My Ecdysis

Onward and Upward!

2010-06-04T02:45:00.003-04:00

I certainly don't want to get all weepy and sappy as I move this blog to my website.

So...keep your tears and throw some confetti because we are MOVIN' ON UP!

Update your reader and get to my new home: www.myecdysis.com

The Illusion of Permission

2010-05-17T15:27:00.004-04:00

I never earned a degree in photography, but I call myself a photographer.

No one ever taught me how to write creatively, but I call myself a writer in creative non-fiction.

There's an illusion of permission, particularly in the arts, that you really should have the right kind of credential or background before you call yourself anything, before you utter the word "artist" or "poet" as a descriptor.

Of course credentials are helpful. There's no dispute that a formal program or academic certificate offers professional development and advancement. But what I'm referring to is the community level, grassroots, center-of-the body need to create and express ourselves. And the unfortunate tendency is to self-dismiss our drive because we are not really "authorized" to do so. In other words, we - those without permission - dare not dip our toes into the creative process or artistic world. We let it slip away.

Who has the license to create? Who gives YOU permission to move, bend, and contort paper, pen, ideas, words, clay, textile, paint, beads, voice into something that expresses a peace/piece inside you?

Today I was talking to someone about photography and she asked me how I got into photography, if I had ever taken a class. I'd never taken a photography or lighting course. I never joined a club. Hell, I didn't even own a camera until I took my first job after graduate school.

But, photography always moved me. The color. The symphony. The patience of waiting for the right moment. I always felt that photography was about observation and timing. And as the youngest of four children, my whole life was spent observing the world around me. There were three eyes on by body, I often thought. The two on my face and the one in my brain, clicking a camera to capture a moment. The way Andrew smiled at me right before I received my first kiss. The shadowed foot steps of my family when we walked the beach in 1992. The electric blue bubble letters on a sign that read "Vote for Lisa" when I ran for class president in 4th grade. My father's hands as he drummed the steering wheel to old classic music in our Ram van.

The lesson plans of the camera are formidable and can be frustrating. There's a slight math and science to the camera; a sophisticated vocabulary that must be decoded before one can smoothly operate the camera as a tool. But I stuck with it. It started as fascination, then grew to a hobby, then flourished into a passion. And then I committed to it. I dedicated myself to learning it, with my love for photography tucked under my elbow. That's when I knew I was a photographer. I not only loved doing it. I committed myself to it.

It's very similar to romantic relationships. The real-ness of the relationship, what legitimizes it, what affirms the relationship to be authentic and solid and heavy does not come from those outside looking in. It comes from the commitment of the people to one another, to the relationship.

You must commit to the process, to the art as action. You must commit yourself.

Photography, as an art, takes practice. It takes vision.

I told my friend to stop waiting for someone to give her permission. "If you keep waiting for someone to tell you that it's ok to try something, you'll never start. And the only person waiting and sitting in disappointment is yourself. There's no permission needed. Just start creating."

I thought about that for a few hours afterward.

I thought about how long I waited to try. I waited for someone to tell me that I had an eye for photography. That day never came. It's no wonder either. The "you have a good eye" compliment never came because I wasn't DOING anything and therefore had nothing to show; nothing for anyone to reflect upon, critique, or admire. When you wait for permission, you wait in stillness.

Why did I wait for permission? Why do we figure we need to earn something EXTRA before we allow ourselves to draw or sketch or, dammit, even just TRY something creative. To raise our fingers to an unfamiliar block of clay, an untouched canvas, or a blank page takes a steel rod of bravery.

We are moving into an age where the single nomad, crushing himself into a starving corner is no longer the picture of an artist or master creator. Today, artists are single mothers with two jobs
and a bus pass. Photographers can be world travelers or lifetime small town dwellers. The elitism is bleeding out. Art is everyday. Artists should be as common as a worn kitchen table.

We may grow old. We may lose that fresh inspiration that wakes us up in the middle of the night. But the goal of creative work is not to be legendary or even remembered. The goal is to be free.

The 12 Startling Similarities Between God and the Right Editor

2010-05-06T09:54:00.006-04:00

I've been a writer all my life. I cannot remember a time when my right hand did not grasp a pen and moved left to right on a page, documenting the significant and insignificant morsels of living.

A few years ago, I was struck by lightning and had the tremendous opportunity to work with make/shift magazine, and with Jess Hoffman, and slowly begin learning about the fundamentals of editing.

Editing has its moments of excruciating difficulty. It is not the free flowing creative river that is writing. It can be an unpredictable whiplash that stings every time you work with a new writer. I've had the magnificent pleasure of learning from many different kinds of writers and editors and, today, thought of the countless similarities I began seeing in my relationship with God and my relationship with editing.

This is what I found...

The Twelve Startling Similarities Between God and the Right Editor

1) The Editor works with you and your ideas, trying to observe and guide and not intercede.

2) When you are excessively verbose, the Editor gets to the heart of what you are saying.

3) The Editor is patient, but nudges you from time to time.

4) The Editor knows that the writer must equally trust the Editor and believe in herself.

5) The Editor has worked with so many different kinds of writers, you know there's nothing that the Editor hasn't seen.

6) The Editor knows what is sacred and carefully addresses issues close to your heart.

7) The Editor has a vision, but it is co-authored.

8) Ultimately, the Editor wants your best self, your best work, and works with you to make that manifest.

9) Often times in conversation with the Editor, you realize hidden truths underneath a lot of rubble.

10) "I know what I know, what do YOU think?"

11) The Editor will never give you an assignment that is too large for you to handle.

12) The Editor has a way of arranging things that leaves you mystified, dumbstruck, and grateful.

So, to all the writers out there: I wish you not only deep, rich soil to till your work in, I wish you a gracious and visionary editor who believes in your ability to fruitfully open a truth for yourself to share with the world.

Seeing Myself in My Son

2010-04-28T12:28:00.004-04:00

I was cleaning the office and found one of my baby pictures.

It was eerie. I compared my picture with Isaiah.

Oh my...

Birthing a New Feminism

2010-04-14T10:31:00.009-04:00

On December 20, 2009, I gave birth to two things: a 9lb. 7oz son and a new feminism. It was the third time my reproductive organs had encountered surgical metal; twice to remove ovarian tumors and cysts and once to remove a breathing boy.

By nightfall, I was vomiting from the drugs administered to my body for my c-section. After an excruciating vomiting episode, my head hit my pillow in utter exhaustion and my newborn began to cry out of hunger.

I looked at my body. Like a meticulous and tedious film director wanting to capture every detail of a flowerbed with a camera, I surveyed every inch of my body. I started at my feet.

My legs were buzzing numb, still, from surgery. To keep from forming blood clots, my legs had been strapped to a pumping machine. Two pieces of plastic swathed my legs. They hissed when they squeezed my calves and lazily loosened after three seconds of tight holds. The noise prevented me from deep sleep and made my legs sweat.

A catheter was inserted. I saw the bag full of my urine with taints of blood. It was a horrendous sight.

The dressing over my surgical incision covered the most tender and vulnerable part of my birthing body, the exit wound of my baby.

An ugly red rash had exploded onto the top of my chest. Its bumps were just as unsightly as they were itchy. A reaction, maybe from the hospital gown? Or hormones?

My left hand was a splotchy mess from a messy IV insertion. Mounds of clear tape awkwardly held in a needle and dried blood itched under the surface. It was hooked to a machine, beeping and regulating my body. Bags of I don’t know what dripped into my arm.

My right arm held Isaiah as I tried to breastfeed him. His desperate attempts to latch on were beyond painful, but with the help of countless nurses and my husband, he drank.

Gulped, really.

My normally brown face was gray with remnants of drugs and fatigue. No food. No water. Only ice chips. My water was taken away when I drank too much too soon and vomited into the pan again.

Later, to help stir bowel movements, an enema was inserted.

And I surveyed my body, every orifice of my body was either plugged, bandaged, bleeding, dry, or fatigued. And as Isaiah drank, my breasts ached with new agony, unfamiliar with this new demand of nourishment and, suddenly, as if my leg pumps, catheter, IV, and surgery scars weren’t enough, I began having more contractions. My uterus throbbed with an intensity that made my eyes close.

The hormones stimulated by breastfeeding will cause contractions. This will help your uterus descend and go back to its normal size.

And Isaiah’s latch intensified.

Never, in all the days of my life, had I ever undergone anything so life-giving. Never had I myself been so life-giving. Every part of my body was simultaneously healing and giving.

But I was in much pain. The lactation consultants were so beautiful and caring, I wanted to weep into their laps.

They gently touched, massaged, and handled my breasts. The nipples, swollen and red, screamed with pain at the slightest touch of a hospital gown. Maya, a middle aged woman from Russia, was sharp, informative, and decisive. Her teaching was fast, her hands careful, but her eyes were business. She recognized the pain, she knew how hard this was. Myra understood that I was thisclose to losing my sanity.

She understood that while the vagina or, in my case, the abdomen, was the door to life in the womb, it was the nipples that were the entry point of survival for my son.

The body, my body became a poem, a poem of survival.
______

I stayed in the hospital room, save two hours to walk down the hall for a parenting class, for four days straight. My dreams were in neon and my breasts were engorged. What I remember about that period in my life was how unbelievably gentle and kind people can be when you are in pain.

Briefly, like a loose leaf lightly touching a windshield before moving on, I thought about Feminism. Now a mother. Never again like before. Never just I. My life just took the most radical turn. That morning I had made myself chocolate chip pancakes. Six hours later, I was a mother. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye. And in that change, I came to a realization that there were two kinds of feminism. The Feminism of issues and the feminism of our lives.

I realized the Feminism that is perpetuated in mainstream and mainstream-like media is not the feminism of our lives. It is the feminism of commerce. It is the feminism that picks and chooses the winners and losers, the visible and invisible, and accessible and ignored. It chooses what will sell and what sells focuses on status climbing, material wealth, and westernized independence. Things that bring pleasure, not transformation.

The Feminism that has stepped on the backs of women of color and ignored the backs of trans and disabled women is the Feminism that camouflages itself with diverse panels and collectives but neglects to modernize its definition of social liberation in the era of digital media. It is the feminist theories stuck in the academy with no implored action. It is the round table discussions reserved for annual conferences that result in no true connection or building blocks.

This is the Feminism that has the time and luxury to ask leisure questions such as, “Why don’t you identify as feminist?” and “Where are all the women of color bloggers?" The same Feminism that circulates the energy over the same privileged circle of the educated, the employed, or as I call it, "the Sames;" the ones who stand an inch into the outskirts, banging on the "equality" door but who also ignore the women whose heads are in toilets cleaning their bathrooms or nannying their children.

This is the Feminism of fruitless banter and recycled conversations. The space to bring these issues up could be a hopeful sign of progress, however, the repetition of those conversations and the predictable accusations and defenses serve no other purpose than keeping the pendulum swinging in balance. Aka, the status quo.

This is the same Feminism that haunts the academy and academic support offices such as Women’s Centers and elite conference gatherings. The conversation of the privileged becomes priority over decision-making. Consciousness-raising is imperative for transformation, but it cannot begin and end with questions. There must be forward motion, however slight.

Simply putting 50% of women into anything male dominated may alter the demographic, but that’s not necessarily transformative. Putting a woman’s face where a man’s once was, without any sort of critical change, is not equality but appeasement. And before Linda Hirshman takes that quote of mine again out of context, let me explain further.

The purpose of feminism is to end itself. Andrea Dworkin called it one day without rape. Others have other land posts measuring feminism’s victory. The purpose of feminism is to one day find ourselves where we don’t need to fight for human rights through the lens of women’s oppression. Note: I didn’t write that the purpose is to bring down the man. The purpose is not to have a female president. The purpose is to transform the infrastructure that holds kyriarchy in its place. Replacing men with women – of any race, ethnicity, creed, or ability – who refuse to acknowledge the insidious and mutating face of gender oppression is not forward stepping. It’s a perpetuation of history.

And so the question comes: how invested are you in the liberation of women?

Because if you agree that the liberation of all women carries more weight than the identification as a liberal feminist, the feuds over whether feminism is dead becomes irrelevant. The uproar should be about dying women, not a dying Feminism.
_____

There was something so entirely miraculous about those four days in the hospital. I witnessed myself birth life. Bones from my bones. Blood from my blood. Life from my womb, I brought a person into the world. From two, I grew my family to three.

This awesome mystery/reality settled itself in bits and fragments.

My father told me that the birthing woman is different afterward. Her power is different. She herself is different.

My power is different.

For months, nearly everyone I encountered – friends and strangers alike – offered their opinion on what parenting should and would be for me. It was in that hospital room, where Nick slept uncomfortably on the couch without shaving and I, hooked to monitors and machines, understood a profound difference.

Parenting is the responsibility that we both shared. Together. It would be the late nights of feeding, rocking, and soothing that we’d walk together, he and I. But mothering, becoming a mother, was an entirely different bond. To me, motherhood is a yearning helplessness. Yearning to love more, yearning to teach better, yearning to make the world right – however impossible that might be. And recognizing that impossibility often made me cry.

I suddenly had this crazy urge to clean up the world for my son. I needed to organize.
___________

The feminism of my life unfolded in a love story that resulted in the birth of my son. Gathered at my bed was my mother, the woman I’ve thought of and written so much about. The woman who I have processed more than any other human I’ve met. My father kept stroking my hair and muttering concerns over my state.

The feminism I had begun to build was a house of love that no longer shunned my parents out of frustration, but embraced our difficulties and disagreements. Filipino culture was not something I needed to understand to live, it was something I needed to live out.

Nick held the can for me while I vomited. He wore scrubs and, in the delivery room, wore a surgical mask. The shade of the scrubs made his hazel eyes deep green. I saw him between hurls. I saw my son. Our son.
____________

Anything that I would dedicate my life to had to include, even demand, men. It may prioritize the lens of women’s experience for the liberation of all, but men had to be there. Where was I going without my son? What was I creating if not for him? I didn’t want to go where my family would not belong. It no longer made sense to separate myself and be alone. There was no division between the world I wanted to build and my son’s participation in it. I wanted freedom. Mine and his.

The Feminism of issues serves its purpose well. It informs us of the problems. But we’re more than issues, are we not? Isn’t our life worth more than the issues?

The feminism of our lives is the story of love, survival, testament, death, and epitaph. It is what we dedicate ourselves to and what we will pass on as truth to our children. Whether or not we identify as “feminist” is a sandbar to the oceanic movements of feminisms.

In my community, there is so much work to do, so much silence to break, that for the brief minute of a life where I get to use my voice, I am not going to expend my breath on explaining whether or not I identify as feminist. And the back-breaking work of so many women and men who never use the word feminism is not qualified or standardized on the arbitrary use of the word either.

The awareness matters. The intentional work toward eradicating inequality matters. The feminisms of my life matters. The use of the label does not.

Listen. Listen closely. Can you hear it?

The revolution will not be a movement. It will be Birthed.

APAD 2 (A Poem a Day)

2010-04-08T23:03:00.002-04:00

Food is the miracle

What we do with it -
How we do it -

cook
distribute
grow

will determine our revolution

Spring for Brownfemipower

2010-04-07T22:31:00.002-04:00

For my dear BFP,

Depending on what camera you have, all factors can play a critical role in the colors popping in your pic.

I went out for a walk and was eyeing the same tree. I took a few shots and got the effect I think you are talking about -- lighter sky, deeper flower color -- and I got it by playing with the shutter speed. That's my area that I always play with.

I have a Nikon D80 with a ProMaster lens, 17-50mm.

Keep playing around with yours until you get it. The colors will come!

APAD 1 (A Poem a Day)

2010-04-07T12:00:00.006-04:00

Thanks to Mamita Mala for this idea. I'm late, but I'm going to try and do this...

I'm going to try and get over my fear of perfection (because that leads you to a brick writing wall of paralysis) and just WRITE.

So, heeeeerrreee goes...

Lolo and Lolo
I never knew my grandfathers
- grand clocks who stopped before my time -

My Lolo Fernandez rode the train
and loved basil gardens

My Lolo Factora believed soup bones
healed birthing mothers

One Spanish, One Filipino
One engineer, One soldier
Two invisible vines
encircling one garden

When my mother smells the basil in the grocer
Or moves her face into the wind, she says
I'm thinking of my father

In early December, my father grows quiet
And wordlessly heads to a morning mass
He's thinking of his father

They never speak much of them
But I see their eyes change
when Lolo moves in their presence

And the stopped clocks tick one last tock
through my parents

And I listen to their memory.

The Changes of Spring

2010-04-06T16:11:00.001-04:00

And suddenly, in Isaiah's world, this THING happened. There was no build-up. There was no transition. HEAT appeared.

And just like that, I had to explain it to him: SPRING is here. Or as Nick says, "Just tell him that each day is the best day of his life because the weather keeps getting better and better for the next six months." That's true if you were born on December 20th.

Isaiah's legs are suddenly bare, no more extra onesies and winter caps. The warmer has been removed from his car seat to keep his skin air cool and his plumpy aura pleasant. It's suddenly warm and the first day it went from the 40s to the 80s, Isaiah slept almost half the day, as if his body went into some sort of confused mode that drank all of his energy, "I have to regulate the temperature of this big baby, we need to shut down," is what I imagine his cells and neurons communicating to one another.

It's been about three and a half months since Nick's and my life took a radical turn. And things are indeed different, as I reflect on the past year. I believe Isaiah was conceived during this past week and, if you believe that life begins the moment of conception, Isaiah is technically a year old already. He friggin looks like a toddler anyway, so that feels appropriate to write.

When he's fussy or won't stop making noises, sometimes I pick him up and go outside and show him all the signs of new life in the world. The tulips springing out from the ground in our back yard, the tiny budding flowers, and the tips of green beginning to open themselves into leaves on the trees. Isaiah's fascinated by the color and the wind on his face and I start laughing to myself when I look at him look at spring. For me, Isaiah's the ultimate sign of new life and here he is, grazing the new spring grass with his chubby foot.

The gorgeous weather has also permitted us to go for long walks together and that has made ALL the difference during the day. No more being cooped inside the house, no more praying for the snow to stop trapping us indoors. I feel free! Boundless! And I'm enjoying it while I can because I know in a handful of weeks, my allergies will bound me to the house once more and I will be unable to take meds because of nursing Isaiah. This will definitely be interesting. I'm going to look like a bloated, congested goat.

Isaiah's life keeps changing our world and the worrying, planning, and mild anxiety doesn't seem to stop. Ironically, accompanying all of this is a deep serenity that I was not prepared to find in parenting. Sometimes, when it's just me and Isaiah, and I'm singing him to sleep, I kiss him on the top of his head and can feel the soft spot. A physically vulnerable place on his body revealing his pure youth - his skull is still fusing together, his brain is still growing. And in this place where I rest my mouth, I can feel his heartbeat. His heartbeat. I can feel his actual heartbeat at the top of his head. Something about that often makes me cry. In so many ways, Isaiah is this utterly dependent little thing of a human who can only wiggle around, half roll on a couch, and yelp for his needs. And yet he is his own person. He's a completely separate human being from me and Nick, a person who will grow into his own, and experience his own choices and trials, failures and triumphs. He has his own heart. He doesn't need mine or Nick's.

That realization startled me. Isaiah is his own person.

Somewhere in the future I see myself struggling to let him go. Whether that's his first day at kindergarten, his first boy/girl party, his driver's license, or college decision, I don't know. I can't fathom how this little miracle is someday going to leave us and show us his own heart's identity.

For now, I'm just enjoying those moments of realization and relishing in all the little epiphanies he brings me on a daily basis. For now, that is more than enough.

Isaiah is a gift that is endlessly unwrapping.

Happy Easter

2010-04-04T08:24:00.000-04:00

My Little Super Hero, Part 2

2010-04-03T10:12:00.002-04:00

My Little Super Hero

2010-04-03T09:54:00.001-04:00

My Feminist, Good Friday Homily

2010-04-02T00:05:00.002-04:00

Today, I will be fulfilling a life long dream: to deliver a reflection during a church service. Because Good Friday service is "technically" not a mass, lay parishioners are allowed to give a "homily."

When I was growing up, I always knew better than to ask my mom if I was allowed to do anything during Holy Week. On our refrigerator, she would post the church bulletin and with a highlighter, go through and underline every single mass, reconciliation time, and service offered. I was the youngest of four and all of us were expected to attend, no matter what was going on. No exceptions.

It got really difficult when I was in high school. And since it was Easter break, people would have all kinds of get-togethers and parties. And since we were on vacation, you knew everyone was going to be there. Everyone, that is, but me. One time, though, I did get the nerve to ask my mom if I could go to a party. She just raised her eyebrows at me and say, “Lisa, are you going to a party on the day of our Lord’s death?”

So, you can imagine, I did not go.

I didn’t want to be a party-goer during Good Friday, so I just thought to myself, “This is just a sacrifice I’ll make by staying home.” All the while, though, I was wishing I was with my friends. Remember, as a teenager, staying home on a Friday night of vacation was a really, big deal.

My mom was right. Today is a day, among many things, about grief. It is a day typically marked with solemnity, a sobering awareness that’s almost palpable. Good Friday is when we relive the most intense story in the gospel – the Passion. It is a time that we, typically and appropriately, regard with mourning and reflective hearts. It is, after all, the day that Jesus dies.

How do we move into these hours? Is it with heavy hearts? Spiritually, that makes sense. But is there more to Good Friday than just the quiet grief and observation of Jesus’ death? Good Friday is more than just staying home and self-sacrifice. It is more than just the quiet 3 o’clock hour.

Personally, I know that I am able to move through this darkness because I know the light of the resurrection is but stone roll away. I have heard the sounds of Easter before, I have seen Easter lilies bloom. I have the strength to move through the darkness of Good Friday because I know and believe that today will pass. Friday passes into Holy Saturday and Holy Saturday gives way to a Sunday miracle.

But, is that what I want my Good Friday to be about? Waiting for Sunday? What is your Good Friday about? Perhaps Good Friday is the opportunity to find and witness someone else’s passion. Who in your world, who in your life, who in your heart do you know is dying? Who are those people in your life whose tomorrow, next week, and all the days of this year will be Good Friday?

Today we gather and remember the suffering of Christ. It’s easy to be overcome by the physicality of Jesus’ suffering: the scourging, the crown of thorns, three falls of Christ. But what haunts me the most about the Passion is that Jesus, who walked in the knowledge, faith, and trust that he was God’s son, believed that he was abandoned by God. Jesus! I cannot think of a more crushing anguish or more profound loneliness than to believe you have been forgotten, even forsaken, by God. The very God who created your existence.

Somewhere, someone today is going through precisely that; that division from God, believing that they are forgotten. Beyond these walls, or maybe within these walls there are those who are living the Good Friday that Jesus experienced. I don’t know any one in my life who endured the brutal violence Jesus did, but I do know people who are going through the psychological and spiritual trauma Jesus did. In my world, I see my friend Katherine who is ostracized from her family because she is a lesbian and is no longer invited to her family’s Easter celebrations. I see a place called Payatas, a community I visited in the Philippines that lives at the base of dumpster where the people sift through the garbage with their bare hands for food that can be recooked for their families. I see my friend Emily who has been trying but has not been able to conceive a child for many years. I think of my mother who is walking with her mother in the last stages of life.

Who in your life is in the darkness? And who are we to be afraid to bring light to them? If Good Friday is anything, it is a day to put aside any fear we may have, and let the light of God move the stone from someone’s tomb.

How do we do that? For myself, I write letters. I send handwritten letters on ordinary days. I try not to wait for holidays or birthdays or anniversaries to remind someone they are not forgotten. This may seem very small or just a crack at their seemingly insurmountable suffering, but I am often amazed at how much light comes through one small crack. But what is even more astounding to witness is how much darkness is dispelled by that crack.

To truly follow Christ is not just observing his death, but remembering why he died. Jesus was killed because he brought light to those in darkness. So, perhaps today is more than just brokenness and sacrifice. Perhaps it is a day not to enter, not be enveloped, not become one with the darkness, but to be the light, however small.

I would like to leave you with one question and I hope you can come back to it often as you move through your Good Friday: What will you do to dispel the darkness?

Writing a Homily

2010-03-31T08:49:00.005-04:00

A dream I've always had is to preach from a pulpit. Ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to stand in front of a congregation and lead others in a reflection of God, scripture, and its relevance to our lives today.

And, who would've thought that I'd be able to actually do that in the Catholic church. Amidst all the controversy and criticism, I've found a parish that I have built my community, a place where I am building my faith in people as well as in God.

This week is Holy Week, the holiest days of the Catholic calendar. And on Friday, Good Friday, I will be delivering a reflection after the gospel is read - usually when the priest reads his homily - and offering my thoughts on what Good Friday means to me.

Since this is something I've wanted to do since I was six years old - before I learned women could not be priests or deacons, before I knew I'd have to practice a different faith to if I wanted to preach from a pulpit - you'd think that I'd feel fireworks go off in my organs.

But there were no fireworks.

As I sat down to write my reflection last night, it felt like it did any other time I saw down to write my thoughts: natural. There was nothing spectacular about the moment my fingers hit the keyboard, no electric current coursed through my hands. I didn't feel like a prophet, savior, or even a disciple.

I felt the same as I normally do: a writer recognizing a difficult subject to address.

It felt natural to contemplate the meaning of Good Friday as a Catholic, as a woman, as a mother, as a 31 year old free spirit who simply wants to share what I have inside with my community.

It felt natural; as if this is what I have been supposed to be doing all along.

Sunday Weigh-In: Round 3

2010-03-28T08:43:00.001-04:00

Worry not. I shall come roaring back. Next Sunday is Easter Sunday and, appropriately, you will see a second resurrection in addition to Christ's.

Milk Stained Bumper Stickers

2010-03-22T19:36:00.008-04:00

A Funny Poem About Breastfeeding

It's funny how no one talks publicly about breastfeeding.

It's funny how nearly every man I know is uncomfortable when the topic comes up.

It's funny how, unless you yourself have breastfed before, people get a pained expression on their face if you talk honestly about how difficult or painful breastfeeding can be.

It's funny how cleavage and sexy boobs are somehow categorized differently than milky nipples.

*replace "funny" with "maddening"

Sunday Weigh-In: Round 2

2010-03-21T08:05:00.000-04:00

The smack talk this morning nearly woke up Isaiah.

Never Thought of That

2010-03-16T19:36:00.001-04:00

Growing up Filipino, I never thought I'd say these words: My son is part Irish.

Sunday Weigh-In

2010-03-14T09:55:00.000-04:00

Round One goes to Nick.

Dammit.

Control

2010-03-09T10:13:00.000-05:00

My wonderful mama has flown in from Virginia to stay for a weeks with us so she can help out with Isaiah. I never appreciated another set of hands around the house so much in my life. You'd think that between Nick and I, we'd have everything under control.

Shatter those expectations right now. There's no such thing as control when you're learning how to be a parent for the first time. Quite the opposite, you'll find that nearly everything is actually OUT OF CONTROL.

For example - let's take the bathroom.

Once the pride and joy of our house when we got a few things redone, but since Isaiah has come along, it has evolved into a banished and neglected corner on the second floor. It is in such dire need of a cleaning that even NICK said something about how we need to get control of that thing. By "thing," we're talking about the overdue scrubbing of the tub. Our BRAND NEW tub that we've neglected for months now.

Control is a funny illusion of life. We THINK we know what's around the corner because we anticipate problems, we logically hypothesize the risks and factors of every decision and, understandably, wait for the expected outcome.

Remember, though, that an illusion is something that appears to be real. It presents itself as something actual, something tangible, but it is, in fact, not.

It's like how I believe I have Isaiah's schedule in control and then, out of nowhere, he decides he's bored out of his mind and wiggles like crazy for an hour. He's fed, dry, and not tired. He's just wiggling. Wiggle, wiggle.

He wiggles out of his bouncer, he wiggles off the blanket on the floor, he wiggles out of my arms, he wiggles to the corner of the couch. And I think, "I can't control this boy."

Ah HA! Parenting lesson #827462 - NO CHILD IS UNDER OUR CONTROL, PARTICULARLY CHUBBY NEWBORNS.

And thus Nick and I feel out of control at times. We do our best to stay in routine, not make any plans and be nerdy 30-somethings with no lives outside our jobs and domestic responsibilities that include trips to Home Depot. We have learned that control is, quite frankly, laughable.

I thought I had control of nursing Isaiah and yet, still, every stinking week, something comes up. This week, for example, I developed a low grade fever on Sunday. My leg muscles were achy and my whole body was sore. I couldn't believe I was sick. Considering how neurotic I've been about washing and/or sanitizing my hands every time I touch an unsterilized door knob, I didn't think I'd catch any bug.

And as it turns out, I was dehydrated. I kept drinking waterbottles full of H20 and didn't have to pee at all. Miraculously (insert sarcasm there), the next morning my fever broke. I kept drinking and drinking and by the early afternoon, I felt as fine as a shiny new button.

How could I forget to increase my water intake? Nursing, working out, the weather is *just* beginning to warm up...hello? Water? More of it?

Before I admonished myself too harshly, Nick shared a story with me that made me feel oodles better...

The other night Nick woke up in the middle of the night because he heard Isaiah on the monitor. Nick thought Isaiah was just fussing around but he still got up to listen to the monitor more closely. He was alarmed, though, when he realized that Isaiah's breathing was making an irregular high pitched squeak, like he was having trouble breathing. As he started to move quickly toward the door, concerned that maybe Isaiah was sick or in a bad sleeping position, he noticed that the high pitched noise was moving with him, despite he was growing further and further away from the monitor.

"It was my own breathing," Nick told me. "It was my own freaking nose that was making those noises. I couldn't even distinguish my own self from a baby monitor."

Mhm. That's bad, babe, I thought.

So, you have a dehydrated and dizzy mom and a dad who can't hear his own nostrils.

Perfect.

It's SO On

2010-03-05T10:03:00.002-05:00

For those who know us best, the gene that determines competitiveness runs strong in both Factora and Borchers families. It has to. I've never met anyone who's more competitive than I am. That is, not until I met Nick.

Competitiveness comes in many forms. There's the obvious kind that reveals itself in sports. The Michael Jordan/Tiger Woods (sans sex scandal) kind of competition. This is the "I CANNOT LOSE. EVER." gene which makes athletes train twice as hard and cultivates a near military discipline that most of us civilians would find unbearable.

Then there's other genes of competition, more subtle but just as lethal. This competitive gene revolves around the oratory debate stratosphere, aka "I MUST BE RIGHT. I AM RIGHT." kind of thinking. It's a gene that makes its way into the most innocuous of situations - bowling, finding a parking space, starting a campfire, any household project, insurance claims...

You think these situations are not competitive? Move in with us for a week, you'll understand after that.

No matter what the situation, Nick and I often pit ourselves against the opponent, be a piece of stubborn firewood that will not flame up along with the others or a slow car in the Panera Bread parking lot who is blocking traffic. Everything's a competition. No dispute too small, no challenge too big. There are two trophy words uttered in our house that carry more weight than anything: I WIN.

Sometimes it's shouted, sometimes it's whispered into a billowing pile of laundry. Whatever needs conquering shall be conquered in our house.

So, you can imagine the kind of raised eyebrows and smack talk in our marriage when the competition is between us. It can get ugly, but it's always entertaining. Many people do not know that Nick is, as Keith Borchers said in his best man speech at our wedding, "an ego maniac who thinks he's sweet at everything."

Save opera and any form of dancing, this is true about Nicholas David Borchers. He hates losing. He can't stand being second. He likes strategy and mind-games during poker. He's all about focus and readjustment. Don't be fooled by his calm demeanor. There's a beast inside him called THE WINNER'S CIRCLE.

And then there's me. Don't think that I don't have my own monster and even according to Nick, I may be more competitive than him. There's a reason why I have the Rocky IV soundtrack on my iPod. Most people wouldn't see it coming, kind of like a CATEGORY FIVE HURRICANE that didn't come up on your weather outlook.

My competitiveness is often stuffed away because of its monstrosity. It can and has ruined moments of friendly game playing. While everyone else shrugs after a loss, I seethe inside. Competitiveness is like a constant search for perfection, which can never be attained. So, the desire to win or be right or dominate knows no rest. But, it's not always appropriate to be competitive so I, along with Nick, keep it to myself. We're like two man-eating sharks in a Sea World tank: it's in our blood and in our nature, but we're trained to be harmless.

That was a long introduction into the heart of this post, but it's critical for you to know the background of our competitive edges.

Nick and I have a combined goal to be and become healthier parents. Running around with Isaiah necessitates optimal states of health so we decided to commit to losing a few pounds. I need to shed my pregnancy weight and Nick, many months ago, invented a campaign called, "Don't Get Fat" because of his fear of rolling into a "fat new dad."

So we made a deal and the stakes are high.

Beginning Sunday, March 7th, we are having our own personal Biggest Loser competition. We adapted the show to our own lives and here are the ground rules:

Weekly weigh-ins on Sunday
Largest percentage of weight loss wins
Two goal dates: June 4, 2010 (our 5 year anniversary) and September 4, 2010.
Whoever has the largest percentage of weight loss on June 4, 2010 has the intermediate prize - winner gets one evening of their choice every week to go out and do whatever s/he wants while Isaiah is with the other parent.

If you don't understand the impact of that reward, go back and read it again. This prize is HUGE. This can mean going out with your friends. For Nick it can mean going to play racquetball with Books and Sam or going to the library for a few hours. For me that means extended trips to a coffee shop or taking my time at a farmer's market.

The ultimate prize, come September 4, will be individualized. Nick has yet to announce what his prize will be if he wins. If I win, I get to go to the conference of my choice in any part of the United States. (I'm such a nerd. I adore conferences on writing, feminism, media, etc...) Beside the fact that I want to shed my preggers weight, that conference-attending prize alone all by guarantees that I will win. Hello? Travel? Hotels? Learning? Meeting new writers and artists? That's what I was born to do.

This competition is huge and normally, I would not post something like this on our blog, but I figured if our friends and family - and God knows who else on the internet is reading this - is in the know, we are accountable to seeing this through. And we will.

It's man vs. woman. Focus vs. Passion. Tall vs. Short. Endurance vs. Intervals.

Choose your team now and place your bets. Nick is team blue. I am team green.

Cheers to a healthier Borchers/Factora-Borchers family in 2010.

(And, here's to ME, cause you know I'm going to lick this thing...)

The Irony of His First Laugh

2010-03-02T22:33:00.000-05:00

Writing, for me, serves many purposes. Not only is it my passion, my center, my lifelong dream and goal, writing is also cathartic. When I write, it always relieves something. It helps me share the good. It also helps me release the aggravation.

Today, I am writing for the latter.

It is my first taste in understanding how parents can simultaneously love their child and also want to run away to Bora Bora alone and get lost in the beauty of the ocean, away from screaming cries and milk stains and the smell of diapers and the sight of bad eczema.

Today Isaiah was a complete paradox. After sleeping through the night consistently for over a month (I know, I know - we're incredibly blessed and I shouldn't be complaining), he didn't last night. He WAH!ed and AIGH!ed for an hour while I tried everything to calm him down, but...to no avail.

He woke at 8am and was just as fussy. So I stripped him down to his diaper to look for any signs of...anything - rashes, bumps, bruises - signs of discomfort or hurt. Nada.

While he laid on our big bed squirming like a fish out of water with nothing but his diaper on, I couldn't help but laugh at how adorable he looked. His pure smooth skin (except his face where he has eczema, poor guy) and fat rolls...he looked like an enormous human cinnabon, just ready to be eaten. So I leaned over and teased him, calling him my favorite pumpkin and gave him a friendly zerbert on his stomach.

And thus came Isaiah's first laugh.

3 hearty, adorable chuckles erupted from his tiny little mouth and I squealed in delight.

That was the highlight of the day.

The rest of the day he was either fussing, crying, yelping, or sadfacing. I was at my wit's end and contemplated what Bora Bora looked like this time of year. I could hear it calling my name. Liiiiiisssssaaaaaa...LLLLLLLiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssaaaaaa

I was brought back to reality when Isaiah spit up on me for the fifth time.

It was a toss-up between me and his burp cloth for WORST SMELL IN THE LIVING ROOM. We both were covered in Isaiah's regurgitation.

Of course it had to be a night when Nick worked late until 9pm. He walked in to find me on the floor, lightly bouncing Isaiah in his bouncer while his eyelids drooped closer and closer to a close. My other hand was stuffing dinner in my face because I hadn't eaten in hours. Taking care of Isaiah required both hands all day. Food was secondary. By 9pm, I was so ravenous, I felt like I was going to eat a piece of old firewood laying in the fireplace. It looked like a hotdog at the time.

Luckily, I was able to scarf down dinner while Isaiah bounced around for a few minutes. Nick had barely entered the house when I announced that I needed to go upstairs and get my sanity back. "I'm going to take a shower. If you need me, I'm NOT available."

It's ironic that Isaiah's first laugh came today when I spent most of the day near tears with Bora Bora dreams. Nothing, not even the promise of spring in three weeks could alleviate the stress of a restless baby.

And so, I write.

2010 State of the Self Address

2010-02-27T11:56:00.002-05:00

Four years ago I began delivering the “State of the Self;” a reflection on the past year of life which is always given the evening of my birthday. This is my 2010 State of the Self.

February 27, 1979 is the day I stopped breathing someone else’s air and began breathing on my own. It was not by choice. The woman’s body is built only to support another life for so long before the placenta begins to thin, before the protective and nourishing sac of life begins to deteriorate. It’s like our birthday is our first eviction and the landlord is out mother’s body.

A birth. A day.

I spare no indulgence on the 27th of February and, previous to this year, birthdays always meant my customary helium balloon, sheet cake with vanilla satin icing, and a long list of “must to do” things that include morning mimosas, naps, writing, dreaming, and sniffing around closets and car trunks for my hidden gifts. For the record, I never pretend to be more than a child on my birthday, save the mimosas.

But this birthday is different. This is my first birthday as a mother. This is the first birthday in which the word “birth” and “day” have extracted themselves from streamers and sweets and grew into profound meaning. “Birth,” as in, a son, my firstborn. Day has grown to be more than the frame of 24 hours. “Day” is now gift.

Last year, my State of the Self focused on my identity as a writer. My pen itself nearly throbbed with pain as I described the challenges of creative writing. Now, I worry less about identity as a writer and more about truthfulness. Being truthful with Isaiah may very well be the most challenging task of my life.

And one truth I am going to share with my son is to take moments for himself. Or as I like to put it: Breathe in the awesome. I never understood those who hated their birthday. I suppose it can be viewed as a self-important concept, but the celebration of life, of my own life has always superceded any other reason to deny the day. Those who dread their birthday often do so because of a number – age. Or it reminds them of death.

Birth, for me, evokes the boundless beginning of life.

But if birthdays aren’t your cup of tea, I hope and pray that you do find a day, a time to rejoice in your own life in the very miracle of your existence. Because if we can’t find a reason or an hour to relish in our blessings, to be authentically and radically grateful for our friends, family, lovers, gifts, talents, experiences, insights, and lessons – I don’t know if we’re truly seeing ourselves – or life – clearly enough.

Thirty-one years is more than enough reason for cake and drinks. And after birthing my son, I know that thirty-one seconds alone is more than enough reason for celebration. The paradox of birth – its fragility and its power – must, begs, needs to be recognized. And celebrated. Isaiah has taught me that.

So, my state at 31 is one of utter grace. Grace of understanding. Grace of frustration. Grace of holy parenting and emotion. It is a period of firsts and failures and finding that my life can hold so much more than I ever thought possible. That realization also came with the responsibility that I myself am capable of so much more than I ever thought possible.

It is my birthday wish that everyone – at some point in their life – births new life and it need not be a child. A revolution, a concept, relationship, invention, methodology, habit or path that inducts an enhanced thought-process, a better more gentle way of loving and being in the world.

Because if we all took a moment to birth and rejoice in our own birthing, the state of grace would no longer be a temporary lingering, but an everlasting positioning of soul.

The Artist's Way

2010-02-19T10:11:00.004-05:00

Some weeks ago (my memory is really bad since pregnancy), my dear friend and much respected writer, BFP, wrote something along the lines of saying that she was less interested in "activism" and more interested in the lives and journeys of artists.

That struck me. For numerous reasons.

The first thing that struck me is thinking about my blogging life. When I first began blogging four years ago (yikes! has it been that long?), I remember wanting my "writing" to FIT into the feminist blogosphere. I read many blogs then, wanting to understand what was important to the "Feminist Community," and, truthfully, always struggled in that genre.

I struggled because writing is, essentially, an extension of one's self. What interests me is what I will write most intimately about, what I love is what will illuminate the page (or screen) with my words. Making my writing fit is like trimming my own self, trying to make ME fit.

What I was always interested in were topics like God. Addressing sexual and gender violence in our everyday relationships through deconstruction and critical questions of gender norming. Family. Humor. And love. Always love. These were my interests.

I didn't know it then, but my writing came and continues to flow from a very deep, supremely sensitive place where I process my memory, my life experiences. Of course, current events and news are always interesting, but the writing I connect with is the writing that comes from LIFE, my life. And I'm always interested in how others live or lived their lives.

How did Gloria Anzaldua live with diabetes? How did my mother live through immigrating to this country on her own? How did my cousins live through the passing of both their parents? How did my 8th grade science teacher feel when she decided to get teeth braces at the age of 48? What is it like for young women of color writers in the US?

These were my questions, they weren't "feminist," I suppose, but they came from a very real place that questioned the systematic punishment and guardrails around women.

Feminism exists for all of us to live richer, deeper, more fulfilling lives. Feminism exists for us to question what we want to question and to live as we want to live. The lives of artists, the lives of those who create are lives that are often imbued with resistance; they live counter-culturally. Artists, the souls who create something out of nothing, those who build from ill-fitting pieces possess a strength that reveals itself in their life choices.

I no longer worry about whether I or my writing fits. Rather, I focus on whether or not I am truthful, committed to creation and relationship, and love. Always love.

New Mommness

2010-02-15T22:40:00.004-05:00

So I started working out two weeks ago.

To feel my body MOVE, as in constant motion, without stopping, in cyclic ways, in scissor ways, in stretching to the skies...well, it's been a trial.

I remember WAITING for the day when I could work out again. When I was pregnant and huge and my belly was larger than Jupiter and Saturn and all their moons COMBINED, I was itching to work out HARD.

And now?

Ugh, I can feel the absence of muscle. (except my right bicep which is ripping awesome from carrying my big baby) My lungs are in a state of, "What's going on? I'm actually working under stressful conditions..." and my buttocks are yawning themselves awake, "Mhm, this doesn't feel like the couch cushions..."

I don't want my pre-baby body back. I want a better state of health.

I want - God willing - my next pregnancy to be even better, with a cleaner bill of health. No worries about sugar, no anxieties about high blood pressure. Granted, all was well with this pregnancy and my fear of these conditions was all for naught. But I want to be better. I want to be stronger, more ready.

And then there's breastfeeding. Did someone fail to write this sentence in all the pregnancy and birth literature out there:

REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOU DO, IF YOU DECIDE TO BREASTFEED, THIS WILL LIKELY BE THE MOST PAINFUL AND DIFFICULT PART OF THE POSTPARTUM EXPERIENCE.

I'm not dissing the sleep deprivation. I'm not smirking at the episiomoty recoveries. I'm just sayin' that the boobfeeding experience is one that I was NOT, repeat NOT prepared for...blisters, rashes, PLUGGED DUCTS, changing colors, sizes, breast pads, nursing bras, lotions, water, airing out...

Heaven help me. Why didn't anyone give me a reality check about breastfeeding?

There was one person, I believe, on FACEBOOK who wrote one comment on my wall when she found out I was pregnant: Watch out for breastfeeding. I wish someone prepped me for that one.

Of course I knew it would take some time to figure out. The sore nipples and what not -- I was anticipating all of that. But holy smokes, the PAIN, the agonizing over each feeding in the beginning...I actually had nightmares about a gigantic breast in my face; as if I was the baby and one huge boob was coming toward me. It was the size of a house. I woke up sweating.

So, yeah. Breastfeeding.

Another reason confirming that women truly can do and withstand anything.

Tim Tebow is the Best Thing to Happen to Young Women?

2010-02-08T10:06:00.006-05:00

The so-called controversial anti-abortion message. From all the coverage, I was expecting a ferocious lion. A very lame commercial came on instead.

Interesting read.

It was written prior to the Superbowl and the unveiling of the controversial Tebow/Focus on the Family ad, but I think Jenkins makes some brilliant points. Her most resonating words are those that critique NOW and its narrow focus on feminism, women's rights, and reproductive freedom...

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn't be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one.

Personally, I was up to my eyeballs with annoyance over the anxious and hyped up worry from particular feminist groups who, once again, gave reproductive justice and gender rights movements a bad name with their outcry of this ad being "anti abortion," while others featuring scantily clad women holding beer bottles and footballs have been deemed acceptable for Superbowl Sunday.

Never mind all the sexist-driven ads which young women watch that bombard them with anti-health messages concerning their bodies, choice, worth, and potential. At least Focus on the Family isn't hypocritical (with this particular commercial) - they want to celebrate life and families and they do just that with the Tebow clan. While NOW exercises their outrage over this particular ad, a million other commercials which blatantly demoralize and sexualize women go without complaint. Wouldn't it be something revolutionary if NOW had protested the Go Daddy ads or pointed out how women are often used as a sex appeal accessory in alcohol and beer commercials?

As much as I may disagree with its stance, as much as I could argue with its points, Focus on the Family is, well, focused. Ask feminist and pro-choice leadership groups what they focus on and you'll find a mess of disagreement and hypocrisy.

4am Lessons

2010-02-05T13:28:00.003-05:00

Before I had a son, I wrote about feminism as a subject. It was a noun, sometimes even a verb. Feminism existed as a THING to be written out, explained, debated.

As the past seven weeks of my life have unfolded, I've either woken up to a new form or writing, or I've undergone some sort of lobotomy where I have no recollection about that kind of writing. You know, the kind of writing where I blatantly write FEMINISM IS THIS, IS NOT THAT, IS MORE LIKE THIS, IS DEFINITELY NOT THAT...

I breastfeed Isaiah and this painful learning process about the wonder of the body and the miracle of nurturing has captivated my writing in new subtleties. His eyes are dark and I stare into them. I don't see anything but openness. His open pupils stare back into the dark storms of my eyelets and I wonder what he sees in me. And I think about the world and what it will tell him about being a boy, a growing man. The window alone reveals a half-snowed road and the neighbor's holiday lights still hanging red and white, yet I see a colder world than the winter temperatures. And I worry.

I don't believe teaching "Feminism" is going to do anything for my son. I don't know if attending gender and women's studies courses are going to save him from a hypermasculine society and sexually-distorted media driven world. Maternity leave has let me soak up the world without paid work and I am listening to the sounds of the news. The conversations around me. The behaviors of strangers in stores. The fragments of life are there for me to observe and I'm not convinced Isaiah will learn how to survive that world with "Feminism."

There's no bargaining in raising a child. The world, as I see it from Cleveland, does not bargain with mothers. It doesn't exchange or make deals. Isaiah, with his soft cooing and heart-melting pouts, will be taught messages about his soul, his worth, his identity...and I'm praying I know how to raise him how to reject most of it.

Counter-cultural child-rearing is going to be a monstrous feat in my future. It already is...And the "Feminism" I knew - the kind that had me chasing conferences, journalists, and blog wars - has quieted itself, perhaps even buried itself. A new ecdysis is shedding, rapidly. In its place are questions of health care and education, public breastfeeding, family consumerism, and equal parenting.

To be of use, for Feminism to be of use to mothers, it must come complete with relevance to women's lives. Ordinary lives and extraordinary responsibility. There is no room, in my son's life, for classes or blogs, podcasts, or lectures.

All he has is me. All he knows is me his mother. His father, my partner. WE are all he will know for a window's crack of time before the rest of the community begins to warm his world with ideas. The doubt and insecurity of my own ability to teach him weighs heavily in my heart.

And so I write. I write him letters. I whisper things into his ear at 4am when it feels like no one else in the world is awake. Just us, mother and son. I whisper things, things far too complicated for his tiny brain to comprehend, but I believe the introduction of my voice as a whisper will allow me into his psyche as a voice of reason. A guiding force of love.

I continue to write him letters and whisper into the night. And pray, that for now, it is enough.

Despite the Dark, We See Light

2010-01-18T08:12:00.006-05:00

Each day I make vows and each day I break them.

Is this the practice of new motherhood?

Each morning I make vows to write - write the overdue thank you cards, write my thoughts about this time of my life, write blog posts, write my proposals, write correspondence...write write write.

And I write nothing.

Part of the problem is that my mind still feels like it's been stung by a bee the size of large mixing bowl. I have very little creativity lately.

But what I do have is a lot of honesty these days. I think I'll have to take honest writing over creative writing. Perhaps someday I will create a curriculum to create "Honest Writing 101" to replace "Creative Writing 101."

Isaiah is four weeks old. Last night, as I muted the Golden Globes in the background and fed him, I thought how strange it was that time, productivity, and madness are all measured through this person. Four weeks. That's the only time I have known. Productivity - I'm all milk stains and sleep deprivation and dirty diapers. Madness - these winter storms and flu bugs have me a bit cabin crazy and on my knees, pleaing for spring's arrival. All I know and feel is through him and because of him.

Honest writing.

The truth is that I can't recall a time in my life where everything changed so radically and quickly. I feel like I'm on the other side of life now. Before Isaiah, I thought much of the world was divided between partnered couples and single folks. Now it's cut again with children. Having children is a much deeper difference than the single vs. partnered. The parents - regardless if they are partnered or single - are who I identify with now. The responsibility! The boundaries! The limitations! The joy! The expense! The perpetual worry! These are all things that I knew before, but knowing is shit compared to actually LIVING it.

Honest writing.

Children has changed my marriage. While I work very hard to build and sustain a healthy relationship with my spouse, I can see how the pressures of raising a family cause so much destruction, distance, and departure. I can see why people leave. And I can see how often women give everything away in motherhood. I can see how women can lose themselves; how easy it is to do everything the easy way and shoulder the load alone because it's complicated, time-consuming, and difficult to ask or expect anyone else to do it. I can see how so many adopt the I'll do it all and I'll do it myself" attitude until the entire list of tasks and details of survival has been hitched on their shoulders and the responsibility to care and anticipate needs grows heavier than the dreams dreamed before parenthood.

I think I understand that now.

I need to make and keep that boundary; a line that divides giving all that I have and forgetting my own dreams that were billowing well before my belly ever did. I will keep myself and therefore keep writing. Writing has been paused, but not forgotten. My pursuits have been slowed by not erased. The fear of losing my identity in a diaper is too great for me to forget that I am a person of many dreams.

Isaiah is the greatest joy I have known. He has brought to fruition the reality of unconditional love and, unbelievably, that I am capable of doing so. He has brought an urgency to my art, an expansion to my soul, and renewed sense of goodness in the world and people around me. I believe in people again. I believe in the inherent goodness of those around me because, despite all the darkness of the world, despite all the injustices and short-lived sprees of hope, strangers and friends alike REJOICE in new life. There are beams of sun on faces when they learn a new person has joined the human race. There is an unmistakable and authentic excitement in their eyes when they learn I was pregnant or when they first saw the wiggling blanket in my arms; it seems almost involuntary, as if it could not be helped.

That got me thinking.

If life is so tragic and laden with disappointments, why smile when a baby is born? Why celebrate when another has been created?

In all that adults know of this life, with all that we know about one another - our history of hatred and violence, our tendencies and selfishness, our egos and big heads - how is it that we, with all our flaws and cracks STILL rejoice in the knowledge that more life, another person has been born to this?

Is it that we hope this person will bring more good to the world? Is it that? We are hoping this little squirming newborn will grow to make change? To make a difference?

Perhaps.

But I have come to believe that even with all the pain and woes of living, deep down, we quietly understand the miracle of existence is worth getting excited about; it's worth sharing. And we subconsciously know (even if we have consciously forgotten or deny) that life is good, love is alive, and while the problems and challenges we face will forever taint the horizon, the light that illuminates that very same horizon is mesmerizing.

And we rejoice.

New Motherhood

2010-01-08T11:48:00.004-05:00

I have a saying:

Sometimes when there's too much to say, there's nothing to say at all.

There's so much amazing-ness to the new experience of motherhood. I am slowly coming to a schedule, a level of health and clarity where I will be able to write and express the up and down and everything in between about my new life unfolding. Until then, photos will suffice my journey.

The Gift

2009-12-24T08:57:00.001-05:00

The Pregnant Process of Writing

2009-12-07T03:54:00.002-05:00

I'm in the last few weeks of my pregnancy and I wish I could write like I used to. I've heard some women measure the differences pregnancy has made in their lives by their physical bodies, the hours of sleep they used to get, how their emotions change. One of the biggest changes for me has been my writing voice.

Perhaps it's the draining of my memory or the lack of focus on one central issue that has prevented me from writing as I used to. Perhaps its the inward-ness I've experienced as a pregnant women. The lioness in me to outwardly roar into the ear of the world has been sleeping with her cub. Instead of love projected into activism, travel, writing, and conferences, my life is love put into daily self-care, methodical practices to prepare for a child, mental quiet to adjust to the radical life changes happening.

My writing is deepening and the evidence is not public. Writing has always been such a private locket for me; a small beautiful thing hanging close to my heart and writing, before it's released to others, has always first transformed me before I let it out. This pregnancy, how I have come to grow with a life within me, has changed my perspective. All of the things I were before I still am, just in a profoundly different way. The awareness of another human could not be more pronounced than in the glowing and growing underbelly of a pregnant woman. There is not one step I take now without effort, not one night where I am restless and drained, not one breath I take that is not shared.

That awareness is a new writing tool, a new gift that I am still marveling in its sheath.

In the next few weeks, a new chapter of my life will begin and I am deliciously terrified of how that will unfold. I worry that I will not be able to write as much, or as well, ever again with new parenting responsibilities. I am afraid that my life will move in a direction that closes the spaces I once reserved for writing. To some extent, I'm sure that is true - a childless schedule typically lends itself to more freedom than a woman with a newborn - but if there's one thing I have learned from the past eight and a half months is that there are some things in life, there are some things that simply call for trust.

And love always leads the way. Love led me this far to birth this child.

Love will lead me back to writing well.

The Maguindinao Massacre

2009-11-30T11:36:00.002-05:00

Deeply reflecting on this and too entrenched in my thoughts to write.

Why Zeba Khan Can

2009-11-17T11:41:00.003-05:00

be my next great pundit.

Not only is this her short bio:

I am a social media consultant for nonprofits. I have researched women and minority issues in the Muslim World, Islam in America and counterterrorism finance with the U.S. Treasury Department.

but for the love of God - SHE'S FROM TOLEDO, OHIO!

::gratitude and pride oozing from the northeast Buckeyes::

CLEVELAND SAYS: VOTE KHAN!

(Her Ohio-ness is a creamy icing on the cake...she's also an original and intelligent writer who focuses much of brilliance on Detroit. What's not to love?)

The Frontlines of Motherhood

2009-11-16T13:42:00.006-05:00

A first time pregnancy is fraught with fears and questions. Existence, as I have known it, changed the moment I realized my life had reproduced another. A raw wonderment framed these fears and questions as the human body illuminated itself with miracle after miracle of unfolding life.

Beyond scientific reasoning, the body simply knows its duties, its problems, and negotiations. It produces milk and ajusts its supply according to demand. The body releases hormones that strengthens hair, nails, and bones while moving emotions around in preparation for a new life.

There are things in pregnancy that simply happen, almost like instructions were written in our bones and our bodies just obey. Decisions around birthing, terminating, breastfeeding, daycare, and health are uniquely assigned to each mother, like DNA. No fingerprints are alike. No pregnancy experience is mimicked or identical.

My own pregnancy, mostly, has been joyous, comfortable, awesome, and reflective. The most difficult terrain to hike has been balancing the identity of a working mother to be and making decisions to work post partum. An almost mother is asked to project. Predict. Assume. Have an answer based on the factors around you.

To be honest, that expectation - the expectation to know what my life will look like, what I will look like in a new role - feels ridiculous. Absurd, even.

It occured to me as more questions about WORK came up in conversation that we really don't allow parents the privilege of adjustment. We give parents the decision making power, the expectations, the information. We give parents enough advice to get through anything. What we as a society DON'T do is give a reasonable amount of time to transition ourselves into our new role as life and caretakers. Supposedly that is what the 9 months of gestation are about. However, the expectation of WORK is to continue along as if we are NOT pregnant, as if we are NOT expecting. The expectation is that we arrive at the places and appointments just as we always had been, regardless of what it took to get there. Even if you had to pull over to vomit, even if you had to stop and eat because your stomach felt like it was concaving, even if you dragged your body out of bed and it felt like it had been drugged with sleeping pills - you still show up and work. Never mind the growing globe underneath your shirt, work is WORK.

Work - our societal structures of financially compensated labor - dictates that we make projections to the best of our ability on what we will do once we birth. We run with the leashes around our neck that dictate much time and space we are able to take, or "be off work," when, ironically, this time will likely be the most difficult, painful, work-filled time ever known.

I have yet to find someone with a story whose work, company, organization, or agency truly and humbly honors that transition.

When we ask for family leave or maternity leave, what are we asking for? Are we asking for time to adjust? Or are we asking for a period of self and familial transformation? Every parent I have ever known has communicated in one way or another that life, as you know it without children, changes from top to bottom. Every layer, every facet of decision making and lifestyle is altered to make room for another person.

Now, I'm not advocating that new parents get an unlimited amount of time and money because of a decision to start a family. Understandably, businesses need to continue. Tasks need attention. Labor needs call. But, in the twisting definition of modern families, how we care for new life is just as important as how we care for new parents. How satisfied and/or stressed new parents are directly impacts the quality of work they produce and the quality of love they can share with their children.

So, when people ask me what I am doing after the baby is born, I answer with the most honest answer I have: I don't know.

I don't know. There is no reference I can pull or a map I've created.

But, decisions have to be made.

Who will take care of the child?

And I also wonder

Who will take care of me as a new parent? Who can I turn to in times of emotional flux? Who will answer at 3am when the whole street has dark houses and mine is only one lit up? Where do I go in my journey to be a good, decent parent?

Despite a floundering job market where feeling anything but gratitude for even having a job is not permissible; flexiblity, understanding, and basic employee trust would be revolutionary these days. We're not robots. There's no formula to know exactly what I'll be ready for and how I'm going to balance that. But the system we've designed, the main street sidewalks we've paved all point to schedules, numbers, and dates. There's no room for adjusting, really adjusting to life's milestones. We're given handfuls of weeks, sometimes even less than that to rearrange our lives. There's no space to truly embrace the beautiful unpredictability of life. There's no space to laugh at ourselves, or our mistakes.

Sometimes I feel like when I am most honest, I am labeled naive and irresponsible. No, I have no plan yet. Yes, the baby is coming next month. No, I don't know about daycare. Yes, I do want to breastfeed, I think. I don't know. Maybe.

Why is it that when I say, "I just want to see how I adapt to being parent," the persons listening hears that I'm not ready? That I'm not thinking things through?

And then there's my partner...he has even less options than I do in his "family leave" options. Since he technically did not "birth" anything out of his body, he should be able to jump right back into the swing of things after a few weeks.

The war zone in frontlines of motherhood are dry and worn and dirty. Even in the best of circumstances where we welcome and love the changes to our bodies, minds, and memories, we are expected to keep those changes OUT of our workforce lives. The productivity, the race toward an arbitrary goal, the endless monotony and routine must continue as if nothing but pleasantries occured. Never mind if you're stitched up in the center of your body or your chest is aching with battle scars. There's no time to waste explaining how sleep deprived you are - just GET TO WORK.

Unapologetically Me

2009-11-13T09:59:00.002-05:00

SO - my new website is underway and I am feel like a kid peering into a toy store that hasn't opened yet. I'm fascinated by any and all glimpses of what could be inside.

I have to say that this experience - co-creating a website with a webmaster - has brought me to a high level of admiration for artists, creators, designers who truly LISTEN to clients, who genuinely desire to incorporate feedback and thoughts into the final project.

My webmaster is this kind of brilliant, listening soul. I absolutlely cannot wait to unveil her work.

Even more, I am excited by how excited I am by her work. Isn't that the synergy of artists and creators? I am inspired by HER work and that makes ME a better writer.

There have been a few delays due to my pregnancy and catching a bug a few weeks ago, but we're back on it and as the time draws closer to its launch, the more eagerness, inspiration, and fear eat at my toes and fingers.

I am going to be writing from the place where I feel most comfortable, the place where I feel most passion, the place I reference as the Unapologetically Me space. It's a place that I was hoping to arrive at as a writer - the place where you know exactly what your voice is and how you want to use it.

My new website will be a place for ALL my readers and audiences to find me. And, unapologetically so, will have to get used to all the facets of my writing that I am experimenting. Family and friends, strangers and critics, bloggers and readers - all will find me at this ONE place. To centralize myself, to stabilize my writing - Unapologetically - has been a long time coming.

It's with blissful uncertainty that I begin a new website and attach a this blog as a cargo behind it.

And, thanks to the many readers and emailers who encouraged me to take the high road, the answer is YES - I will be staying with Ecdysis as its title.

The evolution was A Womyn's Ecdysis, My Ecdysis, and now Ecdysis.

You don't want to miss the molting I have in store for you.

Letter #12

2009-11-11T10:10:00.004-05:00

Dear Isaiah,

Sometimes I still wonder what our pregnancy would have been like had you turned out to be a girl. I wonder if you'd have received more letters from me. Frankly, the idea of raising a son is a new unchartered territory - even in my mind!

The closer we come, though, to receiving you in this world, outside my body, the more unspeakably excited and tender-hearted I become. You are going to make me a mama.

We've made it to 32 weeks (and counting), although the doctor says you're looking three weeks ahead of schedule. I marvel at the slow journey of pregnancy, yet, when we reach weekly milestones, I feel like its sped by and hardly feel prepared.

Last night, your father put together a crib for you and I watched him. Sitting on the floor, looking up at him struggle over nuts, bolts, and frames of wood, I laughed and giggled over his frustration. You're so small and the crib seems so much bigger than what you will need. But, your dad shows his love and eagerness for you in so many ways (other than crib assembly) and it has been moving to watch him grow through this experience as well.

Thanks to the advice of so many sage women in my life, I have come to know you as my unborn child, not just a gendered being in my body. I have come to accept that I will make so many mistakes - more than I will care to count - and as long as I try my best and keep fighting, you will learn the things that I most desperately want to teach you: love, faith, justice, empathy, resiliency, and humility.

I hope you to be a prophet. An activist. A person who seeks less to matter in the world as much as realizing how much people in the world matter. I hope you to be a lover of gentleness and truth, unafraid to walk alone on our front lawn, during recess, down the street, across a barrio, with another soul, with a unknown Entity.

I have come to accept how much of my life, henceforth, is out of my control. You will learn to first depend then interdepend, then exist independent of me and your father. Those transitions will be painful for all of us, I'm sure, but the strength of my hope and belief that we can do this together is stronger than those impending fears and inevitable struggles.

I am ready to be your mama and that readiness is beautiful to feel.

Love,
Mom

The Revolution Will Be Blogged!

2009-11-10T09:36:00.002-05:00

If you want to know the difference between the feminist blogosphere and radical womyn of color, read this beautiful article by Lex. Not many can say it better than Alexis Pauline Gumbs:

The energy transmitted through the radical women of color blogosphere (a.k.a. those of us who are seeking to build community and create transformation across space and time, bringing ancestors and babies every step of the way) is a life-giving force. This magic, this potential is also why we are punished for loving each other. This is not the glorification of a scene, this is a distinction between scene and community, a reminder of what is at stake.

Dr. Tiller's Second Murder on Law and Order

2009-10-27T09:44:00.004-04:00

Charlotte Taft wrote a piece, "Dr. Tiller Murdered Again on NBC's Law and Order," critiquing last Friday's episode in which shades of Dr. Tiller's murder became fodder for the "fictitious" storyline in which an abortion provider is assassinated in his own church.

Taft writes passionately, clearly from a place that most people cannot empathize. Most of us are not abortion providers or work closely with abortion providers who see first hand the complex and often heart-wrenching decisions that are often hidden in the shadows in the war between "life" and abortion.

With due respect to Ms. Taft's piece, I didn't pick up anything overtly offensive from the episode. Mildly surprised that it vascillated between the values of pro-choice and pro-life audiences, I was most pleased to see that some parts of the script were encouraging debate and revisiting what reproductive health means today, after almost four decades of Roe vs. Wade, where more women have access to care, where we know more about what women's health is and what is needed. We know more. We still have long miles to go, but what I took from that episode is that the water is murkier than ever. Unfortunately, the ringing question, "When does life begin?" seems to trump the fact that we know more in 2009 than in 1973. Women's roles and contributions have shifted. Our consciousness as a society has (slowly and painstakingly) shifted. We have not arrived at full equality, but we are not in the throes of '73 anymore.

Certainly, I can appreciate and support Taft's piece in RH Reality. If I were on the frontlines of abortion clinics, worked and befriended Tiller or people like Tiller, I probably would have been up in arms, too.

But I am not.

I'm a regular bystander of NBC. I'm a regular person who stayed in Friday night with a virus and ended up watching Law and Order because there wasn't much on TV. In many ways, couched in the heart of America, I am just like everyone else - trying to feel my way through this process of where this country is headed with the most contentious and violent issue in our hearts. And in my opinion, a 1 hour show that has a track record of simplifying issues, making them dance with good script-writing, and long up-close shots of usually Caucasian actors will never make the grade, but it does make a point.

The point I got was good: this issue is only resulting in more violence and staunch pro-lifers and staunch pro-choicers are not going to be the answer. The inflexible pieces of abortion and life keep us in circles, yelling matches really.

It's going to come from the compass of middle America. And middle America is torn.

Weekend Feminist Bumper Sticker

2009-10-24T06:49:00.001-04:00

Poetry on Feminist Catholicism

2009-10-22T14:41:00.002-04:00

I wrote a poem about Adam and Eve. Well, more about Eve than Adam.

I don't believe in the literal interpretation of Genesis. I don't believe in the apple, the garden, the tree, the temptation, the Fall, or the banishment.

I do believe that oral story telling is a rich part of tradition and somewhere along the way, telling stories began to lose their power of metaphor.

In the literal, vein, however, I wrote this poem and designed a backdrop as I think more about my Catholic faith.

Letter #11

2009-10-20T16:07:00.002-04:00

Dear Isaiah,

Yesterday I took a walk outside on an unexpected 60 degree day. My shoes came off and I dug my feet into the lush, autumn green. A tiny ladybug had landed on my knee and I played with it for about 10 minutes, flipping the tips of grass onto its pathway so it changed directions.

I wondered how in the world a God could exist that thought to create an insect with a red shell and black polka dots on its back. I wondered how in the world a God could exist that could create you inside of me.

You, me, and the ladybug hung out for a while before I went back to my office to finish the rest of the work day. But the fresh air and colors of yesterday stayed with me.

Today, I began fearing if I might be sick. A tickle in my throat, dry cough, slightly warm forehead...I began talking to myself, convincing myself that I was fine, you were fine. WE are fine.

I walked into my office and saw a storm of lady bugs on my ceiling, crawling on the window, more flying around on my screen, trying to find a way in. No where else in the building was there a concentration of ladybugs. I frowned, wondering why I would be so unfortunate to inherit all these pesky things. The wonder of yesterday was gone.

A co-worker walked in and gasped, "Look at your ladybugs! They are a sign of good luck!"

I googled it "symbolism of a ladybug," and, sure enough, it means good luck and if one lands on you, it's a sing of impending good fortune. It also means I/we are being protected.

Given my worry and anxiety that I am sick because of this tickle at the base of my throat, a small sign, smaller than a thumbnail, gives me some irrational comfort that you/we are going to be just fine.

Someone recently shared with me, after listening to my worries about becoming a mother, "It's already begun. I can hear it. You want so much to keep this brand new life as pure as possible for as long as possible."

My eyes filled and I nodded.

She laughed compassionately, "We don't have a prayer! Even their first breath is already tainted."

I smiled sadly, knowing it was true, but intuitively feeling like this impossible effort to keep you pure was still attainable.

Her eyes leveled mine, "But we do the best we can. Always. That's what we do."

I am doing the best I can. I hope that is enough for you/us.

Actually, maybe it's more than enough for you and it's ME who is expecting more.

Love Always,
Mama

UTNE Magazine Gets it Right Again: 50 Visionaries Who are Chaning Your World

2009-10-15T15:48:00.003-04:00

And the list for the top 50 visionaries are out once again and I must beam that ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS is on the list! How thrillingly appropriate to recognize this brilliant troublemaker who resides near and dear to my heart.

Congratulations to Utne for keeping their eye on the true visionaries and an even BIGGER congrats to Lex for her pioneering work, compassionate spirit, and bottomless well of activist energy!

Nobody Said Choice was Easy: Pregnancy and Vaccination

2009-10-15T09:41:00.003-04:00

It's true when they say that the never unheated issue of abortion is the most visible skyscraper in the cityline of reproductive rights. Many other issues, although not as controversial or heavy hitting, are often left in the cool shadows, lingering on the minds of distressed women.

I'm inching toward my 7th month of pregnancy and the issue of the NIHI vaccine has been monopolozing my mind since flu season descended on my calendar, and straight into my big pregnant heart afflicted with tender worrying about my first child.

To vaccinate or not vaccinate that is the question.

Here's what I want to know: how do you trust ANYONE these days to give you correct information? For most computer literate citizens, there is no shortage of informtion. Thanks to trusty libraries, there is no question left in the dark, but, the question remains in my suspicious mind: How do I trust this information?

Maybe there are a handful of organizations or groups dedicated to unbiased information distribution, but, for the H1N1 issue, I'm pressed to find hard core facts that don't have some sort of agenda to nudge you in a certain direction.

This is my body and inside my body is my first child. The questions going back and forth neutralize my ability to make a decision. There is risk in doing something, there is risk in doing nothing, so I look at the facts.

Fact #1 - in my local community, there have been reported and confirmed H1N1 cases. To be exact, the local family care center 2 blocks from my house.

Fact #2 - 1% of the population is pregnant and yet, of those who have died from the the H1N1 flu, 6% have been pregnant women

Fact #3 - The vaccine is new and although people want to remain positive, the uncertainty of its effects are not known. NOBODY truly knows what the effects might be on pregnant women.

Fact #4 - Pregnant women have a weakened immunity system and those in later pregnancy may have more complications from flu-turned-pneumonia because of lack of sleep, irregular breathing patterns (baby pushing up against diaphragm makes deep breathes more difficult), and overall fatigue

Fact #5 - There is risk either way and regardless of what I do, my choice will be unpopular with someday in my life

My father is nearly sweating himself into dehydration because he wants me first in line for the vaccine. My mother is unconvinced that vaccination is safe. My dear Adonis keeps reading whatever he can, uncertain what is best and afraid to push me into getting the vaccine which he, underneath it all, thinks is the best option for our growing family.

I remain on the sidelines, swaying to the winds of news, gut, prayers, and hope.

So, after you've got choice, after you've got the information, what do you do if you still can't make a decision?

I've asked Isaiah what he thinks and he just kicks and rolls happily inside, his firing neurons building a system that utterly depends on the decisions I make with my body and our health.

A Brief Word

2009-10-14T11:05:00.002-04:00

Thanks to those who are asking about my impending move. Not to worry, though, this blog will automatically redirect you to my new site.

Change is afoot!

Open Thread And Soliciting Advice

2009-10-13T15:29:00.002-04:00

I hate when I ask for reader's opinion. Mostly because it reads like I cannot make up my mind. I mean, never mind that that IS the truth, but I usually hide it real well. In the closet: I am indecisive.

So a new website is underway (do you HEAR the archangles singing in the sky?) and I am deliciously excited to unveil it and start FRESH, with more authentic, funny, candid, meaningful, frequent writing. Ah, I feel like I'm about to go in for a makeover. I'll smell all glorious and everyone will turn and sniff in my direction, "What...who was THAT?" Yes, friends, that is the smell of my new website called...called...

And that's why I need your help.

MY ECDYSIS was reformed from A WOMYN'S ECDYSIS. The word "ecdysis" basically means shedding an outer layer. It's a biologist's term. I've got history with it. It makes sense.

It's also confusing, people misspell it like it's their PAID JOB not to look up how to spell it correctly, and, truthfully, NO ONE KNOWS HOW TO PRONOUNCE IT. I think I've spent more time correcting spelling and annunciation ECDYSIS than I have about kyriarchy, feminism, or any other issue I've written about.

So, I am at a crossroads.

How do you know when to change? Has "ECDYSIS" ecdysis-ed itself? I'm a big proponent of continuity, especially on the internets, but I'm itching to find a replacement. With no success.

I cannot think of anything that is more appropriate for me than My Ecdysis, and yet, I want something new.

Oh, the cyber tug of internal war continues.

And so, my dear readers, those who are loyal enough to email or leave your thoughts in the comments section -- what do you think?

Taking suggestions, feedback, criticism, thoughts. Anything but profanity.

Columbus Day Should be Reclaimed as National Day of Historical Truth-Telling

2009-10-12T11:28:00.005-04:00

If ignoring the controversial Columbus Day holiday is not what we should do, then what is?

If the Columbus voyage is compared to a modern day voyage to Mars, then what do we make of the European colonization that took place subsequent to Columbus' "discovery?"

What do we make of the wiping out of the Native Americans who were here, and HAD been here for so long? How do we recoin a holiday when the basis of the "discovery" was actually theft? And brutality?

What do we do when we know that truth? What happens after truth-telling? Has anything changed? Instead of moving the holiday around to create longer 4 day weekends in November, what do we DO with the knowledge that the history textbooks document Columbus day from the victor's side? Has that knowledge changed your perception of this federal holiday?

The least we can do is make today a day of truth-telling. If we want to tell the story of a man who went on a really brave, long trip; if we want to tell the story of the violent genocide inflicted upon the Native Americans; if we want our children to have a day off of school for these reasons and, for some, receive a paid holiday, the least we can do is press upon the truth, if only for one day.

The Argument for Realism and Dangers of "Positive Thinking"

2009-10-10T04:53:00.006-04:00

Barbara Ehrenreich recently gave an interview about how "positive thinking" is undermining America to which I say, BRAVO.

Ehrenreich argues that, basically, a little realism and truthful admittance of our feelings when we are dogged by the inevitable harder aspects of life are not only normal, but quite healthy. She talks about her new book which explores the roots of "positive thinking" which hit close to home when in treatment for breast cancer and was advised to "embrace" her disease.

Another insightful and interesting perspective from Ehrenreich that may have me borrowing this book from the library once available.

The one point I would either disagree with or elaborate with Ehrenreich:

For the positive thinker, that means everything looks rosy and everything is going to be all right no matter what, so you have to block out the little warning signs.

For the very depressed person, you're just convinced that everything is going to be miserable, that you're not going to enjoy anything you undertake, that you're going to fail at everything.

There, too, you're just projecting things. It's extremely hard to "see things as they are." It's a project -- we have to consult other people, we get other views, we sometimes have to question other people's views, but that's the only way to proceed, and that's how our species has survived as long as it has.

The anti-deflatable population, those who are absolutely committed to seeing everything rosy, are not positive thinkers. I would argue those folks are in denial. Denial is powerful. It has the capacity to mentally save us from crushing circumstances when we need to focus on something else, like a strategy to survive. Denial is not always a bad thing. Psychologically, denial is a coping mechanism that, when appropriately used in a timely manner, can be extremely effective and helpful, provided you deal and process whatever is troublesome soon afterward.

But that's not the kind of denial that I'm referencing with this population Ehrenreich is describing. The denial of whole perspective, the denial of seeing the source of pain and unfairness is not positive thinking. It's intentional self-blindness.

The folks who Ehrenreich speaks of are the classically weak. Those who run from insecurities into big homes and refuse to acknowledge pain. Those who tell laid off workers to have a better attitude or say that cancer is "a gift." I don't believe those are positive thinkers. I think there can be redemptive strength and epiphanies that come from suffering, as many cancer patients attest, but, I tend to agree with Ehrenreich on this point: How about a little realism?

The world is a living paradox. It is filled with peace and injustice, good and bad, healers and killers, miracles and tragedies. Those who actually see this, those of us who are see BOTH sides of humanity and still see hope, those are positive thinkers. Those are the visionaries who have walked through the caves, curse at the darkness, hate the stench of oppression, identify the causes of crises, and STILL, despite all of that maintain some sort of decent, whole, and active existence in the world. Those are positive thinkers.

It's not to the lengths that she describes in her cancer treatments, but I think of my own experiences with "positive thinkers," or people who don't want to hear the hard knock truth of our emotions when faced with crisis or even severely stressful situations.

Like pregnancy.

I cannot begin to count how many times I have tried to discuss certain fears I have about delivery, about becoming a parent, or even about the plain Jane pain that will take over my body in a few short months when I give birth. To which most people automatically direct me to "think about the positive parts of this! You're having a baby!"

I KNOW.

There is no minimizing the miracle or joy I experience on a daily level because of this new life. There is no way to diminish the unparalleled brilliance of what is transpiring in my body right now.

At the same time, there is still an abiding anxiety that I neither reject or ignore. It is part of the REALITY of my life, this experience. To project PURE positive thinking is to deny a reality which can be very much part of a positive gift later on, but for now, the deep anxiety and concern I have over the H1N1 vaccine, developing gestational diabetes, traumatic birth, birth defects, and overall, what kind of parent I will be are all so very real and scary.

But everyone loves to talk about the positive parts, the hunky dory pieces of nursery talk and baby land.

To "see things as they are" is, indeed, a rare perspective these days.

How Intimate and Functional is Your Feminism?

2009-10-06T11:23:00.005-04:00

I'm presenting at a conference in a little over a week. I was given 20 minutes to talk about feminism, new media, and identity. Twenty minutes.

I remember when I was in college and thinking that writing long papers was one of the biggest challenges. "What am I supposed to write about?" I always looked for fillers to make my number pages increase, as if writing MORE signified more meaning.

Eight years after college, I learned that it's short papers, abbreviated periods of time that holds true challenge. How do I only have 20 minutes to create this presentation when I have so much to say?

In preparing for this conference, I've been writing primers on feminism, my feminism. My perspective. My truth. I have been reviewing the definition of feminism and its futility in the common, everyday world in which we live in. How feminism affects the relationships we claim mean so much to us. How feminism affects our communication patterns in workplaces built on hierarchy and authority. How feminism challenges and/or enhances our expectations of the men in my life (and especially the women in my life!).

How does feminism, YOUR feminism affect you? How personal, how intimate do you allow your feminism to become?

If personal transformation is key, or a precursor to societal transformation, intimacy with feminism cannot be sidestepped. It takes a monstrous force to allow oneself to be vulnerable enough to change, vulnerable enough to change our relationships and beliefs that influence our daily behaviors. That is the function of my feminism -- using it as a ladder to climb for a better view, reaching higher [deeper] levels of clarity. It is not navel gazing if we actually USE feminism for self-transformation, instead of using it as a lens to think or muse on our own experiences. Once we're done musing, it's time to enact change. Put our lessons into practice.

For me, action and change are found in small-sounding shifts. For example...

I stopped lying.

I stopped lying to people when they ask how I am feeling. I stopped saying that I feel great and have enough energy to be pregnant, go out, cook, take care of myself, work a full time job.

I stopped lying and began saying what is really happening: I'm tired. I'm tired by 2pm everyday and need to sleep. Saying this means I've asked for help. Admitting this means allowing others to see that I'm changing and I'm affected by that change. It means acknowledging that I am not as energetic as I once was. It means allowing myself to be seen in my own skin. It means not pretending and letting whatever expectations of me that others held to fall to the ground and stay there.

I stopped lying because the energy in creating a lie - however slight the alteration of the truth it is - distracts and subtracts from the energy bank I DO have.

The result is I am able to see myself as I am: a very pregnant woman, very much in love with this experience, and needing time to Be exactly as I am.

It wasn't the hugest lie to tell. Perhaps the liberation I feel has more to do with the fact that I am being more FULLY myself, allowing more of the truth in, instead of filtering it out.

It's meant closing my door to sleep. It's meant reaching for more water. It's meant coming to grips with the darker parts of pregnancy that are creeping closer and closer in my insecurity. It's meant more doctor's appointments and less bravado.

It means being real.

Feminism, the kind I am presenting, has to do with that kind of liberation. It begins with small lies we tell ourselves to get through the day, it begins with taking down ridiculous facades we don't even need to begin with, and frees up our identity to pay attention to who we really are, what we are really about, and refocus that energy in what truly matters.

It is my hope, or plan, that beginning in those seeds of truth will allow us to grow into truth-filled bodies where we can recognize the people and places that truly need more energy and hope.

I serve no other person well if I begin from an unstable foundation.

Deadly 2009 Philippine Flood Compared to 2005 Katrina

2009-09-28T13:44:00.007-04:00

In the customary USA-bootlicking rhetoric that has become a signature of the corrupt Philippine government, President Gloria Arroyo defended the government's actions when it received harsh criticism of its slow efforts and rescue pace after a typhoon settled over the Philippines Saturday and dropped a record amount of rain in one day, saying more rain fell on Manila and surrounding areas in Saturday's deluge than on New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit there in 2005.

I've grown accustome to Philippine presidents, especially Arroyo, making comparative statements between the Philippines and the United States, as if trying to solidify a positive, allied relationship. After buying a stamp in the Philippines with the image of George W. Bush, I learned political leaders side with the US, identify with the US, and see no sacrifice as to large in striving to be the Robin to the US's Batman. So much so, the Philippine government pushes English in the schools and keeps Tagalog at home. It encourages and honors workers to leave their families, their country to work overseas and send home their paychecks to keep the economy "moving."

But if there is one similarity between the Philippines and the United States that reveals itself most clearly in times of natural disaster, both countries are ill-prepared, slow in response, and give preferential treatment to the rich.

What is the state of Katrina four years later? How has the city rebuilt itself? Have we forgotten already how many lost their lives, families, and homes?

And the Philippines shows similar characteristics - leaving the poor to fend for themselves as the skies drop a month's worth of rain in 9 hours and displacing millions as another storm moves in and is expected to arrive Friday.

As for recovery efforts, the US pitched in $100,000, a military helicopter, five rubber boats, and 20 service people.

With that kind of response to the worst typhoon the Philppines has seen in 40 years, the Philippine government needs to learn something about its relationship to the US which is eerily similar to the lesson it is teaching its own citizens: when disaster strikes, you're on your own.

Letter #10

2009-09-23T19:59:00.005-04:00

Dear Isaiah,

I've known that you are a boy for several weeks now and I feel somewhat guilty that when I thought you were going to be a girl, I wrote you several letters. Now that I know you are going to be a boy, I think my fear of raising a son has put me in an even deeper, inward place of wondering one thing: what in the hell am I going to do with a son.

You are kicking up a storm. Most often, you kick when I am sitting down and leaning over my laptop or computer to write, you tumble a reminder that you are inside me, waiting to come out, slowing maturing into something independent.

Physically, I'm beginning to feel a bit off balance, like you're protruding forward in my belly makes me feel like I could fall forward if I'm not concentrating on keeping the small of my back tucked back in. There are funny things happening with my vision; small circles appear at the lower half of my right eye when I look away from my computer or suddenly get up. The doctor says it's probably normal. My legs look like two pillows squished into shoes and my hair is a wild mane of thick black gloss, swinging across my back, keeping me warm. My fingernails grow a mile a minute and my acne-free life has been interrupted by these small soldiers, bumping their way along my forehead. My skin is warm, always warm and my mind elsewhere. It's never with whoever is standing in front of me.

I'm starting to get out of breath and none of my clothes fit. Slowly, but surely, you are taking over my body and I'm beginning to understand both the overpowering love women feel toward their unborn child and I'm beginning to understand the frustration of feeling completely alien in my own skin. It's kind of a bipolar experience.

Have I mentioned to you how I am in mild denial that I have to go through labor? It's not the pain, it's the UNKNOWN about labor that puts heavy anxiety in my abdomen. I don't know anything -- how long you will take, what a contraction feels like, if something goes wrong, if I will tear, a c-section...? And there's no comparison. No metaphor that makes me feel better. The more others try to explain it, the smaller my ear canal becomes. I don't want to hear what it was like for OTHERS, I want to know what it will be like for you and me.

Eventually, inevitably, without a doubt, sooner or later -- I'll know.

In our morning talks, I try to tell you what the world might be like by the time you get here, but each week, the world changes a bit. Health care reform stays stagnant though. Celebrities take turns in the headlines. Feminist news is on recycle. The seasons change. It's now Autumn. World leaders continue their facades while citizens lobby their hearts out. In about 14 weeks, I don't know what the world will tell you when you breathe it in for the first time. I'm hoping, selfishly, maybe I can breathe it in and try to see the world for the first time again with you. Maybe I'll be full of curiosity, stubborn in my will to forge my own path, and open to all the possibilities of life.

But, maybe you'll need me to be me. I'm far from new. I'm not nearly a newborn. Nor am I an old-timer. The only expertise I have to offer is the observations from my own two eyes and the scrapbook of lessons, the journals of my discoveries to share with you. Maybe you won't need a partner to be curious with you, maybe you'll need a mom who still believes in her own dreams, full of art and creativity, stubborn in my own right, loving in every decision.

I hope that will be enough for you. And I hope you and I will be born with an understanding of each other that surpasses my fear of raising a son.

With love always,
Tremendously,
Mom

Nothing Gold Can Stay

2009-09-13T08:58:00.003-04:00

Do you consider yourself a spiritual person?

I always have. Since I was a little girl. Well before I really understood "religion," I just had a feeling there was something unexplainable, something covering the world that was neither manipulative or parental. It was just a belief that there was something that extended before what I knew as the "beginning," and something that never knew an end.

It's interesting that people "work" on their spirituality. Like how they work out or something at a gym, or get their heart pumping for training, or sweat to burn calories. Spirituality is a relationship between self and the Unknown, something that demands time, thought, consideration. It requires exercise, yes, but not the kind that we associate with "work" or "working out." So often, in any self/relationship improvement, we consort to books and advice and media to tell how how to do it, how to survive it, "how to" everything. The "how to" literature section has exponentially grown in the past few decades. Rarely do we truly trust our own intuitive selves, the tools already inside of us. We seek EXTERNAL for what we know is internal.

So why is the relationship with spirituality difficult to sustain? Because its ambiguous and directionless nature taps into our quivering questions that leave us anxious? Or is it because it asks us to be brave soldiers and live deeper lives? If spirituality is an engaging relationship between our very own Selves and this constantly accessible, ubiquitous and nameless THING, why is it so hard to engage, to believe?

I looked out the window and saw a violet bird. A violet bird. I've never seen a violet bird, but there it sad, about 4 feet from my window and it brought me a feeling of unexpected realization that I am not alone. My partner is gone for the day. My phone is quiet. No emails or messages to return. And discounting the wondrous being growing inside me who cannot yet verbalize his presence, I felt like I was going to be very alone today, trapped into a day of little to no interaction and conversation.

And then the violet bird appeared. This flash of beauty that, with one glance, reminded me that there are living things, breathing and carrying on, all around me. The world is taking one giant breath with me today and I am far from alone. I remember as a little girl how I used to exist in that knowledge. As I've lived more years, acquired more physical and tangible relationships with others, somehow that knowledge dissipated.

Spirituality came to be a connection to others instead of self to Unknown, self to Trust. It morphed into how stimulating a thought was, how connected I felt to another, how accepted I was to a community. These are all important, beautiful things, but...

I forgot how simple glances at the world around us, alone, in the depth of our own consciousness gives way, gives space to something other than ourselves, even our choice of company.

How often do we make room for that to happen? How open do you think you really are to gift of fleeting peace and contentment without trying to make it last?

September 11

2009-09-11T12:22:00.000-04:00

Remembering.

The Collision of Sobriety and Humor

2009-09-08T14:51:00.000-04:00

Pregnancy has stripped my cells of all traces of caffeine and alcohol. But instead of sobriety, this scatterbrain syndrome of pregnancy has set in.

You know that horrible feeling when you see a patch of fog when you’re driving and realize that at ANY MOMENT YOU CAN VEER OFF THE ROAD because you can’t see one inch in front of you? That’s the state my brain has been in since I have been pregnant.

“Lisa - can you mail these letters on your way to work?”

Of course.

Five days later, the envelopes are still sitting on the table and I’m wondering, “Mhm, what are these?”

I was hoping the sobriety of my life would lead me to a higher clarity, like, I would wake up in the morning KNOWING something profound and rare. Hidden gems of knowledge. The exact location of over the rainbow. The formula for the sticky glue of post-it notes. Who really assassinated Kennedy.

No. None of that.

Pregnancy has dropped these really mundane rolls of weight gain and Babies R Us visitations in my lap and I have realized a few things about me. One of the disturbing truths is

I am not as badass as I thought.

With this new clarity, one thing I DO see is how ridiculously UNbadass I am. Sure, I have the audacity to ask unnerving questions to just about anyone and try to keep my guts in every decision I make. I kickbox. And then get choked up during the bridge of Gloria Estefan’s “Here We Are.”

Or jam to Bananarama.

Pregnancy hormones can cloud your mind, but the detox of caffeine, alcohol, and any stimulants can really move your pupils inward.

Two Questions during Pregnancy

2009-09-05T05:06:00.002-04:00

As pregnancy progresses, my writing is becoming foggy, my paintings more torrid, my age more prominent.

The two questions that remain unanswered and pumped with adrenaline are these:

What kind of mother will I be?

and

What kind of writer will I become?

The Complicated Life as a Regular Person

2009-09-02T20:42:00.004-04:00

My blog is doing it's own ecdysis and I'm not sure how to respond.

I am watching it, observing it. Similar to how I am with my stomach.

My stomach is this ever expanding universe of placenta, amniotic fluid, uterus, blood, fat, and baby. Inch my inch, it makes itself more elastic-friendly.

And as my belly grows, my blog is shrinking. Or becoming shy.

Who am I now? Three years ago, I was this bold, feminist writer, searching for meaning, community, and blasting mainstream feminism for its uncaring blind spots and US-centric mannerisms.

And now?

Now I am morphing into my own authentic writing style.

My desire to write has grown day by day and my time to devote to it is decreasing day by day as my energy levels deplete and whatever hormone is responsible for making my brain so scattered increases, I am wondering

Where is my writing going?

I'll tell you where it's going -- it's going to a place that I've never taken it before. Or, at least, I'm going to TRY and take it to a place it's never been before: intertwined with my life.

Unbeknownst to most followers of this blog, I have a tiny blog for friends and family to read about my daily life. Unbeknownst to my other blog, I have this blog to write longer, free writes about life, feminism, injustice, irony, and love.

Symbolically, I am ready to merge the two together. I feel this NEED to make things as simple as possible and that means to stop separating my writing audiences. It means to be scared and let people in my circles of life KNOW my writing and try to have some faith in them. I have more faith in putting my words to strangers and faceless commenters than I do people I have to face in life.

It will mean careful writing, truthful writing, brave writing.

THAT means more time, more deliberation.

One of the things that most excites me about this step is my bravery to write like the memoirist that I am. I am not so much a blogger as I am a writer. I am funny. I also like to write about injustice. I am just a regular woman with an extraordinary desire to create and express the usually forgettable details of life. I am excited to return to MY kind of writing. I am excited, in a way, to use humor again. To be me.

And with that, my friends, my plan is to push this blog into a full website in the near future. I'm working on this (among many things), but it's in the works. I ask for your support, your thoughts about a feminist memoirist website, and overall patience in getting this thing up and running.

My goal is to have it up before my son arrives.

With new life, comes a new beginning.

This is my ecdysis.

A Comparative Free Write: The Wedding Industry vs. The Baby Industry

2009-08-28T12:07:00.001-04:00

Crossposted at Feministe

Lately, my thoughts have been swirling around one comparative question:

What’s worse – the wedding industry or the baby industry?

Recovering my 2004 journal, the year I was engaged, I see loopy sketches of my fiancée with the word “love” underneath and short poems exploring life and commitment. To describe my decision to marry marriage I used phrases like “a symphony of mystery” and “frisson of pleasure.” Not too far from my blotchy sketches are wrinkled, tear-stained pages. I see I made a separate column called “hate” and I named every detail of the wedding process, the whole parade and folly of rings, illusion, disingenuous sales pitches and vendors, showers and parties, and the endless charade of enjoying it all.

[October 2004: Today I nearly passed out when trying on veils. It looked so ridiculous and false on me. The room was screeching with white-dressed bodies barking orders to whoever would listen. I had to sit down and breathe between my legs. I have to see myself when I look in the mirror. I have to see me. On my time. I have to see myself in this.]
I was never a bride.

I was just a person in love, ready to move forward.

I had choices and I did it. I got married AND had a wedding. The coming together of two radically different cultures, races, and expectations was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. Both families had religious backgrounds, so tradition had some role to play in the process and compromising on what was authentic and what was for show was a long, tedious process of discussion and frustration.

But I did it.

That transition from single to married was healthily marred with grief and mourning. Facing the profound changes in relationships, responsibility, lifestyle, and geography weren’t celebratory, they were somber and I took them seriously.

However, one of the things that that irked me the most was the response so many had when I shared I was getting married: “Oh, EVERYONE’S getting married!” That miffed me. And I would always say to my friends and confidants, “Yeah, but I’m not everybody. This is a big deal in MY life and I am trying to share this with you. This is me, not the whole world.”

In that time period of my life, I remember thinking that the blanket of the wedding industry and the superfluous toppings of details and colors erased me and my reality. It erased the very real and tangible truth that I had fallen in love and decided to commit to one person. That imminent torque in my identity was my focus. And love. Love was my primary lifeline.

It was rare to find an understanding person in those 9 months of engagement. No one likes to hear of hesitancy, fear, and doubt that can exist outside the vacuum of saying Yes to marriage. It wasn’t about the relationship I had built with him that was sturdy and grounded. It was about the internal conversion of accepting full and unpredictable responsibility that came with building a future with another person. It was about facing the fears of possible failure, adultery, death, dependency, sharing, and betrayal.

I was never a bride.

I was just an honest person, a writer.

And here I am again, faced with another 9 month transition and the roller coaster begins again.

It’s like falling in love again. My partner and I have been brought even closer because of this choice. The only time I truly feel at peace is when we lay on our sides and talk about how uncertain the future is, how our expectations are creeping in our consciousness even when we try to keep them at bay, how this person coming to us will be nothing like what we think or imagine. We laugh at our crazy inadequacies to be in control. We laugh at the idea of making a will when we don’t have much, financially or materialistically, to pass on. We struggle through naming guardians in case my partner and I die. We smoothed through bumpy parts of our interracial marriage. Now we will have an multi-cultured/-racial/-everything child.

And then there’s the baby industry and circus…Listening to advice I don’t necessarily need or want. Dealing with colors and decorating a room. Registering. Showers. Ooohing and ahhing over bellies instead of diamonds.

Within weeks of knowing I was pregnant, truckloads of magazines and websites found me despite my non-disclosing nature. The amount of THINGS I am told that I need exhausts me.

[August 2009: “A baby wipes warmer? Do I look like the type of person to warm up my own toilet paper?!”]

There was something eerily similar, I noticed, to the wedding industry.

[August 2004: “A ring is a beautiful symbol, but why an engagement ring? I’d be fine with just the wedding band.”]

A life-changing event, a shift in identity, another choice made in a hopefully egalitarian

manner…and the isolation sits in.

“Oh, EVERYONE’s pregnant these days.”

“Yeah, but I’m not everybody. This is a big deal in MY life and I am trying to share this with you.”

How is it that more people are interested in what kind of crib I will need than how my writing schedule will alter? How is it that more people are interested in the date of the ultrasound that will announce gender than the date I get a nuchal translucency screening that tests for Down Syndrome? When I do articulate feelings, why are my worries and fears minimized to a scattering of pulp when I muse aloud about my career, my ability to move and travel, the unknown, unpredictable future and that, yes, I am choosing this, AND, yes, am still scared?

Why do people equate decision making with the quality of unshakeable certainty? And why do we strategize to circumvent fear? Why is it endlessly equivalent to second thoughts, wanting to retreat or rewind time?

Is it so unthinkable to posit that fear is the intuitive threshold to responsibility and acknowledging the parts of ourselves that are afraid takes more strength than pretending or that I don’t see how enormous this choice is? Could fear be reframed to be more of a guide than a disdained guest in our bodies?

Married, pregnant female seeks presence and companionship, not advice. Experienced and gentle minds to converse with and a community that loves honesty and facing unprecedented transformation are desirous. Above all, seeks wisdom, not distractions.

Raising Isaiah

2009-08-20T11:41:00.003-04:00

Cross posted at Feministe

I think you should simply spare the little mongrel parasite from the burden of her life so that you can more fully experience the pleasure of a lifestyle unfettered by the Christo-fascist “reproduction memes” that are genetically engraved in the our DNA by the authoritarian patriarchy. Think about the lifetime “carbon footprint” of your potential child… can you live with yourself knowing the destruction you’re unleashing on your own home?

One of the most beautiful, and quickly disappearing, forms of writing is letter-writing. I’ve always adored writing letters, little notes, maximizing the potential the back of a receipt, leftover notebook paper, the last unloved post-it note in the pile with the least amount of sticky left.

The shining gem of personal letter writing comes from the built-in audience. You write to or for one reader, but sometimes the revelation can be shared with many. I discovered this from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a trouble-maker in Durham who once asked me to be a part of a writing collective, to submit a piece of writing about what it meant to be a woman of color, about what it meant to survive. It was entitled, "Without You Who Understand: Letters from Radical Women of Color," and published in issue 5 of make/shift magazine.

It taught me about the power of letters.

Everyone else wrote magnificent essays, essays that came with their own brass bands. My writing doesn’t have a brass band. My writing is more like a solo violinist or pianist. I shared a letter that I had written to a friend one winter evening when I couldn’t sleep.

Letter writing helps me focus on one person and simultaneously, somehow, channel my own deepest longings and contemplatives.

Which is why I chose to respond with a letter to “Margaret Sanger,” who left the above italicized comment for me in my first post at Feministe.

Dear Margaret Sanger,

It is with a complicated heart that I try to answer your questions and respond to your comment. You certainly have a superior grasp of language, I admire, and have little doubt that someone with such a mastery of words makes any mistake in your comment. Each word sounds deliberate. And as a writer who loves linguistics, I studied and thought about your words a long time before I gave my answer.

Your advice to me about ridding myself of the “mongrel” inside me so I can enjoy a better life gave me an opportunity to ask myself, and others, “Why do we decide to have children anyway?”

I’m sure the answered are as varied as there are children, but the most common answers I’ve heard always point to some mysterious Knowing, some sort of underlying and assumed desire that many of us will procreate. Or, that having children is simply “what we do” or should do or end up doing as we age.

Why birth? Why adopt? Why be a surrogate? Why help bring more life amidst so much wrong and untailored mess?

Well, Margaret, I can only answer for myself and I know you’ll be unsatisfied with my reply because it seems that we that you and I probably have very different perceptions of what it means to be alive. Exchanging thoughts about global warming, population and birth control may be a healthy discussion, but that is not the arena in which I understood your question. I heard it on a more personal level asking the age old question, "Why are you having kids when you know how terrible things are?"

What does it mean for me to enjoy “the pleasure of a lifestyle unfettered by the Christo-fascist ‘reproduction memes’ that are genetically engraved in the our DNA by the authoritarian patriarchy?” One, it means that I find my own piece and peace of the world that is, quite clearly, full of kyriarchal domination and destruction. In many ways, my ability to enjoy life is already limited because of this kyriarchy. Is it possible to fully, truly enjoy every part of life knowing so much suffering exists in the world? Is it possible to be drenched in pleasure when the majority of the world is going without, while I, somewhat easily go forth?

It took me many years of maturing to find the balance in being a real, sensing, authentic writer and feminist. I believe it is not our natural state to be overwhelmed by the wrong, which I was for a long time. I grew into a writer that not only wanted to survive but also wanted, as Gloria Anzaldua said, “to record what is happening in my lifetime, to note the progress, to annotate the struggles.”

To survive this endless tidal wave, to be around for the next few decades, to live through this hell we are witnessing, it is imperative, in the most urgent sense, to find ourselves, our naked feminisms that stand counterpoint to the kyriarachy. If the utter victory of kyriarchy is to beat, rape, silence, and make miserable the lives of women, I am surrendering a sacred part of my life if I believe that this world is capable of nothing more than oppression. If I believe that the only contribution of a life brought out of my very womb would be nothing more than a carbon footprint, then, for me, hope is gone and kyriarchy has won.

Raising Isaiah to be a teacher, or a dancer, or a shoemaker, or a poet will depend on what I carry forward, what I harbor in my own vessels. If I believe that he’s a parasite, he’ll be a parasite. If I believe he will unleash destruction on the world, in my home, then he’ll be a destructive force.

But what if my partner and I believe he can bring More to the world? What if, along with his inevitable use of resources and adding one more set of footprints to walk the earth, he grows into a person capable of goodness that you or I cannot even comprehend? What if he brings a seemingly unreachable understanding of life to me, my partner, to others while he lives? What if my partner and I don't believe that ceasing to produce life automatically equates a better living?

With a little bit of courage and whole lot of radical love, this experience is guided by my questions and deathless curiosity of what is possible and believing that my enjoyment of life is not the point of life, at least, not for me. It is with fearful hope, not certainty, that I choose this.

Be well,
Lisa

The Last Ungendered Day

2009-08-12T09:32:00.002-04:00

I started using the self-descriptive term "feminist" about five years ago and although my life's work to create a better world extends much longer than those five years, the lens of feminism - my feminisms, to be precise - has positively enhanced the way I experience and percieve the mystery of socialization and gender.

Tomorrow, I have my 20 week ultrasound. Before pregnancy, I didn't know that 20 weeks is a milestone. Usually with prenatal care, an "anatomical" ultrasound is done, which means Adonis and I get to see the baby growing in my uterus. We see the face, ears, feet, hands...everything...including its genitalia.

Many things have surprised me about pregnancy, but none moreso than the impact of hormones in my body. My memory has been underwater, my moods sometimes swingy, but my emotions have been fairly calm. I've felt peaceful. One of the few pieces of anxiety I've been experiencing relates to gender and finding out the sex of the baby.

I've been pretty open about my feelings concerning my pregnancy through my letters to Veronica, my unborn daughter, which I started a long time ago...well before I was pregnant. And one of my fears is not just having a child, it's about having a son. I think that my fear dwells in my uncertainty if I can teach a child and have a larger impact than the rest of the world. All the lessons this child will learn will have to be undone at some level. It begins tomorrow. It begins the moment the ultrasound technician will say "boy" or "girl."

And the barrage of texts, emails, FB messages, and comments wanting to know will begin. Along with the pink and blue bull that I don't believe in.

Facing the reality that I am carrying life within me has meant coming to the reality that I am deeply responsible for the wonder and destruction this child shall bear on the world once it enters this life and takes its first breath.

I am faced with the reality that the men who rape women once had mothers too and I wonder what they learned (or didn't) about loving and treating women, both in personal relationships and strangers. I think about the way teenage boys careen by the waterfountain at school and mock the budding bodies of womanhood and adolescence out of their own insecurity. I am, essentially, afraid of what boys because, after working with violated women and children, I know what they are capable of.

I don't want to raise a son contributing to another woman's disempowerment.

But feminism has also taught me that not only are men capable, and actually prefer, to be loving, active, energetic leaders for goodness and wholeness, it's also taught me that women are not grouped together in their fight for equality. The bullying, the cut throat competition, the hidden jealousy, the betrayal...raising a daughter now terrifies me just as much as raising a son. After I've work with violated women and children, I'm afraid I'll raise a daughter who doesn't care about her worth and values her sexuality only at the price set by society and media.

Whether son or daughter, I'm afraid she'll give up on herself.
I'm afraid, quite simply, they won't care about the world they way I do and I won't be able to stand their selfishness.
I'm afraid that when they ask me questions about what I've done to make the world better, I'll look in the mirror and only see a half-worn human and full blown coward.

Somehow, in the years I've contemplated and studied gender and advocated that all persons are equal, I'm petrified I'll find that I've only kidding myself because I know the world can and will knock me on my butt with its cruel, streamlined, flick of the wrist power to teach domination, selfishness, individualism, and greed.

Knowing this child's gender makes it all real, too real, because once I know "boy" or "girl," I'll inherit an entire set of specific strategies the world has planned to brainwash my kid. I don't have anything except what I *think* I know, a lot of guessing, intuition, and a loving partner.

I hope those seeds are enough.

Will they know how to love, truly love themselves and another human being?
Do they know the world is not fragmented and we, all of us, are inexplicably connected?
Does having this much fear dictate what kind of mother I will be?
Who will be there to save me when I'm the one in trouble?

In some funny way, I want this child to forever remain as it is right now - perfect, growing, dependant on nothing but amniotic fluid, oxygen, and my voice. Not only do I fear about this child hurting, but I'm afraid of the harm the child will be capable of doing as well.

Tomorrow I will know if I am having a son or daughter.

Transformative Blogging: A Free Write on Pregnancy, Feminism, and the Internet

2009-08-05T09:52:00.008-04:00

Three years ago, I started blogging.

I was newly married, working at a university, confronting my disdain for the midwestern common, and beginning to fall in love with photography.

Today I am 4 months pregnant, working at a spiritual center, combing through my complex relationship with geography and identity, and am a freelance writer and photographer. My dreams are more realized, I can humbly admit to myself.

This summer has been a fragmented blogging experience. I've loosened my ties with the online world after experiencing an avalance of its toxicity. But I know of the power of the internet, the power of online communication and exchange, and I know that I will never completely sever my ties with blogging.

The frequency of my blogging came alongside the confidence to speak my mind about mainstream feminism, kyriarchy, and the destructive practices of dominating US-identifed feminists in the field of gender, sexuality, and "feminism." Somewhere, in the Bermuda triangle of my mind, online expression became necessary strength-training for my feminisms. Online exposure - seeking external information from strangers and "experts" - became one of the most frequently visited gyms to exercise feminist discourse. Until now.

Pregnancy has taken me inward. Deep into the reflective tissue of memory, trauma, joy, and motherhood. It has taken me into these far off places of security and fear, health and death, responsibility and loss of control. I've retreated into my body, less focused on the rest of the world and simply in the world growing below my belly button.

This event, for lack of a better word, has transformed me again beyond any trip, research, or moving poet could ever shift me before. At no other time in my life have I walked more slowly, spoke less with more to say, and allowed to open my life to truly not caring about the world whilst still loving it deeply, wildly from my corner in Cleveland, Ohio.

Early pregnancy was very much like discovering the internet - information overload. There was story upon story of miracle (once infertile now fertile) to the heartwrenching (still born stories that made me weep for days) and more "advice" than I could handle. It left me staring at my ceiling in bed, convinced I was sick, was headed into an unhealthy pregnancy, and needed more medical attention than any other person who had ever given birth in the history of baby-making.

I harbored no trust, particularly for my own mind.

My early experience of feminism and the internet was similar. Three years ago, my blog was somewhat directionless. It was filled with thoughtful entries, some humor, and candid glimpses into my life, but it lacked any true identity. It lacked the substantial stamp of SELF. PERSPECTIVE. AUTHENTICITY. TRUTH.

The exploration of how to effectively use media, the internet, blogging, and feminism to transform ourselves and our pockets of the universe remains an unchartered course, a hike for which an infinite weight of rations is needed. This might take a lifetime. But I have learned that while blogging has been very much a gift - delivering relationships, realizations, connections, and insight - it is also a place that can sometimes take you away. Away from your body, away from listening to your own authentic creations. I realize one of the biggest differences in my writing over the past three years is that I write less reactionary pieces and responses than when I first began blogging. I was exploding like a firecracker to a zillion commentors and posts that led me nowhere except away from truly reflecting and moving within my own consciousness.

This gift of pregnancy has not only given me necessary reflection and work to emotionally prepare for a new role as mother, but it has deterred and sharpened my eyesight to be selective in who I choose to read and listen to. It has taught me that more is not always better and reading an endless parade of memoir writing about motherhood will never grasp what the experience means to ME. What is happening to my body, my brain, my bones right now.

It has been through pregnancy that I see "Feminism" with new eyes and I see much more red than I ever saw before. Red bias, red intentions, red discrimination, red narrowness...I see red. Reproductive health rights are arrows pointing to the majority of heterosexual, young white women. Sexuality and spirituality are rarely explored as an interlaced relationship. The conferences change names, but still move in their same agenda. "Liberal" and "progressive" are thrown around without much depth and review. Blog wars still flare from time to time, roaming from appropriation to racism, but after a few months of quiet, you'll still find the same bloggers rowing in the currents of mainstream thought and contributing to US-centric, heteronormative rhetoric that alientates and ostracizes "unpopular" issues like the fact WE ARE STILL AT WAR IN IRAQ, WE ARE NOT A POST-RACE SOCIETY BECAUSE WE HAVE A BI-RACIAL PRESIDENT, and the violence of poverty and rape still choke the life out of womyn everywhere in the world.

Maybe the point is not for the blogosphere to be transformed, but for me to transform according to my offline life, my quiet purpose. And just hope and pray that others are doing the same. Maybe if we all did that, our blogosphere, our world would change. Maybe we could all go through something similiar to a pregnancy where we witness new life growing in some way and we are drawn inward to listen to the new beat of existence, a changed way of being.

Maybe if we listened more, talked less, we could actually hear something other than the deafening needs of our egos and more of the muted chants of our yearning hearts.

The Most Influential Women in Media

2009-07-22T10:22:00.007-04:00

Sometimes I love - like SERIOUSLY - love the copy and paste function.

The Most Influential Women in Media is based on money, fame, audience and power. Money is determined by an estimation of earnings from approximately July 2008 to July 2009. Audience is determined by average Nielsen Media Research numbers for television ratings and net traffic for the past 12 months. Fame and influence is determined by overall mentions on Factiva and by social media outreach, or the amount of followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook

THE MOST INFLUENTIAL WOMEN IN MEDIA IS BASED ON MONEY, FAME, AUDIENCE, AND POWER.

Minus the "audience" bit, I could have SWORN I read something back in my younger years about basing anything on money, fame, and power usually leads you down the wrong path.

I think Utne's list of 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World is actually much more refreshing, uplifting, and real.

Let's start a fresh list; a list of people who actually think women of the world MATTER and actually WORK for little or no money.

Who do YOU think are the most influential women in media?

Let me know who and why and perhaps I'll write a rebuttal, with a link, to Forbes telling them to kiss my big, round pregnant belly.
______________
update

I just spent 30 minutes writing an update and now it's gone. In a nutshell, I wanted to hat tip Joan Kelly (first in comments) who helped me clarify my original point. I do not think income runs parallel to sincerity in one's work. I meant that I wanted to recognize women who do back-breaking work and are barely scraping by with their families. I agree with JK - most of the influential women in my life are sacrificing and trading one good for another to make ends meet to buy groceries.

How do WE define "influential" people in our lives?

Letter #9

2009-07-20T22:38:00.002-04:00

Dear Veronica,

In about two weeks, I'll know for sure (well, almost sure) what gender you are and that seems to be a monumental event to everyone but me.

In some ways, I've already known you as Veronica, but you could be Isaiah, and I'm wondering how that will change if I find you are a boy, or girl, or whatever.

I wish I could be more eloquent about this issue, Love, but the truth of the matter is, I don't give a damn what GENDER you are. I just want you here safe, secure, alive, well, and breathing in my ear.

Nearly everyone but you is irritating me these days and I attribute that to my hormones. The hormones that is making my body grow hair like a gorilla, the hormones that are making me want to make love every night at least once, the hormones that make me feel depressed then ecstatic. In other words, the hormones that are making me crazy.

Having a baby seems like the most natural thing in the world. Billions of women have done this well and have survived and yet I feel like I'm the only one feeling like this. Supported, yet, deep down, I feel abandoned. I look at your father and feel this chemical dependency on him that scares me. I never knew I'd feel this way. Other days I feel like I am falling in love with him all over again as I see how his unfolding fatherhood is shaping him and his thoughts. He and I agree on so many things, it scares me. I thought we'd be in disagreement.

My parents are in town this weekend and they keep staring at my stomach, where you are, and smiling, excited for this new life to come roaring out of me. Sometimes, even though you are inside me, I feel very alone. More eyes are fixated on my stomach than on my eyes. So many people ask, "how are you feeling," rather than, "how are you?" and I feel the difference in my sense of isolation. It's as if people don't see me, and only see you.

You matter. I matter. I just don't know how it all meshes together when it feels like the only reason I matter is because you are in me, growing in matter.

I hope you can see through my jumbled thoughts, Love, and know that you are the most important thing in my life. I love you more than you or I can possibly fathom and not even my confusion and attitude can overshadow the earthquake of love I have ready to share with you. I'm human, you'll see, full of imperfections and selfishness and stupid thoughts. It's good that you know that upfront so you'll understand when I screw up but will always come back and remind you that I love you.

Some days when I walk around by myself, I wish I could hear your voice. I wish we could already have a conversation. Your soul is wise, I can tell, and I know I will learn much from you.

I hope I don't let you down as a mother. These days, my insecurities seem to be getting the best of me.

But you ARE the best of me and worth more than any fear I can harbor in my bones.

Let's keep each other strong these next few months.

Love,
Mom

4th of July

2009-07-04T09:45:00.001-04:00

Freedom and Independence...

how different that looks for all of us, no?

The Face of Human Rights and Feminism: Melissa Roxas

2009-06-29T20:53:00.006-04:00

Melissa Roxas' Press Conference: Statement by Melissa Roxas from Habi Arts on Vimeo.

Melissa Roxas is a Filipina US citizen. With family in Quezon City, she went to the Philippines to do research as a health volunteer for her writing project.

She is a writer. An activist. She was combining her commitment to human rights and social justice with her writing. It led her home to the Philippines where on May 19, 2009 she was captured and tortured for 6 days before being released.

In a press conference, she describes the abduction and torture she was subject to from the Philippine military.

Roxas is the first known US citizen to be abducted and tortured in the Philippines during the Obama administration and is seeking justice. The Arroyo presidency in the Philippines has overseen several hundred kidnapping, disappearances, torture, murder, and rape of activists, students, scholars, and educators in the name of the military which is funded by US dollars.

One year ago, I was with my family in Quezon City. I was doing research at local universities and non-profits to better understand the sexual violence against Filipino women in the Philippines. In my time there, the threat of abduction or torture was a far fear from my mind because, as everyone pointed out, I am a US citizen and, therefore, untouchable.

Roxas is the living proof that no one is untouchable and citizenship protects no one. Not even when you are doing research for a writing project. It does not protect you from beatings, being suffocated, tortured, blindfolded, or psychologically tortured.

There are no words to describe these on-going human rights violations in the Philippines. It is happening here, there, and no matter where you are, what your name is, violence, it seems, is only a knock on the door away from your house.

On a personal note, I am more than stunned by her account of what happened. Even as I write this, I don't quite know what to write except that her story needs to be told and spread far and wide. There is no way to describe the horror of what she went through. What I can do, what you can, at the very least, is listen and be informed.

This the face of human rights. This is the face of feminism. This if the front line of writers, volunteers, educators, and dreamers who want a world of peace and are willing to go to the ends of the earth to understand the reality of others. Melissa Roxas is the face.

How Imperfection and Accountability Mix: Part I

2009-06-24T19:16:00.005-04:00

The topic of accountability has always been an incredibly important one for me. As a feminist, as a writer, as a person who tries to be wise before I leap, accountability is never far from my hand as I write.

What does it mean to be accountable anyway? Following in the linguistic footsteps of "love," "radical," and "liberation," the word "accountable" is often thrown around for weight and at times, I feel, drama.

I write about accountability because I think it is a very complicated project of self-awareness and growth. Lately, I've been thinking about the two kinds of accountability I have had struggles with - online accountability and offline accountability.

Let's dive first into offline accountability...

Roughly 16 months ago, I came to a startling epiphany that I needed to go the Philippines. It was a pilgrimage of self-discovery, ethnic pride, family tradition, and confusion. The Philippines was the native homeland of my parents. It's image had soft, billowy clouds around it. It remained, for 30 years, an elusive link to my identity. A dangling key swinging thousands of miles from my reach.

That is, until, I decided to go. Alone.

I felt a sense of accountability to myself, my parents, to the people I had never made an effort to know and yet think about so much. The Philippines. It was there that I found a grounding peace. It came from meeting family. It came from researching sexual violence against Filipinas. It came from meeting activists, scholars, farmers, and artists who welcomed me as a Balikbayan, "one who returns home."

It was there that my sense of accountability grew. It grew, specifically, to Filipino women who were abused, trafficked, raped, kidnapped, tortured, and tossed into ditches, shallow graves, and death without justice.

I was gone for June through August of 2008.

* * * *

Today I received a heartfelt and difficult letter. It was from a dear friend whom I have loved for a long time. He and I exchange writings, poems, rainy talks without umbrellas, and stories. When I looked at the rain, I thought of G*. We had more differences than similarities but our similarities were powerful. We had similar concepts of spirituality, justice, and the agonizing waves of darkness that come with passionate loving. We loved our lovers fiercely and our friendship was connected with thick cable chords wrapped in understanding. Thickly, tightly wrapped.

G* wrote me a letter about two things: his joy and his disappointment. He wrote me about the joy of marrying the love of his life, his unfolding career, and New England -- the city of Boston we both loved so much.

And then he wrote of his disappointment. He referenced the time period of when I was deciding to go on my trip to the Philippines, except he didn't write it explicitly. He wrote how I, essentially, disappeared and never told him to his face that I was moving, leaving Boston and our friendship, and never returning. After the Philippines, I would be moving to Cleveland to start anew, write more, and lead a life of quiet purpose. The problem was that I never told him. In the last months of my stay in Boston were the same months he was preparing for marriage. And I never called. Never wrote. Never said good-bye. I was focused on other Things, see? Things like accountability, justice, and human rights.

This letter came to me with dried disappointment. The kind of disappointment that you can almost feel in your hands. It was as if the letter had been dipped in river of hurt and then left on a desk to dry before it arrived for me to read. It was dreadful to read because it was so true.

I left Boston and my life there without saying a word to this man, my friend, someone to whom I was accountable and, quite simply, forgot about. In some of the most forming and exciting months of his life, I vanished. Left town. Let news get to him via friends and old gossip.

* * * *

Even those who pride themselves on loving and justice fuck up. In major ways, we forget some of the most simple concepts of compassion. God, that's humiliating and so painful to remember that our scarred human skin is entirely capable of scarring someone's unblemished arms. Don't you hate being graphically reminded that you're not a perfect person? Worse than that reminder is the vile acid in your stomach when you see a wound on another person that you are completely responsible for and, to make matters worse, the wound is a settled scar that was clearly left untreated.

* * * *

The letter was simple and short. It was honest and humble, hurt and truthful. Those are the best and worst words to read. Real friends are the ones who get the truth to you, no matter how long it takes or how sick it makes you feel. I read it a few times.
Went downstairs to sit. Ate dinner. Scarfed it down because somehow the raw shame had famished me.

* * * *

I wrote back. I offered a reply coated with insufficient apology. There's no usefulness in remorse one year later. I wanted to honor his honesty. A simple apology was not enough. I forgot him. What's more - I LET myself forget him. I wasn't looking for self-flagellation, but I was looking to learn how to be accountable to a friend after I so clearly let him down. And so brashly abandoned someone who was and is dear to me.

* * * *

Even when we let Love lead our actions, we somehow manage to follow imperfectly. Even in our most pure efforts to create justice, art, connection and amendments, we somehow rip the roses when we meant the weeds. In a year since I left, in a year since I've been thinking, writing, and wondering about accountability to women and gender analysis, accountability to family and friends in my life vanished.

* * * *

What does accountability look like with, despite, because of our imperfections?

No Country for Men and Fathers?

2009-06-23T05:50:00.004-04:00

I've been thinking about fatherhood. For as much as I think about motherhood, I think about the absence of fatherhood.

That wasn't MY story, per se.

My father, still the same funny, hard-working, and insanely generous person, has been with me for 30 years.

Still, I am thinking about fatherhood.

In pop and mainstream culture, US feminism is branded and re-branded with the same ingredients, westernized notions, and colonial/racial/able-isms that have plagued it in the past. Let's get real, here. While I emphatically believe that multiple forms of feminism exist, most folks still think of mainstream feminism as the only Feminism alive.

How wrong, and how unfortunate, that is...especially for men.

It was just Father's Day on Sunday, two days ago, and nowhere, other than fleeting greetings did I find any substantial feminist-centered articles or op-eds about fathers, their place, significance, impact on their lives. In general, there rarely are any feminist bloggers who write about their fathers. There are countless reflections, dedications, and ruminations about motherhood, but it seems the feminist=women only/women-centered ideology has become so fascist, that men and fathers are not even recognized. Not even on Father's Day.

The way feminism came to me was through activism and identity politics. Feminist language and thought has equipped me to centralize my own experiences to organize my thoughts of the world and more clearly under the systematic kyriarchy that hold womyn under siege. Through the lens of gender, I am more apt to dissecting the critical role of women AND men in the vision of radical justice and equality.

Including, inviting, teaching, loving, needing, welcoming men and fathers into feminisms is not the same as centralizing them. Men do not threaten feminism, false ideologies of gender, power, and "natural" order do. Most people confuse the oppression tactics with the men who exercise it. I'm not advocating these men - or any persons who abuse positions of power - are innocent or anything, but I think it's good to remember, using the adage of 80s and 90s feminists, men aren't the enemy. Far from it.

I think one of the saddest corners of many feminisms is ignoring men and fathers. It's as if the concept of centralizing womyn, valuing womyn, and studying the global trends affecting womyn has isolated men from the concerns of feminists. And while, yes, women constitute the majority of the world, the close second half of the population needs to be equally considered as we fight for justice, advocate for freedom. What freedom looks like for women will not be the same for men, but that difference doesn't automatically cause friction, or even conflict.

The world feminists need is not simply a reordering of numbers so women hold the same positions as men, so CEOs and business partners, and professionals all have equal footing. That might be nice and have good value in changing the landscape a bit, but I don't think it'll solve our problems which run much deeper than just a numbers game of equality. I'm not minimizing representation or the necessity to provide equal access for girls and women to hold the same opportunities as boys and men, but why is that representation so often becomes the measuring stick of progress for mainstream feminism? Why is that - "men can and therefore, I can too" mentality resonating in the same sphere as freedom?

What if the "men can" way is a path that leads to dissonance, destruction, violence, and brokenness? Restructuring the path, I believe, is just, if not more, important than filling that path with the feet of women.

For example, our military could one day be half and half, but if the philosophies of our military stayed the same, would that 50/50 really represent radical change? Wouldn't it be more radical to hear that our military had taken a more serious stance toward sexism, the rapes occurring within, sexual violence used as a tool of torture and genocide?

* * *

So what does feminism look like with men and fathers with us? What does a Father's Day sound like in the feminist blogosphere?

Silence.

What kind of lessons have we learned from our fathers, surrogate fathers, the men, transmen, male-identified individuals who changed our perspectives with love, bravery, vulnerability, and support?

Silence.

And what are our strategies for mobilizing men and fathers?

Silence.

And how do we get past the ridiculous notion that men and fathers are more than just "allies" in the movements for radical love and justice?

Silence.

* * *

My father raised me the only way he knew how - with love. That love might have been patriarchal, ageist, and sexist, but feminism taught me how to receive and give love, not shun, my father. Every father/daughter relationship is different. I'm not blanketing my experience of the only father I've known with yours or others. But, more often than not, feminists overlook the need for justice seeking men who know and practice radical love beyond boundaries.

The answer to unpacking my childhood was not lashing, ignoring, or not sharing my life with my father. The answer was looking into his past, understanding the context of his life and upbringing and then loving him more so I could show him the colors of my life.

There were cultural differences. There were disagreements. Miscommunication galore. And it was hard. Damn hard.

But for my father to know me and how important these issues are to me, to have my father send me articles and magazines he hopes I like that center women and justice solidifies my belief that the community of feminism will and must include our fathers, the men we claim to love, and the young boys we hope will help transform the world.

CALL TO ACTION: Reunite a Baby with Birth Mother

2009-06-20T10:32:00.005-04:00

I normally don't post alerts or campaigns on my blog, but this is unspeakably important.

As a pregnant womyn, the story of Cirila Baltazar Cruz is unbearable. The past three months have altered my perspective. Standing at the threshold of a new unfolding of responsibility, love, fear, and acceptance has been a journey of unbelievable difficulty. The fact that this - illegal adoption from immigrants - is happening REPEATEDLY is unthinkably barbaric. IT'S TIME TO ACT. Write a letter to the folks at the bottom of this email. FORWARD THIS WIDELY. Repost on your blog. The denial of basic rights, the denial of a mother's rights is taking on new monstrous faces and it's enraging. I cannot imagine what this mother must be feeling. Perhaps I do not want to imagine what she's feeling and getting this story out, getting this atrocity to the public to ACT and REACT with calls and letters is the least I can do as a womyn of color, an expecting mother, as a daughter of immigrant parents.

Don't just read - MOVE.

h/t to Flip Flopping Joy

Request for Action from the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance (MIRA):

Cirila Baltazar Cruz gave birth to her baby girl in November of 2008 at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, MS. She speaks very little Spanish and no English, as her native language is Chatino, an Indigenous language from Oaxaca, Mexico that is spoken by some 50,000 people.

The hospital provided her with an “interpreter” who is from Puerto Rico and does not speak Chatino, the language of the mother. Because of the language barrier and the misunderstanding by the hospital’s interpreter who only spoke Spanish and English, a social worker was called in.

The hospital’s social worker reported “evidence” of abuse and neglect based on the following:

* The “baby was born to an illegal [sic] immigrant;”
* The “mother had not purchased a crib, clothes, food or formula.” (Most Latina mothers breast feed their babies).
* “She does not speak English which puts baby in danger.”

Ms. Baltazar Cruz’s baby was snatched from her after birth at the hospital and given to an affluent attorney couple from the posh Ocean Springs who cannot have children.

The authorities made no effort to locate an interpreter in her native tongue. MIRA located an interpreter who is fluent in Chatino in Los Angeles CA and has interviewed the mother extensively with the interpreters help. The mother has been accused of being poor and not being able to provide for this child. No one has asked the mother to provide evidence of support. She owns a home in Mexico and a store which provides both secure shelter and financial support, not counting the nurturing of a loving family of two other siblings, a grandmother, aunts, uncles and other extended family.

Meanwhile, there is word in the Gulf Coast community that the “parents to be,” have already had a baby shower celebrating the “blessed arrival” of this STOLEN child!

PLEASE MAKE CALLS & WRITE LETTERS DEMANDING THE SAFE RETURN OF BABY & REUNITE WITH HER MOTHER

If you believe this is unjust and outrageous and goes against all moral and religious beliefs and values, please call or write to the presiding Judge and the MS Department of Human Services to STOP this ILLEGAL ADOPTION! Stealing US born babies from immigrant parents is a growing epidemic in the United States. Many Latino parents have lost their children this way!

Honorable Judge Sharon Sigalas
Youth Justice Court of Jackson County
4903 Telephone Rd.
Pascagoula, MS 39567
(228)762-7370

Children’s Justice Act Program
MS Dept. of Human Services
750 North State Street
Jackson, MS 39202
Call (601)359-4499 and ask for Barbara Proctor

For more information please call MIRA at: (601) 968-5182

MIRA Organizing Coordinator
Victoria Cintra at (228) 234-1697 or Organizer Socorro Leos at(228) 731-0831

Digital Poetry

2009-06-19T15:22:00.003-04:00

Sometimes my passion for photography, art, and poetry collide on Fridays and I make some digital collage with poems on them. Lately, I've been ruminating about technology and connection. The way Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and online communities have brought energy, community, and information to my life.

And, with some unexplained twinge of sadness, I think about how my offline relationships are so scattered because of proximity, time zone differences, and growing up and away.

I watch people wherever I go. On the bus, at a Fish Fry, in New York, at a protest, at church, at a children's birthday party and wonder if technology has enabled us to share our stories more with the world and less with those in our everyday lives. As my writing grows with disciplined practice and immersion into the internet, I often wonder if there's a correlation to my growing need for human touch; face to face conversation; body language accessibility, and audible laughter.

Has digital technology enhanced your relationships? Has it changed the way you see people, including strangers on the street? Where do you see us heading with all this media advancement?

Stand With Sotomayor

2009-06-19T09:47:00.002-04:00

I stand with her

because she's committed to marginalized communities
because she hasn't forgotten where she's from
because she was raised by a single mother and rocked Princeton and Yale

Speak! and "I Will Survive" Book/ Listening Party

2009-06-17T14:41:00.000-04:00

It's A Boy, It's a Girl

2009-06-16T14:17:00.004-04:00

There's no better dumping ground for socialized gender stereotypes than the ears of a pregnant woman. For a womyn like myself, it raises my blood pressure to listen to all the gendered talk and so I see writing about my pregnancy as one of the necessary exercises to stay sane and keep the kid healthy.

Sharing your pregnancy with others is like an invitation for the worst gender assumptions to pass through my ears. There's nothing, I repeat nothing, more annoying to me right now than the comments that sound like misogyny on steroids.

"It's just better to have a boy. You'll worry less."

"I wanted my first born to be a boy. 'Cause after that, you can just relax and not worry about what the others will be."

"Girls just are too much."

"It'll be better if you have a boy. With a girl, it's just, it's so...it's so much more worrying."

What is this equation in birth? Labor + boy = relief
while Labor + girl = stress

Let's go past all the generalizations (all BS in my opinion anyway) about girls spending more money when they grow up, you'll have to deal with more emotional crises, you'll worry more about violence, etc...

I see both boys and girls as precious and vulnerable little things who will look up at me and not know left from right, evil from good, right from wrong...and they'll learn what from me? --> That because she was born female, I will worry more about her being a victim of violence? That the world will treat her less, pay her, view her less because she was born with a vagina? What impact does that have on how she confronts the world? Will she fight it or believe it?

And what will I teach my son? I presumably don't worry about him because he was born with a penis and we all know that the world prizes that much more than if he were born my daughter. Maybe he'll have it tough from time to time, but he'll never worry about his safety or getting raped or drugged because he's a male.

The reality of the world is not hidden from me. I see misogyny, I see the violence, I see who takes the brunt of poverty, brutality, trafficking, and abuse. I understand how the world will treat my child differently based on its genitalia. I get it. But how does knowing how the world mistreats girls and women lead to the thought it's better to parent a boy?

How radical is my mothering if I just walk the stereotyped line and accept the world as it is, not as I want it to be? Am I more of a mother if I protect more, worry more if it's a girl? Or does that make me a coward?

My deepest fear is not in having a girl. I feel like I would know how to raise a girl because I identify womyn. I've never been a boy, I've never been a man. I don't know how to teach masculinity in healthy, loving ways except in what I imagine it SHOULD be. My fear is that I do have a son and he grows up, eating the garbage available from media, peers, and school. And instead of regurgitation, he'll swallow it, whole. And in my naivety of not knowing how to raise a man, he'll grow to eventually be one of those fathers telling a young mother that it's best to first have a son than to ever have a daughter.

That's more terrifying to me than having a daughter.

It's 1994: Do You Know What the Internet Is?

2009-06-12T11:49:00.002-04:00

The Great Wall of Mainstream Feminism

2009-06-11T19:23:00.004-04:00

There are few things in the world I hate more than when the words "prominent," "feminist," "icon," and "won" are jumbled together in a feminist context.

I don't know why I do this to myself. I have long sworn off mainstream feminism and yet, like a moth to a flame where I know I shall burn myself to death, still, I am drawn to read articles that ponder whether Angelina Jolie is "the next feminist icon."

According to "prominent feminist," Naomi Wolf, Jolie "is hot" and "has it all."

Let's skip the whole song and Hollywood dance of her celebrity and take a closer look at what Naomi Wolf says of her,

"Against every Western convention, she has managed to draw together all of these kinds of female liberation and empowerment. And her gestures determinedly transgress social boundaries — boundaries of convention, race, class, and gender — giving many of us a vicarious thrill."

Um, pardon me, but am I the only one that nearly puked up colonialism when I saw her adopt children all over the world, bringing more wind to the Oprah theory that we, those with money and in industrialized countries, should feel free to "save" these other children from the violence and poverty they would be otherwise subject to?

It's not as if I expect Bazaar or Forbes to take that kind of approach to celebrity analysis. Far from it, I expect mainstream media to further confuse the notions of liberation with colonialist domination. But from writers, thinkers, and philosophers teaching from the walls of feminisms (yes, read it, again my friends - it's plural) -- in what orbit are you circling where you think Ange-freaking-lina Jolie is the "next feminist icon?" What kind of sound minded, socially-just conscience gets a "vicarious thrill" through ethnocentric, heteronormative practices and then sings ignorant praises and files it under Liberation, Best Practices?

From the same brand that said Sex and the City was a cultural phenomenon that further liberated US women, that also denounced Obama during the primaries because Hillary Clinton was the first women to potentially clinch the White House, which also says NOTHING in celebration of or in defense of Sotomayer -- comes the newest installation of mainstream feminism: the (slightly) nuanced message that tells women that, YES, we CAN have it all. By golly, if a big boobed and heavy lipped white actress who makes millions off of her sex appeal can fly a plane, snag a handsome and doting beau, and have her pick of the world's poorest children, well, shit! I CAN HAVE IT ALL TOO!

Ah, mainstream feminism...how many times must I say this? The demise of our efforts will not be neoconservative right-wing bats who look an awful like Dick Cheney. It won't even be the machismo. I'll even go as far to say the collapse won't come from a thousand reincarnations of Ann Coulter.

The damning crack in the great wall of feminisms is caused by the mainstream feminists, the "prominent" writers and thinkers who jump and down on the wall, throwing praise to other White women who have money, small waists, and heterosexual sex. They continuously and knowingly break the backs of the women and daughters who need more advocacy than they need to hear about a wealthy, country-jetting actress. This wall will certainly cave from the Utah-sized egos that ignore race and colonial theories and teachings, who offer their souls to Hillary Clinton and nothing to Sonia Sotomayer. And when this wall crumbles, the dust will settle and reveal two things that mainstream feminism has caused: the majority of women are trapped under the wall and are dead while the women who walked the the top and caused the crack are still alive.

Letter # 8

2009-06-11T14:08:00.005-04:00

Dear Veronica,

I've been thinking about how these letters will be if I find out you are, in fact, a boy, not a girl as I have been thinking.

I don't think it will matter much. You'll be either Veronica or Isaiah and what I have to share with you is the same, regardless of what sex you happen to be.

I'm about to enter my second trimester with you and I can scarcely believe it. The picture Dr. David gave me yesterday of you nearly took my breath away. You LOOK like a baby. A head, limbs, and the outline of a body...I couldn't believe it. I also couldn't believe how I already thought you looked so cute. You're, literally, a picture of shadows and, to me and your Pops, you looked simply adorable.

I've been thinking about what kind of world you are about to come into when January 2010 strikes and what captives me most is you are in me, yet not of the knowledge that I have. You have no knowledge of what evil looks like, or how it will pain you once you come into this world. You have no knowledge of what kindness looks like. The only thing you know is peace inside a floating sac of my blood, nourishing you with no disturbances or worry. All of that will change soon.

I shared with your father yesterday that I have observed how protective of children I feel these days. Suddenly, the world seems like a cold, cold place. An unloving and precarious playground with sharks in the pond, strangers leering at the fences, and untrustworthy mystery figures walking about. Isn't it clear? I'm afraid to bring you into this world and the responsibility I will have to protect you as best as I can. So far, the only person I've really looked out for is myself. Selfishly, I sometimes think I will be a good protector because I don't know if I can handle any amount of harm done to you. A selfish mother, indeed.

The wonder and innocence you symbolize to me right now cannot be adequately communicated. You are life, a breathing life waiting to grow and come into the world through my body and I find myself writing about the rights of women's bodies, the rights of our voice and the place of our humanity. Your mom's writing is often misunderstood and I hope you can learn from me. There is nothing wrong with being misunderstood. Actually, it only confirms that the more you speak your own way, the more of your own path you'll find, the more others will misunderstand your ways.

I spoke to you this morning of individuality and trusting the voice you will develop inside you. The voice may not always be certain, but it will be strong in curiosity and wanting to do the most loving thing. That will lead you to where you will need to go. I don't know if you can hear me, let alone understand the little talks we have in the car, but I hope you can soon understand that individuality can and should only exist in the context of community, accountability, and justice. Never, in all the days you will live, should you ever think you are alone in this world or this world was made just for your path. It is a beautiful, intimidating mudball where you will be pressed to find your own path. If it resembles anything like mine, it should be crooked with lots of uneasy turns that are hard to navigate. But it'll be your path.

And then you are to share it with others. Should you ever be misunderstood along the way, know these letters serve as my companionship in your journey. To be misunderstood, my dear Child, is a blessed thing.

Love,
Mama

Class, Race, and Privilege in the 'Central Park Jogger' Story

2009-06-10T09:23:00.012-04:00

This essay is written with nothing but the deepest respect of Trisha Meili's story and her compassion to share herself with the world and aid those in despair. In the tangled web of examining privilege that comes with race and class, and scrutinizing the judicial system, difficult questions arise about the background of the survivor and the wrongly convicted. Looking at how privilege impacts the crime and conviction is not a strike against Meili. It's an attempt to take a cold, hard look at the judicial system.

In 2004, I read I Am the Central Park Jogger, a best-selling memoir about the healing road to recovery of Trisha Meili, a Wall Street Investment Banker who in 1989, was brutally raped and beaten in Central Park. The story lit up the nation in outrage.

Her book, released fourteen years after her attack, focuses on the neurological and spiritual healing of the violent crime that nearly took her life. Now a motivational speaker, Trisha Meili has been recognized as a leader and advocate for brain trauma, sexual assault, and survivor rights.

I remember reading it in graduate school. Counseling sexual assault survivors, doing group work, and individual therapy peaked my interest in her memoir. I remember telling a friend, "There's no criticism after reading a memoir of survival. What am I going to focus on -- how the writing wasn't that sophisticated or the strength of coming out to share her story or rape and recovery after she nearly died? Some stories are not about the writing, it's about the lives underneath it."

As is with sexual assault, there's always more to the story.

One thing I know about sexual assault is that the judicial system often deepens the wrongs and violence of the crime. Usually, it's implicating the survivor. The system is often a jungle, an impassable jungle of victim-blaming, terrorizing, disbelief, and sexism from the moment a womyn admits she has been sexually violated.

The story of Trisha Meili is different.

The truth is that a convicted rapist and murder, Matias Reyes, would eventually confess that he alone had raped, tortured and beaten Trisha Meili. That truth would not surface, though, for thirteen years after the attack and not until five other Black and Latino young men, known as the Central Park 5, would be wrongfully interrogated and convicted for the crime.

Now, Raymond Santana, Khary Wise, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson and Yusuf Salaam, are still seeking damages for wrongful convictions and time served, ranging from 6 years to 14 years by different members of the Central Park 5.

While this story bears no surprise to anyone familiar with the judicial system, the lives of all of those involved have a horrendous twist of irony.

Trisha Meili, the strong survivor of this terrible and unthinkable crime, has no memory of that night. The brain trauma suffered rendered her memory blank. She does not even remember going out for the run that night. Her story and pain left me speechless, but I also know that the story of Trisha Meili is not the usual case of rape.

The majority of rapes are perpetrated by known acquaintances, friends, and partners. The majority of rapes are not reported, go to trial or have a named, guilty rapist sentenced. The majority of sexual assault survivors do not have the privilege of attending ivy league schools or working at prestigious Wall Street banks. Yet most speakers who circulate public speeches about rape are White women. After working at *University and being in the field for a while, I've observed that most paid speakers who openly share their lives, are White women and are accepted as the face of strength, resilience, and courage. They are some of the faces of strength, but most women, particularly women of color and women of low-income do not have the freedom, ability, or support to seek services, publicly speak, or even share their story of sexual violation.

I am speechless once again, this time for the five young men, teenagers back then, who were guilty of many crimes, but not the rape and beating of Trisha Meili. The unthinkable waste of 20 years, a lifetime, for them and their families...are there any words?

How do race and class factor into this horrible crime? This White, Yale grad has been able to miraculously recover and inspire others after a barbaric shredding of her body and humanity. These men of color, tortured in a completely different way, and forced to admit a crime they never committed, endured an injustice that stole their lives and families for two decades. And now, the city is "dragging its feet" when responding to the request to compensate $50 million each to the wrongly convicted and their families.

In the background, New York City, the city of dreams, and of horror. The place of reality which illustrates that racial division and class differences still don't mix well in the law.

The Central Park 5. Some stories are not about the writing, but about the lives underneath it. I wonder if these young men will have best-selling memoirs.

To Whom You Are Accountable

2009-06-07T08:28:00.004-04:00

Filipinos have a cultural trademark of slapping nicknames on folks which have absolutely nothing to do with their real names. For example, my full first name is Ana Lisa, but growing up, my parents had a slew of nicknames for me that slid in and out of my life. I never questioned it, just knew they were terms of endearment and I embraced my cultural names.

My father called me Shouloo [SHAO-loo], which typically meant, "little one." The youngest of four, it seemed appropriate and a sign of affection. "Shouloo! Get me my tsinelas [sandals]!" My nickname always softened the request to get my father whatever he was requesting.

My mother had a few names for me. "Anak," [ah-NAHK] means "dear" or "child" as she also frequently called me "Ming," which I never completely understood. But they were always said lovingly so I had a feeling they were similar in nature.

As a child, they told me stories of the Philippines and I imagined a faraway place of paradox. A tropical paradise. Unthinkable poverty. Dirt. Spirit. Malls. A home.

* * * *

Last year, I went to the Philippines for multiple reasons. One reason was to academically immerse myself in history, economics, language, and the arts. I was also researching the history of the women's movement in the Philippines and was to study under a professor who had endured political trauma - kidnapping and torture - during the martial law under then president Ferdinand Marcos. Dr. T* was an excellent teacher and I often felt confounded by her life experiece that she used in her teaching college students.

I studied at the University of the Philippines (UP) and quickly absorbed the political tension on campus. I was to attend a rally in one of my first afternoons at the campus. The rally was to raise awareness about the missing Sociology professor and student who disappeared during a research project they had been conducting in the mountains. These young women - Karen* and Carolyn* - were intent on researching the trials and life of rural agricultural workers in the mountains.

They disappeared.

Like so many other philosophers, teachers, activists, and thinkers in the Philippines. Disappeared.

Gone.

* * * *

No one was as interested in my research as they were about my personal story, however. Most of the feedback I received when folks learned of my trip mostly centralized on either one of two assumptions. I actually 1) "abandoned my husband" to learn and conduct independent research OR 2) defiantly traveled alone to the other side of the world without him

* * * *

My parents never taught me or my siblings Tagalog, or any other dialect of the Philippines. Language, its sole function so often understood as the train of understanding, is the carrier of so much more in the Philippines. Being able to speak Tagalog is a marker of cultural acceptance, of union. Stuttering in half English (though nearly all urban areas speak English) is a billboard of westernized upbringing.

The latter. That was me.

* * * *

I meet with all kinds of human rights groups that talk about the many struggles of the bleeding nation. Without filters or softeners, the reality of the corrupt violence makes me afraid. I tell a native that I am afraid. She laughs in my face. "You are an American citizen, yes?"

I nod.

"Just show your passport. No one will ever touch you." She dismisses me.

Feeling slighted and awkwardly untouchable, I turn to a friend for a brief processing. She is from New York. "Yeah, Leese, I mean, come on. We lead different lives. It doesn't matter if we're Filipino, we don't live the same danger these other women do. Janice* just survived her first round of chemo therapy while she spent the night in her office, advocating for justice. She's committed. Why? Because her friends, her actual friends, have been kidnapped, murdered and raped. She's allowed to laugh at us because we don't live that. We can take her bitter laughter if we understand what she goes through."

* * * *

"Tell them we're beyond poverty. We're not even allowed to eat the garbage. We're even charged for the remains no one wants," a Filipina tells me as my research project ends. I say nothing, remembering the communities I met who are charged $60 USD for a truckload of garbage to sift through.

* * * *

"Please, don't forget us. Please, tell others our stories so others will understand what we're living through." I hold the hand of a widow whose husband, a union rights organizer, was assassinated two years ago with no one brought to justice.

* * * *

My parents call me Ming and Shouloo, names of love. Lately, though, I notice they don't call me those names anymore. I realize it's because they were all names for a little girl.

I am no longer.

* * * *

It has been almost a year since I left for my first trip to my parents homeland and I have written nothing but scratches about its impact on my life. My notes, my research sits out waiting for me, waiting for my commitment to travel back in my memory and relive some of the most gorgeous moments of my life, and also some of the most horrific.

I realize, with sadness, as I nurse this plum of a life inside me, s/he will likely not receive the cultural division that I experienced growing up. The intense confusion, and resulting drive, that came with growing up Ming and Shouloo in the United States will not be present for my child.

But the stories I have, the memories still burning in my mind will shape this child into understanding a certain part of the world to where s/he will always have a connection. With connection, comes accountability. Loving accountability.

* * * *

With a picture of the growing Plum on my desk, I reach for overstuffed notebooks with handouts and maps as bookmarks, reeking with the smell of dust and dried sweat.

I remember. I begin writing.

__________________________________________________________________
Salamat to Tanglad for your inspiration, companionship, support, and incivise writing.

The Relationship: Pregnancy, Abortion, Faith, Violence

2009-06-03T08:59:00.006-04:00

I attended my first pro-life rally when I was 10 or 11 years old. With my mother on a back breaking smelly bus, we traveled through the night to D.C., arrived, marched with our church group, and boarded the bus to drive home. I barely slept.

The pro-life march was my first trip the our nation's capital and the magnificent sites were shadowed by the thousands of pro-life marchers I walked with. Huddled under a tent from the dripping rain, I listened to stories of guilt-ridden women who'd had abortions and realized their mistake.

I held a sign of some sort. I don't remember what it said, but I'm sure it was something along the lines of "Love them both. Choose life." As I held my mother's hand, I smiled at a group of women in business suits who I thought looked like congresswomen. They smiled at me and gave me a thumbs up sign, my heart soared.

I was ten when I walked down the pro-life avenue and clung close to my mother as pro-choice advocates stood with their signs on the outskirts of the march. As I passed a group of pro-choice ralliers, one said to me and my group of walkers, "You all make me sick. I want to spit on you." I buried my face into my mothers stomach, afraid of what might happen.

My mother whispered into my ear, "You pray."

I thought she meant for my safety so I threw a prayer skyward that sounded something like, "Please God, I don't want to be attacked. I don't want to be spit on. I just want to walk."

* * * * *

I was 25 when I moved in with Katie*. She worked at the local Planned Parenthood and though we went to the same undergraduate university, I'd never met her before. We got along swimmingly. I worked at a university's women's center, she at Planned Parenthood and we mostly talked women's issues, feminism, and the differences that lay between us.

One night, over a tiny wooden table with crowded plates of rice and chicken, Katie asked me, "So, where do stand on abortion? Does your faith steer you pro-life or the women's center steer you pro-choice?"

I slowly swallowed my food, hating that question, and deliberately delayed because I wanted my heart beat to slow before I answered. A shot of adrenaline always pulsed through me when I spoke of issues of reproductive health, abortion, life, and faith.

"I don't think you'll like what I have to say. No one does. I don't identify pro-life and I don't identify pro-choice. I don't think either 'side' has the vision for what women in this world need."

I moved my eyes from her face, knowing the line of questions that were coming.

"But do you believe in a women's right to an abortion?" Katie wasn't eating anymore.

"I believe in women. I believe that all this crap and dialogue is bullshit. I believe we haven't been given the funding, education, and means to even think beyond having a baby or having it terminated. We don't even envision the kind of LIFE women should be given and so we aren't given the options we deserve, the resources we need, or even the chance to consider what else is possible with our lives. So when you ask whether a women has a right to an abortion, all I think of are ALL the things, all the basic things that women don't have that lead to make her choose between 'life' and 'choice.' It's not that simple."

Katie resumed munching on her rice and chicken, "Well, yeah. I mean, women don't have access to the education and resources they need in general, but that's a whole other conversation."

I looked up, "Is it?"

* * * * *
A few months have passed since that discussion and I come home to find Katie watching Desperate Housewives. I made a snide comment about trashy evening programs that do little for our brains and notice she is not throwing back any signature sarcasm. I ask her what's wrong.

Katie tells me a long story. She tells me a long story on the slashed tires she's endured. The man who photographs her car license plates. The daily protesters outside her office. The security measures when she walks into work everyday.

I listen to this woman, my friend, who tells me what it's like working at a Planned Parenthood in Cincinnati, Ohio. I think about the mild harassment endured when I tell people I work at women's center - a non-medical facility - where it is always assumed I provide information and possibly even assist abortion procedures.

It is then I realize that there are several battles going on, but one war. There are different battles of those who fight the front lines of gender equality, those of us who try to raise consciousness and educate about the damning effects of essentializing the characteristics and roles of women and men and ignore anyone else who doesn't fit our expections. And then there are those on the front lines of reproductive rights who go live an almost double life. Katie tells me how she has two resumes she sends out, one that is open about Planned Parenthood and another that softens the position and her role in its function. Katie tells me endless stories of dinner parties gone awry because of political debates, family gathers that bleed awkwardness because of her work, and the silent assumptions of acquaintances when she shares the nature of her occupation.

* * * *
Today in the news there is much talk about the murder of Dr. Tiller and even our normally calm Mr. Obama President expressed his "shock and outrage" about what has been called a"reprehensible act of domestic terror."

According to the Op-Ed in the New York Times, this is the fourth killing since 1993 of a physician who provides abortion procedures. Not to minimize this heinous and unthinkable crime, but let's look at the global picture of abortion via reproductive rights. Four murders in 16 years averages to one every four years.

Every minute of every day, a woman dies from pregnancy-related complications. Approximately 530,000 women and girls die worldwide from such complications every year, including as many as 70,000 women and girls who die from botched abortions, according to Population Action International.
* * * *

But those women dying is not a crime because most of them occur in "developing" countries. All the women who die from botched abortions do not have reactions from our President because...simply because it's women who are dead from botched abortions.

The President from D.C. says it's time to find common ground. I disagree.

It's not time to find common ground, it's time to admit there is no common ground and, still, cease fire.

It's not time to try and say pro-lifers understand pro-choicers or vice versa because the decades of divisive rhetoric has split this country into a segregation deeper than red and blue states.

There's no time to find common ground when so many women are dying from lack of education, resources, and freedom. I believe the access to healthcare, education, and information trumps the rallies and cries for choice. True freedom is full access to the knowledge of health, consequence, givings and sacrifice of our actions. Why are we so damn staunch in our fight for abortion and so up in arms when a physician is murdered? Albeit, it's a tragedy, but LOOK AT WHAT WOMEN IN THIS WORLD ARE ENDURING.

But as so many have reiterated to me, when I speak of vision and freedom in regard to reproductive health and "choice," it becomes "a whole other conversation."

As long as it remains a whole other conversation, it will never be our reality.

It Will Feel All That You Feel

2009-06-01T07:31:00.002-04:00

My mother told me that the baby will feel all that I will feel.

In relation to a high sodium/sugar diet warning, or a lesson about high blood pressure, it seems like an appropriate lesson to understand about the effect I have on the fire growing inside me.

And then I wondereed if my baby can feel my sadness, my anger, my joy, and laughs when I laugh.

I've never had anything grow - alive - inside me before and that statement just shot a syringe of terrifying responsibility through my veins.

In my dreams last night, I dreamt I drank alcohol, fully knowing I was pregnant. I dreamt I was indulging in behaviors I never had before -- sorrid love affairs, whole loaves of bread and muffins, and cigarettes. I wake up, sighing a relief that it was just a dream.

But where is this terror coming from?

As a soon to be new mother, I am just beginning to glimpse this new world of responsibility. The world that I've heard stories about, but never stepped into. I think this is the world where I've heard so many womyn judge and compare at the highest stakes of criticism: motherhood.

I don't have much in excess. I don't have a lot of savings. I'm not in therapy. I can't buy organic. I sure as hell don't have a mini-van or buy new clothes and sandals from a name brand store. I don't know how to sew, have changed about 3 diapers in my life, and can't stand doing the laundry.

I do believe that the memory of my mother's rearing will guide me in what I need to do.

My mother entered the United States when she was 20 years old, determined to make money for her family in the Philippines. Over the course of 43 years, she's managed to raise four children with no college degree or a lick of luxury to speak of. She raised us without lollipops or ice cream trucks. She hid, literally, from her children, when the ice cream truck music sounded on our street and pressed herself into a wall because she didn't even have a quarter to spare for a popsicle.

My mother fought her way through high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep deprivation, heel spikes, thyroid problems, and bitter racism in the midwest.

She had religion. She had her faith. She brought us up, surrounding us in a protective circle of love, prayer, and simplicity. Where others had salads and desserts, we had a pot of rice, two fish sticks, and water for dessert. We were a family and didn't need much else. Not until we were told that we needed "more" by our friends and commercials. Then our conversations became more and more westernized, more Americanized.

It's only now I can begin to appreciate the decisions my mother made and how difficult times were for her, but we barely understood the stress she must have been under for so long. She raised a family in a foreign country while supporting her other family back home, sending her siblings to college, supporting her widowed mother.

It's the memories my mother has left me that gives me strength when I feel terror, when I feel I may not have "enough" to bring life into this world. When I wonder how we'll afford a crib, baby seats, strollers, changing tables and food, I remember that my mother never bought baby food, but used her big pots, hot water, an old blender, and tupperware.

It's the memory of my mother that releases any external pressure or worry that I may not "have," or am, enough.

This Pregnant Feminist Will Eat You Alive

2009-05-29T17:34:00.006-04:00

Everything's changing.

The moment was actually split. Plural.

There were two realizations that changed my life. One was the moment I knew I wanted to be a mother. The second when I realized I was pregnant.

Those two moments were distinct and both charged with a transformative power difficult to express.

The moment I knew I wanted to become a mother of some kind was a shock of worry -- what if I couldn't become pregnant? What if my health was not up to par? What kind of mother would I be? How will my life change?

Then the moment arrived when I realized I was pregnant. Everything turned into a statement, not a question. That left me in shock. I am now pregnant. My health is not up to par. I will be a mother. My life will change. All declaratives. All terrifying. No more questions.

I've come to understand my life in terms of my feminism and vice versa. My feminism is subdued or enthralled by the ongoing events and lessons of my everyday life. The more I engage in my life, the clearer my thoughts become, the more complex my issues grow. I wondered how my blogging would be affected -- would I suddenly be thrust into the prego blogosphere? No...I thought to myself, I'm still the same person. I'm not a genre. I'm a womyn of color, pregnant. I am growing fire inside my uterus. You better believe I'm going to be writing about this.

Being a pregnant womyn has pushed me into a new role in this world. It has shifted my thoughts to a future-oriented way of thinking. When I watch the news, it's not longer about me, but how it might affect the future my child will live in. When I see a car accident, I wonder if a child was lost, or if a child just lost a parent. Then I cry.

My eyes are wet with weepiness. As I ran on a treadmill, I stopped to weep into a corner. Then I got up and ran again.

The assault of medical worries and superficial expectations on what makes a "Good Mother" has astounded me. Everything from pre-natal yoga to avoiding bologna...all of the information and "education" has paralyzed me.

The greatest advice came from a friend who simply said, "Listen to your body. It knows what it needs."

There's a new fragility in my life that has gifted me with a strength I do not want to refuse. I want to be a strong mother, a strong womyn. I see the demons of this world who have painted the canvas of motherhood with images of white perfection, middle class luxuries, and the oldest tool of oppression used toward new and old mothers: guilt. I see the expectations heaped upon my life in the short 9 weeks I've been pregnant and am tickled with excitement. The world has no idea who they are messing with. Me. You are messing with pregnant me and my writing is going to fire back at all the mainstream feminisms that have contributed to the locking down, locking up, and criminilization of womyn of color who choose motherhood despite the odds, who choose to have children with or without a partner, who choose to raise their children with less than adequate healthcare coverage, who work and fight and love all in the same day. My blog will be focusing on the issues of pregnancy and feminism, on giving love and attention to all the truthful ways real womyn birth life into the world.

There is no epidural for the kind of birth I want.

Speak! Speak! Speak!

2009-05-27T18:23:00.003-04:00

Pump up the volume and enjoy.

Choice and Memorial Day Weekend

2009-05-25T08:24:00.005-04:00

When I think of all the people and their families who have served in some capacity for their country, I think of my options. And my fortune. And my privilege. I think of the secrets that the public does not know or want to know of our military.

I think of a former colleague, a mother whose son was in Iraq and barely spoke for the three years he was away and then 9 weeks before his discharge was the only time I saw her smile as she told me he was soon coming home. Weeks later, I looked for her at work and heard her son was killed in a roadside bomb.

I think of friends who whose loved ones are away, shut away in a remote part of the world, their duties mysteries, their actions unknown, their security unstable.

I think of all the people who are actively in our military, whose belief system I do not understand but simultaneously respect. I think of how so many of these people fighting in our war are late teens and early 20-somethings. They're kids.

And I think that that is how my choices are available, how our world builds its freedom -- on who wins wars, who has military power and security and bullying power. I think of all the activists, professors, and educators in the Philippines who are abducted, raped, tortured, and disappeared under the watch of their government. I think of the voiceless screams of the women I know walking the streets of Mercado Oriental, in mother-daughter prostitution rings, who have no choice but to work for violent pimps and sell their bodies, their mother-daughter relationship to an evil system of endless oppression, and whose government gives them only sobras and palabras?

Memorial Day always makes me think of choices. It always makes me think about privilege. It always conjures up the two sides to every coin and often the confusion I feel when I pass cemeteries with hundreds of mini-flags and flowers, confetti on the graves that honor those who gave their lives and to whom I hang my head in prayer and gratitude. It makes me think of our freedom -- and what it buys us in other countries.

Choice. At what expense does yours come with?

"Is"

2009-05-20T09:19:00.002-04:00

I was about to google a question that began with the word "is" and these ten questions appeared down in the scroll to try and predict what my "is" question would be:

IS
bronchitis contagious?
pneumonia contagious?
Obama the antichrist?
Michelle Obama pregnant?
your Jason Mraz lyrics?
limewire illegal?
Lil Wayne dead?
the world going to end in 2012?
santa real?
pluto a planet?

Let's pretend Google is an omnipotent force...
If you could ask one "is" question today -- what would you ask if you knew you would get the truth in reply?

Quick Point for the Day

2009-05-19T08:41:00.004-04:00

Anytime a White identified woman asks how to be an ally to a womyn of color, or how to be a "real feminist" that includes full self-actualization, I am always in amazement that the first things said are about how "hard" things are, how "oppressive" the world is, how racism has depleted the hope, stamina, and good-nature of womyn of color.

Speaking at least for myself, yes, there is another side of life that womyn of color must deal with that often has to do with poverty, injustice, violence, and discrimination in waves that most US-White women do not understand.

However, what I think most people don't understand is that with rough terrain often comes full souls, hearts that are readily open and laugh often, party much, and celebrate the matters of most importance.

Communities of differences beset by injustice are often the first to identify the good spots of life, the waters that most take for granted.

That side of womyn of color is often not understood.

I am not a meeting the world with a bitter head, I see it head on, face up, and have joy.

I have joy.

So, if you want to better understand the lives of womyn of color, it is imperative to not only understand the pain, but to watch the joy.

Bumper Feminism Stickers

2009-05-10T17:48:00.004-04:00

BA lights it up while I can make a bumper sticker about it.

Giselle: Artistic and Racy or Just Racist?

2009-05-07T10:06:00.003-04:00

Take a look.

What do you think?

The Concept of "Work"

2009-05-04T16:11:00.003-04:00

Anytime I talk about "work" (work being defined as a series of assigned tasks for which you are regularly paid), I'm always met with misunderstanding. Work, clearly, is one of those deep and layered topics that convey class and privilege. I know that.

I know that the things I am about to write clash in a country beset with a recession, with terrible stories of loss and hardship.

That's not the context of work I am talking about today. I'm not talking about work as a means of survival, a means of providing life and nutrition and basic needs. I'm talking about work as an avenue of creative force; a garden of possibility to grow and till our ideas and tender seeds of maybe.

Work, the way the US has exposed it to me, sucks.

That's all. That's pretty much my point.

Across sectors - academic, corporate, private, public, government - and across disciplines - mental health, social justice, physical therapy, spiritual and religious, legal, blue collar and white collar...

Work tends to suck all the energy and creative forces from me. The paid, 40-hr work week frankly depresses any bank of creativity I had. Even jobs that boast the ability to be creative don't really want new ideas, they want new ways of being successful, but not necessarily new or philosophies.

By no means a research study, but I often ask my friends and acquaintences how they feel about their life in terms of their job. A lot of them say, "it's ok," and divide what they do professionally with their personal life. That's understandable. Not everyone has the privilege of fusing the two in a pleasing relationship.

So, what's wrong with me? Is anyone else out there that feels like an office is an eerily similar shape and size to a cell?

Or when you look at children, your joy fades when you envision them growing up to sit in front of a computer screen?

As I continue on an aggressive path of carving out a career, I am consistently coming back to these questions of division. Why do I have to do this? Why have I not yet learned to just suck it up when everyone else has?

In the pit of my stomach, I feel a pretense when I say what I do for a living. An ideal life to me is brimming with work that brings me joy...a life where I met with challenges and daunting prospects that bring me closer to community, the world, and myself.

"That's what everyone wants," is what I'm told.

Than what do we need to do to make that happen?

Forget funding the revolution, how about funding our own existence, starting with being happy with our jobs, our lives!

Are you happy in your work? Do you separate work and Work?

Since I can't ask when, I'll ask this: HOW do you find what you love to do?

Bumper Sticker 2

2009-05-01T15:15:00.002-04:00

Patch your car with my new bumper stickers!

The Roar of the Midwest

2009-05-01T10:05:00.004-04:00

The first time I went to Detroit, Michigan, it was to attend the Allied Media Conference. That fateful June of 2007, I met some of the most amazing thinkers, writers, and activists I'd ever been witnessed.

One of the things that caught my attention (and envy) was the absolutely loyalty people had to Detroit.

At the time, I'd lived in several big cities in my life - Boston, New York, LA. I'd had my share of smaller cities like Aberdeen, Washington and Cincinnati, Ohio. I'd even lived in Managua, Nicaragua and Quezon City, Philippines as well. I'm rattling off my nomadic record to say that I'd never met activists who were born and bred in a city and determined to see it resurrect from the grave like I met the ones in Detroit.

Sure I'd met some crazy loyal Bostonians, New Yorkers who would die for the burrough of Brooklyn and those infamous born and die in the 'Nati folks...but there's a difference between loyalty or pride and urban blood love that translates into action.

I've spent much of my adult life lamenting the locus of my geographical soul. Like a pathetically, navel gazing fool, I'd spent so much time on what the sky scrapers said about me and my spirit, I never connected with the spirit of a city, cultivated a connection with its streets beyond what it FELT like to me. In short, I never gave anything or worked to make a city better than how I found it.

Now I live in Cleveland. I'd listened to movies that poked fun at Cleveland, that snickered at the darkening and hollowing problems that plague the city. When I moved here, I expected to cut out my own existence and stick to that. But now I'm opening myself to this place. I'm open to absorbing this lakeside city that is slowly emptying itself.

A city of problems, a city of frustrated citizens determined to see it grow, Cleveland is a place of strength in the face of delapidating buildings, abandoned warehouses, and rotting corners. But it is also the face of medical intervention, fresh and organic neighborhoods, unusually compassionate locals...the spirit here is raw, deep, and convincing.

So it bothers me when videos like this come out...essentially using old habit humor (read: negative) to list the city's wrongs and embarrassing points. While it's just another YouTube video, it gets under my skin that so many Ohioans are passing it freely calling it nothing but hilarious and a belly work-out. Ha Ha - Lebron James. Ha Ha - Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Ha Ha - "we're not Detroit."

For those who fight for dying cities - where the media is struggling, where the unemployment rate is worsening, where the ailing health of our youth is translating into more adult obesity and diabetes, where the gun violence lingers while the jobs flee - videos that commonly satirize poor, urban areas are angering.

It angers me. Greatly.

What makes a city great?

The culture, the diversity? The restaurants, the community amenities, the number of independent entrepreneurs it draws each year? The weather? Its living cost? Whether its a coastal location? Accessability to nature and the great outdoors? Its sports teams?

Maybe its its residents. The activists and educators and artists and bakers and leaders who are aflame with energy to see the city rebuild itself.

I don't know if Cleveland is the place where I will die and be buried, but I know that the spirit of this city is a alive. Even if its turbulent, it's alive. And those fighting for Cleveland know it is more than just a political talking point or a punchline for comics. It is our Home.

Patch These All Over Your Car

2009-04-30T08:16:00.006-04:00

Sometimes feminist thoughts put me in an all too serious mood. I'm needing to go back to my roots...my side that is creative, humorous, and loves variety. My writing didn't always used to be so long-winded.

I'm going to start making bumper stickers for my blog about whatever is on my mind.

Have a saying you want to see into a bumper sticker? Send it my way.

Written in My Plain Gendered Language

2009-04-29T23:09:00.004-04:00

Since my induction to the feminist blogosphere, I've put much time into narrowing my focus. Widespread blogging seems too general, unfocused, and leaves me with little direction. Mostly, I don't feel I learn as much as I want when I blog across the spectrum.

About a year ago, I decided to move forward in specific issues relating to feminism - defining "radical," exploring sexual violence, faith, media, and womyn of color.

Every once in a while though, I wonder if focusing on "feminism" somehow limits my exploration of "gender."

How does that focus change me, my writing, when and if I write: I want to explore feminism vs. I want to explore gender.

Is it the same thing?

Before I would have emphatically stated yes.

Now, I would emphatically distinguish that mainstream feminism and academic courses absolutely ignore the entirety of gender as an issue. Often times, feminism is conflated with the upward political, class, and elitist advancement of White women. Somehow, in some contorted, quiet way, I've often thought that gender has gotten lost in feminism. Sure, it's pointed out when women, particularly women of privilege are abused, oppressed, or violated, but, for the most part, feminism and gender, ironically, are often not paired together in headliners.

I'm thinking, specifically, of the transgendered lives and experiences that I, admittedly, know very little about.

I am not and do not identify transgender and have often felt like my understanding is extremely limited by my slow understanding and deconstruction of socialization when it comes to gender roles. For as much as I analyze the experience of womyn of color, I often fail at pushing myself to explore the experience of transgendered womyn of color. Semantically, it's easy to ask, "What about the transgender folks?" But to truly be an individual open to learning the struggles and causes of the transgendered population, the questions must conquer the fear and confusion.

And so, as someone suggested to write about feminism as it relate[s] to transgender, here's my honest reply:

I don't know. You tell me.

And I write that with as much respect and honesty as a womyn of color who once asked how feminism relates to US-born Filipinas with immigrant parents. I write that as someone who asks how feminism relates to a late-birthed sexual awakening and an even delayed political consciousness. How does feminism relate to transgender lives?

If I do not live a transgendered life, do not know the full extent of the pain and violence and discrimination suffered by transgendered womyn, I will not know how feminism relates to them, or even IF it relates to them.

Despite what is being written in the history of mainstream feminists in the westernized, classist world of iconic femmies with self-serving agendas, the truth is that feminism has the power to transform consciousness and spirit. It has the ability to challenge our very definitions of humanity and rights. I believe, however, that it must arrive in the grain of relationship and a shitload of humility.

Feminism, the study of women's lives, excludes no one...in theory. Yet, we don't live theoretically, do we?

We live individually, often to own detriment. We live so individualistically that we fail to even understand gender within feminsm and we fail ourselves. We fail as writers, activists, listeners...we fail as people, I think, when we forego others. Feminism has long bypassed transgendered womyn. I write that as someone who only sees transgender issues written about when someone has been slain. I write that as someone whose blog only mentions transgender issues a handful of times.

Truthfully, my goal as a writer is to point out the holes. Most people mistake that for seeing the negative, or constantly bitching about what's wrong. But there are enough fans of mainstream feminism and not enough compassionate critics who long to see it do better than what it is currently doing. And the "doing" isn't by feminism itself, but by the students and practitioners who claim to be activists within a "Movement." And if the students and practitioners are happy with feminism, we are in big trouble.

It isn't just about transgendered folks being ignored or how the issues are only mentioned in the blogosphere by way of violence and brutality, it's the complete disregard for any gritty issue of gender when it involves unfamiliar territory. This is true for feminism as it relates to the disability movement, transnational or international womyn, immigration, faith, Katrina...the list goes on.

Feminism does not make itself relevant to folks like you and me. We must make it so.

In other words, your voice, my voice is needed to explain why.

Feminist Running Dry

2009-04-28T17:35:00.001-04:00

What do you think should be blogged about
that isn't being blogged about?

Letter #9

2009-04-25T16:21:00.004-04:00

Dear Veronica,

Bloated, gassy, indigestion, and interrupted sleep. Is that you in there?

I'll have a better idea tomorrow.

It's almost two weeks since my little happy dance that I ovulated and your father and I are trying to keep our hopes reasonably low while I get up in the middle of the night because of gas pains and cramps.

"It could be my period, that's all. But I really hope not."

The wondering is torturous.

I remember in 1997, I went to one of those ridiculous fortune tellers who read my palm and told me two things. First, she said that my professional career would be diverse, that I would try many, many things before I made up my mind. She said I'd work with children, adults, in different disciplines and settings before I settled. Well she was certainly correct about that.

The other was that I would only have one child and that child would be a son.

I don't know what these letters will look like if you turn out to be a boy, but it doesn't really matter to me. I've fantasized about you, Veronica, a small piece of existence coming into the world through my body and should you turn out to be Isaiah, well, I'll love you just as much.

It's hard for me to focus on anything but my body right now and it's glorious possibilities and horrendous limitations, but I keep my eyes forward. Not up, not down, just forward. I am setting my heart on hope, with a lot of strength.

Should you continue to exist only in my heart, I will continue to move forward in dreaming of what might be and being the kind of person I would have lived out as a mother - kind, stern, loving, challenging, understanding, and faithful.

Come to us. We're waiting.

Love,
Mom

Feminism in Motion

2009-04-20T19:51:00.006-04:00

If you don't know by now, let me remind you: make/shift magazine is a fresh, grassrooted, and truth-telling effort that is looking for events of any and all variety in all parts of the world that are capturing "feminism in motion."

We (especially me) are looking for the awesome work that is being done that have few outlets of publicity.

Show us the colors, sizes, and fierce faces of feminisms.

Catch the plural?
We're looking for the folks behind community justice, creativity, education, activism, and art.

Still unconvinced?
Visit the website or email me.

Please forward to all universes, planets, countries, nooks, corners, and tree houses you can! Just get it to me by May 25, 2009. Submit to me at: lisa@makeshiftmag.com

Muchas gracias,
Lisa

Immigrants March for Dignity

2009-04-20T18:44:00.001-04:00

*IMMIGRANTS MARCH FOR DIGNITY IN QUEENS, CALL FOR ACTION ON MAY DAY 2009*

for pictures, see here

WOODSIDE-- Latino, Filipino, Korean, South Asian, and Indigenous South
American immigrant rights groups marched together last Sunday in a 150+
strong march along Roosevelt Avenue to demand an end to random police raids,
arrests, ticketing against immigrants, and scam employment agencies. The
march, beginning at 69th Street and ending up at 83rd Street, ran up
Filipino immigrant businesses as well as South Asian and Latino
immigrant-owned businesses in a show of stunning multi-ethnic solidarity for
a common cause-- dignity for all immigrants. Amongst the key organizers and
sponsors of the march were the Jornaleros Unidos de Woodside (United Day
Laborers of Woodside), Philippine Forum, NAFCON (National Alliance for
Filipino Concerns), Filipinas for Rights and Empowerment (FiRE), New York
Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (NYCHRP), Anakbayan NY/NJ,
Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, Sisa Pikari Labor Center, No
Raids Committee in Queens, BAYAN USA and the May 1st Coalition for Workers
and Immigrant Rights.

The Queens rally and march come at a critical time as Capitol Hill turns its
attention to US immigration policy next month. Two weeks ago, President
Barack Obama announced that US immigration reform would be a subject on the
table of lawmakers this May. The following week, two major national labor
federations, AFL-CIO and Change to Win, announced their united endorsement
for comprehensive immgration reform.

For the grassroots immigrant rights groups marching last Sunday, however,
the developments call for more urgent pressure coming from the most
oppressed and victimized from the broken immigration system-- immigrants
themselves-- and the immigrants of Queens are especially ready to speak out.

Latino day laborers stand along Roosevelt Avenue generally looking for work
and have founded a protective community for themselves. Despite this,
growing anti-immigrant attacks by the NYPD, such as random ticketing for
standing on the sidewalk, culminated in an arrest and detention of 10 day
laborers for no apparent reason other than standing this past October 2008.

"Yesterday, we wanted to show the local community that it’s not just the day
laborers that are fighting but the rest of the community. We also wanted to
show the real problems that are going on in the community especially the
police harassment," stated Felix Ortiz, a day laborer with the Jornaleros
Unidos de Woodside and victim of the said harassment by the police.

"Together we are fighting for our human and constitutional rights," said
Attorney Felix Vinluan from National Alliance for Filipino Concerns
(NAFCON)."And we will not stop until we have equality amongst all people of
all races.

The Roosevelt Avenue march comes weeks before the upcoming May 1st rally and
march for immigrant rights in Union Square at 4pm. Every May 1st since 2006,
thousands of New Yorkers have rallied and marched for comprehensive
immigration reform, including a path to legalization for all, end to ICE
raids and deportations, and swift family re-unification for separated
families. This is also a beginning for groups to come together and plan for
neighborhood clean-ups and other community-based activities in the local
Woodside and Jackson Heights area.

References:
Christina Hilo, BAYANIHAN Filipino Community Center,
email: cshilo@gmail.com

Roberto Meneses, Jornaleros Unidos de Woodside,
email:jornalerosunidosdewoodside@hotmail.com

Stop the Navel Gazing

2009-04-16T05:08:00.005-04:00

In catching up with the feminist blogosphere, I found some powerful discussions around cisgender privilege, trans issues and lives, and voice.

If you'd like to read as to why Voz created this image to boycott Feministing and Feministe, I encourage you to follow this discussion and learn as I have.

As a self-identified feminist of color, I try to engage in all issues related to gender, power, and identity, but I think I allowed my fear of not understanding the lived experience of trans womyn and men, along with my fear of saying the wrong thing permeate my blog with barely audible support. It took me a while to even get my vocabulary straight as to what certain words meant and in what context to use them. Is that the best I can do?

I think not.

This recent outcry really rattled me. In both good and bad ways. Their powerful voices, their deep passionate debates about rights and awareness remind me of some voices in the womyn of color blogosphere who have long abandoned these mainstream blogs which, among many radical womyn of color, are notorious for unsafe dialogue and space.

This conversation is "intersectionality" (how much do I hate that word?) at it's finest. As Voz says, "Because exploitation of women with a trans history for blog hits and cis navel gazing has to stop somewhere."

Because exploitation of women with a trans history for blog hits
and cis navel gazing has to stop somewhere.
Why not with u?

Indeed. Why not with me?

More Voices From the Women, Action, & the Media (WAM) Conference

2009-04-14T22:03:00.002-04:00

A powerful and interesting perspective on the 2009 WAM conference in Boston.

h/t to BFP

From Joyce Angela Jellison

I have been stewing for two weeks - mad as hell at how I have been treated and then I am searching blogs and I find this - I feel empowered with this connection.

Basically, I was told by the WAM conference committee to get someone from the commercial publishing industry to present with me - huh? I mean what the fuck? If I had that type of connect would I be self-publishing? I actually do have some commercial connects, but not for the genre in which I write. These lovely connects declined to co-present as they did not want to undermine my message of self publishing as an empowerment tool - much respect for the consideration.

I did jump through a hoop like a dreadlocked poodle and get another sister - well known - Letta Neely to present with me -she is self-published, but the feminist elite at the Center for New Words love her - she is their magical negro and I mean that without offense to Letta - just to example how some quasi-progressives dont actually see you as equals but rather as their charges - like I dont need them to lift my ass from some plantation - I am already free so the good master treatment doesnt work for a womyn like me and it should not work for anyone.

Next thing I notice is they are ignoring me and referring to me as a moderator and Letta as the presenter - when I wrote the proposal and busted my ass trying to get a co-presenter. They invited me to lead a dicussion on women of color and the obstacles to the commercial publishing - but you know what, it is bullshit like what they tried to pull at WAM that is an obstacle. Racist love is a bitch and I have no time for it. It is basically the appearence of solidarity but it manages to silence you because you are manipulated into thinking certain parties see you as an equal when they are treating you like a special project.

Move the fuck out of my way and let me write - and if you dont publish me, fuck you. I can publish me and sell my books like pussy on a street corner. Feminism is about choice and what I pimp is purely my business…. So this feminist elite have inherited the movement from their grandmothers and mothers and like them - they exclude the brown, the black, and other groups that rival their definition of feminism.
Fuck silence and Fuck WAM - I wanted to go to the Black Women and Radical Tradition Conference at CUNY anyway

Letter #8

2009-04-14T08:46:00.004-04:00

Dear Veronica,

I have high hopes for this month and trying to contain my excitement and impatience is a lot more difficult than you'd think. You'll find that people are much more accepting of children being explosive than adults. The expectations for adults is that we should be even, controlled, and mature. That's not what your mom is these days.

Finally, a bit of good news on the ovulation tests. It looked good and I squealed and woke up your dad to share my overflowing joy. We snuggled as I clutched the stick, two lines growing deeper in truth as each minute went by. I smiled at my body and prayed for good health and possibility.

Your father and I are Catholic and we plan to raise you that way as well. In our faith cycle, this past week was the most powerful week all year. As someone said, "It's when the impossible becomes possible." Funny how all this occurred during Holy Week. It felt somewhat miraculous and difficult to believe.

Faith is a choice, but also a gift. It comes in many forms, different languages, symbolism, and tradition. If you ever decide to leave the Catholic Church, which many people decide as an adult, the only thing I would encourage you to do, Love, is to stay with whatever draws you deeper in mystery and challenge. Stay with what draws you closer to a mysticism and Love of others. I found it in faith. You may find it in something else, but always keep one hand on the rail of belief because, I do believe there is more after this life. There is so much more than you and I will possibly be able to understand. That unknown used to frighten me and I tried to believe for a period of time that there was nothing else but my body, this world, our earth.

But deep, deep inside, in the cavernous echo of my heart, I always believed there was something Else out there.

Years ago, when I worked in the University, I often laughed at bumper stickers on the backs of cars with which I was stuck in traffic. There was this one I never forgot. On the right side of the bumper it said, "Militant Agnostic." The other side read, "I don't know and neither do you."

Precisely!

No one knows for sure...which is why it's called faith.

It might be a toss of a coin and I might be wrong about everything I believe. But if I, your old farty Mom, lives a good life where I can help improve this planet, where I create something that brings joy to others, or work on behalf of those who are in need - and if my faith is the backbone of those actions - than even if I'm wrong, I'm still in a good place.

I take in what energizes me to live a decent life. Faith is the oxygen to that action.

When you come to us, you will have moments where you hate what we tell you, you'll be bored and angry when you want to do something else and make you learn what we have grown to love so passionately. But, I will tell you that I understand your frustration and I do.

You'll wonder why in the world I'm teaching you things that seemingly do not translate to your life and I will tell you to stay with it, to revisit the stories and keep thinking. You'll resent how I will tell you to ponder mystery and move forward with no easy or clear answers. I'm sure you'll even leave for a while or express disinterest for the things I find so critical to your faith development. Even with all of that, I am so excited to pass this gift to you.

It's messy and hairy and full of contradiction and ambiguity, but you'll find, dear Child, that the challenge and reward of faith is a reflection of the deepest way to live life, your life. You need not come with answers, only a willingness to love.

Love,
Mom

Emerging, A Feminist Faith

2009-04-13T20:21:00.005-04:00

What does it mean to be a feminist of faith?

Specifically, what does it mean to be a Catholic feminist? Is this a living contradiction? Can the two blend together in a search for truth, meaning, or even justice?

How can two radically different ideologies and practice possibly come together?

I always wanted to write about my faith and, funny, it seems the more confident I grow in writing about my faith, the more capable I am of asking questions in my writing. There are no ways to move through faith without poignant questions of practicality, relationship, and the living out of our faith.

It sometimes feels like those of us who do have some sort of active spirituality that is exercised through organized religion are often segregated, left in our own strange world of ritual, tradition, and silence.

I wanted to write about faith because I find so little feminist writers who write out of a plain existence. So many articles and books about Catholicism are written from the religious, or the scholars, the ones who have dedicated their entire lives to understanding. I've come to find I've dedicated my entire life to questioning and, therefore, often took myself out of the running to write about faith. Too scared about what people would think, too scared to find what I might possibly overturn in my own soil, but mostly, I didn't write because I didn't feel I had authority to write about faith, feminist faith, my faith.

How ironic, isn't it? As a person of faith, as a person dedicated to the preferential option for the poor, social justice, and relevant theology, I never really saw myself as someone who had anything to say about faith. It was my backbone, but never my specialty to write. It was my crux, but I was convinced I would only be adding to the noise. There were plenty of people with enough opinion out in the world, and I never felt really justified in adding mine to the increasingly loud voices.

Besides, I thought to myself, the world needs people with answers and maps to help them feel better. All I have is hope and helluva lot of questions. And, I curse too much.

Once I was through categorizing my short-comings as to why I would never write about faith and feminism, I began drafting a book proposal about radical marriage. In my drafts, I began reflecting on my life, the things that most resonated with me that shaped my views on marriage. There was really no way to write authentically without centering the one thing that remained constant - my questioning and growing faith. There would be no book about radical marriage, or any topic, really, if I denied a part of myself that influenced every choice I ever made in my life. My writing, giving myself, would be something authentic. Challenging and provocative. To be a writer of substance, I had to trudge up the things that I most feared and was reluctant to address. To address my experience and understanding of marriage, I had to talk about God.

To write less, would mean to be less.

When I talk about God, some of my dearest friends still think I judge them, their lives, and their belief system, or atheism. Truthfully, I tell them, the presence of a living spirit has little to do with what you talk about, but more on how you live. The way you live is more important than whether or not you say you believe in a God or not. They don't believe me. To this day, many of my friends still fret that I judge them for not having an active and practicing faith.

My last answer is this: If it bothers you this much, then it's not about me or our friendship. You need to come to a place within your own life where you are comfortable and confident with what you do and do not believe. No amount of my coaxing, comforting, or shrugging will satisfy a heart laden with guilt, anger, or dismissal.

And so, the hesitancy to write about faith grew. And then, several years ago, someone gave me a quote that went something like this: You do no one a favor by shrinking yourself. It does nothing to become one with darkness out of solidarity. Be yourself. Be light.

By pretending faith was not important to me, I spent years in the dark trying to blend in the background. The veil has been pulled and these are my colors. I am a womyn, a feminist of faith. And for all the questions, contradictions, and controversy that brings - well, it's better to face those things head on, with no pretense, than to submit to a writing life with no authentic tongue.

A Catholic Feminist's Meditation on Holy Week

2009-04-10T06:39:00.006-04:00

When you say that you're Catholic, it's almost as loaded as when you say you're a feminist. Almost.

When you say that you're a Catholic feminist, well, that's when the furrowed brows come out to play.

I've been both Catholic and feminist all my life, I've just only known about the Catholic identity a lot longer than the feminist. But, both have always been there, the development of one consciousness with separate feeding tubes.

I've hesitated to blog much about faith. In rare surges of courage, I'll post a thought or two about my spirituality, but the fear of scholars and other forms of judgment have paralyzed my writing on spirituality. Often, I convince myself that writing with emotion and with truth is spiritual, and it is, but writing ON the topics of feminism, faith, and spirituality is entirely different.

The questions come swiftly every time I want to write about being a Catholic feminist. Maybe I don't know enough. Maybe it'll leave a bitter taste in non-Catholic, non-believers blogmouth. Maybe I'll find something in my exploration that will make ME question my faith even more.

Being a womyn of faith is a funny thing. Often times, my experience of being a Catholic feminist runs into conflict. Many equate being a person of faith with being a person of certainty.

Oh, the irony!

Faith, for me, is about attempting to shut down every sensory tool in my body and listening only to what moves wordlessly within me. Faith, for me, is not about being right, but about relationship. Moving with a Creator, not following rules, is a hard concept to grasp. Speaking through prayer, not just reciting prayer takes a certain level of clarity and trust. Sometimes those grains are as small as seedlings, but I trust that the presence of those seedlings, no matter how tiny, are important. Critical even.

For much of my life, my friends have turned to me to inquire about my faith, its twists and turns and volatility. At times, I think a lot of people assume it's an ongoing, painful road where I am barefoot, bleeding, and sorrowing the passion of Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

Two of the two heaviest words in a feminist's vocabulary.

Faith, if you center it in relationship, will never be stable. I will never be stable. How many relationships of love are barefoot, bleeding, and sorrowing? They have moments that mirror that description. There are those dark, dark hours of tragedy, death, illness, and loss that cannot be humanly reasoned or understood.

And there is living room dancing as well.

There are moments in that relationship where I dance by myself. Salsa, ballet, my own version of hip hop...MY moves that express joy, release, and euphoria. There are moments like that, too.

The swing between the two is faith, a constant searching for a Deeper, a More.

Relationship, the kind that I am looking for, is not meant to be justified to those who don't believe. That relationship is what I need, period. G*d is both noun and verb, an infinite and endless collaboration with a mysterious Being.

I feared writing about this. I feared that there would be no place for it in my writing.

Over the years of desiring to write about Catholic feminist spirituality, I felt small tugs on my shirt. Like a small toddler looking up at me and trying to get my attention. I would feel small tugs on my shirt that whispered, "if it's a part of your life, it will be a part of your writing."

But fear is paralyzing and it makes your life spotty with a haven for shadows.

I lived with the whispers for the majority of my life. The function of writing, the function of truth-telling eventually leads you to a path of fullness and strength. Writing, to work its peaceful and powerful effects, needs more light than shadows. It needs courage to talk about the shadows and dark corners.

Faith has always been a part of my life and the denial of that faith is a denial of my feminism. It is a hypocritical fallacy to declare my own feminism with no hint of my faith. I don't think anyone would have a problem with my declaration of spirituality. What most people have found conflict is, specifically, when I say I have a Catholic faith.

Immediately, thoughts jump to one topic: abortion. Women's rights. Reproductive health.

And while I think those conversations can frame enriching and enlightening learning, it also detracts from the millions of womyn and men who are within the Catholic faith who are striving, yearning, torturing themselves to express the conflict of being a person of faith and a person of the world. That conflict needs relationship and the need for expression encapsulates more than just the pro-life argument or the Church's stance on gay marriage and sexuality.

What I am saying is that I want to write about my faith without fear. And I hope/think that I have come to a point in my life where I can have faith IN feminism and my feminism in my faith. For me, the two have never been disjointed.

The Tridium of Holy Week are the three most significant days of the Catholic faith and begins today. I plan to blog about my feminst spiritual perspectives on it this week.

I hope you can join me in a spirit of reflection and meditation.

The Lure of Online Feminism: Relationship Building and the Internet

2009-04-05T17:58:00.007-04:00

I've received numerous emails and messages about my last post in which I shared the process of starting a new job and deciding to intentionally decrease my involvement in the feminist blogosphere. In my personal reflection, I offered a few insights about the process in which I realized that I was not fully engaging in human relationships because I was thinking about the online forms of feminism.

Three years ago, I was fully offline and not finding what I needed: community. I started blogging because of that void. The ache to be in deep, challenging, analytic conversation throbbed deeply in my bones. As a writer with no community of women of color or like-minded radical feminists, I found a wonderful resource in the online world. The mobility and accessibility, to me, was exactly what I had been needing. Through the feminist blogosphere, I found a connecting thread with others and in this space, my voice became stronger.

The function of the internet is complex and multipurpose. For those unable to be or engage in offline communities, for any reason, the internet can be a life-saving ticket of relationship, learning, and creativity. The function of the internet will be varied and in different degrees of significance. I would never say that what I did three years ago, or have e-built since then, doesn't count or is less meaningful. Quite the contrary. The online work and relationships I made were some of the most meaningful and enriching experiences of my life.

What needs to be clarified is my point: I am not saying that all online interactions is less significant or valuable as offline. My finding the RWOC and feminist blogosphere is a testament to that. Those connections got me through transition, job hardship, moving, confronting inner demons, and gave me back my sanity on countless occasions.

That counts. That counts beyond numbers, words, or reason.

I recognized a conflict last week when I realized I was paying more attention to blog topics and subheadings than the womyn a foot away from me asking me to get her walker so she can exercise her leg muscles for ten minutes. Wondering what any blogger is writing about is nowhere near as important in the moment I am trying to assist a womyn take medication after a seizure. In that moment, the work I am doing is not more important than any person blogging about their insights. I'm saying that the work I am doing is more urgent, more necessary than letting my thoughts float into the blogosphere when I am nowhere near a computer.

The crossroads lie like this: be present to the client or think about what Nadia is going to post about the AMC. Talk to a staff member about her internship and getting her associate's degree that she's worked on for several years or give my mental energy to wondering how BFP and Jess' walks are going. That's not a judgment call on the significance of that work, but it's a judgment call on the function of the internet for me in that moment. It is not a message to the disabled community nor is it an attempt to throw a blanket on all bloggers and readers of feminism to get offline and do "real work." That's a judgment call on where my own head is and what where my priorities lie in that moment when I have a decision to make.

To be human is to need relationship. To be in relationship, we must be present. However relationships come to us - offline or online - we need to be fully engaged to their the offerings and misgivings. One of the misgivings of the internet, for me, is that it lures me with its instant gratification and constant change. I began to grow comfortable in the mode and preferred that work over the offline womyn in my very hands. Examining an unexplained bruise on a womyn's breast is more important than reading my blog roll. Because of that fork in the road, because of that choice that is at my feet, I must make a judgment call on what is more important, what deserves my undivided attention.

That offline work that I am currently doing is not more important than the relationship building I did/do with the online RWOC. It all counts. It's all valuable. But when you start to sacrifice relationship for online activity - activity that is not consciousness raising, relationship building, or serving a greater purpose of need - then, yes, I believe it's time to get off the computer.

Saying that I need to be fully present to an individual human is not a message to the disabled community that their methods of communication are less valuable or "don't count," nor do I tell the person I was three years ago that her online outreach work weighs less than what I do now. It's when I begin choosing nameless and safe avenues of communication that serve more as a distraction AND deny the opportunity to be in full relationship with a human person breathing in front to me...THAT's when a problem occurs.

The Lure of Online Feminism

2009-03-29T19:03:00.007-04:00

I wanted to try an experiment this week, the week that I started a new job.

I wanted to try and disengage from the online world of feminism and refocus that energy into the human interactive relationships I would soon be facing in my new work. After being an active blogger for about three years, it was difficult to do at first. I resisted the urge to obsessively check my blog's email, comment moderation, and my favorite feminist bloggers as I normally do throughout the day. The rules were strick: 2-3 internet slots a day, no more than 20 minutes each. When you consider correspondance, reading, news, Facebook, listserves, and random recipe searches on Google, 1 hr/day is not a whole lot if you're an active blogger.

Slowly, though, things got easier as the pace of my job increased.

I work with the MRDD (Mentally Retarded and Developmentally Disabled) population and supervise a staff that works with homes to teach, encourage, and support folks who are trying to live more independent lives. Needless to say, it's hard work. It's draining work.

Today, as I watched a table of four clients eat their lunches, I thought about how little I have been online and how removed I felt from "Feminism," capital F. The news might be breaking something huge and I'm not reading it, or whatever the latest and greatest (or worst, depending on how you see it) IT thing is being talked/written about, I'm not around to read or react to it.

I believe in feminism. I believe in the flaws and all the rights of it. I believe its purpose is multifaceted, but one of the primary faucets of its existence is to be used as a lens for liberation work, a method to view oppressive relationship and overpowering structures that abuse and ignore womyn's voices.

If I believe that, then how is it that I started to measure how current I felt with "Feminism" because I haven't blogged in a week? While I am standing in a house filled with women of every size, mobility, and age who are trying to lead independent lives, make their own decisions, and improve their own quality of life -- WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT ONLINE FEMINISM?

The truth is that we're all prone to comforting ourselves and patterning our behaviors to what feels good, complementary, and familiar. The feminist blogosphere, for all of its energies and wondrous capacities, has not yet fused or connected to the "real" world.

The "real" world is a relative phrase, but for me, this week, it was observing and training womyn on how to measure laundry detergent, how to tuck the sheets into their beds, and counting pills for medication.

The "real" feminist in me saw the staff I work with, all women, who are juggling two sometimes three jobs and internships to put themselves through school and make ends meet for their families.

I am drowning in "real" feminist work and have open opportunities to forge relationships with new womyn in my life who only know me as their supervisor.

And yet, I stood in the kitchen wondering what I might have missed in the online world.

ONLINE FEMINISM IS BASED ON ACTUAL LIVED EXPERIENCES

Why look for the second version when the original is staring you in the face?

So, how had I learned that writers and opinionated activists who have their own corners of the internet to speak were more relevant than what this other womyn with oatmeal all over her smiling face had to tell me about her mother?

A lesson for today for all bloggers and readers of feminism:

the moment you begin preferring screens and books to human contact/relationship building and stories, however slight that preference, remind yourself that it's time for a break.