Stuffed squash and
Sausage stew and
Spiced muffins and
Sweet potato popovers and
Creamy corn chowder and
Risotto from scratch and
Stock from scraps
  because I am able
  and they are there

Chop, stir, spoon, cook,
dash of this because it smells right,
measure of that to rise it well

Each meal might last as long as leftovers, built into the menu
  or
  a frozen portion put up for who knows when
(more likely gone tonight)

and

this is how
I feed
my family
  self
    soul

***

I’ve been cooking more, lately. We’re back to weekly meal plans (and their requisite weekly shopping trips), a chore that creates more work, yet (done well) makes our lives easier. There is mindfulness to be found in the movement of food from pot to plate, to be sure, but sometimes it’s more a struggle to eke out the time, trade off the babe, fend off the child (or, harder, invite him in to help). Yet when it is done: I have done it. We, more likely, but for all the effort is communal, my pride is personal. I was taught some skills in each discrete kitchen task, but never shown, in instruction or by model, the how of putting it all together in putting a meal on the table. This is learned. This is mine.

There are so few areas of my life I feel unreservedly, realistically competent. Not confident — a wager on oneself, a boast of one’s abilities — but competent: to know a job has been done well, and I have done it, not by fluke or luck or Herculean effort, but by showing up and simply doing. A repeatable act.

I have skills as a parent. Contrary to the trolls taken to haunting my comment box, I am not a bad parent. I have skills, and creativity, and a vast, emphatic love for my children. I have a metaphorical toolbox full of skills and tricks and guiding ideas — but its latch sticks. Its hinge is squeaky sometimes, and I’m not sure there’s enough oil in the world to make it open smoothly when I most need it. I do not feel competent as a parent, not past infancy. I cannot stir lovingly and spice well and bake children with brilliantly balanced flavors, nor whip up a smooth and full and just-right-sweet relationship with them. I know how to hold and I know how to hold firm, and I even have an idea of when each is needed, but the synthesis (the putting into practice when three burners are full and the oven needs emptying), the ownership and overarching knowledge of this parenting gig, is lacking. My snuggle soufflés, like my similes, fall flat.

But in the kitchen: this I can do. There’s no cookbook I follow (though I always have Joy at hand, a metaphor too obvious to pursue), no single philosophy beyond “food as much like food as seems appropriate” (because sometimes there’s only time for canned beans, or a craving only boxed mac’n'cheese will fill). I use what I have, clean out the fridge when things get funky, mix beloved dishes with new recipes with spontaneous inspirations, and feed us, and feed us, and feed us — knowing none of it will last, knowing failures and fiascoes are blessedly fleeting, knowing with each meal I am building something worthy, knowing tomorrow’s drivethru cannot uneat today’s homemade fare.

This is competence, and I did not know its lack until I first tasted its elixir. I find myself craving more.

“I am cleaning, when I am DONE cleaning, we can have a dessert.”

“But I want it NOWWWWWAAAAHHHHH!”

“The baby is sleeping: for the last time, be quiet!“

I close my eyes, close out the bickering, bring the infant in my lap just a bit closer. Behind my lids, I picture a single flame, sparking and sputtering before settling to a steady, bright burn. No time to sit in the dark, no hands free to light a candle, no chance in this darkest night to commemorate the birth of light. My lips quirk; think, is there a more perfect metaphor for the first months of parenting?

The baby in my lap startles as my first baby slams a door, and I snap my eyes wide, imaginary light displaced by the artificial, neither one the quiet fire I’d hoped for. I bring my newest child back to the breast she is blindly rooting for, whisper “Happy Solstice” in her incomprehending ear, and wait for the sun to return.

I seek out the blond curls of my firstborn, his bright red “girly” blouse now covered by his bright red “boyish” coat. My tired-tight shoulders tense further in anticipation of too-long-passed events about which I now can do nothing, and make a noise for the teacher to continue his story.

“It was really upsetting him; he told them to stop, but they didn’t. I told one of them ‘some boys have long hair’, and he thought for a second” — here his voice fills with humor — “and he said, ‘well some boys do, but not with such a pretty face.’”

We both laugh, the conversation continues past my — yes, pretty — child’s eccentric relationship with gender performance and the discomfort it regularly provokes in his peers, and we continue home.

***

“I heard some kids were calling you ‘she’ at the party yesterday,” I ask, so-carefully-light in tone, as I set his oatmeal in front of him.

“Yeah.”

Sullen or distracted? How do you tell in a four (and a half, he would insist on adding) year old? I persist, lightly, lightly.

“Your teacher said you didn’t like it.”

Not distracted now, but agitated: “Yeah, I told them to stop calling me that, but they wouldn’t. They should have asked before calling me she!”

What is this? Echoes of our conversations on namecalling (“always ask someone if you can call them a name first, and only do it if they say it’s ok”), or something new?

“You wanted them to ask before calling you she?”

“Yeah, but they didn’t. They should have asked.” Really worked up now, oatmeal forgotten.

“But your teacher got them to stop, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did.” Calming again. Picks up his spoon, takes a bite. So do I. Then:

“Would you have minded if they called you she if they asked first?”

“They could have called me she if they asked first, but they didn’t ask.”

“Oh.”

We munch oatmeal while part of my mind wonders if talking with all four year olds feels so much like a scratchy record, skipping to repeat imperfectly but ceaselessly. Probably, another part responds.

The rest tries to count how many times I’ve asked this, to guess how many times I’ll ask again and whether the answer will ever change.

“Do you want me to call you she or he?”

A pause.

“He. They could have called me she if they asked. But I want you to call me he.”

“Ok.” I stand, pick up my empty bowl, bend over to kiss his still-chewing head. “Well, it’s good to know.”

It is.

I am watching as Occupy Wall Street the camp is being destroyed by the NYPD, barely two days after participating in the protest against a smaller, but similar, dismantling of Occupy Portland. I am filled with rage and impotence and grief and fear — but also hope.

I hope that you know this night only as the inflaming of a movement, not its destruction. I hope that by the time you are grown, you do not understand Occupy Wall Street any more than I understand the women’s movement of the 1970s, because the changes we are agitating for have long been your reality. As with that wave of feminism, I do not kid myself that Occupy is perfect or that all our problems will be fixed, but if I pray, I pray that you will have moved on to a new movement to improve some other area of our public life. (I pray that we do not ruin your grandparents’ work and allow those progresses to be lost as well.) I hope that by the time you pay taxes, we will have returned to a healthy, progressive tax code, and that you will not be shouldering a larger proportional burden than the people employing you and your friends. I hope that if you ever need it, the government will provide for your safety net, as well as your libraries and health care and advanced education, and you won’t have to turn to an illegal encampment for it. I hope some part of you disbelieves us when we speak of peaceful protest being illegal, because that will be such an unfamiliar idea to you.

But if not: I am sorry. I am sorry we did not do enough, did not care enough, did not defeat our cynicism enough to provide you a better, more just life. I am sorry our apathy overcame our determination, sorry our fear won over our rage. I am sorry we continued to elect people who worked against us, who worked for the few obscenely rich people who helped them convince us to reelect them. I’m sorry we believed the stories told to us by a media willing to be bullied into silence. I’m sorry we failed you.

That, my children, is my deepest fear on this dark night.

I love you. I love you so much that if my fears are realized and we do fail you, it won’t be for lack of my trying.

Forever,
Your mom

“Well, I have to go, little one. I have an appointment.”

“Why do you have to go to the appointment?”

“…Honestly, kid, to try not to yell at you so much.”

“Oh. I need an appointment like that, too.”

***

Two weeks later:

“Why aren’t you coming with us?”

“Because I have an appointment.”

“What kind of appointment is it?”

“It’s a therapy appointment. Remember, to help me yell at you less.”

“Oh. Mama, I think you should have one of these appointments every day!”

But.

I have misgivings about some of the rhetoric around these misogynist proposals. Not just the dishonest and bigoted shite coming from the side of their advocates, but from “my” side, as well, as we try to argue our way to avoiding becoming nothing more than government owned gestators.

Because Vulva Baby is a person. And she was the day she was born. And: she was the day before that, too.

I have said again and again that children are people, and babies are people, and assholes have mocked the hell out of me for that. Yes, these amendments absolutely must be roundly and thoroughly crushed, because they are functionally evil. But the argument of non-women-haters shouldn’t be “fetuses aren’t people”, because… who says? I know Vulva Baby was as much a person on Aug 31 as she was Sept 1. I know it, and no amount of anti-personhood rhetoric, no matter how much I want it to succeed at its cause, will convince me otherwise. But on Aug 31, though a person, she was a person inside me, dependent on me, fully intertwined with me. That’s the difference that makes all the difference, not any personhood or lack thereof. And no, she wasn’t a “person” on January or February 1, but, if I’d miscarried then, as I was afraid I was doing, I would have mourned. Mostly the lost potential, but also, partly, the tiny spark that was, then, her. That became, sometime in the next several months, this tiny person who now rests beside me.

We have no concept of interdependence, culturally, and a loathing of liminal states. We distrust if not abhor spectrums, and strive for absolutes: either a zygote is absolutely a person, or a 40 week fetus absolutely isn’t, because if it’s aught else, then we’d have to grapple with complexities and grey states and elucidating less sound-bite-friendly reasons to support our side. But when we shy from that, we lose so much. We lose truth, we lose common ground, and we lose the beauty of the growing person-within-a-person of a chosen pregnancy.

Fetuses should have no legal rights, because they reside wholly within the domain of the bearer of the uterus which houses them. But part of that domain should be the right to declare “this is a person”. No one else should get to do that — or deny us that.

He wears a baby now. Babies are cool.

This picture brings many thoughts to mind, none of which I have time to explore fully (because she’s back on my chest now):

• I know not everyone has jobs that can be done from home, but so many do who aren’t being allowed to (even The Man is only able to once a week). This is a part of the strict separation of “work” and “life” in most current societies — a ridiculous division which fails both at honoring and valuing home-work and at acknowledging that most of us want to work¹ and want to have it be part of our lives.
• Similarly, though many people don’t have work that is baby-friendly, many of us do who aren’t being allowed to. Even The Man’s work-from-home guidelines include a ban on performing any form of child care during paid work hours. It is true that having sole care of an infant while working would be exceedingly difficult for most², but again, the expectation that any parent have sole care is a result of the work-life separation mentioned above. There could be so many creative approaches that make far more sense, if we were willing to consider them.
• This is life in a “social media” world: communicating in multiple channels at once, often with the same people. Pundits who deride the “current generation” (usually teens or young 20s) for their “technology addiction” are utterly missing the point that communication technology³, is changing how we work and live. But the fundament remains the same: humans communicating and connecting, as we always have and will. Only the particulars differ.
• I have a damn adorable baby.⁴

Your thoughts?

Trigger warning for descriptions of medical abuse and flashbacks.

Uninvited

I’m lying in the bottom bunk next to my 3 year old son who’s sick with a painful ear infection. The top bunk feels like it’s falling down on me and I silently chant, “Go to sleep. Go to sleep” so that I can get up before the inevitable comes.

But, he’s taking a long time. He’s in so much pain and needs my comfort. By the time he drifts off, I’m covered in sweat and shaking from trying to hold this back.

He snores and I no longer have the strength to stop it. I’m gone.

Bright light shines in my eyes. I can hear the breathing as it quickens in anticipation. The glasses are slightly greasy as they magnify the light. Fingers pry my jaws apart. The pulling and pushing begins. The needle jabs between my teeth. Our breathing comes in gasps for the ohsotiny cuts with the metal tool. Finally, the tongue depressor pushing back to make me gag. I notice my heels are kicking the vinyl footrest of the chair from the pain.

Then it’s gone. I feel release.

I’m back with my son and he’s still snoring as I let the tears flow silently. My love for him is so intense as I watch his sleeping face that I doubt whether I should be caring for him.

My children deserve a complete mother that isn’t plagued by flashbacks of abuse. The depression is bad enough some days that I feel unable to care for them. There are days when my anger at myself is turned on them and I yell. I yell simply to hurt them and drive them away from my inner pain.

Yet, I continue. I continue to parent, even while flawed. I continue to parent my children with love and apologies. Those apologies for tripping myself up to avoid triggers for my flashbacks.

I continue because I believe that, while I am flawed, no one can love them like I do. I believe that positive parenting and gentle discipline will break the cycle for all of us.

I know that witnessing suffering triggers the flashbacks. So, I overreact when one of them hits the other or when one of them is sick, such as the ear ache above. I want to remove the pain from my children. I want to run. I want to fight the flashbacks. I want to beat the memories down with a sledgehammer.

But, I know that being able to stay with these children and holding them through their pain the way I truly want to be will come not from resisting but from getting to know the fears well.

I stay because I want to, but I can’t do it alone. I’ve got support I need while I do the work. Because it is work to heal. It is work to not curl up in a ball and stay there. I have actively cultivated a network of support. I have been brutally honest that would be times I would beg or demand to be left alone, but I should not be abandoned by them. They know that I will return to a state in which I can reaffirm that I want to stay the course. I have two trusted sitters, a few close friends, a coparenting partner, a therapist, an online community, and several holistic health care providers. They provide a net of support every time I fall.

It’s up to me to trust that it’s okay to fall. There’s no shame in this process. I can get back up on my own.

I have openly talked with my children about times I am sad, angry or simply unavailable. We speak about how love stays no matter where the person is. They’ve volunteered that love is like a “gas” or like “peanut butter.” Both of which I think are pretty apt analogies. They know that they have a large group of people who love them. I’m not their sole pillar of support.

I take scheduled nights out by myself, even when I don’t want to. It allows me to miss them. I’m able to be more patient when I return. I’m better able to calm myself and just allow the flashbacks to happen without reacting to them as strongly. I still have the physiological reactions and feel shaken after, but I can root in reality more quickly.

It’s hard. Harder than anything I’ve ever done. I question whether I would have had children if I had known I would be bringing them through this path with me. But, then again I question whether I would be alive to even walk this path. The love they have shown me has given me the ability to surrender without any assurance that I will get better or that it will become easier. It is the first time I can surrender without submitting to another’s power. I retain my own power because of their love.

I will walk, fall, and walk again every day. I will never be the mother I want to be. I will never be the person I want to be. I am okay with that. I’m okay with trying, never succeeding and trying again. Without guarantees or safety.

This daily practice is what it means to be a gentle parent struggling with mental illness. It’s not wrapped in a shiny bow of hope. It is ugly. It is real and true. I often wish it were not. But it is mine.

See, I could totally go pro with the pumpkins. Yes, that is a rotary cutter. Mmm, power tools.

So, while I wait for The Man to come home three two hours early in an attempt to give me half an hour of writing time¹, I ask you: how do you eke time out of Life to, y’know, write? Or how do you stay out of the crazy-dark-despair when you can’t? How do you work on one piece a piece at a time over several days, a skill I’ve never quite managed? How do you make your sleep-deprived, slug-like brain function during the fifteen minutes an evening you carve out? How do you convince yourself that the little you can do is good enough for now?

How the hell do I do this?

And:

Happy Halloween

I made the mistake early in my pregnancy of asking the Boychick if he wanted a brother or a sister, meaning did he want one-of-the-above. But he heard me, paused for a moment, and announced “A sister!” I laughed, and tried again after explaining that we didn’t get to choose, but he was undeterred. From then on, he was adamant that a sister he would have.

And then came the baby, vulva first. (The line that ran through my head at the birth, which we weren’t expecting to be breech, was “I don’t think scalps have mucus membranes.”) We explained again, as we had throughout the pregnancy, that we were making a guess about her gender, based on her genitals, and we wouldn’t know if she was a girl until she told us, just like we didn’t know he was a boy until he told us¹. He was fine with this (it helps, I think, that he has an openly trans man in his life, so he’s familiar with vulva-but-not-a-girl) — as long as we were clear that she was his sister. “Sibling” just would not do.

So sister she is. And she she is, for the moment, as long as English insists on gendered pronouns. Oh, I could refer to her online as ze or s/he, but the truth is, we don’t do that in person, and it seems overly pretentious to do it online alone.

On pronouns and provisional assignments

Which, of course, begs the question: why is she she? Why do we, The Man and I, advocates of gender diverse parenting that we are, assign gender at all, no matter how provisionally? I’ve been asked this before, even been attacked because of it, and had my “commitment” to the “cause” be questioned.

Not, please note, by anyone with children of their own.

Because here’s the thing: this parenting gig? It’s fucking hard. It’s hard intrinsically, one of the most physically, emotionally, and mentally challenging activities one can engage in in life, and certainly the one with the longest haul and hardest hurdles to “quitting”. And my society, my dear, pressures-all-(privileged)-women-to-be-mothers-but-forget-about-actually-supporting-them society, makes it so, so much harder.

All parents are attacked for their choices by somebody²; any parent making a choice outside of the “mainstream” gets attacked even more viciously, by even more people; and the more marginalized a parent is, the more the attacks come not “just” in words³ but in tangible, terrifying ways.

Nearly every time I write about gender diverse/gender “neutral” parenting, I have a queer parent or a trans parent or a parent on public assistance or a parent dependent on the goodwill of their disapproving family tell me that they would be so much more radical/subversive/gender-diverse in their choices if they weren’t afraid they would lose custody of their children.

They have reason to be afraid.

I’m reasonably protected from the most catastrophic of the consequences, apparently living in a socially-condoned heterocentric, white, middle-class relationship — but even I still have so much shit to deal with, with my finite mental/emotional resources, that there’s only so much I can do. There are only so many choices I can make that take me out of the mainstream and into even-deeper public scrutiny, and still, y’know, survive.⁴ So I make the ones I do, the ones I can, the ones I am willing to defend in the face of the worst of the judgment.

(Just for not enforcing gender roles with my children, I am called a cunt and a dyke and a fucking crazy bitch and told I should have my children removed. There are all too real consequences for stepping out of kyriarchy’s line, before it even comes to the level of custody issues. It is not only unreasonable but actively harmful, a means of perpetuating kyriarchy and oppression, to demand that parents, already attacked on all sides, do all the work raising children radical. Society has to help make it reasonably safe for us to do so, as well.)

Vulva Baby or the Girlchick?

Girlchick seems the obvious blog moniker for this new child of mine, doesn’t it? We have a child with a penis, the eponymous Boychick, who was given that name years before his gender was self-declared, and now we have a child with a vulva. And I tried it on, used it in a post, tweeted it a handful of times — but it never sat right with me.

I look at this child, and I don’t see “girl”. I see a baby, as her brother was once a baby; nothing screamed “boy” about him, the occasional acquaintance’s comments to the contrary, and nothing announces “girl” about her. She is very much not her brother: she spits up less, and farts more; she is happier to be in a carrier when awake, but more often prefers facing to the side instead of towards me; her elimination signals are clearer, and she wakes more frequently at night; her hair is redder, her eyes less goopy, her scalp more bumpy, her digits shorter. And she has a vulva. What about this makes her a “girl”, if we are to avoid essentializing gender to genitalia?

When strangers ask me “Boy or girl?”⁵, I’m apt to answer “she’s a she”, because saying “girl” just doesn’t feel right, or honest, or accurate; this answers the question they really need to know⁶, which is what language to use to talk about this adorable being. But it seems nearly obscene to that heavily put a gender on an infant this young; can’t she just be a baby for a little while, before we start telling her what role to play?

Resolving the conflict

That may seem like a contradiction, this use of “she”, this (mostly) avoidance of “girl”. But one is about survival in a society antagonistic to non-gendering; the other is saying “this far and no farther”. I cannot stop all damage from being done to this perfect child of mine, but I will do what I can to minimize it. I won’t pretend that she’ll be unaffected by others’ perceptions of her, but I will help her be aware of them; I won’t tell her what her gender is, but I will tell her what her society thinks her gender should be; I won’t subject her to every strangers’ disapproval of alternative pronouns, but I will tell her she can choose another if she likes; I will tell her she has a vulva, but I won’t tell her she has to stay that way. And I will tell her I will always, always, always love her, whoever she turns out to be.