There is no better recommendation for voluntary simplicity than the great Christmas schlep. Somehow this year I was able to name and know this, and therefore hold back my humbug even as I moved things in and out, up and down in this little house for days on end.
Adding to the schlep of gifts in and packaging out, ornaments up and storage boxes down, tree in and furniture to other rooms was the fact that we’d been on auto-pilot since before Thanksgiving and there was a pile-up of detritus in every wrong place: bedroom toys littering the living room; library books hiding among Small’s own books; my shoes in the four corners of everywhere; blizzards of paper. Great stacks of laundry spilled forth from the second floor closets, needing to be washed in the basement, folded on the first floor and put away throughout the house.
I would have said—and I would have been backed up on this, at least by members of my family who find my aversion to capitalism distinctly odd—that we live a simple life. Not an off-the-grid life by any means, but a life which is not defined by earning and owning. I heard a lot of pissing and moaning this holiday season of the variety of how can we have a meaningful Christmas and not spend a lot? And, won’t I disappoint my children if I don’t buy them all the crap their friends are getting? Sweetie and I covered the “meaning” part of Christmas several years ago when my humbug was really bringing her down.
I am—I suppose, now and forever, for better or worse—the Director of Physical Reality of the Interior for our family. Which is to say: the lawn could turn black and die overnight and I would blithely walk past it without noticing, but I am responsible for tracking every item that passes our threshold. Every ATM receipt; every toy beloved one moment and abandoned the next; every piece of clothing to be washed and dried in accordance with label; every ornamental chicken displayed proudly on our porch that gets dusted and washed and dried and replaced on a freshly wiped shelf twice a year whether it needs it or not.
The weight of the physical reality of Christmas dragged me down, which made Sweetie sad because she wanted to love Christmas with me, to enjoy ourselves and find meaning and fun. So we brainstormed the things we loved about the season—not carrying countless boxes of fragile ornaments up and down the basement stairs and painstakingly unwrapping and hanging them, perhaps, but drinking festive beverages and listening to the Peanuts Christmas soundtrack. Not the obligatory hunk of dead flesh we have to serve the collected masses on New Year’s Day, but a date for dim sum at the best Chinese restaurant in the Valley.
And so we created a road-map for the six weeks from Thanksgiving to New Year’s marked with the highlights of our season. While I’m still the able bodied schlepper, I am largely released from the ornament adventure and its piles of newspaper and tangled hanging wires and empty boxes. Instead, I get to stop by to admire my family’s progress between batches of salted caramel popcorn, taking a turn around the room to the piano stylings of Vince Guaraldi.
***
But as small and restrained as our Christmas—and our life, by extension—is, I am still struck by its abundance. For us the season of un-Christmassing lives on: the extra dining table never got dismantled, and now it doesn’t make sense to put it away with Chinese New Year around the corner. The Christmas tree got tossed just last week to make the deadline of the neighbor’s bonfire, and the boxes of ornaments still stall in the corner.
But abundance doesn’t strike me only in the volume of physical reality, although I ought to write myself a cheer for this time of year: “Schlep, schlep, schlep, schlep, fight, fight, fight!” I also see that no matter how carefully we winnow Small’s gift list and guide the relatives towards the essentials there are always more toys than can capture her attention, more games than we have time to play. Items set aside on Christmas day have yet to be rediscovered; I will find craft kits unopened and gifts untouched as I prepare for next Christmas, just as I did this year.
Even our Christmas dinner had a “loaves and fishes” quality to it: the modest menu we had planned continued to feed us for three days. On the holiday itself we did not even make the entrée or dessert: instead we spent the afternoon assembling the Vietnamese summer rolls that were to be our appetizer and lolling around sated after eating an enormous platter full of them.
***
I would do well to remember that we have much more than we need. And that our simplicity is to a great extent voluntary even if it does not always feel that way. Half empty I see the deck stacked against us: two women of working class origins, not a professional degree or trust fund among us. Half full I see that we have ordered our life in accordance with our values and that money—even when we long for more of it—never makes our top priorities.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Friday, January 22, 2010
mind body mama: Fire Season
In the early morning of December 27 the fire departments of The County Seat and its neighbors responded to a flurry of suspicious blazes in the neighborhood surrounding the two-hundred year old fair grounds. Before dawn broke two houses had burned to the ground. Several cars were destroyed and thousands of dollars worth of property was damaged. Two men died.
Two weeks later another local family was shattered when police arrested their young son on suspicion of arson—and murder.
This past Sunday, Our House of Worship rocked with a lay-led Martin Luther King Day service. After lunch I took Small contra-dancing and ran into the Birth Pie family along the way. It was after sundown when I finally got home and booted up the PC to see how my Facebook friends had passed their day. Sweetie turned on the evening news to get some intel on the slushy mix starting to fall from the sky. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Small on Sweetie’s lap, transfixed by the television screen.
I heard my wife murmur, “Yes, it’s sad, someone’s church burned down.”
In a second I was at their side to see a steepled New England meeting house engulfed in flames. With a few keystrokes I confirmed that this was the church beloved by a new friend; visited often by SpecK; whose minister performed the perfect wedding of the Life Coach and her sweet man in October.
There is something about the image of a church burning that makes me cringe. There is something about the image of a church burning on Martin Luther King Day, in a season of fires, that was too much for me to see. I turned my eyes away but not before my insides curled like singed paper. The picture I could only look at for an instant hit the morning paper above the fold and followed me through Monday. It was gorgeous and repulsive, haunting and indelible.
There is, as yet, no reason given for the fire at the hilltown church. Churches burn, apparently, brilliantly well. They are filled with fuel and oxygen that feed a hungry fire. It is a great blessing that no one died.
On Tuesday afternoon I looked up from my computer to see my factory-working, motorcycle-driving, beer-drinking neighbor coming up his driveway in a suit and tie, his body hunched against the icy rain, arriving home from his mother’s burial. Later that night the Massachusetts Democrats were sucker punched and ceded Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a right wing centerfold model. A week after natural disaster struck the most devastated nation in our hemisphere, the desperate people of Haiti still waited for help.
I curled up with Small on the sofa and finished reading Dennis Lehane’s masterpiece, The Given Day. The novel chronicles the human cost of the 1919 Boston police strike, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a few crystalline moments of our nation’s bottomless capacity for racist, xenophobic violence. The next book I reached for was Geraldine Brooks The Year of Wonders, a chronicle of the 1666 plague in a small English village.
Reading, it appears, is not always a great respite. My mind became a soup of suffering, endurance, loss, humiliation and defeat. How tragic the death of any one of us is to those who live on, whether an elderly woman at the end of a life filled with love, or a sleeping young man victim to another’s cruel indifference; a little girl in a fire bombed church or a man fevered with a virulent flu.
Grief clings like ash. There is no getting clear of it; loss defines our time here. It seems almost senseless to speak of it; it is like trying to describe air.
Which is why I am looking upon my neighbors with nothing short of wonder this week. I am amazed that we keep getting up in the morning, given as it is that each of us will die—yes, even our mothers. We dig in rubble every day, whether the rubble of a nation that has nothing reduced to even less than nothing, or the rubble of our hearts when hope is buried by hurt.
I am thinking of that burned church’s congregation and how they will be called upon to love one another and hold each other’s grief and work for their common future. I am thinking of Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood for dreaming and of Sasha and Malia Obama waking up each day in the White House. I am thinking of the workers who died for our rights to an eight hour day and of the fact that someday there will be better health care in this country, whether or not I live to see it. I am thinking of the Democrats and how wildly we screwed up this election, and how nothing is really to be gained by self-recrimination and hurling accusations at one another.
We just have to dust ourselves off and begin again, because we are human, and that’s what humans do.
Two weeks later another local family was shattered when police arrested their young son on suspicion of arson—and murder.
This past Sunday, Our House of Worship rocked with a lay-led Martin Luther King Day service. After lunch I took Small contra-dancing and ran into the Birth Pie family along the way. It was after sundown when I finally got home and booted up the PC to see how my Facebook friends had passed their day. Sweetie turned on the evening news to get some intel on the slushy mix starting to fall from the sky. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Small on Sweetie’s lap, transfixed by the television screen.
I heard my wife murmur, “Yes, it’s sad, someone’s church burned down.”
In a second I was at their side to see a steepled New England meeting house engulfed in flames. With a few keystrokes I confirmed that this was the church beloved by a new friend; visited often by SpecK; whose minister performed the perfect wedding of the Life Coach and her sweet man in October.
There is something about the image of a church burning that makes me cringe. There is something about the image of a church burning on Martin Luther King Day, in a season of fires, that was too much for me to see. I turned my eyes away but not before my insides curled like singed paper. The picture I could only look at for an instant hit the morning paper above the fold and followed me through Monday. It was gorgeous and repulsive, haunting and indelible.
There is, as yet, no reason given for the fire at the hilltown church. Churches burn, apparently, brilliantly well. They are filled with fuel and oxygen that feed a hungry fire. It is a great blessing that no one died.
On Tuesday afternoon I looked up from my computer to see my factory-working, motorcycle-driving, beer-drinking neighbor coming up his driveway in a suit and tie, his body hunched against the icy rain, arriving home from his mother’s burial. Later that night the Massachusetts Democrats were sucker punched and ceded Ted Kennedy’s senate seat to a right wing centerfold model. A week after natural disaster struck the most devastated nation in our hemisphere, the desperate people of Haiti still waited for help.
I curled up with Small on the sofa and finished reading Dennis Lehane’s masterpiece, The Given Day. The novel chronicles the human cost of the 1919 Boston police strike, the Spanish influenza epidemic, and a few crystalline moments of our nation’s bottomless capacity for racist, xenophobic violence. The next book I reached for was Geraldine Brooks The Year of Wonders, a chronicle of the 1666 plague in a small English village.
Reading, it appears, is not always a great respite. My mind became a soup of suffering, endurance, loss, humiliation and defeat. How tragic the death of any one of us is to those who live on, whether an elderly woman at the end of a life filled with love, or a sleeping young man victim to another’s cruel indifference; a little girl in a fire bombed church or a man fevered with a virulent flu.
Grief clings like ash. There is no getting clear of it; loss defines our time here. It seems almost senseless to speak of it; it is like trying to describe air.
Which is why I am looking upon my neighbors with nothing short of wonder this week. I am amazed that we keep getting up in the morning, given as it is that each of us will die—yes, even our mothers. We dig in rubble every day, whether the rubble of a nation that has nothing reduced to even less than nothing, or the rubble of our hearts when hope is buried by hurt.
I am thinking of that burned church’s congregation and how they will be called upon to love one another and hold each other’s grief and work for their common future. I am thinking of Martin Luther King shot down in cold blood for dreaming and of Sasha and Malia Obama waking up each day in the White House. I am thinking of the workers who died for our rights to an eight hour day and of the fact that someday there will be better health care in this country, whether or not I live to see it. I am thinking of the Democrats and how wildly we screwed up this election, and how nothing is really to be gained by self-recrimination and hurling accusations at one another.
We just have to dust ourselves off and begin again, because we are human, and that’s what humans do.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Self Defense Snap-Shot: On the Bridge
The self defense teacher grows accustomed to being asked, “Have you ever used your self defense?” Her answer: “I use it every day.” When the questioner is someone accustomed to practice—someone who prays or does yoga or employs affirmations or has already dipped a toe into the great river of martial arts—she may tilt her head curiously, already understanding how a philosophy and spiritual discipline can insinuate into every aspect of a person’s life. When the questioner is someone who doubts the instructor’s ability to kick some ass she’ll respond by rolling her eyes and sucking her teeth in impatience. “That’s not what I meant,” she might say petulantly.
The path between these two ways of understanding self defense occurs through stories It’s the only way I know to make the internal experience of self defense practice visible. The challenging student wants to hear how the teacher has kicked and punched and caused damage to another person’s body. But the every day work of self defense has nothing to do with kicking and punching and hurting. It is a silent and nearly invisible practice of breathing and centering oneself, listening to ones own deepest desires, facing fear, speaking up, and making ethical choices.
My colleague Sally Johnson Van Wright uses stories in an exercise she calls “What She Did Right.” It invites students to witness a woman or girl’s courage and self control and decision making skills as she practices self protection.
Today I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: Self Defense Snap-Shot. I’ll tell you some stories of how I’ve used my self defense practice in my every day life. I encourage you to follow along playing “What She Did Right”—looking for the moments where I employed choice and agency and relied on my self defense practice to guide me.
As you read these stories you may find yourself remembering your own Self Defense Snap-Shots—moments of assertiveness or trust in your own instincts or self calming. Please share your stories in the comments or on your own own blog with a link back here! Teachers love stories; self defense teachers love self defense stories.
It was early spring or late winter, one of those days when you can finally leave the house after being cooped up with a small child for so many stormy days. My daughter was two, maybe three, and I was pushing her in the stroller on the stretch of Cottage Street that washed out almost a century ago in the hundred-year-flood. I passed over the water where I’ve seen small boys fishing and once, a piano. From the little bridge I could see through the window over over the altar into my dojo, one small studio in the huge old factory building that dominates our town, the structure our firefighters call “The Big One.”
We were heading home, walking toward the traffic on the narrow, crumbling section of sidewalk. Up ahead I saw another mom pushing her own stroller. She was young and had two children much smaller than my girl. Two strollers won’t fit on the sidewalk at the midpoint of the old bridge. While she was still on the far side, before I had a chance to step off the bridge into the empty turning lane, the other mom steered her kids off the sidewalk.
That surprised me. It would have been safer for me to walk in the street. I was facing the traffic. My girl was much bigger than her babies.
As we passed, I said “Thank you.” I said it quietly. I don’t know if I smiled. I don’t know if I saw her eyes.
I know I said “Thank you.”
I was three paces past her when she turned and screamed, “You’re welcome, BITCH!”
I have heard self defense students say “I blacked out” to describe the explosion of rage across their brains that obliterates all other awareness.
I say, “I saw red.”
My neck snapped back and I saw her howling red face and her body moving away from me.
The heat and tightness in my chest was unbearable. It was like pain. The sudden tension in my jaw. My hands clenched. It was like being hit. It was worse than being hit. Everything went blank.
Like an animal, my body leapt to respond. A screeching, cursing, howl of a reply seared my throat and stalled behind my teeth. I could feel the spit flying from my mouth as I screamed back at her; I could feel her hair in my fist as I yanked it from her head and the tiny bones of her shoulders as I shoved her into the gravel.
My fuse—down to a stub after a long sleepless winter of mothering—was lit. I could hear the sizzle and smell the smoke.
But I couldn’t take my hands from the stroller. I couldn’t step away from my sweet burden on the street, on a bridge. The stroller formed a canopy around my girl and my body was between her and woman screaming at me. If I turned around, if I raised my familiar mama voice, the anger and danger would separate from the traffic noise and rain down poison on my girl. She had not noticed a stranger shrieking at me but she would notice me if I screamed or cried and she would be frightened.
“I said ‘thank you,’” I whispered, trying to catch the breath that clutched in my tight chest. “I said ‘thank you.’”
And I thought, “It feels bad to feel so bad.” It felt awful in every way to feel angry, frustrated, misunderstood, embarrassed, regretful. I could feel those emotions from my tight scalp to my clenched toes. I saw how the monster of rage could relieve the hot red stew of bad, bad feelings, how blacking out or losing it would get me out of this moment of feeling so awful.
But I knew that it was only a moment, and then maybe a few more moments, and that under the bad, bad feeling there was fatigue, and sadness, and eventually resolution. I could already feel the tiredness in my body as the adrenaline slipped away. I wanted to fall down on the ground and rest. I could see the gas station and the corner bar and the sidewalk on my street and I knew in only a few minutes I would be home and this moment of feeling so bad would be in the past.
I caught my breath, shaking. I never looked back. I took my girl home.
The path between these two ways of understanding self defense occurs through stories It’s the only way I know to make the internal experience of self defense practice visible. The challenging student wants to hear how the teacher has kicked and punched and caused damage to another person’s body. But the every day work of self defense has nothing to do with kicking and punching and hurting. It is a silent and nearly invisible practice of breathing and centering oneself, listening to ones own deepest desires, facing fear, speaking up, and making ethical choices.
My colleague Sally Johnson Van Wright uses stories in an exercise she calls “What She Did Right.” It invites students to witness a woman or girl’s courage and self control and decision making skills as she practices self protection.
Today I’m introducing a new feature on the blog: Self Defense Snap-Shot. I’ll tell you some stories of how I’ve used my self defense practice in my every day life. I encourage you to follow along playing “What She Did Right”—looking for the moments where I employed choice and agency and relied on my self defense practice to guide me.
As you read these stories you may find yourself remembering your own Self Defense Snap-Shots—moments of assertiveness or trust in your own instincts or self calming. Please share your stories in the comments or on your own own blog with a link back here! Teachers love stories; self defense teachers love self defense stories.
It was early spring or late winter, one of those days when you can finally leave the house after being cooped up with a small child for so many stormy days. My daughter was two, maybe three, and I was pushing her in the stroller on the stretch of Cottage Street that washed out almost a century ago in the hundred-year-flood. I passed over the water where I’ve seen small boys fishing and once, a piano. From the little bridge I could see through the window over over the altar into my dojo, one small studio in the huge old factory building that dominates our town, the structure our firefighters call “The Big One.”
We were heading home, walking toward the traffic on the narrow, crumbling section of sidewalk. Up ahead I saw another mom pushing her own stroller. She was young and had two children much smaller than my girl. Two strollers won’t fit on the sidewalk at the midpoint of the old bridge. While she was still on the far side, before I had a chance to step off the bridge into the empty turning lane, the other mom steered her kids off the sidewalk.
That surprised me. It would have been safer for me to walk in the street. I was facing the traffic. My girl was much bigger than her babies.
As we passed, I said “Thank you.” I said it quietly. I don’t know if I smiled. I don’t know if I saw her eyes.
I know I said “Thank you.”
I was three paces past her when she turned and screamed, “You’re welcome, BITCH!”
I have heard self defense students say “I blacked out” to describe the explosion of rage across their brains that obliterates all other awareness.
I say, “I saw red.”
My neck snapped back and I saw her howling red face and her body moving away from me.
The heat and tightness in my chest was unbearable. It was like pain. The sudden tension in my jaw. My hands clenched. It was like being hit. It was worse than being hit. Everything went blank.
Like an animal, my body leapt to respond. A screeching, cursing, howl of a reply seared my throat and stalled behind my teeth. I could feel the spit flying from my mouth as I screamed back at her; I could feel her hair in my fist as I yanked it from her head and the tiny bones of her shoulders as I shoved her into the gravel.
My fuse—down to a stub after a long sleepless winter of mothering—was lit. I could hear the sizzle and smell the smoke.
But I couldn’t take my hands from the stroller. I couldn’t step away from my sweet burden on the street, on a bridge. The stroller formed a canopy around my girl and my body was between her and woman screaming at me. If I turned around, if I raised my familiar mama voice, the anger and danger would separate from the traffic noise and rain down poison on my girl. She had not noticed a stranger shrieking at me but she would notice me if I screamed or cried and she would be frightened.
“I said ‘thank you,’” I whispered, trying to catch the breath that clutched in my tight chest. “I said ‘thank you.’”
And I thought, “It feels bad to feel so bad.” It felt awful in every way to feel angry, frustrated, misunderstood, embarrassed, regretful. I could feel those emotions from my tight scalp to my clenched toes. I saw how the monster of rage could relieve the hot red stew of bad, bad feelings, how blacking out or losing it would get me out of this moment of feeling so awful.
But I knew that it was only a moment, and then maybe a few more moments, and that under the bad, bad feeling there was fatigue, and sadness, and eventually resolution. I could already feel the tiredness in my body as the adrenaline slipped away. I wanted to fall down on the ground and rest. I could see the gas station and the corner bar and the sidewalk on my street and I knew in only a few minutes I would be home and this moment of feeling so bad would be in the past.
I caught my breath, shaking. I never looked back. I took my girl home.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Mind Body Mama: A few things I learned from Momalom’s Half Drunk Challenge
Remember the Momalom Half Drunk Challenge? A week long period of blackout level stupidity and online overload just before Christmas? Here are some reflections.
1. When you write more, you have more to write. Even though writing every day in the week running up to Christmas was an idea singular in its insanity, the experience demonstrated beyond a doubt that when I write more I have more to write about. As my friend the Blunt Christian has put it, “I think in sentences again.” Writing every day, even briefly, turned my head into a tumbler of ideas and words and phrases that worked on its own between and during my domestic and workaday duties. This might be why Ellen Snortland and Kate Hopper and practically every writing teacher I’ve ever had or heard about endorses daily writing as necessary practice. Point taken.
2. I do not want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. I’ve always been clear that I didn’t want to be that kind of blogger—the product-endorsing, one-woman brand machine that’s about following and being followed, creating a scene, turning myself into a channel of new media.
But I have credited blogging with saving me from the lonely writer’s room, for making it possible for me as a middle-aged mom to write without desperate isolation. I’m grateful—so grateful—for the connections I made with other bloggers during Half Drunk. I am delighted to witness their writing, to consider my computer part of the energy and space that holds their creative process in the midst of their crazy mom real lives.
But my real mom life is crazy too, and I don’t want to spend much more of it sucked down the monitor. My life is enriched by holding an open heart for the other mama writers I’ve met online, but not more than it is enriched by driving up to the hilltowns to lunch with my new friend the brilliant and gifted writer Erin White. It is too easy for me to stay home thinking I am not isolated because I’m chatting with—or maybe not even chatting, just peering into the life of—another mama writer. I’ve got to put on my hat and go out in the cold, hear my own voice somewhere other than inside my own head.
The Half Drunk also showed me a dark side to the blogging adventure. Erin named it for me over soup and sandwiches: the pitfall of cheekiness. My voice changes insidiously when I write to an audience as I imagine them. I feel compelled to play a character, to alter my narrative to conform with a self that is bright and sarcastic, dark and quirky. My friends and family will be quick to tell you that I am actually bright, sarcastic, dark and quirky. But I don’t want to write myself into caricature. I want to be a careful, precise writer, I want a voice that is true and strong, not trying to please. I want to be an essayist, sometimes a humorist, occasionally a preacher. I want to be a writer.
3. Feminism saved my life. (I’ve got to credit Erin on this one too—it showed up in an email she sent me a few weeks back.) I find the mom-o-sphere—whether online or in real life—stunningly and surprisingly different from the women’s community in which I’ve lived my adult life. That community is overtly feminist, anti-violence, anti-racist, supportive of economic and social justice and—in the words of my first karate dojo, The School of Come-the-Revolution, “unapologetically pro-lesbian.”
Not so among the moms of my daughter’s contemporaries, which is why I often feel like a shadow of myself among them. In my real life, I am almost never the only lesbian in the room—unless I am hovering over the Cheetoes at a seven year old’s birthday party. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t shave or wear makeup or color her hair—unless I am at my daughter’s school. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t speak disparagingly of her body—unless I am waiting with other moms outside of a ballet class.
Online, I encounter moms writing from their hearts, so far past the cocktail party chatter of the playground that I almost want to weep with gratitude. But even here, the personal doesn’t leap to the political. For all the hand-wringing and heart ache we each experience—around our agonizing about how to balance childcare and paid employment, for example—most don’t see beyond ourselves to understand the condition of women—of mothers— as collective. "Motherhood is a labor issue" I want to whisper while slipping copies of Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars into diaper bags around the country.
Twenty years ago when I came out as a lesbian and feminist, a relative expressed his distaste for my political ilk because “they make themselves out as victims.” I didn’t have the chops to answer flippantly, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I wish I had. I’ve aged, and mellowed, and gotten married and had a baby and seen my world shrink to a domesticity I could not have imagined in my rabble-rousing days. I’ve failed to keep up with the women’s movement and find my credentials challenged in new radical circles, as my politics on gender and disability and race and the environment and globalization are not sophisticated or embedded enough, stalled as they are in the 1990s of my youth.
But I know that my experience as a woman and a mother in this time and country are not just an expression of my rugged American individuality. I know that my life is an expression of my time and culture, that my path is forged as much by my privilege and limitations; as much by my race and class and gender and sexuality and ability as by my abundant creativity and will. I might not always have a cogent analysis, I might not be at the forefront of today’s radicalism, but I don’t imagine myself the only architect of my condition. I know my life reflects my world as much as it reflects me. When we don't talk about that, I feel a part of myself left in the shadows.
1. When you write more, you have more to write. Even though writing every day in the week running up to Christmas was an idea singular in its insanity, the experience demonstrated beyond a doubt that when I write more I have more to write about. As my friend the Blunt Christian has put it, “I think in sentences again.” Writing every day, even briefly, turned my head into a tumbler of ideas and words and phrases that worked on its own between and during my domestic and workaday duties. This might be why Ellen Snortland and Kate Hopper and practically every writing teacher I’ve ever had or heard about endorses daily writing as necessary practice. Point taken.
2. I do not want to be a blogger, I want to be a writer. I’ve always been clear that I didn’t want to be that kind of blogger—the product-endorsing, one-woman brand machine that’s about following and being followed, creating a scene, turning myself into a channel of new media.
But I have credited blogging with saving me from the lonely writer’s room, for making it possible for me as a middle-aged mom to write without desperate isolation. I’m grateful—so grateful—for the connections I made with other bloggers during Half Drunk. I am delighted to witness their writing, to consider my computer part of the energy and space that holds their creative process in the midst of their crazy mom real lives.
But my real mom life is crazy too, and I don’t want to spend much more of it sucked down the monitor. My life is enriched by holding an open heart for the other mama writers I’ve met online, but not more than it is enriched by driving up to the hilltowns to lunch with my new friend the brilliant and gifted writer Erin White. It is too easy for me to stay home thinking I am not isolated because I’m chatting with—or maybe not even chatting, just peering into the life of—another mama writer. I’ve got to put on my hat and go out in the cold, hear my own voice somewhere other than inside my own head.
The Half Drunk also showed me a dark side to the blogging adventure. Erin named it for me over soup and sandwiches: the pitfall of cheekiness. My voice changes insidiously when I write to an audience as I imagine them. I feel compelled to play a character, to alter my narrative to conform with a self that is bright and sarcastic, dark and quirky. My friends and family will be quick to tell you that I am actually bright, sarcastic, dark and quirky. But I don’t want to write myself into caricature. I want to be a careful, precise writer, I want a voice that is true and strong, not trying to please. I want to be an essayist, sometimes a humorist, occasionally a preacher. I want to be a writer.
3. Feminism saved my life. (I’ve got to credit Erin on this one too—it showed up in an email she sent me a few weeks back.) I find the mom-o-sphere—whether online or in real life—stunningly and surprisingly different from the women’s community in which I’ve lived my adult life. That community is overtly feminist, anti-violence, anti-racist, supportive of economic and social justice and—in the words of my first karate dojo, The School of Come-the-Revolution, “unapologetically pro-lesbian.”
Not so among the moms of my daughter’s contemporaries, which is why I often feel like a shadow of myself among them. In my real life, I am almost never the only lesbian in the room—unless I am hovering over the Cheetoes at a seven year old’s birthday party. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t shave or wear makeup or color her hair—unless I am at my daughter’s school. In my real life, I am almost never the only woman in the room who doesn’t speak disparagingly of her body—unless I am waiting with other moms outside of a ballet class.
Online, I encounter moms writing from their hearts, so far past the cocktail party chatter of the playground that I almost want to weep with gratitude. But even here, the personal doesn’t leap to the political. For all the hand-wringing and heart ache we each experience—around our agonizing about how to balance childcare and paid employment, for example—most don’t see beyond ourselves to understand the condition of women—of mothers— as collective. "Motherhood is a labor issue" I want to whisper while slipping copies of Miriam Peskowitz’s The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars into diaper bags around the country.
Twenty years ago when I came out as a lesbian and feminist, a relative expressed his distaste for my political ilk because “they make themselves out as victims.” I didn’t have the chops to answer flippantly, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.” I wish I had. I’ve aged, and mellowed, and gotten married and had a baby and seen my world shrink to a domesticity I could not have imagined in my rabble-rousing days. I’ve failed to keep up with the women’s movement and find my credentials challenged in new radical circles, as my politics on gender and disability and race and the environment and globalization are not sophisticated or embedded enough, stalled as they are in the 1990s of my youth.
But I know that my experience as a woman and a mother in this time and country are not just an expression of my rugged American individuality. I know that my life is an expression of my time and culture, that my path is forged as much by my privilege and limitations; as much by my race and class and gender and sexuality and ability as by my abundant creativity and will. I might not always have a cogent analysis, I might not be at the forefront of today’s radicalism, but I don’t imagine myself the only architect of my condition. I know my life reflects my world as much as it reflects me. When we don't talk about that, I feel a part of myself left in the shadows.
Friday, January 8, 2010
mind body mama: A few more ways my life has been enriched by motherhood
An observation I might have lived without, if had not become a mother:
• “It’s cool how your stomach goes into all those little wrinkles when you bend over.”
Word usage I might not have considered:
• “I want to walk on the snow to get a hang of these new boots.”
• “We are all wearing different styles, but we are all cool. Mama, you are sensible cool. Mom, you are normal cool. And I am crazy cool!”
• “One of my suggestments for the bathroom is a tiny shelf right here for books and magazines. And a taller toilet. Because Mom likes a taller toilet.”
Questions I might never have asked anyone:
• “Why are your underpants on the dining room chair?”
• “Do you need a klenex? Are you sure you don’t need a klenex? Because you look like a person who needs a klenex.”
Conversations I might not have been party to:
Sweetie: [Preparing for a solo road trip] “I’m taking more money from you.”
[Minor inconsequential parental financial squabbling.]
Me: “…Oh, it’s ok, I don’t want you to be on the road without cash.”
Small: “Yeah, because what if you have a sudden need for Cheetoes?”
Small: “I’m sorry I spilled that.”
Mama: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with spilling something. There is something wrong with standing still while it runs all over the place.”
Small: “Let’s be optimistic that we can fix this situation.”
And a question I might never have asked myself:
“I heard you and Mom fighting. Why did you say all that crap about her?”
• “It’s cool how your stomach goes into all those little wrinkles when you bend over.”
Word usage I might not have considered:
• “I want to walk on the snow to get a hang of these new boots.”
• “We are all wearing different styles, but we are all cool. Mama, you are sensible cool. Mom, you are normal cool. And I am crazy cool!”
• “One of my suggestments for the bathroom is a tiny shelf right here for books and magazines. And a taller toilet. Because Mom likes a taller toilet.”
Questions I might never have asked anyone:
• “Why are your underpants on the dining room chair?”
• “Do you need a klenex? Are you sure you don’t need a klenex? Because you look like a person who needs a klenex.”
Conversations I might not have been party to:
Sweetie: [Preparing for a solo road trip] “I’m taking more money from you.”
[Minor inconsequential parental financial squabbling.]
Me: “…Oh, it’s ok, I don’t want you to be on the road without cash.”
Small: “Yeah, because what if you have a sudden need for Cheetoes?”
Small: “I’m sorry I spilled that.”
Mama: “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with spilling something. There is something wrong with standing still while it runs all over the place.”
Small: “Let’s be optimistic that we can fix this situation.”
And a question I might never have asked myself:
“I heard you and Mom fighting. Why did you say all that crap about her?”
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
mind body mama: Late to the Party
I used to be an overachiever. I used to be ahead of the curve, anticipate the obstacles, and wield an air-tight plan complete with contingencies. As much as I didn’t want to admit it last night when Janet Superhero cracked on the acronym, “Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance” was a common by-word of my upbringing. I come by it naturally; I can’t help feeling behind if I am not ahead.
But there are other proverbs available by which to live one’s life. One of Ellen Snortland’s comes to mind: “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” And motherhood has mellowed me. As a mother, so much happens outside of what you’ve planned that planning seems beyond the point.
Plus, as has been noted, I really, really needed a vacation.
All this to say: I did not keep my (self imposed) deadline of posting last week. And I did not come up with a pithy way to wrap up 2009. But, serendipitously, my procrastination provided me with inspiration.
Some might think it better called “cheating.” But here’s another proverb for you: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Bloggers smarter than I—like Lesbian Dad and Jen at Momalom—used their New Year’s post to round up their favorite posts of 2009. What a brilliant idea! And to think, if I had posted on time I would not have had a chance tosteal imitate flatter it.
Instead of a monthly 2009 round up, I’m pulling together my favorite posts on a favorite subject. So if you’re late to the mindbodymama party you can catch up on what’s going on around here.
Raising a Strong Voiced Girl
Ellen Snortland says,
“One of the things that makes you an expert in your field of ‘how to’ is being able to discern that which is absent and then making it visible in an understandable, accessible way.”
This is, above all, what I am trying to do when I write about the intersection of self defense practice and parenting. Even though when I say those words out loud in the same sentence—“self defense and parenting”—as I did at a dinner party of Life Coach Jillian’s last year, people’s eyes glaze over and roll back in their heads and they get very quiet and tense.
What do they think I mean? Teaching my child how to mace her classmates on the playground? Using jujitsu to throw her clingy little body off me when I need some space? Practicing our blood curdling screams together? They’re probably thinking Stranger-Danger and that we spend our evenings studying the online sex offenders’ registry.
None of these are really terrible ideas—except maybe the mace. And the fact that kids are more often assaulted by people that they know than by true “strangers.” And the phrase Stranger Danger is hackneyed, over used, inflammatory, and ineffective.
None of that really matters, though, because it’s not what I’m doing.
This is what I write about: How I—and BirthPie, and Party Pam, and Life Coach Jillian and Foxy and all the black belt and color belt and car-pool mamas at The School of Love—parent our children so they can develop and strengthen the skills they need to protect themselves in this world.
The skills we teach are best summarized by the Five Fingers of Self Defense:
• Use your mind and breathe.
• Use your voice.
• Create distance.
• Fight back if you have to.
• Tell someone you trust.
We teach these skills the way we teach our kids any other deeply held values and spiritual practices: We let them see us practice. We teach by example. We talk about what we believe. We seize on teaching moments.
Here are some of my reflections on the intersection of self defense and parenting:
Mama Rage—Why we have to stand up for our kids, and why it is so hard.
Raising A Strong Voiced Girl, How To—A primer for the parent who wants to raise a girl who knows that she’s worth defending.
Hidden Hurt—What’s missing when parents ask their kids to change, “so they won’t get hurt.”
Get Your Self Defense On—My thoughts on how a violent episode played out in the media, and how my family turned a playground threat into a teachable moment.
Germ Warfare—Life with a girl who knows how to say “NO!”
Raising a Strong Voiced Girl—The essay that started it all, online at the sadly defunct http://www.mamazine.com/.
But there are other proverbs available by which to live one’s life. One of Ellen Snortland’s comes to mind: “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.” And motherhood has mellowed me. As a mother, so much happens outside of what you’ve planned that planning seems beyond the point.
Plus, as has been noted, I really, really needed a vacation.
All this to say: I did not keep my (self imposed) deadline of posting last week. And I did not come up with a pithy way to wrap up 2009. But, serendipitously, my procrastination provided me with inspiration.
Some might think it better called “cheating.” But here’s another proverb for you: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”
Bloggers smarter than I—like Lesbian Dad and Jen at Momalom—used their New Year’s post to round up their favorite posts of 2009. What a brilliant idea! And to think, if I had posted on time I would not have had a chance to
Instead of a monthly 2009 round up, I’m pulling together my favorite posts on a favorite subject. So if you’re late to the mindbodymama party you can catch up on what’s going on around here.
Raising a Strong Voiced Girl
Ellen Snortland says,
“One of the things that makes you an expert in your field of ‘how to’ is being able to discern that which is absent and then making it visible in an understandable, accessible way.”
This is, above all, what I am trying to do when I write about the intersection of self defense practice and parenting. Even though when I say those words out loud in the same sentence—“self defense and parenting”—as I did at a dinner party of Life Coach Jillian’s last year, people’s eyes glaze over and roll back in their heads and they get very quiet and tense.
What do they think I mean? Teaching my child how to mace her classmates on the playground? Using jujitsu to throw her clingy little body off me when I need some space? Practicing our blood curdling screams together? They’re probably thinking Stranger-Danger and that we spend our evenings studying the online sex offenders’ registry.
None of these are really terrible ideas—except maybe the mace. And the fact that kids are more often assaulted by people that they know than by true “strangers.” And the phrase Stranger Danger is hackneyed, over used, inflammatory, and ineffective.
None of that really matters, though, because it’s not what I’m doing.
This is what I write about: How I—and BirthPie, and Party Pam, and Life Coach Jillian and Foxy and all the black belt and color belt and car-pool mamas at The School of Love—parent our children so they can develop and strengthen the skills they need to protect themselves in this world.
The skills we teach are best summarized by the Five Fingers of Self Defense:
• Use your mind and breathe.
• Use your voice.
• Create distance.
• Fight back if you have to.
• Tell someone you trust.
We teach these skills the way we teach our kids any other deeply held values and spiritual practices: We let them see us practice. We teach by example. We talk about what we believe. We seize on teaching moments.
Here are some of my reflections on the intersection of self defense and parenting:
Mama Rage—Why we have to stand up for our kids, and why it is so hard.
Raising A Strong Voiced Girl, How To—A primer for the parent who wants to raise a girl who knows that she’s worth defending.
Hidden Hurt—What’s missing when parents ask their kids to change, “so they won’t get hurt.”
Get Your Self Defense On—My thoughts on how a violent episode played out in the media, and how my family turned a playground threat into a teachable moment.
Germ Warfare—Life with a girl who knows how to say “NO!”
Raising a Strong Voiced Girl—The essay that started it all, online at the sadly defunct http://www.mamazine.com/.
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