The Elemental Mom

Moving Day!

2007-01-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the efforts of my pal Dana, this blog, my other blog, and my more professional writing stuff now have a permanent home on the web. You can now find us here:

http://www.theexcellentadventure.com

It's still got some fine-tuning required; the RSS isn't working yet, and we're tweaking some stuff, and migrating my old blogs from here to there (thus the funkiness you all have been seeing lately). But I'm really excited to have our own domain, our own skin, and, well, another tangible marker of progress along our adventure. Thanks for your support...

Prenatal Downs Testing

2007-01-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

This article hit the news a few days ago. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=2762171 "Medical Group Recommends All Pregnant Women Get Tested for Down Syndrome"

The main reason: Tests far less invasive than the long-used amniocentesis are now widely available, some that can tell in the first trimester the risk of a fetus having Down syndrome or other chromosomal defects.

It's a change that promises to decrease unnecessary amnios giving mothers-to-be peace of mind without the ordeal while also detecting Down syndrome in moms who otherwise would have gone unchecked.

I can't speak for every woman, of course, just for me. But I know, without a shadow of the slightest bit of doubt, that the moment I knew I was pregnant, that was my baby. Flesh of my flesh, and all that. It was mine. I think a lot of us feel this way, else why would the dead baby card be so effective? You're entirely emotionally invested in this new little person you're growing. Peace of mind? Where in the world is there peace of mind in this kind of testing???? I'm not expressing myself well at all. It's this huge emotional ball for me. But in my heart, prenatal testing is an ordeal, no matter what your answer is. The testing is an ordeal, the false positives and false negatives and true negatives and positives. How do you remove the ordeal from that? There is no way. In a normal birth, you meet your baby for the first time when the bonding hormones are raging, and you are utterly primed to unconditionally love that little thing, no matter what it comes out like. I don't think it matters if it's disabled or abled or male or female or whatever. The work, the real work, of pregnancy, is preparing for the results of that unconditionality. And all their damned poking and prodding and testing won't ever make it any easier, or any better. No matter what decision a woman makes with the information she gets, there will be a toll on her. There will be an ordeal. The only thing we really can control is the grace with which we handle the circumstances we find ourselves in. It's bigger than us, it's bigger than medicine. It's the dance of life, and I choose to call my own steps, thanks. As I take them.

Who Do You Want To Be?

2006-12-31T11:15:00.000-08:00

Who do you want to be today? Who do you want to be? Who do you want to be today? Do you want to be just like someone on T.V.?

OK, so Danny was talking about media, and about the creation of self based on glitzy outside (unreal) models. But today's the 31st, and this chorus has been going through my head all morning.

Oh boredom is so terrible, it's like a dread disease Nothing could be worse than when there's nothing on T.V. I'd rather be a cowboy than to stare blank at the walls I've been reborn so many times I can't remember them all (And I say)

Ain't that the truth? Every year around this time, people remake themselves. Jerico, the lovely boy who does my hair, makes people sign liability waivers if they go for what he calls a "change cut" in the months of November and December, because that's the time when change is often a indicator of suicidal thoughts. No kidding; this is apparently known widely in the beauty industry. But in January, everyone always changes everything, so it's OK.

I think I'll be a teddy boy, I think I'll be a hunk I think I'll be a tough guy and I think I'll be a punk I might just be a fashion star All dressed in frilly rags Or perhaps I'll cross the other side and walk around in Drag!

What's funny is how this upcoming month of January allows people to reach to be something different, when somehow the month of December is all about Tradition (tm). Find myself wondering if the pressure of jamming yourself back into the mold your family and loved ones expect of you isn't what creates the desperate need to remake yourself the next month.

Do you like to be just like a rock in the middle of the sea Do you want to suffer by yourself in a pool of blissful misery Do you want to feel like a saint in artists' clothes With a rosary in your hand Do you wanna be crazy like Van Gogh like a stranger in a Strange, strange land

I think all of us are all of those things, in some part, at some time. Thus, the attractiveness of being that when we're in the long hard slog of being this. But ya know, better to try to make a change to something better, than to allow fear of failure to trap one into being static. Stasis is a form of death.

Would you rather push the buttons And be feared by all humanity Or perhaps you'd like to be a bum Do you wanna be stupid, just like me

Heh. 'Nuf said. Who do you want to be . . . . . .

Pitter-Pat

2006-12-20T07:33:00.000-08:00

...is what I call Rowan every morning when he gets up. Mornings are not, traditionally, a good time for the members of my family. We have a long and glorious tradition of waking poorly and hostile. My own mother bought me an alarm clock when I was in junior high, so she wouldn't have to deal with my attitude until I'd gotten past it. So it is not at all surprising that Rowan is clinging fiercely to morning times as his dedicated Mama-and-me time. He sleeps late (natch). I can hear the bedroom door open, and listen to his little feet (thus, the pitter-pat) as he walks first to the office, then if I'm not there, out into the living room. He waits at the door, frowning and grumpy, for me to notice him. "Pitter-Pat!" and I open my arms. He usually hits them at Mach 3 (who knew a tired crabby kid could move that fast?), and burrows into me, hiding from the world. It's the clearest expression of need I think he still has at this point. My little guy needs his Morning Mama. Some day soon, my Pitter-Pat will wake up and want something else, like a drink of juice or a book or shower or breakfast or something. Something not me. It'll be another milestone, and like most of his milestones these days, it'll be quiet and not entirely obvious. Not night-and-day like the baby milestones were, something that could be noted in the calendar as "on this day he did this amazing thing." No, this will be subtle. I may not immediately even notice the change. But it will have come and gone, and I'll have a memory of a pitter-pat, long past when I'll have the real thing. And with how fast he's growing up and maturing these days, I know it'll be here sooner than I'm ready for it. So I'm listening even more closely for the opening of the door, these days. Listening for Pitter-Pat.

New Post at LWOS

2006-12-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Wheee! A seasonal post, even! Hope you guys like it. http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2006/12/paper_chain.html

Expanding to Reach the Edges of Myself

2006-12-13T07:30:00.000-08:00

I made the leap. I bought the extra-huge Monarch Franklin Covey Planner. In the past, I'd always stuck to the compact size, reasoning that it would fit easily in the backpack, and therefore I'd carry it and use it more. Two years of not doing that, has led me to realize that smaller is not necessarily better, and that I cannot squeeze myself into 3.5 x 5" pages. My life is bigger than that. I'm lucky enough to have a FranklinCovey store not too far from me. So I went, in order to test-drive the pages myself. I have a bone to pick with FranklinCovey. The extra-large pages are all slanted towards business execs, and the "balance family with work" pages, clearly designed for women, are all the smaller pages. Clearly, these people have never encountered the lives of most of the working mamas I know. I'd write to the company, but I suspect that people who are basing an entire corporate marketing platform on the notion that women juggle these things and men do not are probably not going to want to hear from some upstart Californian looney. Maybe I'll take this on some day when I have no other bigger windmills to tilt at. I still have the same desktop graphic on my laptop that I put up on Nov. 1, that some creative soul offered up in the NaNo forums. It's an Aquarian clock, with a calendar, and the Scottish proverb "What may be done at any time will be done at no time," then lower down, it says, "Now's the time." I have been resonating with that for over a month now, and haven't changed my desktop, because every day, I remind myself that now's the time. I am reminded of one of my favorite Rachel Carson quotes:

One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be see many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will.

She's right, of course, in this as she is in so many other things. We miss stuff, because we focus on that which is blaring in our face, and therefore the little mysteries slide by, sideways, taking with them that which makes the richness of a life. How does this tie back to the planner?

For the happiest life, rigorously plan your days, leave your nights open to chance. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

So here we are, back at the king-sized planner pages. I find myself wondering how I ever tried to make do, get by, stumble along through the smaller pages. I'm finding both my plans, and my ability to execute now, today, to be increasing, simply by the virtue of allowing myself to expand to the very edges. It's a good feeling, a nice stretch; planner yoga of a sort. With bigger scrawls come bigger hopes and aspirations. I'm not living in shorthand any more, which feels pretty good. Who knew that planning in complete sentences rather than bullet points greases the imagination? We're heading into one of my favorite times of the year; the season of the re-creation of the self, the zone of the New Years' Resolution. The first 21 Days of January, wherein new plans, new people, new selves and new habits are created. But before the slog on changing ruts, comes this beautiful prep time, where people envision the selves they want to have in the new year, and freed of the burden of execution, they imagine bigger, more expansively. So here's my advice to you. When you're thinking about creating your year, go for the big pages.

Four-Hour Watch

2006-12-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

On one of my Mommy Lists, someone is complaining about not getting enough sleep. And it's hitting my buttons. Americans who spend their entire youths living on no sleep and chocolate-covered espresso beans at their own choice, suddenly become hostile and whiney when they're getting more sleep on average, but broken up on their baby's schedule instead of theirs. It astonishes me how many people don't think about this when they decide to become parents. And it astonishes me even more how many crackpot schemes are out there for "managing baby's sleep". Fercryingoutloud, get over yourselves. In my Coastal Navigation class the other night, we were discussing the notion of ship's watches. Most people do something like four-hour watches, round the clock. You're up for four, sleep for four, up for four... and so on. Because someone needs to drive the boat, you know. I realized that I have never once ever in my life heard a sailor whining about missing sleep. So I asked the instructor about it. He just shrugged, and said "well, that's part of the deal. Watches are a seamanly thing, you just do them." Well, ya know what? Sleep in fragmented bits on odd schedules at unique times are a parently thing, you just do them. He went on to talk about how night watches are some of his most magical memories; where it's just you, and the sea, and the sky. Hey, even Crosby Stills and Nash did their realizing on a midnight watch, in the Southern Cross. There's a ton of literary and musical reference about the mystical revelations to be had on a night watch. I read a book recently about a woman who singlehanded a boat around the world in a race. She slept in 10-minute snatches, here and there, as she could. Now granted, I don't think anyone really wants to take it that far, but the point is, when someone's doing something utterly amazing like racing a circumnavigation, sleep deprivation is seen as cool and worthy. Well maybe, just maybe, sleep dep due to meeting your child's needs in the best way possible for the fifteen seconds (OK, maybe three or four years, but trust me, it seems like fifteen seconds when it's over) they're little, is something cool and worthy. Maybe if we all just stood up and said "I am one of those gnarly extreme round-the-clock parents", people would back off and oooh and ahhh. Or maybe, just maybe, you get rewarded at the end by your happily adjusted and fabulous child. And that's enough. So I'm heading off to take my turn at the Watch, with my babies. While I still can.

The Escalation of Lights

2006-12-06T07:25:00.000-08:00

'Tis clearly The Season.

My neighborhood, eight square blocks at the foot of a venerable old Catholic Church, is intensely competitive in the Domestic Decoration Front. For Halloween, people start planning months in advance, and end up doing dioramas of graveyards that span three houses’ worth of lawns. Last year, six houses pooled their funds and rented a dry ice machine, and flooded the entire street with low-creeping ground fog. It was absolutely spectacular. The entire city I live in buses kids into this neighborhood for Trick-or-Treat, because we’re known to be both safe and enthusiastic, which is not something easily found around here.

But you ain’t seen nothing until you’ve seen Christmas. Decorations started going up this year before the Thanksgiving turkeys had even been carved. Literally; the guy two houses down was wrestling with figuring out the blower machine for his inflatable snowman while his wife was in the house angling with whether the aluminum foil went shiny side up or down, as she does every year (it’s down, in case you were wondering.)

But this year, the annual competition has gotten a little more aggressive than normal. The folks that used to live next door were definitely keeping up with the Joneses. And the first year we had this house, and did the full-on light gig, they went out and bought just one strand more than us. Which was fine; they have two sons that are four years older than my sons, and very aware of the holidays in a way that my sons are not. Also, no one in this neighborhood was used to lights being on this house; the previous owners were, to quote the Redoubtable across the street, "frugal". Which means that in 40 years of living here, they never spent the money on lights, and this house was always dark for the holidays. The contrast alone got us compliments, our first year, so the expectation bar for this house was really, really low. Through a set of pretty astonishing real estate gymnastics, our old next door neighbors moved across the street last year. And a new family is next door. Well... several families are next door. It's a multigenerational hispanic family. They are loud, boisterous, full of life and color and enthusiasm. It's been a real joy having them here; they've added spark to the street. And when their decorations for Halloween were kinda subtle, I didn't think much of it. But this? This is Christmas. You should see the lighting on the house next door. I'll post pictures just as soon as I figure out how to get it to turn out well. Every single edge of the house is covered with running multicolored lights. At least fifteen strands are crisscrossing the lawn from the house to the two large sycamores in the parkway. A string of running-lighted stars spans the front porch. Multicolored icicles hang from every gutter surface. The chimney is wrapped. And every night, new lights go up. One or two strands at a time, subtly, so you don't really notice they're augmenting. Except that the whole display just becomes more fabulous and over the top and wonderful, by bits, every night. Makes you want to shout "Feliz Navidad!" at the top of your lungs just to look at it. Our old neighbor wandered over the other day to chat with Hubby. He's clearly feeling the pressure. Despite pre-wired reindeer in the lawn, wreaths on the large flat surfaces, inflatable snowmen, and white icicles, his spread simply cannot compare to the multicolor extravaganza across the way. So he keeps augmenting, but it isn't having the effect. Jason consoled him, encouraged him, and then chuckled vindictively as he found his keys and his wallet, and headed for the car. ...because we needed just a few more feet to really do the sycamores justice.

View from the Finish Line

2006-11-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

Yes, sportsfans, I did it. I started four days late, I finished four days early. I finished. Oooh, say it again, it gives me chills; I finished. 50,000 words in less than a month. I have written a novel. This is heady, heady stuff. I took the challenge on at the insistence of my pal A, who thought it would do interesting things to my head. She was, of course, right.

I'm an editor for a living. It was nearly impossible to wrestle my Inner Editor into the closet in order to get out of the way of the work, and let the story get written. As it was, she snuck out a few times and wreaked some havoc before I bodytackled her and got her back under control.
It was fantastic to be on the other side of the red pen. I think this exercise has brought me some empathy that will really be helpful in the editing process with other people.
Story is a living thing. I thought I had a clear idea about my general plot outline, characters, and themes. Only to have a subcharacter muscle his way in about 1/3 of the way through, and take over everything. Other folks have written about this phenomenon, and I'd always thought it was, I dunno, disingenuous. But no. That's really what happened.
Writing is an emotional thing. I mean, I knew that, I write emotionally here and on my various groups all the time. But it's short-duration stuff. 50K is a sustained amount, and I'd go from the top of the world and having tons of ideas to thinking I should just pack it in because it was all crap in the course of a few pages. I felt rather like Baby-Face Nelson, actually.
Fiction is astonishing. I am so used to working in the Land of the Verifiable Fact, that I kept wanting to research and footnote everything. Hello! Fantasy novel! No research required! That didn't stop me from hitting Wikipedia every so often anyway, so as to decorate the story line with nuggets of actuality.
Apparently, having a writing soundtrack is critical to my process. A big shout out to the folks in the fabulous NaNoWriMo Forums, who turned me onto Corvus Corax, whose music took over my story when the rogue character did. Other soundtrack music included Loreena McKennitt, who had the grace to release a new album on Nov. 21, Boiled in Lead, Dead Can Dance, Jethro Tull, Faith and the Muse, and a tiny little bit of Johnny Cash.
"That which can be done at any time, will be done at no time." It's a Scottish proverb. And it's the crux of the matter. I'm leaving it on my desktop permanently.

A few heartfelt thank-yous are in order:

To A, first and foremost, for goading me into it, and being right there every minute to talk me up and talk me down.
To J, who was the godlike supportive spouse. He put up with me being basically absentee all month, he took on extra duties, and every time I checked in, he actually managed to still be encouraging, without even once asking to read it.
To I, who pitched in to ride herd on the boyos, above and beyond.

What's next? Glad you asked. I have a month's worth of neglected family, bills, and housework to catch up on. Gonna let the story sit and percolate a bit, then jump back in to edit. I'm sure I'll whine about that here, when I get there. What's it about? Vigilante fiction, with antlers. No, you can't read it yet. I'm, uh... still working on it.

Just Go Read It

2006-11-20T15:04:00.000-08:00

I'm still not blogging much, because I'm NaNo-ing (and it's going beautifully, thanks, although it's a terribly emotional ride; more about that in the future...). But for now, someone on one of my lists sent me this: http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/problem.html Go read it. Cause therein lies about 18 of my best tirades. I'm quoting the end; so if you don't want the spoiler, go read it, and if you want to know why you should go read it, here you go:

The point is that thinking, and being able to think, is the only way to make anything BETTER than it is, and sure there's a risk in that but its a hell of a lot better then sitting in one place and trying to hold everything together, particularly when it isn't really quite what you want and you know damned well that its all going to come apart one way or another anyhow. Thinking IS fun, and the only way we have to make anything better, but its ALSO the best way anyone has ever come up with to REDUCE risk. The world wasn't made for people, you know, and we don't understand all about it, and we never will, and there will always be things happening that we didn't expect, and the only way to deal with that is to have people around who know how to think, instead of just doing their particular job the way they were told to do it. Never thought about that, huh? Makes sense though, doesn't it? So what should we do about it? Well, I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm going to spend less time worrying about whether other people think I'm doing my job right, and more time thinking. And I'm going to tell my students that that's what they should be doing too, whether or not they or anybody else think that's what I'm supposed to be telling them. And I'm going to tell my kids to stop trying to get everything right on their worksheets, and instead every once in a while to try something different, to do something differently, just for the hell of it and to see what happens. Yeah, life will be a little more chaotic, and sometimes things will go wrong because of something I did instead of because of things I hadn't yet somehow managed to get under control. And maybe, if it spreads, I might have to work harder to persuade people to do what I want them to do, and walk farther to get a quick lunch. I'm pretty sure though that I'll feel a lot safer, and I'm damned sure life will be a lot more fun. Want to come along?

Yes, yes I do.

A New Blog!

2006-11-16T14:23:00.000-08:00

Hey gang! I've started a new blog, about us moving aboard. It's called TeamHudson's Excellent Adventure, and you can find it here: http://excellentadventure.wordpress.com/ I'll continue to post here about stuff pertaining to me, to the boys, to birth and family. Stuff about the boat, and our transition from here to there, goes on the other one.

New Post on LWOS -- Reprise of Financing the Gap

2006-11-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

Hey gang, I know I haven't been posting here; most of my writing oomph is going into my novel for NaNoWriMo. I will be back when November's over! In the meantime, I've got a new post up at LWOS. It's a reworked, superior version of a post I launched here, originally, a long time ago. Check it out: http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/ or http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2006/11/the_finance_gap.html If you haven't wandered on over there, you should. There is some incredible writing, and some amazing thinking, about the capability of the human spirit. It's pretty inspirational stuff. Have fun!

Commonality

2006-11-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

I am in chiropractic rehab therapy. Nine + weeks of exercises, daily adjustments, and 20 minutes of traction. It's to hopefully cure the fact that my upper spine is curved 145 degrees backwards of where it should be. A normal person's neck curves back, mine curves very nearly perfectly the other way. This causes neck and shoulder pain, headaches, carpal tunnel and hand and arm numbness, and nearly constant muscle tension across my back. It's uncomfortable and annoying, and thankfully, responding well to treatment. The exercises are, frankly, severely boring. They take around 15 minutes, every single appointment. So that's a lot of time to let your mind wander. Yesterday, my mind drifted to an exercise that I learned, of all places, at an improv workshop at the Northern California Renaissance Faire. The exercise was called Commonality. You'd stand in the center of a group of people. 10 or 15 of them. And find something in common with each one of them. Maybe you're both women. Maybe you both have blonde hair. You're both performers, you're both in this class. You're both interested in living history. You're both having trouble with this exercise. At first, it's really, really tough. You know nothing of these people. Nothing at all. Not even their names. But as you practice, as you work through the group, it is astonishing how much you have in common with a group of fairly randomly selected strangers. So that's what I did while doing my exercises. Commonality with these people. What do I have that's like you? Where's our common ground? If we were all to start talking, what would I say to you to break the ice? I'm reading a book about near death experiences (NDEs). Strange, I know, but it's written by, of all people, the man who is our boat broker, and I'm gaining all kinds of insight into him, and into his operating style. But anyway, one of the things he says in this book about NDEs, is that across all cultures and across all time, people who have them come back with an unshakeable faith in the unity, the oneness, the commonality, of all creation. It's a small exercise, really, in the face of the grandness of all creation, to muse about what the 10 or so other patients in the chiropractor's office might have in common with me. But wonderful, in its grounding. Give it a try.

Black Box Theory

2006-10-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

In browsing information about sailing, I have come across the works of John Vigor. I've got a few of his books on order from Amazon, and will blog about them later. But for today, I want to talk about the Black Box. In his article, John tells us:

In 1986, when I started fitting out my own 31-footer, Freelance, for a voyage from Durban to the United States, I reduced the Fifth Essential to a simple system of accident prevention. In the Freelance corollary to the theory, every boat possesses an imaginary black box, a sort of bank account in which points are kept. In times of emergency, when there is nothing more to be done in the way of sensible seamanship, the points from your black box can buy your way out of trouble. You have no control over how the points are spent, of course; they withdraw themselves when the time is appropriate. You do have control over how the points get into the box: you earn them. For every seamanlike act you perform, you get a point in the black box. Points come in so many ways it would be impossible to list them all. But I can send you in the right direction. Let's say you're planning a weekend cruise down the coast, and time is precious. You have been wondering for some weeks if you ought to haul out the bosun's chair and inspect the masthead fittings. It has been a couple of years since you checked everything up there, but it would mean delaying your departure by an hour, maybe more, should you have to change a shackle or something. If you finally give in to the nagging voice inside you and go aloft, you earn a point in the box. If you don't take that trouble, your black box will stay empty. If you sniff the bilges for fumes before pushing the starter button, you'll score a point, just as you will for taking a precautionary reef at nightfall or checking the expiration date on your rocket flares. Thinking and worrying about what could happen is also a good way to earn points - if the wind started blowing into your quiet anchorage at 40 miles an hour and the engine wouldn't start, or whether you should put a couple of reefs in the mainsail before you climb into your bunk, just in case. No matter how good your seamanship, there are times when there is nothing left to do but batten down the hatches and pray. If you have a credit balance of points in the box, you'll be all right. People will say you're lucky, of course. They'll say a benign fate let you get away with it. But we know better. That luck was earned, maybe over quite a long period.

In a boat, of course, this makes perfect sense. But it also makes sense in the rest of life. Jason and I have started referring to tasks as "black box." Do you fold the laundry out of the drier, or just toss it on the bed? Black Box. It gets folded. Do you wash the dish you just used, or do you set it, crusty food and all, on the counter for someone else to do? Black Box. It gets washed. It's interesting to see our attitude to our home and our stuff change. And it's interesting to feel the energy change. When more is done, more is do-able. It's like all of a sudden, it's all more manageable. I'm not sure how that works, or why, but I can tell you that I'm feeling mighty fine about the state of the Black Box.

Creative Space: The Work Light

2006-10-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

I have this weird tradition of always taking a desk lamp before I leave a job. It didn't start that way. Taking, I mean. The second-worst job I ever had, I was doing desktop publishing for a graphics software company on the long slow slide to obsolescence. Tempers were high, drama was higher, everyone behaved badly. And when I left, someone suggested I take the green glass banker's lamp that had been in my cube, I think to assuage their guilt at their crappy treatment of an employee. Fine by me; it's Rowan's reading lamp now. The longest and goofiest contract not-a-real-job I ever had, I ended up with a cheap blue plastic torchiere lamp. It's in the playroom, because it's blue, and goofy. The very worst job I ever had, I was the Production Manager for a children's software company. When I left that job, I did my entire exit interview in Dilbert cartoons. It really was that bad. And with me came an industrial art graphics lamp with a high-intensity 100-W halogen bulb. Really puts the spot on things. I adore that lamp. It sits on my desk, keeping my efforts as high-intensity as its light. And last week, the bulb burned out. It's no ordinary bulb, it's this weird frankensteinian thing with bolts at the bottom. Home Depot didn't have them. No other local hardware had them. But this morning, my charming and talented hubby dropped by Lowe's, and sure enough, they had my bulb. It's interesting, but having my lamp back makes all the difference. The overhead room light didn't do the job; it had to be my art lamp. So now that I'm perking away under its bright and warming light, I find myself thinking that using this real art tool makes my work more like art. Gives me more credibility within my own head. And that internal boost results in an external product of higher quality. And yes. We bought spare bulbs.

Getting Brave: Gearing up for NaNoWriMo

2006-10-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

After much musing, pondering, and many well-timed kicks with steel-toed boots from my pal Angela, I have decided to take a leap, and participate in NaNoWriMo next month. This is, in a word, terrifying.

I have never written fiction. Ever. Stretched the truth a little creatively here and there? You betcha. But never have I set pen to paper with the intent of creating a tale of my own.
I have never committed to such a hard deadline. Those are two very real numbers, 50,000 and 30 Nov 06. You either make it, or you blow it. That's a lot to face up to.
If I do this, then I am a writer.

That last one is the toughest of all. I mean, sure, I write here, for y'all to see what's up with me, the Boyos, and come along on this wild ride of a life. But somehow, being a writer is a different animal. It's more committed, somehow. It's claiming an identity that I've always aspired to and always allowed the stream of life to carry me away from. I'm taking November to reclaim a bit of myself. Jason's being a gem about it, and already planning ahead for how he can arrange household duties to give me the uninterrupted time it's going to take. I think he sees, even if he can't enunciate, what a big deal this is. Even if I downplay it. And of course, by telling all of you... my feet are really held to the fire. I have to make it, right? I must focus, I will accomplish. And maybe if it isn't complete drivel, I'll let y'all read it. =)

New Post on LWOS -- Sailing With Rowan

2006-10-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

Just a little shameless self-promotion. See it here: http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/ or if it takes you a few days and it's scrolled down in the posting queue, go here: http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2006/10/sailing_with_ro.html

A Little Light Birth Activism

2006-10-11T07:10:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the day for a little light birth activism. Three vignettes, for your amusement: It's Open Enrollment time at my company. For those of you not familiar with corporate-speak, this means it's time to pick heath plans. We have the option of five different plans. I spent this morning looking at the material they put together for us, and then at their non-branded websites. And since none of them answered my #1 question, I started making phonecalls. And asking them if they covered homebirth midwives. I am not pregnant or anything; I just really feel that change in the medical paradigm has to be driven by consumer choice. You would have loved the reactions I got. Spluttering. Coughing. Denial. Shock. One woman told me that "you can't give birth at home." "Oh," says I, "but that's how I did it last time." Stunned silence. Then, "but it's not safe to birth at home! What if your baby dies???" I couldn't help myself. I laughed. Said "oh, honey, I'm so so so sorry. How did that red pill taste?" and then quickly, before she could recover, said "I bet if you ask your grandmother, or looked at your family genealogy, you'll find that everyone in your family from all the way back was born at home. It's your *heritage*." Silence. ::sigh:: I didn't get through, I know I didn't. But man, it felt good. For the record, none of the insurance companies will cover a homebirth midwife. Including the one that did, in fact, pay for mine, 16 months ago. So basically, the rule is, they will, if you lie well enough. Pretty depressing. And demoralizing, right? So I walk away from my computer to hit my chiro appointment. My chiropractor's billing person is 9 months pregnant, and ready to be done. She asks me, "you know about birth. What's a safe way to induce?" I reply, "Well, considering you go into labor when your baby's lungs are ready, there isn't a safe way, as far as the baby's concerned." She says to me.... ...brace yourselves... "My doctor never told me that!" I could scream. I could weep. I could do both at once. But at least she's now going to wait for her baby. It's a start. Finally, I ran into an old friend. She's 46, and discussing having a baby with her new man. He's been told he "can't have children." Because of... get this... "low sperm count." I ask if she's familiar with the research about such things, and she isn't. I ask if anyone's ever explained to him the difference between sperm count in a test tube and the real thing. They haven't. I ask if it's no sperm, period, or just low. She says, just low. Where, my friends, in what world, is "low" the same as "none"? It only takes one, last time I checked. We're going to have coffee later this week, and I'll bring her the research links to take a look at. All in all, not a bad day. But how did so much disinformation, disempowerment, and downright FUD get out there in the world? Makes you wonder.

Back in Shape

2006-10-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

I have been asked, in all genuine care and curiosity, when I am going to "get back in shape" after pregnancy. Back. In. Shape. It's been four years since I had Rowan, 16 months since Kestrel. Before Rowan, I was a total gym dog and powerlifter. I was actually recruited for the gym's bodybuilding team. I was like that, back then. But now? I will never "get back in shape". Because before, I was a Maiden, and after, I was a Mother. Forever afterwards, I am mother-shaped. The four-pack abs are gone forever. Which is biologically as it should be. I was lucky enough to be able to breastfeed. That keeps poundage on, since biologically, you're supposed to retain fat, so that if there's a food scarcity, you can keep feeding your baby. That fat? That's there for survival of the species. I think I have better endurance now than I ever had before. But then again, caring for a small being is incredible 24/7 exhausting work. I am not model-thin nor am I muscularly toned. But by god, I can move mountains. Of laundry, of dirty dishes, of toys, of odds insurmountable for my litte tribe. My body is working the way it's supposed to, to be a mother to the race. And there is something incredibly powerful about that. More powerful than my gym-induced weightlifter body ever was. Because this body is formed this way not only by purpose, but by the evolutionary pressures of the ages. The pressures that I am the successful result of. A few weeks ago, I was laying on the bed, and Rowan came over to tickle. My shirt got pulled up, and he sat back and started tracing my belly stretchmarks (most of which came from my pregnancy with him). Got this huge smile. And then said "Mama, you are so beautiful." I would not trade that for my old four-pack abs. Not in a million years.

Self-Limiting: The Saga of the Flower Cake

2006-10-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, we had HVAC installed in our house, and so to both get out of the way of the tradesmen, and to take advantage of the gorgeous weather, we headed north to Napa. One of our favorite stops there is the V. Sattui winery. Not only are their wines fabulous, but as far as wineries go, they are very child-friendly. Many wineries are so interested in adult appeal that they forget that frazzled parents may be some of their best repeat customers. V. Sattui has a very nice deli, for the purchasing of lunch, and a big, grassy, wildlife-filled picnic area, for the kids to burn off of energy and general enjoyment of the outdoors. The deli is packed with little containers of amazing gourmet food. It's a dazzling array of shapes, colors, textures, and smells, many of which are at reasonable eye-level for a four year old. We moved very slowly through the aisles and displays, having long discussions about the various food items, why some things were more expensive than others, what things tasted like, why different people have different tastes, which things might make for a good lunch. The discussion naturally ranged over topics of human sensory capability, cooking techniques, colors, numbers, economics, sustainability. an amazing smorgasbord of conversation, set off by little jars of gourmet mustard. Rowan has a corn allergy. Consumption of corn, which is nearly ubiquitous in the American diet, turns his generally thoughtful and four-year-old appropriate behavior into uncontrollable fits of flailing and screaming rage. It's a dramatic transformation, and one that we've been observing, and teaching him about, since he was two. We've considered several approaches to dealing with this issue, and we have come to trust Rowan to feel what's happening in his own body, and to limit his intake of things that "make him crazy." Not only has this served to teach him about himself and give him sovereignty over his own body and his own decisions, it's laying excellent groundwork for the future. A kid who can control exposure and face temptation at age four is a kid who can navigate the murkier waters of adult temptations later on. Rowan knows to ask if a thing has corn in it, and to come up with a plan for managing his behavior, should he "get crazy." Usually, that plan involves wrapping himself around me or his Papa, and hugging until he stabilizes. At V. Sattui, they have a dessert case. Gorgeous, gourmet little confections, tiny works of art in sugar. So I was not at all surprised when the case caught Rowan's attention, and he stood there, overwhelmed, trying to choose. He asked about corn, and I confirmed that yes, chances were high that every single morsel in the case had some form of corn in it. He walked away. And walked back. For about fifteen minutes, I watched my son take two falls out of three while wrestling temptation. And finally, he asked me for the flower cake. The flower cake was a single white cupcake, fabulously covered with sugar frosting flowers in an array of primary and pastel colors. It was a delight, and someone in the bakery staff had obviously put a lot of energy into it. Also a lot of artificial coloring, another problem substance. A quick consult with the woman at the counter confirmed the presence of both cornstarch and corn syrup. We had a quick huddle, while I explained all of this to him. He nodded with each item, but still insisted that he wanted that cake. He confirmed that "hugs are for when I get crazy", and seemed totally prepared to take it on. I mentally rearranged my itinerary to allow for dropping everything and heading home when the inevitable meltdown occurred. We sat down at the picnic bench, and devoured our lunches. Rowan took out the flower cake, and with a plastic fork, carefully, delicately, with the care of a professional surgeon, removed one small flower from the top of his cake, and ate it. Savored it. Let it melt on his tongue, leaving a glorious purple streak in its wake. And then replaced the lid on the container. "Are you sure you're finished?" I asked him. With the blissful look still on his face, he replied "yes, I'm sure." He only wanted the one flower. There sat a confection to entice gluttony from the most staid of souls, and my four-year old limited himself to the one flower. Back in the car, more stops, more errands. And the return home. Whereupon he asked for his flower cake again. Again, the ritualistic removal of the container lid, the surgical removal of just one sugar flower. Which he presented to me. "Thank you, Mama. Have some flower cake." His Papa and his baby brother also received single gorgeous sugar flowers. And then the lid went back on. That cake has been in our refrigerator for over a week. Every day, a little more of it gets eaten. But only a little bit. If there's someone in the room with him, he offers to share a bite. And then carefully, back into the fridge it goes. My son still reacts to corn. But he also reacts to autonomy, to faith, and to trust. Here. Have some flower cake.

Shamelessly Seeking...

2006-09-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

Your votes! Blog Emmys are here: http://mysteriousladyclues.blogspot.com/2006/09/let-blog-emmys-begin.html Hop on over, put in a vote for me, OK? Or even a nomination would be great! Thanks!

Growing Up the Boy Named Sue

2006-09-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

Recently, an acquaintaince of mine and I were discussing a particular instructor we'd both had. He was a large man (over 6'4"), heavy, with a deep, booming voice, and a very rapid-fire, agressive, New-Yorkey conversational style. "Don't you find him intimidating?" my friend asked me. Upon reflection... no. I really didn't. I wasn't even really sure why my friend was intimidated. I relayed this story to my husband, who laughed out loud. "You were raised by something scarier than you're ever gonna meet out in the world. Of course you're not intimidated."

My daddy left home when I was three And he didn't leave much to ma and me Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze. Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid But the meanest thing that he ever did Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

...actually, my father died when I was 11. And my stepdad, The Bear, stepped in. I refer to him as my dad, simply because he survived my teenage years, and thus earned the title. My father was a small, highly intellectual, very airy kind of guy. The Bear, as you can guess, is a huge, very earthy kind of guy. He pretends to be big and dumb, but that's only to lure in and trap the unworthy. He used to go choose off tour guides at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant for fun, to test them on their knowledge of nuclear disasters.

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean, My fist got hard and my wits got keen, I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame. But I made a vow to the moon and stars That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars And kill that man who gave me that awful name.

The Bear didn't believe in sissies. I am the only girl I've ever met who recieved a firearm for her 13th birthday. I'm also the only girl I've ever met who, when in the fourth grade, I came home from school crying because a bully was picking on me, recieved punching lessons instead of sympathy. And then recieved full support when I went on to break the poor kid's nose when he hassled me again.

Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad From a worn-out picture that my mother'd had, And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye. He was big and bent and gray and old, And I looked at him and my blood ran cold And I said: "My name is 'Sue!' How do you do! Now you're gonna die!!"

My mother joked that it seemed sometimes like despite the obvious genetic problems, I'd eventually gotten the right dad, because I was a lot more like the Bear than like my own father. And maybe it's part of youth's belief in their own immortality, but very early on, I forgot that I was not a 6' tall man. I ceased being able to recognize differences in physical size, or in bodily strength.

Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes And he went down, but to my surprise, He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear. But I busted a chair right across his teeth And we crashed through the wall and into the street Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

As most teens do, I knew everything. And was not afraid to back up my opinions. The Bear got fed up and threw me out of the house three different times, but I never even got as far as packing before Mom called me back and things were patched. But less dramatically than that, we held nightly sparring sessions. Verbal sparring, that is. The issues of the day, brought to the table with the mashed potatoes, to be ripped apart and analyzed. I learned both my argument style and some of my best phrases of opprobrium during those meals.

I tell ya, I've fought tougher men But I really can't remember when, He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile. I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss, He went for his gun and I pulled mine first, He stood there lookin' at me and I saw him smile.

As I got older, I eventually got to a point where I could argue the Bear to a standstill on some points. I will remember the first day I did that until I die. He just sat there at the table, beaming, despite having been talked in circles for the better part of a few hours.

And he said: "Son, this world is rough And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along. So I give ya that name and I said goodbye I knew you'd have to get tough or die And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

I sometimes tell people some of the gorier stories of my childhood, and they're apalled. Not only are they stunned I survived, but they're stunned I'm not still in therapy. And I used to wonder about that too... wonder if maybe I shouldn't be. Then I laugh at myself. Right after my divorce, with my world crashing down around me, I drove home for a visit, and found that the Bear had set aside two cases of .12ga shotgun ammo, and a bunch of targets. My Winchester disintegrated in my hands, I fired it so much and so fast, and having planned ahead, the Bear was standing right behind me with a Mossberg to replace it. I felt better on so many levels. I know people who've spent years of their lives in marriage counselling, and I wonder if two cases of .12ga wouldn't do the trick for them too. But being a small woman in a large man's world, it is astonishing to count how many times in my life large men have assumed they could physically or verbally intimidate me. Like many women, I have been physically threatened with rape, and both times, I have literally laughed in my attacker's face, because I knew there was not a damn thing he could actually do to me. Model Mugging runs courses for women who've been raised, well, properly. The girls I always envied, whose parents bought them their first car instead of making them rebuild it themselves. The girls who lived in genteel homes, instead of homes littered with Viet Nam veterans with shaking hands and haunted eyes. The girls who recieved modelling classes instead of combat training courses. The girls who recieved Barbies instead of 50-round banana clips.

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight And I know you hate me, and you got the right To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do. But ya ought to thank me, before I die, For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue.'"

I hated, well, most of it, while it was happening. But looking back... I have fought one hell of a fight. I can see the places I would have been crushed, had I not had the raising I did. I think it's Maya Angelou who wrote "Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now.' She gets it.

I got all choked up and I threw down my gun And I called him my pa, and he called me his son, And I came away with a different point of view. And I think about him, now and then, Every time I try and every time I win, And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!

It's bizarre and schizophrenic to look back, appreciate so much of what happened, and simultaneously vow that my children will walk as little of my path as I can manage. Oddly enough, the Bear brought that up, last time we talked. He's just itching for my boys to grow up, old enough so he can really play with them. "But don't rush them, or anything" he tells me. "Just let them be." But in the meantime... shh, don't tell... "Bampa" is building Rowan a small cannon, that really fires. Because some things, maybe, shouldn't be changed.

Made For Birthing

2006-09-26T12:23:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, the discussion came up, as it does, about women who've just had babies. One woman mentioned a four-hour labor, where the baby practically fell out of her. "That woman was just made for birthing!" was the exclamation. I stared intently into my drink, not meeting anyone's eyes. At all. I had a primary cesarean, and then a VBAC. The jealousy/envy over vaginal births never goes away. Rip-her-throat-out-wtih-my-teeth jealousy of those women whose babies fall out of them. Yes. Almost crippling. Unless you've been there, you cannot understand the fundamental feelings of failure that a cesarean can create. And once you do your homework and find out that yours was perhaps avoidable, the emotional rip tide can carry you out to postpartum depression hell, to slowly drown in it. Then I had my VBAC. And was totally blown away by the fact that I still had a ridiculous stupid long hard labor (36-ish hours). I had thought that if I got the positioning thing right, the baby would fall out. I figured that if I approached it without fear, if I visualized my little heart out, that I'd get the kind of easy birth these women had. Nope. I, apparently, am ... not built for birth? Not meant to birth? Not a birthing woman? Yet... there was my baby. I had birthed him. When people read Kestrel's birth story, or hear the story of my labor with him, I am greeted with all kinds of shock. 38-howmany hours? Without any kind of pain medication at all? You're serious? Yup. Totally serious. There are rules in the Geneva Convention about not doing things to soldiers, that laboring women endure. No sleep, no food, then hours of extremely strenuous physical work to the point of bodily harm. You'd get arrested for treating a dog that way. But women just do it, like they've always done. I am sometimes amazed, reading my own and other womens' birth stories. We? We did that? Why yes, we did. And then ride the endorphin high for days on end. The very endorphins that are one of the chemical bases of bonding. So that on the very deepest of levels, by our ability to marathon instead of sprint, we prove that we are made for birthing.

Thank You

2006-09-12T06:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we did a family field trip to IKEA. And I'm here this morning to brag shamelessly. The IKEA warehouse in Emeryville is huge. I mean, bafflingly, overwhelmingly huge. And you're fed through it like rats in a maze, complete with arrows painted on the floor to keep you from getting lost forever. I assumed it would be unbearably boring for the boys, so I prepped a bag of raisins for snacks, and spent a lot of time talking about stuff, showing them the bits that were interesting. Both boys comported themselves beautifully. I think I started in telling Rowan how proud I was of how well he was coping (and acknowledging that he was, indeed, coping) midway through the Offices section, and kept it up as the screams of other bored-beyond-capacity children echoed off the cavernous interior. We spent some time in the Children's section, because they have play structures there, and it allowed Rowan to both blow off some steam, and to be the focus. Interestingly, my child is not the shopper a lot of kids are. Jason and I kept asking if he wanted things, and he kept declining. Really amazing. He did end up with a flashlight with a snake body, and a hanging chair of his own for the apple tree. At the end, we bought some cookies for the car trip home. Despite the fact that Emeryville isn't that far from home, the rush hour traffic makes it more of an expedition than tiny stomachs can endure comfortably, thus, one sensibly provisions before starting the engine. And being as how they were Swedish cookies, they had no corn syrup (a uniquely American perversion, that; to replace plain old sugar with corn syrup, which makes Rowan violent and insane). So there we are. We have just endured Megashopping, and both boys were still smiling and happy as they got into their seats to go home. No dramas, no crazies. I handed each boy a cookie. And Kestrel, who is now just 15 months old, took his cookie and clearly said, "Thank you!" I am blessed and graced beyond all reason.

Props To Me!

2006-09-10T12:01:00.000-07:00

I am totally pleased to announce that I am now a Featured Author on Life Without School, a blog for homeschoolers and unschoolers, to explore what our lives are like. My premiere post, "Unschooling Birth" is the same as I posted here a few days ago. But this will be the only crossover; all my subsequent work on LWOS will be unique, so if you want to know what I have to say over there, you'll have to come check in. Please, leave commentary, check it out, and let the blog leaders know that you're happy to see me there. In other news, I had a meeting Friday with Beth Adams-Smith and Richard Smith of the Atlantic Cruising Club/Jerawyn Publishing. I will be writing a book with them over the coming year, a Marnia Guide to California. You can check out the other books in the series at the ACC website. This isn't really a creative writing project, but a travel writing one, and I am beyond ecstatic to be involved in this project. It's going to allow me all kinds of latitude in exploration and other article opportunities. So... here I go, leaping into publishing of all kinds of flavors. And thanks to all of you, who've been so awesome about nurturing, encouraging, and just being along with this blog, which I started simply to see if I could do it.

Closer

2006-09-05T06:20:00.000-07:00

Anyone who cosleeps can tell you that sometimes, on some nights, a king sized bed just isn't enough. Rowan has his own bed, in our room, and has the ability to sleep wherever he prefers. Sometimes, that's his bed, sometimes, it's ours. Some nights, he wants his own space, some nights, he wants to cuddle. That's fine with us. He's still a very little boy. Lately, he's been sleeping more in our bed. He's growing, so he's physically a little uncomfortable, and seems to sleep better when snuggled up to the Human Blast Furnace that is his Papa. Unfortunately, that means he's also next to Kestrel, who, like most babies his age, flails unbelievably. Whomever said the unfortunate phrase "sleep like a baby" has obviously never coslept. Kes is all over the place, sometimes because he's looking for comfort, sometimes because he's signalling that he has to pee. Either way, we've all gotten our share of Kestrel-inflicted bumps. Eventually, it'll mellow out, and he'll sleep like his brother, who at this point pours himself into bed, and doesn't move or stir for 10 or more hours. Sleeps more like a teenager than a baby, really. Last night, Kestrel was flailing. Lots of stimulation, a very busy day, and some unusual items in his diet, combined with teething and growing, and bammo, you have the SuperMobile baby. Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop. Pound. Thumpthumpthump. Flail. Mumble. Repeat. Finally, in desperation, I grabbed him and snuggled him in close, really close. Wrapped an arm around him, nestled his head up onto my shoulder... ...and felt his whole body relax. He melted into me like a symbiote, and immediately was soundly, motionlessly, blessedly asleep. And really, how many things is that a metaphor for? We, all of us, do better sometimes when we're closer. When the people who love us best make room for us right beside them, so we can snuggle in, absorb the warmth and the smell and the security, and settle in, in peace. Closer is the answer.

Thinking Tomato Thoughts

2006-08-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

It seems that summer in my area of the world was about ten minutes long this year. The tomatoes are just now ripening. It's the end of freaking August, and the vast majority of them are still deepest, not-even-fryable green. These are what June fruits should look like, not nearly September. We're members of a CSA, and every newsletter for weeks has been about how lousy the tomatoes are this year. I do not trust the weather. Everyone's full of their normal conversation about our typical Indian Summer, but honestly, our seasons haven't been normal for a while, so why does everyone expect normal still? We had 40 straight days of rain, followed by an unstable spring, followed by a week of 100-degree+ days, followed immediately by fall. What's normal in that? So I'm preparing the garden for the worst, prepping the beds for their plantings of winter veggies like cauliflowers, cabbages, and leeks, and assuming that the tomatoes will mostly be a loss this year. I'm really sad about the tomatoes. We did them all-volunteer this year. We took all the little volunteers from last year's Tomato Jungle, selected 14 likely ones, and planted them in the bed, all formal with cages and stakes and regular watering and whatnot. I was really stoked that we seem to have some serious genetic diversity happening, and that some of the heirloom tomatoes we'd eaten and then tossed the remainders into the compost seemed to be some of the hardiest volunteers. It makes me unaccountably happy, that the few upstart heirlooms are the strongest. The idea that untampered-with prevails? That's just really cool. And it's one thing to argue about it, but wholly another to see it played out in the drama of the back garden beds. The fight for nutrients, for water, for sunshine, for bed space, is fierce, and it cheers me unbelievably to think of these odd little scrappers making it to the top. I just hope that everyone else is right and I am wrong and we get to enjoy some of them. Think tomato thoughts for us.

Lobstey

2006-08-29T07:18:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday, we went, as we always do, to the Farmer's Market. In addition to doing our weekly veggie shopping, we usually spend time at the bounce house and the climbing wall. Rowan digs them both. This week there was a new guy running the bounce house. Trying to talk up the kids. Rowan was wearing a shirt we bought him, that has a cartoon picture of a crab, and the word "crabby" under it. It's a joke for his birthsign. The guy asked Rowan "are you crabby today?" Rowan looked at him and said, "I'm not crabby.... I'm lobstey!" The guy didn't get it. I had to explain it to him. My four-year old had just made a joke that took into account english grammar rules, biology, and social status, and a grown adult had to have it explained. Ha! Amazing, the depth of understanding a child can pick up just by listening.

Unschooling Birth

2006-08-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

As all my nearest and dearest know, birth has been an obsessive topic of research of mine for ... well, since the people I paid to handle my first pregnancy and birth let me down, landing me with a cesarean (I refuse to capitalize it) for iatrogenic difficulties resulting from caregiver (ha!) impatience. They had the degrees, the training, the background, that I did not have. I trusted them, they let me down, and I have this scar on my belly to show for it. That was four years ago. In the meantime, I researched birth. Obsessively. Learning about what happened to me was my path out of the PPD/PTSD darkness the whole experience landed me in. I read. I studied. I performed more biostatistical analyses on other people's research than I did in four solid years of graduate studies. I learned, I learned, I learned. At this stage of things, I can sling obstetrical lingo like a pro. In fact, better than some pros. I know an astonishing amount about the natural state of a pregnant body, about the variations on normal, about birth as it's meant to happen, without the mediarchy meddling in it. My command of the relevant research is nearly encyclopedic. My knowledge of the trade journals, the insurance regulations, the governmental statutes, is exhaustive. I know, because to me, fighting for the plain old normal birth of my second child, every single data point mattered. And the final exam? My glorious homebirth VBAC. We, all of us, my family, we passed. So here we are. Rowan's four now. And I'm beginning to look into schooling. It isn't pretty. I could go on some about the state of public, private, institutionalized, education in this country. But suffice it to say, it's not for us. We're looking at unschooling; the radical idea that children are learning machines, if you don't strangle the delight out of it for them. That if you give them building blocks for wings, they will assemble them (in their own unique ways), and they will soar. Terrifying, beautiful thought, that. I feel like I've bonded with Daedalus, somehow. As usual, when you're going offroad with something parenting, you ask yourself whether or not it "works". I suppose by "works", what you mean, generally, is, "will this form of education result in a child who is centered, intelligent, well-rounded, and able to attain the goals they set for themselves?" As usual, I've been fretting. Will it? Will this be the right thing to have done? The shelves of birth-related books and research are gradually being supplanted with the shelves of education-related books and research. I'm on the yahoogroups. I'm reading the bulletin boards. I'm joining the associations. I'm reading, dear lordy, everything I can get my hands on. I'm learning the terminology that the initiated use to describe the inner workings of the child mind. I am becoming conversant in the theoretical modalities of educational theories. And as another friend grilled me about some aspect or other of pregnancy, and I tossed off an answer as casually as could be, it hit me. I do not have a degree. I am not a medical graduate. But I am unschooled, in birth. And if can work for me, like this, then am I not, by modeling this compulsive researching behavior, proving both to my kids and to the Doubting Thomases of my culture, that it does most thoroughly work this way? Yes, I am. So forward we all go. Because it does, it does, it does work this way. UPDATE: This post has been nominated!!!

Learning Experiences

2006-08-19T12:56:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot going on with me lately, thus the paucity of blog entries. I could bore you all with my journey, or I could cut to the chase. Friends, I have finally figured out that there are only 24 hours in a day, and that I must sleep in some of them. Go on, I can hear you laughing from here. I think my problem is that I find nearly everything fascinating. And so when cool amazing things cross my path, I tend to jump on them. Revel in them. Celebrate them. And bond with them. And I forget that with all that ebullience, you still gotta sleep and eat and do the laundry. I've taken the day off to refocus, having plummeted rather harshly from a bout of the aforementioned ebullience. I overextended, and am now taking it deservedly on the nose. Learning Experience (tm), with a side of Humble Pie. Jason and I had a fabulous talk last night, as I was conducting an inventory of my wounds. He's a master at taking the most egregious of my self-pitying, and turning it into solid gold. I think I probably learned more about Seeing Myself in an hour last night that I've learned in quite some time. Some of it wasn't terribly flattering, but all of it was honest, and delivered through a lens of trust; the sugar coating on the pill. So I've now swallowed it down, and am digesting. And like any morning after a storm, the whole world looks cleaner and crisper and brighter. I'm still obligated to deal with the mess that I created, but I'm finding that I can face it with a degree of optimism, and even some humor. And you know, sometimes, that's absolutely the best that you can hope for.

Tubthumping

2006-08-13T19:14:00.000-07:00

Last week, I was in my Basic Cruising sailing course. Days 1 and 2 were superlative. Days 3 through 5? Sucked. I was angry, frustrated, close to tears most days. Not because the sailing was hard (although there was a small craft advisory going on, so yes, the sailing was hard), but because yet again, I am smacking my head into a wall. Hello wall. Nice to see you. Again. Damnit. See, here's the deal. I am a very small woman. And I have this propensity for engaging in sports dominated by large men. Large clueless men. Day 3 of class involved, amongst other transitional disasters, me giving a basic illustration about the laws of physics, center of gravity, mass and inertia of a 3000 pound boat, and the force of 10 knots of breeze at the dock. The instructor wanted me to hold our J24 to the dock by holding onto the shrouds. Which put my center of gravity directly over said boat, trying to still hold the boat to the dock against the wind. Needless to say, I failed. The instructor seemed to think it was a failing of mine. At least, his yelling indicated this. Unfortunately, even he had to bow to the laws of physics, once I calmed down enough to illustrate them. I could go on with stories. Suffice it to say, the instructor failed me. And now, I have to go back and do reviews until I'm passable. Considering every instructor has different nuances about what they want done, I may be there a while. Friday, I was a raging hysterical lunatic. I don't take failure well. I called the Bear on Saturday morning, and gave him the outline of my horrible week on the boat. He laughed. And said "Gee, we've never seen you here before, have we?" And there it is. Way back in college, when I was taking scuba classes preparatory to becoming an instructor, I was under the command of, well, a large sexist pig who felt that threatening my life (three separate times) was a perfectly valid teaching tool. Cue Chumbawamba. =) I got knocked down, I got back up again. Over and over and over. It was some of the harshest few months of my life. But what ended up happening was that one by one, I won every other person in the chain of command over, and they eventually stomped on him hard enough that he saw, really finally saw, what he was doing, and stopped it. Lesson learned, for him and for me. His lesson? Stop being such a misogynist prick. My lesson? My strength is legion, and my cause is righteous. Sounds a bit grandiose, maybe, but it's how I feel. Women had been flunking out of that scuba program for years, and until me, none of them had been willing to take on the whole thing and fight. Women after me, they passed. It was a great feeling. So on the drive back to sailing school on Saturday, I did what I should have probably done, oh, around Thursday. "OK, you Deity folks, what's my lesson? What am I supposed to be learning from this?" And immediately, everything eased. I actually smiled on my drive, instead of spending the whole 20 minutes choking back tears as I had been doing for the last three or four days (did I mention, I don't handle failure well?). The first person I saw at the school asked me flat out, "What happened?" And I could have kissed him. His implication, in tone and incredulity, was that it wasn't that I am a crap sailor, it was that circumstances precluded completion. The next three people I ran into asked nearly the same question in nearly the same way. And by the time I'd told the full story of my week, I'd managed to turn it into a fine comedic routine, complete with pantomime and gesticulation. I had two people literally lying down laughing. The instructor for my review was astonished at some of the things I told him, and was going to take it up with the instructor who'd flunked me. The instructor I'd had for the first few days was flabbergasted as well. Change is happening. I can feel the shift. And it's gonna be good. In the meantime, the school has a deal where if you don't pass, you get 90 days of free instructor time to make it up. So I get nearly three months of free sailing out of this. You just can't beat that... provided you go into it with the right attitude. "Tubthumping" is Shouting to Change The World (then having a drink to celebrate). It's stumbling home from your local bar, when the world is ready to be PUT RIGHT... I get knocked down, I get back up again. Ain't never gonna keep me down.

Madonna of the Cockpit

2006-08-09T07:10:00.000-07:00

Many of you have asked me where I was during the series of photos I posted yesterday. Mostly, I was on the other end of the camera, but I thought this picture sums up a sailing mama's life pretty well.

First Sail...

2006-08-06T07:24:00.000-07:00

...for Jason, as skipper... and for Rowan... and for Kestrel... and a fabulous day was had by all!

No One Ever Promised

2006-08-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

...or, smacked upside the head by my own assumptions, yet again. I don't think I've ever said it quite this way... but part of what set me up for my cesarean was my unshakeable belief that because my mother had a beautiful, ridiculously easy birth with me, my births would be easy too. Stupid of me, really, because I'm not built like my mother at all, I'm built like my grandmother, who by all accounts, had a horrendous birth with my mother (her only child). So I should have seen it coming. But you know, my mom, in her desire to be positive and encouraging and just downright fabulous about the whole thing, had it so talked up, it never occurred to me that it would be any other way, and so I never researched the what-ifs, because they were never going to happen to me. That's old news now. Fast forward to last Friday. Last Friday was Rowan's gymnastics lesson. He loves them. Loves the teacher. She loves him (tried to hijack him into coming to several of her other drama and singing classes immediately, "because he projects personality so well.") Hit me up again, in fact, to make sure I hadn't forgotten, and that I get him signed up for her September sessions. In the face of all that, 100% positive, glowing, encouraging... Rowan decided he didn't want to go. "No." says my son. It's a statement. Flat. Unemotional. Absolute. And impervious to parental pleas for compliance. I am utterly dumbfounded. You see... I was a very compliant child, most of the time. My mother raves (to this day) about how easy I was to get along with. And I never, ever saw this coming. That I would give birth to Captain Defiant. So there we are. It's time for class. And Rowan is not interested. Not in changing into playclothes from his comfy jammies, not in leaving the house, not in getting into the car, not in getting out of the car, not in getting to class. (Unschooling types are already laughing at me, because of course, I pushed him into doing all those things, and that's where I lost the moral highground.) We finally get to class, and the teacher is so happy to see him. He starts to smile, then looks at me, and physically curls up into a little fetal ball. I grab him, drag him out into the gym (away from where the class is), and sit him down for a talk. He's a hysterical little ball, totally freaking out. And I so much cannot understand, I lose it, and I yell. And in the middle of me saying things like "you wanted to go to school, so here it is, deal with it" and other paragons of sensitive parenting (cringe), Captain Defiant looks at me, and says "No, Mama. Just no. I don't want to, just no." Just no. I immediately feel like the biggest failure of a parent in the whole world. We both sit there, breathing at each other for a few more seconds, and I say "OK, let's go tell your teacher we're leaving, and we'll go to the library, or get lunch, or go for a walk or something." Can you see it coming? We get back to the area where class is, and Captain Defiant whips his shoes off, and leaps into the fray. He is, by God, in that class. Buddhism has nothing on parenting, where the lesson, over and over until I get it, apparently, is "unclench." It's Friday again, we'll see what happens. Either way, I'll handle it better. No one ever promised me a carbon copy of, well, me. And I think it's probably better that way.

Because We Like Them

2006-07-30T09:53:00.000-07:00

My pal V has 10 kids. Go ahead, let it sink in. But while it's sinking, pay attention to your reactions to that. I know that not too many years ago in my past, I would have been horrified and scornful. But having cycled through Susan Griffin's question,

"I have been asked if I had the choice again, would I have a child? This is an absurd question. I am not the same person I was before I had a child. That young woman would not understand me."

...I know that that young woman would not understand me. Because pretty much the heavens opened up for me, when I asked V the same question everyone else asks her. "Why?" I asked her. "Why 10?" "Because we like them," she replies. Four little words. And within them lies the entire Kingdom of Parenting. "We," she says. She and her husband both. It's an equality thing. They both think the kids are really, really neat. And they are a team. Maybe not always a unified front, maybe not always totally on the same page, but at base, mutually committed to the idea that everyone's got to pull together, and that family is worth it. "Like," she says. Can you imagine it, liking kids? Well, yes, everyone gives lip service to liking them. But it's entirely another thing when faced with the daily Toddler Stampede and all the extreme provocation therein, to remember that you will spend far more time with them as an adult than you will as a parent-child dyad, and that when all is said and done, it's all so much easier if at base, you like each other. I find this to be a form of mindfulness, especially useful at those moments when Captain Defiant has unleashed "No!" to what is to my mind a simple request. If I basically like them, then I have to stop and look at it from their eyes, and try to understand it, from a place of respect. And it's astonishing how many things I am humbled and horrified to realize were only conflicts because I chose to see them as power struggles rather than as natural conflicts of perception. "Them," she says. Who they are. Their inherent beings. Children are born with personalities complete, and anyone who challenges this just isn't looking, in my opinion. Both of my children were complete people, at birth, and no denying it. I can refer to both my children's birthdays as "the day I met you on the outside", because it's only a tiny stretch to the idea of having met them when they were in utero as well (in retrospect, both of them were expressing themselves in there as well as they could, in their very different ways). Last night, in order to avoid horrendous traffic, instead of hopping in the car and driving home from where we were, we walked to the nearest restaurant. It happened to be a fairly swanky, not particularly child-friendly place. We were seated, we ordered our meal, we were just busy being us. And I was a bit startled when a woman's hand appeared on my shoulder, and I found myself being addressed by a Matron, whose universe this clearly was. I tensed. "You," she intoned, "have done an absolutely wonderful job with those children. You should be proud." She then patted Rowan on the head, and left the restaurant. Just a few minutes later, our waitress (clearly a college girl) made a similar comment. "What are you used to?" I asked her. "Oh, we get a range in here. But I will tell you that your children are the best behaved I've ever seen. They almost make me think I want my own. " I smiled, remembering where my head was at with regards to children when I was her age. "Well," I told her, pulling all my motherly mantle about me, "it's pretty easy. You just have to remember that you have them because you like them, and then go forward based on that." She looked stunned. This was obviously a very new concept to her. She walked away. And as we were leaving, she returned to the table. "I think you've just restored my faith in the idea of being a parent," she says. Blinked a few tears from her eyes, and walked off. Thanks, V, for giving me the answer, in four short words. Because we like them. Of course.

Making Room to Pray

2006-07-27T09:57:00.000-07:00

I am not formally religous. Organized religion sort of makes me recoil, actually, no matter who's organizing it. But lately, I really, really feel the need to take what I'm thinking about and hand it up to a higher power who will make it all have been for some purpose. Nearly two years ago, I started a little nightly ritual, called the Thank-You Candle. I bought a heap of little tealight candles (fair-trade palm wax, thank you much!), and every night at sundown, I light one, put it on my altar, and say thank you for something. Anything, really. It started out as an exercise in gratitude, in seeing at least one positive thing in every single day, and winding up my evening by dwelling on the up side. Then, as the candle burned and the smell filled the room, I'd smile a little, and think again about what I'm grateful for. But lately, my little statements of gratitude have been being overshadowed by bigger things. First, is little A. Diagnosed with a form of brain cancer, he is fighting all the time. And just a few days younger than my Rowan, well, let's just say that every time I chat with his mom, M, I am amused that two little boys on opposite sides of the world should be so alike. Rowan and I talk about him all the time, especially when we light the candle. And while Rowan's thinking about little boys being sick and then being well, I am thinking about mothers who carry it all upon them. How can we keep being expected to be so strong? Because the only other option is failure, and that's not acceptable. Second, is this whole Middle East thing that I have already ranted about. I can't even manage to think about the big stuff any more, the whys and wherefores. It's all just babies dying, in my mind. And it's too big for me to even come up with words for any more (although I'm sure I'll keep trying). Third, is fear. It's been hot here, and we're going to bed with the windows open. That means we can hear the sirens charging up and down the highway and the main street a few blocks over. We used to joke that "someone's having a crappy night." But lately, the sirens are going all the time, and it's just not funny any more. I'm not so naive that I think that every siren is simply good cops doing their best to protect me and mine. Why so many more sirens? Is everyone crazier? Are there suddenly more bad guys than there used to be? Fourth, and always, is compassion. I keep trying. But some days it is so incredibly hard to remember to treat those around me with compassion. I'd like to say that I had it in me to just do it, but lately, I have to remind myself in terms of juxtaposing it with the horrors going on elsewhere. I have to remind myself that "it could be worse, I could be living in Lebanon, or Afghanistan, or Iraq, so I can afford to be kind to pretty much anyone, no matter how churlish." I guess it's OK to take enlightenment in baby steps. As heretical as it is to say out loud, I've been listening to Yusuf Islam singing the Adhan, and it's comforting. I think there's a deep need, across humanity, to have a time every day where you just take it all, wad it up into a big ball, and hand it over to an omnipotent being who can handle it better than you can.

Helplessly Hoping

2006-07-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

Today's post is a reprint of a Cindy Sheehan article originally posted on Truthout.org. Sums up what I'm feeling lately pretty darned well. I've both linked and highlighted in red a mention of Kucinich’s Resolution (H Con Res 450) Demanding Bush to Call for Cease-Fire, which you could contatct your Representative about, if you were motivated.

Helplessly Hoping Day 21, Troops Home Fast By Cindy Sheehan t r u t h o u t | Perspective Tuesday 25 July 2006 I have been in such a blue funk of depression and worry since Israel's over-reaction - or "over action" - in Lebanon in what seems to be insanity escalating out of control. What our media and some world leaders seem to expediently forget is that Israel massacred an entire family on a beach in Lebanon with a rocket and kidnapped two Palestinian citizens before Hezbollah and Hamas kidnapped some Israeli soldiers. Who started the cycle of violence in those countries? Who knows? Who cares! The important question is: who are going to be the courageous ones with integrity, wisdom and compassion who are going to at long last stop the absurdity? As hard as I may try, I cannot wrap my mind around the fanatical rhetoric coming out of DC and from all over the world and the mindless and seemingly overwhelming support of Israel's right to "defend itself." What Israel is doing in Lebanon by killing hundreds of innocent civilians in a relatively short period of time is like the US defending itself from the tens of thousands of innocent babies, women and children in Iraq. It is morally reprehensible and just an extension of BushCo's campaign to enrich the voracious war profiteers. I read yesterday that our State Department approved a new shipment of bombs and rockets to Israel. With the thousands upon thousands of US-made bombs and rockets being dropped on Lebanon by the IDF it makes one wonder if the expiration dates on the bombs were nearing and the war machine needed to sell and ship more bombs so that the CEOs could fill their Hummers, limos, and jets with gas. Naively, I always presumed that the State Department was there to prevent the use of military force, not support it by authorizing more weapons for more efficient killing! Don't we have a War Department for more killing? I feel like I am living in Bizarro World. I have been watching a lot of cable news networks and have heard such one-sided phrases as: "Over 50 civilians killed in Lebanon today, but the real story is in the Israeli city of Nazareth, where two Hezbollah rockets landed." Why is that the real story, Tucker Carlson? It is an immensely tragic story, because two harmless children were killed in Nazareth, but how does it trump over 50 civilians being killed in Lebanon? Oh yeah, I forgot! John Bolton said that there is no "moral equivalency" between innocent Arabs being killed and innocent Israelis being killed. It's not immoral for Israel to kill innocent civilians because they are fighting terror with more terror: it's the American Way! One day I heard another perfectly coiffed and composed talking head say while the fancy war graphics rolled across the TV screen in my hotel room: "This is day 12 of fighting in the Middle East." Day 12! Try selling that idiotic sound bite to the people of Iraq and who are dying by the dozens still every day in increasing violence. Try telling our soldiers who keep on dying over there that this is "Day 12" … It is more like 2,567 on day 1,200 plus of fighting in Iraq. The war crimes in Israel and Lebanon have so conveniently knocked Iraq completely off the radar screen, which is probably a thing of beauty and a welcome development to the White House and Pentagon. We are being told that a few hundred people have been killed in Lebanon when we were shown a mass grave on CNN in the ancient city of Tyre that had almost 90 coffins in it being presided over by a distraught mayor, telling us that at least two or three hundred more of his city's residents were buried in the rubble of the barbaric Israeli attacks. Tyre is one city, and we viewed the mass grave days ago. Tyre and the rest of the country are being relentlessly bombed for the sins of a few, which is a crime against humanity. It seems like we are armchair witnesses to Armageddon and ashamed witnesses to our fool of a President at the G-8: groping women; talking, eating, and swearing with his mouth full; drooling over slicing a pig and generally acting like a drunken and amorous frat boy at a toga party. I would like to ask George Bush a few more questions besides "What noble cause?" Like: "What the hell is so humorous, you jester in a tailored suit? You told us that you were making the world a safer place because of your War of Terror, and you are decidedly not!" I would also like to ask him if he is proud of himself for the way things are going on the 1200th plus day of fighting in the Middle East. Of course it is not about pride - it is about profit and the Project for a New American Century. I mourn for the murders of the Israeli people, which are just as tragic (but not more tragic) and done just as barbarically (but not more barbarically) as the murders that Israel is commiting in this needless violence, as much as I mourn the deaths of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and the innocents in all Arab countries who are trapped in this insane spiral of bedlam. When is the world going to realize that bloodshed cannot be stopped, cured or even alleviated by shedding more blood? Killing is a cancer that spreads the more it is fed. This disease is spreading around the world, and instead of passing resolutions to condone the punishment of an innocent civilian population, Congress should be passing resolutions condemning ALL types of violence and should be supporting Rep. Dennis Kucinich's (D-Ohio) call for a truce (H.Con.Res 450) so a diplomatic solution can be sought - one that brings ALL sides to the table and one that ALL sides can feel comfortable and safer with. The only way to a "lasting cease-fire" that the weapons broker, Condi, keeps talking about is a negotiated settlement that includes and insists on peaceful co-existence in the region. Martin Luther King Jr. said it is either "peaceful co-existence or mutual co-annihilation." Our planet is headed on a path of annihilation if we don't all stop and take a deep breath, relax and realize that our brothers and sisters are being killed in the Middle East so that more bombs and rockets can be rushed there (on all sides) and so that our oil companies can have total control of the world's oil resources. I have felt so helpless in the face of such unwarranted carnage, calamity, and sorrow. I have felt hopeless that anything I do can even alleviate the suffering of one person. I am helplessly hoping that the people of the world will join me and rise up to say a collective: "In God's (Allah's - whatever's) name: enough is more than enough, already!" One last quote: Dwight David Eisenhower said, "I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." I believe that we the people of Earth should demand that our governments get out of our way and stop being beholden to the war machine and allow us to have peace. Selfishly, I would love to have a world that my surviving children and their children can peacefully co-exist with peoples of other nations in. I recognize Israel's right to defend itself as I recognize the US's right to defend ourselves as I recognize Lebanon's and Iraq's right to defend themselves - but I do not, cannot, and will not recognize anyone's right to commit wholesale slaughter on babies and children. I refuse to recognize that right no matter who does it - terrorists or state-sanctioned wars of terror - I refuse to recognize the right to slaughter and, whether it makes a difference or not, I refuse to be silent about it. It must stop: For my children, your children and their children. They are all our children.

Child abuse by any other name

2006-07-23T19:00:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine sent me this link yesterday: http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411419/792057 Can I just say, right here right now for the record, I can't even freaking believe we still even have to have this conversation in the civilized world??? Maybe this is just another in a long, long series of things that proves to me that I and my parenting just don't belong in this culture. Somebody wake me up and send me back to wherever I came from, cause it sure as hell isn't here. In my freaky little fringey world, the primary job of motherhood is physical nurturance, followed by spiritual nurturance, followed by social nurturance. The main thing being, uh, nurturance. It's my job to keep them fed, clothed, sheltered, rested. Attending to the basics until they can take those functions over reliably themselves. It's my job to be my child's best advocate. It's my job to believe the best of them, to attribute positive intent to them until I find out otherwise. Not that I don't blow it, mind you. I get tired and crabby and hungry and pissy and intolerant and impatient and dogmatic just like every other human being. But fifteen solid minutes of beating my own flesh and blood for their tiny little transgressions? That is pathological. There is no other word for it. No sane human being could possibly watch their own child sleep and manage to still deny that the Hand of the Divine rests upon them all. But then again, I also think it's ridiculous to believe that an omnipotent being could be so offended by the sins of us mere mortals. It's precisely the same issue of scale, to my mind. My God does not beat his children, and neither should I. They use the term "smacking", a cute little dimunitization of a word. The word, friends, is CHILD ABUSE, in case you're unclear on the concept. Just like a pedophile is hardly someone who "loves children" as the latin derivation suggests, fifteen minutes of physical abuse is hardly "smacking". But opressors since the beginning of recorded history have managed to get away with lessening the impact of the reporting of their horrors by twisting the language. I suppose the drive to commit physical violence goes deep. I know what I'd do with 15 minutes behind closed doors with one of those goons... not that it would help...

Seemed time for this reminder

2006-07-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28151 It's a bit dated, with the September 11 references, but the overall message? Yeah. Just Yeah. You listening out there?

Peace Train

2006-07-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

Everyone in my real life knows that I avoid the news, mostly, as a means of self-defense. But you'd have to be under a rock in a cave to not know about the insanity happening in the Middle East. Every single blurb I read, everything I hear... I hear panic, I hear fear... over some stupid hunk of dirt and someone's idea about control, and about the truth of God. Yes, yes, I know it's overall more complicated than that. But I don't care. They're all somebody's baby, killing or being killed. Every single casualty has a mother grieving. But ultimately, I believe in the triumph of hope over hate. And so, I'd like to invite everyone to go here: http://www.mountainoflight.co.uk/av/av.html Stop whatever you're doing, make sure you're on a computer with excellent speakers and Macromedia Flash installed, and settle in (no matter how long it takes, I don't care if you're on dialup, it's worth it) to listen to Yusuf Islam singing Peace Train. Someday, it's going to come.

Complex Faustian Debt

2006-07-19T08:05:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, I came into some money; enough to pay off the last dregs on my credit card. "Hurrah!" you say? Not so fast... I called the card company, and asked for a payoff amount. "How are you intending to pay?" he asked. "Electronic transfer. Why?" Well, it turns out that interest is being calculated every flippin second, and how fast you get the money to them matters deeply. So the young man took a stab at the total amount, which I immediately paid, through the company's web interface. "Hurrah!" says I. But not so fast... Turns out young man overcalculated, to the tune of about $80. So the card company had $80 of my money. Fine. I call them, and ask if they can issue me a check for the overage. "Sure," says the young man on the phone, "but it will cost you a $15 fee." Yup. They are going to charge me $15 to get my own money back from them. Bastards. "Fine" says I, "I'll leave it there." And leave it there I have, until yesterday. Due to one thing and another, I decided I needed that money. So I call the company, and ask if there's another way. "Sure," says the young man on the phone, "you can get a cash advance anywhere. Any bank, any company, even casinos, will give you that money, just flash them your ID." "Hurrah!" you say? Not so fast... I toddle down to the bank that issued the card, step brightly up to the window, and ask for my money. The teenage minimum-wage earning bippy functionary declines. "What???" I say. "I can get that money from a freaking casino! So says the man on the phone!" "Sure," says the teenage minimum-wage earning bippy functionary, "but we have to assess you a fee equal to a percentage of the total advance and subject to the current interest rate on cash advances." "Get me a manager, and someone who can operate a calculator!" I cry. "All I want is a zero balance! You can't have my money, I don't want yours, can't we get some sort of detente going on, or is this Hezbollah and Israel over Gaza?" The teenage minimum-wage earning bippy functionary blinked at me, clearly not understanding a word of what I'd just said. She then blinked again. "I'll get my manager," she finally decided was the prudent course of action. "Does your manager know how to operate a calculator?" I asked? "I'm not sure", replies teenage minimum-wage earning bippy functionary. "Why do you need one?" I slip into Mighty Homeschooling Mama mode. I don't even realize I've done it. "Well," I explain, "if you're hellbent on charging me a fee for extracting my own cold cash from your greedy bloodsucking imperialist claws, we're going to calculate the percentage fee and the APR (which incidentally it is wholly illegal for you to apply on a credit overage, but you don't know that, apparently), and then I'm going to request a cash advance amount that will result in me owing you three cents, so that your company's greedy bloodsucking imperialist accounting department will have to keep going through the hassle of billing me for three stinkin pennies, and since your billing costs far more than that, in wages, in paper, in mailing costs, your greedy bloodsucking imperialist employer is going to go into the hole a minimum of $10 every single time they dare screw with me and my simple request to right a wrong." She popped her gum at me, and asked me to step aside so she could help the next customer, clearly unmoved by my challenging of authority. Eventually, I left, clutching my card, my cash, and my dignity around me. I had challenged the behemoth, and I think I won. "Hurrah!" you say? Not so fast...let's wait until the next billing period.

Rowan's Four!

2006-07-17T07:28:00.000-07:00

Today, my little guppy is officially four years old. So big, and so very little at the same time. This is the first year that I've woken up, run a mental finger over all my old wounds, and been generally OK with everything that happened in Rowan's birth. In years past, I've woken up screaming, had horrible cramps all day, and just generally had all kinds of little tweaky PTSD symptoms (unrecognized, untreated, generally scoffed at and ignored, cause afterall, I have a healthy baby, right? ::snarl::). My VBAC seems to have healed a lot of those old wounds, and I'm grateful for it. I was pretty sick of being sick. Course, the topic of unnecessary Cesareans still makes me a bit rabid, and I'm still trying desperately to figure out how to help women not become like me, still with very little success. But back to Rowan. His personality has developed so intensely over the last year. Sometimes it's all I can do to keep up. I've found that if I remember that it's all about his stomach (a Cancerian trait), and that he approaches everything shyly, and sideways (more Cancerian), we do OK. And yet, he's so close to Leo, there's a streak of boldness, of "look at me!" that's really breathtaking. I could ramble on about his vocabulary, which is stunning, his ability for logical thought, which is astounding, his physical agility and grace, which are subjects of both awe and terror. He's any parent's dream and nightmare, which is true for pretty much any four year old, I think. I struggle daily with the lows of dealing with losing my temper at him, and the highs of trying to figure out how to give him all the tools he needs to become whatever will give him the most personal joy. This parenting thing is certainly a ride. Thank you, my little Rowan T., for four very intense years. I can't wait to see what happens next...

The Spirit Indomitable

2006-07-15T07:39:00.000-07:00

Wednesday at swim lessons was horrible. Rowan's got a new teacher, more's the pity. She's a bippy, used to be teaching Kestrel's class, and was completely useless there too. I can't tell if she's not too bright, or just very very distracted, but in either case, she's a crap swim teacher. And on Wednesday, my little guppy acted up. He was underwater for most of her instructions, did nothing he was told, and spent so much time trying to swim around behind her (underwater) that she gave up and had the lifeguard yell at him. A number of times. I was so mad, I was grinding my teeth. I kept an eye on Rowan, and he seemed utterly unphased, and kept doing his thing. Which was rather upsetting to Bippy n Co. We skipped class on Thursday. In my typical way, I stewed about it. Who the hell were these people? Why yell at a kid in swim class, fercryinoutloud, for swimming???? Oh, because they want him swimming on the surface, because kids who swim below are too hard to control (there's a really incredible metaphor there that I'll probably spin into something cool sometime). I ranted at my mother, at Jason. What were those swim bimbos thinking, screaming at a kid who was demonstrating (albeit, spontaneously) better swimming skills than any other kid in the damn pool??? And quietly, internally, I fretted. What if, in his first brush with the organized educational system of this world, he got his spirit crushed? Was I going to be able to keep him happy in the water anyway? Or had the damage been done? Last night, in the bath, Rowan asked for deep water. Then he asked for his mask. I threaded the strap, helped him put it on, and was rewarded by his grin and the following Declaration of Independence:

"I don't need swim lessons any more, Mama. Because I'm a diver!"

My little guppy then submerged himself full length in the tub, did a decent flutter kick, and stayed under for nearly 15 seconds. I've landed a new scuba teaching gig (more on that in another blog sometime soon), so there will be plenty of time for Rowan to play around in the water with Mama and her dive students. I think we're done with formal swim lessons. And my child? My child has the spirit indomitable.

I Never Knew

2006-07-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

I pride myself on the breadth of my studies, and on having a sort of general familiarity with all kinds of things. So finding huge gaping holes in what I know is somewhat distressing... and it's even worse when it's a hole I didn't even know I had. I mean, I know I know nothing about astrophysics, for example, but that's a comfortable edge of the map for me. But last night, the family was snuggled down together, watching Michael Palin's "Sahara". It's a fabulous BBC documentary that follows Michael (of Monty Python fame) on a trip around the Sahara. It's quite engrossing. And it's highlighting so many things I don't know. Some of it is comfortable edges. Until he got to Senegal. I had never heard of Goree Island. And am thoroughly ashamed that at my age, I had to be sitting, listening to an Englishman lecture me about something that I bet 90% of the people in my town know all about. The town I live in has a huge "us-vs-them" dynamic. It's more compartmentalized here than in any other place I've visited, with less cross-traffic. And with isolation, comes hostility and mistrust. There are a lot of acts of violence here, and of racial hatred and misunderstanding. So there on my TV, a group of American dancers is rehearsing a performance commemorating the suffering of their ancestors in that hideous place. African Americans, Michael tells me, make pilgrimages to that island every year, to see the place where their ancestors had their last sight of Africa. I never knew. And if I never knew that.... what else don't I know? What other critical component of understanding am I missing? And for christ's sake... why did no one teach me before now?

Splashing Genetic Expression of Self

2006-06-30T07:46:00.000-07:00

There's that quote that floats around mommy groups, about how the decision to have children is momentous because it means forever to have your heart walking around outside your body. True enough. Yesterday, though, it was not my heart, it was my genes. From time to time, the boys do something, anything, whatever, and it is so clearly the expression of a trait of mine or Jason's, we look at each other and say, "Your child!" It's our little joke. Slightly more unsettling is when one of them does something that is unequivocally an expression of a relative they've never met. More than once, I've seen my father or my grandfathers come out of the boys. We think of genes as things that control height, eye color, weight, whatever. It's a little stranger to think of them as controlling strong traits of personality, or of mannerism. My Grandpa did this little pattern-tapping of his fingers, and my heart nearly stopped the first time Rowan did it, just after he could control his fingers in the first place. But as the boys get older and more able to express themselves, they become a deeper, richer expression of all those who came before, in a dizzying and fascinating grab-bag sort of way. So I suppose I should not have been all that surprised yesterday, day four of swim class, when Rowan refused to stay in the water. Screaming with all the force of his will behind it, "I do not like that pool! I do not like to swim!", he catapulted over the side, away from his instructor, and into my arms. Sobbed like a little lost thing. "I hate it I hate it I hate it!!!" And of course, the mommy pressure was on. I made a promise to myself long long ago that I would never parent my kids based on what other parents thought of us, because at the end of the day, we're the ones that have to live together, and I have to respect my children as innate human beings. It's a great working theory, and has served me well often before. But at the upscale pool we signed up for classes in, I am surrounded by ultracompetitive liposucted fully-made-up Escalade-driving swim team moms, and I'm clearly the blob from another planet. So as Rowan came pelting into my arms, I was surrounded, immediately, by a wave of disapproval. Louis Vuitton bags were moved subtly aside so that I and my dripping, miserable kid would not contaminate them by our weakness. I got Rowan calmed down enough to ascertain that there wasn't anything particularly wrong with the pool, with the teacher, with a classmate. I got him to look at me, and I told him he did not have to go back in. He relaxed visibly, and curled even tighter into me, as if in gratitude. It was pretty incredible (even if it was cold and very wet). And about five minutes later, he whipped around in one of those toddler 180s that give parents mental whiplash, and asked if he could go into the baby pool. The point, in my mind, of swimming lessons in the first place, is so that the boys think of water as a safe and happy place, the same way I do. The reason we're doing lessons is that I have no memory of learning to swim. I remember throwing myself into our backyard pool when I was an infant. I have this fabulous mental picture of my mother's face through several feet of pool water. It's a great memory of mine; mom's version is not nearly so happy. Rowan flung himself into the baby pool, and was transformed. Put his goggles on by himself. Swam underwater (pulling himself along by his arms on the bottom) for a good 30 seconds at a time, coming up for a quick breath, and going back under. In fact, he spent the rest of the time either splashing the other kids, or face down, until he got too cold to continue. Whereupon he demonstrated the great good sense to get himself out. I was thoroughly proud of him. And proud of my ability to stand my parenting ground, as I listened to the tense reunions of kids who had been forced into the water by their parents, and the screams of the next round of kids so forced. And it was only as we were walking to the car that I recalled that I had flunked out of the only swim class my mother tried to put me in, when I was about Rowan's age. "Momma!" a little voice breaks into my rememberance, "I like the water!" Mission accomplished, memory recalled, the genetic imperative expressed.

Swimming Lessons!

2006-06-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, we started swim lessons with the Mighty Hudson Boyos. I was totally unprepared for the lump in my throat when a total stranger read their names out on the roll call to get them paired up with their teachers. I mean, when choosing their names, we had thought about "sounds equally good on a stadium loudspeaker and a book jacket", but I was a little unprepared for actually hearing them over a microphone. It was really, really good. Here's Rowan, in his class. Because he's bigger, he was in on his own, although the camera angle on this shot lets you know precisely how far away Jason actually ever got: Apparently, he shined. Did everything a little bit above and beyond, and was inconsolable when class was over, until we explained that we'd be coming back every day for four weeks. That seemed to help. =) Kestrel, because he's littler, was in a parent/tot class. As we bounced into the water, the instructor supervisor remarked "now that's the look we like to see!" as Kestrel giggled like a mad thing. The only bummer was that Kes got way too cold about half way through the half hour class, and we had to get out. Today, I'll be ransacking the storage bins for the rash guards, in the hopes we can stick it out a bit longer.

Chop Wood, Carry Water

2006-06-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water. -Wu Li

It's been a fraught few weeks at work; horrible layoffs at Sun, and the new newsletter program launching. Guiding lots of people who are stressed out and unhappy and worried about their jobs through a brand new, highly-technical process. Joy. Not. I've been pulling 12 hour days, which is really saying a lot for me. And Jason's been looking concerned as my shot-o-clock quotient escallates (side note: no prize but lots of gratitude for the reader that submits the best mojito recipe!). Spent all day yesterday cleaning the house with a vengeance. Having spent the whole week feeling exhausted, it was a little surprising to find this huge well of energy. Course, slugging back a shot of Floradix before bed on Saturday might have helped. So. My home is in great shape. We're talking neatened, straightened, organized, aired, vacuumed, and mopped. Yes, mopped. The toys are neatly in bins and on shelves. The laundry is washed, line-dried, and folded away. The bed is made. Several feng shui cures got put up -- prism faceted crystals to move energy down the halls, white paper lanterns to juice my creativity area, red paper lanterns for the romance & relationship area. The pothos is cleaned, groomed, and re-hung. The shelves in the freaking refrigerator have been wiped down. After a week of nothing but slogging in the mind, it was *so good* to have a day of chop wood carry water, you know? I feel like my brain is totally refreshed, even though what I did was far from "restful" in the classical sense. It's far too easy, especially in a consumerist society, to get caught up in "recreational pursuits"; to be obsessed with resting and being rested, in such a way as profits someone. But sometimes, true restfulness is as close as the mop and broom.

The Editor is In

2006-06-22T07:37:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been blessed with the opportunity to do developmental editing for some dear friends of mine. Each of them approached me, separately, with their brainchild, their creation, their work of.... fiction. Or not. =) Editing is a task of trust and faith. They trust that I will treat their baby kindly. I have faith that I can tell them what I really think without them freaking out. Each one of them wrote therapy. Their works were thinly-veiled references to themselves, their situations, their inner thoughts. And every one of them was horrified at how much of themselves they'd accidentally written into their "fiction". One of these folks, the Writer At Large, blogged about his reaction to this realization here. The rest of this post is my response to him... Your baggage shines through... but you know, that's part and parcel of your voice, the thing that makes it your writing, the thing that stamps your writing with your uniqueness. The only difference between fiction and self-indulgence is that fiction is publishable and self-indulgence, well, that's blogging. =) I have an entire readership over on my blog that's doing nothing more than reading about various facets of my personal baggage, brought out to the light of day, dusted off, given a bit of polish, and set up for commentary. The human drama is made of these little gems. And people deeply want to identify with them. They want to know that the upholstery inside your head matches the curtains they have in theirs. It makes the echoing vasty nothingness of reality seem a little friendlier, a little more populated. The thing that makes fiction superior to blogging is its generic-ness. When you're reading my blog, you're reading *me*, unequivocally. But when you're reading a story, that character could be anyone. Could be the author, could be the reader, could be the reader's neighbor; the neutrality of characterization allows people to pick up those drapings and try them on for size. It's an excellent psychological and metaphysical exercise. And it takes someone gifted to create that space and hold it, for their readers. So quit worrying about your slip showing. And just keep writing. =) =) =) ...and if you need an editor, well, you all know where to find me.

FatBrain Revisited

2006-06-13T16:56:00.000-07:00

Some days, the camera hates you. And some days, it's a totally different story. There's this great discussion in "What The Bleep Do We Know?" about how the camera sees more than the eye, because it sees "without prejudice and without judgment." You've all read my original FatBrain blog. It all started with a picture. This picture, in fact: Horrifying, no? So. Remember my blog about The World Famous Cod Hole? Go read it. And then, come back and look at this photo: Same girl. Less than a month later. Just add water. Sure, I'm wearing a PFD in this one, but I think the difference is pretty plain to see. I could call it plain vanity. But I think it's far more than that. I think it's another of those signposts; the ones that say "get the heck outta there, you fool! Your lifestyle's killing you!" I mean, really. Which of those two pictures would you rather be in? It's not FatBrain after all. It's LifestyleBrain. Who knew?

Kestrel's One!!!!

2006-05-31T06:40:00.000-07:00

On his first birthday, Mr Kestrel Bastian thoroughly enjoyed his fresh-made strawberry ice cream, tried really hard to take some more steps, and cuddled up a storm with everyone who would pick him up. He played balloon forests with Rowan, had a short and very splashy bath, and then off to sleep. All in all, a fabulous day. Pictures to be uploaded this weekend, once I'm out of class. Throughout the day, I kept (natch) coming back to me... as in "this time last year I was....". Which was just a titch unsettling, because everyone around me who'd been there kept offering course correction. I remember the whole thing way more rosily than they do. They seem to remember a lot of sweating, swearing, and screaming that I have no recollection of at all. I remember being tired, I remember feeling hopeless, I remember Jason giving me the biggest reality check of my entire life, and I remember the actual moment of giving birth. The rest is sort of a blur. For a bit of nostalgia, the whole tale is here.

Ahoy! -- The Value of a Father

2006-05-29T17:07:00.000-07:00

This is so not where I thought this was going to go. But you know, sometimes life just rears up and smacks you on the offside when you aren't paying attention. It was my intent to blog about my adventures this week on the water. But instead, I'm going to blog about fathers. Because today's a holiday, I overestimated the amount of time it was going to take to get me to OCSC, and I arrived nearly an hour early. Which was actualy great; I got to walk down around the docks, sipping a gorgeous cup of strategically-gingered chamomile tea. I then moseyed up into the club room, to await my course. In walks a man. And I nearly break my neck doubletaking. He looks like The Bear. He talks like The Bear. He's the same size, holds himself the same way, even has the same physical and vocal mannerisms. He introduced himself immediately... his name is Bruce, he's my instructor. And thus is ruined the first few hours of my class, as I'm distracted from my primary mission (to determine the difference between heading close hauled versus beam reaching, and knowing which lines to tug and which way to move the tiller to accomplish those things), by a really incredible mental game of "what if". My regular readers may remember some of my earlier blogs about the Bear. He's had an incredibly tough life, and has the tracks on his body and his heart to show it. He's in poor physical health, and about similar mental attitude. He has never been a man who believed in either optimism nor in praise, and frankly, with an eye to where he's been, that's pretty understandable (even while it's been difficult sometimes, as his child, to cope with). Bruce is none of these things. He stands tall, his gaze is sharp, he hops about the moving boat like he belongs there, which he certainly does. He regularly bursts out with comments about how gorgeous the day is, how perfect the weather, what smashing good crew we're all shaping up to be. My classmates and I all beam with pride. Over the course of the day, we get to know Bruce. He was born in Oakland, same as the Bear. He went to Viet Nam about the same time as the Bear, except as Army rather than Navy. He's had a series of business ventures fall out from under him. He enjoys "things that go fast" and has a history of racing, but boats instead of cars...which is a spectacular case of mirror image with The Bear, such that the symmetry made me laugh out loud when Bruce said it. Because only in this world would the Navy guy grow up to race cars and the Army guy grow up to race boats. But anyway.... With so many things the same, I was wracking my brains, just wracking them, to figure out what the singular difference was, where the turning point happened between Bruce and Bear. And then the comment was made. Bruce had a father. Who taught him to sail when he was 10. And from then, he was "seriously hooked". His love of boats has guided the rest of his life. "Kept me out of trouble" he said. The Bear most certainly did not. He had a paternal arrangement, but it wasn't a dad. It wasn't someone who would take the time to take a kid out and show him the joys of anything. The most you could say was that the Bear's dad kept him fed, clothed, and sheltered. It brings to mind the stories about how young male elephants without old bulls around become hard-living thugs, and stampede and destroy. To the point where wildlife managers will bring bulls into territories with troublesome youth, to keep them in line. Because there's something about the male psyche, whether human or otherwise, that requires the guidance of older males to thrive. Notice, that's "guidance". Not just "presence". It matters, greatly, apparently. I know the Bear and Bruce have walked their own karmic paths, learned their own lessons, and have lived their own lives in their own ways. I won't demean either's journey by naming one "better" than the other. Sometimes the roughest roads teach the greatest lessons. But I am more solidly committed than I ever have been before (and that's saying a whole lot) to keeping my boys in tight with their father.

Ahoy!

2006-05-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

This week, I'm having an adventure. I've taken a week off from my normal employment, and I'm taking a Basic Keelboat sailing course through OCSC. I'll try to blog about it when I get home at night. Talking to Jason last night, I realized that I'm not nearly as nervous as I normally would be about such an undertaking. I remember not sleeping the night before each and every one of my dive classes, for instance. But last night, I slept like a baby. Well, like a woman with two babies. OK, not at all, but for utterly different reasons (who knew that Kes could pee that much? Or that Rowan could ask, in his angelic little voice, for so many drinks of water?) I think that when you get older, you understand your personal limitations and aptitudes a bit more, and you kinda know what you're in for. You also understand, somewhat cynically, that if you're paying people for a course, they've got a vested interest in getting you through. That last bit comes from many, many scuba classes taught. It's so disorenting looking at a course setup from this side instead of that side. But kind of amusing. I'm spotting euphemisms and backdoors in the course staff's speech from a mile off. And quietly allowing them their space, because I know, oh man, I know what they're thinking. And I'm going to do my darnedest not to be the sort of nightmare I've so often had. Antonia, the manager of the place, had approached me to perhaps teach charter scuba classes for the school. So I might, with whiplash-like speed, get to see the other side of that equation again. I like the idea of earning the cash to continue on with the courses by teaching, myself. There's a symmetry to it that appeals. I just need to find an adequate facility in the area, and so far, my search isn't bearing fruit. I'm also finding it gut-wrenching to think about being away from my boyos all day every day for five straight days. And realized, this morning, that this is what most working parents do. My heart's out to all of you; I have no idea how you stand it. It'll be interesting to see how this affects my nursing relationships; Kes is totally ready to wean, and this might just do it. Rowan... is a different story. But maybe with some encouragement, this could be it?

My Boys Done Well

2006-05-22T21:00:00.000-07:00

...no no, my other boys.

Salty Walt
and the Rattlin Ratlines. They won SFWeekly's
Best Sea Shanty Band I am just beside myself with glee. Check em out!!

A Week Off the Wagon

2006-05-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

Last week, I spent the entire week in the old-flourescent-lit, windowless, rat-infested basement of Moscone South, editing articles for the JavaOne conference. I arrived in the AM, and stayed through the late PM, four days straight. Sun bought all my meals. Oh. My. God. I had no idea, really, how amazingly, wildly different, my diet really is. I mean, sure, I knew, but after a while, what you eat is what you eat, and you lose track of it being anything but normal. It has been three days since we got home, and I'm still feeling like crap, despite cleaning my diet back up. (Doesn't help that I threw my neck out due to hours of staring at a monitor, and I'm on icepacks pretty much constantly). I had read about "cooked food hangovers", and thought them to be exaggeration. But I am now, officially, a believer. What's cool is that Jason is too. He felt crappy enough that we ended up buying Thursday night's dinner ourselves, and headed out to a raw food restaurant in the City (Alive!). It was both detox and comparison shopping. I had sorta wondered how what I prepare compares to what other raw fooders do, and came away pleased with myself. So that was nice. So after four days, the total triage report:

lower energy
increased body odor (I don't use deodorant at home, and after two days on cooked food, I needed it)
increased mucus production (that gross coating on your tongue? Ugh! and random snotty nose upon exertion)
mental fuzzyness (which, in desperation, I tried to fix with a Dr. Pepper. Stupid!)
irritability
whacko milk production
achey and stiff
digestive difficulties (I'll leave that to your imagination)

As far as Kestrel's ECing, it went straight out the window. Several stealth nighttime pees, totally variable poop pattern; we haven't gone through so many pairs of Poquitos since he was a newborn. Ridiculous. If ECing was like that, I'd have trouble keeping up, no doubt. What's stupid is that I even made good choices, from what was offered me. Fruit for breakfast (mostly melon, which is part of what threw Kestrel off. Rowan's pee frequency also increased, but he's totally on top of it), salads for lunch when the opportunity was there, tortilla-less fajitas on the day that was lunch.... I really did modify intensely. And it still killed me. Sometimes, it takes a brick to the head to provide motivation. I came home and bonded intensely with my CSA-delivered veggies. I've been living on salads and smoothies since we got back. And I'm recovering. But I'm totally in shock, wondering how most people *function* on the kind of food that was being provided (which most of my coworkers thought was "pretty good".) Pass the kale.

Letter To Laura (Bush)

2006-05-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

Got this in my inbox, from Codepink:

On Mother's Day weekend, May 13-14, we will bring 3,000 roses to grieving mothers of wounded soldiers who have little to celebrate this Mother’s Day. This central part of our 24-hour vigil honors the mothers and other women who have paid the greatest price for this administration’s senseless war on Iraq. Our partners at Working for Change, the activist arm of Working Assets Funding Service, has helped us raise the money for this action, helping us send a strong message to the occupants of the White House and the country: Mothers Say NO to war.

We have received thousands of letters from you to Laura asking her to tell Bush end the war in Iraq. Now we've been invited by Working for Change to join their Mother's Day action and send her another letter: this time not to invade Iran. Please join Working for Change and send a letter to the First Lady to urge her not to let her husband start another catastrophic, costly war in Iran.

President Bush was unwilling to listen to intelligence specialists, who told him that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. He was unwilling to listen to military specialists, who told him that he would need a much larger force to occupy Iraq and prevent civil war. If he won't listen to his advisers, let's see if he will listen to his wife.

This Mother's Day, President Bush and his wife Laura will take joy in their daughters. But for thousands of mothers across America, past years' joy will now be replaced by unspeakable grief. They will usher in this Mother's Day not as a celebration of motherhood, but as one more painful reminder of an irreparable loss.

Now, the President is rattling his saber at Iran. Despite the fact that top experts say that Iran is at least ten years away from a working nuclear weapon, recent news reports have indicated that the Bush Administration is already planning offensive military operations -- and even, ironically, the use of nuclear bombs -- against Iran.

Please, this Mother’s Day, celebrate by asking Laura Bush to tell the President to get out of Iraq, and not to Invade Iran .
See you in the streets on Mother's Day, Allison, Dana, Farida, Gael, Jodie, Medea, Nancy, Rae and Tiffany

I've already sent in my donation for a rose to be tied to the white house fence, in honor of the fallen. And now, here's my letter to Laura.

To Laura Bush, First Lady of the United States of America: We're all mothers. And they're all someone's baby. We can dress them up in trappings that make us comfortable calling them "enemy", but somewhere, they have a mother that will grieve horribly when they're gone. Please, please, please, ask your husband to stop this madness. Plenty of Presidents have gained notoriety by going to war. None has ever gained the adoration of his people by having the courage to stop. Let George be the first.

Here's where you can send your letter: http://www.workingforchange.com/activism/action.cfm?itemid=20734 Go do it. Now. Before someone else's baby dies.

FatBrain Strikes

2006-05-05T07:21:00.000-07:00

It started innocently enough. A friend took a snapshot of me, Kestrel, Catalina (the other baby he was playing with), and her mommy. Her mommy was gorgeous. Thin, made-up, perfect hair, generally just all-around put together. I looked like absolute hell. I was making a bad face, but.... but.... I'm fat. For the first time ever in my life, having babies has led me down the metabolic road to hell. It's not like I didn't know this was coming. I'd actually taken advantage of the presence of a scale in the home I was visiting (I don't own one, and haven't weighed myself since just after I had Kestrel) to find out the damage. The numbers aren't that bad; I weigh what I weighed before Rowan was born. Except that then, those numbers indicated a body that went to the gym for at least an hour every stinkin day and had muscles so solid that I got recruited for the gym's bodybuilding team even while 6 months pregnant with Rowan, and now they indicate a body that cleans up toddler food leavings by eating them herself. I'm wearing my pre-pregnancy clothes, too. Except for jeans, since my hips have spread and there's not a darned thing I can do about that short of wrapping myself like a mummy. If a pelvis is going to move around to let a baby out, it's never going back to the way it was before. I'm cool with that. But why, oh why, does it need to keep that extra bit of padding on top??? The female body metabolism shifts radically during nursing, so that fat reserves are held onto for dear life... the life of the baby, to be precise. When a woman's body is providing nourishment for a baby, it tends to fortify against any possible disruption of the food supply, and that means keeping fat around. So that means that evolutionarily speaking, I'm a winner. The genes for survival are there. Very little comfort, that, but there you have it. The clearest statement I can find for how culture and evolution can at times be at cross-purpose. It would help if I lived in a culture where postpartum poundage was recognized as a sign of a mother's dedication rather than a signal that she'd gone badly to seed. Alas, we worship the maiden and despise the mother and crone here in the Western World. Women with children are the #2 most ignored group of people anywhere, just behind old women. I'll never be a maiden again, and I'm good with that. I *am* a mother, I have walked that valley, I have two beautiful boys and a whole lot of good story material to show for it. I just wish that, as capable as I am of bucking society's trend in every other arena of life, I didn't recoil in horror at my own photographs. Besides the Mommy Metabolism, of course, the two key factors to personal poundage are diet and exercise. We've been flirting with a raw diet for months now, and I've been vegan for about a year, with slipups now and then for scrambled eggs and gourmet cheese. So it's not like my caloric intake is all that dramatic. I'm a fruit and veggie girl. So, very little hope for help there. It's the lack of real exercise that's killing me. Who amongst us walking the Mommy Way has time for a real workout like in the pre-mommy days? Certainly not me, not if I want to keep my domestic scene from degenerating into utter chaos. And while life with a toddler and a pre-toddler does provide opportunities for incredible activity, it's seldom the sustained activity that's required. It's usually just individual instances of heart-pounding stress, with great stretches of not much in the middle. The challenge, going forward, is acceptance. Isn't it always, though? Acceptance of my mommy body, acceptance of my time limitations, acceptance of my role as Provider of Primary Nutrition to my boyo. And in the meantime, maybe I should run around the block a few times.

Welcome, Baby Boy R!!!!!!

2006-05-04T08:40:00.000-07:00

Last night, my pal FR had her baby. He came to the world in the usual way; a peaceful, gentle, home waterbirth. Nothing remarkable. Except that he's a VBAC baby, and FR had to fight, research, negotiate, plan, and stress to have that unremarkable birth. Since she told me she was in labor, I've been pacing the floor, lighting candles, saying prayers, and sending good vibes. I had three dreams about her birth last night. I've been staying casually (ha!) within earshot of the phone (it was in the bathroom with me when I showered this morning), and checking my email so compulsively I look like a hampster in a research lab. I just got the call. She sounds like I did after my homebirth VBAC. Stunned. Blissed-out. Thrilled. Tired (oh, man, tired). But *alive*. Alive in a way you just can't describe adequately. I am sitting here bouncing up and down, getting all teary-eyed, and rejoicing. Another birth, reclaimed. Welcome, welcome little baby boy. May you grow to be a joy to your parents, a delight to your older sister, a credit to your family, and a living example to every woman out there who wants to do what your Mama just did. I hope you understand, some day, what she had to do to give you the very best start in the whole world, and that you honor her for it.

A Weekend Portrait: Avocation Exercised

2006-04-23T19:06:00.000-07:00

It's dusk on Sunday. Cesar and Danni are over, Danni riding herd on the Boyos and Cesar mowing the lawn for us. The lovely, grounding smell of fresh-cut grass wafts through the open window. Inside, I am sitting crosslegged on the bed, balancing Darth Vaio on my lap. They do call this behemoth of a machine a laptop, but seriously, it's more like a desktop slightly crushed. But the 17" screen is fabulous, and worth the extra weight and heat. There's a cup of hot tea on the bedstead to my right. The cup, a Mara of Mexico mug, in the Pisces design, two swirling fishes blending into one earth-toned yin-yang shape. The mug is heavy, solid, deeply comforting. Full, at this moment, of agave-nectar-laced Sandman tea. The mug is symbolic on several levels; a reminder of what I'm here to do. It's a gift from AstroGirl, a thank you for editing a piece for her. And that's what I'm doing. Editing. And oddly enough, it feels really, really good. I'm about 1/3 of the way through Angela's novel. And I am enthralled. So enthralled that I keep getting pulled along by the story and forget to make comments where they're necessary. I do this when I do pleasure reading; my internal editor is usually perking along in my backbrain, making all the little tweaks it feels the editors at the big fiction houses were remiss in ignoring. I know I'm reading something really good when even my internal editor shuts up and gets swept away by narrative. There's nothing that remarkable about me editing; that's what I do in my day job, is turn articles on the Java programming language and Java technologies into marketable and readable english for Sun Microsystems. But that's technical editing. It's a very different bear than this is. In that editing world, it's about technical credibility, and reader engagement be damned. It's about imparting expertise, and writing only enough prose to glue the desired code samples together coherently. But fiction editing is a whole different kettle of, well, fish, actually. I find the two fish on my mug a lovely metaphor for the two priorities in writing; imparting information, and imparting narrative. The two swirl around, and it's pretty fruitless to argue about which should rightfully be on top, since they're equally slippery critters. The thing about imparting narrative, which is the perview of the fiction writer, is that it's far more emotionally bound up than informative writing. This is the fourth piece I've recently edited for someone I knew, and I am blown away by how much personal information shines through the "fiction". As Angela, in her wisdom, told me, "you have to own your own shit, cause it'll scream out of the words at you." And she's right. And I'm getting far more caught up in helping my friends with their issues than I am caught up in helping them maintain first-person point of view and active voice. Really is making me look at some famous authors a little differently. But as the sun creeps down, and the kids come inside, it's time to put the work away. But I am satisfied, and it's a good way to begin a week.

Easter Every Year Thereafter

2006-04-15T19:13:00.000-07:00

My father died at Easter time. There is something horribly crushing about being the only girl in the world mourning a death when everyone around you is celebrating a resurrection. The year of my father's death, I'd spent easter vacation (cause that's what it was called way back then, before it became the more politically-correct and religion-neutral "spring break") with my father. We both knew it was the end. I was 11. He was in his 40s. He couldn't stand, couldn't sit for long either. He tried gamely to eat my creations, and was very subtle about throwing them back up as soon as I'd leave the room. I read him stories. He usually fell asleep. So I'd finish them alone, in whispers, in his darkened room, and watch him breathe, wondering if he'd stop while I was sitting there with him. Some few of my father's friends and relations came by to visit during that week. None of them had any idea how to face a death such as his with dignity and humor, and most of them bungled it in some way. And they had even less an idea how to handle a child in the middle of that death. So mostly, I sat very still, and I listened to them babble, and promised myself I would cut out my own tongue rather than sound like that when I grew up. Only someone desperately selfish uses a dying man's energy to shore up his own grief. One relation, Great Aunt Nina, knew how to handle herself. She at least had the sense to realize that I needed out of that house of death. She took me out to lunch, for a run on the beach, and then she gave me $5, to go buy myself a toy for easter. She took me to a drugstore. I don't remember which one. But they had two whole aisles devoted to easter paraphenalia. The plastic baskets, the polyester bunnies, the polystyrene eggs. Pagan/Christian polyglot in pastel panoply. I bought my father an easter basket. Even at 11, I understood that there would be no resurrection. But I had to try, you know? I remember sitting in the middle of the aisle, making people walk around me, as I stuffed the wicker with clear green fake plastic grass, fuzzy little chicks, a stuffed bunny, and hollow plastic eggs. I remember leaving them hollow. Hollow like me, hollow like my father was becoming. I left the grass in the aisle for some clerk to sweep up, like I was having to sweep up the bits. Ugly, brutal symbolism. Even for 11. Aunt Nina took me back to my father's house. And was surprised when I handed my father his basket. She hadn't seen me put it in the car. We had a little Easter festivity, the three of us. A brief interlude of forced joy. Back in the living room, Nina looked at me. Total control of her voice, despite the tears rolling down her face. "You bought that for him with the money I gave you, didn't you?" "Yeah." She left. Hurriedly. And didn't ever know that I saw her pull over at the end of the block to cry before she tried to drive on. Every year, I challenge myself to go into a drugstore, and walk the aisle of easter paraphenalia. It's still as plastic, as pastel, as it was all those years ago. Some years, I can make it through the store OK. Some years, I sit right down next to the giant inflatable rabbits and sob like a kid, which never fails to irritate or embarass someone, who's just there to do their obligatory easter shopping. It's worse in years, like this one, where Easter falls between his birthday and his death day. I don't know why. It's been even harder this year, since I realized that my older son is the spitting image of my father at the same age, and that only two other people breathing air besides me even care. This year, at the easter egg hunt, when Rowan opened the hollow plastic egg, I cried with joy. It's taken this long, for me to see, that yes, as long as we live, and remember, there is indeed a resurrection.

Infidelity: A Polemic

2006-04-15T18:33:00.000-07:00

Chatting with a friend the other day, the topic of marital infidelity came up. Apparently someone she knows is flirting on the razor edge of that particularly messy disaster, and so she and I were tossing the concept around. Talking about how the internet has lowered the threshold of infidelity to where even the most reasonable of souls are suddenly tempted beyond the edge of reason by some person a thousand miles and ten milliseconds on the other side of a keyboard away, into betraying someone in the next room. The fact is, infidelity is being duplicitous, and nothing sucks your soul out your sneakers faster than duplicity. One of the best definitions of marriage I ever read was, believe it or not, in this wacky pathological Christian broadside paper. Bathroom reading in one of the weirder homes I was ever invited to. But anyway... their definition was that marriage is a unity of purpose. Two souls pointed in the same direction for the mutual and exclusive benefit of each other and their progeny, above and beyond all else. When a person starts screwing around, whether it's bodily fluids or brainwaves that are being exchanged, your energy is no longer in unity of purpose with your spouse. And that is just dishonest. That is making the decision to take something away from your marriage (your exclusive energy) without telling them. They'll notice the drain, and just not know why. And the whole damn thing goes pear-shaped. And then no one's happy, and it's this long, agonizing thing. You've probably guessed that I am the sort of person that yanks band-aids off in one rip, and who leaps into the ocean without first checking the temperature. I knew that my relationship with my Ex was going to hell. But the day I caught myself seriously fantasizing about another man, I went home and ended it. Because my energy had already left the building, you know? And from thinking to doing is such a tiny step, hardly worth mentioning. And from there, all that's really left is the creation and cleanup of the inevitable wreckage. But then, there's this other thing. This other thing is honor. I am a big believer in the idea that if I can't do it in broad daylight in the middle of the street (modesty forgiving, obvee), I have no business doing it at all. I like to think that if any part of my life ended up on a billboard, I'd be OK with that. I have had people argue with me, about the need for secrets, the need for privacy, the need to not tell certain things to certain people. Whatever. I can smile at my reflection in the mirror, and I sleep easy at night. Most of those folks are on happy meds. My favorite author, Lois McMaster Bujold (in "A Civil Campaign", which has got to be one of the finest novels in all human history), has written that reputation is what others know about you, but honor is what you know about yourself. And that nothing is more damning than when your reputation is sterling, but your honor is shattered. And that's what we're talking about. Something that you have to change your passwords over, that you have to burn when you're done writing it, that you have to choose who sees it because of the effect it would have... it corrodes you from the inside sure as Drano on the Rocks with a twist of lemon and salt on the rim. I'm certainly not saying stick it out in a miserable relationship, and I'm pretty sure that living your life based on the phrase "stay together for the children" gets you a front row seat on one of the rings of Dante's Hell, being serenaded for all eternity by Blink 182 (who may or may not be relegated to hell, but for sure make guest appearances there). All I'm saying is... maintain your integrity. And guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And don't get confused about which is which.

Plastic Nature of Time

2006-04-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

Every morning, I wake up, and promise myself I'll post something. Then I do a quick check of email, to see how my friends and loved ones are doing. Then I notice the unpaid bill on the desk next to me, and pay that. Then I go make my morning cuppa. Then the dog needs out. Or in. And the cats need in. Or out. And food. Whether it's already there in the bowl or not. Then the baby wakes up, ready for a day of play. Then the phone rings, the inbox fills up, and before I know it, it's time for dinner and another whole day has gotten away from me. There are times when I lean against the fridge, (cause it's cool against the forehead, and because I have a magnet with the picture of the Dalai Lama, with the words "Be Stoked" across the bottom, and I like the idea of pressing forehead with HH the DL when my day's disintegrated), and ponder the reality that we do not have, as the researcher says, equal epistemic access to both past and future. See, there is nothing about time, inherently, that should make it accessable going forward but not back. It is actually strange that by doing something now, we affect the future, but not the past. This fact makes quantum physicists a little crazy (or a little crazier than they already are). Some days, it's pretty powerful motivation to try to dip my toe into the river of time one more time to see if maybe it'll come out different than it has every other time before. In the meantime, The Little Boy needs breakfast.

Just a favor for some friends...

2006-04-01T07:21:00.000-08:00

Spitting Mad: NIH State-of-the-Science Conference: Cesarean Delivery on Maternal Request

2006-03-30T19:52:00.000-08:00

Just so's y'all know what I'm rampaging about, check this out: http://videocast.nih.gov/PastEvents.asp?c=998 or if you just want to read it, go here: http://consensus.nih.gov/2006/2006CesareanSOS027html.htm#Statement. Bluntly put, these people are out of their fucking minds. And they're in charge, ostensibly, of our health. Got that? People in charge of women's health that cannot decisively determine that a planned vaginal birth is more healthy for mother and baby than an elective cesarean at 39 weeks gestation. I'm nearly beyond words just now, I'm so upset, and that should tell you all something. If you listen to all three days (which I didn't, because I just knew I'd die), you'd have noticed something. You'd have noticed a lot of men and a lot of MDs and very few women. Very few survivors. One woman's daughter, after listening to them go on, remarked that it sounded to her like they think that babies have fangs. If this is truly the state of things, if these ...these.... oh, adequate terms of opprobrium elude me, I'm so upset..... people... can't figure out the difference between coerced cesarean and maternal request with Amber Marlowe's case still in the freaking courts, how can they think their way through anything??? It is apparently not about birth. Or about common sense. Or about faith that maybe God/ess made us OK. Or about health either, in any demonstrable, supported-by-the-goddamned-research kind of way. It is about power. It is about control. I have little flashes of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale going through my brain right now. If they can't tell the difference between real birth and technocratic birth, then we are far more doomed than we think. I could keep going... in fact, this may end up being the most heavily edited blog I've ever posted. They can't figure out why the VBAC rate is plummeting yet the elective cesarean rate is skyrocketing. I would have loved to have one of them come along with me in my search for a care provider willing to work with me in my VBAC. They can't figure out why primary cesareans are skyrocketing. They should read their own press. Their base assumptions are flawed, their logic is flawed... I'm screaming, inside my head, on so many levels, I'm quite sure my eyeballs are going to shatter from the reverb. I used to think that "women's rights" were wrapped up in Roe V Wade. I was so wrong. The real fight is here. Right here. Everything that matters starts with birth.

The American Travel Cringe

2006-03-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

Since the first time I found myself staring up into a skyful of stars I didn't recognize, I have adored Australia. There is something about it that makes you want to just roll around, revelling in the spirit of the place. After my first visit, I became a minor student of Australian culture. Not so much the Fosters-and-INXS kind of export culture, but the beetroot-on-burger kind. And stumbled upon the Australian Cultural Cringe. It certainly explained why Australia, despite all reasons why it should be so, was not yet the center of the universe. But then again, I'm an American. A nation that prides itself on knowing more about everything than anyone, but still supports the following embarassing statistics:

Only 27 percent of American adults hold a valid passport
25 percent of American adults have never left the U.S.
Only 36 percent have visited more than two countries
Only 42 percent of Americans have ever held a U.S. passport

You want cringe? *That* is material for cringing. The American Travel Cringe. My pal Isabel is not a product of America, directly, having been raised in Turkey, and then ports, well, everywhere. She's utterly fearless. Her blog about packing up and walking the Camino de Santiago with her cat Arthur is linked to on the right nav. I tell bits of her story to people, and they freak. Spain? A woman? Alone? With a cat??? The logistics freak them out. The very notion that it's an utterly doable thing, even if she did sidetrack into other fabulous adventures, is ungraspable for a lot of people. I'm finally getting around to getting Kestrel's birth certificate, only because I need to get his passport, since he's over six months old and therefore needs one now, to get out of here should we be stricken by wanderlust. I was mentioning this to a work acquaintance the other day, and they were flabbergasted. The mere idea of a passport for a baby was so... unusual. But then again, this adult I was speaking to didn't have one. Hadn't ever left the country, and so hadn't ever needed one. How bizarre and insular is that? We live within one border, we speak one language, we eat one hideous diet, we watch one television, and we think that's The World. And now who's cringing?

Ain't Worth the Stink II: What's in a Name?

2006-03-22T09:31:00.000-08:00

In my first marriage, I kept my surname. Call it providence, call it premonition, but I knew I needed to keep my name. Which made it vastly easier to reassert myself when it all came tumbling down. As for my first name, my Ex had a nickname for me that was an abbreviation of my full name, that nobody liked. Even the sound was a little irritating. Fast forward to second marriage. Well, second dating. Jason, within weeks of our first meeting, began calling me Ree. Ree! Try saying it without a little smile or a squeak entering your voice. If you try to yell it, glower it, say it menacingly, the ending vowel sound twists, and it isn't Ree any more, it's something else. Ree somehow stuck. All kinds of people don't even know my birth name, because Ree is more.... well, it's way more who I am now. And then, there's the last name. I knew, deeply, that I wanted to be a Unified Front with Jason. And that meant we had to have the same last name. It just felt right. And during that time, between Marriage 1 and Marriage 2, I'd realized that actually, the Fergusons I come from are a pretty miserable band of folks (who are almost without exception dead, and so utterly beyond offence at anything I write here.) I only know one other Ferguson, my pal Daymon, whose blog is linked to in the left nav here. Hella funny guy. He and I used to bag on our banjo-picking pinchmark white-trash ancestors with abandon. Fun stuff...but I digress. I was stoked to end my line of Fergusons with my marriage. Tah-dah! Ferguson eradication! Imagine my chagrin and dismay when the two worlds merged, horribly, on a credit card solicitation (I'm beginning to think they're portals to hell, dropped in bulk shipment.) Ree Ferguson. Ugh! Ugh ugh ugh! Even typing it gives me the creepies. The symbol of my survival and triumph, paired with, well, the symbol of my colorfully alcoholic and wildly disfunctional ancestors. Concurrently enraged and chagrined, I set out to trace the heinous pairing back to its source. Oh goodness. Seems I'd left traces of my old name all over the place. My PADI instructor card. My REI membership. My freaking credit report (speaking of a hellmouth. But yet again, I digress). I've been a Hudson for nearly six years at this point, but there were still all these weird little lingering bits of... well, of trapped energy. Trapped in the past, anchoring some little bit of me back there. It's been really illuminating, figuring out which Items of the Name to eradicate with tactical nuclear devices, and which things to take out, dust off, pretty up, and replace within the structure of my new (real?) life. Bits of me I see fit to nurture, bits of me that died along the way. Cleaning house this deeply feels really good. I feel all kinds of psychic dust bunnies being swept out of corners they've lurked in for, well, six years, and I'm applying hairspray and a match to the lot of them. I suppose on the mercantilist upside, at least from here on, I can tell the charming operators on the "Do Not Contact" phones exactly how out of date the lists they're purchasing are.

It Ain't Worth The Stink

2006-03-08T10:55:00.000-08:00

I've been watching "What the Bleep Do We Know" semi-compulsively over the last few days (if you've never seen it, stop reading this RIGHT NOW and go find a copy!!!!!). Love that film. Love how it stretches my brain into new and interesting shapes. Anyway...in a fabulous act of synchronicity, my pal Pam sent me a feng shui kit. A book, some crystals, a mirror. So I'm reading that, with the dialog from What the Bleep in the back of my head. And I'm realizing some things. It is in our nature, apparently, to acquire material stuff, and then drag it along with us. And what's more, we also accumulate the junk our ancestors collected, and that stuff is more... fraught... than the stuff we accumulate for ourselves. But the stuff is memorabilia, carried around for the purpose of evoking memory. Just ask anyone. As a characteristic of Life on Planet Earth, we human beings have glitches. We have bad days, worse days, catastrophic gut-wrenching moments. It happens. Just ask anyone. According to the biochemists, and the psychiatrists, your brain synapes wire to each other associatively. So if you associate something with someone, the memory synapse associated with the person co-wires to the synapse associated to the something. Which is to say... when you see the thing, you remember the person, and all the co-wiring that's associated with them. Good days, bad days, catastrophic, gut-wrenching days. Fascinatingly, the brain cannot tell the difference between something in storage in your head (memory), and something you're seeing. Which means that a flash of memory of a train wreck is the very same thing as being at the train wreck originally. So whenever you see your stuff, it's the same as reminding yourself of the drama associated with it. Which psychologically and biochemically speaking, means you are anchoring yourself to the drama of the past. With all that in mind, if I asked you if I should keep anything at all that reminds me of my ex, what would you say? You'd say hell no, wouldn't you? Anything at all that reminds me of him should be pitched with great enthusiasm, right? And yet, when I hold up the objects, and say, "should I ditch this?" people almost always tell me no. It's worth money. Or it's useful somehow. Or I might need it. Or whatever reason. And every time I look at those things, my body gets treated to a biochemical wash of, well, catastrophic gut-wrenching. So I am once again rampaging through my home like a tornado, getting rid of belongings. Things that have intrinsic value, but psychic stink. And it's weird how much lighter I feel, and I'm not even finished yet. I wonder how good it's going to feel when I'm done...

What a Continuum Must Be Like

2006-03-06T08:06:00.000-08:00

This weekend, Nana and Ria came to visit, for the first time since Kestrel was born. And I was given a breathtaking glimpse as to what it must be like to raise children within an intact continuum. For those not familiar with the idea, the Continuum Concept is a book by Jean Liedloff, that examines the idea that babies are born with certain expectations of family and social structure, called a continuum, and that part of what's so screwed up about our culture is that our continuum is broken. (I'm grossly oversimplifying here. Go read the book. Really.) I've long believed that the nuclear family is a bad idea. No sane human being gives one individual sole responsibility for multiple children and then locks that individual into social isolation, while simultaneously delivering the cultural message that the work they do is without value. It's an ugly setup, a one-two punch that demoralizes and devalues homemaking and careproviding, while simultaneously creating an environment of extreme stress and scarcity for a child. I mean, of course a child who has to constantly fight with siblings, the housecleaning, the bills, the cooking, etc., to get its needs met, is going to grow up with self-esteem issues. It's nearly a given. So picture if you will, a well-oiled domestic machine. Four adults, two children. There's always one adult for playing, one for working, one for resting, and one to do whatever occurs to them. As a person tires of one activity, they swap smoothly with someone else in a different activity. Each person stays within their own comfort zone, and what's more, they're *mindful* about what they're doing, because it's the thing they've chosen to spend their energy on, not something they're forced into doing because it must be done and there's no one else to do it. It was bliss. The kids noticed, too. By Sunday afternoon, when everyone had left, both boys were happy, grounded little people, ready to calmly cuddle down to sleep. And I was right there with them. And today, I'm back to the normal nuclear grind, singlehandedly working, riding herd on two boys, and trying to stay on top of the mountain of housework. I'm stressed, and so are the boys. They can tell I'm not focusing on them, so the escallation for attention has started. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I'm just a weener. Or maybe, I just really miss my continuum.

Love Story Too ~*~ A Belated Valentine

2006-02-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

I'm mad at you. I work hard to make healthy meals, and you and The Little Boy just snuck out for Jack in the Box. And The Little Boy was excited, because he and his Papa went and got yummy things, and I'm sorry you weren't there Mama, but here I saved you a french fry! I'm frustrated with you. Because the bed is covered with laundry to be folded, because the dishes need to be done, because I haven't figured out dinner for tonight. Because the walls need to be painted from our remodeling, because the carpet is thrashed, because there are bills to be paid. And I'm already tapped out, and wondering where the treadmill stops. All I want is a nap. A nap like The Baby in the other room is having. The Baby, who, when I tiptoe in to watch him sleep, has an angel's face. Yours, to be precise. So I'm thinking of you. We have photos of us at our wedding, us on our honeymoon, hung (crookedly) on our walls. I walk slowly down that hall (which needs to be vacuumed), and I pause to touch them. For an instant, I'm on the beach in Fiji, where you proposed to me. I'm smelling the salt spray around us on the beach in California, where we got married. I'm barefoot and the sun is shining. And we're walking on those beaches, talking about our family, the family we're going to make. I am mad about the french fry. But how can I stay mad? It's from my little I Love You. The walking, laughing, playing, little "I Love You" that we made. Together. This life? This is our love story, the one we make together, the one we're making every single day, in story time and lunch time, sleep time and bath time. In hours and in minutes, in our tasks as they come to us, this is the love we've made. I can't stay mad. Not even for a french fry.

Baby Clothes

2006-02-26T12:47:00.000-08:00

I'm biting the bullet. I'm cleaning out the baby clothes. Kestrel is growing like a little weed. Just shy of nine months, he's already outgrown anything smaller than 12mos. Which means that there's a huge amount of unwearable stuff in his dresser drawers. And every time I go in there, charged with purpose, determined to clean out the clutter, I end up sitting on the bed crying. After Rowan, it was sort of like a prayer to clean, fold, and store his little things, for use again with another baby. His little shirts and pants and socks, filled with memory, put away for hope. Two little guys later, the clothes are of course stained, stretched out of shape, and not nearly so spectacularly crisp as they began; much like me, actually. I hold a tiny tshirt up to my belly, and laugh, because it's too depressing to carry the metaphor too far. But of course, once started... There's far more clothing here than we ever actually used. There are tiny things never even used, since both boys were born gargantuan. Do I keep them in hopes that a third baby might be tiny enough? Or do I give up completely, and ditch everything smaller than 12 months, on the theory that subsequent babies just get bigger? I've allowed myself one space bag for heirlooms. One small bag (shrinkwrappable, that's the thing of it) to hold the bits I cannot bear to part with, that I'll want to give the boys for when they have babies themselves. Items they wore in particularly beautiful pictures. The outfit we bought Rowan when we were in Hawaii. The jammies he was wearing the night Kestrel was born. That kind of thing. I have to keep this positive. I am giving baby clothes to people who need them right now. People on Freecycle, people who have no money and new babies who need clothes. It's silly to keep this stuff bound up in my closets forever. Energy flows best when it flows, not when it's trapped. Maybe the joy that's ground into the clothing's fibers along with the watercolor stains and the jelly streak will seep into those other children, and for no good reason one day, those babies will smile. Am I convincing you? I'm not sure I'm convincing myself... I can't separate the issue of clothing from the issue of family size. Every time I put one tiny pair of socks in the freecycle pile, I feel like I'm giving away my option for another baby. Every time I clean a drawer out, though, I can feel my energy lift, as the mash and the clutter moves on, feng shui-style. Maybe I'm clearing out the energy for another child. Or maybe I'm tidying up the energy for the two I have. Am I convincing you? I'm not sure I'm convincing myself. At all. But I'll keep trying.

Children and Museums: The Crime of Babywearing

2006-02-20T12:06:00.000-08:00

Our family attempted to visit the De Young Museum on February 15th. Midway through our visit, we were asked to leave. What had we done wrong? My husband and I were "wearing" both boys (one eight months old, one three and a half) in sling-style soft back carriers. You see.... you're not allowed to wear backpacks in the De Young. They're afraid you'll lose track of your personal boundaries, and bash into something. Doubly so with children. Therefore, they must be in strollers, or on your front. This is a deeply child-hostile policy, on three fronts. The first front is on a comfort/attention/behavior viewpoint. Parents who take their children out into the world bear, in my opinon, an obligation to keep them entertained, mannerly, and engaged. The museum's policy makes that all but impossible. The second front is a philosophical consideration. People appreciate what they know. If you're going to raise a child who appreciates art, you must expose them to it in a positive way, get them excited about it. How in the world are you to do that, if attending a museum is an uncomfortable, awkward, boring experience? Third, it assumes that the babywearing parent is somehow unconscious of where their child is. That would be analogous to banning wheelchairs, because the handicapped person might lose track of where their wheels are. It sorely underestimates the union between the babywearing dyad. The museum's current policy on back carries marginalizes those of us who are both willing and able to control our children, and want very much to introduce them not only to art, but to the art of correct social behavior in such facilities. In discussing my upset with other babywearing, museum-going parents, I've discovered that the experience, with regards to the acceptance of soft back-carriers, is inconsistent. The Metropolitan Museum in New York rents them for use. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art consistently asks people babywearing to leave. And about half of the parents who've visited the De Young were asked to leave, while the other half enjoyed their visits uninterrupted. It's my hope that some sort of compromise, or waiver policy, may be achieved, not only at the De Young, but at museums everywhere. I also understand that there may be some sort of insurance or other complication that makes that unattainable in the short term. But as babywearing parents, I think it's incumbent on us to challenge these sorts of policies, and do what we can to educate policymakers. If you have a picture of you and your child in a back carry at a museum location, I would very much appreciate it if you'd send it along for inclusion. Should that fail to have the desired effect, next stop is a letter-writing campaign. Stay tuned, either for the Happy Dance, or the Call to Action, whichever's necessary. =) Thanks to everyone who's offered me support in this so far. I know it seems a little thing. But I fully intend to raise children who are comfortable in cultural institutions, and know how to behave appropriately, and I will not allow some poorly-thought-out policy get in my way. Stay tuned. And thanks for your support.

FtG -- Quicken Smells Fear

2006-02-12T16:19:00.000-08:00

...at least, my installation of it does. It can tell when I'm nervous, when I'm insecure. It mistakes my fear of finance for a fear of software, and it acts up. Little does it know, I've been bludgeoning software into behaving well for ages. I'm not too bad with dog training either. So as the great Lois McMaster Bujold says, we're going for best two falls out of three. I'm cleaning up my files, in preparation to send them off to The Black Dragon, my mighty Tax Goddess. I'm recategorizing stuff, cleaning out duplicates, getting accounts linked properly. Basically, catching up on a year of financial housekeeping that I should have been doing all along. Funny how the spectre of the Tax Reaper makes you get all noble and upstanding. It's tricky, though, because the software is designed, well, for people who know what they're doing with money. Back when I started using Quicken, I was basically using it as an online check register. I've come a long way since then, sure, but I still don't have the financial knowledge to deeply utilize the structures built into the program by those wiser than me in such things. For instance, I got tired of my personal assets column being all blank and lonely. I own a house here in the Bay Area, and I know that despite the fact that the majority of this house still belongs truly to the bank, it's somehow considered an asset to me. Makes no sense in the real world, but we're not talking about the real world, we're talking about the Funhouse World of Finance. So I set up the account properly. And lo and behold, not only is there an account on the asset side, there's an account on the liability side, and it tracks how dismally slowly my principal is diminishing, and how much of that montly payment goes straight to loan interest. Oi! And I get confused about where different types of accounts go. How they get categorized. How they get set up within the program... I have three new knots in my back over this. But ya know, when the program told me that it could not connect to my financial institution (three separate times!), I knew precisely what to do. I put that program in its place, yes I did. It's a small victory, but it's mine. And you have to give yourself what little credits you can along the way.

Poetry, Right Now....

2006-02-07T10:54:00.000-08:00

I found this from a link from Danielle's blog. And it was too fabulous not to repost. So I am. You can go find the original here.

God Says Yes To Me by Kaylin Haught

Taken from Being Alive published by Bloodaxe Books

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked her if it was okay to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me that sometimes she said you can do just exactly what you want to Thanks God I said And is it even okay if I don't paragraph my letters Sweetcakes God said who knows where she picked that up what I'm telling you is Yes Yes Yes

Liberty, Equality, Electronically

2006-02-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

Dear readership, I have a confession to make. I am short. No, really. It's true. I've been discussing a phenom, whereby the words I write, both in emails in my various yahoogroups, and here on this blog, seem to impact folks, whereas in my real life, I can talk about some issues until I'm purple, and no one hears me. What does that have to do with being short? I have been told by quite a few people that they picture me as bigger than I am. Apparently, my shadow is larger than I (Peter Pan had the same problem; alas, I know no Wendy to stitch it back on). And stature is related to attention. Small people are assumed to have all kinds of "issues". Thank god I'm not short *and* male; everyone assumes short men have problems with their height. But not only am I short; I'm also getting older. Study after study has proven that older (read: no longer sexually available) women get worse service, less attention, and are generally marginalized within this youth-obsessive culture. The fact, and the fabulousness, of the online world, is that ideas are presented purely, and the reader is forced to take them at their value, without having physical cues or prejudices. You don't know the physical appearance, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, religious conviction, or really, anything else about the person who wrote the words. You have to take the words as written, and evaluate them purely on their own merit. And what is it that makes it so that if you can't see me, I must be just like you and you can accept what I say, but if you can, I couldn't possibly be? They say that vision is not a pure sense, that it's the combination of the data the eyes collect merged with what the brain processes. The eyes transmit roughly ten times more data than the brain uses to create the images we see. According to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Bates, most vision malfunctions are a result of either overstress of the eyes, or of mental/emotional impacts. So is it that dismissiveness of truth that happens when the messenger is Not Like Us is a function somehow of how we see them? Could it be that prejudice isn't a social malfunction, but is actually our brain's frantic attempt to throw up another filter against the overwhelming data coming in, to process it by wholesale flinging some of it beyond discussion? Wouldn't it be interesting if, after all these years of fighting for equality, for liberty, for civil rights, if all of those things were finally found in a new age of purely electronic communication?

Today I Accomplished Nothing

2006-01-30T07:17:00.000-08:00

I said that to my husband, as we were discussing our days, over dinner. "The house is a wreck," I said. Bless the man, he laughed at me. He sees things differently. There are piles of laundry, both clean and dirty. Sure, all the diapers are folded and put away, and the laundry to be folded is in piles based on who it belongs to, and the dirty is sorted into loads to go into the washer, but I didn't *finish* it. That's because Kestrel needed to practice walking around the house. Four bunches of cilantro are still sitting in the fridge, waiting for me to transform them into pesto. They've been waiting a week already. I simply didn't get around to them, because Rowan needed a story read to him. There are balls of dog fur large enough to have their own microclimates rolling around on the floors, because I haven't vacuumed in... oh.... a really long time. But that's because by the time I had an opportunity to do it, Kestrel was sleeping, and only a very great fool trades a sleeping baby for a vacuumed floor. OK, so I did manage the grocery shopping. But I didn't get everything on the list, because Kestrel started fussing, and needed to be taken home, pronto. So I'll have to go again in the next few days. Oddly, I recognized his impatience and need to get out, while people in the store were still commenting on what a happy, calm baby I had. Makes me wonder what their standard for judgement is. I did do the big bathtub-toy-washing I was planning on doing, but that's because Rowan and I made a game of throwing all the toys into the net bag, and I let him push the buttons on the washing machine (moldy skanky bath toys *love* the sanitary cycle on the washer). And then we went and cuddled up in the glider and watched Star Wars while Kestrel finished his nap. The sinkful of dirty dishes (which, unfortunately, don't love the sanitary cycle on the washer, and must be done by hand) glared at me, but I ignored them successfully. And the dozen boiled eggs are nestled safely in the fridge; I was able to manage that, stepwise, because I'd put one egg in the water, go rescue Kestrel from wherever he'd gotten himself stuck, then go put another egg in the water, then Rowan would need lego help, then go put another egg in.... times twelve. Then boil. Then cool. One dozen eggs. Would have been a fifteen minute process for a normal human being. Took me an hour. So to continue the theme of the day, instead of tackling the chores after dinner, the four of us hung out together, played silly videos on Hubby's computer, Kestrel gnawed on everything, Rowan entertained himself, the cats, and his brother with his amazing raver flashing-light whistle. The boys eventually drifted off to sleep, and I followed them soon after. Hubby let the cats out and the dog in, and then snuggled up with the rest of us. I accomplished nothing. And I accomplished everything.

Speech to the MBC, April 2005

2006-01-27T14:18:00.000-08:00

I was invited to give this speech before the California State Senate, in its hearings regarding the Midwifery Board of California, and whether or not midwives in California should be allowed to attend those attempting vaginal birth after cesarean, or VBAC. I ended up not delivering it live, due to being seven months pregnant and not up to making the journey to Sacramento. It was, however, read for me. I'm posting it here so that it doesn't end up lost forever in the files of the State, or worse, in my Sent folder...

Ladies and gentlemen.... I would like to speak to you, not as a woman who was cut open for the most fatuous of reasons, not as a woman who, because her baby was breech, or her care provider was fearful, or it was the day of the big golf game, was subjected to needless abdominal surgery. I would like to speak to you as a consumer. I don't need to appeal to your emotions or tell you my story; if you were interested in the stories of women who have survived their ceseareans, you'd be members of ICAN, and I'd not have a new thing to say to you. Here's what I will say to you, though. The wrangling between midwives, OBs, various medical regulatory boards, and insurance companies that has created the hostile VBAC climate in California has led me to embrace the idea of unassisted birth as my safest option. And it's not as radical as you might think; here in the western US, we are the daughters of frontierswomen, who had unassisted births as a matter of course, of recorded family history, and of not inconsiderable pride. There is a rich heritage there, ready to be taken up again. Which means that because you, collectively, were unwilling to work with me, were unwilling to practice unemcumbered, evidence-based, family-centered, respectful medicine...because none of you were willing to support me in VBAC, I stand before you as somewhere around $5-7k of lost revenue for the midwives of my area, or somewhere between $10K and $20K of lost revenue for my local hospital/OB. Multiply by that by the size of the family I plan on having. Then multiply that by the number of women I speak to every day on birth-related email groups and message boards, at playgrounds, at libraries and grocery stores, who are in the same position as me, and who are arriving at the same decision as me. That is a lot of lost revenue. Any retail business can tell you that one unhappy customer tells 10 other people. I am here to tell you, I'm not merely unhappy. I am angry. I am a grown, responsible, homeowning, taxpaying, fully-employed adult, and I will not sit still for some group of regulators to impose language like “patient will not be allowed a trial of labor” on me. I will not be "treated" for my normal, healthy pregnancy by someone who is less conversant with the relevant research than I am. I will not be marginalized. I am voting with my feet. I am voting with my hard-earned dollars. And I am tired of your wars. End them. Realize that we are your market, and your survival demands that you be more responsive to your market than you have been. Because we *will* keep having babies, and as long as you contine on this path of denying us VBACs, we will begin, in greater numbers, to realize that we don't need you.

What ice?

2006-01-24T13:25:00.000-08:00

Through sheerest good luck, I met a woman the other day who does all kinds of incredible travelwriting. And she's got this awesome hook, of riding cool motorcycles through fascinating places. I'm frankly in awe of her. She's got the writing career I'd only halfheartedly dreamed of having, sort of allowed my life to wash me away from, and am in the process of reclaiming. But that's not the point. Since I met her, I've been turning over in my mind, what kinds of cool hooks I have. I admit that when bowled over by someone else's sheer coolness, it's really easy to see your own life as being kinda 2-D and Not All That. I keep reading bits and pieces of her stuff, thinking "wow, motorcycles sure are a neat way to break the ice with folks all over the world. Shiny!" And while I was in the middle of some intensely biological childcare activity, the thought struck me... hey, I have kids! And kids are sure a neat way to break the ice with folks all over the world! Shiny!" Um, hello? Dense much? Maybe, just maybe, there's no freaking ice!!!! Maybe, just maybe, there's a whole world, right here and out there and everyplace in between, and we're all plenty cool here. Sans ice. Maybe the whole world is just that much more accessable than we have been led to believe, and maybe all you have to do to write about it is be in it.

Wake Up

2006-01-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

Most of the people I've run into know that Monday, January 16, is a holiday. No post. No banks. No work, for a lot of people. And when I nudge them "It's Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday" they say "oh, yeah. Right." and go on with their plans for the day. For shame. He had a dream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all have heard the soundbites. But what we are not doing is anything, damnit, anything at all to honor the man. We torture innocent people on foreign ground, and no one does anything. We slaughter mothers' sons for no damn good reason at all, and no one does anything. We shall overcome? No. We shall continue on being the monster that we were. From Alabama to Arabia, we'll continue on our merry way, wreaking most violent devastation and mayhem. My man Zack said it best. WAKE UP! (now go read those lyrics. Or better yet...here's the critical piece:

"He may be a real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed obediance to white liberal doctrine of non-violence...and embrace black nationalism Through counter-intelligence it should be possible to pinpoint potential trouble-makers...And neutralize them."

What have you done? You! Yes, you, reading this now. My friends and loved ones and those of you who've just stumbled upon this blog.... what have you done lately? Get off your ass and go do something meaningful for MLK's dream. Make today a day on, not a day off. He believed in civil rights. Go write your Representatives about stopping torture. And while you're at it, set yourself up for the 4-Minute Democracy, and then use it. He believed in nonviolence. Pick a war protest, and go participate. He believed in "the table of brotherhood." Go wrap your head around someone else's viewpoint. Need more ideas? Go here or here. And if you can't manage to do anything else, at least read the whole I Have A Dream speech. It's astonishing, once you've read it, how often you'll hear it misquoted, misrepresented, or used totally out of context. It's the least we can do to honor the speech the way he wrote it, not the way it's spun. We have no one of his stature in our dialog today. Those who would speak truth to power tend to get shot here in the Land of the (heh) Free. And through apathy and the daily grind, we have become a nation of the somnambulent. That must stop. Wake up!

The Muse Prefers a Keyboard

2006-01-13T06:58:00.000-08:00

"Yellow" says Is. "Your eyes are turning yellow." While chatting our way through a passable luncheon at a local establishment, Is and I were discussing writing. And just like that, the Inspiration struck for a piece. I quickly rattled off the first few lines, and then, as it does, the rest hung, waiting for me to type. "I have long considered the creative impulse to be a Visit - a thing of grace, not commanded or owned so much as awaited, prepared for. A thing, also, of mystery." says Loreena McKennitt. I know precisely what she means. My Muse smacks me in the back of my brain, and power-dumps three or four starting lines into my head. I have approximately five minutes to get to a keyboard, or it's gone forever. Apparently during this time, my eyes also turn yellow. I've never actually bothered to run past a mirror while scrambling for my laptop, so I was wholly unaware of this particular aspect of the creative visit. I'm usually more focused on getting to an outlet pronto, so I can catch this particular piece of grace before it hits its "use-by" date. In the interests of more fully being available to the Muse, I pinged my local geek community with questions about tiny, portable keyboard-entry notetaking devices. And got a pile of jokes about a pad and pencil. I've tried it. It just doesn't work. There's something about a keyboard that makes it all come out right that I cannot duplicate with non-keyboard writing. Certainly the Steno Solution would be cheaper and more accessable. But the Muse prefers the keyboard. "Woah." says Is. "You just lost it, didn't you?" She's right. The allotted five minute window is past, and the inspiration is so gone, I can't even remember the first few lines that I was originally smacked with. Gone. In potentia. My eyes are back to normal, apparently, and I'm nibbling absently on the remains of lunch. The french fries aren't bad, it's a pleasant day with pleasant company, and my muse has ditched my inadequately-responsive butt. In favor, I must suppose, of someone with a Treo.

Technical Aspects of Blogging

2006-01-12T05:47:00.000-08:00

My God. I thought I was just here to write. This blogging thing is more complicated than I thought. I feel like the guppy set loose in the big bad sea, with nothing but Google to protect me. I guess it's part of my inherent type-A-ness, but if I'm going to do a thing, I'm going to do it well, with an understanding of the dynamics, the scope, the possibilities. Although I am a bit tentative about writing this, simply because I know I'll come back in a few months and laugh at how sophomorish my understanding was at this time. There are books written on blogging! I am laughing my butt off even as I type this. Hello! If you're devoted to your medium, work within it! There's something profoundly disingenuous about writing a book about blogging. And one of the books I found is nothing more than... you guessed it... a collection of essays formerly hosted on blogs, but gathered together, "to give them context." I shudder. Seems to me that folks actually blogging are the ones to listen to about blogging. And there are gobs of them. ProBlogger has heaps of really deep material that I've just started dipping my big toe into. Performancing.com has the delightful trait of showing me just how much more to know there is. Blogging for Fun and Profit is a kinder and gentler version of similar data. Some of the allure of any given blog is the visual impact. I have seen some glorious custom-designed sites out there, and frankly, I want one. Natalie R. Collins' is particularly striking. I want to break free of the blogspot-generic-template, and do something really fabulous. Course, that involves talent (which I don't have) and money (which I will get more of). Good thing I have webdesigner friends who can help me out. Course, that all just hangs off your blogging platform. I hopped onto this home at Blogspot simply cause it was easy. But no. It's never just easy, is it? I'll be reviewing tools, apparently, thanks to this article from the USC Annenberg School. Frankly, I'm just grateful to, at this point in my blogging career, understand half the language in there. The comparison chart alone sorely tested my new vocabulary. For a lot of folks, blogging is the kinder, gentler gateway to the publishing world. I just found BookAngst 101 this morning, and recognize all kinds of folks I know there. And of course, How To Blog is a huge Technorati category. As it is whenever you start researching something new to you on the Web, you click, and read, and click.... I'm probably hundreds of pages deep just now. And feeling like such a small fish. Discussion, meta-discussion, uber-meta-discussion. I think the toughest thing to hang onto in this firehose of information is.... Veracity. Oh, yeah. Apparently "I just wanna write!" is some form of copout out there in the world. You have to find your group, your designation, you have to get blogrolled, you have to be listed on Technorati, you must have your RSS feed working flawlessly. Monetizing is either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you approach it. The amount of tension is just astonishing. It's like it's some perverse form of competition right out of the gate. As if there aren't enough readers out there, and each one must be courted, achieved, and possessed, to the exclusion of all else. Scarcity thinking, that. There's plenty of bandwith for all of us.

The World-Famous Cod Hole

2006-01-06T05:53:00.000-08:00

Jason was cleaning out our entertainment cabinet, and oh hurrah, found a videotape I thought I'd lost. It's the record of our excursion, back when we were fairly newly a couple, diving on a liveaboard exploring "The World Famous Cod Hole", which is a dive site way up along the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. And as you do, he immediately popped it into the VCR. I had to leave the room to cry. It's not that I don't love my life now. It's not like I wouldn't die for my boys a thousand times over. It's not like motherhood isn't the coolest, most profound, most life-altering spiritual exercise I've ever undertaken. But watching that video, I saw a girl who had a life where she could say "hey, it's been fun, but I'm heading off for two months to Fiji and Australia to go have adventures and soak in the ocean. I imagine I'll come back if I feel like it." And damn, I miss that. The soundtrack to the video that the guy on the boat did of that trip is the Des'ree song "Ya Gotta Be". It's been on fulltime on the radio in my head since Jason found the tape. Probably doesn't help that Rowan is watching the thing nearly compulsively. He is obviously having a fine time integrating this woman he knows as "Mama" with that person on the tape, who is six years younger, sporting two-inch-long screaming bleached blonde hair, and is in excellent physical shape. He seems delighted that he can now point me out. The first few watch-throughs, he mistook me for another woman on the trip; a doughy midwestern newlywed who annoyed the bejeebers out of me at the time. I suppose that's some form of cosmic come-uppance. I'm pretty sure that finding that tape is yet another notice from the Cosmic Muffin, that I really, really need to get on with my life. Or back to my life, it's hard to say which, precisely. I think that through sheerest inertia, I have somehow allowed myself to go fallow, and to sort of circle around the shallow end of the drain. Or maybe that's just what one naturally does when one gets married and has children. All things reckoned, I'm doing just fine. And then in quiet moments, Des'ree sneaks into the back of my brain, and she's saying to me,

Listen as your day unfolds Challenge what the future holds Try and keep your head up to the sky Lovers, they may cause you tears Go ahead release your fears Stand up and be counted Don't be ashamed to cry You gotta be You gotta be bad, you gotta be bold You gotta be wiser, you gotta be hard You gotta be tough, you gotta be stronger You gotta be cool, you gotta be calm You gotta stay together All I know, all I know, love will save the day

Shout OUT!!!!

2006-01-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Ohmygod!!!! You guys!!! 175 of you read this blog yesterday! I am just flattered and overwhelmed blessed and stoked, deeply deeply stoked beyond all rational description. This blog was something I started kinda for the kids, and kinda as a place to nurture and incubate my fledgling writing career, while I worked up the confidence to submit stuff to publishers, and the courage to face my rejection slips like a big girl. My first three queries, based on expansions of posts here, have elicited one total rejection, one rejection-that-led-to-acceptance, and one strong encouragement (I won't say it's an acceptance yet; it's a dedicated fan who's friends with an editor of a *very* influential genre publication, and willing to hand-deliver my submission to her.) It's a start. It's a heck of a start. Thank you all for your support; it's meant a lot so far, and I'm sure I'll keep peeking back on these stats when I feel like a total failure who's incapable of stringing two clauses together. Keep reading, keep commenting, keep emailing me. I'll do my darnedest to keep posting stuff that keeps you coming back. Write on and be stoked!

The Escapist Files

2006-01-03T06:59:00.000-08:00

I'm currently re-reading one of my favorite chits of escapist literature... An Embarassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof. It's a tale of two Toronto publishing folks who pack it in for two years and go sailing around the Caribbean. What I still can't understand, and I've read the book many, many times, is why the heck they went back at all. The narrative of the journey is pretty cool, but then it just kinda....trickles down to nothing. I just don't get it. Which says something about where my head is at, clearly. I mean, there they are. They have the boat. They have the income generation from back home. All they'd have to do is get a little frugal, and they could spin it out to three, four, five years. Or a lifetime. But no. Apparently there's something compelling about Toronto's "flat greyness" over the panoply of the Caribbean. It seems to me that once you've reached escape velocity from a life that clearly stresses you out, that involves less mental, spiritual, and physical fulfillment than the one you're leading, that what you should do is congratulate yourself on your progress, and keep going that way! I think that of the many horrors the Industrial Revolution has perpetrated on the western cultural psyche, the idea that we must, individually and collectively, settle, is one of the worst. It's common knowledge that the old idea that you pick a job/career at a particular company and stick with it, for a bit of mutual support between you and the company, is dead. No one looks out for the worker in these times. And personally, I think the drive to consumerist attainment as a measure of personal success is pretty lacking. I mean... I have a house, why do I need the house? My car gets me there, why do I need it to be a personal symbol? Just when did stuff become people, anyway? I'm thinking that if I'd gotten my hands on that boat, they'd have never pried me off.

Slippery Slope of Diapering

2006-01-01T15:13:00.000-08:00

Kestrel is seven months old. In the last five days, we've had precisely one accident. Things are going great. Things are also going great in the mobility department; he's crawling, he's pulling himself up to stand, he's just a motile creature. Needless to say, I cannot even hope to keep him on the small piddle pad in bed any more. And I just hate sleeping on the waterproofing-o-rama. I just hate it. Serendipitiously, the Mighty Inventor of "Cue Mariachis!", my pal Pilar, sent me seven of the most glorious AIOs I've ever laid eyes on, from Free Range Baby. (Conventional diaperers are gonna laugh at me now, I can hear it) I get this brainflash, that hey, since Kes is signalling 100% these days, and we're totally in the groove, I can slap an AIO on him for nighttimes, and not have to constantly wrestle with the whole bedproofing scheme. (The topic of why, if he's signalling so perfectly, I'm still such a whacko about having him sleep on waterproofing is a topic of a whole other email, if not some minor psychoanalysis. But anyway....) And this, I realize, is where the slippery slope started. It's so much easier to strap the waterproofing to the baby! Course, because I am a hardcore ECer, the very thought that he might actually pee in those gorgeous AIOs is abhorrent and just a little nauseating. So far, he hasn't. We're both sleeping better now that we don't have to wrestle him back onto the pad after each nurse, potty, and squirm session. But finally, I can see how you'd start getting lazy. Thankfully, I don't have that temptation, since Kes is one of the loudest signallers I've ever met. And of course, at 7 months, he's a mere two months shy of the expected (Chinese) graduation, and I'm keeping that firmly in mind, because well I know that if we blow that deadline, I will get remonstration with my egg rolls from Annie, my native EC coach.

Hangin' with St. Anthony of Padua

2005-12-28T17:16:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not Catholic. Neither is my stepfather, The Bear. Having had a brush with death once in my life, I can tell you that if you were ever exposed to the Catholic faith, it will rear up at those critical times. As the car I was in skidded across black ice on Siskiyou Summit towards a really huge dropoff, I found Hail Mary coming out of my face. I didn't even know I knew it, and have not been able to duplicate this feat of knee-jerk recall since then. But there it was. Apparently, Catholicism dribbles into your soul with breastmilk. Got a call from Mom a few minutes ago, that The Bear is back in the hospital, and they're looking at amputating his entire foot. Depending on his circulation. They're gonna poke around, and do what they feel is best, and let everyone know when it's over. Naturally, he's terrified. Mom's beyond terror; she's existing in that oddly calm place where you deal with the facts as they present themselves, and you do not think through the minutes. One at a time. Mindfully. The Bear and I have been somewhat estranged for quite a few years, over several cataclysmic differences in lifestyle choice, and we chose icy distance rather than the sort of fits of temper we're both predisposed to. This is a relief to all within the blast zone. Mom's been sort of hanging between us, keeping us forcibly aware of each other, if not precisely in contact. Which is fine. Things most likely would have continued on that way indefinitely. Funny how crisis makes you deeply reexamine your philosophical position on all kinds of things. So here I sit in front of my laptop, trying to figure out where my emotions are going to land. And sure enough, the Catholic thing comes creeping out. And Blessed Google lets me know that sure enough, the Man of the (Next Few) Hours (before the surgery, where all I can think of to do is pray and light candles and incense and pace holes in the floor) is St. Anthony of Padua. He's a busy guy, also the Patron Saint of against shipwrecks, against starvation, American Indians, animals, asses, barrenness, boatmen, Brazil, domestic animals, elderly people, expectant mothers, faith in the Blessed Sacrament, fishermen, harvests, horses, Lisbon, lost articles, lower animals, mail, mariners, oppressed people, Padua, Italy, paupers, poor people, Portugal, pregnant women, sailors, seekers of lost articles, shipwrecks, swineherds, Tigua Indians, travel hostesses, travellers, watermen. Whew. I'm trying to decide if it's more relevant, to the amputation angle, that he's about lost articles, or that he's about mariners. The Bear asked to speak to me, and I let him know that I thought he was going a bit out of his way, but that Rowan was going to be thrilled to have a peg-legged Pirate of a Grandfather. He liked that. I didn't make any jokes about eyepatches; that seemed somewhat gauche. Read that again: he asked to speak to me. Woah. An olive branch thrown in fear is still an olive branch, and it's just beyond churlish to do anything else but grab it out of the air with grace and compassion. But maybe even beyond that, an olive branch handed out during such a time might even mean more. You can be sure that someone in a hospital bed spends a lot of time thinking of their own mortality (and if they weren't to begin with, the crosses over the doors sure help you along that way). To be thought of as someone worthy of reaching to... I think that might mean something after all. So while I wait to hear word from the surgery theater, I've lit my candle, I've listened to the church bells from St. Basil's, the church around the corner, and had a pleasant chat with St. Anthony. We're gonna be spending a companionable evening together. Amen.

Not-So-Gross Domestic Product

2005-12-27T08:01:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of the season, my family's been working its way through biographies of religious figures. "2000 Years of Christianity", "Muhammad: The Last Prophet", "Dalai Lama: The Soul of Tibet". It's been really enlightening to think about what it must have been like living with these real human extensions of Deity. Somewhat mercifully, man-on-the-street interviews didn't exist in Jesus' time (and I wonder what his neighbors said about him???) Anyway... Something they said in the Dalai Lama biography stopped me in my tracks. "Tibet," they said "is a nation wholly devoted to the production of enlightened beings." Woah. They do not have an agricultural infrastructure. They do not sell anything (even before the brutish Chinese invaded them). They have no military. They don't produce tchotchkes. There is no such thing as a Tibetan automobile, and there never has been. They don't talk about how much money they do or don't have. They produce enlightened beings. And what's more, they export them. I can't help but contrast that with my own nation, which currently is on a campaign of exporting filth, death, destruction, and debt. Oh yeah, and McDonalds, which may qualify as all four. You just have to wonder, what it would be like to live in a place where the entire culture is focused towards creating and reincarnating beings committed to the purpose of the betterment of the human soul. Dizzying, isn't it?

Darkness, Death, and the Mother of Winter

2005-12-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

It is cold. This time of year, as everything curls in upon itself, except of course Death, who has begun his visits. I can smell his breath. I've smelled it before. I know enough to salute as He passes by, and not to hate him for the work he does, both untimely and unnecessary, beneficent and bringing relief. He'd be an interesting guest at parties, I think. And every time notice of his visits reaches me, I both cry and acknowledge. It's a cycle, and I know that. Charles deLint says that the problem with us is that we keep thinking of life as a ladder, when actually, it's a wheel. It's the Solstice. Darkest day of the year. And, according to Eastern thought, the most yin time of the year as well. And yin is female. So I guess it's natural there'd be a lot of tension. Our culture doesn't acknowledge yin energy as being good and necessary. We fight against it. On this darkest day, we are to keep the light burning, so as to not lose it. It's startling how much effort it takes to continually brandish false light against natural dark. But once you've closed your eyes once or twice, you start seeing the glow behind your eyelids, and it's glaring and offputting. I welcome a day of dark. I rest my eyes, leaning my forehead on cool glass windows, and relish the rest. I allow the feeling of cold dark to rest upon me, the way it slides over you when you slip beneath ocean waves. I feel the insides of my eyes relax, my breathing slow, my muscles unclench. And instead of constantly saluting and invoking the Father of Winter in his Santa incarnation, I find myself seeking a quieter, more graceful, more female figure. I seek the Mother of Winter. She's a natural counterpart to Death, I think, and personification of the Yin energy the time is suffused naturally with. I seek the Mother of Winter within me. For truly, a mother needs the quiet, sometimes.

The Most Famous Homebirth of All Time

2005-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

(click to enlarge) Everyone who knows me is probably sick to death of my crowing about my ecstatic triumphant homebirth VBAC last May. My personal support posse has listened to my evolution, from typical medicarchy-controlled hospital birth, to organic, natural, mostly unassisted homebirth. I have, admittedly, become somewhat of a zealot. So it is with almost manic glee this holiday season, that I examine nativity scenes. They're everywhere. My neighbors across the street, devout Catholics, have one in their yard. They're the same folks who very concernedly came over to see how the baby and I were after my "dangerous" homebirth. Yet there it is in their yard; a depiction in 3-D of the most famous unassisted homebirth of all time. Yup. Mary was on her own in that manger. No medical assistance anywhere. In fact, apparently, no other women anywhere either. Just a bunch of animals, and her husband. And then of course, men called wise but who hadn't the sense to bring the baby a few receiving blankets or a cloth diaper (wouldn't that make for fun holiday pageants and passion plays down through the centuries? Would baby Jesus use birdseye flats or DSQ chinese prefolds?) Yet somehow, Mary managed to get it together, and raise him up just fine. The Tibetans are no doubt amused at our obsession with this single birth; their religious figures are reborn every generation. The current Dalai Lama was also born at home, with only his oldest sister assisting his mother through her labor with him. Considering hospital birth is a phenomenon of recent times, and most religious or prophetic figures births date from well before the prior turn of the century, the likelihood that pretty much every one of them had a homebirth is very, very high. It would be faulty logic to draw an association between homebirth and the potential for divinity, but I just can't help but wonder...would any divine (in the Christian version) or reincarnate (in the Buddhist) entity, really choose a hospital birth setting, specifically, if it had any choice in the matter? The implications are staggering, from whichever angle your brain attacks this one. I just can't help be intrigued at the irony that both homebirth and nativity scenes are under fire by the mainstream. Most years, someone somewhere is being badgered to take their creche down from wherever it is. And most years, midwives are being subjected to a nearly identical witch hunt. So this year, I think I'll find a way to put up a nativity in my yard, even though I'm not a Christian. Maybe it'll bother the neighbors as much as having to hear my vocalizing while pushing my baby out earlier this year did. But I doubt it. Homebirth separated from them by thousands of years and the sparkle of the hand of the Divine is, to their way of thinking, somehow different from what I did here in my humble little suburban manger. Or maybe it's just that now they have to wonder about my child, and those strange guys in sandals that showed up a few months back...

Paperback Writer

2005-12-16T06:33:00.000-08:00

Due to the encouragement of my friends and the beneficence and patience of my hubby, I'm going to be spending my Saturday writing queries. A query is a tool by which you grovel attractively in order to get your words seen. In print, that is; I'm already being seen, albeit by a smallish audience of already-confirmed fans, here.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Well, yes. I mean, I don't have a whole book on tap; just ideas for essays and articles, some of which I'm using this blog to bring up out of my backbrain and into the light of day.

It's based on a novel by a man named Lear, And I need a job, So I want to be a paperback writer, Paperback writer.

I think that fear of being overly replicative has got to be right up there with spellcheck failure as a writer's primary terror. And hubris, too, of course. No one wants to be caught cribbing directly from the pens of the giants. But of course, since the truly great are just there floating around in the collective unconscious, it's a big risk that you'll jump in and end up right next to them...

It's a dirty story of a dirty man, And his clinging wife doesn't understand. His son is working for the Daily Mail. It's a steady job, But he wants to be a paperback writer, Paperback writer.

Someone said that we write best when we write what we know. I know I've filled these blogs with what I know, or what I'm learning. Personal reflection is of late becoming a pop star instant ticket to credibility. Pink, and Christina Aguilera both have "family-airing-of-the-dirty-laundry" songs in their repertoires.

It's a thousand pages, give or take a few. I'll be writing more in a week or two. I could make it longer if you like the style. I can change it 'round, And I want to be a paperback writer, Paperback writer.

The art of the query is to take the same idea you have, and twist it around in as many different ways as you have places to submit it, so you're not double-dipping, yet you're still getting to talk about whatever your soapbox is. I guess the trick for me is not getting attached (how Buddhist!). I tend to write from the gut, and then think of what I set down as set in stone. The idea of jiggering it endlessly to attempt to appeal to the Keepers of the Gate is a little offputting.

If you really like it you can have the rights. It could make a million for you overnight.

When you start talking about getting published, ironicaly, most people immediately start talking about the moneymaking aspect. Several times, I've wanted to hop up and down and scream "These are my *babies* I'm putting out there! It has *nothing* to do with the money! It's all in the thought!" And of course there's the cold reality that the ranks of those who make bank with their writing are slim indeed. J.K. Rowling notwithstanding.

If you must return it you can send it here, But I need a break, And I want to be a paperback writer, Paperback writer.

Well, yes, a break is indeed what I'm hoping for. I've got a muse hammering the back of my brain so hard I'm beginning to develop permanent dents. She's been trying to get out for a really long time; so long, that I suspect she probably resorted to sneaking out and pounding on my friends on my behalf. Not to worry; I've got a Muse Care Package all put together.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat....

2005-12-15T06:38:00.000-08:00

I sent the following email out to some of my nearest and dearest yesterday...

So after much agonizing over what to do next, the decision was made to do a full bypass on (my stepfather's) leg. He'll be on the table, they estimate, 3-5 hours, and has a fairly terrifyingly high probability of dying on the table. If he makes it through, he's got a fairly terrifyingly high probability of having strokes and diminished functioning. Mom's coping darned well. I'm doing what I can to offer practical help from a distance. In one of his lucid moments, (the stepfather) forbade me from coming out to help in person, because he doesn't want to risk either of "his beautiful grandsons" catching some hideous hospital-borne plague bacterium. So that's that. Can't say but that I'm relieved; the thought of driving on frozen roads over Donner Summit with a six month old in a carseat behind me wasn't precisely thrilling. So anyway, I'm stressed. Mostly because the possibilities keep scuttling around in my head like irate tidepool crabs. Someone hand me a mallet. Quick.

And bless her heart, E found the mallet. In amongst a host of other wholly practical advice, she tells me,

Not that I'm terribly good with it myself, but since you've expressed an interest in the concept in the past, this is an excellent exercise time for practising living in the moment. When the panic and anxiety spins around hard and fast, one coping strategy I've used is to fill my head w/ a simple song, usually Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Instead of, oh my god, panic.... I go for Row, row, row your, boat, gently down the stream.... over and over. Visualize it. Almost like a mantra. It sounds hokey, but it does help drown out the bad stuff. There's only so much you can do. I hope I don't sound like the New Age fluff and bluff I fear I sound like--you know what a stress case I can be. But I also have lived many years w/ very deep anxiety at various levels, so I understand. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. I understand what the panic feels like, and I know how it can eat your stomach lining out.

So this morning, while I'm showering and working on creating my day, I find myself humming. Row, row, row..... ahhh. She's right. There's something about a simple round, an image of calm water and boats. But as I'm surfing to find the lyrics for anyone (perish forfend!) who isn't familiar, I discover that there is a Buddhist Mantra aspect to the song...which is what E was saying, in a different way. Todd Barton tells us:

The Mantra Row, row, row¹ your boat,² Gently,³ down the stream,⁴ Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,⁵ Life is but a dream.⁶
The Commentary

Row, row, row. In form and structure this triple repetition of the imperative, row parallels the daily Buddhist invocation of the Three Jewels: "Homage to the Buddha, Homage to the Dharma, and Homage to the Sangha." One could, for example, say, "Row for the Buddha, Row for the Dharma, and Row for the Sangha."
Texturally, however, the word row is more closely linked to the Sanskrit word gate, which means "to go", and which begins the famous Heart Sutra Mantra:
gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha

which translates as "Go, go, go perfectly and completely to build the path for enlightenment." Thus, the word row in our text is a shorthand for the Heart Sutra Mantra and may be construed as "I row towards enlightenment."

your boat. It is your boat. You built this boat with your karma. It is nobody else's boat. It is nobody else's karma. You are rowing this boat toward enlightenment. It is your karmic stream.

Gently. This is a call to go toward enlightenment gently, without force. It is like the gentle observation of your breath in meditation. Furthermore, it beckons us to undertake all actions, thoughts and deeds in gentleness and pure awareness. It should also be mentioned that some Buddhist scholars believe this word to refer to the Taoist/Buddhist concept of wu-wei, "nondoing."

Down the stream. The "stream of Life." The daily dharma. The seemingly endless stream of death and rebirth. Your karmic stream.

Merrily, merrily… This is a reference to the "merry" or "happy" state experienced in meditation. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, "This happiness arises when we become free of incessant worrying and preoccupation, and from the fact that the body and mind are at ease".¹ Thus, a direct result of meditation is the ability to row down the Stream of Life gently and merrily.

Life is but a dream. Of course, poetically, "dream" rhymes with "stream". But we might also say that spiritually "dream" and "stream" rhyme. Stream, as we have seen, refers to this life, which is Maya – impermanent and illusory – which is ultimately a Dream. Meditate on the impermanence of all Dharmas.

The Paraphrase

(Homage to the Buddha, Homage to the Dharma, Homage to the Sangha.)

Aware of your karmic stream, Go along easily, completely and perfectly Toward enlightenment in you daily life.

Happily, happily, happily, Meditate on the impermanence Of all Dharmas.

When chanted, this mantra is cyclical, its beginning and end are One. In form, it is like the Wheel of Samsara. In practice, it can be chanted endlessly until you boat reaches the Other Shore, the Shore of Enlightenment.

Row, row, row.....

FtG -- Fighting the Guilt of Going the Right Direction

2005-12-11T12:52:00.000-08:00

One of my New Year's Resolutions (which I do at Celtic New Year rather than Gregorian New Year) was to get my financial house in order. I was finally going to face all the ugliness head on, and do the research to get the right answers. The fruits of that research are going to be forthcoming in future FtG blogs. But anyway.... One of the commandments of pretty much every financial self-helper out there is to pay yourself first. OK, fine. Set that up so that a reasonable amount out of each check was going into the old 401(k). Waited. Waited. Waited some more... and then suddenly, got a paycheck where double my requested donation was taken out! Oi! So I call. I yell. They promise to put that money back into my next paycheck. Next paycheck rolls around, money isn't there. I call. I yell. Turns out what they'd decided to do, based on the legal penalties to them for doing anything else, was double-dip outta the one check, to cover their butts for taking so long to set my account up. Now, we live in the Bay Area of CA, where housing prices are steep. I have one paycheck to pay our bills, then the next covers the housepayment, with basically spit leftover. So what the gyrations of the payroll folks has done, is leave me paying the housepayment out of a short check, two checks in a row. I had to do all kinds of finance gymnastics to make this work. And I am fighting nearly overwhelming guilt and shame, like I'm some kind of financial deadbeat. I am having to fight every instinct I have to keep from going in and changing my 401(k) allocation. But paying yourself first is what matters, right? I think it's also more depressing than it'd be otherwise, because everyone around me is indulging in the pre-Christmas mercantilist orgy, and I do feel a tad left out. So I'm having to be creative about Christmas gifts. That's a good thing, right? So I'm paying myself first. And that's a good thing too. And I'm rearranging my bills more comfortably, and that's also a good thing. So whence this cringe?

Damn the Primary Cesarean

2005-12-10T12:54:00.000-08:00

Today was the funeral for Amanda's Noah. I lit my yahrzeit candle this morning. And I damn, damn, damn the primary cesarean. So many doctors, motivated only by greed and by hurry, and not at all by any oath to first do no harm, play the dead baby card, and make that first cut. It's so much easier than educating women to not fear birth, to be strong, to see birth as their initiation into the bigger mystery that is motherhood. Nah. Let's drug em and slice em, let's increase our profit margin, let's free up beds in the hospital for the catastrophes we've created. It's a really slick system. First, fail to adequately prepare women for their first pregnancy. Then, cut them open without true informed consent. Then, once they're cut, inform them that they can never have a vaginal birth, due to the policies imposed by ACOG, which is nothing but a trade union. Women are required to sign up to have each subsequent child cut out of them, with the trite and hideous phrase, "once a cesarean, always a cesarean." You know, we arrest drug pushers for using the same tactics; the first hit's free. And the OB and hospital's profits just keep going up, should that woman manage to have more children (because of course, miscarriage and secondary infertility are also effects of a cesarean). Many of us, who have the scar, wonder what we could have said to the women we were before, to prevent this from happening, to protect them from the experiences we had. And despite hampstering this question, in all the dark hours of the night and day for three and a half years, I have no answer. I don't know how to impart the information I've gained in a way that makes sense to the woman I was then. I dwell on this personal variation of Susan Griffin's question,

"I have been asked if I had the choice again, would I have a child? This is an absurd question. I am not the same person I was before I had a child. That young woman would not understand me."

I must make that young woman understand me. How to start the conversation, though? If she was a woman with a head for finance, I could tell her that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Just because your mother popped you out like a champagne cork doesn't mean your birth won't take days and days. Just because you have "birthing hips" doesn't mean that the baby's going to slide out without you so much as breaking a sweat. Just maybe, it's going to be more work and more pain and more effort than you've ever put into anything in your entire life. If she was a woman who believed in better living through chemistry, I might tell her that the endorphins released by a nonmedicated vaginal birth are nothing like the ones generated by the fear put into you at a hospital, and the baby birthed gently with love at home is nothing like the baby whose trust is broken from the moment he is touched first by someone who is not his family. If she was a woman who valued unhindered living, I might try to get her to listen to me about some of the incredible benefits of gestating in peace, unharassed by a medical system whose goals are not the same as yours, despite their marketing spin. An entire nine months to fall in love with your baby, without anyone pushing the agenda that you should be tentative about the pregnancy, babbling their constant dire warnings about "but what if? But what if? But what if?" and charging perfectly healthy women and babies thousands of dollars per pregnancy for nothing more than to make them uncomfortable and needlessly concerned. If she was the sort of girl who rebelled against authority, I might start out with my crusade against pregnancy tests. Who needs em? You're either pregnant, in which case your body will tell you, or you aren't, in which case, your body will tell you. The idea that you have to pee on a stick to confirm your pregnancy, is just the first in a series of little pseudocultural rituals designed to distance a woman from her body, when it's sending the strongest signals it ever will. But really, I'm just one voice. And if she's an independent girl like me, she's not going to listen until she gets there herself. And by then, it's too late.

Strength is a Mother

2005-12-07T06:54:00.000-08:00

I haven't posted recently. Two events have rocked my world. Two tragedies, to people I only know online, but somehow, it really matters. First, Debra's baby Quinn went back to heaven. At just over a year of age, he went to sleep and just never woke up. I've known Debra online for just over three years. She has pushed everyone who knows her to ask the hard questions and embrace the difficult truths. She's been my inspiration, and ultimately, it was Debra's strength that allowed me to decide on homebirth VBAC for Kestrel. Because of the trials she went through over Quinn, who was born disabled, I realized that a mother's love can overcome pretty much anything. Debra walked the walk, she was handed the incredibly unfair card of a child with overwhelming disability, and she fought for him like a lion. Every single day, she fought. Fought the system that wasn't giving him everything he needed, fought the fatigue that comes with having to fight all the freaking time. Debra is strength, to me. And now, she's having to fight all over again, against loss and pain and grief and getting her legs knocked out from under her again and again and now some more. And since Quinn passed a little over a week ago, I cannot put either of my sleeping boys down without pausing to check their breathing, and being absolutely present in the moment with them, and grateful, so incredibly grateful, that I have them, that they are healthy, that we are a family. I find myself sitting by Kestrel's cosleeper or Rowan's big boy bed, and just weeping for any mother who sits by an empty bed. Then, there's Amanda. Amanda, who during a perfect homebirth, felt herself rupture, and despite making it to the hospital in under five minutes, was treated stupidly by the staff, such that her uterus ruptured in three places, she coded on the table but was resucitated, and her baby, Noah, was lost. There are no adequate words for the rage, and the grief, and the rage again, cycling around each other as my thoughts spin from detail to detail, from question to question. Mostly, I damn the doctor who did her first unnecessary cesearean. I damn the people who dare call themselves medical "professionals" who then patronize and minimize a woman's pain, and knowledge of what's going on in her own body, because she's just another hysterical birthing woman. My thoughts are only able to touch briefly on Amanda's road ahead; I sit at the keyboard with all the other women who know her and have been part of her story, and the tears roll ... Birth is as safe as life gets, and sometimes, it's just not very safe. It almost makes the heart break to think about the generations of women before us, who knew that truth and faced it and jumped back into the pool that is creation of a family, over and over. How could they bear it? How can we? And yet, as I write this, Kestrel is lying on the bed cooing and plbthing to his toy cow, and in a few moments, Rowan will wake up, and I'll hear the pitter patter of his feet come running down the hall to see me, and get his morning "hugs and kisses and hugs" as he calls them. We keep on, because we are strong.

FtG -- Getting Started with Finance How-To Books

2005-12-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

Since starting out on my own journey of finance education, I've skated through a number of the entry-level, self-help finance books. They're all a little different, and they seem to target a different mindset, or level of personal damage. Ideally, you'll recognize yourself in here, and pick up a book yourself... or, let us know your opinion on one of these.... Money Drunk, Money Sober by Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan really targets the 12-step, totally out of control financial disaster crowd. People whose behavior with money resembles their behavior with any other illicit chemical. =) The approach didn't really work for me since that's not my relationship with cash, but I can see how it might benefit someone who was in that space. And it's also a really good read, just in terms of highlighting how one can creatively approach their finances, and start exploring whatever mental damage they do have surrounding cash flow. The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom by Suze Orman is just delightful. She's gentle in her handholding, but gives you the straight scoop. Once you've worked through this book, you get a feeling that even if you aren't a finance whiz, you've at least got your financial house in order, and that alone can be a relief. The glossary alone is worth the purchase price. She's not as 12-steppy as Money Drunk, but there's still a lot of exploration about the emotional component of finance, and the idea that it may well be your heart, and not your head, that's landed you in straits. Personal Finance for Dummies by Eric Tyson rocks. It just rocks. No emotional, self-help tone here; his whole goal is to get the financial information out there to you. It's more technical and more in-depth than the other two, and you have to do some quickstepping to keep up, if you're starting from ground zero. He's cynical and acerbic, and his writing style makes me giggle every few pages. Honestly, I don't think you should read 9 Steps without reading this one immediately afterwards. The two books cover identical ground (nice to have the backup that this is The Core of What Really Matters), but Suze does it assuming you're mentally tender, and Tyson does it with the implicit threat of a boot up the butt if you don't do what he tells you. Maybe it's just my background that makes me respond well to this style. But I definitely dig Tyson. I've got two other books of his sitting on my "to read" pile, and I'll review those when I get there.... Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. Um..... OK, I'll be honest. The editor in me thinks these books stink. They are written in a conversational tone, which is OK, but they're done badly, with a total disregard for the rules of English. OK, so that's a nitpick. But it also contradicts itself in places, and offers soundbites instead of real information or discussion. Having said that, Kiyosaki has some nice quotes, and some good inspirational material. He also scapegoats, in that his books make it totally OK to blame everything that's wrong with your financial life your underachieving parents' fault. For a really scathing critique, check out John T. Reed's page. So there's my start. I've heard great stuff about "The Energy of Money", "The Yoga of Money", and a few others, but those all seem to be related to different ways to think about finance, not a primer on the rules that cover it. So I'll read n review them later.

FtG -- Holiday Finance Disaster

2005-11-27T08:00:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, I was supposed to start off with basics. But I think it would be more practical to start with where we are -- the Holiday Spend-O-Rama. At no other time is there so much cultural pressure on you to do the wrong thing, wrack up consumer debt, purchase needless stuff, and generally make yourself crazy. But try, just try, telling your loved ones that you're swearing off this mercantilistic orgy, and just see what happens next. Oi! So, some reading that I found inspirational, that you might enjoy. Cancel Christmas This one's particularly good for the comparison of what kind of money you'd have if you'd boycotted christmas in 2000, and instead invested. It's really illuminating. Although having tried to explain this very concept to one relative and not been able too, apparently it's further out than I thought. UK 'must learn' Christmas finance The BBC lets us know that the Brits are just as bad about this as we are here in the States. Give It Meaning (You might need to register to view this one, but consider that part of your New Finance Info Gathering resolution, and do it anyway!). The idea in this article alone is worth the read, all by itself. I am so inspired. Check it out. Ten Tips for a Happier Holiday Pretty generic, but there's some good links on charity, and on gift guides for kids. 10 Questions for Holiday Shoppers Nice and blunt, from a "repairing your credit" standpoint. 20 Gifts Under $20 From my pals at the Dollar Stretcher, which is a fabulous site in any circumstance. Got links? Let me know what you're reading!

Gratitude and Thanks

2005-11-24T07:53:00.000-08:00

Woke up this morning thinking about getting food on the table. It's soooooo easy to jackrabbit, on this particular holiday, into the materialistic. But due to the film What The Bleep Do We Know!?, I've been toying with the concept of consciously creating my day, which actually works far better than I would have expected. But anyway... I moved into thoughts of true gratitude and thanks. Philipp Moffitt says,

Practicing mindfulness of gratitude consistently leads to a direct experience of being connected to life and the realization that there is a larger context in which your personal story is unfolding. Being relieved of the endless wants and worries of your life's drama, even temporarily, is liberating. Cultivating thankfulness for being part of life blossoms into a feeling of being blessed, not in the sense of winning the lottery, but in a more refined appreciation for the interdependent nature of life. It also elicits feelings of generosity, which create further joy. Gratitude can soften a heart that has become too guarded, and it builds the capacity for forgiveness, which creates the clarity of mind that is ideal for spiritual development.

Once you still your mind a bit from the daily grind of how-tos and must-dos, there's quite a bit to be incredibly grateful for. Anne Cushman says,

As Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh points out, even neutral experiences (the touch of the air on our skin, the fact that we have teeth to chew our food with and do not currently have a toothache) can be transformed into pleasant ones simply through the power of our attention. To encourage this transformation, I often begin my mudita practice by formally "counting my blessings," as my mother used to call it. In a silent inner litany, I say "thank you" for the magnificent gifts of a healthy body: lungs that breathe the cool, foggy air; a nose that smells eucalyptus leaves and banana muffins; eyes that see hummingbirds swooping outside my window; a tongue that has just savored a golden, juicy peach. I express gratitude for my friends, my family, my son riding his tricycle up and down my deck, the doe and fawn that wander through my yard, nibbling on the lower branches of a plum tree. I give thanks that bombs aren�t falling on my city, that tanks aren't smashing through the walls of my house.

I wanted to spend my morning sharing mine with you... so here we go: I am Grateful for:

My sons, Rowan and Kestrel My husband, Jason The fact that Jason is here, with us, to see Kestrel's early months My triumphant mostly unassisted homebirth vbac My health My home The luxury of being able to choose what food I want, instead of having to take what's available, because that's all there is Clean water My job, which allows me so very much freedom and autonomy, and lately is also offering me the challenge of having to really, really think, instead of merely follow orders The fact that I can reasonably awake each day with the assumption that no one is going to be lobbing bombs at me or anyone I love The fact that every day, I have choices in how to behave, and the consciousness to recognize those choices The fact that I am lucky enough to have access to technology and information

And that's me. But as the Dalai Lama says, regarding mudita, the innate delight in the well-being of others,

It's only logical. If I am only happy for myself, many fewer chances for happiness. If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy!

So...what are you grateful for?

Windhorse, revisited

2005-11-23T07:54:00.000-08:00

Cracks me up that I started this blog as a mommy thing, and it looks like we're heading into intense Buddhism and Finance territory (talk about opposites! Ah, the contradictions of modern life!) Anyway. my pal Bryan, who is also quite the Buddhist scholar, had more to say on the topic of Windhorse. This is excerpted from "Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior", Part One, "How to be a Warrior", Chapter 10, "Letting Go", and Part Two, " Sacredness: The Warrior's World", Chapter 13, "How to Invoke Magic". By Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, Supreme Abbot of the Surmang Monasteries in Pre-China Tibet.

In meditation, you can experience a state of mind that is without second thoughts, free from fear and doubt. That unwavering state of mind is not swayed by the temporary ups and downs of thoughts and emotions. At first you may only have a glimpse. Through the practice of meditation, you glimpse a spark or a dot of unconditional, basic goodness. When you experience that dot, you may not feel totally free or totally good, but you realize that wakefulness, fundamental goodness, is there already. You can let go of hesitation, and therefore, you can be without deception. There is an uplifted quality to your life, which exists effortlessly. The result of letting go is contacting that uplifted energy, which allows you to completely join together discipline and delight, so that discipline becomes both effortless and splendid. Everyone has experienced a wind of energy or power in their lives. For example, athletes feel a surge of energy when they are engaged in their sport. Or a person may experience a torrent of love or passion for another being to whom he or she is attracted. Sometimes we feel energy as a cool breeze of delight rather than a strong wind. For example, when you are hot and perspiring, if you take a shower, you feel so delightfully cool and energized at the same time. Normally, we think that this energy comes from a definite source or has a particular cause. We associate it with the situation in which we became so energized. Athletes may become addicted to their sport because of the "rush" they experience. Some people become addicted to falling in love over and over again because they feel so good and alive when they are in love. The result of letting go is that you discove a bank of self-exisitng energy that is always available to you - beyond any circumstance. It actually comes from no-where, but is always there. It is the energy of basic goodness. This self-exisitng energy is called windhorse in the Shambhala teachings. The wind principle is that the energy of basic goodness is strong and exuberant and brilliant. It can actually radiate tremendous power in your life. But at the same time, basic goodness can be ridden, which is the principle of the horse. By following the disciplines of warriorship, particularly the discipline of letting go, you can harness the wind of goodness. In some sense the horse is never tamed - basic goodness never becomes your personal possession. But you can invoke and provoke the uplifted energy of basic goodness in your life. You begin to see how you can create basic goodness for yourself and others on the spot, fully and ideally, not only on a philosophical level, but on a concrete, physical level. When you contact the energy of windhorse, you can naturally let go of worrying about your own state of mind and you can begin to think of others. You feel a longing to share your discovery of goodness with your brothers and sisters, your mother and father, friends of all kinds who would also benegit from the message of basic goodness. So discovering windhorse is, first of all, acknowledging the strength of basic goodness in yourself and then fearlessly projecting that state of mind to others. Experiencing the upliftedness of the world is a joyous situation, but it also brings sadness. It is like falling in love. When you are in love, being with your lover is both delightful and very painful. You feel both joy and sorrow. That is not a problem; in fact, it is wonderful. It is the ideal human emotion. The warrior who experiences windhorse feels the joy and sorrow of love in everything he does. He feels hot and cold, sweet and sour, simultaneously. Whether things go well or things go badly, whether there is success or failure, he feels sad and delighted at once. In that way, the warrior begins to understand the meaning of unconditional confidence. The tibetan word for confidence is "ziji". Zi means "shine" or "glitter," and ji means "splendor," or "dignity," and sometimes also has the sense of "monolithic." So ziji expresses shining out, rejoicing while remaining dignified. ~*~snip~*~ The chapter "Letting Go" introduced the idea of windhorse, or riding on the energy of basic goodness in your life. Windhorse is a translation of the Tibetan lungta. Lung means "wind" and ta means "horse." Invoking secret drala is the experience of raising windhorse, raising a wind of delight and power and riding on, or conquering, that energy. Such wind can come with great force, like a typhoon that can blow down trees and buildings and create huge waves in the water. The personal experience of this wind comes as a feeling of being completely and powerfully in the present. The horse aspect is that, in spite of the power of this great wind, you also feel stability. You are never swayed by the confusion of life, never swayed by excitement or depression. You can ride on the energy of your life. So windhorse is not purely movement and speed, but it includes practicality and discrimination (judgement), a natural sense of skill. This quality of lungta is like the four legs of a horse, which make it stable and balanced. Of course, in this care you are not riding an ordinary horse, you are riding a windhorse. By invoking the external and internal drala principles, you raise a wind of energy and delight in your life. You begin to feel natural power and upliftedness manifesting in your existance. Then having raised your windhorse, you can accommodate whatever arises in your state of mind. There is no problem or hesitation of any kind. So the fruittion of invoking secret drala is that, having raised windhorse, you experience a state of mind that is free from subconcious gossip, free from hesitation and disbelief. You experience the very moment of your state of mind. It is fresh and youthful and virginal. That very moment is innocent and genuine. It does not contain doubt or disbelief at all. It is gullible, in the positive sense, and it is completely fresh. Secret drala is experiencing that very moment of your ustate of mind, which is the essence of nowness. You actually experience being able to connect yourself to the unconceivable vision and wisdom of the cosmic mirror on the spot. At the same time, you realize that this experience of nowness can join together the vastness of primordial wisdom with both the wisdom of past traditions and the realities of contemporary life. So in that way, you begin to see you the warrior's world of sacredness can be created altogether.

Bringing it back around to parenting...have you ever noticed that some days with the kids are just brilliant, and some days, nothing any of you do is ever quite right? I really think that kids exist in a state of this drala, this windhorse. That's where they get the confidence to scale 30 foot walls, how they pick themselves up from tumbles time and again, and fling themselves back into whatever they were doing. Children never let themselves get drug down by the housekeeping, or stressed out about tomorrow. And I think that "growing up" is the process of beating that natural, innate ability to tap into the power of basic goodness out of them. Who knew Peter Pan was a Buddhist? The idea of flow, groove, or "rush" as mentioned above is something that has also been associated with parenting. In their book "Magical Parent, Magical Child", Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce offer up exercises for keeping your parenting in that space. They refer to it as the "Optimal Learning Relationship", but really, isn't that all just windhorse in psychologists' packaging?

Teething, Family, and Photography

2005-11-23T07:04:00.000-08:00

On Nov. 19th, his Grandma's birthday, Kestrel cut his first tooth, bottom left front. And thankfully, the drama seems to be cooling...less drool, less pain. My happy baby is returning! Now, just a whole mouthful left, aiya!

We spent our whole weekend with family; cousin Nathan turned 1, and Uncle Scott held Kes pretty much through the whole party. Rowan played his little heart out with all the other cousins; Tyler, Ryan, Brighton. We left when the effects of too much cake began to show themselves in outbursts of toddlerish enthusiasm. =) Sunday was Scott and Noreen's wedding reception. We're thrilled for them; we're more thrilled for Ryan, though. And it was nice to have an afternoon in the sunshine, with good food and good people. I'd have photos for y'all, except Rowan broke the camera. I see this as A Good Thing, though. Lately, he's been fascinated by taking pictures, and not just the taking, but the assessing and selecting of them afterwards. Quite the little photographer. So we haven't been restricting his access to it at all, but are letting him just explore this creative burst. Unfortunately, if you turn the thing on and off too many times, the motor that controls the aperture fries out. We're getting it fixed.

Financing the Gap

2005-11-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

Money. Finance. Cash flow. ...words that strike terror, guilt, and fear, into the hearts of most of us. We all dread tax time, most of us have recordkeeping systems that aren't systematic at all, we take whatever insurance our employer offers us (or whatever we can or can't afford on our own) and don't even think about whether it's the correct amount. If we're lucky, we've got a 401(k) that we're saving into, but the majority of us have no idea what we're actually invested in or what horrors we're perpetrating on the world in the interest of stockholder profits.... the list goes on, and what it spells is "denial". It's interesting that we have all these cringes built-in about finance, yet the majority of us received little to no financial education. We're beating ourselves up for being illiterate. Everyone can get behind programs to help people learn to read, yet when the program's to help us figure out money, we get all freaky. Well, it's time to stop. Scott Noelle, my favorite parenting guru, coined the phrase "the healing gap". His explanation of the phenomenon:

How could I raise a child responsibly when I was still recovering from my own troubled childhood? That feeling, over seven years ago, came from an awareness of what I now call the healing gap, a phenomenon that arises when a person consciously seeks a healthier path than the one he or she is currently on. In parenthood, it's the gap between the healthy parenting ideas you embrace consciously and what you're actually capable of doing, here and now. Real-life parenting does not emerge solely from the parent's conscious intentions; it involves the whole person — mind, body, emotions and spirit — as well as the social and cultural context in which it takes place. In other words, it's easy to change your mind, but implementing a change in your whole self is far more difficult, especially when going against the grain of society and culture. The gap between parenting theory and practice is filled with "stuff": each parent's unique collection of fears, attachments, emotional wounds, unmet needs and obsolete strategies — plus external, sociocultural pressures — that impede our efforts to do what we believe is best.

I use Scott's wisdom all the time, when trying to cut my perfectionist self some slack when I blow it with the boys. And while working through my own finance baggage with my pal Angela, I realized that Scott's gap exists every bit as much for money as it does for parenting. Wading through finance information, you get routinely smacked with fears, attachments, emotional wounds, unmet needs, and oh man, the obsolete strategies. And of course, heading into the holiday season as we are, the sociocultural pressures to behave badly financially are all around us. I'll be the first to admit my overwhelming ignorance. Hi, my name's Laureen, and I'm financially ignorant. There. I did it. =) And since I hate being ignorant, I'm embarking on an adventure of self-education with regards to things financial. And you're all welcome to come along. I'll be reviewing websites and books, eNewsletters and stock trading sites. I will take the proverbial hit, blundering around the financial world, and asking all the questions we're all generally too embarassed, or too distracted, or too clueless, to ask ourselves. And then I'll report back with findings. They'll be posted here with the same heading, Financing the Gap (or FTG), and I'll make sure they link correctly in the right nav. It's probably important to say, up front, that this is NOT about advice, it's about highlighting some of the best and coolest places to go to get the information to make the best decisions for you. The more I read, the more I understand that there is not one ultimate financial truth, there are different perfect answers for different people, and it's only by being immersed in the material that you'll learn enough to figure out what your truth is. I'm hoping that this will generate discussion, and further questioning (I can't really be expected to think of every question, can I?) And this is not just a stunt to drive traffic to my blog, although that will be a nice side-effect. Truth is, the thing that has finally gotten me to quit dodging and start facing the wild world of cash flow is that I want to give my sons a financial legacy of something other than debt and chaos. I want them to understand money, to not be a slave to it, to not be prey to unscrupulous debt-mongers and salesmen and godforbid analyists. I want them to be able to live off their investments, and to enjoy the life fantastic, without falling prey to the habits that doom most of us to eternal wage-slavery. I'm assuming that, as is usually true with organic research, my path will meander with my interests, so I won't commit to any particular direction or topic or godforbid, outline. Right now, here are some of my thoughts. Feel free to leap in with suggestions:

Basic personal finance education books -- Suze Orman, Eric Tyson, Robert Kiyosaki, Charles Givens. Controversies, contradictions, and chapter titles.
Web resources -- links, forums, articles
Finance in the media
Lingo
Vehicles -- why would you want, say, eTrade over eVision, or would you want them at all?
Tips n Tricks, Hidden Money and Money Found

So away we go. Hope you all enjoy the ride....

Universal Preschool -- Over my dead body

2005-11-18T06:35:00.000-08:00

Because of the trickles and bits I'm seeing around the media, I've joined a yahoogroup (anyone who knows me, knows I think that yahoogroups are often the best source of info about most parenting concerns) devoted to discussing the juggernaut coming to California, courtesy of that bonehead Rob Reiner, called Universal Preschool. Frankly, I'm terrified. We'd already decided to homeschool our kids, and we're both leaning hard towards an unschooling model. The idea that it would be manadatory to send Rowan off to be indoctrinated by strangers, right now, makes me want to throw up. I've read enough of John Taylor Gatto, (look here too), and of John Holt to realize that the education system that I and everyone I know came out of, failed us in so many profound ways. It's not a system to nurture individual talents, it's a system designed to instill maximum complicity in a docile and unquestioning population. It failed Jason in one direction, it failed me in the other, and we are not going to, in turn, fail our kids, simply because we lack the creativity to figure out another, better way. And now, the attack on our children begins even earlier. Universal Preschool. An abomination.

He Crawls!!!!!

2005-11-17T07:16:00.000-08:00

WAHOO!!! Yesterday, despite teething and a yucky cold, Mr. Kestrel S. Hudson crawled two whole ...steps? Is that what they're called when it's crawling? Anyway, we're all terribly impressed. And truth to tell, I'm also a little panicked. Crawling before the first tooth is out? Egads! The motivation for this forward motion was, unsurprisingly, trying to get to his big brother, who was sitting at the end of the couch. I can see that in the future, Rowan will end up being the motivation for many of Kestrel's mighty leaps. What an incredibly awesome, humbling thing.