Allow me to introduce the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer’s first musical guest post. This piece comes from Camille Bright-Smith of BlogInSong.

She says about this work:

This song is about the honest ordeals that parenthood creates which include questioning reality, crisis of paranoia, utter bliss, and everything in between.  As Feminists or Humanists or People I think we owe it to each other to stop candy coating love, parenting, marriage, home ownership, etc…  Let’s create art that is truthful, even for the mainstream, and see if we can make a small impact.

I’ve included it in the Primer because telling our stories as women, our truthful stories, is a deeply feminist act. By discussing the paradoxes of mothering especially — how simultaneously it is good and bad and transcendent and mundane and terrifying and joyful — we oppose the kyriarchy’s attempts to shove us into the inhuman and inhumane boxes of “perfect mother” or “bad mother“. Speaking honestly of the ambivalence of motherhood serves to reject the patriarchal notion that mothering is “natural” or “easy”, while also telling of the profound love we find, not in the “things” of the kyriarchy, but in the humanity of relationships.

We must find our voices to tell our stories. Some find theirs in song.

How Love Can Be

I can count
On the tiny hands and feet I’ve carried
The sheer amount
Of fear and dread and energy
That I’ve put out
Please don’t mistake this
As complaining
But it’s astounding
How brutal love can be

Here my babies humble me
Here they test what love can mean
Here my head is filled with blood
And fear, and fear, and yet I shrug
And grin, my dear, my dearest love
What fun we had today

Breathe in, breathe out
Disaster threatens every angle
Twist and shout
Yes the naked dancing
Endlessly

Here my babies humble me
Here they test what love can mean
Here my head is filled with blood
And fear, and fear, and yet I shrug
And grin, my dear, my dearest love
What fun we had today

Breathe in scream out
Where sunset brilliance leaves us begging
For more of this
unsettling
This deepest truest reckoning
This lovely bubble laughing trouble
How lovely love can be

Camille Bright-Smith is a full time songwriter who founded BloginSong to push the limits of songwriting, activism and blogging commentary.  After studying Opera and Composition in College she set out for rock stardom in Los Angeles and enjoyed a dozen years of chasing the dream up and down California.  She now performs with an 80’s cover band called Mullet Over, gardens a lot, continues with a full schedule of very liberal activism, and of course writes lots of songs.  She has twin toddlers who consider her an angel from fairy land or the most mean of the blue meanies, depending on the day and the amount of sugar they have taken in.