I have been watching the DNC like I watch all political theatre, with my laptop open, tweeting away. Everyone lost their collective junk when Michelle Obama came to speak, and for good reason.

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How amazing is she?

Her speech was beautiful and heart-felt and made me cry twice. But there was a weird thing happening on my twitter feed that just really bothered me. Over and over again people were all “Hillary wishes she could be like Michelle.” “Michelle is so much better than Hillary.” “Hillary would lose (insert whatever made up competition) to Michelle.”

Um. Y’all. Michelle was there to endorse Hillary. She literally said “I’m with her.”

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And yet…people are still like OOH! FIRST LADY CAGE MATCH!!! And to be clear, this wasn’t super conservative women should stay in the home people. I don’t follow those people on Twitter. These are people who are claiming to be feminists.

Um. Y’all. The competition you have put these two ladies in? That isn’t real.

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There is no competition. They both want the exact same thing. They both want the democratic nominee to be the next president. They have both been democrats their entire adult lives. Of course that is what they want. But people don’t want to talk about how they are on the same team fighting for the exact. same. thing. Oh no. They want to talk about how jealous Hillary must be of Michelle, how Michelle is secretly smug about her approval rating. They want to turn this into some kind of First Lady pageant where Miss Congeniality wins it all.

I don’t care what you think about Hillary, or Michelle. This is the junk we do to ladies all the time. I know because I have two incredibly talented and beautiful sister who also happen to be very smart. While our parents were amazing at letting us all be exactly who we were, but that didn’t mean that other people didn’t want to ask who was the “smart one” “the funny one” “the pretty one.” Y’all we are all smart and funny and talented and pretty. I mean, just look at us!

Hello! Hotties!

Look, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck don’t have to put up with this garbage. No one makes enemies out of two men who are clearly rooting for each other. They are with each other, and everyone knows it and that is totally fine with the world. No one ever is like, man, Matt so wished he had Ben’s jaw line. Or ooh I bet Ben totally knows everyone likes Matt better. That isn’t how it works for them because that isn’t how it works for men.

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Yeah. It must be pretty awesome to never have to worry about there not being enough room for you. Because THAT is what this is really about. Pitting women against each other is really about saying, there is only room for one lady here, so y’all better figure out which one of you is going to make it, because there is only one seat at this table for the lady.

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No. NO! I reject your preposterous position that there is only one seat for HALF THE POPULATION. That is crazy talk. No. There will no longer be just one seat for the ladies. LADY is not one kind of person. We can have Michelle, AND Hillary, AND Elizabeth Warren, AND Ivanka Trump. While I won’t vote for her dad, there is no denying she didn’t kill it at the Republican Convention. Girlfriend is good.

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So PLEASE stop with the Hillary vs. Michelle, Sister vs. Sister, pit women against each other because they couldn’t possibly be for each other garbage you are pulling. It is an old and tired story, and it simply isn’t true. I will not raise my daughters in a world where there is only room for one of them, and I will not sit at a table if that means my sisters lose a seat. You can keep that table. There is room for all of us.

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I started Accidental Devotional 5 years ago. I was going back to work after our second baby in two months. My husband was less than a semester into graduate school and the people I trusted most were beginning to suggest that writing was something I did, but perhaps a writer was something I was. I found the name in a comment from a dear friend, Abby reading your blog often turns into an Accidental Devotional. I loved it. It was perfect.

And it was. I spent 2012 blogging five days a week and following people I admired on Twitter. A few of those people have become my dear friends, and while I am not totally proud of every single post I wrote that year, writing is like running. You only get better if you do it. Like all of life, you have to show up. And I did. I did show up over and over again.

Slowly I began to show up other places. On a place called Mercy Mondays. To the FaithFeminisms conversation. As a guest poster on a blog no longer in existence about why I stopped talking about my inner city teaching experience. I showed up to online writing groups and a few conferences. I just kept showing up. Sometimes people ask me about how to go about blogging, and really this is the only piece of advice I have. Show up. Keep writing. Keep tweeting. Keep posting.

Slowly I found that I was writing about more than the ways God showed up in the middle of my messy life. I started talking about race, feminism, parenting. I started talking about the questions I was having about my faith, my profession, my privilege. Every single time I thought I was bumping over the boundaries of what my readers wanted from me, I discovered there was more than enough room. Over and over I thought, this is it. I have gone too far. I have said too much. Over and over again my readers said me too, we love you, we are with you. I cannot believe the community I have found, here on the internet. It has been such a gift.

There is a lot of new happening in my life. Next week all my colleagues will go back to school. I will not. My husband will (in two weeks God willing) go from being a PhD candidate to a PhD. Period. My baby is going to pre-k. I am going to seminary. It is a lot, but everyone is more than ready. Everyone is sure that this is our next right step.

We got our back to school hair cuts last week, the girls and I. I took eight inches off my head before we even started talking about styling. New haircut lead to new head shots lead to new banners lead to new website. I still own accidentaldevotional.com and that is probably how you got here, but I am ready to show up as my whole self. I have moved on over to AbbyNorman.net and all of my social media places are @abbynormansays I should have my email abbynorman@abbynorman.net up by the end of the week.

Of all the changes happening in my life, this is the one I am most bittersweet about, changing my url. Maybe I am a millennial. I love Accidental Devotional. I love everything it brought me. I love everyone it brought me, but it just doesn’t quite fit anymore. It is like growing out of a favorite dress as a child, or realizing that the couch you love dearly is about to collapse under the weight of your dog. These things have served you well, but it is time to move on.

I am excited and ready to move on, but I want to pause here and say thank you. Thanks for finding God with me at Accidental Devotional. Thanks for giving me the space to grow into myself. I am sure I would not have made the decision to go to seminary without this space. Thank you for giving me the space to grow and cheering me on in that growth.

Here’s to just being Abby Norman. All of her. All the time.

I am at Off the Page today, talking about the cost of me not wanting to do the uncomfortable work of talking about race. Sometimes, people ask me why I talk about race as much as I do. I seem to bring it up a lot. Why should it matter? Why do I always have to think everything is about race?

I bring up race, I retell the story of my own awakening to my own internalized racism because the cost of not is too great. My brothers and sisters of color are paying too high a price for my wanting to stay “safe” and “comfortable.” They don’t have that choice. If the only work that I can do is to re-tell the stories of my own awakening then I will tell them. If you have been reading for awhile some of this will likely sound familiar. 

We live in a society that perpetuates racist thoughts. What I have watched and listened to my whole life has encouraged my mind to think one way. The wrong way. I don’t like admitting I have racist thoughts.

It was really, really uncomfortable for me to realize I had some internalized racism. It was really hard for me to look myself in the mirror and face the fact.

But you know what’s worse than me having to face that about myself? My friend’s fear that her husband and son will be killed by the police, or a vigilante, or otherwise harmed by someone who fears them because they are black and young and therefore seen as a threat. I do not have to tell my children to operate a certain way in the world in the hopes that they will be treated fairly, but she does.

You can read the rest here.

I wrote this when Michael Brown died. I have updated it. This is my heart.

I did not always have ears to hear. 

When people told me that young black men were sometimes shot in this country by police, I would respond with a small shake of the head. How sad. But in my heart I would not really believe. That could not possibly be true. Police are here to protect us. This is America, this is the twenty-first century. People do not simply get gunned down for being black. That is history. That simply does not happen anymore. In my heart of hearts, I am very ashamed to admit, there was a tiny whisper: Surely they did something to deserve it. 

I did not always have eyes to see. 

People tried to tell me that this lens I see life through is a white one. But what did they know? They did not know about me and my struggles. White kids could grow up poor too. I was disabled for goodness sake, okay. I knew about teachers treating me poorly just because of my body. I knew about having it rough. How dare someone tell me my life was privileged. Didn’t they know just how hard I worked?

I did not always walk humbly

I knew. Okay? I got it. I was an inner-city teacher. I was saving the world. Racist thoughts, racist ideas? Not me. I was better than all of that, and I proved it every day by teaching at a black school. I was down.

But then

But then my husband got a job coaching speech at a historically black college. And when I traveled with the fine men of Morehouse, some of the brightest in the country, I got asked if I was okay. More than once I got asked if I was okay. Because surely a white woman traveling with a bunch of young black men is in danger. Because surely young black men are dangerous.

But then I started working at an all black high school. And when my darkest, dread-locked student went to grab a pencil, there was something in my mind that told me I was in danger. For a split second I was sure it was a gun. Because somewhere in my own mind and heart, something told me that my black boys were dangerous. Something no one had ever taught me. Something I had never wanted to learn.

But then a student came to tell me that her brother got shot. By a cop, on a rural road in Georgia, and he bled out on her white dress while the cop sped off. She had to call 911 and comfort him as he died in her arms while the ambulance came wailing to her aid. There was never an investigation.

But then I got an email a few days before school started that one of last years students had been shot. And there was no news story or vigil. There was no call to action or call to arms. Just an email. FYI one of your students has been shot. It happens sometimes.

But then I moved into a predominantly black neighborhood and some of my friends expressed fear of my neighbors. The neighbors who sat on their porch and fed my dog all day when we left our front door wide open. My neighbors didn’t want to shut my door, just in case we wanted it like that, so they watched it instead. The neighbors who have mowed my lawn, invited me to their birthday parties, held the packages that came to my house. And some people asked why I would live in the ghetto, and wondered aloud if I was concerned for the safety of my kids. Not because of the crime report (my neighborhood is very safe) but because they assumed that black people are dangerous.

But then we put our daughter in the neighborhood school, and people want to ask me about her safety. My four-year-old in a classroom of other four-year-olds. Who did they think was going to hurt her?

And I began to hear.

I began to hear that there was a distinct danger you face every day, if people just assume that you are dangerous because you are black and you are male. And I began to hear the stories of police brutality, of unnecessary aggression, of my sophomore boys being treated like criminals simply because of their bodies.

I began to finally hear, that just because it didn’t happen to me did not mean it did not happen. 

And I began to see.

I began to see that my skin granted me access to pretty much anywhere I wanted to go. I began to see how no one ever starts out aggressively toward me, because I am never seen as a threat. I began to understand that my students, my colleagues, my neighbors were not granted the same access, the same pass.

I began to see the injustice of this world, and the ways in which I was purposefully ignoring it.

And when I look back at how much it took to have my eyes open to see and my ears open to hear, I am ashamed. 

I am ashamed that I did not seek to understand until I had to. I am ashamed that I did not choose to see until it was right in front of my eyes. I am ashamed, that until I had people that I loved who were being affected by racism, I was completely oblivious to its existence.

My heart was hard. I was only concerned with injustice when it was hurting people I loved. It should not have taken someone I know dying for me to care that innocent people were dying. It should not have taken me knowing them personally, for me to believe that they were innocent.

I was blind, I was deaf, I was proud. 

I am praying the people of this country have softer hearts than mine. I am praying that we are broken over all the lives that have been turned into hashtags and that brokenness is only a beginning. I am praying we listen when we are told that this is only one of many. I am praying we hear when brown mothers tell us they fear for their babies’ lives. I am praying we do something when our eyes and ears are opened to injustice. I am praying we speak out, we reach out, we educate ourselves. I am praying we care. 

I am praying for eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts that are moved into action. 

It is not enough to stand with Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Alston Sterling, Philando Castile. It is not enough to feel bad about the black men and women being killed because they are presumed dangerous. It is not enough.

We need to open our eyes. We need to stop and listen. This is not the first time this has happened, and this is not the first time we have been told. May this finally be the over due catalyst for our hearts to move into action. May our hearts be heavy that it has taken this long.