I am my grandfather's grandaughter

I just subscribed to The News From Lake Wobegon and This American Life. They are free. Free!!!

I might weep over the goodness that is public radio.

In other completely unrelated news, will you all keep your fingers crossed for the store? We seem to be on a little bit of a roll and I want--no, I need it to keep on going for like, well, the rest of my working life or so. Because I really don't want to get a different job.

Shehecheyanu

The first ripe fig and the first ripe tomato! (I was late with the tomatoes).

Good question

A.: Z, can I introduce you to your taco? (pitched high, voicing taco) "Hi Z.! Please eat me!"

Z.: (addressing taco) Why do you want to die so soon?

A heart I know by heart

We all went to the Please Touch Museum today for Z.'s adoption day,* and I spent a lot of the visit mom-watching. The mom in the chador, the mom in slinky sundress with the backpack slung around her waist, canceling out the look, the many moms in t-shirts and the scattering of moms with visible pregnancies, and I realized that I assume a mom has given birth and most likely nursed, and has watched her body change because of her children, and that motherhood is an experience that involves a radical disruption of one's sense of physical self.

I assume that even though none of it is true for A.

Hunh.

*Yes, I birthed her, but A. and I adopted her together--such being the ins and outs of same-sex parenthood.

Fodder for thinking about lesbian gender

This list has got me thinking about butch a lot the past day or two, in a back-of-my-head way, and I want to see what happens if I bring it forward. I think it will be kind of rambly around here while I do, so forgive me. Please click through, so you can see what I'm talking about--the pictures are awesome, and it's a visual record I'm reacting to here.

I tend to think of myself as product of the crunchy/hippie lesbianism of the 80's--I hung out in dyke bars, but I came out in the peace movement, surrounded by activists and artists. The butch-femme tradition is something I tend to regard from a remove--I admire the guts and the sexual in-your-faceness of it, but I'm not really within it. Contrasts in masculine and feminine energy don't work for me that way.

My hair has been long for all but a few years in my middle twenties, when I cut it boy-short in an attempt to be read more easily as a lesbian. It did work: I got a lot less attention from men and I read more easily to other women, but there's identity as how you're read by others and identity as how you read yourself. My missing hair haunted my dreams for years until I grew it out, and I don't think it's a coincidence that I had to go through that experiment before I really figured out how to bring myself to a relationship.

But hair aside (and it was usually braided), I used to be a pretty straight-up flannel dyke: jeans, Birks or Docs, a baggy unisex t-shirt, an Aran sweater or a tartan shirt from Bean, and that was me dressed. And I still dress that way on winter days when I'm feeling the weather, or I want to feel armored and secure. The body-altering imperatives of femininity are a toxic mess and I have never wanted them anywhere near me, and the baggage that comes along with "pretty" often does my head in. But if I want to look good, I want to look beautiful rather than handsome. Wardrobe: I have shopped from the boy side of the store but not when I'm looking for something to make me feel sexy. It's never been the unisex tees but the femme outliers in my closet that I've reached for when I wanted to feel hot on a date or when I was heading out dancing. I feel as much in drag in a jacket and tie as in a dress: if I find the extremes of femininity asphyxiating, I find the extremes of masculinity alien rather than empowering. Butch clothing is protective, but it's dyke I'm aiming for rather than butch: a woman outside heterofeminine strictures, rather than a masculine woman.

In recent years as I've worked through some of my issues with moving through the world in my particular body, I've chosen my everyday clothes to acknowledge my curves instead of hide them, and I wear my hair loose much of the time. My sexuality and gender have a lot more to do with being a mother and a massage therapist than with playing with the erotics of the gender spectrum--and it's something that I love about women-only spaces, whether they are lesbian or not, that once men are out of the defining-yourself-against-them equation, the possibilities of female identity explode outside the two dimensions of a spectrum.

Scrolling through these pictures of butch women and transmen, I didn't feel like men were out of the equation in the way that makes gender interesting to me--it's not a women-only space, this list, and it shouldn't be when the story Sinclair Sexsmith is telling by compiling it is about a particularly blurry edge of the spectrum where "masculine woman" is not very far from "transitioning man," and that's a story that needs telling. It both isn't and is about me. What I wound up feeling about where I am is that any part of the spectrum is blurry, including my place near the middle. And even in a story about masculinity and female-born bodies, a hell of a lot of other--and to me, more compelling--axes of female identity are popping out of those pictures. I felt like these are my people, this is a tribe I belong to, and the self-portrait of Catherine Opie (#91) nursing her child gave me a shock of recognition. Motherhood is what crashed me hard into femininity, and I have found a power there I needed to own: it crashed me into femininity from a complicated place. How much more complicated for a butch woman or a transman?

ETA: Sexsmith has edited the list to remove transmen unless they give permission to be included--read her explanation for this change here.

Question for those who menstruate*

Can we talk PMS for a minute? Because over the course of my menstruating life, my cramps went from incapacitating in my teens and early twenties to just seriously painful in my later twenties and early thirties, and now that I'm in my later thirties, after a year or two of occasional post-childbirth weirdness, they seem to have resigned themselves to being a non-event, but (you know there's a but, right?) my emotional shifts used to be something that I took in stride. Used to be. Not so much anymore. As my cramps have become negligible, the days before my period have become this righteous emotional spotlight of a bullshit detector, zeroing in on anything that is off in my life. Post-childbirth, my periods have gotten shorter, too. I'm wondering if this is something other women in their thirties have experienced. Are my hormones going after different receptors in my body as I age? Is this perimenopause? And does it give other women towering superpowers of emotional truthtelling? Or is it just a way my own personal limbic system has developed to cope with my not uncomplicated emotional life?

(*Cismen and transwomen can weigh in, and of course if you're reading I'd like to hear your thoughts, but I also really do want to know whether this is a common experience or just the way my own biology has gone.)

Didactic moment

So A. and I have a lesbian-feminist tendency to interrogate the whole happily-ever-after-hetero thing when we read fairy tales to Z., because they are so poisonous. And I'm embarrassed to say it's become reflexive, but I got my comeuppance a few weeks ago. I keep meaning to blog it, so here goes. Remember, Z. is FOUR:

In the car, driving around Eakins Oval, the Beatles are on.

Mama: Z., do you think that's really true, that all you need is love?
Z.: No!
Mama: So what else do you think you need?
Z., hesitant: Vulnerability?

Picking serviceberries

We haven't had enough sun for the berries to be as ripe as they ought to be this time of year.



But I did get to pick them with the Queen of America, and that's something (her pirate crown is off in this picture, because it kept getting tangled in the branches). In the end, we scrapped our pie-baking idea and had ice cream sandwiches instead, which was a pretty fine outcome, really.

Share the road, but don't get yourself killed, 'kay?

It's Spring, it's a recession, the planet is slowly cooking to death: thus, more people are biking, at least in my neighborhood.

There is a subpopulation of bikers that is seriously irking me: women biking in skirts and not wearing helmets while doing so. There plenty of other bikers who aren't wearing helmets, but there are not a lot of bikers wearing skirts who are wearing helmets (in a Venn diagram the "skirt/no-helmet" bikers would be smaller and almost entirely within the larger circle of "any wardrobe choice/no-helmet" bikers). Do they head out the door, look at their helmets and think "oh, too bad I can't put that on, since I'm wearing a skirt today"?

Every time I pass one of these women I think about how not-cute traumatic brain injuries are.

___________________________


Driving.

About a block ahead, an oncoming car suddenly but safely swerves partly onto my side of the road. The marmalade cat the driver spared runs hastily back to the curb until the car passes, then sprints across the lanes, low and stretched out, scared. The car in front of me slows; the cat makes it. As I pass, the cat is crouched and staring, fascinated and poised to leap at her quarry: a flock of birds in a vacant lot.

The birds are safely surrounded by cyclone fencing.

Detoxing

In my case, the addictions are pretty mild. Chocolate, green tea, baked treats. But I have slipped into relying on them to get through my day and my emotional stability is more than a little shot. So I'm going off of sweets, caffeine, white flour. Day 1 today.

This is what it looks like in my head right now:

Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, shoogar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, SUGAR, sugar, SUGAR, sugar, SUGAR, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, suuuuuuuuugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, Sugar, sugar, SUGARSUGARSUGAR, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, c'mon, just one little Swedish fish and no one will know.

And dark chocolate is practically a vitamin.

Why customer service is an art form

Customer comes in making the kind of beeline for the desk that usually indicates an intention to pick up a special order; I greet him as he walks around two customers already in the store, who are half browsing but have also been somewhat engaged in conversation with me.

Customer (baseball cap, undershirt, 60's, a stranger to me): I have a question. I don't think you'll have it, but do you have "Woman in White?"

Me: Good question! I know that section pretty well, and I think we probably don't. (Checks computer.) We'd be happy to get it for you, but it's not in the store. We have stocked it before. Hmm. We sold it in '07, and it looks like it was just a slow seller.

Customer: (congratulating himself) I bet it was.

Me: But it's easy to reorder.

Customer: No, thanks. (wanders over to card spinners, other customers say goodbye and leave without making a purchase. I don't think they would have if I'd kept talking to them, since the conversation had led to hard-to-read questions about whether discussions at the Women of the World book club were feminist, but who knows?)

Me: (receiving books into inventory, making chitchat) I read "The Moonstone," but not "Woman in White."

Customer: You don't carry postcards.

Me: Sure we do. They're over here. (Walks to Syracuse Cultural Workers postcard display near register, brings them out onto counter.)

Customer: I can look at them myself.

Me: No problem. (goes back to receiving)

Customer: (snorts) "Resist Global Corporatocracy." Now, you can't send that to someone.

Me: Depends on the someone.

Customer: Maybe you can put it on the wall, but you can't send it to someone.

Me: (shrugs, keeps checking off books)

Customer: (browses cards a minute or two more) Well, thank you.

Me: Thank you for coming by.

Customer: (coming down on each word, sounding like he's correcting me this time) Thank you.

Calling on the power of blogging lost dogs

My parents' dog is named for Kosmo Kramer, from Seinfeld, but it's a name that suits her by how much she doesn't fit it. She's a pretty little skinny dog in between the size of a whippet and an Italian greyhound, with the coat of a yellow lab, with light freckles on her elegant paws. She's skittish about crossing hardwood floors and shy with strangers, and if she decides she's not going somewhere, sometimes the only thing to do is pick her up and take her there. She carries stuffed animals back to her bed. Socks, too, and shoes. If she wants to make friends with you she puts her head down and her paw up. But she has to check you out for awhile before she takes a risk like that.

She's been missing since this afternoon--there are workmen in the house, and she got freaked out, and a door was left open, and now she's somewhere away from home. She's been spotted around the neighborhood, and she has her tags on, but it's raining there, and night has fallen. My parents are worried, and second-guessing themselves.

So I'm asking you, if you're still reading this on your feed, to help out by doing whatever you can to get the lost-dog-found mojo going.

ETA, morning of 5/6/09: She came home!

As sharp as I sting, as sharp as I sing

I can't get enough of this song.



(Unh-hunh, you know you have to hear it again)



(and again...this one has lousy sound, but it's worth it for the way her foot hits the stage, every time.)



(h/t to Phantom, who knows me well.)

Birthday season begins

Z.'s long-awaited fourth birthday was on Monday. I keep starting posts and not finishing them, so I'm going to resort to the random bullets form just to get it all out of my head:

• Twenty-one kids, 16 of them three or four, the rest all younger siblings: this is because of the way that Z. falls at the exact midpoint of the very large group of kids at her school who will be entering kindergarten in the Fall of 2010. Last year I argued that she should be included in the youngest preschool class, instead of being kept in the infant/toddler program for a third year. That was one of the best advocacy moments I've had as a parent, with the greatest unforeseeable positive consequences, and if a crazily large fourth birthday party is the only downside, I say hooray. (This year, the class wound up split so that she's almost the oldest in her room, but the two older preschool classes spend a lot of their day together, so now she has new, slightly younger friends in her class but her slightly older friends from last year are still current.)
• Despite how high it was on the overstimulation meter, the party was still a roaring success. When the parents are hitting it off and having a great time, you know things are going well. We used the bookstore, which has three levels, and it was very low-key. Storytime downstairs in the kids' section, freeplay in the reading nook on the second floor, crafts in the community room on the third floor. Kids could move on when they got bored, and it was fine. We paid for pizza, cake, balloons, favors (minimal), and paper goods. I think we spent more than we needed to on the paper stuff, but not too much. Otherwise, I feel like we did it well, for not much money, and minimal headache.
  
• Z. made out like a bandit, of course. I've introduced a concept that I take seriously, which is that of the birthday season, which starts on your birthday and continues for a month afterwards. It's kind of like your birthday is the shiny, blazing head of the comet, and the season is its lingering, tapering tail. This works for me because I have a lot of birthday anticipation and post-birthday let-down, and I could see it going the same way with Z., and I don't want to live with her crashing.
  
• Declaring it birthday season lets us ration the presents, and this is a HUGE advantage. Really, I think y'all should all copy me. She opened all of her grandparent and cousin presents while her grandparents and cousins were here, on the day of her party (the day before her birthday). She opened her parent presents on her birthday, plus the present from her favorite friend. The rest she's been opening one in the morning and one after school, and it means she's actually played with each one instead of discarding it in a frenzy of acquisition.
  
• In theory, this would also let us pace ourselves on the thank-you notes, but we have let that slip and will probably do them all on the weekend.
• The binky fairy came to our house on the night before Z.'s birthday. We didn't expect the binky fairy for another night, but Z. said she was ready. No more binkies for sleeping--until she was three she had a binky in her mouth every minute she wasn't in school. Last year we eliminated them except for sleeping and car trips, and in the Fall we let the car trips drop. Getting to sleep with them, and early-morning-still-in-bed use, these were the last regular holdouts. She still has one for the emotional emergencies we have recently dubbed cyclone feelings (post to come on these eventually, I hope) but it lives in the catch-all space that is my underwear drawer.
  
• I mostly forgot about my labor and Z.'s NICU stay. I had a day or two of saying "hey, I think I'm better, no more PTSD," and then A. left a detail in a story that she would have edited out if I hadn't declared myself better, and I promptly crumpled. So not all the way better, but much, much, much further along the road. And learning that A. has been editing out details like that for years (it was about a mother and baby being separated)? I was terribly touched.
• It snowed hard the night before Z.'s birthday, and her birthday itself was a snow day. The night she was born it was the same way. That was a good echo.
  

We're here. Get used to it.

While A. and I were in Baltimore last weekend, we saw Milk, which was one of the things I hoped for out of the weekend. I wasn't sure I was going to get a chance to see in the theater, and it was an astonishing performance, but the thing about seeing it in the theater wasn't Sean Penn on the big screen, it was the audience. It was going to a mainstream theater, on any old day, and standing in line with a whole bunch of other queer folk. It was watching in a big darkened room filled with rows of those slide-back seats, where A. and I? We were the norm, and the story was our history, and it wasn't a special film festival. It wasn't Pride. It was just another movie, telling another piece of American history, like our lives have as much weight as anyone else's.

I left saying "I don't know my history, I just don't," but I did know Harvey Milk's story. I learned some details, I added more players to what I knew, but really I already had that story well enough to use it. So what I think I meant was that being given my history that way, as part of pop culture, made me understand to what extent it is usually buried.

Tired

This morning, my shoelace snapped while I was tying it. No matter, I thought. I'll wear the other pair.

Then I noticed that the shoe already tied on my other foot was from the other pair.

A. has orders not to say anything to me after 11:00, if I'm still awake, which I hope not to be.

Good night, all.

The benefits of a religious education

S.: Z., the Miriam who's your pretend friend, is she the same Miriam who's in the Bible?

Z.: No, she's a DIFFerent Miriam. And her brother Moses is a DIFFerent Moses. Not dah Moses who's in da Bible who supposes his toses are roses.

S.: Not that Moses?

Z.: No, not dat one. A different one.

Smear

When she went out of town last weekend, A. brought Z. back some Chapstick as a "surprise." It's cherry.

The first night Z. had it, I came into the room to do my part of the goodnight ritual and found her sitting up in bed, the room filled with the smell of candy, red candy.

"Z., what are you doing?"

"I'm lip-bumming myself!"

(Happy Valentine's Day, all!)

Dilemma

Z.: What's more important, sleeping or being loved?