Mama G's Traditions

I was tired. Had been on the beach working at my listing and of course had to enjoy the ocean a few hours (water baby here). Was on my moon and cramping, and then I got a call, "Let's go to the movies. We're watching Practical Magic 2!"

I haven't seen 1 yet, lol, and I loved the movie!

Reminded me of our own family's generational curses I've worked arduously to break these last 6 years...

Thank you for the invite and the love. I love you and I'm grateful for you 😘

Much love😘🐛🦋
Mama G 🐎❤️🔥

Sad reality of many little girls of that era. My great grandmother being one of them. At 12 she was married off to a man who had about 9 kids, some grown already!

Even more disgusting reality is that still to this day, minors can be legally married in 33 states of the United States if their parents consent!

She was a child. He was a 26-year-old Italian soldier who would become one of his country's most celebrated journalists. For decades, the story of what happened between them was largely told by him.

Her name was Destà.

In 1935, Indro Montanelli volunteered for Fascist Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. While serving in East Africa, he entered into madamato, a colonial arrangement in which Italian men acquired local women and girls as temporary domestic and sexual partners.

Montanelli later said he paid Destà's family for her. He repeatedly described her as 12 years old, although his accounts sometimes contradicted one another.

Then he went home.

Destà remained in Africa. Montanelli returned to Italy and eventually became one of the country's most famous journalists and intellectuals.

He never hid what had happened.

In 1969, journalist Elvira Banotti confronted him on television about taking a 12-year-old as his wife. Montanelli defended himself by invoking local customs. Decades later, he was still publicly discussing the relationship.

But there is a profound problem with the story history inherited.

Almost everything we know about Destà came through Montanelli.

Her age, her name, the payment, what happened between them and even what became of her afterward survive largely through the changing recollections of the powerful European man who had acquired her during a colonial war.

Destà did not become a famous writer.

She did not get decades of interviews in which to explain what happened.

Montanelli did.

Thank you Mary 🙌🏽

FORGOTTEN LGBTQ HISTORY

The judge who sentenced her thought he was teaching her a lesson.

San Francisco, 1981. Police kicked in the door of a small apartment expecting a dealer and found a fifty-seven-year-old waitress in an apron.

The place smelled of chocolate. On the counter, cooling on wire racks, were fifty-four dozen brownies. They bagged up around eighteen pounds of ma*****na and put handcuffs on her.

She didn't look frightened or guilty. She smoothed down her apron and told them she'd been expecting them.

The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. A funny local story about an older woman misbehaving.

Nobody looked closely enough to ask who the brownies were for.

To understand it you have to remember what San Francisco was in the early eighties.

Something was moving through the city and killing young men, and nobody had a name for it yet. Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. And in some hospitals, staff who were frightened of a disease nobody understood would leave food trays outside the door rather than go into the room.

Young men in their twenties were wasting away and dying alone.

Mary knew what losing a child was. Her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident in 1974 at twenty-two, and it had taken something out of her that never came back.

When she was sentenced for that first arrest, the judge gave her five hundred hours of community service, presumably expecting the work to sober her up.

He sent her to San Francisco General Hospital.

She walked into the AIDS wards at a time when other people were walking out of them. No mask, no gloves, no holding her breath. She saw rows of skeletal young men in agony and frightened out of their minds.

She started calling them her kids.

She mopped floors and changed sheets. And then she noticed something the doctors were losing sight of.

The medication those men were on caused violent nausea. They couldn't keep anything down. They were starving to death at the same time as the virus was killing them.

And Mary knew something about the brownies she'd been arrested over.

They settled a stomach. They brought an appetite back. They let a man in pain sleep for a few hours.

So she went home and turned the oven on.

She lived on social security that barely covered the rent, and spent nearly all of it on flour and sugar and butter. The cannabis came free — local growers heard what she was doing and started leaving it at her door.

Then she packed a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She went room to room. She sat with men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years, because their mothers wouldn't come. She held their hands and told them jokes and gave them a brownie and told them to eat it, baby, it'll help.

And nurses watched patients who hadn't eaten in days start asking for food.

For more than a decade that was her life. Roughly six hundred brownies a day. Fifty pounds of flour a week.

She washed their pyjamas. She went to their funerals. She held a great many of them while they died.

All of it during the War on Drugs.

In 1992, at seventy, she was arrested again — and this time it was felonies, and prosecutors who looked at her record and saw a repeat offender. One of them reportedly said he was going to kick this old lady's backside in court.

They had no idea what they'd picked up.

They thought they had a dealer. What they actually had was the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke, the city went up. Not just activists — doctors, nurses, and parents who had watched her care for their dying sons when nobody else would.

She turned the trial into a platform. Reporters asked whether she was afraid of prison, and whether she'd stop if they let her off.

She told them that if the narcs thought she was going to stop baking for her kids with AIDS, they could go do something anatomically ambitious to themselves in the window of Macy's.

It ran in papers across the country.

Doctors from San Francisco General wrote to the court saying her brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified. The charges were dropped.

And she didn't go home to rest, because her own acquittal didn't help anyone still in a bed.

She teamed up with Dennis Peron and opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club — the first public dispensary in the United States.

Then she campaigned for Proposition 215, travelling the state in failing health, arguing in plain language. Not about liberty or tax revenue. About pain, and about compassion, from a grandmother who had sat with more dying men than most doctors.

In 1996 it passed, and California became the first state to legalise medical cannabis. Everything since has followed from that.

She used to joke that if it ever became legal she'd sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a big house for her patients to live in.

She never sold it. She died in 1999, at seventy-seven, in a nursing home, with no money.

Most of the millions of people now using it legally for pain and nausea and seizures have never heard her name.

They don't know about the six hundred a day, or the bus rides, or the funerals.

A court sent a woman to do her penance in an AIDS ward.

It was the worst sentencing decision in the history of American drug law, and the best thing that ever happened to those men.

Mary Jane Rathbun (1922–1999)

✨ “The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.” — Viola Davis

💎 Silence can protect the person who caused the harm, while leaving the person who experienced it carrying the weight alone. Shame belongs to the person who chose to cause harm, not the person who survived it.

👁️ Too many women are taught to stay quiet to avoid being judged, blamed, or called difficult. But speaking about what happened can be an important part of reclaiming your voice and refusing to carry someone else’s wrongdoing as your burden.

🔥 Your voice matters. Your story matters. And you deserve to decide when, where, and how you tell it. No one else gets to define your experience for you or make you feel responsible for their actions.

You do not owe anyone your silence, especially when that silence was never yours to carry.

📩 Follow Women Manifest Success for more reminders that your voice matters.

Recovery is possible. I never give up hope for my siblings!

Danny Ellerd weighed 92 pounds when police found him under the Interstate 40 overpass in Oklahoma City.

They'd come to arrest him. He had outstanding warrants and fifteen years of he**in addiction behind him.

But one look told them jail wasn't the answer. His hand was infected from years of IV drug use, infected badly enough that doctors would later fight just to save it.

So instead of a holding cell, Danny went to the emergency room.

For fifteen years, he'd lived in abandoned houses and homeless shelters across Oklahoma City. He'd survived multiple overdoses. His family didn't always know if he'd make it through the night.

His father, Mark Ellerd, has talked publicly about one moment that never left him — driving through the city and recognizing his own son standing on a street corner, holding a sign, asking strangers for change.

When Danny left the hospital, he had almost nothing. No home. No plan. Just a Walmart bag with a few pieces of clothing.

Then he walked through the doors of Hope Is Alive, a faith-based recovery nonprofit in Oklahoma City.

Nothing changed overnight. Recovery rarely works that way.

It was built one ordinary decision at a time — stay sober today, show up tomorrow, ask for help when it's hard to ask.

Danny got sober. He stayed that way. And eventually he started helping other men walking the same road he'd just come off of.

In August 2023, he made a decision that would've sounded impossible a few years earlier. He enrolled full-time at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City to study Computer Information Systems, working part-time while he did it.

He didn't just get by. He carried a 4.0 GPA — a perfect grade point average — through the entire program.

In April 2025, OSU-OKC named him a Women for OSU Scholar, an honor reserved for students who combine academic excellence with community service.

On May 9, 2025, he crossed the stage at the Bennett Event Center with two Associate in Applied Science degrees, one of more than 800 graduates that day.

Today, Danny works as a Shelter Advocate at City Care, helping homeless people in the same neighborhoods where he once slept.

He also wrote a book, "Recovery Is Possible: The Story of My Journey Through Addiction and Into Recovery," and started a campaign to give away 1,000 free copies to people struggling with addiction who can't afford one.

The man who once needed a doctor to decide he was too sick for jail now spends his days on those same streets, helping people who are exactly where he used to be.