feminist blogs

I’ve been keeping to myself in a very unhealthy, bitter way lately. I’m battling a major depression and I think starting to pull out of it, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

I’m a person who needs to believe that there is a purpose in life, even if I don’t believe in a higher power. I need to see the reason, the final result, of random events, try to tie them together. So I’m observing a sad, earth-shattering anniversary this weekend.

A year ago on Saturday my roommate and sort-of-adopted son Matthew died of a drug overdose. I was the one who found him. The repercussions of his death just keep on and on. I think to myself how wasteful it was. I think to myself that I have cried for a year. I think to myself that this is not just another statistic, another junkie overdose. It never is. It never is. The ways that the people we love touch us, and then leave us, especially when it doesn’t make sense, last forever.

What do you say about a man who wasn’t even 30 years old yet, who died in his bed with a needle in his arm? What do you say about the woman who knocked on his door to wake him up in the morning, only to get no response? What do you say about the children who didn’t understand? What do you say about a person who comes into your world, a person you immediately bond with, after you’ve been the witness to the most intimate moment of his existence? How do you live with waking up every morning with the image of him in your head?

He was an artist. He was a writer. He was so much, and so little in the end, this young man who threw it all away. And there are a million words I could say about him, there are a million ways I could memorialize him, from the altar in my room to his paintings on my wall, to the tears that come out of nowhere. But I think that in the end, at this point, Matthew would say to me that it’s time to move on, that I’ve hurt enough. So I take a deep breath. I hold his image for just a moment. I will come to a point where the sight of his coat or his shoes don’t make me break down. I will wake in the morning and not see him in his bed, in his room where he lived with me. I will be glad that he died in a home where he was loved, instead of on the Venice beach. I will remind myself that all the love in the world couldn’t stop him. I will take another deep breath and I will say it’s not right but it’s ok.

So finally, Matthew, goodbye. You are gone. Your ashes are gone, scattered, you are gone home to join your mom, you are ok now, I am ok, I will be ok, and we go on. And on we go.

Part 2

She chewed through my phone cord, so I’ve been without internet all day. I finally borrowed a phone cord from the neighbor.

She runs at the desk chair and takes a flying leap at the back of it, then proceeds to spin around in circles.

She has stopped sucking my ear, but now she likes to wake me up by licking my lips.

She sits on my head.

She chases toes.

She aggressively tries to steal pieces of pepperoni from my pizza.

She comes running whenever she hears water running, then tries to stick her face in the faucet. She watches me take showers, then sits in the drain to watch the water go away.

She got ahold of my headphones while they were still attached to the iPod, and was dragging them through the house.

She chewed through my fucking phone cord!

I regret the day I ever used the term “happy pills” within your hearing. You don’t know me, you don’t know my blog, Super Babymama, and you obviously don’t know about my penchant for being flippant about important matters.

This is the way I operate. This is how I navigate painful territory. I guess to make you “happy” I should have first talked about the last year I’ve lived through, starting out in intensive care in the hospital and then, oh I don’t know, finding my roommate dead in his bed of a heroin overdose, and having such severe panic attacks that I had to stop driving my car and couldn’t sleep for days on end and was snapping on everybody in snapping distance. I supposed I should have gone on at length about my year, my overwhelming fears for my Wayward Eldest Daughter’s safety and well-being. I guess you, Elaine, have a right to hear all the details of her hospitalization after being assaulted on the beach in Venice. All of this, of course, being a way of saying that yeah, Elaine, I have had serious panic attacks and stress this last year. I have been scared approximately 300 days out of 365. I have needed sleep. I have been worried about my health. I’ve been Depressed, and it hasn’t motivated me to start any revolutions or political movements or write any symphonies.

But you just cannot get over the fact that I used the term “happy pills.” It’s like an obsession with you. And you won’t stop blogging about it.

Ok Elaine, I apologize. They are not “happy pills.” In fact, the very existence of them, and my need for them, is about the unhappiest thing I can imagine. Ok, satisfied now? And if you are, then DROP IT.

First off, thanks to everybody for their concern about my Wayward Eldest Daughter issue. I kind of feel bad about plastering her mug all over internet, but she and the Skeptical Youngest are rather used to it by now. Kat knows I show off her picture to show how sweet she looks, so that you all can be doubly shocked by how very BAD she can be.

In answer to one of the questions in comments about bi-polar–actually she has been diagnosed. She just won’t stay in any one place long enough to follow through with either talk treatment or meds. That’s one of those things where she has a compliance problem.

On to other things–World of Warcraft is kicking my ass right now, y’all. I’m about to descend into mild geekiness, so if your eyes glaze over at the mention of games, you can skip this part. And if you’re a level 70 paladin with a zillion gold pieces and a hippogryph mount, bear with me here a minute.

I am a level 12 night elf. I am so low-level that killing crabs sometimes backfires on me. So I’m stuck in this ravine, dead, with bloodfeather harpies surrounding me, and every time I resurrect my body they attack me and kill me again, before I can use my hearthstone or teleport or even shadowmeld. And the spirit healer won’t talk to me.

Please, tell me it’s going to eventually make more sense. Please tell me that when I’m running around with a level 20 or more I’ll look back fondly on the days when death came sometimes every 5 minutes. Otherwise I’m gonna hurl this freaking laptop at the wall.

And with that, a link to a great post by Daisy about a subject dear to my heart: Where are all the old woman bloggers?

After turning 50 in September, I became somewhat obsessed with the age of bloggers. I discovered I could find a lot of male bloggers in the 50-and-older category. But where are the women?

I know, there are a few. And I am not talking about Arianna Huffington, who is 57 and a billionaire (and therefore looks 25), but about us ordinary bloggers, such as Raven, Jackie, Risa, JJ, Marion, Maitri and Shadocat. I try to find them and link them on my blog… they are like precious jewels.

I have wondered if the hyperventilating over WOMEN’S AGE might be the cause of this phenomenon; we might call it The Botox Effect. We cover up the “lines” in our writing, as we try to cover the lines in our face. We minimize that which makes us seem old. If there is something new we don’t understand, such as contemporary slang, we don’t dare ask for clarification and thereby give ourselves away. Perhaps, then, there are more of us than I realize? Many women pointedly do not provide their ages on their blogs, while men usually do; a silly, sexist and archaic cultural habit.

At times when I write about nostalgia, as I enjoy doing, I get replies from isolated people (who will not comment publicly, it is worth noting) thanking me for publicly remembering something that they agree needs recounting. But they say it in hushed, secretive emails, as if I have said something dirty out loud. THE PAST IS OLD, and therefore, not a good thing. NEW is good, new is revolutionary, new is a product that has been improved, reformulated, with all kinds of good shit added to it to make it a rockem-sockem, highly-evolved and BETTER thing… better car, better house, better suburb, better dishwashing liquid.

crossposted at superbabymama

image description: a very pretty girl with an L.A. cap, a pierced nose, a black tank top, luminous hazel eyes, and lots of freckles, is looking straight at the camera. Behind her are various people on the Venice boardwalk, including a couple of women with a child in a stroller. This is Wayward Eldest Daughter Kat.

She calls me collect from jail, freaking out, saying, “now, mama! Get me out now! Get me out of here! NOW!”

Mind you, she is in Santa Monica. I am in Wisconsin.

In the almost three years I’ve been blogging Kat has taken on mythic stature, this oldest child of mine who spent her teenage years in a fury of slammed doors, bad behavior, and heart-ache. I often have to search just to find something good to say about her, some piece of goodness that allows me to sleep at night, like the way she once kept a job for three whole months, or the time she didn’t do any drugs for a whole week.

And so it goes. She’s under observation, detoxing in jail, calling collect, making promises, going into angry tangents, scared, withdrawing, not knowing what the fuck is going to happen to her next.

She’ll see the judge on Thursday. She’s a cute girl who looks pitiful when she cries–that might still work in her favor.

My new year’s resolution: keep being honest about how truly weird life gets. And if she gets out, and you’re ever on the boardwalk in Venice, or at the drum circle, or by the graffiti wall, and you see her, tell her that her mama loves her. And the rest is up to her.

This year I’ll celebrate 3 years of blogging.

I ended 2007 laughing my ass off with Ashanti, both of us playing World of Warcraft and chasing some guy making choo choo train noises at him til he ran away.

I started 2007 in the hospital. I thought that was an omen, and at first it looked that way.

I lost Matthew, the son of my heart. Kat went to Venice and came home. Kat went in the hospital and came home. Kat went back to Venice again and came home again. Kat went back to Venice once again and has ended her tumultuous year in jail.

I became mobile, via my fiery red scooter. I left the Milwaukee hood and all its 13 years of memories to start all over again in this strange city to the north.

I met amazing women. I read some amazing things. I learned some hard lessons. I smoked a lot of weed and too many cigarettes. I stopped taking vicodin. I started blogging at feministe, and I still don’t know why, of all the unbelievably talented voices out there, they chose mine.

And now I’m going to bed. Good night, sweet dreams, and a better year ahead.

*crossposted at superbabymama

Let’s start off with Kay at The Gimp Parade:

Katie Jones is a second-grader in Lake County, Illinois, who has severe cerebral palsy and whose parents have sent her to school with a DNR order (Do Not Resuscitate) prominently attached to the back of her wheelchair. Taking that much at face value, the implications for Katie, her parents, her young classmates and school employees are complex and profound.

I’m going to let disability rights bloggers, and bloggers who actually have cp, do the talking here. Please be respectful of their voices, and remember that they are the true experts.

Trinity at The Strangest Alchemy:

There’s something about that that just really creeps me out, as someone who is very well acquainted with authorities who don’t really care whether you know what’s happening to you or not. As Amanda at Ballastexistenz has pointed out over and over in blog post after blog post, there are many different ways to be aware of things and many different ways to have that awareness respected or disrespected. Since the only thing I know of this child is that she apparently likes school, it makes the most sense to me, not knowing much about the whole thing, to try to give her as many of those good experiences as possible. CPR and the like might eventually facilitate that, so why the DNR? Why now? She’s not dying.

And the thing that really bothers me is the statement that only the doctors and parents understand. Don’t the people actually living with illnesses (and does she have one? All I see is these choking fits, which are for some reason “worsening”, despite that all she’s described as having is CP) understand far more than Mommy does? Like I say above, as Amanda and others point out, there are lots of different ways to be aware. And lots of ways in which severely disabled people are assumed not to be aware when they actually are.

Which is particularly disturbing given that all they mention in this article is that she has CP. The same thing I have. Which does not affect cognitive capacity at all, yet they’re talking in a way that suggests she’ll never be aware enough to tell anyone whether she wants to live.

F.R.I.D.A.:DNR on Wheelchair for Second Grader with Cerebral Palsy
Ms Crip Chick: Are We Not Worthy?

How unfortunate.
That.poor.family.
Seeing people “worse off” reminds me how small my struggles are in the scheme of things.
(Thank you, dear Lord.)
But I don’t get it… if she needs help in the bathroom,
She should stay home
They have internet programs now, and books,
Why does she even come?
She’s a detriment to others.
What selfish parents.
Our children shouldn’t have to sit next to her.
This is sickening.
A tube! I don’t want my kids to watch her eat!
If a machine has to breathe life into her lungs,
Is she really worthy of this air?
What if she DIES in the classroom?
I don’t want my kids to watch someone die!
Why are her parents sending her to school?
Anyways, if I was them, I’d want to be with my daughter in her final days…

These are all comments made by people on a Chicago Tribune story that FRIDA recently posted about a young school girl in Illinois who wears a big yellow Do Not Resuscitate* sign on her wheelchair.

The article is a hard read, largely because it’s written with the assumption that if you have CP (cerebral palsy) you’re going to pass any second. Also, I have a very difficult time with these ”right-to-die” stories because although I believe in personal liberties, these particular cases are based on the idea that life with a ventilator or any assistive technology is absolutely horrific. They’d rather be dead than be me. The ironic-but-sad thing is that ventilators, powerchairs, sign language, learning braille, crutches, feedings tubes—for the most part, they make life BETTER for people. Life happens to be of higher quality, you know, when you can actually do things like breathe. Ventilators tend to help with that.

However, what was “harder” about the story were the comments that followed afterwards. (The statements above.) It seems like although there have been many changes for disabled people (like the fact that we can go to school), these things are reminders that disgust for disabled people is still prevelant.

bint alshamsa:

Before you claim that I have no reason to believe that it isn’t pity that non-disabled people feel for my brothers and sisters, make sure you take the time to explain this sort of hatefulness.

I really shouldn’t have gone and read that article and the comments people left. I am crying and I know I shouldn’t be. Everyone assumes that I’m immune to this sort of thing. I am, mostly. I mean, I’ve heard all sorts of ableist remarks in my lifetime, but what person with a disability hasn’t? I can usually spit out of all sorts of sardonic responses when this stuff occurs. Everyone has something that you can use to shoot them down if they really get out of line. That’s usually enough for interactions involving one person or a small group of people. However, I’ve never learned to be emotionally equipped to take the sort of hatred I just read without breaking down inside for a minute.

You know, people with disabilities really take a lot of shit off of people. We put up with the casual use of words like “retard”, “nut job”, “lunatic”, “vegetable”, every damned day. We generally don’t go around blowing up any nursing homes prisons just because we know how inhumane they are even though some folks have no problem with this sort of “direct action”. We put up with shitty housing, illegally inaccessible government buildings, and condescending store clerks every effing day. We are raped and told that it was our own fault. Yet, we still put up with that shit.

Shiva at Biodiverse Resistance–When is it wrong to save the life of a child?

Despite the title of the Chicago Tribune article being “Schools ponder role as child nears death”, there doesn’t actually seem to be anything here to explain why she is supposedly near death, apart from the vague “increased susceptibility to infection” (which is true for a lot of people with a lot of impairments, but doesn’t necessarily prevent them, with medical people who actually regard them as human beings with the same right to life as any other, from having a “normal” life expectancy). Katie has “severe” cerebral palsy; from how she looks in the photos of her on the Chicago Tribune website, i know several people with CP as severe as hers is, who were not expected to die at the age of 8.

It seems that with this case, just like those of another Katie and of Ashley X, Katie is being talked about as if she has absolutely no means of communicating her own wishes, or even of having wishes about her life - yet, unlike Ashley or Katie Thorpe, Katie Jones actually has a communication aid, as shown in the 4th photo, which the caption explicitly says “enables her to express her thoughts” - yet there is no indication at all that she has even been told about this “Do Not Resuscitate” order, let alone asked whether she would want it. (Also like those other 2 cases, it seems as if misinformation is being spread about the child’s impairment - which in all 3 is nothing more than cerebral palsy - in order to make it look both less familiar and more “horrific”, in order to justify horrific “treatment”, than it is.)

I got World of Warcraft for Christmas. If you don’t see much of me for a while, that’s why.

This news that made me happy.
Another story that has been posted all over, so here are the links you should check out for the best coverage:
Nezua

Lakota Secede from United States of America

I GUESS THIS MEANS the Presidential Candidates don’t need to do quite as much campaigning in the Northern plains area of the US?

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

Lakota Freedom Delegation
Kai
No Snow Here
Lucky White Girl

I dedicate this song. To my sisters who had to buy cheap toys at the dollar store, the kind that will be broken by New Year’s. To all my sisters who stood in indifferent lines to get Toys for Tots, who sold plasma to buy a meager Christmas meal, to my sister who can’t afford a tree or ornaments. This song is for you.

The Twelve Days of Welfare

On the first day of welfare
the system gave to me
A worker that never did work

On the second day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the third day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the fourth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
A five hour wait
no call back
no fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the fifth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the sixth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the seventh day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Maximus* and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No fo-od stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the eighth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfair
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the ninth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
“Motivation” meetings
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No-o food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the tenth day of welfare
the system gave to me…
Ten angry talk shows
“Motivation” meetings
Phony baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No-o food stamps and
A worker that never did work

On the eleventh day of welfare
the system gave to me
A notice of decision
Ten angry talk shows
“Motivation” meetings
Phony Baloney job search
Maximus and Workfare
One termination
No ben-e-fits
A five hour wait
No call back
No food stamps and
A worker that never did work

Written by the amazing moms at Welfare Warriors.

*Maximus is just one of the private, wealthy corporations that now runs welfare in Milwaukee.
crossposted at Super Babymama