaccinated and I wanted to have people over. I made a vat of spiked cider and filled mugs for my friends. The very same mugs my ex had hidden away in the basement of our home so many years ago. Now they were filled with booze and joy. I tried to match mugs with personalities. The house was full, and people were shouting. Cheese and crackers were stacked in platters on top of the long table that I had paid for with a story I’d written about my divorce. I thought about how hard I’d worked to get here. To a house filled with friends and wine and happiness. The song “Crowded Table” by the Highwomen is one that always makes me cry; it speaks of community and love and filling our homes. “If it’s love that we give,” they sing, “it’s love that we reap.” “This is going in the book,” I told my friends, shouting over the din of conversations. “It’s going in the end. Because this is my happily ever after.” And maybe it was too earnest, but I thought of all the different kinds of love there are in the world. And I knew that when the party was over someone would help me with the dishes and wiping the counters, and I wouldn’t have to ask.

"We speak of men and their rage as if it I laudable. "Men just get mad and push each other and it's over", we say. "Women are just bitches; they never let it go." That's because we never can let it go. Because where would we put it? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?"

The store beneath is a kind of junk store — the windows are filled with plastic dolls, a wooden chair draped with beads and a large Confederate flag hanging in the background. Illinois, billed “the Land of Lincoln,” was firmly in the Union during the Civil War. That flag is not there for even superficial history reasons. It’s there as a symbol.

It’s a very colonizing impulse to look at something — a land, a city, a culture — and instead of seeing what is there, see a barren landscape that needs your new ideas. It’s an American impulse to see a problem and think you can solve it with a little hard work and some bootstraps. It’s a deeply human impulse to look all around you and see a problem but never consider that you might be the actual problem.

Chained to a child or chained to a desk, a woman's value is contained within her (re)productive abilities. And when these abilities fail, through miscarriage, stillbirth, medical problems, infertility, or she opts out of the whole process, we don't know how to see her. We can't see her. (pg. 52)

So many of the dissertations and books I've read about revitalizing the American church fetishize the new life, without fully grappling with the death.

We find significance in our sense of place. The way a New Yorker brags about the cost of a studio in Queens and the time he got punched on the subway, a Midwesterner brags about those two weeks the buses wouldn’t run because it was colder here than it was in the Arctic. Our pain is our significance. Our survival is our belonging.

If you are so sorry, then do something about it. If you are so sorry, then change literally anything.

Our culture views divorce as a failure. One that requires a personal solution rather than a cultural one. Most divorce books focus on personal healing and self-help to get the divorcée back to dating and remarriage. But what if it’s the whole system that is broken?

So much of our culture depicts young girls dreaming about their weddings. But every middle-aged woman I know dreams about living alone in the woods, maybe with a dog.

Driving home to Iowa from Marion, Indiana, I went through Chicago, sure, but it was far easier to find a field than a town. Far easier to find empty spaces than people. Even in my town, Cedar Rapids, the second-largest city in Iowa, you are never more than minutes from a cornfield. It’s a bigness that can feel limiting if you are the only one of you that you see. But the internet is an equalizer — bringing together voices that once felt alone, realigning boundaries, creating spaces where there were none before.

There is a danger too of creating ideological bubbles. Of filtering out dissent. It’s a criticism that was leveled heavily against blue states after the 2016 election. But when you are in the minority — the voice that is silenced — you are never in a bubble, even if you try. And finding a place where you don’t have to fight for acceptance, where you can just be accepted, even if that is online is the difference between pain and hope.

One year after I moved out of my house and my marriage, I wrote an essay for Glamour titled “I’m a Great Cook. Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Making Dinner for a Man Again.” The article outlined how for eleven years I’d cooked meals for my husband and then for our children. I had liked cooking. I loved it even. I thought of food as my offerings of love. But as our marriage dragged on, cooking became less of a joy and more of an obligation. When my marriage ended, I stopped cooking. “I stopped cooking because I wanted to feel as unencumbered as man walking through the door of his home with the expectation that something had been done for him,” I wrote. “I wanted to be free of cutting coupons and rolling dough and worrying about dinner times and feeding. I wanted to rest.

book. I didn’t promise anything. I wonder, is it really worth it? A 2002 study argued that divorce didn’t make unhappily married people happier. Yet, a 2005 study suggests that 74 percent of divorced women report feeling liberated compared to 37 percent of men.

Capitalism can be just as extractive as marriage. And if you are going to have your labor exploited, it might be easier to do it in a nice home. But I think the problem is that both narratives are failures. Women dedicating their lives to being cogs in the wheel of capitalism isn’t fulfillment. But neither are home and children. Jobs can be lost. So can homes. Children grow up to become their own people. And home, children, and marriage, however much you want them, might not be accessible for everyone.

I was used to being the outsider — the lone voice of dissent. I was comfortable with this role because I wasn’t threatened by it. Not yet, anyway. I wasn’t gay. I wasn’t a person of color. I was a woman, but the gentle grasp of patriarchy hadn’t yet threatened to strangle me, because I hadn’t yet tried to get free.