crossing borders

honestly i am not sure how to respond to this article from september 2008.

my honest response is post-despair.  as in after you have accepted that the world is fucked up.  and that the masters are determined to win. and you are only one person, then what?  i am sure i am not the only person who feels this way.  what happens after you throw up your hands and say: look, that sucks but i cant do anything about it.  i’ve got enough causes on my plate.

this country is denying the citizenship of people because they were born in the wrong part of the country.  if you were born in the southwest you are more likely to be denied citizenship. if you were born with brown skin in the wrong part of the country, if you were born poor in the wrong part of the country, if you were born by midwife, if you were born…

i am feeling overwhelmed lately.  i have to leave the country in less than a month.  the apartment is a mess.  my kid needs to be potty trained.   i have to study arabic.  i have to write.  i have to keep in touch with my friends.  i have to sustain a relationship with my partner.  i have to get my brain in gear to travel with a one-year old and a bunch of other complications.

and so this shouldnt be my issue.

but i too am about to cross borders.  and hopefully that crossing will be easy.  and hopefully i can live in the place that i want to live.  but there is a possibility that something will go wrong.  that i too will be told that i dont belong.  because of the color of my skin.  the sound of my name.  the look of my child.  the sound of my voice.

i thought about writing a poem about this lil article.  perhaps i still will.  but what will a poem do?  other than open up language like a child with a dictionary and a magnifying glass?

ugh, people think i do what i do because i want to be helpful.  if helpful was the feeling i was going for…this is the last thing i would be doing.   i so rarely feel helpful.  you ever have that feeling that you are helpless and determined to do what gets you up in the morning?

my kid is going to be up soon.  el compa will be making breakfast for.  maybe the insomnia will be past like wind on the ocean and i will get some sleep.  the sun will shine maybe.  a us soldier will be told that he is not a citizen, but, hey! thanks for the service.

why do i have insomnia?  cause the heart is not meant to be endure this much without breaking and i spend my nights patching the heart back together with crazy glue and spittle.

when i am around others i can be lighthearted, funny, witty, even, quick, sociable, and cute.  but when it is dawn and i watch the children march themselves to school bundled in boots and furry hats, i cant help but wonder if god knew what he was doing when he made us.  god was like the kid who enters the science fair with a project that was way too complicated for the time allotment so he turns in a half-done project gets a ‘c’ on it and then throws it in the trash and figures next year he is just making a volcano.

fuck god.

it is like 730 am.  i am going to crack open a beer.  smoke a cigarette.  and get some sleep.

a lil sisterist revelation

when i started reading midwife: sage femme, hebamme, comadrona, partera blog i thought she was of color.  thinking probably latina.  and then hours of reading later…6 or 7 pages into the blog, i found out that she was white.  i had to read the sentence 4 or 5 times to be sure…i am still in half-denial, like i really want to claim her as a radical woc.  but then i thought, no, it is awesome that she is white…frankly there arent that many white chicks that ‘get it’.  and when i meet (or read) one who does it gives me hope for sisterhood.  it reifies that ‘whiteness’ is not an adequate excuse to not struggle to be conscious in this world.  or for white folks to throw up their hands like: oh, there is no point in trying…

you know, sometimes life has a way of handing me some beauty.

and now…some articles/blog posts i am digging about birth.

after the birth what a family needs: this is for a friend who is looking at becoming a post-partum doula.  i think that she would be wonderful at it.

word magic: i have questions of anti-circumcision as a movement.  questions about respect for cultures and religions.  but i love this bit in this post:

She was shunned for many years for daring to speak up for the unassisted birth pioneers.  She loved being a midwife but didn’t do it with any compromise of her values.  She was fond of the idea that midwives should attend only one birth per month…She often said that “Every mother is a midwife” and then proceeded to further alienate herself from most other midwives by asking the rhetorical question “Why would I pay someone to be paranoid for me?”…Every profession needs someone to shoot straight from the hip and bring the profession back to a state of humility.

third/fourth wave midwifery and spinning babies

do you remember that democracy now! with melissa harris lacewell and gloria steinem talking about hillary and barack earlier this year?

it is one of the greatest exchanges that happened during the election imho.

it was the difference between second wave and third wave feminism…i know we are not supposed to acknowledge the difference between the generations approach to feminism…but i need the analogy to explain third/fourth wave midwifery…

well, alot of the midwives that i have met (primarily in minneapolis) are second wave midwives.  they have fought so hard for legal recognition that everything else becomes secondary or tertiary in their view.  and they are very protective over the ‘gains’ they have made, no matter how the privileging of ‘certified’ and ‘insured’ midwives has been not only negligent but destructive to women of color, the queer community, sexual and trauma survivors, imprisoned women, and many more marginalized in the birth community and in the world at large.

what they seemed to be much more concerned with is protecting their status and the status of certified midwives in order to advance their cause.  they do so by looking toward women’s cultures that are black and brown and saying: see!  see!  those women have ‘natural’ birth.  and we, white women, are using those black and brown exotic women’s cultures as a model for us to change birth in our white communities.