“But This Time, it’s Ok”

The Devil’s Motto

Anyone who has ever read C.S. Lewis has been exposed to the tone of the Devil himself and the moment he pops in, having glimpsed a cracked door.

His motto:

“This time, it’s ok.”

With single women I teach, that motto helps them to text the questionable guy and ignore the red flags.

When an overserved patron heads into the driver’s seat to eventually collect a DUI, that motto makes his mind shrink the trip home.

When a teacher asks a student personal questions that belong only to Mom and Dad at the dinner table, that motto fuels an “ally” in the eyes of ideology that doesn’t just crack a side door for the Devil, it opens the garage.

“This time, it’s ok. This time it’s different.”

When March 2020 came along and I went into lockstep, I think I knew deep down it was theatre, but I cashed in on my “this time, it’s ok.” I needed the socially acceptable break. It was so cozy! The TV was being like my late father on the rare occasions he yielded and got us McDonald’s. It was saying “The gym is closed. Get takeout. This time, it’s ok.”

I was a harried, working stepmom of a teen and a pre-teen at that time. I was speeding into Hollywood to write and record songs, seeking TV licenses for them, getting back in time to pick someone up from lacrosse and drop someone else off, pick up posterboard for a project, make a decent dinner that had protein in it…I was burned out.

Daily life in a stepfamily meant untangling at least one thread from a giant, looming tangle of life threads - just to have a functional day. I had gotten sick the winter before, and was delicately learning how to implement the lessons of illness while restoring the duties of my state in life. It was overwhelming.

I wanted everything the lockdowns were granting me.

The first night of Covid theatre, when Newsom was still a perfectly acceptable Governor, the one I had voted for, my eyes snapped open at 3am. It hit me - nothing to untangle for two weeks. Every work appointment, kid activity, event, all commitments were instantly off the calendar. Stepmom service with a side of awkward - removed. It was like tiny bubbles of stress were rising out of every joint in my body, leaving a complete sense of contentment.

“This time, it’s ok.”

It’s ok to stay home and avoid the thankless schlep, the timing of squishing work things in, the awkwardness of events, the snark that kids often save for the volunteer stepparent.

I was off, I was free. For “two weeks.”

Of course I went all in! But then two weeks turned into four and I felt the persistent truth push it’s way up from my gut into my heart. Covid was a sham and I couldn’t do it. I had lived as an outsider before, and I thought I would be able to handle the discomfort of standing against a machine of officialdom. I found out why so many didn’t, and I get it.

Backstory

My husband, an identical twin, grew up one town over from where we used to live. I entered his life joyfully because he had more good stuff in his than I had in mine - but I left some worthwhile parts of mine behind - mainly quiet time. We lived in the home his ex-wife departed from, which I took as a signal we would have very separate lives and homes. Then she moved a few blocks away from us. Still, I figured it would all be easy and work out. I also thought this about becoming a one woman band traveling across the country and selling indie albums, so I should’ve been suspicious of myself.

I loved family life and my chance at motherhood, and if you look at our family pictures, it shows. But the topic here is the stuff that doesn’t show. The unforgiving minutiae of blended family life sometimes flowed like sandpaper, and there are no bad days allowed in the role of stepmother. But I am human, and kept mine to my tiny studio behind the house, and in conversations with loved ones who likely grew tired of my cross, waiting for me to just pick it up already and move on. I did what I have always done - found fulfilling employment in a job I invented. But it was an increasingly odd and burdensome experience in California.

I didn’t even know how tough it was until we actually moved across the country and settled into our new home.

Space and Peace Begets Insight

The other day, my husband mentioned a conversation with a friend back in Cali, about life in our new town. As he is known to do, he boldly crystallized it by saying, “It’s easier here - I’m not a twin and Amy’s not a stepmom. We are just us. A family with kids in college.”

Boom! That is why I have gotten so much relief!! I am not in a practice of clarifying my role everywhere I go, fearing the risk of crossing a line. I exhausted myself back then, explaining my presence, my intentions. I didn’t know how to do any of it except love the boys as my own.

My husband is relieved now too - he’s just a guy. He isn’t explaining which twin he is, in a patchwork quilt of other identifiable local family members, every time he runs out to the hardware store.

Today I occasionally clarify my role - standing in front of a family photo in our foyer saying “they’ll be with their Mom that week” will require it. But I’m not in a constant, confusing waltz of stepping in to meet a kid need and stepping out to meet a parent need.

Also, I don’t know the homemaker who used to live in my house. It’s my house, that I picked out with my husband. I recommend this for spouses.

Discovering this unexpected byproduct of our move across the country provided relief and clarified something important: I might’ve been granted this privacy, these boundaries, from joining forces with California officialdom’s “Trust the Science” Covid cult. We were handed an easy street version of carving out our own space and strict personal boundaries from lockdown values. These values are still very much alive in Covid City - I mean Culver City, CA - and wouldn’t have required an involved move. But then I saw the homeless encampment that tripled in size, and knowing what I saw gnawed at me, from the inside out. I dismissed my “this time it’s ok” card, and hunted for contentment from the inside, not the outside.

Helping Ourselves and Others Out of the Hoodwink

Could this be a blueprint for recovering compassion and understanding? Finding out why and how we used our “this time it’s ok” card in the last five years? If you didn’t, can you see how someone might use it?

What if each area a person avoids having to “do the work” (as we personal growth junkies say) has a corresponding “this time, it’s ok” tag in the culture? I considered them “collapse points” in the context of caving into the forced shots, and wrote an essay about it. But mandates have passed, and we are still caving in other ways.

We grant one another cultural, religious, political or medical hall passes that are parroted, accepted. We have all grown accustomed to a glossary of our particular “side” and its verbal signals - that either shut down exploration between people who stand on different “sides,” or grant immediate acceptance within a boundary from a shared “side.” For instance, yesterday I was at a social event where a topic I consider to be further exposure of election fraud and necessary prevention of it was framed, with glossary terms, as a hardship for married women who will have to dig out a passport as proof to vote, and a measure to further marginalize people who change their gender. Identifiable sides. I admit, I passed on pursuing this topic.

If every person does an inventory of why they practice repetition of items they haven’t investigated (which would require reading what the other “side” thinks) they may find the way out of the hoodwink.

But willingness to look at the cold, hard facts today requires something else first - being honest about what you are getting out of avoiding looking at them.

How do we get everybody to look? I don’t know. But it’s why I write.

The Dark Side of Comfort

That 3am moment when bubbles of stress were leaving my body is my daily reality today. But it took years of intense personal hardship and a move that was involved, klunky, stressful and imperfect. I even glamped on a mattress in our new home without our family for five weeks, desperate to get out of Cali and finish my book without sirens ringing in my hood and my ears.

As I get further away from my raw, peak moment of leaning on and receiving God in California - I see the long road. This got me back into church, and if you told me fifteen years ago I would be back in church, I would’ve howled laughing.

Yes, Jesus will comfort us in our afflictions, but as Matthew Kelly points out, and he will also afflict us in our comfort. I lived in constant and uncomfortable turmoil during 2020 and 2021, but it awakened and sharpened me in a way I cherish. I feel warned when I get near the hazardous comfort that sent me into four weeks of devotion to Newsom’s Covid measures - that kind of comfort will cause you to declare the false real, and become stagnant and fixed.

Many years before the Covid measures, I attended a Tony Robbins event where we did an exercise clarifying what we prioritize. I had growth first, and comfort last. I attended with a girlfriend who had placed comfort much higher on her list, and it baffled me. Growth over comfort is a proven feature of my personality, and STILL I spent four weeks prioritizing comfort in the spring of 2020. Propaganda is powerful.

The comforting nod in the grocery store from the other masked person. The obedience to my GI surgeon’s emails from UCLA to take “extra care” with Covid measures. Having been treated for an autoimmune disorder in December of 2019, she suggested I tell friends and family my “special” needs, until we get “contact tracers.” (Yowsers.) I felt the supreme comfort of her approval, going along with the crowd, and imagined a forced audience listening with rapture to my personal Covid needs. Suuuper comfy cozy.

But my soul shook me awake, remembering there was no free ride into meeting my deeper needs at that time. The “this time, it’s ok” gimmick is the Devil’s way to get you to believe you’re trusting in God’s will. It is not ever the answer if you want to live an authentic life.

Wanted: More Conspiracy Theorists (many came true, after all)

Admitting masks and lockdowns were a sham is step one of a recovery system that gets so involved you’ll end up digging into intelligence agencies, 200 years of medical propaganda, endless wars and the reality that we are working on a tax farm with a hidden harvest. Asking questions, and refusing to let illegal mandates be forgotten is only natural now. It’s not an uphill battle anymore when the Pentagon is welcoming back troops who were discharged for refusing the shot, with an apology letter. What else wasn’t front page news?

Many get snagged along the way, idling in one area because it’s just too sad and confusing to keep going. Liam’s theory on Shakespeare really got me. Research gets weird, and involves grief. But it is also enlightening and contains victories, like arrival at amusement when someone uses Wikipedia or Google’s first item in a search as a final conclusion. Wikipedia says I live with two German Shepherds, by the way. (I did once have mutts).

Research and contemplation is required, and I understand why people avoid it. Routine and social acceptance is nice. I am “undercover” now. For the past six months, my priority was to repair. I wanted to remember what it was like to just get invited to lunch, to be with others. For years in California, my only daily activity was walking and saying the rosary while watching people cross the street to avoid me. You’d grant yourself a repair stage too.

Sometimes I realize I am hoping that locals do not discover my loudmouth writing on the internet, which I accomplish using my maiden “pen” name. When I broke down my experience into steps for the last essay here, I found myself scared again, vulnerably posting with one eye squeezed shut, still afraid of hate mail.

Instead I got an outpouring of shared experiences, reflections that were warm, encouraging and full of relief, from readers. Chris Bray restacked my essay! He got me through living in California and provided sources that helped me! He was on Tucker! Chris Bray read it? That was a walking high five and my husband enjoyed seeing my geek-out, reflecting how rarely he sees me celebrate anything I write - I usually just wrestle with it.

Tens of thousands people have viewed that last essay. In the past, I have not ever exceeded 1200 views in the first few days of publishing an article. I am shocked and delighted.

I am also heeding the signal, to keep writing about the way out. Let’s allow probing questions and edgy conversations again. Cop to the time you have spent cashing in on your “this time it’s ok” and cop to your time in the fray, your valiant attempt to help yourself out of the hoodwink. Let me know right here in the comments. Maybe we’ll help others.

Repeat a central theme of propaganda: manufactured hatred that guarantees emotional dismissal without investigation.

I know we are all afraid someone may think we are bizarre, but is anything more bizarre than trusting that an outdoor mask and obsessive hand washing will prevent a deadly virus while people flourish living in filth outside without sinks? Is anything more bizarre than no one saying a thing about it because the TV says “this time, it’s ok. It’s ok to see the obvious truth and deny it because we said so.” The “officialdom” mainstream crowd is running out of uses of “this time, it’s ok.” They’re getting more mileage out of it than a Dad joke.

In a period where many avoid knowing SPECIFICALLY what they think, why, back it up with facts they discovered from reading all “sides”, and discuss it with people who disagree with them - let’s do just that. For instance, I have yet to meet a trans “ally” who has read more than one personal testimony of a detransitioner or parent of a trans child. This is a minor effort for a person to require of themselves before aligning with an ideology that can lead to grotesque suffering. Repeating glossary terms that signal blind support of this movement are chilling, not compassionate.

We must do this with a whole new level of love, grace, and patience. Cause the person you’re talking to join your “side” again. The side that is two human beings with beating hearts seeking solutions in an incredible country of which we are privileged citizens. A country full of corruption, death obsession and pain, that can shrink if examined. The pain points among us are the kind our ancestors only knew from kinetic war. We still just go to the cleaners, drop off kids, eat dinner with other couples and never hear bombs. That in and of itself is dizzying - but bombs are going off. As I wrote in a song in 2021, these shots don’t ring out, but the blood’s been shed.

Welcome to the new subscribers here and a big huge heartfelt thank you to all who shared my last essay, wrote to me, and commented in other places where it was shared. It means a lot to me.