Category Archives: Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer

Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer

WFPP Guest Post: We Will Braid Our Way to Revolution, Baby

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.

7 Comments | Posted on 10 September 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Kyriarchy, Parenting, Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer | Tags: Gender, hair, intersectionalism, Privilege, Race

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WFPP Guest Post: My Kid Loves a Kyriarch

The Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer has been honored with the following contribution from Anonymous.

In this piece, Anon 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.

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

Anon is an adult, white, cis, temporarily able bodied, somewhere between working and middle class, queer, fat, mentally ill woman. She lives in the UK with her two year old, Jake, 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 Jake some nights during the week. Anon is engaged to Anna, but Anna lives elsewhere and will for a while yet. Anon 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, Anna will come over here permanently, and Jake 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.

12 Comments | Posted on 3 September 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Kyriarchy, Parenting, Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer | Tags: division of labor, domesticity, falling short, Privilege, societal pressures, TV

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WFPP Guest Post: Back to school: solidifying the cerebral

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.

2 Comments | Posted on 29 August 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Parenting, Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer | Tags: school, writing

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WFPP Guest Post: Feminist parenting when you’re Not The Mama

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.

4 Comments | Posted on 20 August 2009 by Arwyn | Category: Body, Parenting, Womanist/Feminist Parenting Primer | Tags: contraception, step-parenting

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WFPP Musical Guest Post: How Love Can Be

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.