Butt First!

what if you're good?

Aug 13, 2025

44 years ago today, I entered this big, beautiful world butt first. If anyone says I don’t know how to make a good first impression, I say just wait until my second and third impression because I was probably trying my hardest to be normal that first go around. I am writing this, gentle reader, with a plastic bag on my head. Underneath, hair dye from sprouts because it’s surely a healthier toxic hair dye? I cannot be bothered to pay $185 to cover grays while I feel obligated to share the travails of my life and lament the burgeoning zit on my chin compliments of *chef’s kiss* perimenopause with a poor hairdresser who also would like to be in silence. No, I’ll take boxed hair dye with mediocre results for $17, Alex. Upon my under eye, lay gel patches full of potions from the eye of a newt and promises to make me look like I didn’t strangely wake up at 5am, restless, thinking about Lila’s first day of school and Layne leaving to go set up his room, five days before his class starts, on my birthday, because he “has to” even though I know he’s just excited to live his life without us. It’s how you want it to be, I know. Just something about being a mother that never really allows a full celebration of a life well launched. And people want me to feel bad for having a secure attachment. Sorry I’m not a robot, Deb347_4God.

Anyway, there is a point in your life where you believe aging is for everyone else but you. Those losers succumb to the natural way of life, they are the ones taking their kids to college, their kids are in high school or in the last year of elementary school, but not you: you’re a young mom with littles! It is quite a rude awakening when you realize it’s actually happening to you and there is not one thing to do about it. We all get wrinkles and then we die! Be encouraged! Anyway, the wrinkles are here and I face tape them away and it mostly works but it doesn’t stop the clock and though it sounds grim because that’s what we’re taught to think about aging, there is something quite beautiful about succumbing to the inevitable—staring at it in the face. You might like what you see and it’s not because I’ve worked on my body (opposite maybe?). I stare at my body sometimes and I think, I quite like you. That’s a new thought for me. I have really struggled with my body because I was taught it was dangerous or bad and not skinny enough and there was no relief from that in the church or in the world. The relief I have found is believing I’m good: my body, my mind, my heart. I’m good because when God calls me names, unlike people in my DM’s or purity culture or commercial beauty, He calls me good. Right from the start. He stepped back and was like Dang, I did such good work. She is good!

It’s crazy but what if you’re good?

I don’t know what I came on here to write, only that it’s my birthday and I want to do all the things I like to do. One of which is writing. I was telling my sister, telling the truth about yourself in your testimony is how you get rid of shame and I work hard to tell the truth about myself in some big and small ways (still have a lot of work to do here), of course at cost. It all costs something to call out injustice but if I didn’t, I am not telling you the truth about me. I’m only letting you see Aunt Jonie, a character I play and you like (I mean she is fun). I got a message from one of my besties and she was all, one way God shows up as a warrior in the Bible is partnering with the oppressed and I get to watch God at work in your life when you show strength by linking arms with the lowest. And for all the shidoodle I get in my dm’s, that makes it worth it to me. Put it on my tombstone: What they did to the lowest, they did to me.

As I age, there are fewer and fewer things that feel shiny and worth having in this world. I am spoiled by any standard in friendships/family and opportunity and things, I told Nato that I am so happy with our life and it is a good thing to know when you are living in the good ol’days. Those days are fleeting, heartache is always nipping at our heals and the world is also on fire. Life is good and it hurts to be alive but that’s how you know you’re living.

I feel like a new me was birthed this year. Birthing can be planned only to a certain extent and always involves pain, danger, a giant mess, and perhaps making an ass of yourself, as in my birth story. Even though I ripped through my mother arriving backwards, she still nurtured that little precious life. And so will I with me. I hope you will too with yourself.

Cheers to at least 56 years of more living butt first and bewildering,

Jami

P.s. you need to check out my latest reel where nato explains a miscommunication about pronouns and I can’t stop laughing about it.