feminist blogs

[Written in recognition of this, my fifth wedding anniversary with Jeff.]

Potpourri: languorous Saturday with laptop on front porch, Dave Matthews Band in my headphones, espresso in my I *heart* Virginia coffee cup, cats at my feet, the kids and the husband asleep, the sun piercing through layered veils of leaves to make funny patterns on my fingers as I type. Opening, continuing with incomplete sentences. Email from one crazy relative, sitemeter tracks left behind (I'm pretty sure) by Teresa, whom I tried to call last night, and then couldn't tell if the call had been connected or not (I heard dead silence, so either she picked up before there was any discernable ringing sound, or it never went through).

I shouldn't have called her, I guess, but I couldn't help being reminded of her, on two counts: 1) We were over at Chip's, and he was playing some Pixies, and 2) the incident earlier this week, when Teresa's phone accidentally called mine, resulting in three minutes of strange rustling noises, fragments of her deep, rich voice laughing with some other woman, the recording ending as they arrived at some cafe, perhaps, or at least somewhere with clinking noises and, just above the auditory fray, Diana Krall singing (of all things) I love being here with you:

I love the east, I love the west
North and south, they're both the best
But I only want go there as a guest
Cause I love being here with you...

North/ south/ east/ west (apparently) directionless, suggestible me.

Even on this, my fifth wedding anniversary with Jeff, I will not apologize for the fact that I love her, that I love a great many people with whom I was not destined to share my life in this way.  I'm glad for what I have, and I'm no longer prone to mourning whatever it is I may have lost in the process of choosing this fork in the road over that one: male partner versus female one, east coast versus west, motherhood and monogamy versus the freedom to wander as I otherwise might have pleased.  The fates, I tend to think, arranged things this way; it is a gift that I am precisely here, with Jeff and the girls (who would not exist, in their present forms, had I not traveled this specific route).

Also last night - before we made it over to Chip's - Jeff's ex called.  Jeff was in the convenience store, and I was in the truck singing along to Hey Jude at the top of my lungs, when his cell rang.  My husband has that ringer feature which announces the caller's name, resulting sometimes in amusing mispronounciations. (So while it was "Leigh" who called, the phone said it like "Lie.")

I considered answering (Jeff wouldn't have minded), if only to announce how funny it was that she should call right then, since Jeff and I had earlier been talking about my crazy blonde ex of the same name (though hers is - or at least was - spelled Lee; although she's since moved onto new names and identities). That's something of a sport for Jeff and me: swapping blonde-exes-named-Leigh/Lee stories.  "Well, my Leigh did this."  "Oh yeah, well my Lee did that."  (Alas: in all contests over whose Leigh/Lee stories are crazier, I always win.)  But I resisted the urge, and let it go to voice mail, and when he got back in the truck I told him and we laughed about it.

Whereas, years ago, I would have felt something much more than a twinge of insecurity over his still being in touch with some of his exes, and whereas the reverse issue - of me being in touch with various of my exes - has at times been at least as difficult for him, we're in a strong enough place now that I actually think we are unshakeable. 

I mean, hell: he was okay with me sharing a hotel room with C., two months ago when I went to a conference in D.C.  Considering that C. is the last woman I was with, before Jeff and I finally did get married, that's a graceful and amazing thing. 

There are many things I have in my life now that I never expected, besides a spouse who happens to be male, and our two daughters.  Of these many things, the most amazing one to me is this: trust.

Happy Anniversary, Jeff.  I love you.  I trust you.  And, yes (the inherent cheesiness in quoting overplayed movies starring Tom Cruise notwithstanding): you complete me.

Jeff and me when we first got back together (after a 7-year hiatus during which I had sworn off men), in 1997.

At Chip and Lisa's wedding, 2003. (Stories from that most fabulous and interesting night to be relayed some other time.)

At Ozzfest in Columbia, Ohio, 2004.  Best mini-road trip ever.

Note: This Mother's Day entry is dedicated to all the women I love: those who are mothers or not, by choice or not. You know who you are.

I love the hell out of some Post Secret.  (What is Post Secret?  For the uninitiated, I give you the site's own description: "an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.")  And, while I already had a number of reasons to love Sunday, it never hurts that this is also the day of that site's weekly update.  (Okay, so I'm also a junkie for Big Love and Huff, which I have to record on DVR since new episodes of both shows air at 10 PM Sunday.)

Now the truth is, I had been somewhat dreading this particular Sunday: Mother's Day, for a few reasons.  Had been in torment over what (if anything) to send my mother.  At first, I was going to answer Planned Parenthood's Mother's Day Challenge, where your donations (if made by midnight tonight - quick, there's still time!) will be matched by an anonymous donor, and then you can "choose a unique e-card to send to a special woman in your life, telling her you've given a gift in her honor."  (It was incredibly cool that Blythe Danner and Gwyneth Paltrow threw their mother-daughter celebrity weight behind this effort, as blogged by Jill at Feministe.  And I'm not just saying that because Blythe Danner is on Huff.) 

But this, I feared, would leave me even more open to misinterpretation by by mother than everything else I say already does, despite the fact that we are both pro-choice.  I was born before Roe v. Wade, and, given some evidence of my mother's reluctance about parenting - having her tubes tied right after I was born, giving up custody of me when she wanted to move to St. Thomas, etc. - it has certainly crossed my mind that had abortion been both easily accessible and legal at the time I was conceived, it's possible I wouldn't have been born, at least into this body.  That doesn't mean I wouldn't exist; my spiritual belief, while not formally declared within an organized religious context, is that souls not given an immediate opportunity to become embodied drift elsewhere, find other hosts, vehicles, instruments of presence.  So if I had been a soul waiting for an embodiment, in the "queue" of my mother's uterine lining, and she was not ready for me either in spirit or in body, I would have simply moved on.  (For an excellent, less esoteric discussion of some of these matters, by the way, see What if your mother was pro-choice? at Alas.)

No, my "gift" in that vein would not have been viewed as honoring a powerful philosophy she helped to instill in me, but rather, as some sort of passive-aggressive "statement" about god-knows-what, which I would invariably end up hearing about months after-the-fact from persons to whom my supposed "statement" had been reported.  Gah.

So finally (possibly too late for it to have arrived on time), I sent her an amazing memoir by Pushcart Prize winner Virginia Holman, Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories from a Decade Gone Mad.  (See this book excerpt, reprinted in Richmond's own Blackbird.)  It's about Holman's struggle with her mother's schizophrenia - a struggle with which my mother, if she chooses to, can certainly relate, given her own mother's lifelong battle of a similar kind (although, to my knowledge, it was never acknowledged as schizophrenia per se).  But it's also about Holman's upbringing in the early 1970s, specifically in the Tidewater region of Virginia, where I also spent a good portion of those years (who knows, maybe we saw each other in passing?) - and where I also had an avowedly "free spirited" mother, with many of the life complications that designation portends. From the book jacket:

"1974 was a bad year to go crazy," Rescuing Patty Hearst begins. And it was easy indeed for her mother's first symptoms to be explained away by the changing times. At first, Holman reveals, her mother was viewed as "finding herself" in the spirit of the decade. When challenged about her delusion of the secret war, she invoked the name of Martha Mitchell. When she exhibited florid psychosis, her aunt, influenced by Hollywood's smash hit movie, The Exorcist, seriously suggested an exorcism might be in order. Even after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1980s, Holman's mother retained just enough lucidity to appease caseworkers in a system seemingly more concerned with protecting a patient's rights than with halting the progress of her desperately dangerous illness.

Maybe she'll get something out of it, and maybe she won't, but at least it's sent, and I can breathe again.  Not to mention, enjoy Mother's Day for myself (since I am one!), and since I have less complicated maternal relationships with others to pay homage to, e.g. the Lindas: my stepmother and my mother-in-law, both of whom are getting, you guessed it, the Post Secret book. 

Which brings me back to why I started writing this Mother's Day entry to begin with, namely: these particular post cards.  Through the secrets of strangers, then, I have risen (at an improbably early hour, when surely my girls would have let me sleep in today...) to tell my own:

While for years I was comfortable with pretending my relationship with my mother was like this:

It's now looking a lot more like this:

(...And I love her the same.)

Today I had an errand to run on the VCU campus.  I had considerable trepidation, concerning recent (recent to me, anyway) employment trauma at same. 

So it was with significant amusement that the car I happened to park behind had the following license plate:

I snorted, as if to say: Yeah, later, motherfuckers.

Then I ran my errand and came back.

And the car was still there.  And I had one of those "flashes of the obvious."  All that time I regarded that job as my ticket back to school [given the tuition benefit], and then I got sent right back into academic exile.  I was happy there (apart from certain illegal and unethical employment practices of my specific boss).  So maybe this means something else. 

As in: "Yes, you can still go back to VCU.  It will just have to be... later."

Hmmm.

There are websites and blogs one loves enough to link, and then there are those for whom a mere link is not enough.  For such sites, a virtual shouting-from-one's-rooftop is also required. Such is the case with The Lazy Cartoonist.  Herewith find a representative example of her work, which takes some well-deserved jabs at Scooter Libby, et. al:

Now, it's not just because the cartoons are anti-Shrub that I love this site.  Nor is it simply because the Cartoonist in question errs on the side of "anomalous" in a way I find endearing and personally relevant.  (Even if my own spheres of apparent "anomalousness"/ contested cultural identity do not involve being a male-to-female transgender astrophysicist and part-time, allegedly "lazy" cartoonist.) 

I have to admit: I love this site in great part because this particular cartoonist can cuss like nobody else.

Go on, pay the lady a visit.

In Defense of My Distractions (nay, Inspirations. So what if they're also "distracting." I have a bona fide adult ADD diagnosis - what's your excuse?):

I am officially addicted to Alas, a blog. It's extremely smart, funny, and relevant. This is also the blog where I first stumbled upon the "link farm" phenomenon (woo! I just googled that very phrase, and among the 851 hits, the "Alas" blog was first) - see their most recent post in this apparent tradition here).

Now I realize that any number of other blogs do this too (fr'instance: Chris Lott's tech-focused blog, Ruminate). Yet more proof, as if I needed it, that I've been living under a sociocultural/tech rock. Anyway, it's a smart way of leaving a "Hansel and Gretel"-like trail of code-crumbs behind for oneself, when one is having a wandering type of day. Those of us who are tangent-prone may or may not ever get around to utilizing the full potential of these crumbs (e.g., salient articles, like this one on the scandalous South Dakota abortion legislation, recommended by Kristjan Wager), but it would be a shame to let such stuff go, entirely.

And speaking of Chris Lott:

A thought-provoking post on Cosmopoetica, his "writing/ art/ literature/ music/ etc." blog, appears on the phenomenon of people who write in the margins of books (yes, the literal meaning of 'marginalia,' which I'm deploying in this link-farmish series as metaphor. This provoked a mini-torrent of discussion between another blogger Beau (no relation to Beau-Jacques, my dear friend in face-to-face land written about elsewhere in this blog), Chris, and myself, in which I committed that grievous sin I have always sworn never to commit - I posted an actual poem within my blog comments, Lament for Wilhelmina.  Those dying of curiousity may eavesdrop on that conversation here.

Thrill of Discovery: A heretofore unknown cache of excellent Richmond, Virginia-based blogs:

RVABlogs.com. Some really good stuff. I might submit my blog for a listing there at some point - when I'm not being more actively distracted by other stuff.

Everybody but me knew this blog was here, and now I'm the embarassingly animated latecomer:

If you haven't yet visited Rox Populi, what the hell are you doing here? Drop everything and go there now. And, if you are curious to know to what depths I debased myself in comments on said blog, see my reply to her very funny post, "It's True. I AM a Name-Droppin' Slut."

A feverish 6-year old's observation on the topic of Big Bird:

Over this weekend, my 6-year old Annalisa has been ill. Went to the doc this morning and secured the requisite antibiotics, and she'll be fine. But I could not help but giggle at a comment Annalisa made late on Saturday night, as I was staying up with her, waiting for her fever to subside. I'd put on a Sesame Street re-run to placate the poor babe. At some point she turned to me and said, with her own sad, puffy eyed expression:

"Mom, it's very weird that Big Bird has pink eyelids. It's very, very weird."

Now: tell me the kid isn't right: