feminist blogs

Reading this nice, short article about the importance of break-up songs written by one of my favorite writers of break-up songs, Thao Nguyen.

Making a zoetrope with my daughter and her daddy.

Meeting a friend for lunch at Big Al’s (if you love veggies, ask for the Sarah Special!) and getting inspired to job-hunt again. I’m also grateful for friends helping me out so much! People are good.

Applying for a State Job! I liked it because I finally found where people who don’t work at Universities and/or non-profits work (or attempt to find work). I saw sooooo many interesting folks whom I immediately wanted to befriend. The life stories I imagined! My favorite was the 77-year-old Supervisor lady with a silver side ponytail and a loose-fitted tweed pantsuit. If I get a job anywhere near her, she better be ready to chat!

Watching a cute, li’l documentary about the crafting and DIY revolution in America.

And FINDING MY CAMERA (!!!) so I can take pictures of stuff and show the pictures to people!

What did you love this week?

Spring

Today's Women's History Tidbit:
1933: President Franklin Roosevelt nominates Frances Perkins as US Sectretary of labor. The first woman in the cabinet, she will serve 12 years and will be the primary figure behind the Social Security Act of 1935.


Today I'm in Washington, DC for a NSF grantee meeting. But my great-aunt (my mom's aunt) lives in the area and we're getting together for dinner. I haven't seen her since my mom & I visited San Antonio just before my mom's uncle passed away in 1997. Yeah, a long time.

While I'm excited to see her again and at least one of my mom's cousins, I'm also excited to gain possession of a few pictures of my Grandma and some family history. My great-aunt's daughter let me know that she has been doing family tree stuff and would send that info on with her mom. She sent me a preview of the information the other day that I'm still digesting.

I won't go into everything, but let me say that while the information isn't something to boast about, it also makes my grandmother's ways make sense to me. Not justification for some of her actions, but she makes more sense to me. My mom also makes more sense to me. And I feel like I knew 80% of what my cousin sent me already. But that last 20% was critical and so missing!

I often ponder my history, my daughter's history and all the missing pieces that are glaring. So much died so long ago, not with my Grandma or my mom's death, but in their refusal to share. In what I believe may also had been their collective shame of how things went down years ago. It pains me to think of all that they were carrying around in their hearts all those years.

Obviously I have things that I ponder whether or not I'm going to tell the kid. If I do, when. How. All parents have those things and some of us bury them deep in the backyard and some of us shine the light on them as lessons for our kids. I wish the women of my family had shone the light on their history. I think it would had made for a more enlightened family life.



* Source: 2010 Women Who Dare Engagement Calendar from the Library of Congress

It's high time for a practical everyday parenting post. So, I've had this brewing in my head for a while and I haven't been very sure how to approach it until last night.

Kenisha is now almost 6 months old. She is still breastfeeding and, as a matter of fact, she outright refuses to drink expressed milk from a bottle. I even tried formula just to see what she would do and the result was no different. If it's milk, it must come from the breast. Direct from the tap, no substitutions. This is fine except that occasionally, I need a break! She does eat baby food now so if I absolutely have to be away from her she doesn't starve herself anymore. That has at least made things easier on me when I go to work on Saturday nights. As a result of my being home with her more now that I've had to cut my hours back, Kenisha is way more attached to me and my breasts (although the former may be a result of the latter).

Lately, Kenisha has taken to doing two things during our breastfeeding session that drive me insane. The first is biting. She doesn't actually have any teeth yet but those gums can bring tears to my eyes. Every time she does it I howl with pain. And what does she do? She laughs! This makes me want to toss her out the window (not literally of course, if she'd bounce maybe). I've tried not to show any reaction so that she won't get the satisfaction and want to do it again, but alas, it is impossible not to respond to a clamp down on your nipple. This has led to two things: 1) as you may have inferred from the window reference above, I get angry, and 2) I'm very reluctant to (and afraid of) feeding her, especially when I know she's not real happy with me.

The second thing she's been doing lately while breastfeeding is pinching my nipples! She has realized that if she wants to suck and she puts her lips on my breast or starts grabbing at my shirt that I'll feed her. It's good for me because I don't have to guess if she's hungry anymore since she let's me know. But here's the catch: she doesn't always want to eat! Sometimes she just wants the comfort and drifts off to sleep but other times it's a ploy to get at my nipples! She will latch on and suck as if she's sooo innocent and then pull off and look around a bit, then at me, then at the nipple she was just sucking on. And then she does it! she takes her little thumb and forefinger and pinches my nipple. Luckily, her pincer grasp isn't fully developed so this doesn't hurt but sometimes she's try to rake it and grab it in the palm of her hand. Still not as painful and the biting but it is rather annoying. I've obligated myself to the task of breastfeeding. It's demanding; it's tiring and, as illustrated above, sometimes painful. I did not agree to let this little girl fondle my nipples! I get enough of that from her father (and that's a whole other dimension to this story).

I have demands on my body now from both my partner and my daughter. They both drive me insane and I love then about equally as much as they make me crazy (which is a whole lot).

Am I mad about all this because I'm a feminist? I struggled with that question for a while but I've come to realize I'm actually not as mad as I would have been had I not understood the dynamics involved in my situation. Feminism has taught me well to examine each situation and take it apart at it's root. And while initial reactions tend to be heated and angry, I can step back and take appropriate action as a result of this knowledge. Anger is normal, our actions as a result of anger are what need to be examined. Do we perpetuate or to we imped this cycle of inappropriate and hurtful reactions?

This was originally posted at the AWEARNESS blog.

It was just a matter of time until marketers got their hands on their real desired recruits -- kids. In some social media circles, there's no need to woo mom bloggers with free samples of the latest snack chip, instead kids are doing it on their own:

In some cases children as young as seven have been offered the chance to become "mini-marketeers" to plug brands by casually dropping them into postings and conversations on social networking sites.
They can earn the equivalent of £25 a week for their online banter -- sometimes promoting things that they may not even like. Among the products being pushed are soft drinks, including Sprite and Dr Pepper, Cheestrings and a Barbie-themed MP3 player. Record labels are also using the marketing technique to promote performers such as Lady Gaga.

In a time when First Lady Michelle Obama is campaigning to help our children get healthier, this targeting of kids should make us sit up and notice. It should also demonstrate that we can rid our schools of brand-name clothes and junk food and it just doesn't doesn't seem to matter. As we continue to debate the benefits of milk, our children are online being paid to talk up junk food. And I think we know that our kids don't need to be talked into the latest concoction from a chip company.

While I don't like that FLOTUS Obama is touting BMI as a way to keep track of our children's pot bellies, I do hope that within her campaign to keep our children healthy she pushes for every school to include media literacy as a part of their curriculum. I know that each time my daughter has a project that asks for her to flip through magazines for pictures to cut out, I hover over her like a hawk due to the images that live in between the covers.

It's not enough to talk about how chubby someone is or isn't, what their BMI (I call it a bullsh!t mass index, as evidenced by Kate Harding's BMI project) is or to restrict kids from the yumminess of peanut butter cups. Instead we need a wholesale reorganization of how school lunches are funded and to teach our kids how to sniff out the B.S. in marketing and commercials. We need to stop seeing physical education and recess as something only good, wealthy and/or smart kids get to engage in.

For the record, parents should keep all their "chubby" comments in their head, and marketers should keep kids out of their chip-pushing strategies.

Now let's get moving!

Saw this on Women's eNews, and wow!

Kathryn Lopez posts a column this week about the immediate aftermath of Super Bowl XLIV: Brees after Super Bowl win was a poster boy for family. K-Lo notes that the winning quarterback for the Saints scooped up his young son in the aftermath of victory, holding him with both love and glee.

It’s an image America needed.

“Given that about one-in-four American boys are living apart from their dads at any one point in time, it is great to see a Super Bowl champion with his wife and son, and to see that this win is all the bigger for him for being shared with his son,” Brad Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project said.

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce,” and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, isn’t a football follower, but she liked what she saw: “It bespoke an intimacy of real time spent together. Even in a football stadium of screaming fans the toddler boy didn’t look anxious. He knew he was safe. He was with dad.”

I couldn’t agree more that it was a touching moment. I too like the image of a father embracing his son; I like seeing unguarded affection between parents and children. We all agree it’s a lovely thing.

So what’s the problem? The folks K-Lo cites in her piece (and the organizations with which they are affiliated, like the Institute for American Values) are relentless in their insistence that fatherhood has been damaged by feminism. For the cultural right to which folks like Wilcox and Lopez belong, the empowerment of women has led to the inevitable marginalization of men. In the strange math of social conservatives, it’s all a zero-sum game: the greater the freedom of women to divorce, exercise reproductive sovereignty, and earn money outside the home, the less self-worth their male partners will invariably feel.

It’s subtle in this piece, but explicit elsewhere in the writings of the anti-feminist traditional marriage movement: the great lie that male responsibility is contingent on female vulnerability. Only when women defer to men, submit to men, allow men to take the proverbial reins — only then will men “feel” valued, feel needed. According to this tired bit of wisdom, men get confused and alienated when they are denied the opportunity to shoehorn themselves into a traditional masculine role. The notion that gender identity is a continuum rather than a dichotomy, the notion that men and women can possess different plumbing but the same skill set — all this is too much for the be-penised to grasp. Fathers have abandoned their families, the lie goes, because they no longer feel needed or valued as men.

I adore my daughter. My worth as her father is not compromised by the fact that my wife earns a good living outside the home. My wife relies on me as I do on her — we rely on each other to be there, to do what we say we’re going to do, to pick up the dry cleaning and the baby food when we say we will, to be faithful. The fact that my wife could be a successful single mother without me doesn’t vitiate my value as a Dad. The fact that the world wouldn’t go to hell in a handbasket were I to disappear doesn’t mean I don’t feel loved and important. My daughter needs me, and I believe her life is better with me in it. My wife and I love each other and are building a life together. But my manhood — and my status as a father — is not under attack in our culture, unless you buy the myth that insists that a husband’s dignity requires a certain amouht of frailty on the part of his wife.

So here’s to encouraging fathers to be present in the lives of their children. And here’s to recognizing that the greatest obstacle to making that happen on a wider scale is not feminism, or the culture, or the legal system — it’s our outdated notion of masculinity itself.

Courageous. That word was on the kid's spelling list last week. Even if the teacher called the entire list bonus words, she worked hard to learn all ten words including this one that stumps me once in awhile. I won't find out until Friday if she spelled them all correctly, but she worked hard, could spell them for us and felt great afterward. That's all I can ask of her for bonus words.

Part of asking kids in first grade (even if they are doing second grade work) to spell a big word like that is that we have to define it for them. I can't remember exactly how I defined it for her, but I'm sure I said something about doing something even thou you are afraid.

On Friday I took her out to Vertical Endeavors and she did this:


We rock climbed for about three hours and had a blast. At first she was scared of going too far up and definitely of sitting back to glide down. If you've followed the tales of my kid, you know she's not a fearful one. But standing at just 4 feet tall and looking up at 40 foot walls, well, I was a bit hesitant once I got climbing too. In the picture above she's about half way up. She eventually got all the way up 3-4 times on two different lines.

When she started to show signs of fear, I told her to be courageous. She giggled and tried one more time to inch her way up. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Near the end of our time, I was really pooped. This mama is way out of shape and rock climbing doesn't help my carpal tunnel. Hell, my knuckles still ache! But she had shimmed down on her own and I was stopped. I told her I was ready to come down and she yelled back, "You can do it mommy! Be courageous!"

Do you have any idea what that does to a parent?

I made it to the top of that wall. And then called it quits for the day.

It took courage for me to take her out there. Yes, I'm still a tomboy at heart and take enormous pride in her climbing and bad ass skills, but each time I see her do something like this I'm torn. Instead of picturing a devil & angel wrestling on my shoulders, picture me cheering her on versus me telling her to get her butt down. I am so afraid of her getting hurt as she discovers what her body can do.

It took courage for her to trust me. I talked her thru a few tough spots. Spots where most people, including myself, might have just said screw it and stopped.

At the end of the day what she got out of the day was a new sense of what she can do. I can only imagine what it would had been like to be 6 1/2 and accomplished something like that. The only equivalent I had growing up was walking up the metal giraffe without using my hands. Anyone remember those?

But you could see the pride in her smile. Not only the pride she got from climbing to the top of the wall, but every half hour or so, someone would walk into the area and say, "OMG! Look at the little girl!" You can't buy that kind of self-esteem boost. OK, maybe I did for $15 + $10 rental of harness, shoes & the chalk bag she adored. But I didn't buy one step of her climbs.

I encourage every parent to let their kids push themselves to the limit. For your kid it might be on a rock climbing wall, for others it might be in a band. Whatever your child is good at, push them to discover a new level. And then step back. Don't hover, don't helicopter, don't put doubt in their heads. They will fall, but they have to learn to pick themselves back up too. There are plenty of times the kid has fallen and walked away as well. But at least she tried and I didn't limit her.

As parents we need to be courageous...Even if it means watching them climb far out of reach.

*************
BTW: The staff at Vertical Endeavors were awesome and super kid-friendly. I do picture us returning there, perhaps during Spring Break. Hopefully we're not on the same schedule as the schools out there.

RH Reality Check asked me to write a short something for Valentine's Day about love and raising the kid. Here it is!


I have loved my daughter all my life. It's corny but it's true.

Growing up I knew I would be a mom, somehow. I knew one day I'd be responsible for another human being that goes beyond my wildest dreams. While most women day dream about cute dresses and those adorable ruffle-bottomed tights, I dreamt of teaching her to keep score at a baseball game and to hopefully avoid the pitfalls that continue to consume me.

Six and a half years ago I had my little girl. She's as girly as they come, yet as rough and tumble too.

My daughter has already gone head to head with classmates who spout strict gender roles. While it breaks my heart to see her struggle, I love talking to her as a human being about what people expect of others, how we believe things in our home and how to react to difference. Again, she's six, so I have no idea how far our talks go, but she gives me glimmers of hope. There was the time she ranted to my best friend about how unfair it is that public restroom sinks are far too high for little kids to effectively use. During the Emmys last year she asked if the writers category was broken into boys and girls since all the nominees were men. "No, mija, but very good observation."

Most of all, I love that I am raising the next generation in a long line of stubborn and strong women.  

I love complimenting her on her intelligence. I love watching her discover how awesome her body is on the soccer field and on the gymnastics floor. I love teaching her to solve a math problem. I love that she knows the scientific origins of rainbows and still thinks that they are miracles.

Through all of this, she is also helping me to truly love myself.  

She loves my squishy fat belly.
She loves that we look so much alike.
She loves watching me give a speech.
She loves spending time with me (hey, she's six!).
She loves to cuddle with me so I can read her a Nancy Drew book.
She loves helping me in the kitchen.
She takes care of me and Dad as much as we take care of her.

If there really is a cycle of life, we're spinning through it each day.

Elliott: MOMMMMMM! The cat barfed on Miriam's valentine.

Miriam: (screaming hysterically while shoving a vomit-stained doily in my face) CLEAN IT! MOMMY, I NEED YOU TO CLEAN IT!!!!!!

FFI:
Planned Parenthood

I have a big favor to ask of all of you parents out there. Will you help me answer the question I was asked a few months ago?  I have a pregnant friend who asked me a simple enough question: ”Does childbirth hurt?” But I was honestly stumped. I didn’t know how to answer; believe it or not, this is one question I have never been asked and never even thought about all that much.

I kept promising my friend that I would give her a response, but I wanted to form a thoughtful, honest, personal response. But, I got so caught up in how this question should be answered that I haven’t yet answered it. I thought about what I should say in order to calm her fears, in order to empower her, in order to set the record straight for myself, in order to be a good mom, in order to be a good feminist, in order to be a good friend. But I still haven’t answered her question.

I read what other people say in response to that question. Like Gisele and other celebrity moms, if you wanna call them people. I read what pregnancy Bibles had to say about the matter. I re-read childbirth scenes from novels, like my favorite in Tracks by Louise Erdrich. But I still didn’t answer her question.

Now a few months later, she is in her third trimester and closer than ever to giving birth and answering her own question, and I still haven’t answered that damn question.

Until now. My answer is in the comment section, but I still need your help. I’m endlessly afraid that my answer isn’t sufficient, so if you don’t mind doing me and my pregnant friend a favor by leaving us an answer in the comment section??? We would be forever grateful

XOXO,

Spring & Pregnant Friend