resume

I've lead an eclectic, esoteric, mercurial journey through life and as I reach my reflective midlife, sometimes I wish my life-resume showed a little more... direction. Meandering is just another way of not planning.

And then sometimes, I look over everything I've experienced in my late-blooming adulthood--speed reading teacher, mariachi band, poetess, martial artist, self-defense instructor, youth organizer, crafter/artisan, ballroom dancer, teacher sometime write of poetry and prosery, procrastinator, anthropologist (all the former while being in a doctoral program and being a terrible student, obviously), CBO researcher/info activist, trainer, facilitator, interviewer, popular educator, screenwriter & production designer, midwifery student, doula, gala planner, blogger, itinerant CSA heritage pork dealer, homesteader, priestess, bellydancer, mother ( I actually became a goddess but folks have issue with honoring the sacred feminine...), working mother, finance director, communicator, campaign researcher, union elected, negotiator--and I have enjoyed the journey, friends gained and the myriad life lessons earned, even those steeped in sorrow and inscribed in ink.

While I'll always wish I made more of the opportunities (should have traveled more, should have found a new Wing Chun dojo), I'll never wish that I made less.

Is it just the third decade that thinned out my creativity or is it birthing myself as mother? Working mother is another way of being absent for the hours that matter most to my daughter.

As I prepare to embark on a sabbatical, I anticipate the prospect of being without boundaries and a safe job to define myself and my time.  I am trepidatious.  I want to make the best of this breathing period. I want to find my calling, pursue my dreams and passion. I want to be a mother whose absences do not define the week.

Home

The decision to walkaway from our house & O-town feels an awful lot like the decision to quit grad school. Agonizing, emotionally fraught, tangled feelings about our substantial time/financial investment and an unhealthy, unsustainable situation. Scariest choices I've made and the most freeing. In six months, I will pay off my grad student loans; 8 years to finally shrug that off.

Despite the tens of thousands of dollars that we've put into our property, we'll be relieving ourselves of a debt that would have hung over us until we retired. It feels like for the last few years, we've been treading water while it just kept rising. And now we've stopped treading and realized we could just stand up and stop drowning.

We'll be renters again and that requires an emotional/mental adjustment, but to be free of the cumbersome "joys" of home ownership is liberating. In two years, we could buy again, if we wanted.

It helps of course that my neighbor, former trusted boss, elder is buying our property fulfilling her family's dream of building a community retreat center founded on principles of compassion, justice and aspiration. It was not all for naught. We are contributing to a higher and better purpose...

We move out this weekend, to the burbs (though more diverse than burbs outside the Bay), to the edge of wildland, sienna hills. The opposite end from our urban existence. I look forward to being in a quiet place where my ears don't prick up with every loud bang, trying to decipher whether those were gunshots, and which street they must be coming from, was it a semi-automatic? Was anyone hurt?

A place where we can take long walks in the glimmering dusk, where my peripheral vision can ease up a little, where i have to fend off wildlife trying to survive not life gone wild trying to survive. Where my child can can play without being within arms reach. Where i can bike again, maybe even bike with my kid and not have my heart in my throat. A place wheere i can hear the wind, where the constant shushing roar in the ambience isn't the hum of traffic, but the rhythm of nature. I am perhaps idealizing and romanticizing. The burbs have no culture that cannot be conveniently sited in a mini mall with a Starbucks and Panera on the corners. An actress I like said, the suburbs are where bad things happen. She perhaps was overdramatizing, but I know as sleepy as O-town was, where we are headed is even more domestic and somnabulent.

I shall probably be the only mom in the PTA with tatts *and* a Masters degree. I shall try not to be a snob or an outcast. I've been plagued by a secret dread that something will happen before we leave. Something tragic. I know it is only anxiety and superstition. And i know that one of the neighborhood drug dealers was caught violating parole and is back in the clink, but still, i am tense. Reading the news everyday with its pornography of trauma doesn't help.

I've been looking forward to the fresh start, release of burden so much that I've almost forgotten about the important things I'm leaving behind as well, many of my friends. These last 5 years we've been so wrapped in our Household concerns that we've sometimes forgotten to appreciate our community. I've made efforts in these last few weeks to make time for my friends though the housing search and then move prep made it hard. And i promise to myself to make time to see them still. At least once a week, twice a month, i will try to stay later in oakland and hang out with a friend.

Where in the world is

Facebook has no soul, only soundbites. It is one's stream of consciousness distilled into a pithy fleeting haiku constrained by the disappointing affect of propriety to one's audience. Facebook is observation.

I long for engagement and connection. I long for soul.

http://www.naturalnews.com/032362_grief_illness.html
http://www.homeorizon.com/homeopathic-articles/psychiatry/grief-reactive-depression-and-its-homeopathic-approach

too tired to write more. articles say it all...

I dreamed a dream

I dreamed a dream in times gone by
When hope was high and life worth living..

Dreams lie below one's subconscious, guiding our desires, crafting our motivation. Did I know it? When did someone else's dream become mine own? When did I, the critic, the cynic, the optimist, become a believer? This American Dream. With its promise of home ownership as civic duty and self. When did a home have to be a house?

Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung no wine untasted

Yes, the euphoria that preceded the fall, the mythic illusion sold to us. Starter homes were for trading up. Soothed by the emotional hook, the lie, the "natural" cost of living in the Golden State. Naive.

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
As they turn your dream to shame

We gambled. Double down on black in a game where we knew only what we knew. "The only rule you may be told is this one." We didn't know the rules. Nor the flawed rules behind the rules. Nor the avarice behind the rulers of the rules.

Securitized and resecuritized to secure profit.

And so we pay the price. Our dream teetered on the unsustainable fact that house prices should be sky high, in the red, not by red line, but by greed line, to line the pockets of the usurious. To hope for breaking even means hoping that housing becomes unaffordable again. Who would hope for such a heartless thing?

I had a dream my life would be
So diff'rent from this hell I'm living
So diff'rent now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed

--lyrics by Andrew Lloyd Weber

In losing our security, we found... freedom.

salty memories
saliva, tears, breasts swell by reflex
mothersmilkmotherslove retained
holding breath against the pain
but breath, like tearsmilklove comes anyways

for naima, beloved child embraced by her ancestors

Checkmate, Mama

After watching the movie Black Swan, I don't do the "If you don't do XYZ, I will throw it away" consequences anymore. And also because 2 weeks ago, my daughter called me out on the bluff. She didn't want to clean up her kitchen toys and so I gave the usual consequence that I would throw them away. And she said OKAY! and then helped me to put them in the recycle bin that I pulled out in my attempt to escalate. Finally I tried saying I would give the toys to her baby cousin K8 (archnemisis) and she said OKAY.

Checkmate, momma.

Fortunately the next day, I asked her to make me something to eat and when she had no toys to do so, I reminded her that we were giving it all to K8 and of course she flipped out. So after age 3, don't say "I will throw it away" unless you mean it mean it.

mother's milk

my 3 year old is a poetess-in-the-making

sữa mẹ dúng:

mother's milk is like

dúng trái cam

like oranges

dúng trái dâu

like strawberries

dúng sà lách

like lettuce

dúng cà rêm

like ice cream

war on germs

I think the reason that the debate on vaccines is so heated on this is because it's an intensely personal parenting decision that is also intensely political. My take on all this is philosophical. The dominant metaphor and paradigm for larger Western society is warfare. The medical industrial complex is steeped in that framework, treating disease and bacteria as enemy combatants, and valuing profit over evidence-based protocols. So that's the context in which the billion dollar vaccination industry was developed.

When we look at the mortality rate associated with any given disease, let's say polio, we'll see that the mortality rate was dropping with the advent of industrialization and better sanitation--prior to the introduction of a polio vaccine. The early polio vaccines were "live" and many people who were vaccinated contracted polio from the vaccine itself before they recalled it. Most pro-vaccine lit only looks at the period immediately after vaccines were introduced as "proof" that they work. Without that larger historical context, yes, it's easy to attribute the salvation of the human race to vaccines.

Even with the recent pertussis outbreak, if you look at the population dying, it's typically very poor children, and in Cali, undocumented Latino immigrant children, who are more likely to have poor nutrition and poor health. Yet rather than address the underlying factors of poverty and anti-immigrant health policies, the DPH is telling the general population to vaccinate.

Let's look at Gardasil as another example--this vaccine for females which supposedly prevents genital warts, an STD, which can lead to cervical cancer. This was fasttracked onto the market and is the controversial subject of mandatory vaccination laws. It's been around a few years now and the deaths or sterilization or other vaccine injury of young girls is only beginning to make the FDA take a second look. What is manifestly clear to me, is that vaccines are a massive human guinea pig experiment funded and fueled by the pharmaceutical industry.

Anyways, I recommend Aviva Jill Romm's Vaccinations book over Dr. Sears. She is a midwife, herbalist and now MD. She actually explains the fine print of what are the benefits, risks & adverse reactions to vaccinations (i.e. what your doctor is supposed to tell you) AND how the disease manifests and it's risks so that one can make a truly informed decision. It's the only book I found to discuss the disease itself.

Final tangent (sorry there's no returns in here): It's only very recently that it's become profitable to understand the immune system and commodify non-invasive healing modalities (i.e. indigenous or traditional healing systems). Hence the sudden commercialization of probiotics as the "friendly" bacteria after decades of vilifying bacteria and creating the self-perpetuated problem of "super-bacteria" which are immune to antibiotics. From a holistic standpoint, the human body exists because of bacteria; we live in symbiosis with bacteria and it's not until our body is out of balance that the bacteria become harmful. In that context, we need to re-evaluate the supremacy of Western medicine and its paradigm over all other traditional modalities.

And as parents, we have to weigh and balance all those personal, political, social, financial factors and make the best decisions for our families. (As a side note, in true service of humanity, India patented their traditional system of healing under Creative Commons license to prevent the continued theft of "intellectual property/patent" by pharmeceutical corporations.)

growing pains

Babies are very smart and every thing they do has developmental purpose.

Having an experienced family chiropractor who worked with pregnant women and babies was my maternal salvation from the first time parent anxiety. My chiro mentioned to me how much the cranial plates shift in the first few years as babies' heads make fantastical growth. Sometimes, the cranial plates get a little stuck.

Ever notice how one eye seems smaller than the other at times? It's because the cranial plates near the ear of the smaller eye are a little stuck. Creating pressure in the cranium helps to alleviate the pressure and move the plates--so breastfeeding/nursing/sucking is physiologically and developmentally critical for babies in their cranial development. Sometimes when cranial plates get stuck and sucking doesn't help, the pressure of those cranial "growing pains" causes them to bang their heads or suck on random things or other "odd" repetitive behavior that the medical profession dismisses as phases or meaningless. So headbanging can sometimes help get the cranial plates get unstuck as a last (frustrated) resort.

Teething can also cause similar behavior. If you have access to a craniosacral therapy (chiropractor or massage therapist) it is very gentle and can really help babies to transition through all those growing pains without banging their heads in frustration. I highly recommend going at least once with your infant and asking them to show you how to do some of the techniques if you can't afford to go alot.

If you don't have access to craniosacral therapy, try giving her/him a light scalp/cranial massage. Feel for the grooves between the cranial plates above the ears, around the fontanelle (soft spot in back of head) and with your two thumbs gently gently move them apart. It won't feel like anything is happening or actually moving, but can help get it unstuck. Letting baby suck on something while you do this helps baby to move those cranial plates. I would do this while breastfeeding. There are other specialized techniques as well (like the ear tugging thing which I've been shown how to do but don't really know how to do so I leave it to the trained expert).

parenting equity

We live in a patriarchal society, so in a hetero family even a progressive family, gender is still going to be a struggle. I think white feminism (Stanton, Cody) did a huge disservice to women by demanding equality with white men (legal, political, biological) rather than equity. Historically, white women were emancipated based on the Stanton argument that white women could counteract the freed black male slave vote. Also, those white suffragettes and subsequent white feminists distanced themselves from motherhood as a form of unremunerated bondage and not coincidentally, the wage work of freed black women.

While that is all centuries ago, its legacy is this--Mothers are not valued in the mainstream power structure; the US is the ONLY 1st world nation that does not provide mandatory paid maternity leave. FMLA is a watered down approximation of a well meaning thought. If you are on welfare, you can only take of other people's children for pay, you cannot be paid to raise your own children. So the rallying cry that a "women can do anything men can do" is mostly true, but more importantly, men CANNOT do everything women can--give life and sustenance--and that is exactly what remains unacknowledged, unvalued, and unremunerated.
(ASIDE: the New Yorker had an interesting article a while back about the "liberating" American invention of breast pumps and how it forced mothers to go back to work sooner because now biology wasn't a barrier for women to be like men in the workplace.)

SAHM label is an effort to reclaim the degraded "homemaker."

All that to say that I don't take the gender dynamics as solely an individual couple's relationship problem, but a social problem. I struggle with it too, not because my husband is a patriarchal narcissist (far be it from true!), but because we live these socially imposed power dynamics and norms. And this all without bringing in other dynamics like race and culture.

Motherhood is still unpaid work.

The patriarchal nuclear family structure and the ruptures in extended family networks from immigration and American nomadic existence makes it so much harder; no grandmothers and elders live with us to raise our babies.

Dennis Brutus once gave met Tstsi Dengaremba's novel Nervous Conditions. And I think it gets exactly at the tension between Western feminism/norms and cultural roles.

Having exclusively breastfed and coslept until 1yo meant that my daughter was squarely attached to me which created its own cycle of emotional dependence. It wasn't until ~2.5yo that VL would ask for her Ba when she needed comfort or nurturing. Now this wasn't my husband's refusal or irresponsibility; he picked up the slack on all the household chores and other non-BF parenting so that I could nurture our child. When he was back at work FT, I voluntarily did all the diaper changes at night while I was on maternity leave in equitable appreciation of him working outside the home. For SAHMs, the household chores do fall on their shoulders more, because that is what is equitable. For families where both parents work outside the home, chores and parenting may be more negotiated in the 3 hours we have with the offspring before they go to sleep.

Until males start lactating (physiologicaly possible, if socially/cultural taboo. google it), the first few years fall squarely on the mother's breasts. I still struggle with what mainstream feminism enculturated in me and traditional/cultural roles.

January 7 at 10:12am