feminist blogs

In the event this was you earlier tonight:

Accessing, specifically, 12 pages primarily in the Matriarchs and The Family Cactus categories, before I took my blog offline for awhile, please, for both our sakes, go away*. If I wanted to be in communication with you, I would be in communication with you. I’ve worked hard to make sure you can stay in touch with your granddaughters (and thankfully my husband is willing to serve as proxy in this matter), and I’m happy to send gifts at all the right holiday occasions (have you noticed I’m much better about that since we stopped speaking?), but there is a reason I haven’t been in touch since early in 2006 - it’s because I don’t want to talk to you.

I feel much better about, and emotionally generous toward our involuntarily shared history, when we’re not in touch. I like that. It helps me to remember the good stories. It helps me remember that I love you.

If you have some instinct to re-state, icily and indignantly, that you just don’t get it - what happened? why? - I’ve been explaining the what and the why for decades, and only clued into the fact that you would never hear me, much less change, a relatively short time ago.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly yet expecting different results, then consider this my declaration of significantly improved mental health.

Now it’s possible that wasn’t actually you tonight (in which case, apologies for the mysterious and now obstreperous behavior, everyone else), just as it’s possible it wasn’t my ex the other day, accessing 22 pages mostly in the Exes category from the ISP of the specific place I know she frequents (which may explain the other recent outage to others of you out there).

I know this is the internet, and I’m the one who put all of this out there. I get that.

But if you want to show me that you care about me at all (I am not, of course, counting on this), please respect my privacy anyway. Do me that favor, if you do nothing else for me.

You have two granddaughters, and yes, you usually only get to see them once a year or whenever a conference takes you to the mainland, but there were plenty of years of my childhood when I only saw you once a year, because that was how you wanted it.

You didn’t want me; you made that incredibly clear. I was the inconvenience standing between you and any number of adventures that were more exciting than childrearing. And yeah, there were fringe benefits for me (like riding out Hurricane David with you in a St. Thomas warehouse, what a vacation visit with my mother that was!).

But I don’t want anything like that kind of life for my daughters. Relative to my having attended in the range of eight schools between kindergarten and the second grade alone, my eight year old daughter still lives in the house where she was conceived. Ours is a run-down house, and a rental to boot, but I’m damned proud of the fact that I have now lived in one place for ten years - four years having been my previous record. (One reason why, though I only lived there from 1984-1988, after my dad and stepmom kicked me out and you had to take me back - I do, in my heart, regard Hawaiʻi as one of the places I can somewhat authentically think of as “home,” despite the acute postcolonial guilt I felt, even at thirteen, though you, of course, never did).

And really, it’s okay. Hell, I’m the one who gave you this book, a sympathetic memoir about a woman who’d left her children. Maybe in your perusals of this blog, before I turned the lights out earlier tonight, you got to this part:

A normal person would be able to move (construct a new bridge, repair the old one, navigate some other path across), but I have never been like that, nor has my mother been, or she would not have surrendered her custody of me, with no observed reluctance, on so many occasions when I was young - seeking new locales, lovers, and “lifestyles” as she saw fit.

I don’t begrudge her that, any more than I begrudge Maria Housden, author of Unraveled, who, after the death of one of her four children, stunned everyone she knew by seeking a divorce, granting full custody of her surviving kids to her ex-husband. She then struck out on her own, initially, for an artist’s colony, of all apparently self-indulgent sites. Her story placed in sharp relief the double-standards by which women are viewed as parents, relative to how fathers are judged. No one questions that men need identities beyond marriage and parenting. Housden got hers; so, too, did my mother.

My God, do you see how far I bend over backwards to find honorable, even feminist analogies via which to generously reconstruct my own childhood experience? Did Maria Housden share with her kids the joys of fishbowling when they were quite young? And then tell, at each Thanksgiving, the hilarious story about her young daughter being so stoned that she turned to the hippie next to her in the cramped car, and, after saying “I’m going to eat you up,” bit into the guy’s kneecap? I’m guessing not.

What’s even more curious? How you’d give up custody of me, more often than not, while simultaneously pursuing an option that would have given you custody of Lori Jo, your brother Billie’s daughter. Because he and his wife were alcoholics, and you were so much better than that. During one of my visits, you even showed me a draft of a children’s book, Evra, which in some fashion concerned Lori Jo. (Interesting how you always had a searingly sharp sense of irony, except when it was your behavior that was ironic; then you were just being rational and benevolent!)

You had a special kind of devotion to children’s issues, it’s true. But I was peculiarly excluded from this category, “children.” You made this even more clear when you took a nude picture of me (seated in the lap of one of your lovers from the period immediately following your leaving my father), and an artist’s reproduction made from that, and hung it from every one of the countless houses you lived in, while also sending copies to everyone we knew, and frequently discussing how, in the picture, I looked so sultry, beyond my years, etc. (Incidentally? Before his death, Billie told me about how he always thought that was inappropriate).

I’m not trying to get my childhood back. It’s gone, and that’s fine. But I’m not going to deprive my daughters of the intrinsic value of this time in their lives. Which is what would happen, to some degree, if you and I were in touch, because the effort is always uniquely draining.

Listen, I do care about you. And I’m really not obsessing on all of this stuff constantly. But you have no clue! And I doubt you can help it. You are, after all, your mother’s daughter (though God knows, you improved on that template).

And yes, I am yours. But I’m the one who did break the pattern of us. I’m the one who did not abandon her children at any number of points on the map whenever whimsy (in your case) or drunkenness (in your mothers) happened to strike.

The bottom line - that it’s my daughters who deserve and require my attention, not you - hasn’t changed from when (this most recent round in) our estrangement began. (And if they decide to become mothers, I hope they’ll do their part to improve on the generational template. No doubt, by the time they are grown, I will have given them plenty of things to legitimately complain about.)

You always joked how it was no accident, your moving all the way to Hawaiʻi, while your mother remained in Virginia. You don’t suppose it’s merely because airfare is expensive (although of course, there’s that too) that I haven’t been back to Hawaiʻi since 1993, and that I ultimately came back to Virginia, do you?

There may be a time when I’m ready to talk to you again. If you push it, it may never happen. And there is nothing I want less than I want that. (Re-read last sentence as needed. Now do you get it?)

I love you. Now please leave me alone.

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* Or if you must read here, for the love of God, have the decency to use a feed reader.

[See note re: problem w/ text size*.]

In lieu of the still-unfinished essay referenced yesterday, I give you this**.

My mother with Barack Obama, December 16, 2004, Honolulu, HI.

Someday I’ll find, and post, the one with my maternal grandmother and her hero, Oliver North. (Because I’m nothing if not fair and balanced.)

Plus the ones of my paternal grandpa (who raised me on C-SPAN, God bless him) with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ford.

For more goofiness, see this old post with pics of the late, great Senator Paul Wellstone, who went to high school with my dad; Wellstone’s mom and my grandmother also worked together in the cafeteria; the families also got together, on occasion, outside of school functions. (Did I mention the young Mr. Wellstone - for whom, years later - I did in fact vote, when I lived in Minnesota - looks quite fetching in a skirt?)

For better and for worse, the political thing has always been in the blood.

Not to worry though, the chances of my running for office are pretty much nil. Not only did I experiment with some blow while I was a teenager in Hawaiʻi, I also have an arrest record.

Ironically, the Olympia, Washington cop thought I had cocaine on me at the time; I didn’t. Rather, I had unlabeled capsules of another white powder in an unlabeled plastic baggie. Somehow he didn’t believe that the capsules contained boric acid: a homeopathic remedy for yeast infections. So they kept me locked up until they’d tested every last one of them. Following which he sheepishly emerged from the lab, asking whether I had any more capsules back at my dorm, so I could take care of my, ahem, “little problem.”

Needless to say, I was itching to get out of there.

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* Tech note: WordPress is doing something weird with text size, which renders the individual post with too large text, and the post as it appears on main page of blog with size of title’s text too small. No idea why, trying to figure that out now. Will delete this note after troubleshooting.

** Intended also as a follow-up to a conversation that started here. Because this is the fun response, and I’ve given plenty of energy in recent times to political discourse that is, necessarily, painfully serious.

I have a monster of a post presently percolating in ‘The Past is Not Dead‘ category, the draft subtitle for which is

“In which narratives concerning the Superbowl, prostitution politics, Black History Month, the U.S. Department of Labor, and my ex-girlfriend intersect.”

It’s all about Minnesota, of course. (My tangential commentary du jour on said state, centering around its infamy as a site of unspeakable cold, can be found here. Needless to say, when Minneapolis made the news this morning for its -13° temperature - without factoring in windchill - I was not sorry I’d left.)

Is this, perhaps, prohibitively unwieldy for a blog post’s subtitle? (If one concedes that blog post subtitles are ever warranted in the first place.) Sure, but so’s my history, so whatevahz. (Hmmm. This is what happens when one is a regional and cultural schizophrenic: remnants of pidgin from high school years spent in rural Hawaiʻi* leak through, in the course of referencing my four-year stint in living hell Minnesota, while writing from the American South which gave us Faulkner and thus, my “past is not dead” blog category. Damn you, hybridity!)

Anyway, the damned thing is taking longer than I’d expected to write. Which maybe means something. Like it should be a story rather than a blog entry. And there’s stuff I’m going to have to fact-check. I have a pretty good long-term memory, but when the material is a decade old and involves other living people, of course have to do my research going to do my research.

(Then again, since I am writing about events going back to 1993, perhaps it won’t kill me if I can’t finish the story in the next few days, or even weeks.)

Other things I’ve been up to:

• Feeding my addiction to Wordie. Words contributed thus far (i.e., not already listed by other Wordies) include bligot, wrasslin’, adjectivally, The Rapture, hybridity, garrotte, blognosticate, on the q.t. (thank you, Scooter Libby!), and my all-time favorite word, again from the Hawaiʻi period: humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa.
• Recovering (still) from last month’s surgery. Hence the Demerol. The secondary problem of my surgically-induced hematoma in the abdominal wall (previously bitched about here) continues to be unpleasant.
• Finding God. Or rather, looking up from the incision site within my aggrieved navel (a different kind of navel-gazing, to be sure: but still, navel-gazing) and remembering God, among people I trust, in ways that make sense to me.
• Watching an inordinate number of movies. Via cable: In Her Shoes. (Granted, a plot line revolving in part around high heels has its questionable elements, but it satisfies the requirements as set forth in Alison Bechdel’s The Rule.) Via theater: Notes on a Scandal. (I was terrified to note the extent to which Judi Dench’s character reminded me of one of my exes.) Via our Science Museum’s IMAX facility, Happy Feet. Via DVD: Crash.
• Listening to wonderfulness that is Corntooth, the bluegrass/country/folk rock brainchild of various of our friends, some of whom are better known for their work in local punk, rock, and/or metal outfits like Alabama Thunderpussy, RPG, and Lamb of God. Who can possibly resist Janie and Matt Conner’s perfectly complementary crooning (these two aren’t just married; they’re married) over so much brilliantly executed bluegrassy rock instrumentation? At Mark and Karrie Morton’s recent wedding reception, I got Janie to promise me that Corntooth will have an EP out soon, and I’m holding her to it.

*Kapaʻa High School was rural enough by most folks’ standards, but I lived in Hanalei. Round trip journeys to and from school (down a winding two-lane road - reduced to one lane at bridge crossings) were around 50 miles. That’s what I mean by “rural.”

Tags: Corntooth, Friends, Hawaiʻi, Literary, Minnesota, Movies, The Body, The Past is Not Dead, WordieCorntooth, Friends, Hawaiʻi, Literary, Minnesota, Movies, The Body, The Past is Not Dead, Wordie