Image created by The Momma Dom by Katie M. Webb using AI-assisted tools. Original editorial artwork inspired by the public story of Punch, a young Japanese macaque learning belonging inside his troop. This artwork is not affiliated with or endorsed by any zoo, toy brand, or news outlet.

The Momma Dom’s Musings

Punch, The Momma Dom, and the Gospel of the Weird Ones

For the Gonzos, the bumblebee girls, the soft fighters, and every oddball who had to create security before the group learned how to see them.

The Momma Dom by Katie M. Webb

💜MOMMA’S MENU SYSTEM FOR EASIER NAVIGATION💜

💭 AI transparency ~ Use for the information on Punch you will find helped research the information found in my author’s note, as well as my photos for this article. I did not replicate Punch completely in my rendition of him. I also did not use his stuffy, I used my puppy, Mr. Fidgit E., The Earl of Snarl.

✍️ Author’s Note ~ Punch is a young Japanese macaque at Ichikawa City Zoo in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. After being rejected by his mother, he was hand-raised by zoo staff and given a stuffed orangutan to help with comfort, clinging, and early development. Recent reporting says Punch has been using the toy less and interacting more with other macaques as he learns his way into the troop.

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

What do the weird ones do when the world does not build them a room?

They build a world of their own. Then, because they are ridiculous and holy and apparently incapable of minding their own business, they leave the door open for others.

That is where this starts and it is not with a monkey. It is also not fully begun with a stuffed animal. Not with a viral reel that wandered into my feed like the algorithm had been digging through my childhood, my nervous system, and possibly the junk drawer where I keep old batteries, rubber bands, and emotional evidence.

This starts with the odd ones, the outside the group ones too. It launches with the Gonzos, Blind Melon’s, the music group, song No Rain, with it’s Bumblebee girls. The soft fighters and the kids who walked to the beat of their own trumpet because drums were too obedient and frankly, a little bossy.

This starts with Punch and yes, I am aware Sproutlings, that Momma is emotionally invested in a little monkey in Japan.

Nobody schedules that kind of connection. Nobody wakes up, pours coffee into a purple mug named “George”, adjusts the bunny ears, and says, “Today I will examine the architecture of abandonment through a macaque” but, life is tacky like that.

It tosses you a baby monkey trying to figure out belonging and says, “Here. Let’s see what this does to your heart Momma.” Turns out it does/did, plenty. Punch does not break my heart because he is cute or adorable. Cute is too small a description. Cute is what people say when they do not want the story to get its hands dirty.

Having said this, Punch break my heart because he is one of us. One of the little living things that got handed a hard beginning and still keeps inching toward the group like hope is a job, and he clocked in early. I know that walk. Likely so do you reader. The walk I speak of is not because I am a monkey but, because I am a Katie.

Katie and The Momma Dom are one and the same. There is no backstage curtain where Katie takes off the ears and becomes the “real,” woman while The Momma Dom gets hung up with the winter coats and that one Halloween wig nobody admits they bought. Shameless as no one will throw it away either.

The Momma Dom is not a costume for a silly holiday ritual. She is not a trick to be played out and the reveal slowed down. She is not a social media mascot wearing purple and yelling from the balcony. The Momma Dom is Katie with structure. Katie with her daily armor. Katie with her own language.

The Momma Dom is simply Katie with a purple coffee cup named George, a bunny-eared hat, a crown, a dog with the moral expression of a retired judge with a superiority complex, a purple heart, a vow, a system, and enough sacred spunk to walk into a world that kept misreading her and say,

“Fine. I will build the room myself.”

When the Abandoned One Creates a World

Punch is much like many humans who require a comfort something. A comfort companion dog, a comfort companion parrot, I heard of a comfort llama that wasn’t allowed into a train due to its size. Point is readers, Punch and his comfort object are one system.

That is the first truth of this story. They are one unit connected and bound, the toy and the monkey. The animal and it’s prop, crutch, pseudo mother the one it sleeps on, feeds bananas to, seeks for comfort, security.

Not “aww, look, he thinks it is his friend,” while everyone in the comments melts into emotional vanilla pudding puddles, and then goes back to yelling at strangers about the way they walk and why aren’t they letting us get closer.

One system that was locked and individual. A safe space like a fantasy/reality world called, “Dreamsicle” where it is all sweet, yummy and secure enough to just be alone with his companion.

Rejected, alone, bullied…

Punch needed love, so he created somewhere to put love. Punch needed belonging, so he created somewhere to practice trust on. Punch needed that trust, so he gave his own trust to the one thing that would not shove him, a toy.

That orange stuffed animal did not outrank him, leave him, harass him to correct him, or make him feel stupid for reaching out by pulling Punch’s hair. That is not pathetic to crave care and being a part of something else. That is creation in survival mode. That is one creature giving life and faith into something beyond itself.

That is a tiny body saying, “I still need a place to put my tenderness, and if the living world is not ready, I will start here.”

Sproutlings, dear friends and readers, have you ever found yourself alone with no one for a smile? A place to reason out why the world is dismissing you? Let me know in comments please. I appreciate knowledge from others. Lots of good lessons in that.

Katie knows that move well. The creation from solitude. Katie created The Momma Dom the same way. I also speak in the 3rd person which is great reader as I hit the 1st person, 2nd, 3rd and the 4th wall. Not from fantasy mind you, from necessity.

People unapologetically, and it is a bit rude, misunderstand the things that keep other people alive. They see Momma’s bunny ears and think glorified costume. They see George my purple cup and think it’s just an uncaffeinated prop.

Looking deeper as I tend to, they see the crown and think ego, they don’t see the people who put the crown on my head and said, “Fluffy girl look at who you are.”

They see Mr. Fidgit E., The Earl of Snarl, and think cute little dog. They see the Momma Dom-ism phrases, the eyeball signs of my throne each with their own phase, the pulsing purple heart, the whole Domverse, and think silly side play.

Bless their little unseasoned casseroles and flavorless apple pies. From the inside of my brain, this is not play or fantasy. This is my daily life. I eat, live, and breath what I do and I never give up or in. This is architecture like one designing a system of personal motivation and drive.

This is a woman building handrails inside a life that kept turning into stairs, and broken down escalators that ascends greatly, and rocks that need to be traversed. This is how pain gets a chair before it knocks over the table in my life.

When you factor in the cancer that entered Momma’s life and made her a caregiver to an adult son who often is a man of his own. Who knew they would grow up? That doctors and often the very institution that says they will heal and gets close but leaves just as many scars as it heals symptoms.

Those same doctors that this caregiver more often than not had verbal pow wows with and was ignored. Survival mode is how a heart survives being too often unseen, too often mislabeled, too often told to calm down by people who could not hear the smoke alarm because they were busy admiring the curtains in their offices.

It is beautiful when the abandoned one creates a world, it is tragic that they had to in the first place.

Have you found yourself in this situation Sproutlings. Where you are in a whirlwind with no one to support you, let you lean on them, get a hug? Time to share let me know in comments.

The Sacred Ridiculous

Every weird one has a thing that makes them stand out. Perhaps a lucky shirt they don’t wash except when the worst team in the NFl wins. A grandmother’s ring that is so huge and gawdy it took butter to remove it from your swollen finger.

I think you are seeing where I may be going with this. A song that they whistle to when jumping over cracks in the pavement. They would be the ones that carry an oversize army blanket and wear a boat captain’s hat and an eye patch just for flare.

Perhaps that weird one went off script and started carrying a purple coffee cup, chummed around with a white dog with an attitude like a near retirement career general and a meaty treat. She has her Pure, Love, Energy prayer, her hat with ears, a crown that says dignity and grace was not up for a vote.

Humans love to act dignified and sophisticated until life hits turbulence, and suddenly everybody is gripping a barf bag and screaming for oxygen, or bargaining with God, and remembering a stuffed bear named Mr. Buttons from 1978 that they were bargaining with God about, and where the last of the chocolate Easter Bunny went that year.

Sorry off on a tangent there but a good one readers, let us not get haughty taughty about Punch needing something soft in this world to land into. The soft thing is where a system begins. Punch did not simply cling to this object, he practiced on it.

He watched and worked out the language of the troop on something safe enough to hold. Cling here too long and they get upset but if I touch here and wait will my companion hurt me. It did not. Confidence gained to try again?

He tried to come closer. He learned when to back off. Safety, trust, confidence, try again, that is not just play to Punch, it’s rehearsal. That is a young creature saying, “I am learning your world before I am safe enough to stand fully inside it.”

Katie did that too, The Momma Dom is my rehearsal turned into revelation. A coffee cup became a compass to how long of an adventure I took or what course I steered. My hat became a two eared set of armor. Those bunny ears have a life of their own if you watch the way they lean and twitch. A flag to my surrounded awareness.

My crown gave me dignity when I was building my backbone of self-esteem. My puppy is the best witness one can have as he silently judges as I give him the power to do when I need the clarity of my own self coming back in his cuddles and grumbles or his poignant growls and snarks. That is he has personality and I have my interpretations of them.

A heart symbol became a vow to myself. A phrase became a handrail to the next belief. Any of my characters became the place where my human truth finally stood upright, cracked its neck, and said, “There you are you oddball. I have been looking for you all over but, the bison bingo banazoo big game, went wrong after three old biddies called bingo and started a stampede. Animals stomping, people running, livestock agents, guns, meat everywhere. Hell of a bbq after though. Bison steaks, man you gotta try em. There is less total fat and more iron, zinc and less saturated fat…”

The strange thing was never the joke, the strange thing was the bridge back to belonging.

Do you have something that makes you the odd one? The weird person on the planet? The cool confident gonzo anomaly in the crowd? Share your flare and let me know in comments.

Observe. Practice. Belong.

Punch’s story is not clean or movie of the week sweet and innocent. The Momma Dom says good. Clean stories are usually lying or selling something underneath it all. Modern tactics of staying safe in these times, first tells you there is no clean if you are out there living life.

Punch is not floating into the troop on a cloud of inspirational piano music while everyone gathers around and says, “Welcome, small sir, we have prepared a tiny sash.” This did not go on with a Grammy Award winning singer and composer preforming their top hit, “Plushie and Monkey Surrogate Love Tonight, over Netflix Movie rumored to be in production.”

No, Punch he has to observe the others. He has to practice to be accepted. He has to try the enclosure, read the bodies of his peers, absorb the rules of the group, and figure out how to come closer without getting swallowed by the old fear he will be rejected again.

To anyone who has had to break into a closed system you would know, that is the real work of belonging and being a part of something. It’s not the glossy version but, it is the real version. That real version looks like being corrected, being judged, misreading signals to advance when the crowd is saying back off some.

This is the version where you want to go back to the soft fluffy thing. Loneliness hurts sure in it’s gentle safe ways but, belonging asks you to risk much more of yourself to a different type of loneliness, that of rejection but unsafe inclusion.

The one where the group does not always know what to do with you yet, but you keep showing up anyway and they keep shaking their heads as they pull your hair and question your nerve and the size of your convictions. I see Punch and I see the whole bloody gospel of inclusion in three words:

Observe. Practice. Belong.

That is not just monkey business alone, it’s human business too. It’s a mother with doctors business. It’s a writer’s business and a reader’s as well Sproutlings. It is every oddball’s second-chance manual written in prophets fur, sacred awkwardness, and holy stubbornness.

Observe ~ because the world has rules it does not always explain.

Practice ~ because wanting connection is not the same as knowing how to survive inside it.

Belong ~ because even the ones who start on the outside are not automatically meant to stay there.

Momma wonders Sproutlings, when belonging is not always a welcome mat, is a lesson you survive long enough to understand, one you were meant to learn or one you choose to learn? Comment below please.

Collision Is Not Collapse and Collapse Is Not The End

Punch keeps inching closer to the group, the crowd, the inner circle of things. That is the part that gets me because I recognize it. That quiet moment of thinking you are breaking in but you find you haven’t travelled far enough yet. Still you pack your lunch each day and get on the school bus.

He gets the social static of his situation, the awkward corrections that come fast and hard from the elders, the troop version of, “ not like that, kid,” however less friendly and more survive or be thrust out. This kind of reception in the world and still he studies them and tries to repeat what he sees.

He does not become an object of rejection nor a symbol of defeat. Momma respects that as he fits my “Show up”. He does not let the first no write the whole constitution of his life, he runs back to his surrogate and curls up or lays on top of to nap and tries again. He keeps moving and that is his fighting spirit.

Not the inspirational poster kind with a sunset and a font that belongs in a dentist’s waiting room that says, “Smile.” You know the one that has the lot of toothless kids. Funny they are all missing their front teeth only and that is why Punch is the real kind.

The ugly little engine with the stubborn little charismatic spark. He has that thing we wish we all had that says, “Well, that hurt. Anyways...” Then gets back into the fray. “Collision is not collapse,” Momma always says. “And Collapse is not the end.”

My Momma~ism line belongs here like a steel beam of personal construction.

A collision is a contact with force and energy. It knocks the breath of anything standing sideways. It leaves a mark that defines a change in the person. It makes the body check every room for door frames in which to escape and every heart beat for the exits.

Collapse is when you go down but, even collapse does not get the last word if there is still breath, still spunk, still one soft thing nearby, still one ridiculous sacred object saying, “Get up. We are not done being strange in public.” Punch knows that in his little monkey bones and that is why he does his thing.

Katie knows it in her being, The Momma Dom was not born out of ease. She herself was built out of impact. She is what happened when collision did not get to become the whole ending. Cancer hit, a flood hit, a roof was damaged, a room in repair, her auto immunes tried to take her down, a spouse in need of serious rest, trying to start her writing career.

Katie is the stand-up comedian after the tragedy. She is faster to the humor than most seasoned, “It’s never to early,” satirist folk. She is the wipe your mouth after because you spit out your own coffee she speaks, the adjust the crown on your own head.

The “Oh, you thought that was where I disappeared? See ya tomorrow. I am having egg salad for lunch.” type that will not go away.

Have you found yourself making a joke out of a tragedy. Maybe it was too soon, maybe it was a bit off color or tasteless to the moment. If you wish to share and comment please do. Join the giggle after the moment with Momma in comments.

The Need to Be Seen Is Not Vanity

I watch Punch every day on social media not because I need another internet animal to distract me from my fierce edges of the apocalypse, although let us be honest if we may, a tiny macaque ambassador with a stuffy and an ambition to succeed?

Well, that is not the worst idea humanity has had lately.

I watch him because he is doing something animal instinct sacred, a different way to self-soothe but it isn’t that awkward, he can be exhausting in his trial and errors but so impressive, and slightly insane he prefers to run like a man.

He is becoming visible to zoo visitors, to the group he lives with, to himself even. When he moves with more confidence near the others, I feel it in my body that he has won a small success. When another monkey lets him near, something in me unclenches and thinks he has started to be seen.

When he sits alone and has that lonely, longing look in his little monkey eyes, that one gets me. That is not content for Reels on Facebook or TikTok. That is a memory with fur on it. That is the ache of being in the room and still not feeling registered by those who are staring right at you.

The girl who did not fit existed. The woman who walked to the beat of her own trumpet because a drum was too obedient and too easy to be picked. The bumblebee girl in the wrong field spinning around with her antennas hoping to find the hive of inclusion.

The Gonzo hearted out there one who loved the stranger ones because, the strangest ones always seemed to know something the polished heroes with the plans and the theme songs for their flashy coordinated outfits always missed.

I was never chasing the spotlight, most of the weird ones aren’t. The spotlight is hotter than the sun, louder than an explosion, and usually operated by somebody with terrible judgment who should never operate a Tilt-A-Whirl or the bumper cars alone while drinking a slurpee.

I wanted to be correctly seen, there is a difference and it should be noted. Attention can stare at you and still misunderstand everything I have been in the middle of this myself. Katie has first hand knowledge. I mentioned cancer and being a caregiver.

704 days since my son was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer.

Being seen means somebody registers the living creature accurately. I had doctors who reduced, mocked my intelligence, flattened what I was saying to them about my patient and ignored what became obvious that it was occurring including but not limited to, him withdrawing under their watch.

I was filed under the easiest label, diabetes. I did not find myself filed under the easiest label because the room is too lazy to read the whole chart, an AI decided to have them treat my sudden blindness by looking at my mouth for the food I was definitely lying about eating.

My aunt used to say, “I’m not too sensitive. You’re just not sensitive enough.” There it is, the whole purple heart of the thing for me. Maybe the ache is not the flaw at all. Maybe the ache is the alarm system for your whole being. Maybe tenderness itself is not weakness. Maybe tenderness is the instrument that still works after everybody else got used to ignoring the sound for care.

Punch does not make me feel broken at all because he shows me I care. Punch reminds me that caring is still alive in me and it hasn’t been burnt out by caregiving, illness, worry over a loved one getting older and the distance cancer caregiving has created that we are mending everyday.

In a world that rewards whole sensory numbness, scrolling at a rapid pace and not taking anything in, mockery of people, and emotional drive-bys through Reels and TikToks, there is something purely holy and innocent about stopping for the lonely little creature and saying, “I see you, baby. Keep going.”

Being seen is not vanity. Being seen is proof that you did not imagine your own existence. Can you think of a time that you made yourself seen when maybe a situation pushed you into the darkness. Please comment if you had a time you needed to make room for yourself.

Show Up. Stand By. Defend.

This is where Punch walks straight into my motto without knowing a damn thing about mottos, brands, Medium, trauma essays, or the high holy weirdness of a woman with a coffee cup named George.

See my man Punch shows up every time he moves toward the troop again. The soft surrogate thing stands by him when the troop is not ready, and every tiny attempt defends the truth that he is capable of learning, capable of bonding, capable of becoming part of something larger than his first rejection.

That is the definition itself of Show Up. Stand By. Defend. Small in nature and stature he may be, furry his companion stuffy is, awkward as he feels and as sacred his task, he does not give in just trudging forward. He shows up in his walking and bouncing up and down.

He stands by the troop trying and giving up his own comfort leaving his Mama toy behind to approach the troop. He defends daily himself against attack, and refusing to let the world rename survival as weakness.

Katie and The Momma Dom do not see, “No,” the way other people see a finality. We see unfairness hiding underneath it and make sure it is cleared away. We see truth shoved into a corner and we coax it out or pull it out kicking and screaming to rejoin the joy.

We see the lonely creature, the sad person, the lesson in the story, the odd little shape everybody dismissed because it did not arrive wrapped in acceptable packaging with a nice bow and a receipt. We do not hear no and collapse around that dismissed thing. We hear, “Something here has not been understood yet.”

That is Pure. Love. Energy. Not some perfectly painted watercolor cotton ball after school project about nonsense. Nor a scented candle in a hostage situation that will make everyone calm with it’s lit wick of fragrance. No one is smiling through the fire while another somebody hands you a gratitude journal and a coupon for yoga pants while you are smoking, smouldering, and asking for Oxygen.

Pure. Love. Energy. Is love with boundaries and tenderness but with a spine. Sensitivity with teeth that bite truth. A purple heart that still beats after being told it was too loud, too large for the room, too understanding.

My little Punch has all of that and it’s not because he is cute. Although readers he is cute. Too cute in fact because he keeps trying.

Love with boundaries and tenderness but with a spine and a bite of truth. If you have every needed to find that bite of truth backed by your tough love spine, I want to hear about it. Comment below and let me know.

The Oddball Was Never the Side Character

I have always loved the oddballs, the underdogs, the ones nobody thought would do anything because they were too strange to be possible. That would be what I call the bumblebee girl. Which actually came from a Blind Melon song, No Rain.

Gonzos called to me, the misfits as labeled, the softer ones we should not hurt, the crooked one with the back brace but the great mind for history and tales of old. The one carrying the wrong instrument into the wrong parade. The one who did not want the spotlight but still somehow got the work done while the shiny people were busy polishing their own reflections.

That was never random Sproutlings. We recognize our own species before we have language for it and we mimic often to follow the crowd, they know where the chow line is. I used to say I walked to the beat of my own trumpet, not drum, trumpet.

At a young age I knew a trumpet announces. A trumpet bends sound. A trumpet can resonate ridiculous, mournful, stubborn, and completely out of place unless the room needed a truth blast. Then it was long, loud, and could be felt throughout the body and beating heart.

That is very Momma Dom, truth that can be felt throughout.

I loved Robert Frosts poem, Two Roads, and the image of the roads too, before I learned it was more complicated than the motivational poster version people made out of it. “See, two roads diverged… I took the one less traveled by.” That made me love it more the hidden meaning that was never hidden except by time and teaching.

Of course the thing everyone used to explain, that brave individuality was messier, funnier, more ironic, more human than the clean version. It was a parody for a friend and made fun of things. This man that went into the woods to live in the woods, still went home to have his mother wash his clothes.

That is how it always goes isn’t it? The world wants simple symbols neatly explained. The odd ones know better neatly explained is usually where the bodies are buried. Punch is not just the sad little monkey his videos portray at first. The Momma Dom is not just the woman in bunny ears. The bumblebee girl is not just dancing in a field. Gonzo is not just strange.

The underdog is not waiting for the world to approve them. The oddball is often the one reading the room before the room knows it has a story to be read. The room always has a pulse. Energies congregated together always do. The world sees weird and thinks useless. It sees sensitive and thinks fragile and weak. It sees theatrical and thinks fake, false, phony.

It sees maternal and thinks softness. It sees humor and thinks unserious and a pointless joke. It sees the soft object and thinks just a silly toy. It sees the bunny ears and thinks I am just in costume. The world at large does not understand that sometimes the strange thing is evidence of a deeper intelligence at work and greater plan.

The oddball learned to survive without the usual map, that means the oddball notices doors other people walk past.

Are you the oddball? Did you notice a door someone could not see past? Something softer that meant a bigger hardness? Do tell me in comments please. I would love to hear your words.

Second Chances Are Not Pretty Little Things

Second chances sound lovely until you are standing inside one. They are strange and lonely not to mention humiliating and unnerving. They ask you to try again in front of everyone who already watched you miss.

Punch’s second chance is not clean, neither is mine, for that matter neither is anybody’s.

A second chance can look like standing at the edge of the unbending group while your heart tries to climb out of your body and file a complaint with inner management that tells you to get over it you pulled a double shift during the holidays and it’s a market were no one is happy with you to begin with, Merry Holidays.

It can look like being corrected on what you feel might be right. It can look like being tolerated before being asked to join in. It can look like wanting to run back to the companion blanket, rag, stuffy, person, coffee cup named George, because belonging even at the bottom is harder than loneliness in different ways.

Loneliness hurts, but at least it is familiar in the ways survival can feel like. Belonging asks you to risk your whole self in the gamble. Inclusion asks you to be clumsy in public, especially if you aren’t privy to all the social rules and graces. Asking to be a part, also asks you to keep inching closer after the pushback. That is the real underdog story and it ain’t pretty, shiny, or theatrical.

The underdog does not win by becoming normal, what is normal anyway? The underdog wins by surviving long enough for the group to understand their shape of difference and sculpting out room for an oddball. Even if that oddball is the last banana.

Punch is doing that slipping and sliding on his bananas. Katie does that in her, “I love Lucy way,” of getting herself in some pickles. The Momma Dom does that when she adds her own strong flavors to get her out of it. Every outside the group kid who ever had to find another cast of characters to stand through life with does that.

The ones outside the circle are not always trying to break the circle, sometimes they are teaching it how to open properly.

Did you ever look for a second group? Did you find that circle? Did it let you in? Or did you make it open to you? Tell me in comments.

Katie, Punch, and the Power of Creation

Katie understands Punch because Katie is the builder of community too. That is the cleanest truth I build systems. I also fill those systems with characters that Katie finds meaning out of daily objects and gives life to. Daily objects are what you cling to and save you when the bigger systems of support fail.

The Momma Dom is not a character floating outside of Katie or adjacent either. The Momma Dom is Katie’s created safety system that became a truth system of DOM. A private bridge that became a public door to Discipline. A way to survive that became a way to teach Over Me.

Punch made a world with what comfort he had a given animal with the hope he would learn to repeat what he saw in the group. Katie made a world with The Momma Dom during a time when the world was locked down with Covid and no one knew if there would be a tomorrow.

Both of these worlds said the same thing, “I will create love where love is missing. I will create security where security is missing. I will create language where nobody gave me one. Then I will use it to come closer or bring the world closer to me.”

That is the holy tragedy in my mind, that is the beautiful, painful, fragile hurt and the part that shines brighter than the North Star, and stings like a thousand Murder Hornets at the same time. Why Momma asks? Why? Ah yes, it is wonderfully, grand and epic of a journey of bravery through hell and triumph when the glass walls break down.

Any living thing that has to create safety from scratch. It is heart wrenchingly sad that a baby monkey needed to pour loyalty into something soft before the troop felt possible to approach.

It is sad that a woman can be alone enough in the medical world of hospitals and hotels for 61 days, that a coffee cup named George, a hat with bunny ears, a crown, a dog, and a whole sacred universe become the things that help her stay visible through Power of Attorney for a son with cancer.

Now hear me Sproutlings and hear me well, sad does not mean weak. Tragedy does not mean pity me, type of pathetic. Tragic means something precious survived conditions it should not have had to survive and then got up. Then it decided to make art through the tears. Make a system through frustration.

Then it made a door and it walked right on through.

Katie did not build The Momma Dom to escape being human. She built her so the human part had somewhere strong enough to stand. If you have that strength in yourself and you use a nickname or a persona share it in comments. This will be fun to share.

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Momma’s Editorial: If Punch Ever Needs Some Momma

So yes, I watch a monkey named Punch in the little spare time I have and through a lot of trouble to see. I watch him for the baby monkey as he is adorable. I watch him for the weird ones as he fits the bill, he sweeps the enclosure with a broom and his pseudo Mama an Ikea orangutang toy.

I watch him for the bumblebee girls that are buzzing around, the Gonzos and their outlandish ways, the outside the group kids, the soft fighters with the big impact, the ones who were never going to win by blending in so they made smoothies and swam instead.

I watch him because every time he tries again, some old part of me whispers, “There you go, baby. That is how you do it. That is how the odd one survives the first rejection. That is how the outside one learns the group tempo. That is how the group learns the outside ones trumpet sound. That is how tolerance becomes a new type of pattern. That is how the pattern becomes belonging. That little boy is how collision fails to become collapse.”

If collapse comes anyway, fine let it come for us. See Momma knows a secret, all too well, collapse is not the end. Sometimes collapse is just the floor you push from and that can’t be collapse if you use it to rise. So Punch, if you ever need some Momma, The Momma Dom could sure use a monkey.

I don’t want your cute self as a mascot or a pet. I speak as a fellow sacred scarred, once scared oddball, as a tiny, stubborn, soft-fisted preacher of my Pure. Love. Energy. and as proof that the weird ones are not done just because the first group did not know how to hold them in the fold.

As proof that second chances can be awkward, lonely, brave, ridiculous, and holy all at once and that the ones outside the circle may still be the ones teaching the circle how to open I respect and commend you for making them bend to you. I know what it is to carry the soft thing.

I know what it is to wait at the edge of the boarders. I know what it is to be called too sensitive when the truth was simpler, they were not sensitive enough.

I know what it is to finally stand up, ears on, cup in hand, heart showing, and say, *“*I was never too weird to belong. The world was just late learning how to accept the weird ones know better recipes with bananas.”**

The ones who had to learn how to be seen often become the ones who teach the world how to look. Are you one of my bumble bee people? Comment below and hello!

The Momma Dom by Katie M. Webb

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

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Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

Photo and concept by The Momma Dom and her A.I. Program

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[embed]NEW LITERARY SOCIETY Participate, experiment, and share in a vibrant literary community. Engage in interviews, reviews, literary…medium.com

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