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Good morning, sweetheart! Time to get up! You don’t want to be late for your first day…
Welcome to Fostering Brainchildren: a mommy blog where my children are my creative ideas that may or may not grow up into projects that make me proud.
This newsletter is my journal for expressing my artistic processes with all of the numerous avenues I feel inspired to work on at any given time. Let me introduce myself and my children, since they are not going to raise themselves!
My Gifted Child
Timmy explores her inner child.
I wasn’t born yesterday…
Is there anything more embarrassing than referring to yourself as a “gifted child”?
Being called a “gifted child” when I was growing up only really meant that a superiority complex was sparked, since I would be taken out of class to do mazes in a closet with some middle-aged man studying my every move. I’m sure that was very healthy to my growing mind…
I loved learning. I loved creating. I loved consuming other’s creations. But I never understood if I actually loved these things or if I simply felt pressure to do so. Still do and still don’t.
My parents offered to take me out of public school and homeschool me and my sister, which was the best birthday present I ever got. I hated second grade— not really due to feeling stifled at what we were learning, but mostly because my teacher referred to herself in the third person and I felt that that was patronizing. Yes, I was gifted, homeschooled, and insufferable: a triple threat.
I played with Legos religiously; I had a daily Origami calendar; I read book after book; I took pottery classes at the studio down the street; I crafted homemade comic books about my imaginary friends and board games based on historical events; I taught myself Latin. I was a 4-H kid raising chickens and ducks and llamas and sheep and making so many projects for the Ulster County Fair that my self-esteem was measured in blue ribbons. I began learning percussion at age ten and I was a part of our church band and multiple choirs. My first job was at eleven working at Kelder’s Farm, teaching sixteen-year-olds how to milk a cow. I started college at SUNY Ulster in 2011. I was taking 24 credits a semester— with the Dean’s special permission— while balancing four simultaneous part-time jobs and being the lead in our school’s play. My self-esteem was then measured by a 3.94 GPA (not good enough, love!).
I was so busy, so happy, and so, so miserable.
The first time I saw a counselor in college and we were both out of our depths. I was confused and she was bored. After emotionally vomiting all over her office, the only piece of guidance she gave me was: “…I think you are doing too much.”
I left the office feeling worse than before, pitying myself and pitying her. What a poor idiot she is. How can I be doing too much? How could that be a problem?
My structure, my projects, the hectic nature of which I needed to move through the world gave me purpose and kept me so distracted and so exhausted that I never had time to self-reflect, protecting myself from the truth of my self-loathing. I became a shark because I knew if I stopped, I would ironically drown.
My first mental breakdown and hospitalization happened in August of 2017. I began my journey of well-being and learned how to reframe my various artistic pursuits not as a means to an end, with a focus on production and external validation, but as a way to self-soothe and express myself. My motto became: I don’t make art for others, I make art for myself. Some days I even believe that.
The curse of the “gifted child”: set up with the highest of standards to only, inevitably, end up failing comparatively. And then to feel the need to tell everyone, to prove the glory days existed, as if rose-tinted nostalgia goggles don’t clash with that outfit.
When I look back at that poor little kid who had such a cushy, wonderful life and still struggled so hard to find meaning and joy, I just want to tell her:
You’ll understand when you’re older…
Not that I do or will, but so that I could give her hope with the relief of acknowledging how stressful the search is for answers that may never come.
My First Born
Timmy makes note of her eldest child.
Now they call… me… Mother…
When I started college, I was undeclared, just so I could make the dramatic proclamation of changing my major to Theatre Arts. Yes, spelt like that because she’s still insufferable.
I began as a Stage Manager because Who? Me? I could never be in the spotlight.
Performing live was the first rush I had ever experienced. It felt risky, but enough of a calculated risk with a script, a routine, and a crew to rely on. I had the chance to express my vulnerability through the distance of a character. I discovered my queerness and began cosplaying as Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, making YouTube videos with my best friend at the time. In February of 2015, we performed as our characters at SUNY New Paltz and that’s when I realized I was a drag queen.
Pinky Socrates is my eldest daughter. “Pinky” was the name given to me by the older farm boys growing up, to mock my femininity and my constant full-face anxiety blush, named after the gross little baby mice often found in the barns. Socrates is the ancient Greek philosopher: a fucked-up dude with some fucked-up thoughts, though we will never truly know since he was against the idea of writing and relied on his future pupils to represent him through their perspectives of his teachings. Maybe my second grade teacher wasn’t actually talking down to me?
But that reason for my drag persona’s name is bullshit and retroactive. My sister and I found the slang term “pinksock” on urban dictionary and we laughed so hard at the visual idea of anal prolapse that I lengthened it out and created Miss Pinky Socrates— a.k.a Miss Pink Sock.
I founded the Hudson Valley Drag Brigade with my friends (yet another abandoned child) and performed up and down the Hudson Valley, hosting a monthly queer drag and dance party at BSP (R.I.P.) called Queenston.
Pinky was grounded in August of 2017, but I don’t really remember why… (what is the opposite of foreshadowing)
She still goes out sometimes, but I had to give her a strict curfew…
I brought you into this world and I can take you out!
My Gender Reveal!
Timmy identifies as an attack helicopter parent.
Like mother, like daughter…
When you do drag— the performance of gender— there is a whole perspective switch. Suddenly, you are inherently aware of the social construct of gender: how to play with it, how to mock it, how to deny it, and how to embrace it. It’s the punchline we all wear every day. For some, like me, it began as a costume. And then things began to click.
I liked the way I was being perceived when I presented feminine. I liked the person looking at me through the mirror. I wondered whether I could begin to like myself, like my body— this benevolent stranger, but a stranger nonetheless.
Around 2019, I began socially transitioning. People referred to me as “Pinky” using she/her already, so the morning ritual of mascara wasn’t a shock. I got married to my amazing spouse in September 2022 and came out publicly as transfemme a month later. I started taking hormones in January of 2023 and this benevolent stranger is way more friendly than I gave her credit for.
So, a heads up: a lot of my work revolves around gender, queerness, and the performance of it all.
To be a woman is to perform…
My Problem Child
Timmy sits down to gently address some behaviors that need to be… addressed.
I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed.
I’ve been diagnosed with a slew of various possible neurodiversities in the past: the gifted child/MENSA schtick, manic/depressive when that was a thing, bipolar 1, no wait 2, no actual it’s just a mixed state, no wait ADHD and generalized anxiety and also panic disorder and adjustment disorder and no wait, it’s bipolar 2 again…
I know these diagnoses can be helpful for others, but, for me, with never having any cookie-cutter clear borders— never neatly slotting into any one or two or three categories— they are just another tool that I can use or not to understand myself and communicate with others.
That being said, what the fuck? Why am I chronically inspired to create something, anything, at seemingly all times? Motivation overtakes me at a whim and before I know it my hyperfixation is the best part of my week. Only to then be locked in the attic with all the other misbehaved brats.
But it does feel different to me. My ideas are never truly left at home while I go out to get smokes, never to return. They often just sit in arrested development, stunted until the next month’s flurry of inspiration allows them to grow and breathe just a little.
And then, of course, there’s everything else keeping me from proper parenting. How am I supposed to keep up with this laundry and cut the crusts off of PB&Js when there’s suddenly more laundry and more PB&Js?!
My Problem Child is the follow-through, the focus, the end goal of finally putting some out there. Be it messy, unfinished, or not to my standards, there needs to be a time to accept being an empty-nester and find pride, even if it’s just the pride of having done it.
I mean, damn, it took me four months to even put this Substack out, with all the children distracting me.
It’s probably just baby brain…
My Golden Child
Timmy discusses the enfant terrible who needs attention this month.
I could never choose a favorite! I love all my children equally…
Moving forward, I’m planning on selecting whichever of my neediest perfect angels has preoccupied me each month. Every post will focus on one Golden Child, discussing conception, infancy, childhood, and beyond until, hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to watch them all grown up.
Being a mother, I wear way too many hats. I’ve created drag mixes and performances as Pinky. I’m working my way through at least six musicals, four plays, and two one-woman shows. I’ve got that album I’ve never continued along with that Zine series I’ve never continued along with that Queer Crossword Club I never continued and, oh yeah, that year-long local queer history project I started back during the COVID shutdown and… never continued.
Of all of those spinning plates, with more certainly joining in down the way (I’ve always wanted a big family!), who is my Golden Child this time?
You’re reading her! Welcome to Fostering Brainchildren. The newest little darling to add to the mix. Here’s to hoping I have the energy to keep her well nurtured.
Bonus Child
I’m not a wicked stepmother, I’m the wicked mother that stepped up…
Bonus Child is my monthly idea that may or may not ever come to fruition. It’s a little add-on extra for those who become paid subscribers!
For our first ever Bonus Child, may I present to you a short comedy video I made last year when I had the most perfect bangs. Sitting with my maternal instincts, I was wondering how to blend two ideas: how do I make something that pokes fun at transfemme stereotypes— ie. streaming on Twitch (I literally couldn’t even figure out how to do that), drinking Monster (the first and last Monster I will ever buy was for this video), and our perceived dependence on adult substances (I’m not really a drinker, but you can always find me chain-smoking on my porch)— but without the main butt of the joke about being trans? What I came up with was a classic take on the limitations of pregnancy, which— if the comment section is a reliable indicator— really showed the connection between people who can get pregnant and people who can’t: I did not realize that pregnancy is actually ten months or that pregnant people can’t eat sushi?? Look at our communities coming together…
If that doesn’t prove I’m mother material, then I’m not sure what could.
Well, sweetheart, the streetlights are on, so let’s come inside and wind down, since it’s wayyy past your bedtime!