accountability and war
March 25, 2009
Do you know the PROBLEMS you raise with that baby girl.
DO you know what people think of you when you say you are worthy of being that person.
1. I have read this post several times. i couldnt take it in. i couldnt understand why i couldnt take it in.
cognitive dissonance.
this statement goes against everything that i have ever been told in my life.
also, this statement is true.
isolation, communities, and international womens day
February 25, 2009
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…
music for a good mood
December 17, 2008
jean grae: keep living
some songs live with you. i have had itunes for more than 4 years and this song has never lost its first place position. this was the song i listened to in palestine, congo, mexico, virginia, minnesota, and chicago. it is the song that i walk to– down the street no matter the continent. it stays on repeat.
now why does this song put me in a good mood? i guess because i believe in survival. and it reminds me that no matter how bad things gets ‘out there’ those of us who are scrappy, who hustle, who are creative, who know how to survive, will do so…yeah they are destroying the money supply in this country. the dollar is losing value. a capitalism in crisis and even the capitalists dont know how to deal with it. but its like claire huxtable said when she was asked about the ‘black’ perspective during the Depression: we learned that misery doesnt enjoy company. (i love the ambiguity of her response)…in other words, welcome to our world…
tupac: dear mama
when i was in highschool, tupac was murdered. the first thing i loved about tupac was his eyelashes. crush. in the eastern congo and ethiopia in 2005 barbershops were playing tupac on their cd players. and murals of he, bob marley, and che, a trinity of the brown and black ghettos and shanty towns, were splayed on white washed buildings. it is amazing how he has become a global third world icon. all three of these saints are complex figures. neither pure angels nor devils.
the definition of motherhood
December 12, 2008
what does it mean to be a mother? i am not trying to wax poetic. i am trying to get a handle on what does ‘mother’ mean as a social category. i think that we deny the existence of a lot of mothers when we speak and write as if the central determination of who or better yet what is a mother is that she does the primary care for her biological offspring with whom she carried in her womb for 9 months.
i do this too easily. speak and act as if becoming a mother is about uterus, ovaries, menses, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, etc. as if these biological processes define motherhood. they dont.
at the incite! conference in denver there was a workshop called revolutionary motherhood. and in it were women who were adoptive parents, godmothers, aunts, folks taking the primary care for their parents, and more. and i felt this internal twinge, this resistance to calling these women…mothers.
and then i remembered at this conference how it had seemed so clear to me that even though ‘woman’ in comparison to ‘man’ was an oppressed social category, if incite! centered the experiences of women of color in relation to ‘trans of color’ and marginalized the experiences of transfolk then incite! was being transphobic and oppressive as an organization.
and so if i centered the biologically/primary caregiving-identified mothers as the primary experience of motherhood, then i was marginalizing alot of mothers. saying that their experiences were not ‘complete’ somehow. they were ‘kinda like mothers’ but not ‘real mothers’. and since i was considering some mothers to not be ‘complete’ i considered their lives, their experiences, and their knowledge to be incomplete as well and thus not as important for me to pay attention to.
weaning
August 19, 2008
i breast fed my kid for the first 14 months of her life. we also supplemented with soy formula. this is because the pumping machines did not work for me. often when i would tell this to other breastfeeding mamas they would say algo asi: oh yeah i had to pump alot at first…then they would tell me about pumping for 15 minutes to get 8 oz of milk…this never happened to me. i had three pumping machines (a handheld, a single breast, and a double breast) never happened. i cried. i felt inadequate.
my midwife had said giving my baby formula was giving her poison. ok she didnt say this, she screeched it. when i asked her what was in the formula that made it poison, she said: just read the ingredient list. me: yes, but what exactly are the poisonous ingredients. she shrugs me off. she rarely had good specific knowledge about her midwifery craft. she usually got annoyed when i asked her for details. she regarded it as a strange quirk that i expected her to know facts, figures, cogent analysis. this was not a good sign.
anyways, i got over the fact that i couldnt pump, breastfed as much as i could, and my daughter drank soy formula. i figured that she was probably going to get poisoned a million different ways by the urban air, various cleaning products, chemical and dyes in clothing, etc. so purity was out of the window. and i was not going to dedicate my life to creating the pure child.
furthermore, she broke her leg when she was 2 months old, and was in a cast and body sling for a month, thus ending my baby moon. all i could do was breastfeed her and give her pain killers and cry and pray.
the poisons let her sleep at night.
when we were in mexico a friend asked how did i feel about letting someone else breast feed my kid. and i stumbled in my response. breastfeeding is a private/public intimate act. i breastfeed in public. she and i had breastfed side by side, my lil one squirmy and playful, hers, quiet and sleepy, and yet it felt strange to think of her breastfeeding my child. i had read about disease being passed through the breast milk. i felt undecided about the matter. and undecided about the idea of breastfeeding some one else’s kid. was it a violation of space? a violation of food?
i think, i would want someone to ask permission (if they could) first. but in an emergency do what you have to do.
cuz actually not alot (other than breastmilk) passes through breastmilk. and tandem breastfeeding (in trust) could make some mamas lives easier. after she asked me that, and i did some research, read some stories, i felt like i could let go of ‘possessing’ my babe a bit more.
i loved breastfeeding in mexico. sitting a cafe, drinking coffee, watching youtube, and nursing. other than people giving me little smiles and nods as they passed by, no one seemed to give me more attention when i was feeding her. other than the internationals. ah, the gringos. who thought it was so ‘unusual’ what i was doing. god, i could have slapped them. and their non-baby-having, i am a traveler-look-at-my-dirty-clothes, stop-and stare-at-the-breeder, asswipe-like attitudes.
i started to wean her…well, she started to wean herself…well, it was a back and forth process, when she started walking. her love of moving walking running crawling exploring the world, meant she would rather have a cup in her hand than a breast. and the breast was still good for going to sleep, but other than that she would try to pull the breast off my body so that she could go exploring with it….ummm…it doesnt work like that.
but all in all it took a couple of months to wean. i didnt really have a schedule or a plan. i just put the idea: wean, into my head and figured it would happen. her papa took over more of the feeding and i got to spend more time writing and typing. (she would never, not even as an infant, let me type and breastfeed at the same time…all those images of writer or office working mamas typing as they breastfeed, did not happen for me…fuck!)
and then one day i looked up and realized i hadnt fed her in 2 or 3 days. and she hadnt asked for breast milk. and we were weaned.
or so i thought.
because the next couple of weeks, i felt weepy for no apparent reason. over little things. and tired. and depressed. and silly. and then as i was writing a letter to a friend, mid-sentence, i realized, this was the emotional/hormonal side of weaning.
she has been weaned for less than two months, and i dont think she remembers it at all. i am kinda amazed how quickly she just got over it.
but the entire process from conception to weaning has been amazing. when i have gotten pregnant the first thing to start umm…blossoming…are the tetas…and they dont stop.
i remember looking in the mirror one night, and thinking: these arent my breasts…and then…oh fuck!…im pregnant!
now i watch my toddler galloping over her world and think…oh fuck!…how the fuck did i become a parent?
