my critique of single mamis…and encuentros…

i am having a lot of issues around access, communication,
expectations, and trans national community building.  so i want to
bring those to the table.

i have been really dealing with this for the past couple of months.
but honestly felt insecure about bringing these to the table.

ok so a few weeks ago i was in this conversation by email.  and i was kind of taken a back by the responses in this email.  mainly because i was speaking about issues i was having accessing communication technology and folks in the us.  you know how so much of our media work is us centered, hell us exclusive, and that marginalizes and excludes me.  since i dont live in the us.  pretty simple right.

the responses were… um… special.  one, silence.  two, hesitation.  three, defensiveness.

then i kind of just dropped the convo because the convo itself was marginalizing and excluding me.  and it was getting pretty exhausting. or more accurately i was having a hard time convincing myself to take the whole convo seriously.  i think it just came to a point.  the point when i was told that i was critical of single mamis.  that i just laughed.  and laughed.  and was like ok.  and trying to think of what to say that wasnt snarky, lol lol, or otherwise pushing up the dada absurdity of the conversation.  like.  yeah, i hate single mamis.  i hate my mother.  i hate all mothers.  whatever.

but the thing about this convo.  is that it was such a classic well intentioned pile on.  like there was one of me.  and then other folks responding to me.  supporting each others vision of what i had said.  misquoting me and then repeating the misquotation.  and me responding to the folk in increasingly long emails- because increasingly more people are coming into the convo each their slightly dift perspective on what is ‘going on’.  and me, trying to explain, why, and how, they have misconstrued my vision through their own lenses.

and in the moment in that convo. it all seems so logical.  that this is the way the convo happens.  no matter how absurd it gets.

placenta medicine

After a woman has a baby, many changes quickly begin to occur in her body. Hormones revert to pre-pregnancy levels, organs shift and blood levels decrease – just to name a few. This transition can sometimes be difficult. Placentas contain hormones which, when given in the postpartum period, can make the change easier. Ingesting the placenta also can help to prevent postpartum depression. I have seen quite a few women who had postpartum depression with previous pregnancies take placenta medicine after a current pregnancy and feel completely different.

Placenta medicine also has nutritional benefits. It is a high source of iron and protein. Because the placenta is the bridge between mother and baby, it contains all of the same vitamins and nutrients that mother has passed across to baby. This may be especially important if a woman experiences postpartum hemorrhage.

~ Kelly Graff
Excerpted from “The Bridge of Life: Options for Placenta,” Midwifery Today, Issue 84

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The most practical method of processing the placenta is to dry it. This method has been and still is being used all over the world. Depending on the culture, the placenta is dried in the oven or in the sun. When the placenta is finally mummified after many hours, it will still need to be protected from bacteria and insects.

Traditionally the dried placenta is wrapped in a piece of cloth and hung in a cool, dry place to be cured like bacon. In a modern household, a preferable method is to grind it into a powder and keep it in a well-sealed jar in the refrigerator. The powder can then be used to produce various remedies.

The placenta must be completely mummified before being pulverized. The average placenta is 25 mm thick, has a diameter of 22 cm and weighs about 500 g. Depending on the size and thickness of the organ, an average of three days and three nights is required for it to dry enough to be broken into chunks.

The exposure to heat during the drying process should be as gentle on the healing substances as possible. Afterwards, the placenta will only be half its original size and will have turned hard and black. It needs to be brittle enough to be crushed into pieces with a heavy object.

First, grate the dry chunks of placenta, then grind with a coffee mill or with a mortar and pestle. Keep removing the powder and grinding the bigger pieces. If the powder is still not fine enough, add a carrier substance such as sugar, silica or mineral earth. The crystals of the carrier substance will make the powder even finer.

The completed placenta powder keeps best in a cool, dry place. The container should be marked with the date the powder was made, the dilution and the origin of the raw material. Experience shows that the powder can be stored for up to three years. If bacteria, spores or parasites are not destroyed, the powder will develop a bad smell. If this happens, do not use the powder anymore.

~ Cornelia Enning
Excerpted from Placenta: The Gift of Life, Motherbaby Press 2007

What’s (radical) love got to do with it? Everything.

1.i am a mother. and when i first read jess’s piece that was what came to me: my motherhood. and how central my love with my daughter is in my organizing.
and i have followed the ensuing conversation fascinated. wow. there are all these permutations and experiences i hadnt perceived. so thanks to everyone for that. i will be thinking about this conversation for a long time.

when i say ‘radical love’ what i mean is ‘radical caretaking’. caretaking for me is concrete action. taking care of myself. taking care of others. on multiple levels physical, mental, emotional, spiritual.  it is providing space where others can take care of themselves.  where they feel empowered to ask for what they need.  it is  not because i like them (often i dont, hell, there are enough times in the day i dont like my daughter, but i take care of her…does that make sense?) but because they are another human being and they deserve to be whole too.

when i think of radical love. i think of being a birth assistant for working poor african immigrant teenage moms. and loving them. even though i may not particularly like them. not the kind of folks i want hang out with on a saturday aft. but loving them tenderly through an incredibly vulnerable moment of their lives. and that creates a bond between us. and yes they yelled not nice things to me in their final moments of labor. and they resent me because i am a stranger, not their boyfriend, not their mom. but because we have been really vulnerable with each other…the quality of the relationship is…more human(?)

random stories

1. there is so much to do in this world.  and these days i feel so small about it all.  and so i have to slow down and deal with what life brings me.  piece by piece.  day by day. it is cliched but it works.

2.  the raven eye blog will be up soon.  i had to change hosts and shit.  get used to the time difference between here and there.  business hours are a bitch.

3. in the mean time i have been reading blogs galore.  oh my god.  woc and tpoc y’all are amazing.  there are all these beautiful blogging experiments out there.   exquisite writing.  art experiments.

i am especially digging:

my mural of a diamond

from nadia.

1.here, we live on the fifth floor of an apartment building in downtown cairo.  the closest we get to dirt and leaves are the potted plants on the balcony.  so i am end up sinking into blogs lately (do you ever do that just sink into a blog and read it for hours?) that celebrate the earth, green growing things, leaves, trees, etc.  like this blog called: diy winterdreams.

2. recently she had a post on atc’s artist trading cards.  which is a movement/style that i learned about back in 2004 from my friend cami.  and i always meant to join.  somehow.  but i end up getting distracted by life.  so now four and a half years later…i am thinking about trying to take my lil art journal pages and moving them towards atc’s.

even though this one is traded: i love it.  sew.

but this one is available.  somedays it is how i feel. blue tree

and these trees as well: spiral garden

3. this morning i had a dream that i was painting this gorgeous mural on a wall of our apartment.

isolation, communities, and international womens day

1.  i am really excited about the fact that folks are interested in this lil blog dream.  i had kinda thought that no one be interested.  and people would be annoyed that i asked them in the first place.  and i put it out there because i had this dream and then another one and another one and it became obvious that the universe was not going  to let me get a good night sleep until i did.

2. i am hoping to have it up and basically running for international women’s day: march 8th.  but i may not reach that deadline.  there is alot going on in my world right now and i dont want to half-ass any of the projects i am working on.  including the whole being a mother-thing that i do.

3.  this morning i woke up with mary j blige’s version of ‘im going down’ running through my head…

it all started with survival

it kind of all started when the progressive organization i was working with, christian peacemaker teams told me that i could no longer work with them full time because i was going to be a mother.  that if i did work with them part time my healthcare and other benefits would be dropped.

i started to miscarry a couple of days later.

a couple of weeks after that i put in my resignation.

i realized that the reason that i was not of high value as a global activist worker when i chose to become a mother was because in the communities in which we worked, the mothers, especially the mothers of young children were not considered to be very important by global activists.

even though  in that organization, we had claimed to solidarity organizing, stand with the oppressed, and accompaniment of communities under the threat of violence, we focused primarily on the work and leadership of men in the community.  now, most of the local men with whom we worked were fathers of multiple children, often young children.  we barely looked at the leadership of women in the community, not to mention mothers, not to mention mothers of young children.  the assumption was that those mothers would be too busy to deal with issues ‘outside of the home’.  as if the war zone was in the streets, didnt cross the threshold, as if ‘womens work’, the work of caretaking, sustaining lives and community, were less threatened by violence and war than ‘mens work’ and mens lives.

surrounded in smoke

dear aza,

we put you to sleep early tonight.  you didnt have a nap and had played with kids for hours today.  so by the time that we got back home, you had whimpered and then nodded into dream land.

in the back ground cnn is playing.  supposedly they are providing a ‘balanced’ coverage of israel’s attack on gaza.

today one of the mothers of the children you played with, asked if we were taking you with us to palestine.  i laughed.  what a strange question.  how can i not take you with me?  where would i leave you?  where could you find more love than with us, your crazy parents?
this ‘balanced’ coverage infuriates me.  i am not sure if it is because the numbers of those who have died and are wounded are not considered to be central to the coverage, or if it is because i cannot understand why one would try to treat the two sides as equal when it is obvious that handmade rockets do not equal one of the strongest and best-equipped militaries in the world.  if the conflict, the two sides, are not balanced, why provide balanced coverage?

i have dreams of being surrounded in smoke.  and i cant see anything but you in my arms.

daughter of a single mom: tough as shit

i have been following hermana, resist since i was preggers.  she has one of those blogs that i always want her to update more often.  like, every couple of weeks is just too long to wait. and i am not much of a commenter (i am getting better at it).

my younger brother and i were raised by a single working class/middle class mom.  she was and is amazing.  not only are we, her children, still alive, but she raised us to think for ourselves, to be politically conscious, to be artistic, creative and to speak up for ourselves.  the whole time we were growing up she always had her 40 plus hour a week job, plus the commute, plus a series of side projects/businesses.  my favorite was the afrocentric jewelry and accessories.  we spent our weekends looking at patterns, visiting african fabric shops, scouring magazines, sewing on a 1970-something blue singer machine, and learning about what it meant to be proud african-americans.

to this day my mom cheers for my creativity.   as long as i am writing, drawing, or creating something she is determined to support it.  she is the first one to remind me that i should be selling what i create.  that it is good.  hell, to quote jean grae, she is cataloguing my shit like she is afeni shakur.  she will read and edit anything i write.  and we still bond over walking through open-air markets, appraising the goods, and figuring out how *we* could do that.

and dont get me wrong, we bump heads often enough.  we are too much alike.  and i am the eldest daughter of a single mother, i grew up  a little too fast. know a little too much. i wont go into the details.  lets just say the details count.

single motherhood is tough as shit.  i am not a single mother.  i was just raised by one.  and if it wasnt for her i wouldnt have the visions that i have of what i want my daughter to learn from me.  what i admire most about my mother is that she insisted on putting energy behind that enormous amount of intelligence and creativity she has.  that she believed and still believes that her creativity is valuable and ought to be invested in.  but then she learned that from her mother, my grandmother, another incredibly intelligent and creative soul.

excitement

1. the house is a mess.  but it is the kind of mess that says that we are much closer to leaving.  the mess right before you look around and say, actually, we’ve done most of the hard work.

2. aza has been hanging out with her grandmother a couple of hours away this weekend.  i miss her alot.  it has been lovely to sleep in and hang out just el compa and i.  and be on no one’s schedule but our own.  i remember this feeling.  light and sweet.

3. about midwifery education.  and the path of self-study.  and what will the outlaw midwives project be…

4. to be traveling overseas again.  i couldnt get excited until we got our passports.  now my heart feels closer to my ribcage and my hair looks cooler.

5. started an art journal last night.  committed to working in it every day.  going to let it suck for a while.  interested in discovering authentic vision.  normally i start a journal, realize it sucks, get mad at it, decide to go back to doing ‘real art’ (whatever that is) and then feel jealous whenever i see someone else’s art journal, start a new art journal, let the cycle roll over and crush me once again.

6. to travel cross the country and see friends for the next couple of weeks.

7. had a dream about jealousy.  woke up realizing that of all the negative emotions that i believe are necessary to express (anger, grief, fear, etc.), jealousy is the difficult one for me.  i ignore others jealousy of me.  resent their jealousy of me.  and refuse to acknowledge when i am jealous.  so i dont know how to handle that emotion very well.  i am now opening my arms and allowing jealousy to pour into my life.  ok.  that is a little extreme.  how about i just meditate and reflect on jealousy first?

8.  to be a photojournalist.  to have a voice and vision to share with the world.  working hard to have a clear and soulful voice and vision.  i want to give the best of myself.

9. cyberquilting.  i am becoming a cyberquilter! wondering if i should get lil business cards that list my occupation as cyberquilter?  ways to confuse the fam even more…plus, how does one translate cyberquilter into arabic?

10.  and breakfast.  wonder what el compa will make for breakfast?