On the Job of Raising a Feminist Son

     

In trying to figure out this identity as a full-time mom, partner, and homemaker, I've found it difficult to fully embrace it as the incredibly difficult, exhausting, mentally challenging "real" job that it is. 

I still sometimes find myself working too hard to prove to others that I am not some uninteresting, barely educated, oppressed woman. I focus on the fact that I'm now more productive as a poet and editor than I've ever been before, or that I'm working on prepping to go into a PhD program once Emerson goes to school. Sometimes it is the actual assumptions of others I'm working against, but often it's just my own internalized crap.

What's so hard to get across is that I'm not just doing the normal day-to-day of cooking meals, cleaning messes and wiping a tiny ass--it often feels like that's all I do. But, in all reality, my very awesome, very eccentric, very expensive education is being put to excellent use EVERY.SINGLE.DAY--from linguistic theory, to botany, to yogic philosophy...all the way to Oulipian procedures. And, obviously 15 years of critical theory has done something to my parenting, for better or for worse...

Part of what I keep coming to in parsing out what it is I really do^ is that I am at the beginning of a multi-year project in raising a feminist son who is also comfortable in his own power as a (I assume) masculine being. Everything that I do, every rule/habit/tradition my partner and I negotiate into our family, every aspect of how our home runs impacts Emerson's experience of work, worth, gender, and consumerism. 

I have the opportunity to help raise not only a feminist man of strong character, but a feminist man who is also well-educated, white, and of a privileged economic class. This is no light responsibility.  

In a world where our young men--one could easily argue--are a bit in crisis, where there is a fresh round of culture war on women being waged by those who run our government, and where patriarchal systems are evolving into trixier new incarnations....Yes, I think it is safe to say that raising a child in a conscious, compassionate, deliberate, feminist manner is a lot of work, regardless of their sex. 

So....I'm working on not just knowing that being a homemaker and mom is a real job and a potential site   for world-changing work, but also feeling that this is all true. Really grokking it.

^ The murkiness, the shiftiness of this term in our culture is so obnoxious. For years now, when meeting new people, I've opted to asked the question, "What do you do with your time?" 

Naked as We Came

                                                                    Sally Mann, Goosebumps

Magic Man and I have differing views on clothing and nudity.  I hold degrees from 2 schools that are clothing-optional campuses; I think that makes my views clear.  He sees getting up in the morning and putting on public-ready clothes as a natural part of life.  Even if you're not going out in public, the clothes are a healthy and necessary reminder of civilization, he asserts. 

I don't 100% disagree--giving up on getting dressed can be a sign of depression or other illness.  But, I also think that one works hard in life so as to be able to NOT wear pants (or anything else), if one chooses. There is nothing "natural" to me about clothes. ESPECIALLY in the Texas heat.  I do appreciate a good bra, being of the larger breast persuasion...but outside of that, the rest is mostly optional in my mind, and I have spent chunks of my life happily wearing clothes only part-time. As a result, I have also enjoyed far fewer body image problems than a lot of women I know, especially considering that I've always been a chubster (or Rubenesque, as my mom puts it).

I have no intention of forcing my kids to wear clothes when we are in the privacy of our own home. It is incredibly important, obviously, for them to understand conventional social rules around bodies, privacy, and audience. Home alone with your parents is different than at a friend's house for a birthday party. But, as long as that understanding and respect of culture is there, I see no point in forcing them to stay dressed all the time if they don't want to. There is nothing wrong with their bodies, and making them anxious about covering themselves all the time only increases early-sexualization of their bodies. I think it brings shame into a place it does not belong...possibly making it harder for them to hold clear boundaries of body safety later on.

 TBD's body is his body. It's not mine (even now while still totally encapsulated by my body.) If he doesn't want to cover it, within the safety of set boundaries, I think that should be his choice.

Magic Man and I haven't come up with set rules yet. Seems a little premature.  But, I have full faith that we will find a happy medium. He has no desire to have kids who are anxious about their bodies, just as I have no desire to have kids who can't function in public life. 

Here is a solid post on the subject by Shannon Hayes (author of Radical Homemakers). I agree with so much she is struggling with here. 


Ugh...ok, back to sipping this nausea tea. Yes, I am still vomiting.

(29 weeks, 5 days pregnant)

Parenting Taboos

I started thinking about creating this blog in the first weeks of knowing I was pregnant because I felt like I'd been dropped into a strange role that I normally see portrayed as a different reality than, well, is actual reality. The idea that motherhood is inherently a magical and happy experience for all women is such a fucking myth. Why isn't that a bigger part of the larger discourse? I started on this motherhood path emotionally, mentally, and financially able to deal with a child--I even have a loving and committed partner to share the experience with--and I STILL felt like I was walking the plank at sword-point.

What I became acutely aware of in those early weeks were all the things I found myself wanting to say or ask, but which immediately seemed waaaaay outside of cultural acceptability. I found myself prefacing these topics with apologies and acknowledgments of how terrible it sounded when bringing them up with close friends I've had for 20 years.

Isolation, alienation, a decrease in importance within your family circles, a shift in how society sees your attractiveness/worthiness, the so-called Baby Blues (a disgustingly euphemistic name for something very real and potentially incredibly dark and soul-devouring)...all of these things are obvious parts of parenting, in my mind. What if I don't immediately want to die for my child at the first moments of holding him? What if other things in my life don't stop being important with the first breastfeeding? What if I want to take a vacation without my kid in the first year? Do any of these make me a bad person...a bad woman? Logically speaking: no. But culturally speaking, the answer I felt was YES.

Through lots of talking about it, I've found that the reality of how women feel about these things is really different--something I can relate to--than what many websites and books and nauseating commercials offer. But, why isn't the real of it all a bigger part of cultural representations?

I found this pretty awesome TED video of Alisa Volkman and Rufus Griscom talking about parenting taboos--those things that culture keeps us from regularly addressing in the open. It's funny, real, and comforting to hear parents saying the things you KNOW are true, but usually seem impolite to discuss in random company.

(21 weeks, 6 days pregnant)

Media Images, Young Girls, and What Happens to Them

Radical Homemaking: a beginning

Ok, I have to start this with a preface:
There are a lot of issues of privilege that come into play when talking about someone choosing to stay home instead of working for the monies. Additionally, there are currently a lot of people out there who desperately want to work, but can't find jobs or are incapable of holding a job for one reason or another. Issues of privilege and class (and race...and gender...) are incredibly important for us all to be thinking about in our everyday lives, and my discussion of homemaking is not presented without a conscious awareness of all this. But, that also doesn't mean that we shouldn't pursue ideas and choices because our culture currently doesn't allow everyone to participate in them. On the contrary, I think often change starts when people in positions of privilege start making different choices and speaking about them.



I am embarking on a new life as a homemaker. I feel a little shameful just saying that publicly. I come from a cultural milieu that demands that women pursue careers and ever-increasing levels of financial independence. I have a master's degree, I have taught at the college level, I have studied/debated/lectured on the most hardcore philosophical levels of feminism(s) since I was 15 years old. I was raised in a family where not only did my mother always work--often multiple jobs--but HER mother (b. 1920) also worked and was a savvy businesswoman. As a result of these realities, and so many more, I am currently working through the guilt of "depending on a man" for my financial comfort.

BUT...this idea that it is a weakness for one member of a partnership (regardless of sex) to depend on the other member for financial support, I believe, is rooted in an inherently patriarchal and capitalist/consumerist belief system--a system which I wholeheartedly believe is at the root of most of our major planetary ills (it looks different in different places, but the effects are the same).

My developed skills and natural talents do not make the big bucks. They are not greatly valued by our culture. My partner's skills are. It doesn't make sense for me to invest the precious hours of my day working at a job which only makes a tiny fraction of what my partner can make, and to then have 2 people in a relationship who are tired, stressed out, and only half-able to do the work of building/maintaining a home.