(Image is of a campfire in an iron ring firepit.)
Maybe you, too, are traveling across the country. Or just across town. But somehow you found me: you saw my travel trailer; stickers all over the back, pro-gay stuff, pro-love stuff. Maybe it made you angry, so you came here to cuss me out or tell me I’m going to hell. (I’m okay with that – as long as I’m going to your version of hell where all the fun people are, because I think it’ll be awesome.) Even so, I hope you’ll stick around and read a few posts. You may be surprised - there might be something that resonates with you.
Maybe you’re intrigued, and thinking “What is ‘IYKYK’? Why, with everything going on in this country, do you say ‘Love Wins’? And aren’t you ballsy, travelling around red states with ‘Protect Trans Kids’ on your trailer. Who ARE you? Are you insane?”… and your curiosity brought you here.
Could be, you are a passenger and you’re just bored, so you decided to look up this ‘24hourmama’ thing. In which case, I hope I can entertain you. Go ahead and dive in – just make sure you look up from your phone once in a while so you don’t get carsick, okay?
My name is Rhonda. Like most people, I have been through a lot of tough and trying times. Over the decades I have slowly but surely figured out a lot of it – and some I’m still working on. That’s why I started this – because at this stage of my life I have thrown caution to the wind, spread my arms open wide, and taken a free-fall into life, with no idea what I’m going to be doing, or where I will ultimately end up. I have unshakeable, unwavering trust in the universe. I also refer to the universe as ‘the Divine’, ‘Spirit’, ‘my angels’, ‘my guides’. It’s all one and the same. You may have one (or some) yourself – you might call it God, or intuition, or your conscience, or luck.
Let me tell you, it’s not easy to let go of everything and trust that you are going where you are supposed to go and doing what you are supposed to do; that you will be provided for, and you are safe. It’s … yeah. It’s a lot. But oh my god, does it feel AMAZING.
So, who am I? Besides clearly a woo-woo hippie?
I’m 58 years old cis female. Born and raised in Bourbonnais, IL, a very white little midwestern town, which I could not leave fast enough. After I gave birth to a child I was forced to carry, give birth to, and hand over to complete strangers, I decided to take control of my life. I packed up what little I had and moved to Chicago. By myself. Age 17. That was 1985.
In 1987 I decided to follow my inner Lesbian and came out as such. I met a couple of women at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival who invited me to visit Portland, Oregon. I was pretty unhappy being gay in Chicago, for various reasons, and I was attached to nothing and no one, so I flew out to visit the Pacific Northwest. Portland wrapped me in its weird but loving embrace and asked me to stay. I moved there in 1988, knowing two people, and having no money. One of the best things I ever did.
The years went by. And the years went bi, also, lol. I dated both men and women, had a 3-year relationship with a wonderful woman named Tara, and we are still good friends to this day. In 2000 I met and married a man, gave birth to two children at home, raised them, moved a couple times, and separated and ultimately divorced my husband in 2022 (we are also still good friends).
I moved back to Illinois in 2023, to the neighboring city of Kankakee, to be near my sisters and to get my shit together, heal, and figure out who I was outside of being a wife and mom. It was a terrifying and brilliant move – the gifts and healing that Kankakee gave me are still resonating. I have endless gratitude for my sisters and their continued support, even if they do not understand their crazy sibling. I love them deeply.
As far as what I ‘do’ … we’ll start with what I have done before, which informed what I do now. Aside from the universal experience of working at fast-food places, I have also worked at two art supply stores, a couple of corporate offices, and a surgical equipment company who I made deliveries for. I’ve been a live-in nanny and a housekeeper. I also worked as a stay-at-home-mom for 18 years – a privilege I will always be grateful for. It allowed me to be heavily involved in the remarkable community of Sunnyside Environmental School for the 11 years my children were students there. The gifts I received from that experience are also still coming in, years later.
I’ve had three ‘careers’. I was a medical illustrator from 1993 to 2017, primarily working with Anne Frye on her Holistic Midwifery textbooks. I had other lovely illustration jobs as well, my favorite being those for Seven Peppercorns, a Thai massage manual by my friend Naj Nephyr Jacobsen, who has been one of my dearest friends since we were in childbirth education together in 2001.
I also studied midwifery, and had the honor of attending births of all kinds: beautiful and gut wrenching, home and hospital, short & sweet ones and some lasting days. I hung out my own shingle for about a year and was a primary midwife, but ultimately I preferred the assistant role. I’m very good at helping – not so good at being in charge. Well, I’m good at it, but I don’t like it, let’s put it that way. I stopped attending births when my youngest was two years old and I’d been gone at a birth for three solid days. As a very present and hands-on mom, I had not spent that much time away from my kids – and the look on his face when I returned told me everything: I needed to be home with my children. There are plenty of midwives who can successfully juggle parenting and midwifing, but I wasn’t one of them. Illustrating books related to pregnancy and birth remained my only connection to that world.
When my kids were little I made a zine called ‘Zuzu and the Baby Catcher’, exploring the joys and struggles of raising two littles while catching babies. You can check it out at my abandoned website, 24hourmama.com.
My mom died in 2014, which was a very traumatic experience for me (probably wasn’t so fun for her, either). Mom and I did not have a good relationship, and my feelings about her death were as mixed as a metaphor.
Then the Orange Menace was “elected” and took office, and that sent me into a downward spiral which ultimately saw anti-depressants enter my life. Thank god for modern medicine, is all I can say.
When my kids were in high school, I went back to work - as a delivery driver – lifting heavy surgical equipment and implants, and driving for 8-10 hours a day, sometimes for 5-6 hours at a stretch. Covid happened two years later, and I started sewing cloth masks by the dozen and sending them out to whoever needed them. It gave me a desperately needed sense of purpose. I was laid off for about two months, then surgeries - and life - resumed, although radically changed.
Neither of my kids wanted to go to a four-year university, but they did want a job that they liked and would pay the rent. My son enrolled in a pharmacy tech program, and my daughter a medical assistant program.
My marriage was actionless and sexless and pretty much romance-less at that point, and I was bored, tired, and dangerously depressed. I asked my daughter if I could join her at her school and become a medical assistant, too. We spent months in class together – practicing giving shots and drawing blood and taking blood pressures, etc. – and enjoying each other’s company.
Halfway through the program my marriage died a sudden and brutal death, and I truly wanted to leave the planet at that point. I nearly quit school, but ultimately finished and scored the highest my teacher had ever seen on the Certified Medical Assistant exam, despite my marriage imploding and my moving into my own apartment mid-course. I am very proud of that.
Yeah, it was a bit crazy for a long while, and it hasn’t really let up since 2014. LOL.
Anyhoo, by 2024 I was just living my life in Kankakee, working as a medical assistant for a community health center and truly loving it, living in a sweet little house in a lovely neighborhood three blocks away from my sisters. I lost the 35 pounds I had gained since moving back to my hometown, I quit smoking, started sleeping with a man who was already involved in a relationship (not necessarily a good thing, but much needed all the same), started doing art for the first time since 2017, and overall was pretty content with life.
I’d also been working hard on my spiritual practice, especially in the past year. The lessons were sometimes excruciating, sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant, and always valuable. I learned that my intuition and my spirit guides were one and the same. That I had always known and recognized the Divine. That I possessed extraordinary gifts. That my purpose in life is greater than me: and that was when I was told in no uncertain terms that it was time to take my show on the road. And to write about it as I go.
So here I am.
Before you go explore the rest of my meandering posts - which are primarily about lessons I’ve learned, and this Divinely orchestrated life on the road which I am just beginning – there are a couple of important things you should know.
I am love. I bring love, light, and healing to everyone I interact with. I also trigger a lot of people, because I plant seeds within them. Seeds of kindness, seeds of self-awareness, seeds of hope, seeds of new thoughts and revisitation of dreams. Understand – these are things I cannot help but do – they are who I am. It’s been terrifying, exhilarating, and incredibly humbling to recognize and accept these gifts, and to learn how to use them in a world that desperately needs them. I am in awe, and eternally grateful. We are all divine, and if I can help other humans to realize it, or even start to think about it, that is precisely why I am here. I see you.
I seek and find beauty in everything. I take pictures of rocks and sunsets and trees. I guarantee if we ever meet, I will see the beauty in you. Before we part, I hope you will too.
I am a tree-loving liberal through and through, but I’m not an intolerant asshole. I have had many interactions with MAGA before it even had a name, and I find that – without exception – I can find something in common with every human being I interact with. I rejoice in that. I seek it out. I believe kindness and connection and love are necessary if humanity is going to get out of this alive.
I am acutely aware of the nightmare that is the USA right now. I do go to Hands Off protests and the like – but what I don’t do is follow the news or go down rabbit holes of horror. I don’t repost or share anything that is a harbinger of doom or a heartbreaking injustice or an unconscionable atrocity. I can’t. I refuse to spread that stuff. There are plenty of other folks who are sharing the ugly, and I do think the ugly needs to be seen. My job, however, is to share the hope. The joy. The laughter. The love. I encourage you to protest, to fight in whatever way speaks to you. This is my particular way. Joy is resistance.
I am very open about my sexuality – some of my posts are very sexual in nature. I do not mince words, I do not censor myself. Hell, I barely even filter myself, and I sure as shit don’t edit myself very well. Once of my best friends is a professional editor and I guarantee she gasps and clutches her pearls when she sees the grammatical, punctuational disasters that are my posts. Thankfully, she says nothing. Again, forever grateful.
Music plays a huge role in my life. I reference music constantly. I also use cannabis for meditation – not always, but often. Weed and music saved my life. Do with that what you will.
I post about art because I am re-learning how to be an artist. I talk about LGBTQIA+ issues because I have a queer daughter and a trans son and I’m a decent human being. I post about pretty much whatever comes into my sphere. There is no real rhyme or reason – most of my posts are stand-alone, although some have a few parts. They are in no particular order. I do have them divided into ‘The Ripple Effect’, which are posts about this new life in a travel trailer by that name, and ‘Musings’, which are everything else. I will probably eventually have a NSFW category, but that will be subscriber only, because some of it is outright pornographic. I’ve always loved sexual adventure and erotica. It’s just one of my many layers.
I do not tend to read opinions about most things. For example, there is a LOT of information and opinion out there about having a travel trailer and living in it. On the one hand, permanent RV life is to be avoided: here are the horror stories and reasons why you shouldn’t. On the other hand, it’s amazing: here are the best ways to do it. In fact, here are the best ways to do just about anything – which are also the very worst ways. That’s why I just don’t. If I need to know how to do something, I’ll look it up, specifically. I just need to know how to attach my sewer hose, for example. Once I know the basics, I’ll figure it out. Or ask for help. I LOVE asking for help – I used to hate it, but there is so much to be learned by asking. Plus I get to interact with humans, which is why I’m on this planet.
I also don’t really read books about spirituality, for much the same reason. I have my opinions like everyone else, and I feel free to put them here, but I’m not really interested in following the spiritual journeys of others in that way. Everyone’s path is different, for starters, and no one experiences it in exactly the same way. Moreover, I don’t want to feel like I’m plagiarizing or being influenced by anyone. Spiritual journeys and discoveries can look and feel similar across the world, but every individual who has embarked upon one goes through it alone. As a result, every new lesson, every realization, every level-up feels like the first one ever in the whole world, because it is. It can’t compare, nor should it.
I talk about it as it happens to me, and me alone. I don’t base my posts on anyone else’s work – but I have realized that there are many, many folks out there documenting their journey, too, and it seems like a lot of us are on the same one. To those who read any of these and think, wait, I just read this on someone else’s blog – you definitely did read their version of these experiences as happened to them.
I follow two content creators who I know are mouthpieces of the divine speaking directly to me. I am part of the collectives who follow each of them – for each of us, these creators are giving direct messages from our own angels. It’s remarkable, truly, and it helps so much to know that I am not alone in these intense darknesses and blinding lights.
My channelers are not for everyone, though. Mine are YouTubers Jhadina (@conversationswithj) and Ryan (@Robinson_Ryan). Maybe they would resonate with you, maybe not. I will tell you that if you choose to start a journey of your own – to go deep into your own darkness, to really learn yourself, to uncover who you are and why you are here, to strive to become the highest version of yourself – you will find your guides. You may be surprised what form they take. Just go with it.
So…
Read and enjoy, or get pissed off, or confused, or inspired. Or don’t.
Either way – whatever way – you are welcome, I am grateful for you, and I hope we get the chance to sit and talk around a fire sometime.
‘Til next time,
Rhonda