Let’s hear it for the 19th Amendment
Rented Schoolhouse Rock for Owen last week and they had song in there about the 19th Amendment and suffragists and whatnot. Made me pause, admiring the ponytailed, bell-bottomed cartoon songstress and the way she reminded me to thank my foremothers for the rights I enjoy today.
So I brought Owen with me to the polling place this afternoon, through sleet and rainy ice, to stand in a line four people long and cast my vote for the next president of the United States, as well as for some delegates, whom I chose based merely on whether I liked the tang of their names.
I enjoy my rights, even if I sometimes exercise them irresponsibly. Happy Primary Day, Maryland.
Mommy drinks, but not because you cry
So! Owen and I watched the Today Show yesterday morning, on which Melissa Summers was invited to talk about whether “cocktail playdates” are appropriate. Basically, Meredith Vieira was asking, is it ever OK for a mother to drink in the presence of her children? (story)
Unfortunately for mothers everywhere, the piece was quite biased. And the piece said, NO. From the intro footage of Encino moms drinking (zoom in on the wine!) to Meredith’s loaded questions (“but, how would you feel if it was the baby-sitter?”), the general tone was one of incredulous disapproval.
Melissa did a nice job of speaking out for the rational person, but I fear she was slightly overshadowed by every other aspect of the segment. More’s the pity, because this is the kind of thing that gets blown out of proportion and subsequently used to further pressure moms into some sort of Stepford model of behavior.
Look. Moms are people too. They eat. They drink. Sometimes their drinks have alcohol in them. Nobody’s talking about intoxicated parenting, all right? I think we can all agree that that would be dangerous.
But the simple consumption of an adult beverage in the presence of children, including your own — well, hell. Dads have been drinking beers on the couch for … for as long as beer has been invented, and that’s never been criticized.
I don’t drink often, but I’ve never shied away from having a drink in front of Owen. He knows that some drinks are for grownups (anything that comes in an aluminum can, including National Bohemian). And I know that more than a drink and a half is too much, so I imbibe accordingly.
I don’t see the problem. And I think demonizing moms who demonstrate any sort of human behavior (working, drinking, being exasperated) further dehumanizes them and gives the American public fewer reasons to respect and value what they do. And this in turn is why so many mothers today feel suffocated, anxious, on edge — why perhaps they might need a beer, I would venture to say. Because America has been all up their butt all day long.
Everything’s coming up Milhouse!
What’s this? Could it be … jubilation that I’m feeling, the day after Election Day? Why, that would be unheard of, in all my eight years of voting!
But the internet says I’m not dreaming: Mayor McHottie really did win the governor’s race, Democrats really did sweep state and federal races, and Karl DONALD (duh) *#$% Rumsfeld really did step down.
What a great day. The only thing that would make this day better would be if I had some doughnuts.
post-script: Nothing did more to convince me that those voting machines are totally safe than to have nationwide Democratic wins.
Red state, blue state
I had a frightening dream last night: Someone came up to me and said, “The nation’s at war!”
“Oh, no,” said I, “who is it this time? Iran? North Korea?”
“No,” said they, “Florida and Texas. They just bombed the hell out of New York State.”
My dream self was utterly unsurprised. “Those damn Republicans,” I said aloud.
I’m going to write in ‘House, M.D.’ for Governor
Good morning! Now go vote.
It’s Primary Day here in Maryland, for all y’all out-of-towners. And though I spent a few hours last Saturday drooling over a 5 bedroom, two bathroom converted barn with garage, basement, and pool table (comes with!) in P.A. for $159K(!) … I still live in Maryland.
So I gotta vote. And you gotta vote, too. You’re not allowed to bitch about ANYTHING unless you go vote.
I haven’t voted yet this morning, so I can’t bitch either. Instead I will say some nice things about living in Maryland.
- Listening to WTMD and WBZA
- Sunday morning’s churchy program by Dr Pastor Franklin Reid, of the Baltimore AME church (I’m an asshole and a nonbeliever and I still like this show)(The Church of Getting Things Done!)
- City Paper’s Best of Baltimore annual edition. Does it come out tomorrow?
- Finding a quilt shop TWO MINUTES from my house. Two minutes. Hi.
- Getting mail from Ohio friends (Thanks, Denise!) because I live so damned far away.
So. Maryland = Not so bad. But you still gotta vote.
And you can’t actually write in candidates, since this is just a primary, but still. Wouldn’t he make a great Guv? All bossy and no-nonsense?
Still more mother activism!
Via Feminist Moms:
- Code Pink: Mother’s Day Call for Peace
- Mothers Acting Up
- NOW: Mothers Matter (hey! petition!)
More mother-activism
… Over at Mothers Ought To Have Equal Rights (MOTHERS).
Mmm … political mommies … the righteousness BURNS!
“Not buying what you’re selling” feminism
I am a-quiver with righteous indignation. Honestly, if you’re not reading “Perfect Madness” — well, there is no if. Get it. Read it.
More than just motherhood today, it’s about the toxic culture of America today. Anorexia, bulimia, “choice,” abortion, college, looking hot — for young women today our entire realms of experience are so narrowly inwardly focused. The pressure and quest for perfection. Sublimating everything to be perfect, to be attractive, to be willing and adept sexual objects, to exercise control over the most personal of things — your person. To be intelligent, to be successful, to be beautiful, to have white teeth, to have glowing skin, flat stomachs, rounded breasts, smooth hairless legs, glossy hair. To be “strong” and fit and flawless. To have a good job, a good husband, good children, a nice wardrobe, a nice car, nice things. To have a perfectly clean and perfectly updated house. To have well-behaved drool-free pets. To have no body hair. To have perfectly arched eyebrows, a healthy bank account, to be well-read. To not fail. To never falter. To take the sins of the world upon our backs. To be upon our backs to take the sins of the world.
To say yes. To say “OK”. To say “Whatever you want, I don’t care, do with me what you will.” To accept lower wages, buyouts, reduced healthcare plans, substandard yet expensive child care, to make the nanny happy, to make the husband happy, to make your children happy, to make your boss happy, to make the stranger on the street happy to look at you. To smile. To hold it in. To suck it in. Only to let it out when nobody is watching, nobody is listening.
This is fucking psycho, people. We need to be allowed to take up space. We need to demand to take up space. We need to be fully flawed people. We should be content with normal grooming and hygiene. We need to be able to say, Fuck you. We need to be able to say, This isn’t working, I want my money back. We need to be able to say, I want. I need. I expect. I deserve.
Fucking toxic culture, people. It’s turned every problem we have as a culture, as a class, as a gender, as a nation, inward on ourselves. Micromanaging our loss of control and our fear into highlights and salad.
We need to mobilize. We need to fucking scare the shit out of Congress. We need to lay down our flattening irons and take up arms, metaphorically speaking.
If you get raped, it’s not your fault. If you have sex, you don’t deserve punishment. If you get pregnant, you don’t deserve to be hung out to dry — the same people pushing to eliminate abortion ought to be pushing for a male birth control pill, for accountability, for women as people.
It’s a subtle problem, this toxicity. It seems like it’s just the way things are. We are fed lies through one ear — through the media, through Hollywood, through our own politicians and families and friends — and we believe it. We believe we have made choices and must accept the consequences — I “chose” to get pregnant, to keep the baby, to buy a house, to get married, to work part-time — therefore I deserve skyrocketing housing prices, tax rates, health-care costs. It’s not America’s fault I can’t pay my mortgage or my rent — It’s not America’s fault I want to spend time with my baby — it’s not America’s fault I can’t pay for groceries on what I make working part-time, because I chose that.
But on some level it is America’s fault. More and more resources are being snipped and yanked from under our feet. We have no support systems, because we must go where the jobs are — everything is all connected. Deregulation. Capitalism, the Bush Administration, cronyism, the oil industry, big business, corporate life. Money. Power.
The middle-class is suffocating and we are not demanding back what we have lost. Women are asphyxiating, metaphorically, under the increasing weight to keep control, being told we have all these choices and if they don’t pan out, we must have chosen wrong. We aren’t turning to the government and demanding tax hikes which will go toward the greater good, rather than tax cuts for the wealthy that result in ever more social programs and resources and support networks and money for schools being cut.
It seems like things will never change. The government will push and push and take and take and we will continue to shake, wide-eyed, wondering how we will survive.
The “Mommy wars” and all these books about motherhood focus on a different class of people than the one I belong to. I don’t have the luxury of choosing whether or not to work. I don’t get to have a maid and a nanny. Owen’s not going to be able to take lessons and be an overscheduled kid. He doesn’t get organic food. He gets off-brand diapers and hand-me-down toys.
I’ve been thinking about the Blogher second-day panel called Mommyblogging Is A Radical act, which Sweetney and Finslippy will be presenting. I’m ready to put aside micropersonal issues and focus on the personal as political — my daily life as a middle-class American woman, and what I can expect and what I can demand of my government and my national culture.
I am ready to mobilize, y’all. I am ready to scream, to march in the streets. I am ready, also, to stage a mass letter-writing campaign, to go straight to my elected officials and hold them accountable. It’s sick that many of us — most of us? — don’t have the time to wade through the maze of local and federal government bullshit, but it’s time to go Town Hall on their asses. Momsrising.org is on the right track, but we need more than be covered respectfully in the mainstream media. We need real, concrete, life-changing help. Living wages. Affordable healthcare. Quality and affordable child care. Systems of support. A national culture of support, one that says children are not punishment for a woman having sex for pleasure, but rather something we all have a stake in. Before we abandon Roe V Wade altogether, we need to strengthen sex-ed programs, not just for horny high-schoolers but for adults, too. Simple and accessible birth control. RU-486. The Morning After Pill. And a culture that for fuck’s sake doesn’t pin the worth of a woman on how much she weighs or whether she’s a fucking sexkitten.
What we are told as girls certainly has not matched with the way we have found real life to be, with the way we feel lost and stranded at sea with no one to rely on but ourselves. No one will listen, no one cares — well, fuck that shit. Let’s stand up. Let’s eat that twinkie. Let’s demand what is rightfully ours — a nation that supports us, not one that gives good lip service and expects us to do the same.
Supa’s Activist Corner: MomsRising
OK.
Last bit of motherly righteousness: momsrising.org. Sign a petition and let’s get this party started.
(Phew. Now I’m all mommed out. Time for reality television, or something.)
Mother’s lib (or, Everyone Works)
Just one more tidbit before I go: That whole “Mommy Wars” thing? Where the “working moms” hate the “stay-at-home” moms and vice versa? I knew that was a social construct, a media stand-by for slow news days and attention-grabbing headlines. But the point was brought home recently that something around 70% of mothers do some sort of part-time work, whether it’s one hour a week or one week a year or unpaid labor aside from housewifery or, in my case, 25 hours a week without benefits. Seventy percent! Or something close to that, I’m not looking it up right now!
Aside from the very wealthy (who are sure to have some kind of help, be it maid service or nannies or what have you) most moms, even ones who identify as stay-at-home, do some sort of work. And most working moms are not necessarily doing 50+ hours a week at a high-powered suit job. I could call myself a stay-at-home mom who does some office work, if I wanted to. I choose to call myself a working mom, because that’s what I feel like, and because I have gotten enough fucking grief about putting my child in day care that I am going to take that phrase, “working mom,” and reclaim the hell out of it.
Amalah recently quit her job, and commenters came absolutely out of the woodwork to laud her for making “the right choice” and staying at home. Even though, technically, she’s not a “stay at home-er,” because she’s got one or two free-lance gigs lined up, making her a work-at-homer. But the sheer dichotomy of thought about working, and about the “relief” so many of us dream of when we think about staying at home with our kids versus the stress of having to manage work plus family life — well, it’s all bullshit, don’t you think? Especially when you’re by yourself with virtually no social support network.
Part (OK, all) of what makes working stressful for me is child care. I love my job. I love designing newspapers and I love working in publishing, have done since I was 14. It’s been my life’s dream to be a part of producing a publication intended for mass consumption. But my job does not allow me to work from home, nor does it subsidize child care of any kind. And my mortgage does not allow me to stay home. And my heart will not allow me to raise my child in an apartment or a rowhouse.
So I work. And I pay two hundred and fifteen dollars every week for owen to get four and a half hours of care, four days a week.
But like I said before, if he gets sick — I’m screwed. My neighbors are octogenarians, except for the 40-year-old guy a few houses down who seems to have a drinking problem. No one on the block has young children. No one at my office has young children (that I know of. OK, maybe this one guy. But they’re at least grade-school age). None of my friends are within a five mile radius, and even if they did, they have children and/or jobs as well.
I have virtually no social support network. None.
Which is why we’re moving. Raising a family is certainly survivable this way. We’re not perishing or anything. But the specter of disaster is constantly hovering over my shoulder, and if shit hits the fan, I want to live in a close-knit place with many different kinds of support. I want to know my grocer. I want my son to have kids to play with aside from his day-care buddies. I want to be able to chat with my neighbors about gas prices without them mistaking today for 1961. I want Owen to play out in the backyard without hearing Forty-Year-Old Alcoholic yelling belligerantly about “Fucking Whores and Catholics and Spics.”
The biggest lesson I’ve learned so far, in my 15-month mothering career, is that to expect a person to do this alone is homicidal. I’m dead grateful that I have a job right now, that I have the Internet, that I have a library card. But I keep thinking how much richer my life would be if I had a woman next door with a toddler; if I had my mother in law two streets over to tell me how to launder vomit out of denim; if I had a neighbor girl I trusted wholeheartedly to babysit a few times a month.
The problem, in my opinion, is not working vs non-working, it’s all of us moms together expecting ourselves to do everything “perfectly” and not expecting or demanding society at large to give us a fucking hand already.
recent flickr
-
my sewing tutorials
See my tutorials featured on SMS' Handmade Holidays!
