Annie wishes to include this disclaimer: This post gives the perspective of a male-partnered cis woman who carried [...]]]> Welcome to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer, PhD in Parenting-style. Annie brings to the WFPP her usual informative flair on the subject of leaving her children in the care of her partner while she leaves the house to work.

Annie wishes to include this disclaimer: This post gives the perspective of a male-partnered cis woman who carried and birthed her two children (“mama bear”). The biological facts and societal assumptions discussed in this article may not apply in adoptive or surrogate situations or in non-heterosexual relationships.

Can Mama Bear Let Go?

A baby develops a connection to its mother as it grows in the womb. That connection is reinforced as the mother holds the baby to her breast for the first time and then over and over again. Biology and society place the mom as the primary caregiver for new life. In her book, The Female Brain, Louann Brizendine, M.D. describes what happens after a woman gives birth to a baby:

For the human mother, the lovely smells of her newborn’s head, skin, poop, spit up breast milk, and other bodily fluids that have washed over her during the first few days will become chemically imprinted on her brain – and she will be able to pick ut her own baby’s smell above all others with about 90 percent accuracy. This goes for her baby’s cry and body movements, too. The touch of her baby’s skin, the look of its little fingers and toes, its short cries and grasps – all are now tattooed on her brain. Within hours to days, overwhelming protectiveness may seize her. Maternal aggression sets in. Her strength and resolve to care for and protect this little being completely grab the brain circuits. She feels she could stop a moving truck with her own body to protect her baby. Her brain has changed, and along with it her reality.

Brizendine goes on to explain that for a woman who does birth a baby, this is perhaps the biggest change she will experience in her life. But increasingly, people are realizing that despite this strong biological connection and despite society’s assumptions about a mother’s role, the birth mother does not have to take on the lion’s share of the nurturing and caregiving. Whether the parents choose equally shared parenting, whether the birth mother is the primary breadwinner, or whether the non-birth mother chooses to induce lactation to share in the primary care duties, there are many scenarios where mama bear…the one who carried and birthed that baby…may need to let go. If we want to achieve the goals of feminism, we need to not only ask for more options for mothers, but also ask their partners to step up and be more than a babysitter. But we need to give them the space to do that. We mama bears need to be willing to let go a bit.

Letting go, for me, had two parts. First, I had to be able to separate myself both physically and emotionally. Second, I had to be able to trust my partner to take over a significant portion of the nurturing. In this post, I’ll share some of my thoughts and experiences about letting go as a working mom whose partner is a stay at home dad.

Separating myself

Physically turning and walking out the door as your child tugs at your pant legs and screams “MAMAAAAAAA” is excruciating. Listening from the other room as your partner fumbles through a difficult parenting moment when you feel you have the answer requires patience. Being a slave to a breast pump instead of holding your baby snugly at your breast is tough. In her post Where’s the numbness?, Naomi from Mama’s Apple Cores wrote:

So, why on earth do I want to turn our world upside down so that I can be the one home? It seems so selfish, but I just can’t move beyond this strong feeling that I need to be home. I try to embrace what we have and focus on the richness of our life, and I do okay for a few days. And then one day I go crazy wanting to be home. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I scream. Drive and cry. Drive and scream. Panic attacks. Feel like I’m losing my mind. Maybe this is just my personal instability and being home would not solve that? Would I be happier if I was home? Would I be more stable? Or is this just a combination of me and lack of sleep?

For me, focusing on and getting the most out of the time I had with my kids was critical. When I was home, I babywore, breastfed, co-slept. That meant that even on the days when I did have to go to work, I could still physically be attached to my children for around 14 hours of the day. I never understood so-called “experts” who suggested a 6pm bedtime for a baby in a crib in a separate room. That would have devastated me. That would have meant seeing my child for 15 minutes in the evening and maybe an hour in the morning before work while trying to get ready and get out the door. Not an option.

Giving something to my baby while at work helped to. I pumped breast milk at work for my son until he was 12 months old and for my daughter until she was 18 months old. I would think of them constantly during the day and even get caught humming Elmo’s song over and over again as my brain connected with them despite our physical separation. The drive home was long, very long.

Having a routine helps. It is hard at first. But after a while you and the kids kids realize that each morning Mommy gets up and goes to work. She stays there for a while and she comes home not long after their afternoon nap. Once you realize that there are five days (or whatever it may be for you) where you have to plow through it, but you can then spend two days focusing on your kids, it gets easier. At least it did for me. But a big part of it getting easier was knowing that my kids were in great hands, which brings me to the next part…

Trusting my partner

To have peace of mind when I go out the door or even while I focus on a task in one room while my partner parents in another room, I need to trust him. For me, trust means knowing we agree about the big things and understanding that the little things don’t matter that much.

My partner and I share the same basic attachment-based parenting philosophy. We both agree that leaving our kids to cry it out is not an option. We both agree that breast is best and that our children were going to be given breastmilk exclusively as infants. We both treat our children with the respect that human beings deserve. Knowing that we are on the same page about the big things is what allows this mama bear to let go. I know of other couples where one of them believes in crying it out and the other doesn’t. Where one thinks it is fun to sneak an infant a McDonald’s sundae and the other one wants the baby exclusively breastfed. Where one regularly humiliates and spanks the children and the other believes in gentle discipline. When parents have such vastly different parenting philosophies, trust is difficult and I know a lot of moms who take it all upon themselves so that they do not have to leave their child with the irresponsible or abusive person they chose to raise children with. I am so thankful that I am not in that position.

But letting go also requires not freaking out about the little things. For me, much of how I parent is about the way that I want to relate to my kids. It is about the relationship that I want to build with them. It is about the way that I want them to see me. It is about what I want to teach them and the values that I want to pass on. But the reality is that every human being will have to deal with a large variety of different teachers, bosses, friends, partners, colleagues, and so on over the course of their life. They will not all relate to them in the same way and I think it does children good to learn different ways of relating with different people. Being exposed to different parenting styles will help prepare them for that. The little things are just not worth sweating. They will not make that big of a difference (if at all) in how your child turns out, but stressing over them will have a big impact on your anxiety levels and on your relationship. Your partner needs to know that you trust him or her to make good parenting choices when you are not there (or even when you are) and that even if he or she does have a bad parenting day, that that is okay too.

Finally, your kids need to see that you trust your partner. I like to remind my kids as I am leaving that they will have a fun time with Daddy. I ask them when I get home what fun things they did together. I try to show them that I am happy to see them develop that bond and to have that special time with their other parent.

Hibernating?

In my experience, yes…mama bear can let go. But maybe not forever. I go on dates with my kids to reconnect. I need extended vacations with my kids to deepen and strengthen our relationship after long periods of hard work and repeated separation. This summer, I’m looking forward to hibernating for a few months with my kids while papa bear ventures back out of the cave for a bit.

Annie is the mom of two kids, Emma (age almost 3) and Julian (age 5). She tries to stir up issues and spark discussion on the art and science of parenting at the PhD in Parenting blog.

Jenny, who recently started blogging at The Big Cheesy, talks about her feelings around dressing her daughter in frilly clothes — sometimes — and her reluctance [...]]]> I’ve written before about my opinions on gender and kids’ clothing: this entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer brings in a more femme opinion from a self-identified “girly-girl” feminist.

Jenny, who recently started blogging at The Big Cheesy, talks about her feelings around dressing her daughter in frilly clothes — sometimes — and her reluctance to dress any probably-boy child (should there ever be any) in the same.

On Dressing a Daughter…and a Theoretical Son.

Two things about me have almost always been true: I’m a girly-girl, and I’m a feminist. There are more of us out there than you might imagine. We are the women who adore pink, want lace trim on everything, and think the heel could always be higher. But we’re also always striving to achieve everything we might want, without thinking for a moment that our sex limits us. Feminists like me are the fierce, unstoppable, eternally equal women who have a lot of fun with our lipstick and ball gowns. We’re not unlike drag queens in that way.

But like a drag queen, I don’t live in my uber-girly outfits. Although I do have a closet stocked with stilettos, mountains of beads, pounds of makeup, and enough lacy lingerie to outfit a proper brothel, I usually don’t wear that stuff. Often enough (okay, 9 out of every 10 days), I wear my hair in a bun done without looking, no makeup whatsoever, the same unisex jeans I’ve had for years, and a loose-fitting tee shirt (most likely purchased at a thrift shop). The same frayed brown flip-flops are on my feet. My fingernails haven’t been painted in almost two years. I’m not wearing perfume, or even lotion. And I don’t feel like any less of a woman than I do in my tight turquoise satin D&G minidress.

Because, as I’m sure I don’t need to explain to a feminist audience, my woman-ness has almost nothing to do my costume. Whether I’m in fishnets or my husband’s sweatshirt, I’m a Woman, with every strength and capability than Man has to offer. Being a woman is not about dress, or scent, or mannerisms (or even genitalia, frankly). It’s because I’m so confident in this, my female identity, that I can switch from dressing in a very gendered way to dressing in a very un-gendered way. To be honest, I never think about it. I don’t divide my days into Girly or Unisex. I’m just me, transitioning from one costume to another without thought.

But what of the female child I bore almost 2 years ago? How do I dress her on any normal day, given my penchant for the frills and the froth? To be sure, her closet is stuffed with elaborate dresses and blouses and pretty little coats, things on which I spent too much money. There are so many of them that she outgrows them before the tags come off, usually. Which is probably because she spends her days, like her mom, in jeans and t-shirts. And it’s not that I’m making a statement, gearing her up to be a feminist. I imagine she, like all the intelligent women I know, will be a feminist all on her own (but that’s her choice, not mine). I dress her in the comfortable stuff every day because…it’s comfortable. She is a toddler. All she wants to do is run, jump, climb, and smear herself with avocado. I don’t think either of us would enjoy that exuberance all swaddled in a lacy sundress with matching bloomers. So she wears clothing that could belong to either a girl or a boy–indeed, much of it is purchased in the Boys’ section. I’m not so much of a girly-girl that I think one’s corduroy pants should be pink.

To be totally honest, though, I also buy my daughter boys’ clothes because I want to be able to re-use them, should I have a son. And as a feminist, and a person fiercely devoted to gender-identity freedom, it’s hard for me to accept that I wouldn’t put a baby son in a dress. Why not, really? How is it different from putting my daughter in brown work boots designed for little male feet? Somehow, to me, it is. That bothers me, but I’m not going to wrap my son in lace just to confront my own issues. As much as I dislike our society’s rigid gender expectations, and as much as I flout them myself, it’s much harder for men and boys to do so, and I’m not going to make that decision for any son I might have. If he asks me, at any point, to wear a dress, you can believe that I will happily oblige. I just won’t be leading the campaign, as troubling as that is to me sometimes (since I will essentially be dictating his ultimate gender performance for him, making it not an issue of choice at all).

As my daughter grows, I get sad about her frilly little outfits. To think that I may not have another daughter to wear them again, and knowing that I won’t put them on a son who doesn’t request them, makes me very sad. And it’s probably not because I love them more than I love her other clothes. It’s probably because I hardly ever put her in the girly stuff. Just as I find it easier to go about my day in a more unisex garb, I want the same freedom for her. Yes, I have a blast when I’m all tarted up, and I love to see her that way, too. But it’s not real life. It’s not the daily experience for a woman who has things she must DO. I probably could run a marathon in high heels, but I wouldn’t want to do so. So the dresses inevitably stay on their hangers, and then get packed away for some Maybe Later child. It’s hard, but I recognize it’s a product of the choices I make. As a feminist, i believe that a woman (or a man) should be able to wear WHATEVER she (or he) likes, whenever, wherever. It is because I believe in my absolute equality and power that I can wear pink lip gloss one day and a man’s shirt the next and not feel any different–even if I have been called “sir” a few times. I intend that freedom for my daughter, and I hope I embrace it for my son, too. As a parent I strive to put my ideals into practice, even as it challenges me sometimes. I put the dresses aside for my daughter, and may pull them out for my son. Who knows? On any given day, I just want all of us to be comfortable–in our clothes, and most definitely in our skin.

Jenny lives in Los Angeles with her small family of humans and large family of animals.  Although an attorney by trade, lately Jenny is taking time to smell the bread rising, and to watch her daughter grow.

When Susannah told me this story, of making her preschooler’s “family poster” and realizing it’ll be the first time he’ll really be vulnerable to homophobic bigotry — or “simple” ignorant schoolyard teasing [...]]]> In this entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer, we see that sometimes the little moments and the big moments are the same thing.

When Susannah told me this story, of making her preschooler’s “family poster” and realizing it’ll be the first time he’ll really be vulnerable to homophobic bigotry — or “simple” ignorant schoolyard teasing — for having two moms, I asked her to share it with us for the Primer, because it so encapsulates the fear and the hope and the determination we so often feel when raising our children “different” in a kyriarchal world. She so touchingly makes the point that the best thing we can send our children off into the world with is love — and the knowledge that love matters most of all.

The Family Poster

Dearest little one,

Last Thursday when I dropped you off at school the parent helper handed me a blank white poster board. She said to fill it with pictures as a way to help you tell your classmates about your family. We took it home that day and talked about how big our family is – those people we were born to and those people we have chosen as our own. Our family is spread fairly wide – Nana and Grandpa Rollie in Los Angeles; Uncle Jay, Aunt Shekar, and baby Karolina in Pittsburgh. Closer to home are Grandma, Uncle Randy, Auntie Shane, Auntie Shae, Aunt Tori, Aunt Cyndi, Sarah, Tonya, Gram, and all of my aunts, uncles and cousins.

“Jerome? And Lucia?”
“Yes, baby. Jerome and Lucia are part of our family too. So are Julia, Sonja and Asher.”
“Yeah. (pause) Who else?”
“Grandpa Angelo. We should put a picture of him on the poster too, shouldn’t we?” You never met your grandpa as he died before you were born, but your grandma talks with you about him all of the time.
“And mama?”
“Yes, mama too.”

When we got home we went about our merry way and forgot about the family poster that had sparked a half hour of discussion. I worked through the week to find a fun group of pictures that gives an idea of who your family is. Tonight after you fell asleep I gathered them all together to assemble on the poster board. It wasn’t until I started to lay down the pictures and saw all of the faces that it struck me – this is when the teasing could start for you. You, my love, are blessed with two moms.

I knew the day would come when we’d face this (and I hate our society for making it an “issue” needing to be faced) but I didn’t think it would happen so soon. You will be four years old next week and I am thinking of you sharing about your family with your preschool class. Will someone tell you that you can’t have two moms? What will your teacher say? How many kids will ask you where the picture is of your dad? What will your response be to that? We’ve talked about how there are kids who live with grandparents, aunts, uncles, a mom, a dad, the possibilities are endless. You know the story of how mama and I wanted a baby and Uncle Randy agreed to be our donor. Every so often you ask to hear the “Uncle Randy story” but at nearly four you will not have the words to explain this to your class. You may not even feel the need to explain it.

My belief is that if any questions do come up Teacher Amy will do a wonderful job of supporting you in saying that yes, you do have a mommy and a mama. You do not have a daddy. She will talk about how families look different but that what matters is love. You, Keagan, are SURROUNDED by love. You were born of a love so great that we could never have imagined today. You pushed your way into a world already filled with a family who loved you.

At the same time, you arrived into a society in which many people have strong ideas about who “should” and “should not” be defined as family, marry, love each other. These definitions leave our family out, acting as the proverbial circular peg trying to fit into a square box. Perhaps that act of trying to fit in is the problem. Sometimes it makes more sense to help send a message so big (Um, hello world, wake up and smell the fair-trade, shade-grown organic coffee. EMBRACE diversity! EMBRACE love!) that it would cause that little square box to implode and a new definition to blossom like a phoenix rising from steaming ash.

Love ties together a family – the people who you love, and the people who love you. Your family is made of those people who build you up rather than tear you down, support you at all times, these are the people with whom you feel safe. A blood connection may or may not exist. There is no room in this definition for placing boundaries on love through things like gender, sex, class, race, ethnicity, color, (dis)ability, religion. If you can walk away knowing that when someone questions your definition of family, then I’ve done something right. A family is love. Period. And you, Keagan, are my family, my heart.

I love you up to the moon and back,

Mommy

Susannah lives in the American Pacific Northwest, where her just-turned-four-year-old is blessed with a large, loving family, including, yes, two mothers.

Zoey discusses her journey from career-driven no-kids-no-thank-you woman to mostly at-home mother, and the things she has given up, as well as gained, along the way. She touches on [...]]]> The Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer is back, with a piece from Zoey of Good Goog about what it means to her to be a woman and a mother.

Zoey discusses her journey from career-driven no-kids-no-thank-you woman to mostly at-home mother, and the things she has given up, as well as gained, along the way. She touches on issues of economic independence (and the risks of the lack thereof), the intersection of privileges and hardships, the blessings of flexible work options, and the notion of sacrifice in motherhood, and ultimately explains how she has continued, “even” in motherhood, to be a woman — to be herself.

Before I was a Mother, I was a Woman . . .

Seriously. I wasn’t always a mother.

Once upon a time, I was a woman and I was quite probably one of the most ambitious people you’d be likely to meet. And I wore really high heels and had impractical handbags. Because I loved it and because I could. I wasn’t ambitious in the conventional way – I didn’t care about earning money (although it did help with the accessories). But I wanted to have enough impact to change something in a big way – to leave something behind and say – look! I left my mark. Maybe it was because I was completely invisible in High School. But I doubt it, some people are just born that way. And although I hadn’t admitted it to anyone I was considering a move into politics because I’d grown tired of banging my head against a brick wall trying to change something from the bottom up. What was I interested in changing? Healthcare and the treatment of mental illness/drug and alcohol addiction but that is a very long story.

If you’d asked me back then what I thought about a woman staying at home while her partner works and living off one income I would have told you that the very idea made me physically ill. Because it’s such a risk to take a gamble that your relationship is going to work out. Because if it doesn’t you have sacrificed however many years of experience in the workforce, have no money of your own and are essentially left stranded to fend for yourself. It’s not about trusting someone, or believing in your relationship: it’s about not placing your future in someone else’s hands. And only a stupid person would do that. Is it becoming obvious that my parents had 6 marriages between them? Full disclosure – I may have a few broken home issues.

Also if you’d asked me back then if I wanted to have children I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, because I knew that if I was to have children I would want to put certain dreams of mine aside for a time. And I liked the freedom of selfishness. I didn’t believe that I was capable of being a ‘do-it-all’ supermum. If I was going to be a mother, I was going to want to be a mother in the home and not miss out on anything. Are you seeing a problem with this scenario? Eventually I realised that while further study and career aspirations don’t have an expiration date, having children does (at least for a woman) and I swallowed my fears about leaving the workforce and did just that. I rationalised that if I ever wanted to go back to work my husband could be a stay at home dad for awhile.

And then she was born and everything was different. Not overnight of course. For the first few days it was surreal. I remember thinking she was beautiful but not quite being able to relate to the idea that she was mine and it was permanent. Within a month I had completely abandoned the idea of going back to work full-time because I loved being at home with her and found that to be more fulfilling than any job could be. In the interest of modesty I would like to say that I got lucky and I was given the opportunity to work part-time from home. But the truth is I am really good at my job and I was lucky that my boss was able to see the value in being flexible. I was also fortunate enough to be born in a country where public education doesn’t end with High School, to have a mother who worked three different jobs to keep us afloat and to not have the kind of obstacles thrown in front of me that indigenous Australians face every single day. Not to mention my phone phobia which had led me to an occupation well suited to at home work.

But how could a woman like myself be happy at home? Had I abandoned the woman for the mother? Surprisingly, no. I am the kind of person who will not do things by half-measures. I embraced being home with my little one and wore her most of the time. I persisted with breastfeeding despite difficulties and didn’t pursue any hard and fast rules – I just followed my instinct. She slept with us most of the time too. Along the way, I found out that I didn’t feel stifled by this because by being true to who I was as a mother, was also being true to who I was as a woman. Suddenly, outside of my usual career-focused environment I was able to rediscover all my creative interests that I’d also put on hold – like writing and photography and even home renovation and I was more myself than I had been in a long while. I will stop working entirely next year and it doesn’t scare me anymore.

I would still like to leave my mark in some way. And while it might be tempting to think that the difference I will make is in the lives of my children, I hope not. Because I want to avoid influencing them as much as possible and just be excited to find out who they are. I still miss my high heels, and my handbags, and spending hours on my own. As my children get older I will actively return to my formerly ambitious self because it’s important to me that they see me the way I see myself. And I am nothing if not driven.

This week I had my first night away from my (now) 18 month old and she had her first sleepover. She was beside herself with excitement when I came back and spent the next day holding on to me for dear life, not really willing to let me out of her sight and giving me cuddles so fierce that her little body shook with force of it. And that’s when I know that nothing I’ve given up feels like a sacrifice. Not because I don’t miss the things that I surrendered, but because they are overshadowed by everything I’ve been given.

Zoey is a (mostly) at home mother of one, and no matter how many people look at her like she’s just weird, she’s still planning to have four more children. Professionally she works part-time as a proposal writer, which somehow evolved out of managing a drug rehabilitation centre for dual diagnosis women and their young children.

It’s not so much that her six year old daughter spontaneously comes out with [...]]]> This piece, by professional feminist and writer-mama Veronica, was originally posted at her personal blog Viva La Feminista. I requested to cross-post it here as part of the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer because it’s such a perfect glimpse into a feminist parenting moment.

It’s not so much that her six year old daughter spontaneously comes out with an astute feminist observation — as Veronica points out, much of that comes from her own innate personality, which we as parents can encourage but do not create — but rather the way that Veronica handles it, by affirming the reality of what her daughter sees. Kyriarchy is a virus: it perpetuates itself by getting inside us, obscuring our observations, normalizing a male-centric (among other things) world. One of the most feminist acts a parent can do then is say “Yes, you are really seeing what you you’re seeing. The emperor really has no clothes” — or in this case, the “writers awards” really have no women — “and you are right to point it out.”

Be still my feminist mama heart… My daughter and the Emmys

It’s Sunday and homework is all done (actually, she didn’t have any since she won Star Student of the Week. *gloating*), the kid is in her PJs, teeth have been brushed and tomorrow’s clothes are picked up. Yup, it’s a rare night when it’s 8 pm and not much is left to do in our household. We’re curled up in a heap on the couch flipping between the 2009 Emmy Awards and Sunday Night Football.

Our precocious daughter watches men and women pick up separate acting awards. Then one of the writing award nominations are being announced. “So, is this the men’s writing awards?” “Um, no mija. Just the writing awards. But GOOD observation!”

As much as I feel that I am raising her in what I would call a feminist manner, I wouldn’t say that I point out all of life’s injustices like say an awards category where there are only men or only white women. That is for much later in life when I feel like she could handle such a conversation. Only at the age of 6 she makes that observation herself.

This is the same girl who around the age of 2 or 3 let it be known that it’s OK for the baby rubber ducky to have two mommies and at the age of 4 stated that restrooms with sinks and soap dispensers too high for her to reach were bad because little kids couldn’t reach them on their own and that is just unfair. Seriously? You think I taught her that last one? Last month we were in a restroom when she took a step back from the sink and proudly told me that “Mom, now this is a good  kid sink!” Two years later she’s still on the look out for kid-friendly rest room sinks.

I tweeted her Emmy comment and got a lot of retweets. A sign that others not only agreed with her, but a sign to her that she’s seeing it right. She’s got the right lens on her two perfect eyes.

I will always say first and foremost, she was born with an innate sense of fairness. I merely support her and guide her in that fairness. Yes, she takes it too literal in that she believes a 6-year-old deserves the exact same amount of dinner and dessert as her 34-year-old mother. But on the whole she’s usually dead on.

What I find is feminist in this mothering moment is that I knew exactly what she was talking about. I didn’t need to rewind the DVR to see that yes, it was an all dude category. And I affirmed her observation and stressed that it was a GOOD one. I didn’t ignore her, I didn’t make excuses and I didn’t wave her off as being silly.

I affirmed her voice.

And I think that is one of the most feminist things I can do for her as I help her find her way in this world.

Veronica is a professional feminist, mom to a spunky 6-year-old woman-child, and a writer. She’s paid for two of those jobs and working on getting paid for the third. Because really, we should at least be earning a pension for all the shoes we unknot!

I love this piece not [...]]]> Kelly Diels, of her eponymous blog, offers the following entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer on hair, and parenting biracial black girls, and hair, and love, and hair, and revolution, and hair. Because hair is (if you’ll pardon me) woven in with all those things, especially for black women and girls.

I love this piece not only because I love Kelly’s writing, but because it is an excellent intersectionalist piece. Although — like many — she doesn’t use the words “feminism” or “white privilege” or “internalized racist beauty standards”, her post is about all that and more.

We Will Braid Our Way to Revolution, Baby

I wish my children were turtles and carried a carapace of protective armour on their backs.  I wish I was a warrior woman who would blaze trails of righteousness with fearsome weapon, the word.  Or the laptop.  It has a certain heft.  It can also start fires if you leave it unattended on the sofa.  True story.  Not mine, but true, so leave your laptops on hard surfaces only, if you please.  That was my PSA. No charge.  Tell your friends.

I wish these things — the armour, the bravery, the righteousness, not the small house fires – because I often feel helpless to protect my children from both the big, bad wolf (and lo, he is out there) and the big, bad world.

I am white.  My children are black.  Although in my work, my studies and in my thinking I challenge those poles of identification, the truth of the matter is that my children and I have inherited and inhabit two different worlds.

This is not an easy thing to admit. I’m an idealist.  I really would like to buy the world a coke and live in perfect harmony.  The world that the multicultural clubs and Benetton ads of my adolescence sold me is a sexy fantasy.  Sometimes I think I’ve created it.  Sometimes I marvel at how my friends are just so damn progressive and awesome and kickass that I’ve accidentally-on-purpose astral-planed into a right-thinking world where Barack Obama is president and schools don’t boycott his speeches.  And then schools protest his speeches. And then someone questions the paternity of my children, or my connection to them (are you their mother? their REAL mother?), or talks about their good hair, or or or or.

Or my daughter will tell me: I wish I was white.

Or I will hear her barbie say: I want to be friends with the white girl.  You can’t be my girlfriend because you’re brown.

Or she will pester me for seven hundred consecutive years AND I AM NOT EXAGGERATING to oppress her ringlets into a straight-hanging hair curtain.

Or she will tell me that her cousins are more beautiful than her because they have yellow hair.

The hair, the hair, the hair.  I worry constantly about the hair.

I straighten my hair every day.  It is a creative endeavour.  I’m working a Cleopatra-bob AND IT IS ART DAMMIT.  I love parts of the aesthetic community that women can opt into or out of: I love going to a salon or getting together with a girlfriend to apply rinses and pluck offenders and having my hair stroked and my words heard and frizzies steamed into submission. It is cheaper than therapy.  It IS therapy, and art therapy, to boot, and there is touching and I am a affection sponge entirely devoid of shame.  I’ll take it any way I can get it.

So for me, hair is just another medium for personal expression.  Blue hair says something and so do gleaming chestnut bobs.  Mine says, is it just me or is the unrepentantly oft-married Liz Taylor the EFFING BOMB?  (It might be just me.)

So that’s what hair is to me: a choice. A playground.  At work, no one will look at me any which way if it is curly one day and straight the next. I can come back from vacation with braids and beads (please kill me if I do) and it will be a lark, not a political statement, though HOLY is that weighted with economic and political implications. I can wash it and leave it be and it will be and it will not be a big deal, to anyone, anywhere, and definitely not in my office.  I’m not sure anyone there has even noticed that I have hair even though I sometimes straighten it at my desk.  No joke.  I do it as a joke.  I like to send up my job.

This is fun and inconsequential and this is not necessarily how black women experience hair.  This is not entirely how my children will experience their hair.  Their hair signals something: not white. Not black. It means something.

OMG BREAKING NEWS: TYRA BANKS JUST TOOK OFF HER WEAVE ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.  “Is embracing the state of black hair the new liberation?”

And that is what I mean: for black women, to just wear your hair, as it is, is so bad-ass. So Africanist.  So Authentic.  Such a political statement that even Tyra can make a play at challenging the beauty myth.  Because the dominant standard of beauty in our society is so Eurocentric that to be acceptable black women must pay for entre.  They pay to the tune of $45.6 million a year in home hair relaxers (not including relaxers sold at Wal-Mart).  There’s a quip that isn’t just a quip in the trailer for Chris Rocks’ Good Hair: “If your hair is nappy, white people aren’t happy.”

So my white hairplay is frivolous but what I do with my black children’s hair has meaning.  It might mean that I haven’t bothered to learn how to care for it.  It might mean that I am flaunting their biraciality and their ‘good’ hair and the way they might straddle of the divide between white and black.  It might mean I’m allowing them to be culturally white and aesthetically exotic.

Or it might mean that I will usher them into the art and touch and play of hair.  We might sit for hours and braid and talk.  We might blow-dry and straighten and stroke and talk.  We might oil and twist and knot and talk.  We may play, we may bow, we may straighten our spines and there will be curls and braids and beads and straight and wild days.

But with each style, with each hot-set undertaking, we will talk.  Love talk is radical.

I always wanted to be political, to be an activist, but I was always too lazy for protests, and besides, the crowds freak me out.  I can barely handle the twelve parents and assorted children at softball games without medication.  So mothering has been the most surprising endeavour: my most mundane moments are protests.  Negotiation.  Navigation.  The revolution is much smaller and intimate than I ever imagined.  The revolution will be mothered.  And fathered.  And, one wonderful day, parented.

The Beginning.

About Me.  Kelly Diels.
1.  This year, I’m thirty-sex.  Yes I AM.
2. By day, I’m a single mama who works in the big bad corporate world writing proposals and managing contracts.
3. By many, many nights, I write from my heart and spill my tawdry secrets (they’re mostly not tawdry, alas, but that might make you look) on my wildly unfocused blog, www.kellydiels.com.
4. I also have an unacknowledged Twitter problem except now I just acknowledged it.  Please find me (@KellyDiels) and say hi.

In this piece, Ruth discusses her experience raising a child with a white cis man who hasn’t explored his privileges and doesn’t wish to, who actively perpetuates [...]]]> The Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer has been honored with the following contribution from Ruth, who blogs at Look Left of the Pleiades and the group blog Mothers for Women’s Lib.

In this piece, Ruth discusses her experience raising a child with a white cis man who hasn’t explored his privileges and doesn’t wish to, who actively perpetuates kyriarchal notions and undermines her attempts to oppose them. She explores the privilege of having a supportive coparent from the stance of someone who has never yet had such (but is looking forward to in the hopefully-near future), first being partnered with a “kyriarch”, and currently separated and sharing custody with one. She describes the compromises she has had to make, and the lessons — good and bad — her child has learned from those.

She reminds us once again that no matter how noble our intentions, we can never eliminate the kyriarchal influences on our children — and sometimes the very people we are parenting with, whom our children rightfully adore, are the influences we have the least ability to counter.

Ruth wants you to read her bio first, for some context of what she writes:

Ruth is an adult, white, cis, temporarily able bodied, somewhere between working and middle class, queer, fat, mentally ill woman. She lives in Merseyside in the UK with her two year old, Bertie, and two kittehs. She works as a typist in the mornings and as a present mother for her child in the afternoons. She likes both her jobs. Her ex husband has Bertie some nights during the week. Ruth is engaged to Lucy, but Lucy lives in the US and will for a while yet. Ruth isn’t a “welfare queen” but does rely heavily on government assistance which she sees as her wages for her afternoon job.

My Kid Loves a Kyriarch

How do I start? I’ve written a long bio because it will help you understand where I’m coming from when I write this. But really, it’s difficult.

I’ve read many of these wonderful WFPP posts and found myself nodding along with them and waving my metaphorical pom poms at points! Yet I feel like there’s an aspect of most of them that is speaking from a position of privilege, possibly without realising it. The privilege of having a present co-parent. Better still, a present co-parent who is mostly on-side with your parenting ethos.

I’ve never had the latter. When I was with my husband, I did have the present co-parent, and that did make many things easier. Back then, I had a choice. If I wanted our child to be parented in a gentle, feminist-friendly, biologically appropriate way, I had to do everything myself, because he wasn’t on board with the majority of that way of parenting. But if I wanted to share parenting with him more equally, I had to let him have his way on some things I felt were not in our child’s best interests.

I chose the former.

Our child learned in those two years (and especially his first nine months when I was on maternity leave) that his needs would be met wherever possible. That he would have access to human milk on cue including during the night; that he would never be shouted at; that he would never be forced to sleep through the night before he was ready; that he would be worn most of the time until he was able to crawl. He’d never be given a time-out or told “no” just because “it’s good for him to hear it sometimes”. He’d have his own “no” taken seriously. [Eventually, my ex-husband did at least come round to the idea of relatively gentle discipline; certainly no smacking or angry shouting, at any rate, which has put my mind at rest a lot.]

These were good lessons for him to learn.

He also learned that a woman does everything. That a woman changes the nappies. That a woman gets up with him in the middle of the night and tends to his crying, that a woman carries him everywhere; that a woman does all the housework; he learned after the first nine months that even when both parents are away from the house during the day (and it was still a woman who looked after him then; his grandmother) it is still a woman who does everything in the evenings. He also saw his father use words to make his mother cry and sob.

These were not such good lessons for him to learn.

And then me and my husband split.

And gradually, once the dust had settled, my child learned more things. He learned that mothers live small rented houses in poor areas, but fathers live in their own, larger houses in nicer areas. He learned that mothers have tiny televisions and fathers have huge widescreen High Definition affairs with surround sound and cinemascope. He learned that going to the supermarket with his mother takes forever by foot and involves heavy bags being lugged back home, but that doing it with his father is a quick two minute job in the car.

This is not a good lesson for him to learn.

But, he also learns that his father changes nappies now. That his mother does DIY. That fathers can and in often do see their children even when they’ve split from the mother. That mothers don’t always put barriers to access even if the paths of men they don’t like and have reason not to like. That his father also cooks and cleans. That his mother also sometimes sits down and rests in front of the television with a beer.

These are good lessons for him to learn.

At his father’s house, however, he takes in media that reinforces gender stereotypes. He regularly hears language – usually “jokes” – from his father and his friends – that come from a place of unchecked privilege. He is told he is “good” when he behaves in what his father considers appropriate ways for a boy and, although in more subtle ways, the opposite too (feminine = not “good”).

These are not good lessons for him to learn.

And that’s even before you get to the lessons he learns from outside the family unit. The messages from school, from society, the messages that all parents who are feminists are fighting against in their children. Before I can even get to that, I have to fight it in my child’s immediate family situation.

So you’d think that my house would be completely television free, and my child would spend his time playing with dolls, dressed in pink, learning to cook and clean and be kind to our pets, right?

But no. I try. I really do. But I fall short. Because I’m exhausted. Because sometimes, I need to shower and wash and I have to put on the television and frankly I don’t care if Lazy Town is promoting an unhealthy obsession with weight loss and exercise and fat shaming because fuck it, I need to get ready for work and there’s no one to keep an eye on him. Because sometimes, it’s easier to watch endless diggers and dump trucks and lots and lots of fire engines on youtube than to expend mental energy I sometimes just do not have in reading a queer-affirming story book to him. Because sometimes it’s cheaper (or rather, free) to get hand-me-downs of blue blue little boy blue clothes for him than to spend money I don’t have on organic, fairly traded cotton gender-neutral clothes, or even dyes to colour the free blue ones. Because sometimes it’s just easier to wait until he’s gone to bed than insist on us tidying together.

And so on.

I don’t want advice, because I know what I should do; I even know how to do it. And I do do it, sometimes, and I do try to do it more often than not. And I also know this won’t be forever; that one day, Lucy will come over here permanently, and Bertie will live in a household, at least part time, where he has two happy co-parents who love him and share chores equally (though all the other influences will still exist).

But I just wanted to let you know that sometimes, the kyriarchy isn’t just in pre-school or on the television. Sometimes kyriarchy sleeps in the room next to your child.

More of Ruth’s writing can be found at her personal blog Look Left of the Pleiades and the group blog Mothers for Women’s Lib. She has also signed on to the group project I Blame the Mother, because like your loyal blog hostess, she simply didn’t have enough to do online yet.

This piece, on explaining to her young daughter the nature and importance of her work/school studies, resonates strongly with me, as I’ve dealt with similar concerns over work, school, domesticity, and trying to make sure [...]]]> This entry comes from Jenn Crowell, a student, novelist, and dear friend with whom I share far too much in common.

This piece, on explaining to her young daughter the nature and importance of her work/school studies, resonates strongly with me, as I’ve dealt with similar concerns over work, school, domesticity, and trying to make sure the Boychick understands that I have a life and aspirations of my own. She describes going back to a non-traditional grad school — at the “late” age of 31, as her child enters school for the first time — and the forces that pull on her and weigh on her as she struggles to make her work seem “real” to a child who can’t yet conceptualize the cerebral quality of her pursuits.

Jenn’s story is a humorous and insightful piece on the way one woman navigates the treacherous maze the kyriarchy sets before her.

Back to school: solidifying the cerebral

When my daughter and I both went off to “school” this year (she to a pre-K program at age 3; I for a long-overdue MFA in Creative Writing at age 31), I knew in advance that student parenting would present me with challenges. I was not prepared, however, for one challenge in particular: how to explain, much less validate, the amorphous-appearing nature of how I occupy the hours of nine through five, Monday through Friday, when speaking about my unconventional workaday life with my toddler.

These difficulties, of course, preceded my foray back into academia. For her entire short life, my daughter has always known that Daddy goes off to some important-sounding “work” on a train, his home/employment boundaries clearly demarcated, while, depending upon our childcare budget at any given moment, Mama alternates between chasing her around and frantically typing on a computer keyboard, all under the same integrated (ish) roof.

To be sure, the ratio of chasing-to-typing has always been pretty skewed. By the time she was two, anytime she saw a picture of someone writing (even an anthropomorphized duck in a children’s book), my daughter would gleefully shout, “He type just like Mama!”

You can imagine how this warmed my authorial heart – until I realized that my daughter had absolutely no idea what I was typing. For all she knew, I could be digital scrapbooking or dinking on Facebook. Not that there’s anything wrong with those time-tested methods of procrastination, of course (and not that I’ve ever used them, mind you!), but it felt disconcerting, even troubling, that my daughter had no concept of my key-clacking absorption as “work.”

When I entered graduate school, these feelings intensified. Wanting to assuage them before I flew to LA for my first ten-day residency (*cue self-flagellating whip-crack of maternal guilt here*), I explained to my daughter that Mama was going on an airplane — not to Grandma’s, this time, but to school. She understood that concept surprisingly well (and coped way better with our inaugural separation than I did, let me tell you), but once I got back, the poor child seemed utterly confused by the whole “Mama’s back, but she’s still in school” aspect of my low-residency program.

The main reason for her bewilderment, I think, was that, even though she was going to childcare eight hours a day (*crack* dang, that whip hurts!), she had absolutely no reference point, no concrete sense of what I did all day. In the mornings before preschool, she saw me emptying the dishwasher and packing her lunch; in the evenings, when she and her dad came home, she saw me cooking dinner. (Before y’all get twitchy about the division of labor in my household, rest assured that my decision to cook most of our meals is my own, made to provide myself with a badly-needed mental transition between “work” and “home.” That, and I’m just a big ol’ hopeless foodie. I blame my Anglophile crush, Nigella Lawson. Woman could crack my marriage just by crackin’ an egg, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

As cute as it was my first weekday back from LA, watching my kiddo jump up and down with glee that “Yay, Mama have dinner ready when I come home school!” (not so much a commentary on her dad’s cooking, I think, as one on her delight at me being back), I found my disconcerted feelings increasing, as well as a niggling need to address them. The last thing I wanted my child to think – particularly my girl-child, for whom I desperately desired to model economic and creative self-sufficiency — was that I sent her off to preschool every morning, and then came straight home and metamorphosed into June Cleaver, when in reality I was annotating Great Works o’Literature, and planning field studies, and pounding out new chapters on my own novel for eight hours a day.

Lest this statement inspire yet another misconstrued Mommy Wars smackdown, let me be clear here: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a life devoted to domestic pursuit, if it’s a freely-chosen source of fulfillment (though, mercy, that’s a ginormous caveat, innit?). I just didn’t want my child to automatically assume that domesticity was the life I had chosen for myself, simply because of my Nigella Lawson fetish and/or my compulsive need to tidy the kitchen in the morning before getting down to literary bidness.

And so I began to talk to her about what I was up to. Nothing too somber, or didactic, or melodrama-laden (“Mama is racking up student loan debt, honey, so she can pursue her passion and have a future!”), just a simple “Hey, did you know that while you’re at school, running around with your friends, making a mess with the glitter glue, Mama is working on her school at home, too?” kinda conversation.

Not only did my girlie get it, she thought it was pretty neat, this idea of she and Mama engaged in parallel lives. Pretty soon, she started reminding us, with her three-year-old’s firm penchant for categorization, that, “Daddy go work, I go school, and Mama go school, too!” It was just a matter of time before she had her teachers convinced I “worked” at Starbucks, thanks to my coffeeshop-frequenting marathons while on deadline.

The day I heard that out-of-the-mouths-of-babes quote, I dropped her off and walked all the way up the street to my overpriced caffeine with a messenger bag full of new ideas, a grin on my face, and a somewhat-calmed feminist pulse. (I say “somewhat,” because it’s still elevated over the fact that my non-governmentally-subsidized childcare costs as much per year as my MFA tuition, but that, like my transatlantic lust over Nigella, is Another Post Entirely.)

Jenn Crowell is a freelance editor, author of the novels Necessary Madness and Letting the Body Lead, mother of a 3-year-old girl and a spoiled longhaired dachshund, and a full-time graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University. She’s currently at work on a novel in which both her crush on Nigella and her righteous indignation at discrimination against mothers with mental illness figure prominently.

She discusses the ways that she has had to accept her “last-rung” status in the collective of her stepdaughter’s parenting figures — but then, through conversations with her stepdaughter about having babies and NOT having babies, realizes that she [...]]]> This entry to the Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer comes from Maria, a stepmother in a noncustodial parenting situation.

She discusses the ways that she has had to accept her “last-rung” status in the collective of her stepdaughter’s parenting figures — but then, through conversations with her stepdaughter about having babies and NOT having babies, realizes that she is expanding her stepdaughter’s awareness of what it means to be female and the choices a woman has available to her. She realizes that rather than being a detriment, as the kyriarchy would have us believe, the wide variety of perspectives her stepdaughter is exposed to is ultimately helping her “[become] an insightful, capable and wise woman” — the goal of any feminist mother raising a girl child.

Feminist parenting when you’re Not The Mama

One quality that I have always admired in other people is perspective–a broad understanding of many different conditions and points of view, and the ability to perceive things and situations based on that understanding; to step outside of one’s own experiences and consider those of others. I’ve realized that what makes perspective so valuable is the fact that, as much as it is quality we wish to cultivate in our children, it’s impossible to impart single-handedly.

This is part of my story about perspective–about my expanding perspective as a woman becoming a stepparent, and about the ways I can contribute to the perspectives of others.

When I met the person who would become my spouse, he had already been a father for four and a half years. He is and has always been a noncustodial parent, meaning that while he and his daughter’s mother have joint legal custody, they do not equally share what is called “physical custody”; his daughter lives primarily with her mother and spends some weekends and summer time with him.

This arrangement gave me some time to adjust to the idea of committing myself not only to my partner, but to his daughter as well. Being on the noncustodial side of things isn’t always great in terms of spending time together or in terms of the parental learning curve, but it did mean that I could ease my way into the family and continue, at least for a while, to live as a more typical young single woman. I was fortunate that my partner’s daughter embraced me with unequivocal enthusiasm, and by the time we moved in together, I had long since begun to incorporate the role of stepmother into my identity.

It wasn’t easy. I had previously thought that if I had a child someday, I’d be able to raise that child with my own feminist values. I suppose that, like many fantasies of parenthood, that particular one assumed a certain level of control and power that most parents come to discover is much harder to maintain than they expected (“You’re not raising them in a vacuum,” as many of my elders remind me). Being a parent of any kind means accepting how little control you actually possess.

But on top of that, here I was in a position of more extreme powerlessness. Despite the fact that I don’t usually like to think in hierarchical terms, I must admit that I often feel like I’m the bottom rung in some imaginary ladder of my stepdaughter’s parental figures. I have not known her her whole life (her bio-parents and -grandparents have), and I do not live with or even near her most of the time (her mother, stepfather and maternal grandparents do). I hold relatively little influence. Even so, I wanted to be just as good a role model as I would for a legal/full-time resident child. I just wasn’t sure how that would work.

During the first couple of years, my stepdaughter would constantly compare me to her mother. She was never looking to get a rise out of me, nor do I think she was judging, criticizing or trying to reject me; the simple fact is, she’s very close to her mother, and that was the basis she had for exploring her relationship with another younger female parental figure. I didn’t mind, but all the same, I did find myself at a loss when she would say things like, “I think you should have a baby. My mom already had two and you’re the same age!”

I tried to frame my responses in terms of how I felt or what I wanted, and not in terms of absolutes. My stepdaughter’s mom (who also self-identifies as a feminist) has simply made different decisions than I have, and it’s not my place to judge or to even to speculate as to the reasons for her choices. I can only speak for myself. As insignificant as I sometimes felt, I knew I just had to be honest and explain where I was coming from, so that at the very least, she would understand that women are free to make different decisions, and that that doesn’t make us any better or worse than each other.

I explained that first of all, I probably could have a baby if I wanted to, but just because I can doesn’t mean that I have to. Personally, I didn’t feel like I was ready or old enough. I had a lot of other things I wanted to do first. Second of all, that was a decision that her dad and I would have to make together, and it was something we hadn’t seriously talked about yet. And after a while, she began to see where I was coming from. More importantly, she began to comprehend an awesome paradox: the womanly power to bear children is also the power not to.

Every so often, I have an experience with my stepdaughter that assures me that she gets it; she’s getting better at connecting the dots. One day, about a year ago, when she was seven, she asked me, “Why did Granny Jo [my mother] only have two children?”

I started to say something generic about some people having small families and some having big ones, yadda yadda, and she said, “No, I mean, how did she only have two children?”

Wait a minute. Did my stepdaughter just ask me about contraception?

“Do you mean, how did she keep from having more than two?” She nodded.

Well. I knew that she understood how reproduction works, so I asked her, “What are some ways you can imagine that a woman might keep from getting pregnant?”

“…Maybe have an operation?” [Whoa, easy there!]

“Actually, yeah,” I said, “Some people, men and women, decide to have operations to keep from being able to help make a baby. But how do people make a baby in the first place?”

“They have sex?”

“Right, or at least that’s the simplest way for most people to get their egg and sperm together. You can’t make a baby unless you put an egg and sperm together somehow. So, an easy way not to make a baby would be not to have sex.”

“So…you’ve never had sex?”

Jeez. Walked right into that one.

“Well…the thing is, adults like having sex. It feels good to them, and it’s one way for them to feel close to each other. They like it even if they don’t want to make a baby. So your dad and I do have sex, but I don’t want to get pregnant now. One example of something I’ve done to keep from getting pregnant is I’ve taken medicine that keeps me from ovulating. You always need both a sperm and an egg to make a baby. If there’s no egg, it won’t work.”

That seemed to answer her question for the time being. She thought for a minute, then changed the subject and kept right on talking in that way a seven-year-old does when her train of thought is going 200 miles an hour.

That evening at dinner, she asked her dad if he ever does anything to keep from making a baby. I didn’t have to spell it out for her–she had already figured out that contraception isn’t just a woman’s responsibility.

After conversations like that one, I’ve felt that it doesn’t matter if ours isn’t the custodial household, or if I’m not her primary (or secondary, or even tertiary) parent. As long as she feels comfortable asking me questions, and as long as I respect her enough to listen and give her my best in terms of an honest answer, I’m adding to her concept of what is possible. Each of the other adults in her life adds something different. And with perspective like hers, she is on her way to becoming an insightful, capable and wise woman.

Maria is an urban homesteader and gardener, AmeriCorps alumna, musician, on-again-off-again student, and stepmom. She lives in the DC area with her spouse, two cats, and eight-year-old stepdaughter (some of the time). You can find more of her writing at Small Red House.

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 [...]]]> 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.