Mind Body Mama: This I Believe

In January, the phenomenal Lee Sinclair made her first demand upon the twelve feminist self defense experts she’s calling her national Comet Group.

I’m a little star-struck to even be counted among this group, which includes Nadia Telsey (who founded the school where I was first trained as a self defense instructor), Ellen Snortland (the writer/actor/activist/writing coach whose name I drop as frequently as I can) and Shihan Linda “Ramzy” Ranson (an eighth degree black belt who has intimidated me since I first met her twenty years—and several degrees—ago.)

The Comets—whose name was inspired by Miss Maria Mitchell, the first American woman to discover a comet—are a group of advisors to Lee’s No Means No Worldwide project. As Lee says, “It gives me a good feeling to think of this group’s exchange of ideas as lights streaking across the sky from one woman to another.”

Lee boiled her first question down to this:

“What do you feel are the absolute essentials that a Self Defense class needs to provide for students? These may be strategies or beliefs or a philosophy upon which many other fundamental behaviors rely."

What an amazing opportunity this was for me to name my core beliefs about the work I’ve been doing and thinking about for the past two decades.

This is what I know:

• Self defense is everything you do to take care of yourself: mind, body, spirit. It is acting as if you have value. Self defense considers both short term and long term consequences of your actions in terms of what will be best for you.

• As the instructor, I am not the only expert in the room. Women practice self defense—take steps to protect themselves and their children—all the time. Women are the best experts about what strategies and techniques will work to reduce or respond to violence in their own lives. In my classes we always learn from one another.

• Self defense is about increasing women’s choices. There is no “right answer” in self defense, no silver bullet technique that will work in all situations. No two women will respond to a given situation with the same choice.

• Self defense is a right and not a privilege. Everyone has the right to autonomy of his/her own body.

• It is easy to hurt another person’s body. The techniques we teach work. You can learn them. You can use them if you need them.

• It is never your fault if someone chooses to attack you. If someone makes the choice to hurt you, they are responsible for that choice. You might have compassion for your attacker; you might even understand what compelled him to make that choice. You can take steps to keep yourself safer and learn self defense techniques. But taking responsibility for your own safety is not the same as taking responsibility for having been attacked. It is always the attacker’s responsibility for having made that bad choice.

• It is my deepest hope that my students will never have to use physical techniques to defend themselves. These principles guide my understanding of physical self defense:

o Do the least amount of harm necessary to neutralize the situation.
o Understand that any physical engagement includes a risk of harm to the defender.
o Reserve the most damaging techniques for the most dangerous situations.
o Select techniques that will do the least amount of harm to your own body while striking vulnerable targets on the attacker’s body.

• Like many others in our movement, I use the Five Fingers of Self Defense as a pneumonic for the steps of avoidance/de-escalation/response:

1. Use your mind and breathe.
2. Use your voice.
3. Create distance.
4. Fight back if you have to and with appropriate force.
5. Tell someone you trust.

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.

Mind Body Mama: Half Drunk and in My Pajamas

Taped onto my monitor is this quote from Ellen Snortland: “There is no wasted writing.”

When Sweetiebabyhoneylicious first noticed it she deadpanned, “But there is writing when you’re wasted.”

My new best virtual friends Jen and Sarah think this is a good thing. That’s why they’ve created the Half Drunk Challenge. And I’m in. I’m all in.

Don’t think this means I’ll be drinking this week. I already toasted Sarah’s innaugural post with a finger of Drambue with my hot bath last night. I was asleep before 9pm and woke up at 3am with a headache.

As one of my favorite ninety-year-olds likes to say, “That’s enough of that.”

So what is Half Drunk about if it’s not about drinking?

It’s about lowered inhibitions achieved by any means necessary. It’s about writing something that frightens you. It’s about saying something that surprises you. It’s about risk.

(You do remember that MBA Mama calls me, "the most risk averse person I’ve ever met”, right?)

I’ve got topics for Half Drunk. Right here on an index card. Ideas that have been gathering dust in my writing notebook for weeks or months because I’m too chickenshit to give them a go.

The time is now.

And I’m going to try to do Half Drunk one better: I’m going to post every day this week. That’s truly drunken behavior for me. Given that it’s only three weeks before Christmas and the gift factory is up and running on my dining room table. Given that I have clients starting at 6am some days. Given that I am still trying to find my clean underpants after our weekend in Boston, Thanksgiving, and unexpected funeral-type travel.

It’s going to be my secret tryout for NaBloPoMo. I hate to fail at things. (See above, “risk averse.”) So I’m giving myself a soft entry. Call it NaBloPoWe. Or LMWBloPoWe. Or don’t call it anything at all. Just drop in and see how I’m doing. And check out my friends Jen and Sarah while you’re at it.

Ten more points for the first one to catch the lame-ass literary reference. Jender is out in front, people.

Props to BirthPie for the term Gift Factory.