9:30 Begin getting ready for our romp and stomp library class, for which we need to leave the house at 10:15. Put on three AND A HALF year old Maggie’s clothes.
9:45 Make packed lunch to take to the park after library class.
10:00 Mommy gets dressed.
10:10 Maggie decides going to the library is the worst idea ever.
10:14 Maggie, yelling her library protest, kicks off her shoes. She does not remember where they are.
10:20 Give up on finding shoes. Put on rainboots. It is a bright, sunny day.
10:30 Park near library. Convince Maggie to at least walk to library to return book. She is adamant that she does not want to go to library class.
10:33 Maggie wants to go to library class.
11:15 Library class is over. It was so much fun! Let’s go every day!
11:16 Mommy realizes that in the dash to find toddler shoes, she left her lunch on the counter. Fortunately she remembered Maggie’s. We split a PB&J sandwich. Maggie is against sharing her apple slices.
These days. These are the ones I want more of, the ones I’m working my schedule around because I don’t want to miss them, even when they involve missing shoes, and I have to put on a sweatshirt of questionable cleanliness because I’ve lost the battle with laundry, and I owe $100 in library fines (true story. I’m sorry, library ladies, you are very nice to us. I promise I am going to try to be more responsible).
But the wonder in Maggie’s eyes, and how she pronounces the words she’s learning, and those angel kisses across her nose. Oh those angel kisses. I want to look at them forever, but I know they won’t stay just that way, so for now, we’ll go to the library in our rainboots so I have enough memories tucked away to last.
Received this Hillary sticker in the mail today, a (little late) token for my HRC campaign donation. The same day the electoral college has officially voted for Donald Trump to be our president.
Oh Hillary, what is 2017 going to do to us?
I am an activist who feels dissent and resistance deep in my bones. But there are moments when I see no beauty in the resistance. There are only sick people without health insurance. Black and brown people without access to the vote. Women with bodies subjugated to the judgment of men who know nothing about us.
Sometimes we – or at least I – need to sit with that. Sit as still as we can be, not fighting the grief with optimism or qualifications. There are moments in which we have the sacred obligation to witness the world that is.
* * * * *
And.
And I just finished reading Lindy West‘s memoir Shrill, and it concludes thusly:
“Fighting for diverse voices is world-building. Proclaiming the inherent value of fat people is world-building. Believing rape victims is world-building. Refusing to cave to abortion stigma is world-building. Voting is world-building. So is kindness, compassion, listening, making space, saying yes, saying no.
We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.”
I don’t know why we haven’t been able to stop the slaughter in Syria.
I have a master’s in international relations from a Department of War Studies. There are many, many people who are far smarter and more learned than I am, but I have spent a significant amount of time poring over texts and historical accounts and theories of how diplomacy and war works. When faced with the question of why we can’t prevent and stop Aleppos, I still can’t come up with any better answer than the human capacity, even tendency, to see some people as “others”. Different from us. Dangerous. Less ethical. Less feeling of pain.
In all the major international relations texts I was assigned, the ones you’d find in any graduate IR program, I don’t remember coming across a chapter about what songs the Aleppo children or the Darfur children or the Chibok schoolgirls sang during their winter concert, like my eight year old sang tonight. They didn’t say anything about the children hoping to be selected to play the xylophone, like my Emma wished for and gave me daily updates about. They didn’t mention the way the children’s mothers greeted them after the concert, brushed their hair from their face and kissed the tops of their heads and paused to cup their hand around their babies’ cheeks, remembering those same cheeks at their breasts, flooded with a feeling of love so deep it would cause them to do anything to protect that child that was both part of them and so much more than them.
Maybe if the texts included these stories, we’d be able to figure out the rest, figure out diplomacy and no fly zones and freezing bank assets and not selling weapons for Christ’s sake.
Maybe if we read these stories that are so similar to our stories, their babies would become our babies, so we’d figure it out, because we’d figure anything out for our babies.
Fatima asks from Aleppo why we are not saving her baby girl. I am so sorry, Fatima. I am so sorry that too many of us cannot see that Bana is our Bana. But know that you are not alone in spirit, if it brings any small strength. As I watched my daughter perform tonight, I thought of Bana and wondered what songs she likes to sing and if she likes to play the xylophone.
We have failed you. May God have mercy on us. May God have mercy on Aleppo.
Tonight, I locked myself in the bathroom for a few minutes so I could post on Facebook something my daughter said that made me smile and think and be thankful. It occurred to me that this, this moment sitting on the edge of the bathtub, was a revolution.
One of the reasons that women’s voices are largely absent from history is that we were busy cooking dinner and watching over the kids. And they don’t wait. The potatoes burn. The youngest child is about to dump a cup of milk on her head.
But having something in our hands that allows us to snatch one or two minutes here and there during dinner to record what it is like – to be a woman, a mother – means that in 100 years, our grandchildren will know how their grandmothers felt raising babies, something few generations have known. They’ll read our blogs and our Facebook posts. These aren’t silly. They aren’t inherently superficial. They are history. They are the history I have hungered to read, to know, to learn, but has been far too sparse in details.
It is true that the screens in our hands can take over in a way that prevents us from being present in the moments that we don’t really want to miss. But they are also empowering peoples who historically have not had public voices. Of course, not everyone can afford a smartphone. Not everyone has internet service at home. I want to work to help make sure everyone has a public voice. The smartphone is part of that revolution for many.
You also need a good bathroom lock. Those kids can find you anywhere.
Every night of every December, I look down this hallway as I’m going to bed and think about one of my favorite verses, “A light shines in the darkness…” And I think about how we are celebrating the arrival of a Middle Eastern family seeking refuge. How salvation is found in places deemed unorthodox or even heretical. But you must follow the star you know by heart, the light you recognize as your hope and truth. Also, this year I’m thinking about how the top of our tree is a little crooked. But mostly, you know, the light and darkness stuff.
The tears that just wouldn’t stop last Wednesday began to scare me when they still weren’t drying up by the time I put our girls to bed around 8pm. I realized that I was reacting as if someone close to me had died.
That seemed preposterous, but it was how I felt. I am old enough and finally wise enough to know that the only way through feelings is… through them, so I sat with how I felt. And I invited a friend over, because Mike was at a work dinner, and it was too much to sit with alone. As we talked and I cried some more, I realized that what died was a hope that I had, an expectation that I was going to wake up and there would be a woman president-elect. A hope that millions of women were going to be vindicated by seeing our selves in one of the highest places of power that exists. That I was going to be vindicated.
In the days since, I’ve begun to name other things that died, or that it feels like died.
Stephen Bannon has been named Trump’s chief strategist. Before joining the Trump campaign, he was best known for being the executive chairman of alt-right Breitbart News. Headlines for his stories on the Breitbart website are stomach churning. One of many examples: “Does Feminism Make Women Ugly?”
I grew up in an environment where feminists were often jeered.
It took everything I had to pull my self out of there.
Everything.
Two days after my fifteenth birthday, yet another boy at church made yet another comment about my weight. I was too chubby. The next day, I stopped eating. Within months, I dropped from 145 pounds down to 70.
The boy’s comment was the tipping point, but it wasn’t the whole reason for the anorexia. I had been too big for a long time. I took up too much space. I had way too many opinions, and I insisted on defending them. Obviously, I ate too much, when other women were able to contort their selves and their bodies to whatever thoughts and size were acceptable. To not take up so much damn room.
I couldn’t be a real woman until I could do that, too. So I did it.
A year or so later, I overheard adults at church talking about feminism, how shrill those feminists were, how wrong. I went home and wrote a poem that included,
ESA/Hubble
“I am beautiful
Though I do not believe it myself.
But I must be,
for God made the stars
and they shine, and I know
His hand made me.”
Along with the crystal-clear message that I was taking up too much space as a woman, I had also internalized the message that God loved me and made me. We humans are so messy, capable of holding contradictory beliefs.
Thankfully, as I was perilously close to permanently damaging my health, the latter message won out. When the choice was most acute, I had just enough faith that God’s love made me worthy of being alive that I started eating again.
It was even harder coming to a place where I owned my own thoughts and beliefs, without apology. It wasn’t until I was 25, living in another country and working on a master’s, that I would say I owned my self. All my choices, all my mistakes, all my responsibilities.
To do that, I had to let go of religious beliefs about women’s places, which I had been told were essential to the salvation of my soul. Women being pretty and pure and deferential were a big part of that salvation, reinforced by cultural mores.
I threw off the patriarchal mantle under which I had been born. I married a life partner with whom I am an equal. I made my own choices about my body and life. I gave my little girls my own last name.
What has died this past week is my belief in how much of the mantle’s reach I had been able to throw off in my own life. There is more of it, and I cannot stand it. I remember it. It makes me feel like my throat is choking. It is that against which I would expend every cell of my body to fight off from overtaking my children. It will not cover them. It will not. I will work against it until my dying day.
“Fat Shaming Works”
“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive & Crazy”
“Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer”
“There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews”
These are just some of the headlines of Breitbart News, and just examples of the sexist ones. There are also the racist, anti-Semitic, and nationalist headlines. And now the man behind Breitbart is chief strategist for the President of the United States. His power to shape policy and thus the every-day lives of Americans is real and potent.
Thus, I grieve.
(Don’t worry, I’m going to get to work, too, but first, grief and self care.
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” ~Andre Lorde)
The suffragette roses I bought on Monday night have grown into the most beautiful bloom. I wasn’t expecting that. After Tuesday night, I forgot they were even on the table. But all along, they were blossoming, because that’s what roses do. May it be so.
For a friend who comes over at the end of a long day to sit with me while I cry and talk and cry some more, I give thanks.
For friends and family who don’t even vote the same way but still care for and hold my heart and grief with gentleness, I give thanks.
For a pastor and community of faith that is far away in geography but close in spirit, that is right now lighting candles for ALL the people in our country who are hurting, I give thanks.
For little girls who ask, “Why you eyes wed (red)?”, then put their small hand on my cheek and draw me in for butterfly kisses, I give thanks.
Yesterday the temp was going to be high, so after our Election Day photo op, my oldest daughter took off her long-sleeved Future President shirt and said she’d wear it the next day. It broke my heart to see her put it on this morning. I am so sorry we couldn’t get it done, couldn’t shatter that ceiling.
I don’t have any fight in me today. I am tired. So damn tired. I’m going to be ok with that. Tomorrow, or maybe in a few days, I’ll be ready to fight again. I’ll be ready to be, as Glennon Doyle Melton says, a Love Warrior. Today I’m a Love Puddle.
At least I am not alone. When I first identified as a feminist, I was the only feminist I knew. Now I have a wealth of soul sisters. Who have taught me grace and fierceness and compassion that knows no end. Love is forever tries, to again quote Melton. Give me a few days, and I’ll be ready to keep trying.
Just voted. As I walk away from the polling place, I can feel my heart in my chest. It feels like it is wrapped in love.
There is an old, deep wound that I carry, that I’ve carried for almost as long as I’ve known my name. It is a girl child in a church pew, in a church where there could never be a woman pastor. The church believed in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, so I didn’t understand why the Holy Spirit in me wasn’t as qualified to lead as the Holy Spirit in boys, but apparently it wasn’t. I wasn’t.
I grew up, read and traveled and lived both in and beyond the church, and there were more, similar woundings.
I’ve largely made my peace, mostly by saying, in actions & words, “That’s bullshit.” Today I said it with my vote.
On Election Day tomorrow, I am wearing a yellow rose to remember the suffragettes, who wore them 100 years ago. Let’s not sugar coat it: the suffragettes were called whores and destroyers of families and morals. They held their heads high. They won the vote, then they continued to work for full political and legal recognition and inclusion of women. The vote I make tomorrow in this historic election, I make with them as my witnesses. I bow before the long line of women who have had to make hard choices to do the necessary thing, women who have birthed in their bodies and their spirits a better future, who have grabbed hold of the moral arc and with strong mama arms bent it towards justice, and I say with all my heart, with every part of my being, “Thank you. May I make you proud.”
I light a candle,
As I putter about the kitchen,
Preparing dinner.
A candle for the mothers
Who are tired
Confused
Scared
Who want to live freely
But that path was not cut for them,
So they – so I –
Am cutting it now.
In the kitchen
In the office
Through our home so our children may follow
Everywhere.
I am preparing dinner
But my soul is kneeled
Quiet
Still
With my hand on the soft, green
moss covering a rock
And the other on my heart.
Becoming a pro-choice mama I became pro-choice after I had my first child. Previously, I would have identified as non-judgmental but non-committed – I couldn’t judge other women’s choices, but I had yet to explore my own conscience on the issue of abortion. But there I was, having carried a baby inside my body, now holding her in my arms. She was perfect. She was utterly defenseless.
I experienced how exhausting and scary it was to take care of a baby, even when she was deeply wanted and loved, when there were two parents and an extended family dedicated to her well-being, and health insurance and a steady income and maternity leave.
I now felt as Anne Lamott so eloquently articulated about abortion access: “It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present.” Because children are vulnerable. Because they are precious.
I also came to understand how important it was for the lives already here – women and their families – to have access to abortion.
Women terminating pregnancies weren’t the irresponsible people I had been told they were. The Guttmacher Institute states, “The reasons most frequently cited [for having an abortion] were that having a child would interfere with a woman’s education, work or ability to care for dependents” [emphasis my own].
These were women already taking care of others.
As a mother fiercely protective of my daughter and with a better understanding of how reproductive rights affect families, I became deeply committed to promoting reproductive health and choices, including access to abortion.
Supporting public policies and candidates that are pro-choice In the 2016 campaign to be the Democratic nominee for the presidency, there are two candidates with a grade of 100% from Planned Parenthood: Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Whichever candidate wins the nomination, I will vote for them without hesitation. However, I am supporting Bernie to be the nominee because his policies will be the best for women both including and beyond reproductive rights.
Access to abortion and birth control is about me and other women having agency to create the best lives for our selves and our families. But there are other crucial factors necessary for true agency, as well.
We need family leave policies that are humane, instead of forcing mothers to make a choice between caring for a newborn and her own health versus losing her job. We need a fighting chance at financial stability, with living wages and without college loans debt that cripples our ability to provide for our families. We need fair treatment by institutions like the police, courts, and education systems, regardless of our race (did you know that in the ‘60s, Bernie was arrested for protesting segregation in Chicago schools?). We need to know that we will always, always be able to get our children the healthcare they need, and medical bills won’t bankrupt us if we get sick. We need to know that our money won’t be spent on wars that don’t make us safer. We need legal protection, regardless of our sexual orientation.
Bernie Sanders has been fighting for these things his whole life. He is consistent. He says what he means and always has. He wants every American to have access to a good life, where we have choices, about our reproductive health and more.
“Love will bring justice to victory.” Whenever I talk about abortion publicly, I try to focus on what I hope to accomplish: access for all women who need it. One day several years ago, after hearing someone make cruelly disparaging remarks about women who terminate pregnancies, I went home and wrote this personal manifesto: I’m not interested in telling people how they’re wrong or defending how I’m right. I’m about sheltering bruised reeds and smoldering wicks. I’m about walking alongside the shamed, with my head held high. I’m about holding and loving and comforting and rejoicing. I am not about fighting or defending. Love will bring justice to victory.
I grew up reading the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus cast his lot with those without power, the disenfranchised, the last in line. Women, minorities, the poor. It was from Him that I first learned to do the same. That is one reason that access to health services – including abortion – for all is so important to me. Also important are the financial, legal, and civil policies that can make or break women’s abilities to direct our own lives and mothers’ abilities to take care of our families.
I am pro-choice. I am pro-family. I am voting for Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 2016.
My first reaction to the @NYTimesWell headline in Twitter, “The more potatoes in a woman’s typical diet, the more likely she is to develop gestational diabetes,” was, “Oh my goodness, I need to cut potatoes out of my diet” (even though I’m not pregnant. Let’s be on the safe side).
My second was to take the declaration with a grain of salt (and full fat sour cream and butter), “Wait a minute, in another year, another study will come out that will dictate how awesome potatoes are, and we’ll all be doing potato cleanses.”
I’ve spent a lot of time over the years reading about nutrition research, and I’ve thus far concluded that all I really need to know about a healthy diet comes back to Michael Pollan’s: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.“
Community Well 