feminist blogs

I am nearing the end of my precious time of solitude, and I have a lot of thoughts about what I need to do from this point forward. Whenever I think about what I want, and feel a strong inclination towards something, I wonder about this inability some people have to know or act upon what they want. For me, the act of writing something down feels like I am exposing myself as a possible hypocrite if I don't follow through or if I change my mind.

The thing is, I think some people get hung up. They think knowing what one wants means knowing all of the whys and hows of achieving it, as well as all of the potential outcomes. Rather than acting, they calculate the odds and worry over strategies. And it's not always the other person they worry about...it's their own shifting desires. What if I want something, start to work towards it, and then change my mind?

I am fortunate enough to be able to, at least somewhat, put those things out of my mind. 90% of the time, I have no clue how I am going to go about getting what I want...nor do I have full confidence in the fact that what I want today is what I will want tomorrow...or weeks, months, or years from now. But I know I am resilient, so I will always recover. I know I am a good person, so if the object of my desire is a person, and those desires change, I will treat that person with the appropriate amount of care and respect. I know I take good care of myself, so I will not desire things to the point of hurting myself over them. Also, I know my priorities...and just because I have to sideline something for a bit to accomplish other goals, it does not mean I am a failure. Well, not usually, anyway.

So, with that preface, and after hours and hours of staring at the walls in luscious aloneness...here is the list of things I feel like I need to change in my life:

1. Movement - this one appears on all of my lists forever. At this point in my life, I tend to gravitate towards stillness. The kids and I need to move more often.
2. Environment - it really is time for me to work on the physical environment of my immediate surroundings.
3. Intention - More planning is necessary for me to accomplish all of the things I want to do.
4. Alignment - I need to work on aligning my actions with my ideals.
5. Integrity - This goes along with alignment. Too often, I think especially when I am not planning ahead, things get fragmented and I don't accomplish what I set out to accomplish.
6. Constant connection with my creative self, and an outlet for that creation - None of this "the kids interfere with my creative life" bullshit. They need to be included. I have plenty of time to create when they are asleep or I am away from them. I don't need to worry about being time-limited so much.
7. Community - Damnit, as much as I have loved the solitude, I need to be more active in my community...of friends, and on the whole.
8. Education - Both the kids and mine. We need to continue to create opportunities for learning and trying new things...even if we sometimes fail miserably.

***

There are actual activities that go with these actions. For one thing, to handle the issues of movement, environment, creativity, community, and education...as well as integrity, I am going to work with the kids to clean up our landscaping and create some nice garden spots in our yard...a little at a time. And document our progress in some sort of creative way as we haphazardly take on this project together.

In terms of community...I have often had the idea that I should start doing my monthly potlucks again. I get so freaked out about large numbers of people in my house, though...so I think I really just need to put forth a good effort towards inviting friends over to make food with me and have more intimate dinner gatherings more often. I have been saying this forever...but I think it's really time for me to make good on it. Sometimes it feels so freaking overwhelming to have to live my life AND to have to socialize with the people who make my life worth living (not to mention possible, because in a lot of cases, these people are providing me with a good bit of support, and they deserve to be catered to on occasion!) If I plan it, I can make it work.

In terms of my personal creative life, I think I am in a good place with that. I have several outlets and a wonderful creative partner who inspires me. I feel very lucky and I have no desire to mess with that other than to just keep things going.

I will be thinking about more of this stuff later...as the day progresses, I will slowly formulate a plan. The kids will be home tonight, all bubbly and no longer tired of their tired old mama, who herself will not be tired to receive them. We will hug and bubble over and read and kiss goodnight, and tomorrow morning, we will embark upon a new season together, with new ideas, new rhythms, new habits and patterns...and renewed love and appreciation for our little life together.

<3

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Now playing: Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - Nobody's Baby Now
via FoxyTunes

Monk declared chores unconstitutional today. He was so excited after reading this little pocket version of the constitution and declaration of independence that he CALLED ME to tell me that he wouldn't be doing his chores anymore because it is "involuntary servitude."

When I replied that I would no longer be buying his groceries under that same amendment, he insisted that parenthood is voluntary. HA! So I told him if he didn't want to do his chores, he could, instead, write a 5 page essay on the constitution...and that's NOT involuntary servitude, it's COMPULSORY EDUCATION.

:P

I assume this will be added to throughout the week, but here goes...

Lessons I have learned while traveling with the kids:

Necessary Hotel Amenities: indoor pool, in-room refrigerator, in-room coffee maker, television with cable. Beds? Optional. (Coley ended up sleeping on the floor both nights after falling out of the bed the first hour of the first night.)

Kids Eat Free means you have to choose from a very unhealthy menu and you still end up paying for it.

No matter how subtle the incline, if there is grass, the kids will find an excuse to roll around in it.

You actually can skin your face, if you are Coley.

There is nothing cuter than a pair of giant river otters...except maybe a whole mess of penguins.

Evidently, I am attractive to parrots.

Always always always eat a meal before going to the art museum.

Never bring your fragile-egoed 6-year old aspiring artist into a gallery of youth artwork. He WILL fall on the floor and cry about how he will NEVER be that good...and he wants to go home NOW.

If you are at a truck stop rest room, and the boys have to use the bathroom, better to bring them in the ladies room than chew your fingernails while you watch countless seedy-looking men stream into the restroom you just sent your boys into.

No matter how much you spend and how much effort you exert, the boys will talk endlessly about how great the hotel was (and the swimming pool) (and the cable television) and not mention anything else. You can count this as a victory. You did, after all, choose the hotel.

Also, three days after arriving home, when you spend a simple day at the park and get stuck in the rain and your impossible to please 6 year old tells you "This day was more funner than most other days." Don't take it personally. Just smile, and nod in agreement...and muse over his ability to stay in the present.

Just happened to stumble upon two school-related free-speech issues & thought I should link them up here:

On Monday, March 19th, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments in the case informally known as "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

High school student Joseph Frederick was subjected to school suspension for his display of a homemade banner while standing across the street from school property, albeit during normal school hours.

While initial court rulings held in favor of the Juneau, Alaska school district, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed in favor of Frederick.

The Ninth Circuit determined that the school district did not have the right to unduly restrict the public demonstration by Frederick when he elected to unfurl and display his 14-foot banner with the words, "Bong Hits 4 Jesus."

The school district appealed to the Supreme Court.

BONG HITS 4 JESUS IS ABOUT FREE SPEECH, NOT DRUGS via Brenda Stardom, see also News From the Sandbox.

he initial suspensions resulted after the students knowingly went against administrators' wishes and said the word "vagina" on Friday night at an open mic session sponsored by the high school literary magazine Reflections.

School administrators had asked the students to either not read the monologue or to omit the stanza in which the word "vagina" appeared, saying the word would be inappropriate for younger members of the audience who were expected to be in attendance.

But the students went ahead and together finished the line: "I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina's country."

Suspension postponed for students who said 'vagina' via Fetch Me My Axe see also Susie Bright. (Funny, I totally also responded to that article with a desire to run into the nearest school and yell "Vagina!!!!")

"Why We Banned Legos" is an article in a magazine I subscribe to called Rethinking Schools. I wish the article was accessible online without fee, but unfortunately it is not, so I will attempt to summarize it here.

Basically, a group of teachers in an after school program at a school in Washington State were struck by the social dynamics surrounding the construction of a Lego town. They found that kids were excluding other kids and hording "cool pieces" in an insidious way that wasn't always vocally objected to (in fact, many of the excluded kids seemed resigned to exclusion, in spite of the fact that they later proved that they wished to participate and did not know how to break through the invisible wall). So, the teachers banned the Legos and created a unit study to examine the issues of wealth, power, privilege, and inclusion with their students (ages 5-9).

The original article goes on to describe a fascinating and well-organized exploration of this concept designed by the teachers. Students were asked to voice their opinions about property rights, ownership, and power...and they examined those opinions by taking field trips and playing games that were geared towards helping the children question the notion that power can somehow be benign and that really brought the idea of meritocracy into sharp focus for these children.

However, the reinterpretation of this article is somewhat staggering and reveals much about how strongly we want to protect the idea that the capitalist system of meritocracy. An article was sent to a homeschooling list I subscribe to that basically completely misinterprets the lesson in such a way that it could only have been intentional. I responded to the article thusly:

I suggest you read the actual article on which this editorial is based before leaping to the conclusion that the crafters of this lesson were in any way advocating that landowners be stripped of their property rights so big businesses can have them. I have this issue, and I have only skimmed the article, but I find the article below to be grossly slanted and inaccurate.

[...]

In fact, now that I think about it...it would be a really good homeschooling lesson on media to read this editorial and then go back and read the actual article about the lesson to note the evident slant of the editorialist.

Of course, the response to this was to skip right to communism. One of my fellow listmates said, basically, that while he believed the article wasn't supporting the usurpation of property by big business, he did feel that the lesson was promoting communism, to which I replied:

I imagine the responses on this list will also be useful in a study of media, as well as individual responses to the media. It is interesting to me that Brad has immediately decided that the only possible system of shared wealth is communism, and therefore declared any questioning of how property rights are handled in our society to be answered before they are even asked.

I think critical thinking would encouage children to experiment with several alternative methods of creating equity, and from what I have read in the original article, it looks like that is exactly what the children were encouraged to do.

Of course, all of that was before I actually read the article. hahaha. I had skimmed it, but had not had time to sit down and read it. Later that night, I did so, and found the lesson to be quite well-planned and executed, and nothing at all like it had been described by the author of the editorial linked above. So, this morning when I found another response that insisted the lesson was an insidious method of brainwashing our children to accept the tenets of communism (evil, evil communism!) I responded:

If you read the article, you would find that property rights were a very minute portion of the lesson. The main objective of the lesson was to encourage egalitarian and inclusive behavior among the children, while at the same time exploring the larger issues of power and privilege. Also, there was a lot of discussion and insight in the article about how we tend to assume that power is benign if it is not misused in such a way that would spark verbal protest. There was a really interesting portion of the lesson where arbitrary point values were applied to legos (to mirror how privilege based on skin color, family of origin, and other factors give some of us an unearned advantage over others), and those who "won" were allowed to make rules for the next round of the game.

Additionally, there is a huge leap from discussing equitable sharing of resources by a community and stripping individuals of rights to give them to corporations. The point of the experiment, and I think the objective of a communal social order (of which communisim is ONE example), is to distribute wealth and power in such a way that all members of society have an opportunity to participate. Perhaps we haven't seen such a social order yet in our lifetimes, but I am not sure why anyone would object to exploring how power and privilege operate in our society to give unearned advantage to some and undeserved disadvantage to others.

Later, someone equated the lesson with that urban legend that has a child skipping to school with all of her wonderful school supplies, only to get there and find that she is FORCED to dump her supplies in a communal bucket and comes away with *gasp* INFERIOR CRAYONS! Evidently, those individuals who send their children to public school to mix with the masses are very indignant about this concept of forced sharing. I gotta say, if you hate it so much, keep yr kids home. You won't hear me complaining about the taxes I am forced to share with the school district in spite of the fact that I have chosen to not participate. We LIVE in a society. We all benefit from its resources, and those resources include the other people in our communities. If you can't bear the thought of your child going to school and sharing his or her crayons, honey, I dunno what to tell you! At any rate, my response to the idea that "social engineering" was overtaking our schools was this:

That would be an interesting thing to discuss, but it does not have anything to do with the redistribution of legos that were already assumed to be a shared resource. I am curious how you think this experiment, and the exploration into how power and resources are shared, is equivalent to social engineering, and yet the very world we live in and are shaped by is not.

In fact, I think that's an interesting thing to think about. Do we all just assume that the way we live and the society we are shaped by is natural? And therefore any attempt to question and/or reorganize the order of things is somehow unnatural, or "engineered?"

And then I decided to explore further, and read a discussion about a reaction to the article (there is very little actual reading of the article in any of this. Mostly, people were just responding to the slanted reactions to the article, which led many to believe that the teachers noted that students were not behaving appropriately and therefore they simply yanked the legos away in a reactive manner, rather than the actual reality that the teachers got together and planned a very sophisticated lesson surrounding the removal and subsequent reestablishment of lego privileges, which encouraged the children to examine the issues of ownership, power, inclusion, and equity.

Boy, do I ever NOT have my finger on the pulse of America. What I read on this board shocked me. People are actually decrying the lesson these teachers were attempting to teach, and basically saying "children will be children" and therefore should not be encouraged to examine the power dynamics that come into play when groups of children exclude other children. In fact, I imagine that many of the people on that board believe that it's probably preferable that children learn to grab what is theres without considering how their unearned privilege influences their "rights" of ownership.

While I realize there are many within the public school system who are trying desperately to counteract this idea that the distribution of wealth and resources in this country is somehow equitable and meritocratic, I am frankly somewhat appalled by the response to this article by people who are allegedly parents of children. Are there really that many people who are so opposed to their children learning that perhaps our system is less equitable than those in positions of privilege would lead you to believe that they need to demonize an earnest attempt to point out the inherent inequities of our system and work with children to combat those inequities in the classroom?

Obviously I am in total support of any curriculum which moves our children towards examining "rights" that are essentially extensions of unearned privilege. I am concerned, however, that this is such a controversial thing to stand for. If we can't even address these issues with something so benign as Legos without a firestorm of opposition, how on earth do we address global poverty, hunger, and health care crises?

Coley crawled into my bed at 4 in the morning, complaining of a sick stomach. I was wary, not wanting to wake up to a vomity bed, but I welcomed him anyway.

A minute later, he was running for the toilet and retching. I rubbed his back...got him some water...and it was back to bed.

Snuggling in, Coley put his arms around my neck. "I love you, mama" he said, paused, then asked "Mom? How does barf come up?"

Coley finished lunch early today, after deciding he was going to make a map of "porta-potty land" after lunch. He was far too excited about the creation of this imaginary domain to sit still a minute longer, and so he set about gathering implements of drawing while Monk and I lingered over our bean tacos.

It wasn't long before the Bird (as he is less formally known around these parts) became exquisitely frustrated.

"I CAN'T DRAW A FREAKING SQUARE!" he lamented.

"Try again, Coley. It's really not very easy for anyone to draw a perfect square."

So he tried again, and so he became more frustrated, the tears welling in his eyes as his pitch began to rise "I'M TOO STUPID TO DRAW A SQUARE!"

It was Monk who came to the rescue first.

"I know how to draw a square, Coley. Let me show you. You just make an X, like so, and then connect the lines, like these. See? Even *I* can't draw a perfect square."

Coley tried Monk's X technique and failed miserably in his own mind. The X-squares just didn't measure up to his idea of perfection.

"I HATE squares" Harumphed the bird (a sentiment that made me chuckle). "I'm going to draw TRIANGLES instead."

You could practically SEE the lightbulb click on over Monk's head. "Cole! You silly...you can draw a square by drawing two TRIANGLES...like so."

And so it came to pass that the children learned geometry over bean tacos.

All hail porta-potty land! Where the potties are square by virtue of triangulation!

Being someone who has somewhat out-of-the-mainstream personal and political ideals sometimes presents critical challenges. For one thing, it takes a fuck of a long time to find people who have similar ideals with whom to cultivate community. Not that I can't cultivate community with dissimilar folks, but there are certain ideals that I hold that REQUIRE a certain amount of "on-the-same-page"ism in order for a relationship to work.

However, it is also true that being outside of the mainstream in political and personal ideals presents logistical challenges which frequently lead to the necessity of compromising those ideals in the name of sanity...or at least convenience. Which is totally understandable to me, but nevertheless disconcerting when close friends become victims of necessity.

I woke up the other day and suddenly realized the community I worked hard to cultivate has disappeared - or at least shifted dramatically. I spent about a day this week in crisis mode, wondering where the fuck I was going to find like-minded folks to recreate some measure of what I have lost...not to mention the time to do that. I have to admit, I started to feel somewhat hopeless about the whole thing, wanting to just say FUCK IT ALL. Why DO I always choose the difficult things? Is it stubbornness on my part, or is it a sincere desire to enact change through the little bit of personal activism I am capable of participating in?

It was M who pulled me out. I went to pick up her son for our daily routine, and I mentioned this shift in ideal of our other, mutualish friend. I told M I was feeling somewhat cast adrift by the whole thing. She looked at me and asked flat out whether I was considering the same shift. "No! No...absolutely not." and then she said, simply "Well, we won't abandon you, Lainie. We are in this together."

I know it sounds incredibly cheesy, but wow, did that ever knock me on my ass. I almost cried. Yes, I have abandonment issues that extend to my political beliefs. hahaha. But, also...just having someone fill a need with the perfect words was like having a life preserver tossed to me. Granted, there is a long rope on that sucker, and it will take some time for me to find my way all the way back to the boat...but perhaps along the way I will pick up others who have been cast adrift and we can all get reeled back in together.

And, so it is. This constant ebb and flow. This everlasting shifting of friends, perspectives, ideology. It has always been this way, and probably always will be. I just have to remind myself that I never have had to tread water for very long, and even if I do - I am a fucking strong swimmer and I can do any god damn thing I want.

So, um, just out of curiosity...are there any austin area homeschoolers who are somewhat freakish and way left on the political spectrum who might want to help me rebuild my battered community? I'm currently accepting applications.

(I should add that this shift in my friends' ideology - or at least practice - has in no way altered my love for them...it has just presented certain logistical challenges to our relationships that weren't there previously. I totally understand the decisions that have been made, and they have absolutely nothing to do with me, personally. They are decisions that have been made for good reasons, and I totally support those decisions.)

Redneck Mother posted about awkward conversations that can arise from the seemingly universal question of "and what grade are YOU in."

My initial response when people question why we homeschool is "Because I'm an anarchist" - which usually shuts people up. No one wants to know more about being an anarchist. If they were to ask what being an anarchist means to me (which no one ever has. hahahah) I would probably say something sassy like "It means whatever you want it to mean."

But I just thought of another smart ass remark to the "why aren't your kids in school" question. I could say something like "Because if I sent them to school, I could no longer threaten to send them to school when they piss me off."

I mean, seriously...if I sent my kids to school, I might have to start going to church just so I could threaten them with the prospect of eternal damnation!

It's totally a slippery slope, man!

I am really impressed with the level of math cognition Coley has been demonstrating lately. I know his brother always amazed me, but somehow I feel like we have been selling Coley short in the brains department. Not that we weren't aware that he had a certain amount of intellect, but I have always found him to be more verbally/physically expressive than logically.

However, today, he blew me away.

Cole: What's 4500 plus 4500 (This is a game we like to play)
Me: 9000
Monk: No! It's nine HUNDRED (Monk has been kind of a misdirected know-it-all lately)
Me: No...It is 9000. 450+450 is 900; 45+45 is 90; 4.5+4.5 is 9...etc.
Cole: Yeah, Monk! (sibling rivalry) Besides, 4500 plus 4500 CAN'T be 900!
Me: Why? (Hoping and praying that he is about to say what I think he is about to say)
Cole: Because 4500 is MORE than 900.

I think this is HUGE concept for a five year old to grasp, and I'm very pleased that he gets it. So, we went on to discuss sums of different numbers, increasing them by tens and hundreds and noting the relationships. And then Coley holds up a tiny bite of pizza next to a big slice of pizza and says:

Cole: What is this plus that, mom?
Me: Well, they aren't like terms, so you can't really add them together like that.
Cole: Yeah...it's just tiny piece and big slice
Me: Right. Like, you can't add a dog and a cat. If you have a cat plus a cat, you have two cats...but if you have a dog and a cat, you have one dog and one cat...or maybe two pets.
Cole: Yeah!
Me: Or, like, a car plus a tree is...?
Monk: Not a good combination.

Hahahaha.

Yeah. This is the kind of stuff I need to be paying attention to. It fills me up. Ah.