mind body mama: Girl Power

So it came to pass that one of my feminist process groups had a discussion about the use of the word “girl” in the original name of our group.

One of the two African American members of the group initiated the conversation with an eloquent email. She started her sentences with phrases like, “In my community…” and “In my experience….”

The gist of her message was, “This feels really crappy to me and I’d like us to change the name.”

And so we did.

In the process, I noticed something.

I realized that I had never felt completely comfortable with the name of the group myself. The use of the word “girl” didn’t sit right with me, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. It felt somewhat anti-feminist to call a group of adult, professional women children.

It was the kind of thing the old school lesbian separatist feminists would not have liked. I thought of the thirty-year-old feminist vegetarian restaurant where the collective members call the patrons, “Women.” As in, “You women can sit by the window.” Because they don’t know our names and won’t call us “You guys,” or “You ladies,” as in the vernacular. They always call us, “Women.”

I thought of all of this. I felt uncomfortable with the word choice.

I didn’t say anything.

When my colleague described the way the word “girl” has been used derogatorily by non-Black people towards Black women in this country, I knew exactly what she was talking about. I hadn’t thought of it myself, but I got it.

About one hundred years ago when I was an undergraduate, I studied at the City University of New York. The student body of my college—Hunter College—was, at that time, over eighty-percent African-American women. The other twenty percent were not exclusively suburban blue collar middle class white lesbians.

Which is to say: the story of my undergraduate experience is the story of being different than those around me.

It is also to say: I had the incredible privilege to study feminism in a setting that was primarily Black.

By grace, I listened a lot as my classmates told their stories. I read a lot about the African American experience. I took in a lot of information about experiences other than my own. I learned to see the dominant culture and name things that had been as invisible to me as air: racism, classism, imperialism. I learned a feminism that assumes racial and economic justice as bedrock, not as secondary concerns in a hierarchy of oppressions.

So last month, when my colleague described how and why Black people have been called “boy” or “girl,” and how that nomenclature has been a tool of oppression, it was not new information to me. When she described her personal, visceral experience of having been called “girl” by the “rich, White ladies” for whom she worked, my heart hurt and I felt angry. When she suggested that we might not want her and the other Black women in our group to relive that oppression, that historic or personal memory, through our work and our name, I agreed immediately.

But it reminded me of the canary in the coal mine: the one who gets hit first, and hardest, by the deadly toxic fumes. The choice of the word “girl” for our group felt wrong to me. I had a scritchy awareness that something wasn’t right, the way you might notice a bad smell when you enter a room. But if you ignore it a while it becomes familiar and inoffensive; it requires no action.

But to my African-American colleague, for whom the language choice raised personal and community experiences of racism, it wasn’t a bad smell—it was a toxic cloud. While I was sniffing and saying, “Hmmm, smells funny here, huh?” she was falling onto the ground clutching her throat and coughing, “Ack, ack, ack!”

Does this mean that we are responsible to know in advance anytime our choice of language might translate to an experience of oppression for someone whose experiences are different than ours? I hope not. Because I know I’ll forget again. I might not forget this one, but I’ll miss something else—something completely obviously offensive to someone who’s lived a different experience than I have.

What I hope I’ll remember is how easy it was for me to brush off my own initial discomfort. How easy it was for me to discount the sexism inherent in calling adults by the childish descriptor, and how hard it was for me to access my own understanding of the racist echo. I had to be reminded—even though it was not new information; even though I had already heard many such stories.

I hope I’ll remember that the person living any given oppression is the expert therein; it is terribly hard to imagine ourselves into one another’s experience, even with good and large hearts. I hope that I’ll remember this when my straight or privileged-class or male allies tolerate the bad smell of language or action that feels like it’s killing me, and I hope I’ll have a fraction of my colleague’s dignity and wisdom with which to explain it to them. I hope that I’ll remember this when something feels scritchy but tolerable to me: that I can be a better advocate for myself and others if I speak up.

mind body mama: Close Enough for Government Work

Things that almost happened this weekend:

1. I almost put my I-pod through the laundry.

2. I almost gave the somnolent cashier at Target a coronary when I yelled “Oh, No!” in her check out line, upon realizing that I had almost put my I-pod in the laundry.

3. I almost left the mall without purchasing a set of towels that exactly match the wall colors of my finally newly remodelled bathroom.

4. I almost bought the right number of towels, avoiding a return trip to the mall the next day.

5. I almost lost my lunch when the cat brought a dead mouse up from the basement.

6. I almost let Small clean up the dead mouse so I wouldn’t have to admit to Sweetie that I was too squeamish to do it myself.

7. I almost installed all the new drawer pulls in the bathroom, except that I measured wrong and didn’t tighten the chuck enough and also I almost vacuumed up a drill bit and at the end there was a lot of swearing and now it looks like Matt Groening’s “If you drink, don’t drill” panel and only two drawer pulls are actually installed. Oh well, maybe next time.

8. I almost wrote a new essay for my blog on time, but I went to karate instead. But good news! I’m going to post one right now!

mind body mama: The Process is the Point

I am part of three feminist process groups right now. If you are someone to whom that sentence does not have significance, suffice it to say that the readers who know exactly what it means are pointing and laughing and saying things like, “Better you than me, sister.”

This experience is giving me an opportunity to exercise the most enduring lesson I learned at Heather Berthoud’s diversity training last summer.***

I boiled this lesson into a mantra which, with a lot of deep breathing, gets me through it all without sticking a fork into one of my own eyes:

“When you work with people who are different than you—which is to say, all people—things will move more slowly than you might expect.”

Heather never actually said, “When you work with people who are different than you—which is to say, all people—things will move more slowly than you might expect.” It’s possible that this was not the take-away she intended. But despite the fact that I’ve been attending diversity trainings for over twenty years—my entire undergraduate experience as a Women’s Studies major at the City University of New York was a protracted diversity training—I understood something new in her class:

When I am thinking: “This would go so much faster/better if we just did everything my way,” people different from me—which is to say, all people—are probably not thinking, “This would go so much faster/better if we just did everything Lynne Marie’s way.”

Go figure.

Apparently, other people might be thinking, “This would go so much faster/better if we just did everything my way.”

Other other people might be thinking, with regard to my own stellar contributions, “What is she trying to do here? This is not the fastest/best way. This is making me very uncomfortable.”

And some other people might not even think “fast” equates with “best.”

(Insert more deep breathing here.)

Now, Heather’s a terrific trainer (see footnote: “genius”). Of course the session explored differences which are often culturally linked—such as values around punctuality or conflict, for example. I do understand that my ideas of “best ways” are inextricably tied to my identity as a white, blue collar/middle class, North American native-English speaker as well as my upbringing in a wealthy East Coast WASPy suburb.

But my mantra defines “people who are different from me” as “all people” because the voice of God that spoke through Heather’s training told me that I have to be more patient—with everyone.

When I get that scritchy, irritable feeling that things should be moving along right about now and why don’t we just do everything my way?—it is time for me to get very quiet. It is time to listen as deeply as I possibly can.

I know my way around a committee meeting. I am not only a lesbian feminist; I’m also a Unitarian Universalist. I know that group process can (will) hit a snag. If I get quiet I might be able to facilitate the snag. Maybe there’s a need for information or it’s time to call a vote. Maybe someone misheard someone else. Maybe we all need a snack.

But what feels like a slow-down might not be a snag at all. I’ll never know unless I try listening to my peers. What feels like delay to me might be an indication that the other members of the group need something—to speak, to listen, to feel, to act. Maybe the solution which is obvious to me is not smacking them upside the head because it’s not the best way for everyone.

Maybe people who are different than me—which is to say, all people—are really different than me. Maybe they are being their true and whole and beautiful selves. As opposed to just slowing everything down by refusing to see things my way.

Maybe being comfortable in a group—having everything happen in a way that feels natural or easy to me—is not the highest success. It can’t be if we value diversity. People who are different than me—which is to say, all people—are going to be maddeningly, infuriatingly, incomprehensibly different than me. A lot of the time they are going to want or need something other than what I want or need. I don’t understand it but it doesn’t mean that they are wrong.

If I’m never unsettled in a group it means that people who are different than me are compromising themselves. There’s a social justice piece to this, of course. As a white person I have to be hyper vigilent. It’s easy for members of the dominant culture to railroad a process according to what’s comfortable to them. That marginalizes the non-dominant members of the group; in common parlance it’s what we call “racism.” Or “sexism,” or “classism”—you get the drift.

It feels like a profound switch, though, to draw my attention to my own scritchiness—and lack there-of—rather than the apparent differences between myself and other group members. Rather than casting an eye around wondering how the straight members, or the African-American members, or the privileged-class members are going to demonstrate their differences from me, I look to myself. When I feel too comfortable I have to wonder, “Who’s not comfortable?” When I feel scritchy and impatient I have to wonder, “To whom am I not yet listening?”


(***The other really important thing I learned from diversity training with Heather is that she is a genius. In the event that you are in a position to hire a consultant for your business or non-profit, do not waste time researching her competition—just hire her. Pay her highest per diem, fly her to you business class, and do not send your assistant to pick her up at the airport. Pick her up yourself, because you will want to spend every moment you can learning from her.)

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.

Self Defense Snap Shot: One Year Anniversary of Violence, Unsilenced

I’m not bringing you a self defense snapshot today. Instead, I’m bringing you a whole album. I invite you to visit the inspiring work of Maggie at Violence Unsilenced.

Violence, Unsilenced is a community blog featuring personal stories of domestic violence and sexual assault. Each post is a brave and unique story of courage and survival. It is sometimes hard to hear these stories. But it always feels like a priviledge.

Violence, Unsilenced is an example of the very best things that technology can bring us. It is a holy space among the noise of the internet. A space of truth. A space of courage. A space of compassion and the power of connection.

Maggie says, “Whether it’s domestic violence or sexual assault/abuse, perpetrators control their victims by relying on silence and shame. We can break the silence, thereby eradicating that fear and shame one voice at a time.”

As anti-violence educators, we teach the Five Fingers of Self Defense:

1. Use your mind and breathe.
2. Use your voice.
3. Create distance.
4. Fight back.
5. Tell someone you trust.

Violence, Unsilenced is a triumph of Self Defense Finger #5. In the past year over 100 people have spoken out on Maggie’s award-winning blog. Thousands have posted comments of support, becoming the trusted someones.

In the two decades that I’ve been studying and teaching self defense, I’ve heard countless stories. People have an instinct to survive and to tell their stories. I’ve had neighbors tell me over the fence and shopkeepers over the counter, students tell me in classes and colleagues tell me in the cafeteria, how violence has impacted their lives. How someone tried to hurt them and they fought back: with their minds, with their voices, with their bodies.

I am always honored and humbled when survivors tell me their truth. As I am honored and humbled to bear witness to Maggie and all those who have spoken out in her forum.

Last night at the dojo we stood in a circle throwing palm-heel strikes and yelling “NO!” In that circle was at least one woman who had never done that basic self defense exercise: strike, yell. In that circle were one girl, one young women, two teachers, three mamas.

Women on a cold night getting stronger, yelling into the dark.

I thought, “I have been standing in this circle for 22 years.”

I thought, “There is nothing more important to me than these women, growing stronger.”

I thought, “Why isn’t this fight over yet?”

Maggie: I wish for us a world where there is no need for what we do. A world where women and children and men are safe, and no one needs to fight back or listen to one another’s stories. Because the violence is over and there are no more stories to tell.

But as we move from now to then, I wish you the continued strength of your huge heart. I see in your smile how you draw strength from the triumph of the survivors around you, as I draw inspiration from my brave, bold, powerful students. I wish for your movement to grow even greater and the voices of survival you’ve assembled to grow even louder. From your work I learn again how one person can make a profound difference in the lives of countless others. You are one of my heroes.

Lessons (3)

I am over forty now, so my cycle does not merely include an irritable, chocolate-seeking phase but also a period of extreme intollerance bordering on insanity. One Sunday I woke up feeling as if my skin had been removed. I felt like one of those figures from Bodies, Revealed, with my exposed muscles and nerves all red and slippery and my eyeballs lolling around in a monsterous scalp. Sweetie was headed off for her own day of crazy looking after her mother, Memo. (It’s pronounced “Mee-mo,” we do not have Small calling her grandmother a business document.)

For a brief moment I thought maybe I could avoid all stimuli by pulling the covers over my head. Then my irrepressible darling arrived in my bed already dressed for church. Her self-selected outfit consisted of:

• A blue serge Benneton dress with a white Peter Pan collar ($4, Salvation Army) that makes her look like Wednesday Addams.
• A white nylon crinoline, brand name “Her Majesty.” (Mighty Meg hand-me-down bag.)
• A white cable knit sweater with rhinestone buttons. (Sister Carrie care package.)
• Silver ballet flats (Target clearance, $3).
  

We are Unitarian in a liberal New England college town; to say this outfit was overkill for the occasion is an understatement. One of Small’s friends attended services in his pajamas until he was four. But my kid had even put on her own tights, for goodness sake. I hauled my ass out of the bed. And because it was the last day of January and I publically committed to take her swimming once each month, I dutifully packed the picnic cooler and the gym bag so we could go directly from Our House of Worship to the Y.

Do you have to ask how the day went? Don’t you already know how sitting in the Great Hall full of congregants must feel to someone who forgot to wear her skin? Can’t you already guess that Small wanted to talk to every single person in that hall during the Community Greeting while I wanted to empty out my purse and put it over my head? You won’t be surprised to hear that Small danced—no, marched—away from me on her way to Religious Education, so eager was she to be in fellowship with her classmates. Or to hear that she had a sudden change of heart and regretted not saying goodbye, causing the Director of Religious Education to have to search the building for me. Did she find me? No, of course not. Because sitting through a service led by our brilliant, quirky, treasured Unitarian youth—a service that called upon the congregation to dance, and sing, and witness the young people’s poise and wisdom—was simply not an option in my state of agitation. I retired to the parlor where I could listen to the service while reading Douglas Adams and playing solitaire on my I-pod.

I’m not even going to tell you about swimming. I’ve summed it all up before: Ninth Circle of Hell. And that was without PMS.

This state, this feeling state of extreme intollerance, where I can scarcely bear my own presence let alone other humans, is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul. I feel my real self like some panicked wild animal, blunt snout prodding and sharp claws scrabbling at its confines. Every breath is an exercise in patience. I would pull my own hair out of my scalp, I would smash things, I would holler, if it did any good. But it doesn’t do any good. So I practice de-escalation and count the moments as they pass.

I tried to say “Yes,” to everything, because staying another 10 minutes to play in the climbing structure wasn’t going to make me any more miserable than getting back home. I said, “Yes,” you can watch a video when we get back and “Yes,” you can have a popsicle too. And when we got all the way home only to discover that we’d forgotten the precious white sweater in the locker room, I tried not to cry before we packed ourselves back in the car and headed back to get it.

If I believed in God it would be really hard not to take moments like this as proof that he hates me.

***

But here’s the lesson:

I used to take this state of agitation, of desperation, of inner turmoil, for real. I used to feel this way a lot in periods of depression and anxiety and I thought that it required action. I thought that it was a reasonable response to the circumstances of my life, whatever they were at the moment.

So I did pull my hair, and also cry and stomp my feet and smash things and yell a lot. Thank goodness I do not have an addictive personality, because although I distinctly remember the toilet at CBGBs as a tilt-a-whirl, I did not do much self-medicating. I just acted it out: if I felt full of hate I acted mean, if I hated myself I acted pathetic, if I felt anxious I hyperventilated. I walked down the middle of city streets crying, I smashed the phone down into its receiver over and over again, I stayed up all night writing terrible poetry.

I had really dumb relationships. I had lots of stupid fights.

Now I look at this snarling cur of a mood and think, “Here we go again.” And I watch it. If it doesn’t slink away, if it shape-shifts into something else—days of uncontrolled weeping, nights of sleepless terror—I I ask for help. In the meantime I help myself with the things that help it go easier: lots of tea and hugs from my kid and chocolate and blazing cardio and practice hitting things really hard.

Lessons (2)--Interlude

Last week I woke up with the kind of hormone-induced irritability that could make a person take to her bed with a pan of brownies and a bottle of Drambuie. Unfortunately I had to take the kid to school, and once you’ve already gotten up you might as well go to work and make the little bucks.

“I am a storm cloud!” I informed my first client. I had considered fronting but it makes me queasy. Also, it doesn’t work. The other person knows something is going on and they become paranoid and/or hostile when you refuse to give it up.

Having admitted to my storm-cloudiness I entered the client’s session with focus and purpose which was good because girlfriend was on fire. The chance to witness her totally kicking ass was completely worth the pain of crawling out of bed.

Honesty was working for me so I led with it in my 10 o’clock exercise class too.

“I am evil and grumpy and a horrible mean teacher and you are all going to suffer! Why haven’t you left this place and gone out for donuts yet? This is your last chance! RUN AWAY!”

“Oh, Lynne Marie, you’re so funny!” they tittered. Then, as they do every week, they all did their own customized exercise routines regardless of what I told them to do. I cultivate a classroom setting where students listen to their bodies more then they listen to me, and I devote a lot of time to individual instruction, so my classes look like utter chaos. It’s good for the clients—it’s how I love to teach. But it offers no salve of order when my soul is stormy.

“Jump UP!” I hollered between exercises. They all lay on the ground and rolled their eyes.

Somehow everyone survived the class and BirthPie was there for me to talk to.

“OmygodmyPMSissobadIwanttokilleveryoneIcan’tstanditanymore.”

“Me too,” she hissed. “I need chocolate. There’s no chocolate at my house!”

“I can score you some chocolate. Meet me after school.”

On the pick-up run I slipped BirthPie a slab of the therapeutic brownies Sweetie had baked the night before, having hit the chocolate-jones part of her month too.

“Do not share this with anyone in your family,” I cautioned.

“No chance,” she said, slipping it deep into her satchel.

Once again I was reminded that Frisbee is the only man in our little constellation of families: six females, one guy. In only a few short years it will not be the three of us cycling together but the six of us. I’m advising Frisbee to take up extreme marathoning or international consulting and organize his absences strategically.

Because there may not be enough chocolate or Drambuie in the hemisphere to survive that adventure.

Mind Body Mama: Love Letter to Seamus

My entry into Momalom’s Love It Up challenge: a love letter to my on-again/off-again martial arts training buddy Seamus who leaves for a new life in Tennessee (what the--?) this week.

Dude,

I know you are leaving soon and I have fairly spectacularly failed to say goodbye. I could blame it on a lot of things, like the fact that we just don’t fit into each other’s worlds in any kind of way that makes sense. (Seriously, do you see me fitting in at your karaoke goodbye party?) But the truth is I’m just not dealing. Jender asked me the other day how I felt about you leaving and I said, “I’m sticking with really, really pissed off.” So, there you have it.

The truth is that we stopped hooking up a while back, but so long as we both still resided in this neck of the woods there lived the possibility that on any given Wednesday night we’d be locked in a sweaty embrace, desperately trying to knock each other down. Or kicking each other across the floor with teeth-rattling power. Or practicing joint-locking pain-compliance techniques.

And laughing, always maniacally laughing.

When I met you—damn, I was jealous! You were this hot young phenom and you remembered everything they taught us. I had ten years’ training on you and just hoped to make up in depth and principles what I lacked in straight out memorizing. But then you started coming to my Saturday morning sparring class—hung-over—and I realized what a total goofball you are.

Somehow, along the way, you became my go-to person to practice anything with. The stick fighting that confused me, the falling that scared me, and the kicking that makes me love my life. I wanted to do it all, but I wanted to do it most with you.

I have trained with a lot of women in the past twenty-two years, and I have grown to love and trust many of them, but I have never had another training partner like you. I have trusted you with my body more than I have ever trusted anyone other than a lover—and if I’m honest I have to say I’ve had lovers I trusted less.

At the School of Love we say that training can bring up strong feelings, and that’s okay, but it’s one thing to say it and it’s another thing entirely to see someone else’s badass ugly rage and not want to run screaming off the scene. You and I always knew that our snarling snarkfest had more than a grain of actual anger running through it. And that was really okay because we were strong enough to hold it for each other.

Who would have thought to put the two of us together? I arrived in town with my wife in tow and my wild days a safe and distant memory while you were still stomping around in your army boots doing the Big Dyke Around Town thing. I bought a house and I’m pretty sure you slept in your truck, before it got towed. I had a baby and took her to story hour while you studied auto mechanics.

But it worked. I can’t think of another way we could have been friends but for the sheer delight we found in slugging each other. Maybe if we’d been really young together in the same city we could have squandered our connection on a drunken one night stand and a few months of really tired drama and bad poetry, but that would have been a flat-out waste. What we’ve had is the perfect dojo love story.

Did I ever thank you for everything you did for my black belt test? Like dying your hair Spike-blond, and reminding me not to punch you with my right arm after Strawberry almost broke it? Not to mention the months upon months upon months of loyal practice. That was your test too, I hope you know.

I love you like that bruise you get while sparring that doesn’t bloom until two days later and you smile when you see it because you remember how goddamned much fun you were having.

I love you like that predictably stupid fake somebody throws that still works after all these years.

Like the sneaky uppercut to the ribs,

like the way your wrist cracks in the hanging lock,

like the irritating sweep that takes your foot right out from under you and lands you on your ass,

I love you, man.

Safe travels. Don't forget us.

Lessons (1)

When we bought this old heap house, the bathroom featured broken Fifties-vintage plastic tile. The previous homeowner, affectionately referred to around these parts as “that dirt bag,” had not reached the conclusion that showering was off limits. We immediately recognized that restriction unless we wanted to transform our walls into a mold colony. So we got Seamus to come by with her hard hat and crow bar and tear the whole thing down to lathe and plaster. Sweetie’s next-to-biggest brother crept through crawl spaces no other human has ever seen to install plumbing and wiring and her biggest brother rebuilt the walls with glossy white subway tiles.

Moments later, I birthed baby Small.

So we had a shiny, functional shower but perhaps not the greatest amount of attention to lavish on its upkeep.

Years later—two? Three? I am not the best at tracking the SAHM period of my life— I noticed that the subway tile—or more specifically, the grout—was no longer shiny. At the end of the stall where the shower head is the grout was yellowed and scuzzy looking. At the far end it was as clean and bright as the day it was laid.

That’s when the shame started dogging me. Unlike the rest of this dirty old place, I felt responsible for this tile. I could remember the day we bought it from the smart, sassy Irish saleslady in West Springfield and left the showroom asking each other if there weren’t more things to tile in the house—she was that good. I could remember the brother’s red reading glasses sliding down his broad nose and the way he held his beer bottle in one hand and tilted his head to survey the placement of the next tile. This shower stall represented one tiny corner of my home where a century of other people’s dirt did not precede my tenancy, and I had failed to keep it pristine.

While I felt ashamed and inadequate every day, I never felt compelled to change my cleaning routine.

Which was this: Every six months or so I would agonizingly choose between a green cleaner and a toxic cleaner. Every six weeks or so I would squirt the chosen cleaner onto the dirty tile. The grout would fail to immediately resume its original whiteness at which point my shame transmogrified into frustration, bitterness and anger.

“I don’t know how to clean this!” I would howl—sometimes to Sweetie, but more often to myself. I’d think of the clean, bright homes of my mother and sister and grandmother’s and sister-in-law, and how they would never have let this happen. Occasionally I would spend an afternoon standing in the shower with a toothbrush or a tiny bleach pen, obsessively cleaning the grout with the same lack of results.

The whole experience of failure was so exhausting and upsetting that I’d need at least a month to recover before I could try again.

I kept that up for a few more years.

Six months ago I had some kind of shower epiphany. I have noticed that these surges of self-efficacy have corresponded to Small’s developmental stages: The first time she slept through the night, we painted the dining room. Something about her first grade self determination restored the emotional wherewithal required to shift my shower stall gears.

I decided to act like a person who cleans her shower stall once a week. I expected it to keep looking awful, but I’d know it was cleaner and maybe that would make me feel better. Every Monday I squirted cleanser onto that tile; just the random toxic cleanser that happened to be on the closet shelf. I felt a frison of environmental guilt but determined to take this project on without agony: the next bottle of cleanser might be a gentler brand. I didn’t take hours with a toothbrush or waste evenings Googling “How to clean grout.” I just squirted the cleanser on the tile, wiped it off, and moved along. When it didn’t get newly, beautifully clean the first week, or the second or even the third, I forced myself to think positive. “Oh well, maybe next time.”

Gradually, the grout got clean. Now, you might not even notice a difference between the shower-head end and the dry end. It’s unremarkably, simply clean.

There’s no way to tell the story that exactly explains how this felt like a tiny little miracle in my soul. Every Monday I squirted something out of a bottle and a month later a burden of guilt I’d been carrying for six years lifted off my conscience.

Aha! I thought. There is a lesson here. I could even write about it: “Imperfect effort, applied consistently, will yield results.” I thought about how already knew this lesson from karate, how just showing up is more important than doing things perfectly.

I felt very smug, and serene, and wise from my Zen shower lesson.

The other day I was brushing my teeth and I noticed how discolored the grout was on the bathroom counter that was installed two years ago. My conscience started twisting and whining. “I don’t know how to clean this!” it howled.

For the love of God. I thought I could generalize the lesson to my whole life, and I couldn’t even generalize it to the whole bathroom.

Abundance

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.

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.

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: 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?”

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 to steal 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/.

Mind Body Mama: Each Night, Holy Night

I’ve been thinking of how I could sign off to all of you before this holiday weekend. I considered cracking wise on BirthPie by making note of the great miracle of a 30” snowfall that extended her eight nights of Hannukah another two. And how I hope it doesn’t take her family all twelve days of Christmas to fly to Billings, Montana. I could tell you how fast the years have spun by since I first rocked infant Small at the back of the Great Hall of Our House of Worship at the Christmas Eve service, to this year when she read the Linus verses from the Book of Luke in a loud, clear voice:

And there were in the same country
shepherds abiding in the field,
keeping watch over their flock by night.

And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them,
and the glory of the Lord shone round about them;
and they were sore afraid.

And the angel said unto them,
Fear not: for, behold,
I bring you good tidings of great joy,
which shall be to all people.

For unto you is born this day
in the city of David
a Saviour,
which is Christ the Lord.

The angel said
this shall be a sign unto you;

Ye shall find the babe
wrapped in swaddling clothes,
lying in a manger.

And suddenly
there was with the angel
a multitude of the heavenly host
praising God,
and saying,
Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace,
goodwill to all people.

I could tell you about the gratuitous, over-the-top Christmas music-and-light show our neighbors put on and how, when I whispered to Sweetie “They’re crazy!” Small hissed at me, “They’re not crazy, they’re AWESOME! They know what Christmas means to kids.” And I thought about telling you my birth story again, about how this baby Small came to us in an ice storm and brought me face to face with miracle and wonder.

But finally I decided I could not do better than these words of Sophia Lyons Fahs that I have come to consider the Unitarian Christmas liturgy:

For so the children come
And so they have been coming.
Always in the same way they come
Born of the seed of man and woman.
No angels herald their beginnings.
No prophets predict their future courses.
No wisemen see a star to show
Where to find the babe that
Will save humankind.
Yet each night a child is born is a holy night,
Fathers and mothers-
Sitting beside their children's cribs
Feel glory n the sight of a new life beginning
They ask, "Where and how will
This new life end?
Or, will it ever end?"
Each night a child is born is a holy night-
A time for singing,
A time for wondering,
A time for worshipping.

To every mother’s child: good night, holy night.

mind body mama: My Storybook Life

Earlier this week one of my favorite clients cancelled the third session in a row. When I called to see if I needed to stage an intervention she said, “I’m sorry—those last two were unavoidable conflicts. But the first time, I was just feeling overwhelmed. When I hung up the phone from cancelling I just lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes.”

There are times when I might have thought, “Wow, do I need to make a mental health referral here?” But this week I just thought, “Damn, why didn’t I do that?”

Because I’m fairly sure I crammed thirty seven extra errands into that found hour before I screeched up to my next session. The to-do list just keeps getting longer, and it’s not just the Christmas machine. In fact, our organization, restraint and foresight on the Christmas front seem to have bitten us in the butts. We only have a few things left to do for the holidays, which is why it’s seemed reasonable to say “yes” to untold other things. Somehow I ended up at the School of Love Monday as well as a record three times on Tuesday, and then we rescheduled a meeting for Wednesday night that got bumped by the funeral a few weeks ago. There were flu shots in there, and a session at the radio station recording some of my blog posts, and a spate of emails with the afterschool enrichment program to see if we can get Small enriched even though she’s above grade level.

It’s been the kind of week where, when I call BirthPie to see if she can watch Small for an unexpected hour she says, “Sure, but only if I can do it at your place because Frisbee’s working the overnight and has to sleep all day.”

So I say, “I gave the last extra key to the AM babysitter, I’ll have to hit the hardware store to get you one.”

And she says, “While you’re there, could you get a few extra copies of my house key for my cat sitters?”

It’s a turning of the screw kind of week: every errand leads to another; nothing is ever actually finished. I shed belongings like skin cells: my lunchbox is at the college gym, my sunglasses are accidentally left in my glove box, I can’t find a clean sports bra. I wake up in the middle of the night hoping that it is morning so I can get back to the races, my to-do list scrolling through my brain like movie credits. But it’s only two am so I pass the time making a mental inventory of my January invoices until I fall asleep again.

But it is almost over. Christmas Eve, when I will wrangle the seventh graders into an assertive and cordial team of ushers and Small will read a portion of the nativity story to the congregation, is almost here. (Note to self: must purchase 40 AA batteries for the electric votives, per order of the War Ship.) In just a few hours our Christmas week will be upon us and we are hell-bent on doing a whole lot of nothing but eating, sleeping and enjoying one another for nine long days.

***

In case you haven’t got a visual yet for why I really, really need a vacation, here’s how my workout went yesterday:

It went great, thanks for asking. I had time to work out because I had another cancellation (different favorite client) and I had the foresight not to cancel the AM babysitter. So after a surprisingly good night’s sleep and two cups of coffee I found myself tearing it up on my favorite elliptical machine. I was having so much fun sweating to Dead Prez that I cut it very close to my next appointment.

Which is why when I discovered that I didn’t have a towel with me—after I’d already gotten naked in the locker room, natch—I didn’t have enough time to get dressed and run back to the gym to borrow one.

I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to dry off with the workout clothes I’d just taken off. Eeww! Is right. And double eeww to the fact that workout clothes are now made to be moisture wicking instead of moisture absorbing so rubbing my dirty clothes on my clean body wasn’t even going to make me much dryer.

I showered very quickly. Maybe I thought a brief shower would make me less wet?

I was drying my face with a random clean sock I found at the bottom of my gym bag when I accidentally caught my earring and pulled it out of my ear. I heard it bounce all over the tiled shower stall—the earring headed in one direction, the butterfly clasp in the other. Since I don’t wear my glasses in the shower I couldn’t see where anything went. So the next thing I knew I was naked, and wet—with no chance of getting dry—on my hands and knees, crawling around a public shower, looking for my favorite earring, and late for work.

If this does not make me the poster child for mamas who need a vacation I don’t care to know what I’d have to do to qualify.

***

The AM babysitter, name of Deborah, is an absolute treasure. I worried about inviting someone into the chaos of our lives and the detritus of our decrepit house, but it has been an unmitigated success. Deborah not only makes it possible for me to work two early mornings a week, she loves and knows my daughter. Which is what I most deeply wish for when I put my child into another’s care; that the caregiver will really see her: her quirks and foibles, her gifts and challenges.

I got Deborah a downtown gift card as a year-end thank you. “Small,” I said, “please write a message to Deborah on this card, but don’t make it a Christmas message. Deborah doesn’t celebrate Christmas.” I was thinking along the lines of “Happy Holidays” or “I love you” or “Thank you for playing alien fighters with me.”

When I opened the card to tuck in one of Small’s school pictures I saw the message she wrote:

“Be ready for anything.”

In all fairness, this is the message I should have given Deborah when I hired her.

***

At dinner last night Small wanted to role-play being a lawyer. We’d been talking about how lawyers fight for people’s rights.

“What’s something that you believe in?” I asked Small.

Small drew up her most solemn and imperious self. “I think that gayness—I mean, being gay, like you guys—is OK.”

Sweetie and I looked at each other. We rarely use the words “gay” and “lesbian” around here because there’s no need to draw that strong a line between our family and other families. There are lots of different kinds of families. If it’s necessary of a conversation I might say, “There are boy-boy people and girl-girl people but most people are boy-girl people,” and Small will fail to even look up from what she’s reading to acknowledge my description of the world as she already knows it.

“Um…ok.” I stammered. “But where did you learn that word 'gayness'?”

“Akbar and Jeff’s Guide to Life.” Small grinned delightedly.

I am really not as terrible a parent as it seems, I swear.

***

After dinner we googled Life is Hell and found out it had been reissued as Life is Swell in 2007.

Small said, “Life is Swell is even funnier than Life is Hell. Because in that comic, life is definitely not swell.”

I caught her up in my arms. “Small,” I said with the deepest parental admiration, “that is called 'irony' and you have never said anything that made me more proud.”

“You’ve said that before,” came her muffled voice from my stifling hug.

“Yeah, but I mean it,” I declared. “I’m even more proud than when you said you were a feminist.”

***

When I tucked Small in last night she said sleepily, “Do you know what a bad comparison is? It’s when you say something like, ‘It was as loud as a loud noise.’”

“What’s a good comparison?” I asked.

She pondered. “‘It was as loud as a wolf’s howl’,” she said. “You have to use something that’s a loud thing. The other one is just too obvious.”

“You’re getting to be quite a good little writer,” I observed.

“You too,” she said, snuggling down. “Have you heard the saying, ‘it’s in the blood’? It’s like that. The writing.”

There it is: my storybook ending.

mind body mama: Half Crazy

Welcome to the last day of LMWBloPoWe, inspired by the Half Drunk Challenge. Because there just aren’t enough bloggy good insider references in this post yet, I’ll add another: 101 goals in 1001 days. This is a meme or a scene or a website, I’m not sure, but I read about it on other blogs and it took on a life of its own inside my little brain. (Although at first I kept mistakenly calling it 1001 goals in 101 days and that made me very, very anxious.)

You can read through the list if you’re feeling prurient but be forewarned that this is the redacted version. (There’s risk taking and then there’s showing all your business in public and you know I’m not going there.) I’m not starting today, either: I’m starting on December 28. Which makes day 1001—I have no idea when. Because although I’m not half-drunk I am completely exhausted. And in my depleted state I’m wondering whether publicly committing to anything, let alone 101 things, is merely half crazy.

It surprised me to notice that I’ve already completed a few items in the week it took me to write the list. Because like the life coaches tell us, intention matters. So in the spirit of throwing caution to the wind so lovingly fostered by my friends Jen and Sarah, here’s some of what I’ll be up to for the next two and a half years.

101 Goals in 1001 Days

1. Finish renovating/decorating the upstairs bathroom
2. Finish renovating/decorating the porch
3. Get the kitchen renovated
4. Finish cleaning the basement
5. Organize the dining room closet
6. Catch up on Quicken backlog and don’t get behind again
7. Maintain emergency fund (6 months Liz’s salary)
8. Work with career counselor on Career.3
9. [Intentionally left blank for emerging goals related to Career.3]
10. [Intentionally left blank for emerging goals related to Career.3]
11. [Intentionally left blank for emerging goals related to Career.3]
12. [Intentionally left blank for emerging goals related to Career.3]
13. [Intentionally left blank for emerging goals related to Career.3]
14. Publish three-five articles on self defense and parenting
15. Publish three-five personal essays
16. Give three-five public talks on self defense
17. Complete AFAA recertification (April)
18. Achieve ACSM certification
19. Teach more community self defense
20. Increase business income by 25% each year
21. Catch up on office filing backlog and don’t get behind again
22. Enroll Small in music and/or drama classes
23. Hire someone to paint the exterior of the house
24. Write book and/or book proposal on self defense and parenting
25. Get my writing on the radio
26. Have a romantic weekend away with Sweetie once per year
27. See Mimi’s financial advisor
28. Participate in dojo reorganization, aka The P33 Project
29. Publish “Adventures Outside the Gene Pool” (essay) in literary magazine or anthology.
30. Send at least one gift per year to my sister-in-law who does not celebrate Xmas and B’day
31. Earn my Nidan in shuri-ryu karate—talk to Sensei, train for Nidan, get Nidan
32. Learn to play tennis
33. COMPLETED: Buy snow shoes
34. Paint the staircase
35. Finish Small’s flippin mermaid quilt
36. Do all of Ellen Snortland’s writing assignments
37. Refinish my nightstand
38. Finish the beautiful table Sweetie made.
39. Buy a laptop
40. Double my weekly writing time
41. COMPLETED: Organize my computer files of training session plans
42. Improve my calendar record keeping for PT business
43. Improve my post-session record keeping (ie: SOAP notes)
44. Design and purchase prescription pads
45. Put up new curtains in the dining room, office, living room, and master bedroom
46. Make plans re: international travel goals.
47. Establish a system for organizing pictures on the computer
48. Contribute to existing anti-violence efforts in Holyoke: attend an event, send money, volunteer.
49. Attend Springfield Unitarian church 1-2x/year
50. Master the whole reusable printer cartridges thing
51. RE-ASSESS: Goods for Girls seems to be out of business. Make reusable sanitary pads for African schoolgirls through Goods for Girls
52. Transition my family to reusable cloth Christmas gift bags
53. Contribute to Safe Congregations work at Our House of Worship
54. Hang full length mirror in my bedroom
55. Continue to transition towards more sustainable eating, especially regarding meat consumption. Remember that sustainability includes my energy/ability to manifest.
56. Paint the dining room window sills. Or redo all the trim in the room. But really, just pick one and do it already.
57. Experiment with different writing periods; ie: one hour per day; a full 8 hour day; weekend retreat; etc.
58. Get my sewing machine professionally serviced at Newman’s Sewing, Route 20, Springfield.
59. Submit parenting tips to magazines that offer money for tips.
60. Paint the radiator cover.
61. Refinish the cabinet in the front hall.
62. Finish the shelves Sweetie made and hang them in our house.
63. PRIVATE!
64. Organize my recipe collection.
65. Continue to observe internet-free Sunday.
66. Organize my computer passwords.
67. Make a weekly bill-paying appointment and keep it.
68. Hang up the chicken poster I gave Sweetie for Xmas in 2001.
69. Create a master Christmas card list.
70. Figure out what’s wrong with my bike: needs more air in tires, resize, new bike? Fix it.
71. Ride the new system of bike trails through Easthampton, Florence, Northampton, Hadley, Amherst.
72. Go hiking with Peach at least 1x/year.
73. Keep my mileage records concurrently not retroactively.
74. Build relationship with [institutional client].
75. Medical goal.
76. Get bike hangers for the garage.
77. Put up the new fence in the side garden.
78. Rip out the daylillies on the driveway side garden.
79. Get the bench fixed in the way back.
80. Pry the shoe shelf out of Small’s closet.
81. Extend my clothesline season and commit to no dryer between April-October.
82. Bring Madame Lasagne to more church events and help her get connected to rides.
83. Take Small swimming once per month.
84. Do my rehabilitation/spine health/core strength exercises BEFORE my back hurts.
85. See Mimi at every 6-8 weeks.
86. Finish my AF certification
87. Clean the spice rack
88. Buy the Eight Loving Actions marriage book and do all the exercises
89. PRIVATE!
90. Follow my hateful oral hygeine routine.
91. Serve on the leadership team for the NWMAF SDIC conference.
92. Let things go, including things on this list if necessary.
93. Go to bed early because my body prefers it. Try to create a nice bedtime so it doesn’t feel like a deprivation.
94. Watch more Netflix with Sweetie.
95. Do as much high intensity cardio each week as I possibly can because it makes me feel better: mind, body, and mood.
96. Participate in Lee Sinclair's Girl Gang National.
97. Add goals here.
98. Add goals here.
99. Add goals here.
100. Add goals here.
101. Read this list every (week) day.

mind body mama: Half Wit Hump Day

There is nothing especially daring about this post. But we had a snow day in this corner of the world and after a day of shovelling and walking out in the slush and madcap Christmas crafting--half at BirthPie's house--I am a tired writer. Much more tired, in fact, than if I had gone to work today. Go figure.

This is the writing that came to me today. So to honor my half drunk commitment to daily blogging this week I offer you: a math quiz. I promise I'll get back to riskier business for Thursday and Friday.

(For those of you new to the scene, BirthPie is my best mama-friend. She lives around the corner with her two daughters and Dr. Frisbee, her sweet husband. This is our life.)

Word Problems with BirthPie

1. Dr. Frisbee invites 20 people to his birthday party. I pick up 3 girls at school. If BirthPie is feeling the effects of nitrous oxide 2 hours after her oral surgery, how many cups of flour go in the pie filling?

2. If I babysit BirthPie’s two children 4.6 hours in one month and she babysits Small 6.4 hours in the same month whose turn is it to make the other a casserole?

3. If the phone rings before 8 am, what is the probability that it is BirthPie?

4. Sleet is falling at a rate of 2 inches per hour with a weight of 5 lbs. per cubic inch. BirthPie’s cross-country flight is delayed bringing her family’s total travel time to 68 person-hours. How long will it take me to shovel her driveway?

5. Let X represent the difference in age between BirthPie’s big girl and Small. Let Y represent the difference in age between BirthPie’s big girl and Mighty Meg’s big girl. How many boxes of hand-me-downs are on my porch?

EXTRA CREDIT: I am teaching Self Defense for Pregnant and Parenting Teens at The School of Love until 2:15. The little girls’ karate class starts at 4:15. The big girls’ class starts at 5:15. BirthPie has 1 big girl and 1 little girl. Small is a little girl. School is dismissed at 3:10.

a. Who should pick Small up at school?

b. How many car seats will fit in my station wagon?

c. How many times will I visit The School of Love today?

d. How many girls will I bring to karate class and what size will they be?

e. What kind of tag will the girls play during the teachers’ meeting?

mind body mama: Half Truths About My Baby-Daddy, and a few things I forgot to say yesterday

I have no idea who my baby-daddy is.

My baby-daddy is a biohazard on dry ice.

My baby-daddy gave me a gift I don’t deserve and can’t ever repay.

My baby-daddy jerked-off in a jar.

There is only one guy who could be my baby-daddy and I know exactly which guy it is.

My baby-daddy is somebody’s baby’s father but not mine.

My baby-daddy was robbed of his child.

My baby-daddy sired a litter.

My baby-daddy broke his mama’s grandbaby-longing heart.

I might never meet my baby-daddy.

My baby-daddy will miss my baby his whole life.

My baby-daddy never thought twice.

My baby-daddy will answer my baby’s call.

My baby-daddy will never hear from her.

***

I forgot to say: Fathers. How Sweetie and I love fathers—our own fathers, the idea of fathers. I never got to meet Sweetie’s Dad, Harold, who would have been Small’s Papa. He died when Sweetie was fourteen. We have a picture of him in his WWII uniform in our living room; what a handsome man he was. He was a father to five children and Papa to five more. And my dad, Charlie Da-da, now known as Grampy. He tries to convince us that Small is better off for having two mothers—he is convinced that fathers do not parent the way mothers do. Which may be true. But they parent like fathers, and the good ones like Dr. Frisbee and Crabby Latin and our friend Dave do it with gusto and grace and magic.

When I think of the fact that I will likely outlive my father my heart clutches. It seems unsurvivable to live without a father. And yet, I love a woman. I made my family with another mom. My baby has no daddy. My family couldn’t be any other way, and yet…. And yet.

***

I was floored by the comments to yesterday’s post. ("Have you read the comments on my blog?" I asked Sweetie. "They're going to make you cry.") I love my friends at Momalom and the readers they send me.

A number of you responded to the theme of marriage equality. You may be interested in reading this sermon I preached at Our House of Worship in June on the theme of Love which included my reflections on California’s Prop 8.

mind body mama: Half Adopted

Somewhere in our photo albums is a snap of me, Sweetiebabyhoneylicious and the judge Small almost threw up on the day that our second-parent-adoption was finalized. We’re all grinning maniacally and I look as dazed and busty as I did that whole year of non-stop nursing. It’s surely one of our only family photos to prominently feature the American flag.

If ours was a traditional adoption this picture might be a treasured piece of memorabilia. But our baby was born to me and Sweetie. The hoops we had to jump through to get Sweetie legally recognized as Small’s other mother seemed distant from us and our intention to create a family.

Some people get to be parents by forgetting to pick up condoms or by being married to someone who busts out a baby. Sweetie had to submit character references. As grateful as we were for the testimonials we collected from Sweetie’s brothers and staff members at Our House of Worship (and we were really, really grateful, and deeply touched by their vision of us as worthy parents), I felt slightly humiliated by the whole process. It was demeaning that we needed approval before Sweetie could be called Small’s Mom.

Here’s how second-parent-adoption works in our state: we collected a butt-load of paperwork and met with a lawyer while I was pregnant. Stuff got filed but the adoption was not finalized until a six-month “residency period” was completed—i.e.: until Small was six months old. So for the first six months, Sweetie was not legally Small’s mother.

During that stretch of sleeplessness I can’t say I ever thought of this. I had other pressing concerns such as figuring out how to get bathed and fed and toileted in the fifteen minutes each hour in which I was not breastfeeding.

But the idea of this waiting period tortured me as I prepared for birth. I harangued my midwife—also a lesbian mom—“What if something happens to me AND the baby while I’m birthing? You have to let Sweetie make all the decisions. She’s the mom.” Mean Mary Midwife was noncommittal—in part, I think, because she knew more about the nature of medical emergencies than I and understood that the doctors and nurses would make the first round of decisions.

But also because she couldn’t promise how her hospital’s legal department might handle the lesbian mom thing. (Did the nurses at Jackson Memorial know that their colleagues would force a woman to die alone while her partner and family desperately tried to be by her side?) I went into labor knowing that a worst-case outcome for my family might not only include my death but also my parents getting custody of my newborn child.

If you follow the paper trail you see that our family went through a legal adoption proceeding in the Family Court of Our County Seat. But this is not the way in which I think of Small as half-adopted.

***

I follow, with shrewd interest, the issue of open adoption. Sarah Buttenweiser, a writer local-to-me who I greatly admire, has called the motto of her family’s experience with open adoption more love is more love. I visit Andy’s blog and her Open Adoption Roundtable and also Weebles Woblog. Sometimes I even peek into the blogs of angry adoptees who resent their adoptive parents for making mysteries of their children’s history.

I listen. What I hear is that lots of adoptees want to know who their biological parents are. I hear that our country’s heritage of closed adoptions hurt a lot of people. I hear that open adoption means more love is more love.

But I chose to create my family by using a sperm provider who won’t be known to my daughter until she’s 18, if she chooses to contact him then.

The glass-half-full version of this choice is that I did not decide for my kid whether or not she’d have access to her paternal family of origin. Before she was even a zygote I put the choice in her hands: of all of us—sperm bank, sperm provider, bio mom, second parent adoptive mom, baby—only Small can choose to create this connection.

The glass-half-empty version of this choice is that she might have another set of grandparents who is missing the magic that is Small. She might have a half-sister or half-brother or cousins. She might look just like her father when he was that age and not have anyone witness and know that. She might not be—as she is in our little family—a singular, almost alien, blond-haired, hazel-eyed, extroverted linguistic phenom. She might have a clan somewhere that matches her capacity for magic and math and sheer presence of personality.

It’s hard to think that she might fit somewhere else as well as she fits us. Because she’s ours and we are hers: this is our family. But when I look at the pictures of my elders—Ollie and Dottie and Gabby—I see the Slovak and Italian in their faces. Then I look into the mirror and see their lines traced down onto my own face. There is something about blood and biology that is not everything but is not nothing either.

Seattle University School of Law professor Julie Shapiro writes about family law issues of interest to the GLBT community on her blog. In a recent post she detailed the legal risks lesbian parents face when they use a sperm provider who is known to them. By risks Shapiro meant the various ways that the lesbian moms’ custody or status as parents could be threatened by the sperm provider being recognized as a parent/father. Shapiro concludes:

My point here is that there are legitimate concerns that could lead lesbians to select unknown sperm donors/providers even where they think it might be beneficial to their children to have access to the donor/provider. If you want to increase the likelihood that lesbian couples will elect to use identified or identifiable sperm donors/providers, these concerns need to be accommodated.

You heard me say it loud and proud: I am the most risk-averse person who ever lived. And also: this is our family. We created it the only way we could. I hope that my Small will think we’ve done the right thing.

Mind Body Mama: Bad News, Bad News, Come to Me Where I Sleep

When my mother's doorbell rang at 9:00 am the day after Thanksgiving my first thought was that it would be a friend of Bobbi's come ‘round to meet Her Majesty, my Small. Small is my mother’s first born and farthest flung grandchild and her legend is large around Bobbi and Grampy-land.

I wasn’t particularly in the mood to entertain in my pajamas over my post-holiday coffee so I grabbed up a change of clothes and was bolting for the bathroom when my mom opened the door and I heard an unfamiliar man’s voice say, “Do you have a Sweetiebabyhoneylicious here?”

My first thought was, “Why is someone sending my Sweetie flowers?” My second thought, tumbling over the first, was, “She’s having an affair! And she’s having an affair with a stupid girl—stupid enough to send flowers to her in-laws house!”

Then I heard him say, “Apparently your number is unlisted. Her brother has been trying to reach her.”

And Bobbi said, in a small voice, “Thank you, Officer.”

***

On Thursday morning, when the turkey was safely in the oven and there were hours before the flurry of last minute vegetable preparation, I went for a run in my old hometown. The dips and swells of the New England roads were as familiar to me as if twenty five years had not passed since I rode my bike through that leafy suburb. But around too many curves the vistas I remember were shattered by the decadent development of the last decade. Where once stood hundred-year-old colonials and saltboxes now are miniature castles with four car garages, turrets and crushed white stone circular drives. Houses that were familiar enough for me to never notice are gone and their absence is confusing to my eye.

I live in a hundred year old house. I don’t understand how homes that sheltered families for a century are suddenly inadequate. I could go on and on about conspicuous consumerism and what I think of it. Or how embarrassed I am for the owners of these ticky-tacky mini mansions. “All that money and this is what you did with it?” I think. “Four thousand square feet and you can see into your next door neighbors’ bathroom.” I want to pull the owners aside and whisper to them discreetly, “If you want to see how it’s really done, with wealth and class, the Gold Coast is just a mile away.” I want to take them down the shore road where waterfront mansions—actual castles—sit behind imposing walls, gatehouses and quarter-mile long driveways. I want to drive them through the seaside village where the homes of colonial shipping magnates perch on the hill overlooking the harbor. You might think of them as quaint, historical architectural specimens if you did not look close enough to notice the new copper roof or the Bentley in the drive.

But mostly, on Thursday morning, I was thinking of change. I was puzzling how the road could be the same beneath my feet and the view could be so different. I was thinking of the lines of a schmaltzy Judy Collins song I loved in my childhood which has been coming to mind frequently of late.

…but most of all
It is me that has changed,
And yet still I’m the same.
That’s me at the weddings,
That’s me at the graves,
Dressed like the people who once looked so grown up and brave.

My heart was heavy. I had time to run on Thanksgiving because the old folks are gone this year: there’s no one to visit at the long-term care facility. The last great visit I had with my Gramma—Small’s Gramma Dottie—was two years ago Thanksgiving. She was lucid and sarcastic. And she was thrilled to see Small. It always filled my heart to see Gramma’s eyes grow wide and wet as she gazed upon her great-granddaughter.

We had an hour with Gramma. I even brought Auntie Ollie down from her wing . At the end, Dottie and Ollie were were living under the same roof for the first time in fifty years, but they still weren’t really speaking. Ollie insisted on the visit, I think, because it seemed like a party was going on in Dottie’s room. Ollie never missed a party.

Then suddenly it was time to go. Sweetie looked at her watch and got worried about the turkey in the oven—she did not trust my mother to supervise the blessed bird—and we all got up in a flurry of activity and kisses goodbye. The next time I saw my Gramma she was drifting in and out of consciousness at the hospital, and the next time was her funeral.

***

Our hearts were in our mouths as Sweetie dialed her brother’s number to get the news that chased us into our holiday weekend. We knew death had come, and we didn’t breathe again until we knew that it was her closest-in-age brother who had finally succumbed to the health problems that dogged him for the last fifteen years.

***

Monday night before bed Small had an uncharacteristic melt-down. Her little body finally wore down from the holiday that morphed unexpectedly into hours of holiday-weekend traffic and the tedium of adult visits stunted by grief. Small’s style of unraveling these days is perfectionism, self-recrimination and frustration. She growled and writhed in my arms as she cried, and then suddenly she slumped her little head against my shoulder.

“So many people are dying,” she whispered.

Our family has weathered five losses in the past two years. It seems stunning to me and I’ve lived more than forty years on this planet. I can’t imagine how it feels to a seven year old. And the deaths are coming closer to Small: first a friend of her mothers’, then the parent of her own little friend; first the old folks from the distant nursing home, then her mother’s brother.

Sometimes it feels like a game of Red Rover: we link our hands and brace ourselves for the body blow of the next loss. We wait to feel the impact in our jaws, our bellies. We carry the fear that our elders and our sick will go next and then we are sucker punched by the loss of someone young and vibrant.

I think, “Now I have to be afraid of losing anyone, at any time.”

I have a black dress coat that buttons to the neck in case I need to stand at someone’s grave on a cold winter day. I have a pair of fancy shoes with patent leather flowers and a flash cocktail dress to wear if someone gets married on short notice. I am looking awfully grown up and brave. But inside, I am the same small girl swooping down hills on her blue bicycle, coming around the curves surprised to see the landscape has changed.

Hear the schmatlz here.
Ten points to you if you can cite the other song reference in this post.