mother's day joy

cosmo's pre-school class had a special mother's day program on friday. this is the first such event i have experienced as a mom, and, not surprisingly, i sobbed through a good portion of it.



the kids had made several adorable pieces of artwork for us, including a portrait of mom. mine had bright pink hair, and was the most detailed figure cosmo has made, so far. he's not one for representational drawing just yet. of course, i was touched by the portrait, and the caption "i love my mom because she goes to the store with me." we enjoyed some punch and muffins, and the kids performed a few songs for us:



when it was time to go, there were tears and pleas from the children. i finally wrested myself away, and since i was on my bike, i didn't have a good way to transport the artwork. i was about to leave it in cosmo's cubby when our friends offered to drop it by our house. i accepted, but when they arrived, the portrait of me (the one with the pink hair) was missing. i sped back to the school, to make sure it was still there, and hadn't blown away outside, or something. it was nowhere to be seen. i looked around outside, called my friends for more information. when they didn't answer, i went to their house. they searched the car again, told me where they had parked, and said they'd go back to look. it was a very windy day.

i hurried back downtown, and combed the intersection, trying to imagine all the places the wind could have taken an eight and a half by eleven sheet of construction paper, with a drawing of a mom with pink hair on it. i was unreasonably distraught at the thought of losing this precious memento. i couldn't believe i had turned it over to someone else. i was getting close to giving up, when i got a call from carl, saying that our friends had just dropped the drawing off at our house. they had found it somewhere near where they had parked, on kirkwood. i never saw them down there, but didn't care. the drawing was found, that's all that mattered.
i'd photograph it, but some of the lines are too light to show up. trust me, it is heartbreakingly adorable.



happy mother's day!

artists/mothers

for mother's day, i'll be participating in a show called artists/mothers, in houston texas. it's a multi media event, including readings, performance, video and visual art, put together by sehba sarwar, at voices breaking boundaries.

i won't be attending in person, but i'll have a virtual presence via skype, and i have sent some water color images of coral polyps (and the algae who love them) that i've been working on for the wonderlab. i'm hoping to encourage connections between motherhood and symbiotic relationships that occur elsewhere in nature.

i know personally, almost all of the women participating in the show, and greatly admire their work. i feel truly honored to be in such company.



if you're one of my houston readers, take my advice and don't miss this show.

and so it begins.

as we pulled into the driveway yesterday, cosmo says to me,

"it's all yours mama."

"what?" i ask, bewildered.

"yours. it's all yours." he says, matter of factly

"what's all mine?"

"fault. it's all your fault, mama."

worth it

we've made it through most of the "terrible twos" without much of the terrible part. carl and i have often remarked on the fact that cosmo does not throw tantrums. well, tonight, he did.

(self portrait)

it had to do with climbing on me during dinner, batting at my salad bowl etc. and developed into crying and screaming in his room, which is something that cosmo does very little of (screaming, in particular). i can look back on the day, and see what kinds of things might have led to this: lack of one-on-one attention from each of us, lack of adequate exercise, not eating enough "real food," any number of things. add to that, mixed messages about what constitutes proper behavior at the dinner table. the fact that we don't have a dinner table might have something to do with it. when it's nice out, we eat on the back porch, and we have a proper table and chairs. when it is too cold for that, we eat inside, sitting on the living room floor, at the pew, which is a long coffee-table sort of thing that i made from what was once a church pew. we just recently started eating at the pew again, and haven't really established the ground rules, i guess. it is also possible that these incidents can't entirely be avoided. sometimes he's just got some pent up energy, and it needs to be released, somehow.

i started by making a big effort to communicate with him, getting him to slow down, look at me, speak to me, and listen. that sort of worked at first, and i was quite pleased. then, it stopped working, and he melted into the fitful mess that is a full blown tantrum, and communication of any kind was impossible. i never got angry, i remained steady, gentle, but firm in my approach, and recognized that he just needed to find a way to calm down. eventually, he did. and we hugged, and managed to move on with the evening. he asked for some water, and then, to listen to a BBC radio program CD that we borrowed from a friend, which seemed like the right thing to do. as he was drinking the water, he looked at me and said, "you're a good mama for me." at first, i wasn't sure what he'd said, so i asked him to repeat it. that is what he said. i can't imagine he knows exactly what that means, but it sure was just what i needed to hear at that moment. what a sweetheart.

[and to that, cosmo would say, "i'm not sweetheart, i'm COSMO!"]

abundance

inside our refrigerator sits half a quart of red delicious strawberries. they've been on sale at the grocery store for the last few weeks. i love strawberries. they have been one of my top favorite foods since i was a very small child. i'm not going to eat the strawberries in the fridge tonight, though i surely want to. i have some chocolate sitting on the spice shelf that would go nicely with those juicy, slightly tart, beauties. no, i am not going to eat them. i'm not going to eat them because cosmo also loves strawberries. we have such a hard time getting him to eat enough, and he gets excited about fruit of any kind, especially berries. i just don't have the heart to eat them, when i know how happy he will be to see them in the morning.



it's part of the mythology of motherhood that we make sacrifices for our children. mom always serves herself last at the dinner table, claims to like the parts of the chicken with the least meat (so the rest of the family can have the best pieces) etc...i haven't really experienced this aspect of motherhood myself. i was completely ready to have cosmo when i did, i have no regrets, or resentments. i embrace the changes in my lifestyle that resulted from becoming a parent. it feels to me like everything got better when cosmo came along. i also haven't really noticed the extra cost of having a child, or at least not as much as i was warned i would. as i said, cosmo doesn't eat much. sure, i am more likely to by high quality, organic, hormone-free dairy and eggs, whole grain cereals and breads for cosmo, and of course, those things are more costly. he does grow out of clothes rather quickly. but between gifts, hand-me-downs, goodwill, yard sales and children's resale, we don't spend much on his clothes. i'm aware that as they get older, the costs increase, but so far, i feel like the gain far out-weighs the cost. in fact, there is no way to measure it (the gain).

in other words, i'm not a martyr-type mom. and yet, i almost never eat bananas anymore. i know i always used to. i lived alone for most of my adult life. i bought bananas every week, and they never went bad. i ate them. i like them. what's not to like? they're healthy, sweet, filling, easy to deal with. but now, i don't eat bananas. cosmo usually eats two of them before he even gets out of bed in the morning. he'll eat a few more throughout the day. carl has a banana for breakfast, as a late morning ritual. we buy 12 or more at a time, almost daily! we have been known to make trips to the store, just for bananas (and maybe half and half). i don't usually eat them, because i want to make sure there are enough for cosmo and carl. it is a strange feeling. i'm not used to it--this whole "caring for others before one's self" it's new to me. i think i like it. maybe even more than strawberries.

last week cosmo and i picked violets to put in our salad. there were plenty of those, and i ate my fill. so did cosmo.

what i don't say

i've been thinking about the way i write on this blog, what i write about, and, more specifically, what i don't write about. i don't mention the fact that both of us will be unemployed come june, and that we don't have a solid plan. i don't write about how complicated it is to deal with cosmo's biological father, and how conflicted i feel every time cosmo and i leave carl to go visit him and his family. i rarely write about my political convictions, how disturbed i am (on a daily basis) by the war in iraq, and the many crimes of the bush administration. i haven't mentioned who i plan to vote for in our primary in may. the blog is focussed on cosmo, and on being a mom, but i don't share my thoughts on the really heavy parts of motherhood, either.

in general, i hesitate to get too personal. i guess i am still getting used to the public nature of blogging. i actually don't mind much what strangers reading this might think of me, but i do care about what my friends think, and i have a hard time being open and vulnerable, in the same way, with anyone who knows me, who might be reading this blog. i don't know if i want everyone to know how insecure i feel about the thought of pursuing a career (finally) in architecture, and what a struggle it is for me to begin to put together a portfolio of my work. it is hard to admit that i still haven't lost the extra "baby weight," and how jealous i am of my friends who have. i don't like to expose how judgmental i can be about others (especially other parents) or my issues with comparative self-esteem.



i've kept a journal since i was 13 years old. for 27 years, writing has kept me sane, and helped me work through many difficult emotions and circumstances. but journal writing is private. and i still haven't worked out what it means to share my journal with the world. in fact, i can't do that. i still keep a journal, but it rarely makes it to the blog.

what's funny is that i find that the blogs i enjoy reading the most are the ones that dare to get personal. i want to hear the rants and complaints and self-effacing humor. it can make for really interesting reading. of course, it can also be tedious and self-indulgent. maybe that is what i fear?

i'd love to hear from others on this topic (whether you blog or not).

others people's lives (and mine)

today i found myself searching google maps for satellite views of places i lived growing up. it was a strange and surreal experience to see photographs from the sky of backyards we built forts in, and the empty fields where we played now covered in housing developments. this search eventually led me to pursue names of people i've known from the distant past. i finally landed on a blog hosted by a couple i knew long ago, who i am no longer in touch with. their lives are vastly different from mine, and different from when i knew them, yet there was some kind of common thread. i am really enjoying reading it, sifting through the archives. i've focussed on the posts by the woman i knew the most, and what strikes me is how happy she is about her life. she has lots of love around her, and she feels like she is right where she needs to be.

it occurred to me that this is how i feel about my own life. how lucky. tonight, the stifling heat has lifted. there is a cool breeze blowing, and the sky is a peachy pink, dotted with shades of amethyst. i feel good. i love my life, and i love the beautiful people in it.

in other news, last friday i took myself out on a date. carl was finished with classes and had some time to spend with cosmo during the day, so i walked up to the river oaks theater and saw the lives of others it was the perfect title for what i needed right then. i wanted to be alone, but i didn't want to be at home, where i would inevitably feel compelled to sweep the floors. i also didn't feel like sitting in a cafe and thinking about the cover letters that need to be written, or why i didn't spend my summers during grad school interning at sexy architecture firms (presumably, if i had, i would now have a flourishing career?). i just wanted to get away. simple escape into someone else's story. what better way to accomplish this than sitting alone in an aging movie theater, with a huge screen in front of my face playing a heart wrenching film set in east germany-just before the wall came down? it was perfect. afterwards i shopped at an upscale consignment shop next door, and found some summer pants (which i tried on, at my leisure, no impatient toddler rushing me to get out of the store). they were half off, which is still considerably more than i'm used to paying for used clothes, but still, a bargain. i walked home thoroughly rejuvenated. when i arrived, cosmo and carl were still out. i was at a loss.

so, i swept the floors.

the power of toule

i've been puzzling over this one for a while now. i had been wanting to get cosmo a tu-tu to dress-up in. he's started to take an interest in playing dress-up...he enjoys putting on different hats, putting hats on us and wearing multiple strands of shiny mardi-gras beads from last years' gay pride parade. i thought a tu-tu would be fun because it has such a fascinating texture, plus cosmo LOVES to dance. for the longest time, he would just bob up and down to music, now he runs around, waving his arms, and somehow taught himself how to spin. we almost always have music on in our house (when we aren't listening to NPR, that is), and cosmo enjoys all kinds. he'll even wave his arms around to music on the radio in the car. so, it occurred to me that he might really take to dancing in a tu-tu. but i hesitated. i thought people might think i was trying to impose my notions of gender fluidity on my one year old boy. they'd think i was setting him up for a lifetime of gender confusion. then i had to ask myself, first off, who are these "people?" not my friends. relatives maybe? the public at large? who knows, in any case, those voices shouldn't carry so much weight in my decision making about how to raise my child. i ended up coming up with a response to those voices anyway.

i remembered a favorite essay by marilyn frye called simply "sexism." it appears in her book the politics of reality: essays in feminist theory. she is a brilliant thinker, and her writing is crystal clear. my gleaning here won't do her work justice, so i highly recommend that you read this book (though some of the material is rather dated) and her more recent collection of essays, willful virgin. what stayed with me over the years, about this particular essay is this: those "people" who get so bent out of shape about dressing babies in gender ambiguous/inappropriate clothing are the very same people who claim that clear boundaries and differences between the sexes are utterly NATURAL and biologically determined. so... if these distinctions are so natural and inevitable, then why is it, that in our culture, they must be reinforced, programmed and pounded into every fiber of our beings from the day we come out of the womb? the first question asked of every new parent: "boy or girl?" if you don't sex mark your infant in the obligatory pink or blue onsie, people who meet you in the market become anxious. "how can i tell? is it rude to ask? should i take a guess?" this anxiety, this desperate need to know points to the primary place that sex distinction holds in our society...still.
i'll go ahead and quote frye:

It is a general and obvious principle of information theory that when it is very, very important that certain information be conveyed the suitable strategy is redundancy. If a message must get through, one sends it repeatedly and by as many means or media as one has at one's command. On the other end, as a receiver of information, if one receives the same information over and over, conveyed by every medium one knows, another massage comes through as well, and implicitly: the message that this information is very very, important. the enormous frequency with which information about people's sexes is conveyed conveys implicitly the message that this topic is enormously important. i suspect that this is the single topic on which we most frequently receive information from others throughout our entire lives. if i am right, it would go part way to explaining why we end up, with an almost irresistible impression, unarticulated, that the matter of people's sexes is the most important and fundamental topic in the world.(27)

small children's minds must be hopelessly boggled by all this. We know our own sexes, and learn to think it a matter of first importance that one is a girl or a boy so early that we do not remember not knowing...(27-28)

she goes on to talk about why this is.

It is extremely costly to subordinate a large group of people simply by applications of material force, as is indicated by the costs of maximum security prisons and of military suppression of nationalist movements. For subordination to be permanent and cost effective, it is necessary to create conditions such that the subordinated group acquiesces to some extent in the subordination. Probably one of the most effective ways to secure acquiescence is to convince people that their subordination is inevitable. The mechanisms by which the subordinate and dominate categories are defined can contribute greatly to popular belief in the inevitability of the dominance/subordination structure.

For efficient subordination, what's wanted is that the structure not appear to be a cultural artifact kept in place by human decision or custom, but that it appear natural...It must seem natural that individuals of the one category are dominated by individuals of the other and that as groups, the one dominates the other. To make this seem natural, it will help if it seems to all concerned that members of the two groups are very different from each other, and this appearance is enhanced if it can be made to appear that within each group, the members are very alike one another...All behavior which encourages the appearance that humans are biologically sharply sex-dimorphic encourages the acquiescence of women (and to the extent it needs encouragement, of men) in women's subordination. (33-34)

now, we might point out that a lot has changed in the US since Frye wrote this, back in the 1970s--after all, we currently have a female front-runner candidate for the office of the president of the united states. but ask yourself, what is the single most remarkable thing about her candidacy? she is a woman.

but i have strayed from my original purpose in writing about cosmo's tu-tu. i realized, finally, that my fears about imposing gender identity issues upon him by getting him things like skirts or beads (before he is old enough to choose things for himself) need further scrutiny. the truth is, i am already imposing gender identity on him every time i dress him in boys clothes. but of course that never gets questioned, because it reinforces a social structure that is widely accepted. yet in subtle (or not so subtle) ways, it contributes to social hierarchies of dominance and oppression that i am firmly opposed to.

so, the way i see it, the least i can do is offer cosmo a tu-tu.

my g-g-g-generation

last night we attended a talk at rice university--it was a teach-in actually, about the new military commissions act of 2006 (the "torture bill"), and carl was one of the panelists. cosmo didn't really comprehend the gravity of the topic at hand, as he kept interjecting with shout-outs and guffaws while one of the panelists was listing now legal interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, induced hypothermia and prolonged sleep deprivation. as our friend iris would say, wagging her finger in disapproval, in-a-pro-priate. we had to step out of the room for most of the discussion.

it was a lot more fun for cosmo out in the gallery anyway. he got to climb on the swooping forms of rip-curl canyon and, best of all, he wandered around underneath the room-sized structure made of plywood and die-cut cardboard contours. it was a perfect environment for him. there was nothing he could damage, and nothing much that could hurt him either, so he got to crawl around freely, dipping under the low spots, giggling and sucking in his breath while simultaneously vocalizing at a high pitch (his newly discovered favorite sound to make). he wasn't disturbing anyone and he was having a ball(photo forthcoming).

we went back into the classroom and heard a few minutes of carl's talk. but once he heard his voice and saw him speaking, cosmo seemed to want to go down to the front to be with carl. he squirmed out of my arms and i let him crawl on the shallow steps leading down the side of the lecture hall. the little guy just couldn't contain his excitement though. his squeals of delight were too distracting, so we went back out--this time to the lobby for some dinner. he crabbed around a polished black bench, picking up camouflaged black turtle beans off the top, and occasionally a kernel of corn, or a bright green pea.

when the teach-in turned to Q&A, we ventured back in. i heard a student in a budweiser-logo-styled-padre-island t-shirt question the optimism of some of the "older" people in the room. he said that he found no comfort in the idea that the constitution would bounce back from this most recent threat, in about 15 years or so. he pointed out that he had come of age in this [post 9-11] climate of fear and illegal, unjust war. this current [insane] administration was all he had known. his comments got me thinking about the challenges his generation faces. i began to reminisce about my own college years, and the struggles we faced, the battles we fought.

i became highly politicized around my sophomore year as an undergrad in springfield missouri [sometimes referred to as the buckle of the bible belt]. it was the mid/late 1980s, the tail-end of the cold war era. we lived in fear of nuclear war, we were outraged about the arms race, and the military spending that was stripping social programs of funding. we tried to put pressure on the government to impose sanctions on the south african apartheid regime, we tried to draw attention to the US instigated contra war in nicaragua, and we were increasingly concerned about the environment-- raising awareness and implementing recyling programs on campus. i took classes on non-violence, and the geography of the homeless and volunteered at a battered women's shelter.

today on democracy now! there was a discussion about a new film set in apartheid south africa. the discussion made me remember a night right after i graduated from college. i was out at a club with my boyfriend in oakland california (i had just relocated to the bay area). a bunch of hippies and i were bouncing around on the dance floor to the cool rhythms of some reggae band. at the end of one of the songs were these words free. nelson. mandela. all the members of the band were singing these words, over and over...free. nelson. mandela. the audience joined in. soon the entire club was chanting free. nelson. mandela. it was a beautiful moment in and of itself, but it hit me in a particularly powerful way. everything i had been doing for the past two and a half years...all the organizing, meetings, mailings, flyers, fundraisers, film screenings, marches, peace festivals, state board meetings, green conferences, trainings, teach-ins, poetry readings, soup kitchens, anti-racism workshops...it all felt sort of futile...or not? it was uplifting to finally find myself in a room full of strangers who cared about the same sorts of things i had been working for, but somehow it was unsettling to know that so many people cared, and still it went on like this. change seemed impossible. i couldn't imagine a free south africa.

within a year, the apartheid regime collapsed, nelson mandela was free, and soon the berlin wall came down as well...the cold war was over too. these things happened, but it wasn't obvious to me that my work had anything whatsoever to do with those events. the times changed. the struggles of those days are not the same as the struggles of today. and yet, in some ways, they aren't terribly different, and in some parts of the world, not much has changed (i'm thinking of the israeli occupation of palestine for example). it's not as if my activism ended once i hit age 22. today's struggles are my struggles too. but the issues we face as we come of age seem somehow...formative.

before cosmo and i left sewall hall last night, we had watched some skaters doing stunts off the front steps, danced in front of the big mirror in the ladies' lounge, and cosmo had knocked his head repeatedly (but gently) against the glass wall of the gallery. he couldn't understand why he was unable to reach the brass strip which was RIGHT THERE, no matter how many times he tried, or how far along the wall he traveled! the stickers to prevent people from walking into the glass were way too high for a baby to see.

when the talk was over, we fetched carl and walked across the campus in the rain...
wondering about the dragons cosmo's generation will need to slay.




note:this photo has nothing to do with this post. sorry for any confusion.