So Happy for You

by Celia Laskey

Happiness was not good for capitalism or the patriarchy or white supremacy, i.e., business as usual.

It seemed like boys could sense my indifference toward them the way dogs can smell cancer.

This focus on marriage and weddings led to “the American way of life,” or as I called it then, “the ladder,” which consisted of marriage, buying a house in the suburbs, and having kids. Climbing the rungs, not questioning if it was actually what you wanted or if it was just what you had been told to want.

If you traced history all the way back to the beginning of surnames, I doubted there was a woman who had her own. So the idea of a woman’s identity being tied to a surname was yet another instance of not being able to untangle ourselves from the patriarchy.