Or A Serious Expression In The Middle Of July

The Mother's for Women's Lib carnival linked me to this post, which contains this paragraph:

Not only are traditionally female fan objects and fan engagements devalued, the very gender identity of the fan thus becomes problematic: reading done in private by women is a selfish and time-wasting activity, and fannish investment is a selfish and time-wasting squandering of emotion. Mothers, however, are meant to focus their activities and emotions on one target only: their family. Capitalist culture has long been undergirded by domestic ideology: the man’s primary domain is the capitalist world, where selfishness and aggressivity are rewarded, while the woman’s primary domain is home, where she creates social awareness by selflessly volunteering and providing moral guidance for the next generation. I’m taking this directly from my domestic/bourgeois ideology lecture for the British nineteenth century, but frankly, living in a white middle class suburban area with two kids in private school, the ideological structure of my community doesn’t really look all that different.

And that's an interesting thing.

I have gotten, since Little Foot was born, profoundly jealous of what time I get to spend on myself. And it's hard, on a lot of levels - I mean, starting with the comment "being selfish is one of the worst crimes a woman can commit without breaking the law" but also all the ways in which my time is circumscribed - whether because I actively need to be minding Little Foot or, like now: she finally went down for a nap, after a fussy day in which she largely refused to sleep. I should go, for example, grab the towels out of the bathroom and wash them, but if I put her down she might wake up. (She has been very, very easy to wake of late, alas.) Which necessity - the dirty towels or the unrested infant - rules?

I have always struggled with taking time for myself, seesawing between complete self-sacrifice and a tendency towards indulgence without ever quite knowing where the range of legitimate behaviour fell. It is not something - growing up in a context where any time spent on myself was proof of my selfishness - that I learned well. Nor a culture designed to help rational thought on the subject, even if I were not kept from learning it at home.

And there are the half-spoken assumptions: that of course the lion and I would stop playing games when we have children, for example. That our recreations will become proper, whatever that means. I already watch baseball games, maybe we'd have to take up more television sports? Or - to really buy into the mythologies of adulthood, that his world would be consumed with Job and my world would be consumed with Baby and neither of us would ever have scope for our own pursuits again, except maybe a movie every year or two when the stars align and someone else could mind the babe.

I find myself strung up by the self-doubt, neither counting off tasks - fold the laundry, clean the bedroom, catalogue the crate of books, whatever else - nor taking time to relax, poised between the two because I have no space to give myself for either.

I think maybe this is why I'm tired.

Ignorance and Bliss

I was, for various reasons, having That Conversation the other day. The interminable one, with someone who almost certainly means well, but hasn't quite managed to claw up to spitting distance of social awareness. You know how it goes; you ask, "Look, do you worry about whether you'll be raped if you go out?" and get a response like, "I totally worry about being mugged, I live in a bad part of town." (Because we all know that women totally don't ever have to worry about being mugged; it's one crime or the other.)

Anyway.

One of the other people in That Conversation commented that her moment of revelation was a Savage Love column in which someone had written in asking for advice for how to deal with anal tears, because she'd been mucking about with bondage with her partner and he took advantage of her helplessness to do something she'd previously refused. It hadn't occurred to the writer that she'd been raped.

And, well, it hadn't occurred to the person relating the story that that was rape either. Because she had internalised the "sexuality is like this: resist resist resist resist resist lie-back-and-think-of-England-in-the-end". So: revelation! That is rape!

My first thought on this was relief that I had never been that naive.

My second thought, following immediately after, was that actually, I had been.

Because the cascade that led into my assault was, as I've ruminated before, a long chain of violations, minor building up to major, where I hadn't figured out if I wanted any of them - and by the time I realised I had wanted to say no long ago, it seemed so pointless, so cruel; he expected to be able to do that stuff now, it would be so nasty to suggest that I didn't like it, right? It wasn't nice to lead people on like that. All of the minor transgressions were written off as the price of my failures of promptness, and anything built upon them likewise, not because of resist-and-submit per se, but the same complex of expectation. The things already lost cannot be a crime against person, because they are lost already. And that is what sex is about: resist-and-submit, and if I wasn't able to articulate the 'resist' right on, well, that left me the resolution to do.

Tied for third thought, cascading out of this moment of someone else's enlightenment:

That I didn't know what happened to me was almost rape, and denied that word for many years because I didn't want to appropriate the experiences of "real" victims of assault, but I knew it was wrong, and that's why I wouldn't have been surprised by the opportunistic rape from the letter-writer being named as it was;

That there is a bonus complex narrative about the consequences of being female and kinky (reminded as I was of a friend who was raped under similar circumstances), too;

That for all that I missed out on a lot of the social expectations of femaleness (all the things women are supposed to do 'by default' when they go out because of the risk of rape are things that don't occur to me most of the time - perhaps because I'm a shut-in by preference, perhaps because I was assaulted by a supposed romantic partner and not a stranger and none of them would have protected me) I ... have no idea ... how to show this world ... to someone who does not already see the space in which it inhabits.

I often feel that I don't live in the same world as other women who are talking about the world women have to move through; that was not the case yesterday.




I'm looking at my daughter, now, and it matters that she is female-bodied whatever comes after, because I look at her and think about this world she has no idea exists, snugged as she is now in the arms of her loving family. I have the tears welling up, knowing that she will have to learn to navigate that godawful world, however it looks when she gets older, my happy, sweet child who has never known cruelty, whose sense of betrayal is keyed to a diaper left unchanged a little too long, not ... all the world can wreak.

And I wish for all the world that she could remain as sweetly unaware of the awful things that humanity will do to women as that annoying guy who wanted to know better. That her education could be as gentle as a heated conversation with a handful of frustrated women on the internet, women armed only with domestic violence stats and a fistful of personal experience.

(And I am worlds further away from understanding my mother than I have ever been.)

Offline Memory

I store my memory outside my head.

I don't know how to explain this to people, to people with undamaged memories. The only people who have understood me have had more overtly abusive relationships with one or another of their parents than I did, but they understand.

They understand growing up in 'that didn't happen', a world where any given event might disappear into an oubliette of denial and revisionist history. Where there is this constant meshwork of things never said, things said and forgotten, things said and denied a day later, where a child could not begin to navigate, caught between child's memories and the need to have faith in a caregiver.

(I think of a beloved friend's little icon, a scan of words written by a parent who never said them, a proof of something ambiguous and complicated and now, just ... unable to fit into language.)

I learned to store my memory outside my head.

Email archives, now that I'm an adult: great huge piles of email archives. Even when having conversations in text leads to vast emotional blowups, which it can do - my liege and I communicate shockingly poorly in text, for example - at least I can verify, if to nobody other than myself, that it actually happened.

Notes, mementoes, small objects that are part of an experience. I still hold a faint woundedness in my heart from when my father lost the baseball bat my grandfather gave me. I, very vaguely, wish that the scars on my forearm from when I self-injured had not faded, because scars are memory, and I know I was there, and I have no proof but what is written in my mind.

Small objects that were simply present at an experience, all part of the defining context of childhood, a thing that hooks into a complex of knowing where I came from, knowing where I was, an entire sense of security built around the familiar and the known.

"Do you need this?"

"It's a candy dish."

It's mints set out for some adult party, lights and nice clothes, something to do with artwork. It's Christmas candies by the tree in the house where I was a child, me tucked around the back of things putting ornaments on the side of the tree that faces the wall, voices singing "Haul out the Holly" from Mame. It's an assortment of pretzel sticks, once, and I cannot for the life of me remember why.

It's a little piece of memory.

"I mean, does it matter? Is it an important, like, family thing?"

I don't know how to answer the question, but since it is just a little piece of memory, not bound to a person, a single important event, something seminal, just part of where-I-came-from like so many other small things and really I don't need all of these little pieces of memory do I, there's enough else that can serve, enough that I don't just ... have my childhood dissolve away into doubt, since it is a trivial piece of memory, I say "We don't need it."

I store my memory outside my head.

Infinite Space Bounded in a Glass Ball

This evening I started to inscribe Little Foot's name in glitter and glue on a glass ball. She has a lot of letters, so I merely did the first four, and will wait until it is safe to turn the ornament without smudging to write the rest.

Her name will join the names thus written on other glass balls in past years: the other three adults in my family, the cats' names, and the snake. Come this weekend, my father and his wife will also get to write their names in glue and pick a colour to sparkle in. This way is in its fourth generation at least, now: my grandmother, my father, myself, my child. As generations of humans before me have done, I take the trappings of my old religion with me when I convert. This is the meaning of my Christmastide.

Meaning is a delicate thing, and one does not always take away what was intended.

Perhaps my northern European bloodline appreciates the placement of an abundance festival in the dark of the year - before the worst of the cold, yes, but in the hints of the return of the sun. Perhaps this is so.

Perhaps I am so marinated in Christianity that I cannot give it all up. I would not be the only one.

But: I come back to the ornament, carefully written upon in glue.

If you spend the dark of the winter with my family, you get a name ball. Your name inscribed in glitter, on a glass or satin-coated ball. This is how it has always been, it was so before I was born, I hope it will be so after I go West. A catalogue of names, a litany of memory.

If you will be back in the dark of the next year, your ornament is set aside, awaiting you: none will put it up but you, for it is yours, the token of our collective memory, the sigil of your welcome. If you do not return - if the travel is too much, if the circumstances do not align, if you will come no longer - then we will put it up for you, and remember the times you were present.

I will make cookies and cake for the season, the one a matter of holiday duty, the other a thing of more general celebration, for when my father comes, because it is hard to be properly festive when it is just us and the constant onslaught of baby requirements, but for my father who raised me to these traditions I can go to the effort. Perhaps I will make a roast, I believe we have one kicking around somewhere. And these will be my offerings of abundance for the season more than anything else, the barest essentials, more important than wrapped-up objects to be presented as offerings to the other: I offer food and the promise of the memory of a name.

To be with my family at Christmastime is to be always remembered, to always belong. To always have a place. When I strip away everything else, I am left with this offered universe, written upon in glitter and glue, held always in company and community. That is the holiness that is written upon my heart in the chill dark of the year, when it might be easy to trip into solitude and isolation. This is the community that I build over time, out of fragile glass balls and glue and memory.

For your ka.

Space To Be A Family

Raising My Boychick put up a post about what changes we would look for to make the culture safe for families. More or less. Noodling ensues, and I said I'd write it here because gods know I do ramble on.

This isn't a simple damn problem. The anti-family shit is deeply ingrained in the culture. (A Salon article about just some of the more overtly misogynistic bits.) I can look to Europe and see things that are better, though not all of them are what I would want.

After Little Foot was born, I had what is probably one of the best of all possible situations in this culture, because I'm a weirdo with a fantastic family. I could spent the first month of recuperation time almost solely recuperating - because I had three other people who were taking care of Little Foot while I could heal. Which meant that people could take basically an eight-hour shift of babycare and not be too shorted on sleep. And I could pull that off because of my family structure, because I had the luck to give birth near the beginning of the break between summer session and the fall semester, and because people took staggered leave so I wasn't alone with Little Foot until sometime in September. In among that we had a constant stream of visiting relatives who did some assisting in varying levels.

But note all the caveats in there. Most women giving birth do not have two husbands and their wife to help out. We had to stagger leaves from work, and if I'd given birth a week earlier ("on time") there would have been finals to contest with; later gets into the rolling beginning of the semester, and one of us is in grad school and another on staff at a university. And I think that having the four of us there was pretty much a bare minimum to maintain reasonable levels of sanity through my recovery.

I literally have no idea how smaller families do this without losing their shit.

On the other hand, I have no idea how I manage to be sole caretaker for Little Foot during the daytime during the week without losing my shit, so presumably people with smaller families are tapping the same wellspring that gets me through the day until I get relief as people drift home from work, from school, from classes, from errands.

The isolation of taking care of small children is inhuman. Much as I hate all those biological-essentialist notions that go along with How We Are Meant To Be, this is not how we are meant to be. I worked at home prior to Little Foot's arrival, and was more than content, as an introvert, to do so; now, I find myself feeling isolated and sunk into a morass from which it is difficult to escape. I walk down to the gas station to buy snack food solely to leave the house - with Little Foot tucked into a wrap if I'm entirely alone, leaving her in the care of one of her other parents for ten minutes if I have the help. Perhaps it would be easier if we had a second car and I my driving license, but I have no freedom to just go somewhere; even with help getting her into the car is a small project (check diaper bag, get jacket on baby, get wrap for carrying her at destination, get baby out of house, into carseat, buckles all done up). Perhaps it would be easier if we still lived in the city, and I could climb down the two flights of stairs, hop on the trolley, and go somewhere. But even so, my abdominal muscles have still not recovered from pregnancy, and carrying her for too long, I learned yesterday, means that when we extract her from the wrap I fold in half as soon as her weight isn't countering my muscle strain.

But how do we fix this? We can't put the culture back to a place where all the huge extended families are all settled in roughly the same place - even for those of us on good terms with our bloodkin have had reasons to move. Local crunchyparent gatherings have largely been scheduled during daytime hours in places I would have to travel to by car, as if all crunchyparents have one stay-at-home, and that stay-at-home can drive half an hour because they have a dedicated mommycar and no issues that interfere with its use. (I kind of fear noncrunchyparent gatherings, and haven't looked into them at all.) Subdivisions aren't communities, really, though part of that is my lack of any knowledge of how to really get to know my neighbors in any useful way. Childcare services are a bandage, whether it's an in-house nanny or dropping the kids off somewhere, and has its own intrinsic and complicated class issues.

But we don't see mothers (or other caregivers, but like so many things, this falls on the mothers) going about their daily business with a kidlet in a babypouch. Hell, we don't see those mothers going about their daily business - not shopping, not going to the park, I mean going to the office or sitting behind the cash register or whatever else - with baby shoved in a bucket carseat under the counter either. Employers who have in-house childcare are still a minority. The childcare work is invisible and unintegrated. It's done by magic invisible people. We expect the fairies to raise the children, and then we wonder why the children are fey, elf-touched, and unintegratable with the ordinary world.

It needs to be okay to bring the kids in to work, to have that part of life integrated with everything else. But that's not enough. Parents like me have to be able to not be alone all the time. Which means community building, and fucked if I know how to do that. It means stuff like commercially-zoned spaces within walking distance, parks, and spaces that aren't parent-and-child hostile: places to sit and nurse other than bathrooms, sidewalks that are broad enough to accomodate strollers without driving other pedestrians into the street, having public social gathering places that are open to children.

It also needs to be okay to have work have delineated edges. Every so often I hear people complaining about how parents get to take time to take the kids to the doctor, to their lessons, whatever, that parents aren't expected, necessarily, to do more than their nine-to-five, that there's this tidy cultural excuse that means that parents are only expected to do the work they're contracted for and can't reasonably be expected to do more. This is the sort of broken that's why I have a tag 'sixteen tons' on this blog. (And that's just dealing with exempt employees - hourly employees have a whole different set of problems to deal with, and one I'm actually less equipped to speak to despite having all of my life employment being on an hourly wage basis. Class is complicated.) It would be to everyone's benefit - not just parents - if work was not presumed to trump life unless one has a signed permission slip from overculture excusing our absences. (In a culture where only paranoia about swine flu makes taking time off for illness currently acceptable - despite the fact that infecting the office with that cold will cost a lot more than two days off - what the hell do we expect?)

And that's not getting into the whole needing to scrimp and save up vacation time to do parental leave. My lion had the flexibility to take time off and then do a week working from home; most people don't. We had more people than most to do staggered assistance for me. And, even with all that, I was still bleeding out lochia when I settled in to being her primary, and usually sole, daytime caregiver. And see above about the isolation thing, where I have it pretty good since every so often my liege is about when he doesn't have classes and can provide the amazing relief of "Could you pick her up so I can rearrange" or "Could you handle this diaper change" or "Could you mind her for five minutes so I can go buy a donut" - not even, usually, doing primary caretaker (though sometimes he takes her for the morning and lets me get some more sleep), more "a momentary hand with this makes my life an order of magnitude easier".

Most industrialised countries have longer maternity leave times. Some have parental leave that is available to presumed-both parents (adoptive or biological, even). (And even for families like mine where more parental leave might be wanted, those countries also have more than two weeks of vacation time available at all, which goes back to the whole work-trumps-life rant about being expected to work more than one's hours by default.) I don't know where other countries are on flex-time working and telecommuting; getting those widespread would be a help to more parents than me. (When my lion does a telecommuting day, again, my resilience goes up a lot.)

(And, of course, my health and Little Foot's depend on my lion maintaining that pretty nice job that lets him telecommute sometimes including for a week after he took vacation post-birth. Because of the way employment links to health care, and the way that one's quality of job therefore links to one's quality of life. And if there were an NHS here, how much of a difference would that make to people who have to work shitty jobs for the health care, or who needed prenatal care, or post-partum treatment? Who wouldn't have the money to hire the homebirth midwife we had or handle the not technically last-minute transfer to the hospital?)

And I think long-term, too, like the friend who was enraging me a while back (who apologised, by the way), and think, y'know, the time that people spend raising kids should count towards Social Security or something. I don't know if I'm as optimistic as one of the commenters on Raising My Boychick about some kind of parenting wage, but hey. That'd be cool. (Did you know that Norway counts breastmilk production in its GDP?)


Let's see if I can summarise this into something reasonably tidy:

* enabling community support, whether larger families, extended families, chosen families, I don't care, more people available to help with kids for more time
* walkable communities with basic stores and public spaces near residential areas
* death to the Company Store - shorter hours, more vacation, no expectation of overtime as default, flexible scheduling, telecommuting, available to everyone, not just to parents
* universal health care access (here, this'll make up some of the pain to the companies that are being required to treat employees better)
* recognition of parenting as ... I don't want to say 'economically productive' because I dislike the whole 'it has to be qualified as Real Work and quantified monetarily for anyone to take it seriously' shit, but somewhere in the direction of, y'know, noting this happens, we don't get new taxpayers from the aforementioned childrearing fairies
* parental leave available for all legally recognised parents (acknowledging that families like mine are unlikely to be accomodated here but), whether biological or adoptive
* integrating caregivers with the community, not separating off and isolating paid caregivers (more in-house childcare in companies, etc.)

How's that for a start?

Dreamlife

When I was a child and trying to get to sleep, I would tell myself little fantasy stories all about the boy I fancied and how in a fantasy world he needed to be rescued and afterwards we would live happily ever after.

When I got a little older, I got uncomfortable with that because what if he didn't want me, so I would tell myself little fantasy stories that were only mostly about the boy I fancied and how ... etc.

When I got a little older, I built raw fantasy out of my kinks to soothe myself to sleep, with intricate gearwork constructions of bondage, domination, and service.

Once I had a sexual partner, I would assemble bits and pieces of fantasies out of things we'd done and extrapolations thereof.

Often, these would be kinked, playing with ideas, coming up with scenarios and notions.


... now, when I am trying to get to sleep, my mind is full of baby smiles. And holding her close, cradling her in my arms, and actually having the strength to not have to let go, back away, get a little space, and breathe so that I do not lose my mind. Actually having the infinite patience that is back behind the archetype, being able to pour all the love into her that she can hold.


I honestly find it more than a bit confusing.

And I would miss the sex dreams, if I had space left in my mind to have them.

Grumble

I've turned on the feature that adds a captcha thing to the blog because I'm starting to get stupid quantities of comment spam. Sorry for the inconvenience.