This is your kid.
You don’t have to understand the process to know that no matter what, you want to be in your child’s life as a source of security and acceptance.
Understanding Gender: A Guide for Kids
When a baby is born, the first thing everyone wants to know is, “Is it a boy or a girl?” Even during pregnancy, parents often have an ultrasound scan, to look at a baby’s body and find out whether their baby has “boy parts” or “girl parts” before the child is born.
Creating a Safe and Welcoming School Environment
For All Students, Including Trans and Nonbinary Kids
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Gender is something that traditionally has been taught in very simple ways. Penis means boy. Vulva means girl. Men are taller and stronger. Women are curvier and can get pregnant. People can be either male or female.
He believes he can fly
I was a little surprised by the depth and breadth of my four year old’s delight at the blue and lime track suit my mother bought for him.
He gasped. “It’s everything I ever wanted.”
I was bemused and confused, and called my mother. “Tell Grandma what you think of it.”
“It’s PERFECT,” he declared.
He wore it on a walk with his dad. He apparently flung himself through a sprinkler and came home soggy. I thought little of it, and his dad hung the suit up to dry.
In the morning, he came into my room, climbed on the couch, and took a flying leap at my bed, track suit jacket open wide.
It was not until later, when he jumped off the couch and explained to our roommate, “This helps me fly” that I realized what he’d seen in the royal blue polyester.
The track suit looks like this.
What he saw is this:
Needless to say we had a long talk about the difference between a squirrel suit and a track suit, and that the track suit wouldn’t help him fly.
And thus I crushed the dreams of my four year old. Who has already fallen out of one tree this year and broken an arm. I told him that he’d have to be an adult, and take a class, and be in really good shape, and not tell me about it until he was on the ground.
To someone who just lost twins
Behind the cut, TW for pregnancy loss and grief discussion.
Bullying prevention
Schools are responsible for setting the tone of the school and keeping kids safe at school, but in order to do so they often require a sea change in how they handle reports of mistreatment, as well as how they train the kids.
- We need to train kids through programs like peer mediation, which teaches kids how to handle problems in fair ways through talking.
- We need schoolwide, consistent programs like “The Three Bees” (Be safe, be responsible, be respectful).
- We need to actively ask kids to be heroes, rather than villains. In larger schools this might mean setting up buddy programs where kids who are afraid can ask for help and get several older kids who volunteer to walk with them in “high risk” settings (between classes, after school).
- Adults need to adopt a “believe the victim” mentality. This doesn’t mean coming down like a hammer on every accused, this means LISTENING to every child. Even the bullies. Because in many cases, bullies ARE victims, struggling for control anywhere they can find it.
- Toxic school cultures like “Don’t be a tattle tale” and “Boys will be boys” need to stop. Kids need to be actively trained to treat people well. I don’t care how “innocent” children are, toddlers and preschoolers can be mercenary little bastards and while some are tenderhearted and empathetic from the get go, a lot of them really need to be actively trained not to hurt people to get what they want.
- Consent culture MUST be taught.
- Bodily autonomy MUST be taught.
- A child who bullies needs to be trained, not suspended. They need to be isolated from the child who is bullied.
- Children need to be taught to understand boundaries and be allowed to set boundaries and have their boundaries respected. This starts with things like saying “stop tickling me” and having the tickling stop. And maybe the idea that tickling without asking isn’t funny.
- We need to communicate everywhere that “We don’t treat people like that. We don’t allow people to be treated like that. We don’t let our friends treat people like that.”
- We need to teach adults to listen, to mediate, to problem solve, to look for underlying issues rather than just bad behavior.
- We need to stop punishing victims for coming forward.
The difference between life and death, between learning and depression, between functioning and suicidal ideation is not who people are, it’s how they are treated. That means that the people around them can be heroes, or they can be villains. There are no innocent bystanders.
This is true whether we are talking about trans people, LGBTQA people, disabled people, or just kids who ‘read’ to others as being different for whatever reason.Even when bullying doesn’t involve fists, it can kill. It can make people feel trapped in their situation. And the opposite of bullying is not “stricter discipline” but “more connection.”
Teach kids to be heroes.
Rule Number One
We need to talk. I know we’ve probably not met and we’ve never said word one to each other online because I filter the hell out of my Facebook and you probably don’t go to Tumblr because it’s incomprehensible and I usually don’t get into it on those comment threads. But you need to hear this.
So, I adore your kids, okay? They’re amazing. They are bright sparks in a hard world. They’re looking around at a society that is far stranger than the one I grew up in, and let me tell you, Oregon in the 80’s and 90’s was pretty dang strange. And they’re trying to figure out who they are and where they fit.
These are kids who have loving hearts, who genuinely want to make the world a better place, and find their place in it. They want to make things better for poor people and children, and they want to help keep people safe and they genuinely want to do the right thing just as soon as they can figure out exactly what that is.
I need you to stop breaking them.
In my world, rule number one is “Mama loves you.” Not, “Mama loves you if you go to college and marry a nice person of the opposite sex and dress like people expect you to and get a job that is socially approved with sufficient status.” Not, “Mama loves you if you go to the right church and wait until marriage to have sex.”
Just, “Mama loves you.”
Here are things that don’t matter when it comes to rule number one:
- The clothes someone wears
- Who they love
- What pronouns they use
- What sex acts they do, and with who
- What church they go to or don’t
- Whether or not they are gainfully employed
- Whether or not they go to college at all or finish in four years
- Whether they identify as the gender they were assigned at birth due to inny or outy bits
- Tattoos
- Piercings
- Hair color
- Who their friends are
- Who they vote for
- Mistakes they make and trouble they get into
Now, I get having hopes and dreams for your child. I’ve got three children and I’ve poured my life into them for 23 years. I get having expectations and wanting to provide them with a solid start in this difficult world. But there’s a right way to do that and a wrong way. It’s one thing to help your kids understand your values. But if the value at the top of the list isn’t “Mama loves you” (or parental/quasiparental tag of choice), I’m sorry, the moment your child realizes that they can’t meet your ideal for them, there’s an awfully good chance they’re either going to break, or you’re going to lose them, or both.
You need to understand that you cannot stop a child from being gay, or trans, or bi, or nonbinary. It’s not about “how you raised them”, it just is. And the more you make them feel “wrong”, the less they’re going to care about doing right. The less you love them, the less they will feel lovable, and the more likely they’re going to go looking for that love in harmful places. You can’t make them gay, but you can make them broken.
I am losing count of the number of teenagers I have had in my house or in my inbox or chat talking about how they can’t tell their parents who they are because they are afraid. Kids who did tell you who they are, and you kicked them out, because “not under your roof.” Kids who struggle for years to get back to a healthy place where they place enough value on their own bodies and souls that they don’t go out doing the exact risky and scary stuff you’re afraid of because it doesn’t matter, they aren’t worth it, you told them so.
I spend a lot of time telling them how worth it they are. And they are. These are beautiful souls who, given a chance, will pour their whole selves into helping someone, into making a difference. They have so much to offer, but you make it all harder by teaching them that they don’t.
I love your kids, but it hurts me when they hurt, and I need you to stop breaking them. Stop worrying so much about their immortal souls and worry a lot more about their hearts. Stop worrying about what the neighbors will think, and start worrying about whether your child will survive.
So… stop asking your kids when they’re going to give you grandchildren. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Stop asking them when they’re going to get married, because the last thing you want for them is for them to end up with a bad marriage for the sake of being married. Stop judging the work they’re doing, and the friends they have.
You can tell them it’s okay to stand up for themselves. And accept it if they stand up to you. Listen. Don’t get defensive.
You can tell them it’s okay for them to expect people to treat them well. And then you better treat them well.
You can tell them it’s important to try hard and do their best. But don’t tell them they have to be the best. Don’t make your love contingent on victory conditions. Some of the best people in this world never won anything.
You can say that you worry about risky behavior because you love them and you want them safe, but don’t you dare kick them out and make them even more unsafe.
Teach them that you value them, not that they are worthless.
You can even teach them about your religious beliefs, but don’t you dare put them in hell on earth just because someone told you they might go to hell someday. I’m fairly certain if Jesus exists, he judges people more harshly for cruelty to their children than he does for who they sleep with or whether they have tattoos, that was pretty clear in the bible I read. Jesus was all about embracing people society couldn’t stand. Try being more like that.
I love your kids. They’ve slept on my couch and they’ve lived in my house and they are always welcome here. But it would be a better world if they didn’t end up broken to begin with.
Rule number one. Please. I’m begging you. Make sure they know it. Tell them it doesn’t matter. Tell them you want to understand but you don’t need to understand in order to keep loving them. Tell them they deserve love, and happiness, and joy and all good things, and that you know that their path in life may not look like your path but you want to be a safe space for them to come home to. That you don’t have to agree about politics or religion or social issues or any of those things, that they’re still worthy of all that life can give them.
And if that little person you thought was a boy comes to you and says that she’s a girl, your response there is a life-and-death issue. Their future happiness and ability to survive adulthood depends on what you say to them. And if it’s anything other than, “I love you, let’s figure this out and find out what you need to make you happy,” you’re playing with fire, because the biggest difference in whether or not a trans kid survives (yes literally survives) their teen years and young adulthood is whether they get support and acceptance or not. Your attitude can literally kill them.
Rule number one. Mama loves you.
Because while I will always keep my home open for them, I’d rather they not need me. I’d rather not have to build them back up and explain to them how you forgot the important thing.
Rule number one.
Writing advice
So I’ve been delving into the strange world of Tumblr. I said for years I didn’t understand it. Then I got into the Merlin fandom, started poking around, realized that no one understood Tumblr, and started using it a lot.
So this floated across my dashboard today:
If Tumblr frightens you, the answer I wrote is here:
The question was, “how do write good,” (sic) and Maureen Johnson gave a succinct answer I felt could use some elaboration.
Write. Write more. Ask for constructive criticism. Cry. Get angry. Do what they say. See how it makes it better. Buy your editor/beta reader/tolerant friend flowers or chocolate or something and then write more.
Read. Read amazing writers, read amazing storytellers, note that sometimes the two things aren’t the same. When something you read makes you happy, think about why.
Then write more. Write nonfiction. Write short paragraphs. Write drabbles. Write poetry. Write short fanfiction. Or long. Or your own stories. Write what moves you. Explain things to people with your writing.
Read about writing. Read about language. Read about structure. Read about why things work, why they don’t. Understand the rules. Write until your editor only makes small changes in grammar (and sometimes they’re wrong and you know it but you always listen because if it caught their attention something about the flow is probably off.)
And ultimately? Break rules if there’s a good reason to. Don’t let other people’s ideas about writing get in the way of good storytelling. A few million words in, you’re going to know to your bones when you need to be scrupulously formal and when you need to throw that to the wind because that character over there? He says “Ain’t” a lot, and no one speaks in complete sentences all the time.
But throw all that out the window for a moment, because you can stick your face in a computer screen for decades and never live enough to have a damn thing worth writing about. Go out into the world. Experience love. Experience failure. Have crowning moments of awesome and be crushed by devastating tragedy. Feel the wind on your elbows and smell things that no one should ever have to smell. Think about how you would tell these things to someone else, about how you would help them experience what you’ve experienced.
When you know enough about writing and life to be able to put someone else in your shoes and have them feel the blisters? You’ll write good.
No one actually understands safer sex, if fanfic is any indication
I’d start this post with an, “Okay boys and girls, listen up,” but this post is for fucking everybody who actually thinks about fucking anyone, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
Shiny’s current meds, logic, and dosing
Because this comes up all the time.
CoQ10:
So both of these brands use Vitaline CoQ10, which works VERY well. The claim is that this form crosses the blood-brain barrier better, and I’d have to say that the results are definitely more noticeable than TruNature, which we used before (and did have good effects and raised her blood levels very high, but which did not have as profound an effect on Shiny’s language.)
Natrol was terrible, and I think their supplier was fraudulent. Be careful. Other people have used Qunol to good effect, but Shiny can’t tolerate the citric acid. I found the best price normally at Vitacost for the SmartQ10, but Naturedoc has by FAR the best price on Vitaline 400 mg (by $57 per bottle!). The difference between Vitacost and Amazon on SmartQ10 is very small, so get that one where it is convenient.
Shiny’s CoQ10 dosing is approximately half her weight in pounds, with a zero tacked on, in milligrams. Rounded up always. She’s currently 70 pounds, give or take, and taking 400 mg because it is easier to give her 400 mg in one tablet than 3 1/2 giant chewables. We see no ill effects from a slightly higher dose, but we notice very quickly if her dose is too low.
Kids with 4q deletions are often missing one of two genes which help the body make its own CoQ10. This may or may not cause a frank deficiency in the blood, but it seems to impact muscles, nerves and brain tissue disproportionately. This directly helps correct any deficiency, and increases the amount available as an antioxidant, which can be beneficial even for kids who are not missing one of the genes.
R-lipoic Acid
So, many people have heard of Alpha Lipoic acid, which is a racemic compound of both the S and R isomers of lipoic acid. The R one is the one the body uses. The S one is at best useless and at worse actually gets in the way of the body using R-lipoic acid. A typical dose of ALA might be 600-1200 mg.
For kids with CoQ10 issues, R-lipoic acid helps the body use CoQ10 more efficiently to make energy, which is EXACTLY what Shiny needed. It also protects cells from damage and helps the body recycle antioxidants. Win win win win.
But straight up R-lipoic acid is VERY eager to bond with other molecules. And it is a narcissist. It LOVES itself. In liquids, R-lipoic acid may readily gloop onto itself into long polymer strands, which the body can’t use very well. So we got some results giving Shiny 300 mg ground up in milk, but they took a couple days to see.
R-lipoic acid can be stabilized with a salt that makes it more water soluble and less likely to “gloop”. K-rala stands for potassium (K)-R-alpha lipoic acid. The first brand we bought worked pretty well at doses of 100 mg, but we started increasing those doses and the company was bought out by Vitacost, and the quality went downhill… probably due to a fraudulent supplier, but the stuff stopped doing ANYTHING. I did some reading and decided to try the Geronova brand shown above. We gave Shiny 6 drops (20 drops is 100 mg, so this was less than 40 mg, after she’d been on 300) because the company said it was often much more effective at much lower doses due to the ready bioavailability.
They were not kidding. 5 minutes later, she started chattering. It wasn’t super coherent, but she was MAKING NOISE ON PURPOSE and it had been a long, quiet summer, punctuated mostly by her tears of frustration. And she was CHATTERING. Talking constantly. For an hour. Like every word she’d tried to say burbled up at once.
She’s now taking 12 drops per day, at about 70 pounds, and we’ve gone from talking about getting her to cooperate with sitting in a chair at school to talking about them teaching her actual subjects. (She’s in a life skills classroom, but is incredibly interested in science and the natural world.) Use this brand. Don’t bother with anything else ever. Not ALA, not RLA, use the Geronova K-rala if you need anything having to do with Alpha Lipoic Acid.
Everything else she takes is at dinnertime. GIVE THIS IN THE MORNING. Trust me.
Melatonin
So this we buy at Trader Joe’s because it’s $3.99 per bottle there, but even at twice the price it’s a good deal. Most people who need melatonin can get by with 1/2 tablet, which means 200 doses. That’s 6 months for $4, even at twice that it’s a bargain. 1/4 tablet is enough to make me tired. Shiny takes a full tablet.
More is not better for melatonin. This stuff works, and works well, at some of the lowest doses available on the market. It’s chewable, and citrate free. I don’t advocate melatonin for most typically developing kids, but throw in a chromosome disorder, metabolic disorder, autism, what have you, and the stuff is a godsend.
Give only at night, within half an hour of bedtime.
Fish oil
Shiny takes one of these every night. It really seems to help with behavior and frustration levels. The dose is not high, but the price is, but this works and she tolerates it, and that’s enough for me. It tastes terrible. We bribe with chocolate.
Methyl Folate, B-12 and B6, and biotin
Methylated B-vitamins may be absorbed more readily, and we want things to be as absorbable as possible. This is a tiny lactose tablet that dissolves fast under the tongue. She tolerates it very well. B-vitamins can help the R-lipoic acid and CoQ10 work better. When we added this and other B-vitamins, Shiny’s energy levels picked up even more than with the other supplements. We’re currently giving Methyl B-12, Methylfolate, P-5-P (B6 in a more absorbable form) and Biotin (separate tablet). The doses are probably higher than she needs, but I don’t worry too much about it as she can pee the rest out. We special order the combo from our local health food store, it’s hard to find online but worth it (cheaper than giving them separately, and less trouble.) The biotin can be had on amazon.
This is another B-vitamin we give. She tolerates it well. If we were more organized we’d probably give the b-vitamins in the morning.
ADDENDUM 6/22/17
We have dropped all the B-vitamins above in favor of mixing half of a B-right capsule with the other powders with a little food. This is cheaper, and gives a broader variety of B-vitamins, and they’re an ideal form.
B-right b-supplement
Vitamin D, because Oregon
This has zero taste and she tolerates a drop on food. The drops come out slow but zero taste and tolerates well makes me not care. One bottle is a year’s supply for one kid. Everyone in Oregon gets D deficient if they don’t supplement, so this would be on the list even if she didn’t have a deletion.
So this is a good source of choline, which is helpful neurologically. I take it myself, she has a liquid form, not a capsule. It helps a LOT with her mood. Super low risk. This is better than soy lecithin which can be irritating for some.
Magnesium works with the other vitamins and supplements to help the cells work better. We avoid citric acid, so this powder format has been handy. This lasts a very long time, we use a tiny ‘stevia scoop’ for it. Pretty much magnesium is magnesium. Find a form your kid can tolerate. It’s rarely fraudulent (because it’s cheap and what companies use to cut other meds with, lol!) Bedtime is best for magnesium. Mag can help with asthma and lung reactivity.
Vitamin C:
Pure ascorbic acid does not contain citric acid and seems to be well-tolerated. Buy the smallest jar you can, it only takes a tiny pinch added to foods to boost C-intake dramatically. Can cause diarrhea if you give too much. We bought a large jar and Miles got into it and mixed it with ketchup and most of it was lost and it still took us months to get through the rest. I’m serious that a little goes a long way. 4 ounces is probably a year or two’s worth, watch the fresh date.
Generation WiFi
I’d call this kids born in the 20 years following 9/11
Currently ranging from 0-15 years old, these kids have an unprecedented access to technology even across a wide variety of demographics, wireless, cordless and intuitive. Many of them are competent at navigating a tablet and smart phone from infancy, and they have never lived in a world with the twin towers. Their first awareness of politics probably has to do with Obama on some level or another. Most of them will come of age in a world where gay marriage and legal marijuana are seen as inevitable, and they are the first generation to grow up with a significant cohort of kids who are not in the gender binary and also not in the closet about it. Kids who have literally never been in the closet about it. Sexual orientation is not particularly controversial for them, and by the time they hit college, almost every school out there will have clear consent policies. Their “Berlin Wall” is more likely to be universal health care (should we be so lucky) and the breaking of the big banks.
Parents as researchers
In response to this article because I get Shiny’s story out when I can in hopes that it will give other parents the oomph to look past what they’re told: https://www.propublica.org/article/muscular-dystrophy-patient-olympic-medalist-same-genetic-mutation
I am the mother of a child with a rare chromosome deletion. Watching her as a baby, I would see her energy run out like a dying flashlight battery, watch her “turn off” and stop playing, watch her go quiet and silent as she waited for her energy to pick back up enough to play again. Then she would, like a flashlight turned off and on again, have another burst of energy, play for 20 minutes, then stop.
I said, “Something is up with this child’s mitochondria.”
She had, at that point, demonstrated a consistent reaction to too much citrate or citric acid in her diet, or when I was breastfeeding, mine. I took to googling now and then phrases connected to her condition. Citric acid. 4q21. That led me to learning about the Kreb cycle (also called the citric acid cycle), which helps the mitochondria do what they do to help the body produce energy from the raw materials it takes in.
This lead me to a seemingly random article on Coenzyme Q10 deficiency. Reading the symptoms, all more severe than those of my tiny daughter, I started to get goosebumps. At that point I think I knew two or three other families whose children were affected by the same mutation in the same area, and I knew their children’s symptoms. Every symptom showed up in some degree in our girls. Where full CoQ10 deficiency would give full on seizures, our little girls might have absence spells where they weren’t quite fully seized but weren’t fully functional either. (We now call them brown-outs.) Language issues were rife (one of the dominant features of 4q21 deletions at that time was a near universal lack of expressive language). Kidney issues showed up in some of our girls, not as severe as the article described. The lack of energy was pronounced. When I got to the part about the genetics, I said, “I know where that gene is…” and sure enough, it was at 4q21. A recessive mutation would produce a marked deficiency of CoQ10 because a precursor would not be made. Our girls’ symptoms seemed remarkably consistent with a “half strength” issue… our kids had one working gene, which seemed like it should be enough if the disorder was truly recessive, but clearly it was not, and clearly something was missing.
It was when I got to the section marked “Treatment” (there was a section on treatment!) I started shaking and had to wake my husband to tell him to stop me from robbing a health food store. Over the counter CoQ10 resulted in a near complete reversal of symptoms, within a month. I immediately sent a message to the researchers listed in the paper, and had an answer back by morning. “Little to no risk in trying CoQ10,” they said. “Here’s the dosage we use for people with two copies of the mutation.”
“Maybe she only needs half the dose?” I wrote back, “Given that she probably has one healthy gene?”
I received the electronic equivalent of a shrug back, and put her on the full dose that day while arranging for some testing. She was almost two. I knew that kids who didn’t get solid language skills before two often never did, and I felt an urgency because of that.
Three days later, she picked up a new word, for the first time in a year, she didn’t lose an existing word at the same time. (This, a child who had said “Mama” at 5 months old, consistently, for months, one of the only sounds she made, but who had lost that word for months when another word took its place.) New words followed in a tumble. Her articulation was terrible but clearly her brain was finally managing to produce language in a way it had not been.
She’s now on several supplements, all aimed at helping her body use CoQ10 better. Each addition of the right stuff improves an area that has languished. Some things don’t help, we don’t keep those. The true test is that sometimes we discontinue something, and if skills go with it, we know we’re on to something important.
When she grows, we have to increase the dose or her symptoms start creeping back. The dose that makes her symptoms disappear is almost exactly half the dose she would require if she had two mutated genes rather than one functional gene. Our best guess is that there are other genes in the area that work in concert, and that a simple mutation of one gene does not produce the disastrous effects that missing the whole segment does.
More importantly, other children with similar deletions have tried similar treatments and seen similar improvements. We’ll never have a large enough sample size for a gold standard study, but the risks are low for the supplements we use, and the rewards, thus far, for many families, have been life changing.
We have had many doctors pooh pooh the idea, including one who said, “Mitochondrial ailments are very rare. It would be extremely unlikely for her to have two extraordinarily rare conditions. Missing one gene rarely produces effects with things like this.”
I had to laugh. When a family has already been struck by lightening, telling them they’re not likely to be struck again, despite having found a tall metal object in the middle of the living area, isn’t very useful, especially when the burn marks all look exactly the same.
Interestingly, while my husband and I do not share my daughter’s deletion, his mother was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia. Which may have a gene at 4q21. I have no idea what that means for my husband, if anything, or why our family would be struck by such apparently different lightening in such an identical position.
I’m 43 years old and may well be going back to school soon in order to learn molecular genetics, because there is so much I need to learn to even read the papers that might answer my questions. To gain access to testing equipment I can’t persuade a doctor to use to satisfy curiosity. To contact experts who might take a student seriously when they brush off a parent.
In the mean time my child is now almost 11, and despite the fact we were told she would likely never have more than a few words… she has more than 1000 spoken and signed words that she can use, can read (taught herself to read silently, we discovered it by accident). She sings. She makes puns. She has a robust and precocious sense of sarcasm. She is not “healed”. She is not “cured”. She is who she is, but with every supplement that we find that works, things get a little easier for her, a little less frustrating. We were told that 70% of children died before age 2 with her condition. Then they said 20% by age 5. That there might be a high risk of death before 20. Now? No one is making predictions anymore. We’re in uncharted territory.
The single best resource we’ve had? Each other. Other parents with children with similar deletions. Even some parents who also have deletions in similar areas. We share information. We talk about what works. We talk about who to talk to. We keep each other going when doctors dismiss us or simply don’t even bother to try to understand.
Gandalf for President
I was sort of absently ruminating about how a guy who bears more than a passing resemblance to my grandfather is managing to fire people up so much. Them I realized.
He’s filling the same ecological niche as Gandalf, Merlin, and Dumbledore.
He’s spent every damn Republican majority at the gates, staff in hand, shouting, “You shall not pass!”
Bernie Sanders *is* Gandalf. No wonder we love him.
So I dusted off my Photoshop skills to do this:
This lead to the following…
I printed out a copy to show to my husband, who was having his weekend morning bath in the deep tub.
He was appropriately amused, but asked that I leave the printed copy “over there” so it wouldn’t get wet.
Over there happened to be on the shelf over the toilet.
I said, “‘You shall not pass’ isn’t really the sentiment I want hanging over my toilet. Besides, think about the hashtag… #feelthebern…”
I don’t know that I’ve ever seen my husband laugh that hard at six in the morning.
Getting our house in order: the false competition between the homeless and the refugees.
I’m seeing a whole lotta nonsense out there about how it is morally reprehensible to go offering help to refugees when we have so many homeless. Leave aside that the people bitching the loudest are also the same people who tell us not to give to the poor because it “enables them” to buy booze or whatever they deem unworthy of the “lower classes”. Also probably the same people trying to cut food stamps and whatnot. Let’s just say the credibility of people who say, “but but but HOMELESS VETS” or “HUNGRY CHILDREN” is not high with me because I suspect they care very little for either, truly.
The fact of the matter is that if we got our shit together and did the things that science and research and public policy data say are the most effective at caring for people, we could actually solve a whole bunch of problems and spend less money than we spend now.
I’m not exaggerating. I’m not making shit up here. This is well supported by data.Continue reading
A TV post almost entirely devoid of actual content
So, fall TV stuff… what have you been enjoying?
Things I’m still watching:
Quantico: It has the CW pretty people problem but once I get over that, the underlying story is interesting enough.
Heroes Reborn: I am unapologetically enjoying this. Both in spite of and because of Zach Levy.
Blindspot: I’m a sucker for a good partnership, mystery, and shows involving the FBI. Suffers from plausibility issues, but if I couldn’t look past those, I wouldn’t have fanned 90% of the shows I’ve obsessed over.
Minority Report: I’m really getting to like the people in this, and the show as a whole is better than the first couple episodes taken alone. Plus, Dash is just adorable. I want to pinch his cheeks.
Stitchers: Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculove it. I think I kind of apologetically love this one, as I kept watching it trying to figure out what was annoying me so much about it when I suddenly realized that I adored a couple of the characters. It’s not the strongest thing out there, but it’s campy and cute once you get past the initial self-conscious tropes-and-lampshades game it plays, especially about women in tech. Plus, I’m ridiculously fond of Allison Scagliotti as an actress. Technically summer TV that I didn’t find until now.
Ongoing shows:
Grimm: I… they ripped our hearts out and then…. were too busy to let us recover. Which creates so much empathy. And yeah. If you haven’t already been watching Grimm, you really should start at the beginning. It’s cheesy and campy and very, very Portland, and has some amazing characters. Were…everything of Portland. Funny and tragic and monsters and mayhem and our chosen hero and really ordinary folk who just happen to also be beavers. Because Portland. Lovely complex characters of a wide variety of people and an undercurrent of “looking past stereotypes” that is timely and a useful metaphor. If for nothing else, watch it for Monroe.
Sleepy Hollow; This is new to me and I’m not past the first season yet, but I’m *really* enjoying the first season. It’s smart and funny and stars a young black police officer with a destiny, and she is partnered with, well, Ichabod Crane, returned from the dead. Don’t tell me about how I won’t like it later, right now I’m enjoying it.
Bones: Getting long in the tooth but I’m not sure I’d say the quality has declined, because the places where it doesn’t “flow” for me are the places where it has literally never flowed for me. I have a blast watching this ensemble tell their stories, in spite of, not because of, the gross-out.
Castle: Sigh. It irritates me when a show that made me love it for its intelligent characters and their relationship makes major plot points happen because the characters are being absolute dingbats. But that’s not actually out of character in this show. It’s has good moments this season and a couple of episodes I enjoyed the crap out of, but adding artificial tension to the ‘ship for spurious reasons feels like they’re more afraid of the ‘ship than any of them have ever admitted. So unnecessary. Will I stop watching? No. Will I keep being annoyed by this? Probably for a while.
Agents of SHIELD: Some of this season I have found profoundly compelling. Simmons’ story… my god. Daisy is less annoying than she used to be. I don’t watch this particularly critically because critical watching of Marvel Universe stuff sucks the joy out of it when it is good and doesn’t really enhance the rough bits.
Under the Dome: Managed to lose my attention, as it does. I’ll probably pick it back up. “Between” bore a close relationship to it and i don’t remember what made me stop watching that one except that they finally explained the WHY and it was so asinine that I just turned it off forever. But Under the Dome is a reasonable diversion, if weirdly structured and contrived. The farther they get into explaining everything, the less impressed I am.
NCIS: Y’know, this could have ended a couple years ago and everyone would have said it had had a nice long run. They’re still managing to tell interesting stories, but Pauley Perrette is 46 freakin’ years old and her character has not changed markedly in any way shape or form in 13 years. If the show goes on another 4 years, she’s going to be 50, playing, in essence, a teenager. I wish they’d let Abby grow up. They let Tony develop. They let Tim develop, They even gave Gibbs a makeover. Leaving Abby where she is is just lazy.
Doctor Who: Last season was excrable. This one I’ve connected with more times, but I’m still not THERE. I’m two episodes behind I think?
Things I watch when they land on Netflix:
The 100: A CW show, this looks a lot like a lot of CW shows, but the actual story is interesting to me.
Daredevil: Yes. Liked.
Sense8. My god.
The Fall: Gillian Anderson is a godess. We are not worthy.
Things I stopped watching that Huluflix Prime keeps trying to shove in my direction: Supernatural (2 seasons ago? I think?) Arrow. Gotham (Too depressing, and written in an unpleasant box). Once Upon a Time (Because Elsa. I just couldn’t.) I got 5 minutes into the Muppets and couldn’t continue. Resurrection (Might pick this one back up again but have a hard time caring). Haven: First four seasons I loved. 5th season lost me in short order.
Things I’m waiting for eagerly:
Jessica Jones
Next season of Continuum
the X-files reboot even though it will probably disappoint me. What am I saying. It’s Gillian Anderson. Who has an amazing ability to make Chris Carter’s nonsense addictive and compelling.
And something Netflix is making that I don’t even know exists yet because clearly they have my number. Looking at my history, and knowing how netflix does things, it will be a science fiction police procedural with a horror twist starring Gillian Anderson and Whoopi Goldberg as lesbian lovers living on a space station and solving crimes by day with the help of a squad of intrepid super heroes.
Today’s visit
Today, the President of the United States flew into the city I call home, and then took a helicopter to the place I’m from. One of the places. I often say I spent my childhood in Michigan and grew up in Roseburg, as the line between them fell exactly at the halfway point between birth and adulthood.
I saw pictures people posted from the roadsides in Roseburg. It was a beautiful day. I remember days like that, growing up. The sky covered with painted clouds, the ground green, plenty of sun, but not blinding. Days like that, the clouds form a roof full of skylights, high over the mountains and hills that press in close and largely untamed against the lived-in places in the valleys.
Roseburg is resplendent with natural beauty, some of the cleanest air I’ve ever breathed and I remember riding horses over wet earth and breathing deep and having no idea whatsoever how blessed I was.
I think a lot about what President Obama might have thought, looking at that place I’m from. People lined the streets to show support for families grieving an unthinkable loss, to protect them from any who might come and make hay of their tragedy. School spirit was huge in Roseburg, even I learned enough about football to sit in the stands and recognize a good play when I saw it. Community looms large and presses close like the mountains.
But I remember when we first moved to Roseburg, asking my father where all the black people were. And learning about the hate that had colored the state’s formative years. They’ll welcome you with open arms if you are Christian enough. They’ll welcome you with open arms if you’re white enough. Well, I was kind of too white and not white enough all at the same time. “Did your people kill Jesus?” someone asked, assuming that my Jewish father and my Jewish last name must indicate that I was also Jewish, even though I knew my whole life that Judaism passed through the mother and I never claimed more than a fondness for lox and bagels and learning.
And I wonder if the president saw those Nobama signs, the signs saying “Go back to Kenya!” and then looked up to the verdant mountains, the clean, brilliant air, the painted clouds, the strong community spirit, and then thought about the streets of Chicago where guns claim lives daily, the streets of Iraq, refugees and war zones and children drowning and starving and dying and I wonder if he wondered at the smallness of that place I’m from. You can see so clearly in that crystal air, but the mountains press so close and you can’t see very far. A double handful of people dead and the loudest ones left behind still clinging so tight to the guns that killed them… killed them with the hands of someone who could not see past the tip of his own rage and self-pity, no matter how clear the air.
I watched as the drama and trauma unfolded last week and my heart ached for the place I’d come from. I wanted to go down there, show support. be part of it again for a little while. Health issues prevented this week… but by the time they were resolved, I remembered so clearly why I’d left the clean air and the painted skies and the happy trees. Roseburg is a good place to be from, I think. Some of the best people I’ve ever known have been from there. Some still live there.
“Go home” some of the signs said. “Go away.” It didn’t surprise me at all… I left at 18 and rarely ever looked back. There’s a reason I call Eugene home, and while the air isn’t as clear, it’s a lot easier to see here. I’m home. I’m away. And I’ll hold those who stayed in my heart, but I think I’ll do it from over here.
Why having the EDS diagnosis matters
Why does diagnosis matter?
When I was 4 years old, I got a flu that made it hurt to walk. And a couple months later it hurt to walk again and my mother told me I was making it up for the attention.
When I was 7 years old, I failed English because of instead of copying a sentence over and putting correction in the new sentence, I just put the punctuation in where it belonged on the typed sentence because writing hurt my hands. I flat out refused to do busywork because a) it was boring and unnecessary and b) it hurt.
When I was 8, my handwriting was still terrible, and handwriting hurt, so when we took a trip across country, camping, for a month, every day my mother made me practice my handwriting for half an hour or more a day. It kind of fixated my hatred of handwriting and the quality of it at about a third grade level. She was trying to help. If we’d known that the problem was underlying hand instability, maybe we could have done something to make it easier. Diagnosis matters. My son will never, ever have people accusing him of laziness
I could never run fast. I was always the slowest one. They’d tell me to run faster, and I’d twist my ankle and have to stop, and they’d say I did it to get out of running. I was labeled “lazy” and “clumsy”. I learned to fear running. This despite the fact that I loved climbing trees and swimming and was quite good at both of those things. If they’d wrapped my ankles and knees and had someone teach me how to run correctly, maybe my ankles would not have gotten so bad.
I took ballet from kindergarten through the sixth grade. My wobbly joints made it hard to do things steadily. And my mother wouldn’t let me go en pointe because i couldn’t hold my stomach flat. In retrospect, I got off easy, though I was angry about it at the time. I look at the damage dancers experience (and hypermobility is a selection criteria for top dancers) and I shudder.
We had yoga classes sometimes in school. I was “very good” at yoga. I will never do yoga again. In our family, “But have you tried yoga?” is a catchphrase we use to label assvice from clueless people about how to deal with chronic pain issues. I’m a goddamned pretzel, I don’t need more flexibility in my life.
My skin was extraordinarily sensitive from a very young age. I could not tolerate anything close to the front of my throat, it made me gag. I woudln’t let my mother zip up my coats all the way, starting from age 3, because they “glecked my neck”. Tags in clothes. Scratchy seams. Elastics. Lace. Pilly poly/cotton. Acrylic. I would have physical shuddering reactions to touching most of those things. Underwear HAD to have covered elastics. We learned to cut the edges from tags that had been melted to stop fraying. “I don’t like that, it’s itchy” probably drove Mom up the wall but she stopped trying to force me to wear things after a while. I was given a clothing budget and allowed to shop for my own clothes at a surprisingly young age because she was so over it. Don’t blame her a bit. Knowing how sensitive skin can be maddening, my kids lead a relatively cushy life in that respect.
Sudafed knocked me out and made me sleep. Scared my dad to death because I was sleeping so hard I didn’t answer the phone when he called to check on me one sick day. He came flying home from work to make sure I wasn’t dead. It’s not supposed to make people sleepy. On the other hand, drugs like Demerol and such that are supposed to make people forget about pain absolutely never worked. They would lie to me and tell me I wouldn’t remember and I totally would. I had an appendectomy at 14 and my mother had to push her way into the recovery room and snap at me to stop pulling off my dressings because I was so combative coming out from under general and had so much breakthrough pain that I was clawing the bandages off.
I never understood solarcaine, because it stopped working for me as soon as it dried. Dentists put unbelievable amounts of novocaine in and it would still wear off before they were done. They blamed it on my red hair, long after my hair went brown. They’re not wrong, but EDS also explains it. We won’t talk about how badly the epidural failed with my last baby.
After one sprain, I discovered that things felt better if I wrapped both ankles. Several people said I was attention seeking, so I stopped. I joined swim team so as never to have to deal with the track again. Still had to run during the presidential whatsis. And twisted my ankle.
In high school, it took so much effort to keep my hand stable enough to write that I could not take notes. I couldn’t listen, write and learn at the same time. Could not. People were pissed off that I would learn material without notes. I had to. Notes were too hard. I got docked in some classes for not taking them. I graduated with a 3.87. Probably would have been closer to a 3.92 if I’d been able to take notes. When I took a college class in my 30’s with a laptop, I was able to type the lecture verbatim while learning and listening. It’s hard to write if you have to fight your fingers bending backwards all the damned time. Essay tests were the actual worst. I started typing my papers on a computer before most people had access to home computers.
My handwriting is still awful. But now I use a special pen that doesn’t hurt so much, ask to type the responses to long forms, and flat out refuse to write long things and ask for someone to write for me if I can’t type out the responses.
I got pregnant when I was 20. The nausea and stretch marks were insane. My pelvic floor and belly would never be the same. My breasts headed south. People talked about “bouncing back” from having a baby”, I just found a new normal, one in which I had giant breasts and stretch marks over 90% of my body. I almost passed out a number of times… pregnancy makes you more stretchy, and while I don’t always have POTS, I surely did when I was pregnant. Ended up having unnecessary tests done because we were worried it was another embolism. Nope. Just my flaky body being flaky again.
I developed a series of food allergies. So did my kid. The list of things I’m allergic to is exhausting, and i often forget things until they’re in front of me.
At 23, the world wide web happened and a few years after that I met someone online with severe EDS. Some of it rang bells but I’d never knowingly dislocated things, so I shrugged it off because my skin wasn’t stretchy “enough” and my joints didn’t dislocate. I wasn’t as bad off as her so that couldn’t be it.
My hair started falling out in my mid twenties and I put on a lot of weight. It would take another 8 years to get a hashimotos diagnosis. People said “diet and exercise.” Every time I exercised, 2 weeks in I would get sick or twist my ankle. I tried yoga.
By the time I was 32, I did manage to get close to my pre-baby weight and kept it off until another pregnancy. And a miscarriage and another pregnancy after that happened and my thyroid failed and I put on 80 pounds in about 5 years. The pregnancy was particularly damaging to my pelvis as my child had craniosynostosis and macrocephaly and I pushed her out vaginally and destroyed my pelvic stability. I didn’t sleep for 2 months after she was born, struggling with feeding issues. She was 4 1/2-5 months old before walking didn’t hurt.
Parenting a special needs child and caretaking a mother in law with dementia crashed my adrenals when I went on thyroid meds. My thyroid was only diagnosed because it was one of the things they tested for when I said, “I keep falling” after it took six months to recover from a sprain only for me to fall again.
It was a very difficult time. I was diagnosed with IBS and fibro and sleep apnea and sleep timing disorder and had another pulmonary embolism (I have a clotting disorder as the cherry on top). I went from doing 14 hours a day of hard labor remodeling our house to barely able to function. And yet people sighed heavily when I said I needed help, because I must be exaggerating. Or because they’d been helping so much they were exhausted.
I was put into physical therapy to help me get back some function. That was helpful. I had another baby. That wasn’t. By that point, I figured out that pregnancy was destructive and I had my uterus out when he was 11 1/2 months old. While they did it, they repaired the cystocele and rectocele and open tear that was left from my first baby. The repairs failed within a year. I won’t have them redone.
Someone asked, “Have you considered your problem might be psychological?”
I didn’t speak to him again for a long time. We will never be as good friends as we used to be.
More falls, more pain, more PT, another embolism. I kept thinking, “How can it be possible for one person to have this many diagnoses?”
I began to wonder if maybe I was a hypochondriac. Then I started reading about EDS, and the lightbulb went off. And suddenly it all made sense, and I stopped feeling so crazy and started feeling really angry at the people who pushed me and bullied me and didn’t listen and made me feel like asking for help was a failure and that I didn’t deserve help.
I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. I would be less disabled now if I’d had more support then. I’d have done better in school from an earlier age. I probably wouldn’t have crashed and burned in college so hard. Maybe other things would have been harder or worse knowing, but not knowing did actually create problems. I don’t actually blame people for not knowing, they just didn’t know. They couldn’t know. But part of me wishes I could go back in time and say, “Knock it off. This is why.”
Here’s the thing. I get hurt when I push myself. I pushed myself hard for many years. At heart, who I am, is someone who wants to help people. I want to fix things. I want to make things better. I want to learn. I want to do. I want to live.
I hate bedrest. I intensely dislike going to the doctor. It takes an enormous amount for me to go through the process of making an appointment, and going to the ER is literally the last thing I want to except for dying. So I don’t go unless I’m scared to death. I don’t scare easy.
I put up with things for YEARS rather than ask for help with them because I hate asking for help. I hate being needy. I hate not being the person who can make it better. I don’t like saying no.
When I can, I do. Sometimes I do even when I shouldn’t. And the price is high. One day of overdoing can cost me a week of function. One injury or illness can cost me months of muscle mass. If I seem wary, it’s because of experience, not timidity.
So what do I deserve? I deserve what we all deserve. We deserve doctors who listen and are curious enough to figure out underlying causes. We deserve to be treated with respect and have our conditions treated and pain relieved. We deserve a good quality of life. We deserve supports to make the most out of what we have.
We don’t deserve to be labeled “Drug seekers.”
We don’t deserve to be labeled “Hypochondriacs.”
We’re not lazy.
We’re not attention seeking.
We’re probably a hell of a lot more tired of the laundry list of diagnoses than anyone else in our lives.
And it is reasonable for us to want to understand our bodies and why they do the things they do.
A diagnosis, while stressful, can remove huge stressors, especially that internal voice that says, “Am I crazy? Am I making it up? Are they right about me?”
It can be the difference between finding the right help and being more damaged when we “try yoga.”
On reducing the number of abortions
Recently someone on Facebook responded to a post about Bernie Sanders and his remarks at Liberty University about abortion, with the following statement:
(under the cut because abortion argument)
Continue reading
Pondering identity: Race, class and gender
It is, if not amusing, certainly bemusing to me that the older I get, the less clarity I have about my identity. When I was 20, I attended, very briefly, Evergreen State College. And the one class I enrolled in was titled, “Race, Class and Gender in Comparative Perspective.” The subject matter was a comparison between modern-day India and the antebellum South in the the United States. I didn’t get very far in the class because I got knocked up, and got my own personal sojourn through the roles of “young, single welfare mother” and “college dropout.” At the time I identified as bisexual, female, white, ethnically Jewish, polyamorous, democrat, feminist, and liberal. I never quite figured out the class thing because I had professional parents, who didn’t have much money while I was growing up, and I spend a couple years on welfare… so I had a middle class upbringing with working class resources. I dropped out of college mostly because I didn’t want to waste my money while I wasn’t able to focus. I didn’t go back yet because life is complicated. 22 years and I still say “yet”.
I’m still a liberal, feminist democrat. And I’m still incredibly pale, and I still like lox. I’m still the child of a white, Anglo Saxon protestant mom whose family roots go back to the Mayflower and a Jewish dad whose parents’ families fled Russia and Poland in the early 1920s, long before Hitler had power in the area. Because lots of people were assholes to the Jews back then.
In high school, during my junior year, I wrote a research paper about the history of Judaism. People have been kicking the Jews around for a hell of a long time. There was a lot of material. On the one hand, I felt it very personally, that these people like me had been so abused for so long. And on the other hand, Judaism doesn’t claim me, nor do I claim it as more than a cultural factor, because my mother is not Jewish. I grew up celebrating Christmas and Easter with rare forays that felt like tourism to seders and Hanukkah parties.
Recently someone said to me, “How do you dance the hora?”
I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “And why do you think I know?” I asked.
“Well, your last name….”
Clearly someone who does not understand assimilation. (Side note: I actually have danced the Hora, many times, but I wouldn’t be able to right now and I only “know how” when I’m in a big circle of people dancing the hora because it’s that kind of dance.) It greatly reminded me of college, when a girl from Texas turned to a roommate and drawled, “You’re from California, what’s IN tofu?”
My roommate responded much as I did. She put on her best valley girl accent and said, “Like, I don’t know.”
But people have treated me different for “being Jewish”, no matter how little I look it or the fact that I don’t practice Judaism and never really have. I’m a freckled redhead with green eyes and pale skin, and really all I get from that side of the family is a lot of curl in my hair, full lips and a really flat butt. And my last name. It’s the name that makes people jump to conclusions, like, “Your people killed Jesus,” and “Do you sacrifice babies?” In contrast, assuming I know the Hora is pretty mild.
Growing up I went from being the weird white kid at the mostly black school (the school, now, is 97% black, in the middle of Detroit) to being the weird Jewish kid in a relentlessly white, sorta rural town in southern Oregon.
When people started saying, “White people don’t get it” I always felt kind of weird because growing up with my best friends being Black, and hearing the kids at school talk about their fears, and then ending up being identified without my taking the identity with a people who have been systematically oppressed for millennia, who have been the victims of genocide and segregation, who have been vilified, caricatured, rejected, and feared… it’s hard to imagine that there aren’t kind of a lot of commonalities. And yet… do we ever really understand where other people are coming from? If someone asks me if I’m Jewish, I can say “no”, honestly, and they shrug and move on. Most of the assumptions, even the negative ones, that people make about Jews tend to be fear of financial or political power (accurate or not) rather than assumption of inadequacy or violence, unless we’re talking sports. It’s a different thing. Just different.
So I’m sort of batting around thoughts about cultural appropriation. Intellectually I understand the concerns, but I also come from an incredibly mixed background of religion, ethnicity and place, and grew up with people talking about the melting pot as a good thing. I grew up liking moccasins and Baja hoodies and matzo balls, was baptized in the Episcopalian church and ultimately ended up as a lapsed Unitarian Universalist. And if you ever wanted a religion based on cultural appropriation…
As a teenager my go-to-sleep music was this:
Which is a Punjabi Buddhist mantra (I think) set to Celtic harp music.
Even baby carriers, everything comes from somewhere. Some of them come from multiple places. I like talking about where they come from but mostly I just want people to be comfortable wearing their babies, so sometimes the fact that things like the ergo are really Westernized adaptations of a number of Asian baby carriers gets lost in the shuffle, but hey, there were similar things in Sweden and Africa and yeah, it becomes challenging to know how much to worry about the cultural appropriation side of things.
We’re well off now. Secure, not “wealthy”, almost “comfortable”. On paper we look relatively wealthy, but mostly it’s because we’re planning for my husband to retire early. Like just over a year from now. So it’s got to last a while. But very, very far from where I was when I was 22, on welfare. Or worse, before welfare, when I had literally zero dollars and got by on foodstamps. Still have to think about money but surprises only upset us, they don’t break us anymore. And I grew up not able to afford college. I grew up in working class neighborhoods. But I grew up with parents who were white collar professionals. I had more in common with the upper class kids except the inconvenience of not being able to buy trendy shit. My parents gave me lessons and adventures and put a priority on my education and they were married and still are.
I talk about privilege a lot, and I’m working through most of this stuff with much the same filter. I don’t have a crystallized, formalized opinion yet.
Last night I was watching Honest Trailers, and was laughing my ass off. What they had to say about Skyrim and Harry Potter were hilarious. And then we got to the Avengers, and it was awesome, right up to the point where they said, “This movie will make your inner 8 year old stand up and squeal, unless you’re dead, or a girl.”
And my god. I just shut it down. Closed the window and stopped watching, though there was plenty more in the rabbit hole. If they’d said pretty much any other label in place of “girl” it would have been immediately obviously offensive and I don’t think they’d have said it. But “like a girl” and “girls don’t like these things” and “fake geek girl” have been too prevalent lately to let this one go.
In elementary school, I won the competition to be on the Olympics of the Mind robot building team for our school district-wide TAG class. Won it. And when the team assembled, the boys put their heads together and told me and the other girl who’d made the team, “You guys can do the costumes. We’re building the robot.”
Their robot sucked and failed to work.
In the same class, we were learning to program computers. And when it was my turn, every time the teacher would give me the same program I’d already done, and then turn to the boys and help them do more complicated things. Not because I lacked aptitude but because clearly teaching me wasn’t worth the effort because I couldn’t possibly be interested in that. I was an adult before I taught myself to code at all. There was just no support for it.
In high school, despite having some of the highest scores in the math program, I was not invited to be on the math team. It was like I was invisible.
I grew up hearing Free to Be You and Me tell me that the only significant difference between Mommies and Daddies is the biological act of parenting. I grew up with a dad who taught me to cook and a mom who went to school and had a law office. With a dad who did much of the outside work and a mom who sewed. With a dad who wasn’t afraid to cry and a mom who wasn’t going to back down from a fight for justice. And it wasn’t until college that I learned this was kinda weird. And it wasn’t until the past few years that I really understood how deep gender discrimination goes. That having a female name makes it harder to get published. Or hired for many jobs. Or any of a number of other biases that in retrospect should have been obvious and I thought were just me. I was “bossy” and “bitchy” and “pushy”. I talked out of turn and raised my hand too much. I was fired from a job supposedly for breaking the rules (I didn’t) because one of the bosses didn’t like how her husband was looking at me. Once, an insurance company refused to pay what a totaled stolen and recovered vehicle was worth until my father came on the line and threatened to pull his accounts. I was 24.
And I never fit. Have literally never worn high heels. Too tall. My hands don’t fit in women’s gloves. They don’t make most women’s shoes in my size. Hardly anything is made to fit me. I’m thankful to walmart for actually acknowledging the existence of large women, as it means that I can at least wear colorful sweats and t-shirts without shopping from big and tall men’s stores (which I do anyway.)
I feel like when society defines what it means to be a woman most of it isn’t me. But I don’t feel like I’m not a woman. Except I don’t want people judging me on those terms, so I’m pretty likely to use a gender neutral pseudonym when I publish. I hate that it comes down to that. And my eldest kid is nonbinary. In their words, “I don’t mind being a sister and a daughter, but don’t call me a girl like that’s all I am.” I get that completely.
I don’t have a uterus anymore. And now that Miles is on the very tail end of weaning, I probably will stop having breasts in the next few years. I’m letting go of the things that ever made me connect to the idea of “womanhood” as separate from “personhood”.
I don’t have any answers, but I’m reading articles right now about whether or not Jewish people are white, and sort of laughing exasperated inside because my god, I’ve never felt completely white or completely Jewish or really completely anything because are things ever that simple? I’m not NOT those things, but they aren’t all I am either.
When I look in the mirror and think about identity, mostly I think, “I’m me.”
Not entirely straight, not entirely bi, functionally monogamous but I’ve been polyamorous in the past, not sure I could deal with it now, so does it matter? I don’t know. Not Jewish, not not-Jewish, and the Jewish identity matters more than being “white” as an identity because the tribulations of my great grandparents are much closer than the struggles of my 8-times grandfathers and grandmothers. Woman, female, not feminine, not masculine either, hell, even on the Meyers-Briggs my answers hover in the indeterminate middle. Mostly I’m not binary, and don’t like dichotomies. And injustice makes me angry and sad. And I want people to be safe, secure, happy and loved.
I don’t think there’s a box I fit in. Or maybe that is the box. That I don’t fit.
Maybe that’s what it’s about. Sitting with the uncertainty and accepting that as reality.