I Am Now 'That' Lady

On the death and resurrection of healthy debate (and Charlie Kirk)

As the sun began to set on September 10, 2025, I sat here alone in my little cabin away from everyone I love on a self-created writer’s retreat. It was silent and still. As it should be, as it often is in grief.

For the record, I don’t do current events or breaking news or political updates on Black Sheep Mom. I have enough dirty laundry in my own house to hang upon the line, and I have never thought highly enough of my own opinions to offer them as Truth. I am, at best, an essayist who writes about personal failures and mulligans.

But tonight, the blood is still whooshing in my ears and I have skipped dinner afraid that it will come bubbling back up in the sour, metallic-tasting replays of a bullet-pierced carotid artery. His left hand was still holding the microphone for God’s sake, suspended in air. He was mid-sentence, and then he was gone.

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As a writer positioned adjacent to social justice matters, I fear that I am in the crosshairs here. My daughter knows me well enough to have texted to warn against watching the video. Of course, there was no avoiding it. Nothing with a nervous system is meant to see such things on repeat.

And also— this is not my country. Only in recent days have I regretted that I birthed children onto this soil, a place where disagreeing with someone’s opinion will get your neck blown wide open in front of a sea of beautiful and innocent college kids.

That was Vietnam when I was a kid.

That was Beirut and Rwanda and Northern Ireland.

That shit happened in a place called Bosnia that my neighbors had fled in desperation, but it wasn’t here. It wasn’t America.

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The killing of Charlie Kirk will forever mark the moment that I became ‘that lady.’ The one who says things like, “when I was a kid” and “what is the world coming to?” because back in my day we only thought democide was as bad as it could get— watching those grainy, jerky videos of Kent State students running or the Waco compound ablaze. Political violence was never planned by someone’s confused, angry brother in a black hoodie. We didn’t see Americans dropping dead on Live Reels, blood spurting everywhere unless they were at war in a country far away where they spoke a language we didn’t speak.

As a writer, I am nearly paralyzed tonight. My children, one by one, have helped talk me down off the ledge— so used to this chaos that they hardly flinch anymore. My oldest son, who is 27 and in prison right now for non-violent drug crimes, called in the midst of me watching the news coverage (I never watch news coverage). I apologized for the tenor of my voice, registering somewhere between pleading and exhaustion. He said he knows what it is like to be shocked by a sudden and inexplicable violence in the midst of what should have been an ordinary day, and he knows how it takes your appetite.

He also said that he believes in the death penalty for a culture that can’t assure a young woman a seat on a train without risking being slashed to death in front of everyone riding home from work. Take these individuals into the middle of town on Live TV and show the public that we will not tolerate this anymore, he said. This, oh Irony of Ironies, is prison justice. They do not tolerate a lack of accountability. Period.

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As a writer who thinks on my own, working hard to apply reason and experience to my output into this world, I am sickened by the death of a man who only ever invited civil discourse in a public forum. I do not care that he and I would have disagreed on a number of things. At our core, we have been asking for the same thing— to engage in civil discussions with intelligence and candor.

Dead at 31, he is forever now a martyr whose sound bytes and last videos will be elevated to the likes of RFK in the Ambassador Hotel and MLK saying ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ in Memphis. It doesn’t matter if you like that or not, that is what today’s news will have etched into our political history.

Mostly, I am angry that any one of us would need to worry that some nut-ball will interpret our experiences and opinions as a reason to stab or shoot us. I have long understood that I can’t write the things I do without being kicked down and shoved into a box that is slapped closed with crazy cat-lady stickers. More than one of my readers has assumed that I hate all white men. Simultaneously, I am not able to come to a space like Substack and be honest that I support RFK Jr. because then I will be discarded into another box of generalized losers that should be ‘unfollowed’ because obviously I am intolerant and racist and uneducated.

Bitch, I’m the least racist, intolerant white lady you know. I get up every day to eat, sleep, and breathe injustices and poverty and oppression. How dare you reduce me to a one dimensional, predictable thing. I am not red and I am not blue– I am the whole fucking color wheel and even though I do not know exactly when I became afraid to share my strongest feelings and beliefs out loud, I think it happened some time in the last 4-5 years and if you want the truth– it has diminished my writing.

It has diminished us all.

So, tonight, I am gonna be that lady. For the record, I don’t care about your gender. I don’t care if you like men or women or gender fluidity to touch your pee-pee or your clitoris or whatever gland turns you on. I don’t care about your abortion. I don’t care about your vax status. I don’t care about your race. I don’t care about your political bumper stickers or your feelings about who is in the White House or your level of education or your religion (or your denouncing of God). I damn sure don’t care about your past sins.

But catch this— I do care about how you treat other people. I care about what you have to say about others when no one is recording you. And I care about whether or not you seek to make this life better for everyone, not just the ones who agree with you.

If all of that now makes my blog debatable, I am okay with that— Just don’t bring a high powered rifle to the chat.

RIP Charlie Kirk. You deserved so much better.