This is where I live…

To those of you who still believe racism is a thing of the past, on both an institutional and individual basis, read this, making especially sure to read the comments. I understand that the comments are skewed toward trollage, but I have personally heard more than one Cedar Rapidian refer to those “people from Chicago” (aka, poor black people mucking up our perfect, safe white city).

I know many, many CR people who do not discriminate and work hard to fight their inner racist.  But clearly we have a long, long way to go.

Sad

It’s the worst kind of anniversary.  There are no gifts.  But if there were, this year would be paper.  On the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Women for Peace Iowa held a protest outside of the offices of Senator Harkin and Representative Loebsack, complete with a flag-draped coffin replica.  Yours truly and her son in a backpack were pallbearers.

Upstairs, tiny paper coffins made out of printed flag paper lined the long hallway and spilled into the politicians’ offices.  I didn’t expect to be moved, but my heart sank into my shoes when I saw them.  The worst part was the way they tumbled over one another in the offices–lives tossed away carelessly.  Each one represented a life lost and a family torn apart.  Cliches cannot really convey how moving it was to see these tiny coffins.  And there were only 2,000 of them, just half the number of soldiers we’ve lost.

An Reasoned Response to an Unreasonable Speech

And here is how high school student “Tucker” responds:

Rep Kern: On April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma City a terrorist detonated a bomb that killed my mother and 167 others. 19 children died that day. Had I not had the chicken pox that day, the body count would’ve likely have included one more. Over 800 other Oklahomans were injured that day and many of those still suffer through their permanent wounds.

That terrorist was neither a homosexual or was he involved in Islam. He was an extremist Christian forcing his views through a body count. He held his beliefs and made those who didn’t live up to them pay with their lives.

As you were not a resident of Oklahoma on that day, it could be explained why you so carelessly chose words saying that the homosexual agenda is worst than terrorism. I can most certainly tell you through my own experience that is not true. I am sure there are many people in your voting district that laid a loved one to death after the terrorist attack on Oklahoma City. I kind of doubt you’ll find one of them that will agree with you.

I was five years old when my mother died. I remember what a beautiful, wise, and remarkable woman she was. I miss her. Your harsh words and misguided beliefs brought me to tears, because you told me that my mother’s killer was a better person than a group of people that are seeking safety and tolerance for themselves.

As someone left motherless and victimized by terrorists, I say to you very clearly you are absolutely wrong.

You represent a district in Oklahoma City and you very coldly express a lack of love, sympathy or understanding for what they’ve been through. Can I ask if you might have chosen wiser words were you a real Oklahoman that was here to share the suffering with Oklahoma City? Might your heart be a bit less cold had you been around to see the small bodies of children being pulled out of rubble and carried away by weeping firemen?

I’ve spent 12 years in Oklahoma public schools and never once have I had anyone try to force a gay agenda on me. I have seen, however, many gay students beat up and there’s never a day in school that has went by when I haven’t heard the word **** slung at someone. I’ve been called gay slurs many times and they hurt and I am not even gay so I can just imagine how a real gay person feels. You were a school teacher and you have seen those things too. How could you care so little about the suffering of some of your students?

Let me tell you the result of your words in my school. Every openly gay and suspected gay in the school were having to walk together Monday for protection. They looked scared. They’ve already experienced enough hate and now your words gave other students even more motivation to sneer at them and call them names. Afterall, you are a teacher and a lawmaker, many young people have taken your words to heart. That happens when you assume a role of responsibility in your community. I seriously think before this week ends that some kids here will be going home bruised and bloody because of what you said.

I wish you could’ve met my mom. Maybe she could’ve guided you in how a real Christian should be acting and speaking.

I have not had a mother for nearly 13 years now and wonder if there were fewer people like you around, people with more love and tolerance in their hearts instead of strife, if my mom would be here to watch me graduate from high school this spring. Now she won’t be there. So I’ll be packing my things and leaving Oklahoma to go to college elsewhere and one day be a writer and I have no intentions to ever return here. I have no doubt that people like you will incite crazy people to build more bombs and kill more people again. I don’t want to be here for that. I just can’t go through that again.

You may just see me as a kid, but let me try to teach you something. The old saying is sticks and stones will break your bones, but words will never hurt you. Well, your words hurt me. Your words disrespected the memory of my mom. Your words can cause others to pick up sticks and stones and hurt others.

Sincerely

Tucker

(via Dispatches from the Culture War, who got it at Pam’s House Blend)

What scares me the most about Kern’s words is that they could have been taken verbatim from the stuff I was taught growing up, not by my parents but by the churches they raised me in, and all the bullshit youth group literature leaders put under my nose (I remember specifically a ‘true’ short story about a girl who had been ‘preyed upon’ by a lesbian).  When Attic Man first showed me the video I was literally finishing her sentences.  There’s nothing new here, and it’s still not a set of arguments that holds any sort of academic OR social water.  But it does help reinforce the deeply-held prejudices of people who may have just begun to think about the world in different terms, but will now sink back comfortably into the role of self-righteous culture-bearers and boundary-setters.

My personal, deep-felt thanks to the Richards for making this human for me and consequently (if unwittingly) helping me shed the last vestiges of this shit that still clung to me when I arrived in Pittsburgh.  And you know what else, guys?  Your marriage (then unsanctioned relationship) helped STRENGTHEN our marriage.  Take that, Rep. Kern.

Also,

I’m annoyed at our Perkins waitress last night who praised me for being a “good girl” (yes, I’m 30 and not yet eligible for womanhood) for ordering three vegetable sides and mozzarella sticks (I’m keeping cheese, esp. in fried form, to 1-2 times a week).  Never mind that the broccoli was “butter-steamed,” that the “glazed” baby carrots were dripping with pancake syrup (yuck), and that the mashed potatoes were probably from a box.  People who eat regular entrees do not go to hell for it.  I’m thankful to Clementine for reminding us in the comments that food choices are not an individually moral.  They have societal consequences, but for land sakes, do not stop eating your pancakes because you feel it will put your eternal soul in jeopardy.

I just ate something called an “omlette waffle.”  If that is being ‘bad’ (despite the tofu and salsa involved), I don’t want to be ‘good.’

Vegans will probably think I’m in a funk because I ate a lot of fried cheese last night.

How to Look Good TRULY Naked

TLC’s new How to Look Good Naked caught my eye in the promos, and not just because of the word naked. Giggle. OK, maybe. But I was intrigued by the idea of celebrating women of less-than-commercially/socially-ideal body types. The show comes on just after my group home guys go to bed so it was a perfect candidate for paperwork accompaniment.

I appreciate M. LeBlanc’s (the fabulous new co-writer on Bitch, PhD) review, but I don’t think the show is revolutionary. Slightly revisionary, maybe. But I don’t think a show that still says, like all the other makeover shows, “um, you’re nice, honey, but you need to spend $5000 (that’s not an exaggeration; that’s What Not to Wear, a personal fave) on a new wardrobe, have this makeup artist teach you how to hide (’accentuate’ my ass) your natural features, color your hair (using a stylist you will never be able to afford without this show), and yes, still conform to modern western standards of beauty by choosing clothing that gives the illusion of thinness/curviness to look good.” No show that requires you to resort to enormous piles of capital to look good could be revolutionary. Of course there is the nude photo shoot, which is nice, and the people-on-the-street affirmations, which is the most touching part of the show (makes me cheer, actually). But this is all AFTER the hair and makeup.

The best part of the show is the initial in-underwear consultation in which Carson says, pre new wardrobe and makeover, “you’re beautiful and you don’t have to lose weight to be that way.” If only the show would go on that way! I suppose nobody would watch it, then–most of us like the fantasy of the ugly duckling. Capitalism has taught us that buying things will make it all better, so I don’t think a show with the patience to work on truly revolutionizing how we look at ourselves as women would necessarily sell ad space.

So what’s the problem with buying things to solve our problems, you ask? For starters, it teaches us that we have no internal resources; that the answer to our problems, no matter how abstract, is outside ourselves. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it also taught us to go to our families and communities for answers, but it doesn’t. Capitalism is isolating and divisive. I know that you’ve seen I’d-Like-to-Teach-the-World-to-Sing commercial, too, but please have at least enough cynicism to see that it gives us the warm fuzzies long enough to buy a Coke but not long enough to do the hard work it would take to really conquer world hunger and poverty. The crux of the matter is that solving problems is counter-intuitive to capitalism. In the short term it does, sure, or we’d never go back to the store. The problem is that commercial solutions are temporary because the logic of capital is accumulation and growth. Companies do not celebrate when their profits flatten out–they like nice, healthy growth. We have to keep buying for it to work. And the more we buy, the more we feel the painful side effects of capitalism: environmental devastation, spiraling poverty (wonder how Wally World gets its low prices so low?), and in the current discussion, a deeply held belief that we are not and will never be whole, good enough, truly worth something infinite and expandable (yes, even if our waistlines are).

Take off your clothes. You don’t need them to be beautiful. You don’t need your makeup, either, as I’ve discovered (oh, how pleasant it is not to de-cake my eyes every night or to have 10 extra minutes in the morning!). You don’t need a nice house or car to be deeply, passionately, and abidingly lovely and lovable.

What I don’t know how to do is to make these things true in a cultural sense. Surely we have the tools already available in culture to do so or I couldn’t be talking in just this way. But where are they and how do we use them?

I don’t know…maybe this guy has the answer.

Edited to add: Actually, this guy way deep in the comments of LeBlanc’s comments does–”One day I stood in the bathroom, looking down at my body, and I didn’t think ugh.  I thought I live here. And a wave of wonder washed over me.”

Awesome.

Fall

Obligatory Pumpkin Patch Pic

9:30.  Less Bad Mega Superstore is closed so I go to Really Bad Mega Superstore to buy glue traps, glass & metal dry goods containers, four rolls of paper towels, and bleach.  It’s to be expected, this little bit of extra company in the fall.  We live less than a block from the river in an ancient rental house full of cracks and gaps.  Time to renew the yearly commitment to washing all dishes every night, wiping up every crumb, drying out the sink and stopping all the drains.  Except that we’re exhausted all the time so I don’t know how it’s going to happen.

Yesterday.  I was having a miserable time of it–unlike today’s pumpkin farm trip at a location I won’t reveal because I love the smallness of the place, where you use the bathroom in the family’s farmhouse and the grandkids help carry your gourds to the car, the place we took the group home guys yesterday was the D*sneyland of pumpkin patches, complete with dumb theme ‘rides’ and a kid puking in the crowded bathroom–but I was determined that the guys would have a good time, and they did.  I wish I could say that their joy was infectious (wouldn’t that be nauseating anyway?) but just as I was about to cheer up–we were in line for the hayrack ride (PA readers, this is the same as a hayride) which one of the residents was very excited about–a woman came up to me, rubbed my shoulder and said, “I admire your patience.”  “Oh, he doesn’t take much patience.” He’s right here within earshot, dammit, and why would you assume that his wheelchair and retardation automatically make him difficult? “Oh, I’m sure he is.” “No, he’s actually a lot of fun.” (moving away) If you were really genuinely trying to be nice you would have backed off after my first response.  Now it’s clear that you want to go home feeling good about yourself, encouraging that nice young lady whose job is such a burden and thanking God you don’t have to do it and that someone else is ‘willing’ to for a pittance.

Grrr.

Nightmare

If you can help this family, please do! (you’ll need to read back a little to get context).  I am not in impartial observer but my husband and I have been reading up on this case and it looks like they’re getting supremely f*cked.  Their baby was premature and had a rough birth, and because of broken ribs (old breaks found recently) they are being investigated for abuse.  They are getting all kinds of good second opinions but in the meantime they have enormous legal fees and their baby is in temporary custody.  If you scroll down there’s a post up about a paypal site you can donate to.  I just cannot imagine losing my baby to CFS at 12 weeks…

Reading and Thinking

Read this excellent post over at Kohana’s, then this heartbreaking one at Tamara’s.  What do we need to demand here?  How can we get to a place where mothers get what they need to raise the children they birth?

“This child needed a system that would have allowed her to go somewhere and be with her baby while she got an education and a job. She doesn’t need someone else bonding with her baby while she struggles to do things that are, for her, nigh unto impossible. I do not know how she will do these things…

I don’t want to adopt this child if the system just throws this young girl to the dogs. Cookie’s case was extreme - beyond any doubt. Ginger has a mom who wants her and loves her and needs help. If she were just a little younger, she would have been placed in foster care along with her baby - which is exactly what I feel needs to happen now. But it won’t.”

Against Villification

I’m about to write what will probably be a wildly unpopular blog post. It’s been brewing and stewing for a few days now, taking shape in the shower and on walks. I’m reminded of it when I’m nursing my tiny son, wishing sometimes I could put him back in the womb to keep him safe.

A lot of things have been bothering me about the V. Tech massacre: the students and teachers killed, the loss of a that sense of security and comfort you get in college when you live and work in the same place and brush your teeth with former strangers who have become like family, the notion that journalists shouldn’t have released very newsworthy and informative footage (that’s another post…).

What bothers me most, though, is the language that has been used to describe a very sick, very disturbed, very hurt young man. Let me state for the record: I do not believe in monsters. I believe in mental illness. I believe that some people allow evil to enter their lives, to give in to impulses that will hurt others. I believe that cultures co-create people along with genetics, upbringing, and individual encounters. I believe in the complex interplay of all of the aspects of a person’s life to bring about that person’s behavior at a given moment. I believe, with Hannah Arendt, that Hitler was more the inevitable expression of the progression of prevailing strains of Western thought (that are still with us, alas) than an isolated madman.

Madmen are easy to hate, easy to villify, easy to cast into our social hell because if they are madmen it means the rest of us are off the hook. If we were able to admit that we live, on a daily basis, in our everyday interactions, according to an inherently violent, misogynistic code, one that pits us constantly against one another; if we were to acknowledge that we have allowed children to be abused in every unimaginably horrible way, and certainly also adults as torture victims at our collectively national hand; if we were to recall how all of us at some point have been bullies as often or more than we have been victims of bullying; or that we have stood by as someone else has been bullied, than we would have to accept complicity in what happened at V. Tech. And that, my friends, is extraordinarily, incredibly painful.

So instead we create a monster, Cho, who was crazy and evil and bad. It helps us to see that he was emotionless, mean, sexist, weird, violent. It’s a relief to us that he appears so out of touch with the rest of the world. It eases our minds to see that he is not, was not like us.

But the truth is that everything that Cho was is us, and we are everything that Cho was. This is why I am a pacifist; I see that violence is the gift that keeps on taking and taking and taking. Allow yourself to lose your temper or give into a violent temptation and very likely you will create dozens, hundreds, thousands even of violent others, who create more…and generations of these strange sorts of children emerge. And before you know it it’s far beyond what anyone can control. Admitting that Cho, though certainly already predisposed to such behavior by what I perceive to be an inborn mental illness, is in many ways us, means that we have to take collective responsibility for what happened. We have to say, “my God, we’ve killed these children, these kids who were babies not so long ago.” We have to remember that Cho was a baby once, and see him as one of the victims in this tragedy. And that is hard.

Of course we are also the V. Tech students and teachers, the ones who barricaded the doors to save their friends, the ones who attempted to befriend a weird, silent kid, the ones who stood arm and arm at the memorial service chanting their school’s fight song. That is us, too, the best in us: the capacity for heroicism, for selflessness. Thank God we have this, too, alongside what is so dark in us.

But it is us, all of us. And we have to be brave enough to face it.

Nursing Mother Becomes Re-radicalized

Ok, ok…so most of you have a life that is as busy or probably more than mine…you have jobs outside the home, more than one child (some with particular challenges), classes, volunteer work, etc., so the following is going to sound kind of whiny. On the other hand, I feel compelled to let myself complain, because I have always maintained that no one should ever work a 24-hour, 7 day-a-week job with not so much as a lunch break. This is what we ask women (and occasionally men) to do when we have a system without universal childcare, when we live in isolated homes without a sense of community, when our workplaces do not allow for the needs of the family (including the needs of working fathers who are often the sole support of a caregiver and children at home), when housework and childcare is not financially compensated and barely acknowledged. Understand that I’m not asking for pity–maybe sympathy, comraderie, and support–but trying to understand my experience as a stay-at-home mother/student attempting mostly unsuccessfully to balance my responsibilities as a parent, the running of a household, and the demands of graduate education. I also feel guilty about not reading more than a paragraph of that article.

So–here is my daily schedule, roughly:

7-8 Rise and nurse.

8-9 Shower, dress, and breakfast while the Snapper wiggles and babbles in his swing. Attend to the Snapper when he asks for social interaction, which is often.

9-10 Nurse. He’s too big now to nurse with one hand and do other things, so the best I can hope for is to watch something good on Link TV or catch up on my stack of pleasure reading. Schoolwork is more challenging because I can’t underline or take notes. If anybody has suggestions, I’m all ears.

10-10:15 Put the Snapper in the wrap and force a nap. He will absolutely not nap during the day unless I compel him to. If he doesn’t nap he gets cranky and miserable and everyone is unhappy.

10:15-12 Do dishes from night before. Start laundry. Catch up with checkbook, pay bills, general cleaning, prepare and eat lunch.

12-1 Nurse. Attic Man comes home to eat and take the dogs out. We are fortunate that he lives close enough to do this.

The afternoon isn’t as structured, but I try to get him to take another nap if I can. Things start to unravel as I try to finish the laundry–hard when trying to time it just right to coincide with the end of a nursing session–and realize that the kitchen will never, ever be clean. I am not a perfectionist about the house. I just want to have a clean glass to drink out of once in a while. The afternoon sees 2-3 nursing sessions of 40 minutes to an hour each. I find myself making ridiculous choices: should I do another load of dishes or have a snack? Take a walk or finally put on makeup? Read an essay or read to the Snapper?

4:45-7 Attic Man arrives home. He works out or puts the Snapper in a carrier so I can. On a good night, make a good dinner. On some nights, nurse again.

7-8:30, 9:30, or even 10 Nurse. I am not kidding. We have been trying to settle him earlier in the evening but he seems to want to nurse for 2 hours straight every night, one hour each side. The idea of having Attic Man take him in the evening so I can work isn’t working out. He will just scream and become over-tired and miserable. He needs to nurse and be held all evening, and guess who is the only one who can do that? I really wish men could lactate.

Wake up once or twice during the night to nurse, an hour at a time. If I can’t keep him awake to nurse for the whole hour he will be up 1 1/2 hours later for more.

So I am nursing anywhere from 8-10 hours a day, running a household (Attic Man does a lot but he’s working full-time and finishing up a Masters thesis), and trying to write a dissertation. I didn’t know that my child would nurse so much–the books all say he should be more efficient now, but he isn’t–or that some days I would have to choose between showering and eating.

I am actually quite happy. I love being a parent–it’s extremely rewarding and a wonderful challenge. I just would like to be able to have a more balanced life. I don’t want magazines telling me that I should meditate and have a positive attitude and accept my circumstances, blah, blah, blah. I do all that. But there’s a difference between working with what life gives you and resigning yourself to it because it’s a ‘personal’ problem. This isn’t personal–it’s intensely societal. I am an incredibly fortunate woman to be doing all this with a partner who is supporting me financially and otherwise, to have healthcare, to have a great extended family, and to have had such incredible opportunities educationally, but even I am struggling.

Something just ain’t right.