Crunchy Granola

Swanky Science

2012-01-23T20:46:00.000-05:00

Blogging, even intermittently as I seem to do these days, has brought me the good fortune of friendships with so many interesting people in the computer. Some I've actually met in real life; others I've come to know through words and images online. Susan, who blogs at Toddler Plant, is someone I've only ever met online, but her words and passions have touched my heart and challenged my thinking so often since I first started reading her. Her blog started as a chronicle of her life as a planetary scientist and mother of two young children, and then became transformed into the story of her life fighting inflammatory breast cancer, and being a planetary scientist, activist, and mother. She's graceful, smart, funny, and simply amazing. Reading her latest posts, including today's post about coming home from the hospital and getting ready to welcome her hospice worker, made me cry, and marvel yet again at her astounding grace and eloquence.

It also reminded me that I'd never blogged Curious Girl's 8th birthday party, which I was able to have only because of Susan. She writes a lot about doing science at home with her kids, and writes a lot encouraging all of us to show kids how science is fun. In 2010, Stimey organized a virtual science fair to help support Susan as she went in for her 3rd surgery:

I hope she knows that she is not alone. I hope she knows that even though we can't all be there in person, we are thinking of her, sending love, good wishes, and prayers.

That is what Team WhyMommy's Virtual Science Fair is all about. We want her to know that she is loved and supported. But we also want her to know that our love and support is not all because of the cancer. We love and support her because of who she is, not just because of what she has. She is not just a cancer fighter, but an incredible person, one who is passionate about science and especially women who do science.

I didn't do a virtual science fair entry, but I showed some of the entries to Curious Girl, and she wanted to do those activities. And so, the Swanky Science Birthday Party got planned. Swanky, because CG wanted a fancy party, and science, because of Susan. And who says scientists can't be fancy? So off we went to get fancy tea cups at a thrift store, and off we went to find some great science activities. We played with vinegar, food coloring, and baking soda to make gas swell up ziploc bags (and sometimes break them open). We made ooblek. We made bubbles. And we laughed, and ate, and enjoyed a beautiful spring day.

I hate watching cancer sap the energy of someone so wonderful, even as I marvel at the outpouring of love and affection. But I know that the curiosity of children, and the oohs and ahs of young girls playing with materials to see what will happen, will bring to mind memories of Susan.

Tonight, my heart is full of love for her and her family.

Hovering over Hopscotch

2011-08-16T09:24:00.001-04:00

I've been thinking about helicopter parents a lot this summer. While Wikipedia tells me that Foster Cline coined the phrase in a 1990 book, I came to hear the term more via the NYT ever-odd coverage of parenting issues and through disparaging comments from colleagues. I've written a fair bit here over the years about the importance of independence for kids, and I've built my career in part around the ways institutions can help students make a good transition to college (and independence). I like reading Free Range Kids. So you might think I'd be a critic of helicopter parenting myself.

But no. I've spent a lot of the summer simmering about the way the notion of helicopter parenting plays out in our culture. Helicopter parenting is said to be bad. It's said to deprive our children of the chance to learn how to solve problems and work things out. It's said to keep children from learning how to play independently. It's said to get in the way of teachers doing their jobs. eu retesting language note: in Scandinavia, the analagous term is 'curling parent.')

But......the thing is, I've read a lot more text about helicopter parenting than I've seen in real life. I occasionally have a parent call me to talk about their college student child (not even once a year). I explain that I can't talk about the student's record, but explain the general policy issue at hand or explain the course and tell to encourage their child to talk to me directly. I hear stories of parents who are over involved in their children's sports ( but CG doesn't run in those competitive sports circles.) I imagine that anyone reading this might have a story to tell about Parents They Have Seen Behaving Badly, but on the whole, helicopter parenting is something I've read about more than I have observed.

So let's think about whAt I have been told parents should do. Be Involved in Your Child's Education! Parents are home partners of the school, we're told by the principal. Rightio then: you want me to be involved, just not too much. My sister and brother-in-law are teachers, and a few weeks ago I had dinner with them and two other teacher friends of theirs, one of whom works in a district that,s been taken over by the state. The teachers are getting paid for an extra 4 days of professional development and the school year has been lengthened. My brother-in-law's first question: are they requiring parents to come to those workshops, too? We all laughed, but again the implication: the problem with parents is that they are not involved. Unless the problem is that they are too involved.

I've been sensitive to this issue lately because we've been wondering for the past 2 years what to make of the fact that CG has been saying she's not good at math. Sometime in the fall of 1st grade, I mentioned it to her teacher, that CG was getting pretty frustrated at home whenever some calculation needed to happen and she was verbalizing that she wasn't good at math. 7 years old seemed a little young to start buying into this cultural script (especially for girls). Not to worry, said the teacher. She's meeting all the standards, and it's ok if she counts on her fingers. After all, your fingers are always with you! But second grade has now come and gone, and the same math panic has continued. And inefficient counting on fingers. And continued shrieks of I CAN'T DO MATH. Yet still, the teacher said she couldn,t understand why CG would say this. She was meeting standards. She was fine. We should just continue to point out all the ways math comes up in daily life (counting change, cooking, counting place mats needed, etc.)

Except she isn't. Make a long story short, after several more conferences, the teacher finally agreed to have the district math coordinator do an informal assessment, which revealed that CG has erratic understandings of the math curriculum so far. While there are some big conceptual areas where she is performing at the highest levels (she is awesome at fractions, e.g.) there are some basic things about numbers that she couldn't do. And those areas, the district coordinator says, could really start holding her back. Her conclusion: CG just needs to play! And practice math as it comes up in everyday life! Her recommendation: hopscotch. In other words, you just need to play with your kid and she will learn what she has been missing.

Bull. Granted, we haven't ever set up a hopscotch board that counts by 2 or by 5, but I don't really think that would matter. We never did flashcards (never once has any teacher suggested them for anyone) but we have, since CG could talk, gotten her to help measure, cut, count, and order things. When the district coordinator finally understood that I was mightily irritated by the suggestion that parental play was the answer after 2 years of my telling teachers that there was something not right about CG's math performances, she backtracked and said that clearly the reason CG did so well on part of the assessment was because of all that parenting. We just need to play in a different way. But where's the role of, say, the math teacher and curriculum?!? Why isn't the math teacher offering clear advice to kids about how to learn what they need to know (instead of leaving it up to parental trial and error and emotional upheaval?)

We haven't been playing hopscotch this summer. CG is using an adaptive online site (Dreambox dot com, a subscription site developed by Pearson publishers), recommended eventually by the district person. We've also gotten her a tutor, a recent Math graduate who comes once a week and has been working with her on math facts. We could do flashcards ourselves, but having Cool Tutor come makes her feel like it's ok to make mistakes and it's possible to learn.

CG would tell you, if she trusted you, that sometimes she gets mad at me because I hover too much. She would probably tell you that I make her do math when she doesn't want to, and if she could read about helicopter parenting she might say that my attention to her math is something she doesn't want. But....if it weren't for our pushing the teacher so hard this year about what has turned out to be 2 years of my child struggling to learn a key part of the math curriculum, CG would just be heading into another year destined to fall further behind. (and if it hadn't been for the feeding journal I kept when she came, her serious medical problems wouldn't have been diagnosed right away, but that's another story).

In terms of math, things are getting better. It's a complicated situation, and CG needs to figure out how to remember some facts as well as how to access what she knows when she's nervous. It's coming, although I have lost faith in the teacher assessments and I have little faith in the district math curriculum. And mostly, I'm done with criticisms of helicopter parents. There are conversations to be had, for sure, about how to foster independence and how to help kids learn to fail and succeed. But the discourse around helicopter parenting serves largely to slam parents for whatever we (don't) do. And that, I have decided, isn't helping me sort out how to raise the powerful, articulate, and capable young woman I see CG yearning to become.

Where I'm From

2011-07-07T20:44:00.002-04:00

I am from sandy beaches, from Coppertone and flip flops and beach towels and bike rides from my house to Patricia's and back again.

I am from the house around the corner from the bay, with lilacs out back, a paint-splattered patio with an outdoor shower, with bright yellow walls that curve in over the bed.

I am from the crashing waves and the sweet salt air. I am from the skating rink on Friday nights.

I am from Dad's poems on the refrigerator and melons for appetizers, from Anna Banana and Bob and Susan and Marion and Eugene, too.

I am from the people who talk so easily they forget to listen, and people who don't talk about things that bother them and people who would give you the shirt off their back to keep you warm. I am from people who say "I love you, bup bup."

From not going in the water until an hour after lunch and from vague, rhythmic advice about the importance of girls setting the tone for relationships, ever since the time of Anthony and Cleopatra. From advice that sometimes needed setting aside, and from advice that sometimes comes out of my mouth (but not the part about Anthony and Cleopatra).

I am from Catholicism that didn't stick (although it did supply a love of ritual). I am from show tunes and Girl Scout songs and hours of piano practice. I am from classical music and Celtic music and dreams of travel around the world. I am from the field where my best friend was the first girl in Little League and from the place of hope that thought the ERA and the space program would change my world.

I'm from New York and Ireland, from frozen spinach and fish cakes on Friday. I am from Gino's pizza and bagels with a schmear and regular coffee and tea with the milk put in first.

From stories I can't tell because nobody tells them.

I am from parents who took in their parents, from long-lived parents who have outlived their siblings, from people who slowly, silently, change their minds, who eventually act out of love. From a father who drove me and my friends everywhere, because that's what his father did. From New York Football Giants memorabilia, from photos stored in boxes, somewhere in the house. From silver and china that didn't get used enough. From a kitchen that always had a cuppa and an extra seat and plate. From quiet mysteries and unanswered questions.

**************

This is based on a poem by George Ella Lyon's poem "Where I'm From," which gave Fred First Floyd the idea to create a writing assignment. I've seen this form around before, but this week got the idea from Maggie, who got it from Amanda and Flutter and De. A blogger named Schmutzie is making a link-up. If you're inspired, click on Fred Floyd's name above for the template.

WWGMD

2011-01-08T17:38:00.000-05:00

Curious Girl has recently learned that a slightly younger friend of her has her own e-mail account. As she learned this via borrowing my e-mail account to send a message to this (distant) friend, she naturally started asking for her own e-mail account. Politica and I agreed to investigate, but discovered that gmail won't set up an account for anyone under 13. So I'm pondering whether to set up an account named Curious.Girl there with my b-date. Given the privacy issues on Facebook, I can't see myself being persuaded to avoid the age restrictions there. But on e-mail? Not sure. Of course, this little hangup has given CG more time to discuss this matter with her friends at school, and she's coming home saying things like, "Oh, one of my friends says we should get yahoo.com on our computer because it works much better than gmail." Looks like at least the claim of having e-mail accounts is emerging in Grade 2.

I've been trying to remember keywords from some of Geeky Mom's posts on her kids and screen time. As I recall, she's been playing games with her kids since they were young, and advocates for children's privacy online--as well as parental conversations! Politica and I have set up some parental controls on Safari for the computer that sits in our living room--setting up a bunch of different game sites on the toolbar for CG to access as she wishes--but as CG doesn't actually want to spend a ton of time online, we've never needed to set rules about screen time or access. (The first weekend she had a Webkinz, she probably played 4 hrs a day, but after that....not so much.)

So, the e-mail. One of my friends says that she set up her kids' first e-mail accounts so that all incoming mail forwards to her account--she talked about that up front with the kids, so it's "not creepy," and it lets her say to her daughter, "you know, I didn't really like the tone of that e-mail from so-and-so" when some insults go flying around. I've seen sites advocating kids' email services, like Zoobuh, and I've seen sites recommending that parents check their kids' emails.

I don't want to teach CG that the internet is a dangerous place--well, at least, I don't want to teach her that it's ONLY a dangerous place. I tell her, for example, that if she wants to go looking for videos on youtube, she has to do with with one of us sitting with her, because it's very easy for the "related videos" sidebar on youtube to feature things that are not-so-related and not-very-appropriate for her. I haven't taught her not to talk to strangers so much as not to *go with* strangers.

Ah, lots of rambling...hard to compose good sentences here when I don't really have a well-thought-out philosophy of my own to share here. But I'm curious about how folks with older kids have navigated their kids moving online. What are the perils and pitfalls?

I'm leaning towards letting CG have an e-mail account, but telling her that e-mail is for communicating with people far away (she asked whether she could e-mail her teacher, and I said no, that she should talk with her teacher and if there was something she couldn't talk about, we'd help her write a note). I'm leaning more toward a learn-by-doing, in other words, than a learn-in-the-protected-kids-email world.

But what would Geeky Mom do? Or what do you do?

Happy New Year!

2011-01-02T20:54:00.000-05:00

Hello there, invisible friends in the computer! Happy new year to one and all.
Oh, the posts I have started in my head and never finished. Like the one on girls, science, and Curious Girl's birthday party (last May!). Or the one on adoption and school and genetics. It's never too late, right?
I'm going to join the Adoption Reading Challenge, hosted by Jenna. I wonder if it will be cheating to include Scott Simon's memoir, which I actually read, and loathed, in December. I have a review post started in my head on that one.
I'm loving the idea of a theme for 2011, rather than a resolution. I'm toying with a combination of openness or generosity, as I want to do something to counter a kind of weary grumpiness that crept into my daily routines as the fall semester ended. I am very taken with Chookooloonk's presentation of badassery, though. Doesn't that just make you want to have a badass year?
More to come, in the new year. Figuring out writing time is on my list of things to do.

Considering Origins

2010-09-06T22:14:00.000-04:00

I usually love the Lives column in the New York Times Magazine. No surprise that someone who blogs--no matter how slowly or sporadically--likes personal essays that offer brief glimpses of other people's lives. Yesterday's column deals with adoption, as an adoptive, lesbian mother listens to her five-year old son begin to make sense of his own story.

To Molly and me, our children are so completely ours it feels impossible that anyone else had anything to do with them. But for Jonah, who knows? Some would say, for example, that it was the hand of God that saved his namesake, the original Jonah, from the belly of the whale; others, that it was luck that caused the beast to spit him out.

So here I am in the bed with our youngest boy, telling him the truth as I see it: “Some babies come out of their mommies, and some come through other bodies to get to their mommies. My body couldn’t make babies, so we had to find another way to get you here.” I’ve told him this before, but the story no longer satisfies the way it once did. He may be only 5, but it’s time for Jonah to begin making his own version of the narrative.

These aren't the conversations that happen around our house. Politica and I started telling Curious Girl her adoption story---her birth story--her early story--even before she could talk to us. (This was handy, as it let us practice all kinds of explanations! and it let us try out different stories, as we practiced putting words to what we know, and practiced forming questions we thought she might have.) Politica and I wrote a life book for CG sometime during the time she was 1 and 2 and a half, and that was another opportunity for us to pull together the past for her. But always, we looked at our roles as trustees for her story. There's so very much we don't know, but we have tried to give her one kind of narrative about how she came into the world, and then later into our lives, so that she could get started telling her own story.

I understand the fierceness of her love for her children; I can't imagine my life without Curious Girl. At the same time, I don't understand the language of possession: do I consider Curious Girl wholly mine? Not in the least. Do I consider myself wholly a mother, and she wholly my daughter? Yes. At the same time, she's wholly herself, her own person. She's wholly Politica's daughter. And also, always, wholly her birthmother's daughter. I'm (one of) the mother(s) day in, day out, the person who helps get her ready for school and takes her on rides and gets her to try oven-roasted tomatoes ("These are really good, Mama! They are delicious! They looked disgusting, but they are great!"). But then, day in, day out, there's another woman, miles away, perhaps with CG's eyes, or hair, or build, who brought CG into the world and holds the ties to her past. CG belongs, really, to none of us, but it's through all of us that she'll move into the future she claims.

The Lives column reports just one conversation. I don't know, of course, what other conversations Melanie Braverman and her family have had about adoption. Braverman's two sons have a sister, adopted by another family they know. That girl "plays a starring role" in their house, so it's clear that there was ways in which their notion of family includes the rich complications of her sons' past. But why can’t those conversations include, more easily, conversation about her sons’ first parents? She says that her sons were never much interested in their birth stories—but it’s hard to be interested in something you’ve never heard.

The birth mothers (and fathers) of children placed for adoption are more than just transport mechanisms to get children to their (real) parents. For all that I can’t imagine my life without Curious Girl, I can’t imagine that massive social problems are ordained by the universe in order to bring CG to us. It’s a weird thing to ponder, I’ll grant you, the vagaries that have formed this family of mine, and CG has recently started to wonder about that, too. “What if you got another baby instead of me, Mama? Would I have stayed in the orphanage?” or “What if some other family adopted me?” And she wonders, too, what it would be like to be living with her birth parents.

Braverman says her son is now ready “to make his own version of the narrative” of his own life. On this point, we agree: our children will tell their own stories, making sense of their lives. I hope CG makes sense of her life, knowing that Politica and I respect the people who brought her into this world, that our love for her is a safety net, ready to catch her when she needs it, that over the course of her life she’ll probably imagine many, many versions of her life story, and that the ability to tell her own story is what makes her her own person. She’s not mine alone to hold, and in loving her, I hold her in the messy complexities of a loving adoptive family.

Quick Vacation Blogging

2010-08-04T22:40:00.000-04:00

Why is it that long days full of vacation activities are making it harder for Curious Girl to sleep? At least our vacation digs have some very lovely king-sized beds so drawn-out bedtimes are comfortable affairs.
Politica and I are doing a little happy dance about the Prop 8 ruling. Well, we would be doing a happy dance if she hadn't been glued to the iPad for the past hour reading through the text of the decision. The decision got announced just before dinnertime here, and I ran back to our apartment to download the decision so she could be scanning it between bites. That's what passes for lovingkindness in a politically geeky family enjoying their latest technology.
There are more than 20 states in which it is legal to fire employees because they are gay, lesbian, or transgendered. There are millions of Americans--gay or straight or bi--who are not partnered, who don't have good health insurance connected to their own job or to a partner's job. If--and it's a big if--the Prop 8 ruling withstands the two or three levels of appeal that will follow (9th circuit, 9th circuit en banc, and potential US Supreme Court), the slow tide of marriage reform will do nothing for those problems. Marriage reform isn't the only sort of change we need to make a safety net for all families.
But still: marriage reform is a nice step for some families, and I can't help but smile as Politica reads or summarizes parts of Judge Walker's amazingly detailed decision. (He--and doubtless hardworking clerks--did a thorough job putting a clear record of the trial testimony into the decision, with an eye toward the scrutiny that the decision will get on appeal.)
Vacation is a wonderful thing, even if Curious Girl keeps announcing that she is homesick because 11! days! is too long! to be away from her very own bed. And even if she is not sleeping well. I am loving the smell of the sea air, and I am loving all the ice cream.
Happy summer!

St. Harriet

2010-07-09T19:04:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to re-read The Dance of Anger tonight, starting by browsing for some inspiration. One I've noted already:

We may view it as our responsibility to control something that is not in fact within our control and yet fail to exercise the power and authority that we do have over our own behavior. Mothers cannot make children think feel, or be a certain way, but we can be firm, consistent, and clear about what behavior we will and will not tolerate, and what the consequences are for misbehavior. We can also change our part in patterns that keep family members stuck. At the same time we are doomed to failure with any self-help venture if we view the problem as existing within ourselves--or within the child or the child's father, for that matter. There is never one villain in family live, although it may appear that way on the surface. (148)

I'm a do-er, and Phantom's comment on the last post reminded me of this book, and I felt more hopeful already, just knowing I could stop at the library on the way out of work and pick up a copy. I feel more hopeful knowing that I can read more of it.

Although I snorted as I read a few pages later, in a story about a woman whose 4 year old daughter was upset about the mother's dating, and kept throwing fits that would get the mother to cancel dates. With St. Harriet's help, the mother realizes that she can't control her daughter's reaction to the dating, and that her daughter shouldn't be the one making dating decisions for her. So she learns to validate the daughter's feelings and make adult decisions about the dating. Good work all around. And then there's this: "....throwing a tantrum was unacceptable behavior. If Claudia did this, Alicia would pick her up and take her to her room, where she would have to stay until she calmed down" (152). And of course, if CG were the sort of child who would just stay in her room until she calmed down, I'd be blogging about something else entirely.

I think I'll also pull out my copy of Deborah Gray's wonderful book on attachment and adoption, and Keck's Parenting the Hurt Child. I don't know--I never know--whether CG's emotions are adoption-related, but I always wonder. Her anger has to be trying to communicate something, and those are some other resources to try.

I don't mean to overstate the problems here, nor do I mean to assume that I (or even Politica and I) can change CG's behavior. Seems like there's a little less resiliency there than there used to be; maybe it'll pass; maybe we need a little professional help, in or out of school. I don't know.

But I do know that I can change my reaction to CG's outbursts, and I can snicker at all the parenting books that make it sound like time outs work if parents are serious about them, and that will probably make me feel more hopeful.

And feeling hopeful is a good thing. Harriet. Hope. H.

This is really the

Are we having fun yet?

2010-07-08T19:25:00.002-04:00

It's been a hard summer so far, and this week has been hardest of all. What with the zillion degree heat, none of our coping skills have been particularly wonderful, and we're back into a rather tumultuous dynamic where too much of our conversations are about regulating Curious Girl's behavior. That's just no fun--but it's hard to have fun when a kid just seems determined to push back at every opportunity.

CG is 8 now, old enough to read this blog over my shoulder if she were to be next to me, and old enough to have opinions about what parts of her stories I tell to others. Last week, we were camping, and she sustained a minor injury due to inadvertent carelessness of another child, and she didn't want to tell anyone about this (but did want to put a very big band aid on it, which only raised more questions). Part of what I've been doing while not posting very much lately is pondering how I want to tell stories about CG in more public places--and telling stories about hard times is, well, hard.

I've written before about anger management and the challenges of parenting someone whose anger, sometimes, can just spin so out of control in no apparent relation to the provocation. When CG can't cope with her feelings, we need to help her cope, and my best moves there come when I can stay calm myself and not get dragged into her feelings. That's all easier to do when she'll let one of us help her. This summer, she's been working on not having such big fits--she talks about it; sometimes she'll have a little outburst and then calm down and say, "My body wanted to have a big fit, but I didn't. Isn't that good?"

This summer, though, has been hard. She's been in camp every week since school ended--programs that have run mostly 9-3 or 3:30. After camp, we've not been doing much (although this week we've started going to a wonderful pool a bit), but she's been exhausted. And the afternoons and evenings have been a real struggle. She's just so tired, and I suppose at 8 looking to develop a bit more separation from us....but good FSM, the oppositional conversation is so draining. When she's tired, she never wants to sleep; she just gets cranky. And even though I keep resolving to stay calm, to be positive, I'm getting worn down by her opposition to me (quick example: about an hour ago, when it was bedtime, I told her to come upstairs, take a shower, and we'd get ready for bed. "NO! I don't want a shower!" she said very crabbily. "Fine," said I. "I'll bring the fan up and we'll head right to bed." "NO! I'm taking a shower!!!!!" she yelled. Whatever I ask, she doesn't want to do.)

So I'm just worn down. It's a good thing that my darling girl wants to be more independent. I'm a big advocate for her independence, as I've blogged about before. I love watching her learn to do things on her own. I've been re-reading my own posts (wondering where all the old comments went? I've always used blogger's own platform for comments and I'm surprised that the comments all seem to be missing on older posts), looking at older posts about parenting frustrations, wondering where that mother-writer went. I used to be better at handling CG's challenges; I didn't used to escalate small incidents into big fights; I used to be the one who helped her calm down, not the one she rages against).

I miss all that.

I know, it's probably a good thing that her feelings are overflowing at home.

I know, it's a good thing that out in the world, she's delightfully flexible and adaptable and resilient.

I know, the heat will break, and coping skills will rebound a bit.

I know, it won't be like this forever.

I know, I'm probably still internally over-reacting to my sister's comment, when I mentioned that this summer had been a little hard and CG had been a little overtired, that perhaps CG doesn't know how to deal with a lack of schedule in the summer. Maybe she didn't mean that as a criticism of the fact that Politica and I end up working in the summer more than she and her husband do. But that's what I heard. I know, I should not be holding onto that.

I know, I'm not the only working mother feeling dammed if she does and dammed if she doesn't: if I can arrange to work less next summer, I will (on the theory that too much camp is getting CG's rhythms out of whack...which leads me to wonder whether I agree with my sister's own comment, which just gets more more mad all over again).

I know, it's not good to whine. But it's also not good to sit in your house feeling like an alien with no parenting skills. So I'm telling my story, feeling a little better even in the telling, and hoping that some of you will read it and feel a bit less like an alien without parenting skills the next time your kid loses it. (Right?)

Goodwill

2010-06-12T19:14:00.005-04:00

Curious Girl is reading Warriors: Into the Wild, the first book in a series set in a kitty universe where clans of cats negotiate territory, myths and history, and build social alliances. As a series, it seems not so bad, although my favorite part about the book is that CG is drawn to it, although it's a little over her head for an independent read. (She's a fluent reader, but she doesn't like reading books with dense text. I use a bookmark to block off the lines below the one we're reading if she's reading along with me, but she doesn't have the stamina to read the book independently.) So I've been reading it to her at bedtime. She closes her eyes, and tells me that she's imagining the pictures she wishes were in the book. And amazingly, sweetly, wonderfully, she relaxes herself, and she nods off as I read.

I remember an assessment CG took around 18 months at the developmental pediatrician's. One of the questions on the parent part of the assessment was whether she relaxed into a parent when a bedtime book came out. Relaxed into a parent? Not so much. Reading has always been an aerobic experience for her. There was the year, for instance, when The Snowy Day was in regular reading rotation, no matter what the season or temperature, and CG would jump out of bed and act out the story as I read. She likes talking to her stuffed animals about what she reads. She likes putting her hand on the pages and feeling the book as she reads. She likes petting the cat as she reads. Relaxing? Not so much. That comes later, with the songs and the snuggles.

Except for this past week, as we've started this book. She does remember the plot--she can talk about the universe of the book and she seems to remember the plot about as well as she does the plot of anything we've read before. But something about this book and our reading routines lets her drift herself into sleep.

Towards the beginning of the book, there's a report of a battle with another clan, and the beloved Thunder Clan deputy is killed. His body is brought back to the clan, and CG was full of questions about how the cats would react. What would they do? Could the dead cat hear them? Would there be a coffin? Would they bury him? We talked about what might happen--but then, as the book is silent on some parts of the evening in question, there was still room for speculation. "They'll put his name on a stone with his dates," she said. I didn't think so, I said, as the cats don't seem to ever use stones in this book. "But humans do," CG said. "Humans do, with the stones of goodwill."

Stones of goodwill. What a phrase. CG has experienced loss, but hasn't had much contact with cemeteries. I didn't even know she knew the word goodwill, and I don't know where she gets her cemetery notions from. But I love the idea of stones of goodwill, stones beaming goodwill into the world for people who are mourning.

I've read Katie Granju's blog, Mamapundit, on and off for a while. The past few months she has been very honestly writing about the death of her 18 year old son Henry, his drug addiction, and the assault and overdose that precipitated the medical crisis that killed him. Today, I mailed off a donation to the memorial scholarship the family has established to help families pay for the costs of addiction treatment for their children.

Two of my college friends have lost teenaged children in the past year. I didn't know either child, but their names and the stories I've heard haunt me, as does Henry. As I walked downtown today, I looked around at what some of the older teens or young adults were doing, and thoughts flitted through my head--that child will never get to do that. My friend will never get to see her kid climbing a rock again. Katie Granju will never be walking through a bookstore to redeem a gift certificate with Henry. It's so sad.

But as I saw the rocks downtown (yes, our downtown has rocks. Doesn't yours?), CG's stones of goodwill came to mind, too. Katie Granju's grief is raw, and I don't know what, besides time, will soften its edges as she incorporates her unimaginable loss into everyday life. But if the stones of the earth could radiate goodwill for the mourners, what kind of world would we have?

The New Normal

2010-06-01T12:12:00.006-04:00

Dana is hosting the 5th annual Blogging for LGBT families day, and that seems like a good excuse to get back in the business of blogging again. So here goes....

Hello blog and readers: I've missed you. What have I been doing, you wonder? Probably what many of you have been doing: wrapping up a university semester, looking forward to the end of the elementary school year, figuring how how to help some Daisy Girl Scouts bridge to Brownies, experimenting with different bread recipes and coming to terms with the fact that Politica really can taste the tiniest bit of wheat flour if I try to sneak it into white bread.

I've been sick a fair bit, and was well-cared for by Curious Girl and Politica. They've been sick, too, and I helped take care of them. I've been reading every other week to the first grade, and I had a friend and her daughter come visit in March.

I went to work a lot, and dealt with budget problems. I signed up for a CSA, and I went to CG's spring ice show, applauding for all the children who take lessons and wanted to come out and skate to music.

I visited my parents, and had a lot of fun watching my daughter interact with my parents. We went to the beach, and collected shells, and splashed in the waves, even on the day that CG said she really was very, very sure she didn't want to go in the water and thus didn't wear her bathing suit. We went swimming in the pool every day, too, and loved watching the birds in the palm trees.

We've been eating dinner together every night (except for those terrible weeks where one or the other of us had a GI bug bad enough that it kept us from the table). We read together--Politica and I passing books back and forth between us (read Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast if you want a gripping political/historical mystery), all of us sharing the fun of Curious Girl's explorations of Edward Eager's books about children and magic (Seven-Day Magic is just wonderful).

Still reading? This is not, perhaps, the most elegant blog post I've put up, but this is the life of a lesbian family. Most of what we do is pretty darn unremarkable. Most of what we do looks a lot like what the rest of you are doing.

And most of us lgb parents could be any of your relatives. Some of us come from extended families with gay cousins, parents, aunts/uncles, or siblings; some of us seem to be the only lgb relative around. Any family can be queer. And queer....well, maybe queer will become the new normal.

That's a post for tomorrow, perhaps: how queer families can be read as more queer and less normal. But for today, I want to focus on the ways that queer families can be read as just another kind of normal: we're parents who are doing the best we can, loving our kids, helping them grow, and juggling work and home responsibilities.

Linkalicious

2010-01-22T19:54:00.003-05:00

Partners in Health and Doctors Without Borders are doing amazing work in Haiti and around the world.
I followed the story of the BRESMA orphanage in Haiti (the children there all got airlifted out of Haiti, to the US, Spain, and the Netherlands). International adoption is complicated, always, but it's particularly complicated in the wake of a natural disaster. The BRESMA children seem largely to have been in the process of being adopted by non-Haitian families--but there are many children in Haitian orphanages who do have extended family in the country. There are warnings emerging about the dangers of child trafficking in the wake of the earthquake. I hope that aid organizations focus on what children really need--which is first, safety and shelter and food; secondly, ties to their home land and home families if possible. Some good analysis comes via O Solo Mama.
Kristen Laine has a parenting/outdoors blog! If you liked American Band, head on over! Or if you like being outdoors with your kids, check it out.
I've been experimenting with crusty bread at home, the no-knead kind made from dough that can be refrigerated for weeks. Very handy, and very delicious.

I have posts in my head--oh, so many posts in my head! Here's hoping that the winter season will afford a bit more chance for those words to wend their way to the screen. I think about you, oh kind blog readers in the computer. Belated wishes for a happy 2010 to each of you.

Good Reads

2009-12-16T19:41:00.002-05:00

The friendly folks at Henry Holt sent me a review copy of Rhoda Janzen's Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. I received the book free, but no other compensation.

Laura at 11D says that Mennonite in a Little Black Dress is an impressive book because it appears to start off as a chick lit memoir about the search for Mr. Right, but turns out to be an ode to a daughter's coming home to the Right Family. If you're not usually into books with photos of high-heeled shoes on the cover, think again about this one: it's much less a story about a woman and her wardrobe than the story of a woman and her childhood and a woman and her parents. Rhoda Janzen, whose sudden divorce and subsequent car accident leads her to head half way across the country to spend several months living at home with her (Mennonite) parents, tells a story about going home and growin up.

At times, she's laugh-out-loud funny (anecdotes about traveling with her siblings on family vacations, going out shopping with a pee bag taped to her leg, and arguing with her mother about whether it's better to date a preacher or a pothead made this a bad choice for a book to read while a child was trying to fall asleep on top of me). At other times, she's serious and tender (an anecdote about her first Thanksgiving away from home, when she and her sister raise their voices in traditional Mennonite song before eating, is just lovely). Some times, as Laura notes, she's elusive: she's an academic, but I didn't always recognize my academic life in hers. She seems to have a bit more money than many academics I know in English departments.

Janzen is a poet, and this is her first turn toward memoir. I thought the book could have been edited more tightly--I'm trying to put my finger on just what it is about it that made me connect with her up front. I want to like Janzen more. We should have a lot in common--as Laura points out, growing up Mennonite Brethren is not that different from growing up in a conservative Catholic community, and I, too, had arguments with my parents about unstylish clothing that they valued for its modesty. But somehow, I wanted something a little bit more from Janzen's memoir....but as I try to describe what that is, I can't. I wanted to know a bit more about the marraige whose failure opens the memoir (it turns out later that she and her ex husband actually divorced twice, but there's nothing in the text to help us understand what drew her to him so repeatedly). I wanted to know a bit more about her academic experiences as she juggled the personal turmoil. There are more stories there, for sure.

But what is there is pretty interesting. So if you're looking for a memoir this season, consider this.

Sloppy Data on Stupak Analysis

2009-11-25T10:18:00.004-05:00

Phillip Levine has an Op-Ed piece in the Times today, "False Alarm on Abortion," and as Curious Girl has a play date going on, Politica and I are sitting here in the living room, talking politics and having a hot morning beverage. Politica may or may not get around to writing a letter-to-the-editor in response to Levine's use of data about the effects of the Stupak Amendment on US women's access to abortion services, and she said she'd be happy to have our conversation blogged, for anyone else who wants to get their hackles up before lunch today.

Levine's basic point is that the rhetoric about the Stupak amendment exaggerates its potential impact on abortion restriction and misses the benefits that increased access to health care would bring for many women. He slings around a lot of statistics, like:

The Stupak amendment’s effect on any individual woman’s insurance coverage for abortion depends on what kind of insurance she has now. About 12 percent of the 62 million American women of childbearing age — ages 15 to 44 — are now covered by public insurance plans like Medicaid. For them there will be no change because current law already prohibits the use of federal funds to cover abortion costs.

Likewise, the amendment would change nothing for women who now have no insurance — about 20 percent of women of childbearing age.

So the fact that 32% of American women currently have no access to a legal medical procedure means that we shouldn't protest the fact that this situation won't change in the future?

Levine continues:

The women whose abortion coverage would be at risk are those who are covered by private insurance — some 42 million women aged 15 to 44.

Note that here he switches from discussing the percentage of women on Medicaid or uninsured to the number of women with private health insurance. 42 million women with private insurance are 68 percent of the women of childbearing age in the United States. Are we to believe that since the Stupak amendment might only affect 2/3 of the women of childbearing age, it's really not as big of a problem as some critics have suggested?

Well, that's not exactly what Levine is saying, for he goes on to note that those 42 million women are more likely to be older, to have higher family incomes, and to be less likely to have abortions than uninsured women or women on Medicaid. (He doesn't cite the sources for his figures about income and abortion, and I've not tried to verify them myself; for my argument here, I'm assuming those figures are accurate, but he's sloppy enough with the data he presents that I'm skeptical.) So because of the higher family income, Levine asserts that the Stupak amendment won't pose a big problem:

Even if women with private health insurance find themselves seeking an abortion, the out-of-pocket cost for the vast majority of them is not that high relative to their income. In general, 89 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester; these non-hospital procedures cost an average of around $400.

$400 can still be a lot of money.

Levine also says:

The small group of women who decide to abort after their first trimester — perhaps for reasons of fetal health — could potentially be affected more seriously, as these abortions are considerably more expensive. Yet the women who undergo second-trimester abortions are unlikely to be covered by private insurance now; nearly two-thirds of them have family incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level.

Again he backs into the "these women are currently in a bad position so there's no need to complain that this won't address it" argument, with the "perhaps" suggesting that women seeking later-term abortions are perhaps doing it for "real" reasons, but perhaps not. Late term abortions aren't sought lightly, and it's maddening to read commentary that suggests they are.

Levine does make a good point: that even with the Stupak Amendment in place, health care reform would bring better access to health care to millions of women, and thus provide better access to contraception. This would be good, to get contraception to women who want it. But look at the way Levine plays out this point to slam the decisions of poor women to have children at all:

[His prior research on the effects of expanded Medicaid coverage and contraception and a reduction in unintended pregnancies] suggests that health care reform could lead to a substantial reduction in unintended fertility. Consider that there are 12.4 million uninsured women of childbearing age. Suppose that health care reform ended up providing health insurance for 10 million of them. Each year, roughly 7 percent of all women this age give birth, amounting to about 700,000 births to this group of women. If their rate of fertility were cut by 9 percent, then 63,000 unintended births could be avoided if health care reform is enacted.

He has labeled every.single.one. of the births to uninsured women as "unintended," equating a reduction in births with a reduction in unintended pregnancies.

Politica's students are often surprised by the history of eugenics in the United States. The word may not be so common these days, but the prejudice against poor women having children is alive and well.

So that's what we're talking about after breakfast around here today.

2009-10-29T15:21:00.003-04:00

(This post was actually written by the fine folks at the Courage Campaign website (thanks to a post by Lesbian Dad, who saw a reminder from hekebolos at DailyKos ):

Progressives are closer than ever to a victory on health care reform. As 2009 comes to a close, we’ve moved forward on other issues. But what’s looming up ahead could be a disappointment.

On Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009- less than a week away- there will be critical votes on on LGBT equality in three states: Washington State, Maine, and Michigan. With so much attention devoted to other issues in the political realm, bloggers have banded together to ensure we don’t forget the ones with a firm deadline next week.

For that reason, we’ve [The Courage Campaign] joined with these three campaigns to put together a summary of who, what, and how. If you haven’t heard of these campaigns, and/or haven’t done anything yet to support them, please consider helping out. If you are a blogger please feel free to grab this content whole cloth and use it for your blog posts. Scroll down to the bottom to grab the formatted HTML to drop into a post.

Last year, as Obama and Democrats were winning across the country, we lost marriage equality in California. It was a bittersweet victory. Pitch in to make sure 2009 isn’t a bittersweet year. Take action to support LGBT equality TODAY.

Washington:

Who we are: Approve Referendum 71 is the campaign to preserve domestic partnerships in Washington State. By voting to approve, voters retain the domestic partnership laws that were passed during this year's legislative session, including using sick leave to care for a partner, adoption rights, insurance rights, and more.

What we need: We need phone bankers to get our supporters out to vote. Washington is an all mail-in ballot state, and we need to ensure our supporters put their ballots in the mail. Also, youth turnout is a critical component of our campaign, and youth turnout historically drops in off-year elections. So we need a lot of help to turn them out.

How you do it: Sign up here to make remote calls for Approve 71. We'll then contact you for a training, and you can make GOTV calls.

Maine:

Who we are: The No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is working to protect Maine's recently-passed law legalizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Our opponents have put the issue on the ballot for Nov 3, 2009. Because of Maine's early voting election laws, people are already voting at the polls, so we need help immediately to turn out our side at the polls.

What we need: We need you to devote a few hours to Call for Equality. Call for Equality is a virtual phonebank set up so that you can call Maine voters wherever you are. Much of Maine is rural, where canvassing isn't effective, so we need to reach these voters- along with other supporters- by phone. All you need is a phone and internet connection. No experience required! We'll provide the training, and all you need is a a few hours to help get a win in Maine.

How you do it: Click here to sign up for a training and your shift. There are lots of times available for your convenience.

Kalamazoo, MI:

Who We Are: The Yes on Ordinance 1856 / One Kalamazoo campaign is working in Michigan to support the City Commission of Kalamazoo's twice approved ordinance for housing, employment, and public accommodation protections for gay and transgender residents. Opponents forced a public referendum on the ordinance so dedicated local volunteers, led by former Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Jon Hoadley, are working to ensure voters say YES to fairness and equality and keep Ordinance 1856.

Why The Urgency: In the final weeks, the opposition has gone all out with aggressive disinformation and misleading red herrings to try to defeat the ordinance. This includes signs that say "No to Discrimination" (even though voting No actually supports continued discrimination of GLBT residents), transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn't true. The Yes on Ordinance 1856 supporters are better organized but many voters who want to vote for gay and transgender people are getting confused by the opposition.

How To Help:

1) Help the One Kalamazoo campaign raise a final $10,000 specifically dedicated to fight back against the lies on the local TV and radio airwaves and fully fund the campaign's final field and GOTV efforts.

Give here: http://www.actblue.com/page/3-2-1-countdown

2) If you live nearby and can physically volunteer in Kalamazoo sign up here. If you know anyone that lives in Kalamazoo, use the One Kalamazoo campaign's online canvass tool to remind those voters that they need to vote on November 3rd and vote YES on Ordinance 1856 to support equality for gay and transgender people.

Contact voters: http://www.onekalamazoo.com/tellfriends2

Love Ya Bunches and Scholastic Book Fairs Near You

2009-10-25T18:55:00.003-04:00

Yesterday on Facebook I started seeing friends link to this petition asking Scholastic to stop censoring gay-friendly books. (Scholastic, for folks not in the US or not parenting kids in school, is a a publisher/distribution company that promotes children's books via book fairs at schools and catalogs; when parents purchase books through the catalogs, classroom teachers earn credits that they can spend on more books for their classroom library.) This petition has arisen because of a controversy about Lauren Myracle’s new book Luv Ya Bunches. Luv Ya Bunches, the first in a planned four-book series, is about the friendships that form among a group of girls with nothing, apparently, in common besides the fact that they're all named after flowers. But over the course of a new school year, their social circles collide and friendships form. And one of the girls has two moms.

Scholastic asked Myralce to change the character's family structure to a one mom, one dad family so that they could feature Luv Ya Bunches at book fairs. Myracle did make some other small changes to the book in response to Scholastic's concerns, but she refused to change the character's family. So Scholastic--while it is offering the book in its catalog--will not offer Luv Ya Bunches at book fairs. For a fuller version of the story, see a fine School Library Journal piece on it, and for a cool video of Myracle talking about the book, see Dana's post at Mombian.

Scholastic says it’s not censorship because there are lots of books they don’t offer at book fairs; they pick and choose based on many factors--they run a business, after all, and it seems sadly reasonable that from a business perspective, they want to avoid potential controversy. But then, from a social change perspective, why are we assuming that the very fact of two-mom families is likely to cause controversy?

So, what to do? I heard a bit from a librarian friend today and she offers a few practical suggestions. We can sign the online petition to Scholastic, of course, but I'm a little skeptical that online petitions do a lot to actually change anyone's mind (Politica, who studies such things, tells me that the political science literature suggests that politicians respond more to contacts that are clearly individualized, like hand-written letters, and less to things that are easy to click on and clearly organized by someone else).

But more importantly, we can work with our local book fairs to make the book available. Turns out that the people who organize book fairs can request that particular titles be shipped. So if your school has Scholastic book fairs, contact the librarian or parent who organizes the book fairs and ask them to order Luv Ya Bunches for the book fair.

Why is this important? Book fairs are chances for children to browse book displays and decide, on their own, what books they're interested in. Book displays offer a chance for students to look at books and think "Hey! I'd like to read that." And they offer a chance for students to look at many different books--and perhaps see themselves in a book, perhaps see someone very different from themselves in a book. If Luv Ya Bunches or other books with characters with gay/lesbian parents aren't available at book fairs, then children won't have the chance to make their own choices about reading about families like mine. And if Scholastic successfully keeps books like Luv Ya Bunches out of book fairs, it's contributing to a world view that says two-mom families, or two-dad families, are controversial in and of themselves, or distasteful on face.

So: when you attend your school's book fair (usually there's a parent afternoon or night), ask for Luv Ya Bunches. Before the fair, ask the librarian or book fair coordinator to ask the Scholastic book fair rep to include Luv Ya Bunches in the books that get shipped for your fair. Ask your friends to do the same.

And of course, if you see the book at a book fair: buy it. Buy two, and gift one to a friend.

I've not been impressed by the Scholastic book catalogs that Curious Girl has been bringing home for the past few years. For every bundle of Caldecott award winners or Jan Brett or Judy Schachner book they offer, they seem to have 20 books based on commerical tie ins, or bundled with cheap plastic crap. But Curious Girl loves looking through the Scholastic catalogs the same way I remember loving them when I was a kid (and were they so filled with crap 40 years ago? perhaps my mother felt the same way...). And CG loves the book fairs (even if her book preferences seem to be driven by what covers sparkle or have necklaces attached or have something to do with High School Musical). Books on display can be thrilling. So do your part to get Luv Ya Bunches to a book fair near you. Students at your school probably already know kids with gay or lesbian parents--it doesn't take books to inform children about the social reality that surrounds them. So let's help Scholastic figure out that a book like Luv Ya Bunches makes kids and parents happy, not mad.

And if you've still got a little energy for doing good for gay rights: help the folks in Maine with the No On One effort (voting No one One will allow the marriage equality law to go into effect) or help folks in Washington State protect domestic partner benefits (by approving Ref. 71).

What No One Told Me About Adoption

2009-09-20T22:09:00.004-04:00

This post is written for a carnival on What No One Told Me About Adoption, organized by the (regrettably named blog) Grown in My Heart. (Here's an older extended explanation of my problems with that term, if anyone's interested.)

I'm an academic, and I read my way through life. When I encounter something new, I read. So I read a lot about adoption, and I was prepared for medical issues, attachment issues, conversations about biology and destiny and families and travel and hard stuff and genes. What no one told me is that knowing something in your head isn't the same as knowing something in your heart.

No one told me how profoundly sad I would feel, listening to the hurt in my daughter's voice as she asks questions I can't answer about her first family.

No one told me how small school assignments can connect to adoption. We have some art Curious Girl did last year, around election day, on the prompt "If I were the President of the United States, I would....." Last year, she was simply happy about her work (she'd make sure all animals go to the vet, in case you're wondering). This morning, though, she said it makes her sad, because she can't be President (not having been born a US citizen) and everyone else in her class last year could be President but she can't and it's.not.fair. I was ready to talk with her teachers about the family tree assignment, or the mapping family eye colors to learn about dominant/recessive genes assignment. I wasn't ready to see how even the simple request to identify yourself as someone with siblings, or not, can be hard for an adopted child to answer.

No one told me that I'd have to find a face-saving, child-supporting way to explain to CG's friends that her birth mother isn't coming to visit tomorrow, even though that's what CG has been telling people all day at school.

No one told me how fiercely protective I would feel about CG's first family, how angry I feel when people generalize about reasons women place children for adoption, assuming that birth mothers are undeserving of grace, love, and parenthood.

No one told me how profoundly happy I would feel, listening to my daughter answer her friends' questions about our family and her adoption. I love the way she's found some words to tell her own story.

No one told me how something so hard can be so wonderful, too. In an ideal world, there'd be no adoption. I can live with the contradictions between my life and that claim: I can't imagine my life not as CG's mother (although yes, the pre-child years were full of happiness, too). But the loss at the root of my wonderful life is something no parents and no children should have to endure. Still. Here I am, with my wonderful beautiful creative and curious girl sleeping upstairs. I love the way she and Politica and I forge our family one conversation at a time, one loving action at a time, one emotion at a time. We're making our family together, weaving ourselves together in ways that help each of us, in our own time, make peace with our pasts. It's amazing, and no one told me just how much I would wonder at what the love between the three of us makes possible.

The Political is Personal, or, Teddy, My Daughter Hardly Knew Ye

2009-08-27T07:28:00.004-04:00

Curious Girl and Politica are out of town now, and I knew they weren't listening to a lot of news together, so when we spoke first thing yesterday morning, I told Politica about Ted Kennedy's passing. Curious Girl was, unsurprisingly, curious about Senator Kennedy, and she's been peppering me with questions about him: what time did he die? Did he say anything before he died? What kind of good ideas did he have? It surprises me, a bit, still, how she creates such personal connections to figures in the world.

Senator Kennedy was still on her mind this morning:

CG: Mama, the one who died, the president....
me: Senator Kennedy, you mean?
CG: Yes, Senator Kennedy. I'm wondering if he is still at his house, dead.
me: Actually, he's not. He was so important for so many people that they are taking his body to Boston.
CG: Boston?!?
me: His brother was President Kennedy (she knows President Kennedy because we have his picture on two plates in our kitchen), and there is a special library/museum in Boston all about President Kennedy. We can go there when you are older. Senator Kennedy is there now so that people can go visit him, and then there will be a big celebration of his life on Saturday. President Obama is coming back from his vacation to speak at the celebration.
CG: OH! I WANT TO GO!!!!
me: That would be very special, but the celebration will be for people in Senator Kennedy's family and people who knew him and worked with him.
CG: I want to go! We could meet Barack Obama in person!!
me: It would be great to meet President Obama, but we can't meet him in person at the celebration.
CG: But there might be cookies!
me: they will probably have food afterwards for all the people who loved Senator Kennedy, but we can't just go and meet President Obama. It just doesn't work like that.
CG: But we went to Tante Mississippi Friend's after.
me: That's because Uncle Quiet was in our family, honey. We don't know President Obama and Senator Kennedy. They will probably show the celebration on TV or we can watch it on the computer.
CG: I can see it?!
me: Yes, we can look for it.
CG: I wonder whether the Senator had a bad sickness.
me: Yes, he had the same kind of bad sickness that Uncle Quiet had.
CG: That's very bad.
me: Tante Mississippi was a little extra sad, I think, when she heard about the Senator.
CG: Why?
me: I think she was probably remembering Uncle Quiet's brain cancer and feeling sad.
CG: Do you think she cried enough to make a river in her house?
me: I didn't ask her that, but I think she probably didn't cry that much, but she might have cried a little.
CG: I want to go to the celebration and get cookies.
me: Well, we can make our own cookies and have a celebration for the Senator.
CG: No, for Cat Who Died Last Fall. Will the Senator's mother be at his celebration?

The hopes, dreams, and love of a child, who just amazingly and perfectly--although I don't know that my transcription quite captures it--weaves together her family, her politics, and people she misses.

It's My Birthday and I'll List if I Want to

2009-08-02T22:27:00.002-04:00

I'm a prime number again!
I'm a prime number on vacation, which means that I'll be getting some late presents from Politica and Curious Girl because a) Politica packed one of them so secretly that she couldn't find it upon arrival and b)there's so much to do in Very Crowded, Very Beautiful Town on the End of the Cape that we just didn't fit all our birthday activities in. As Curious Girl said when it was time to go to bed, "So Mama, that means the party isn't really over yet!"
CG is just dying to tell me what my presents are, but so far, she's keeping a secret. We were all thrilled with present #1, thought, which was Season 2 of the Muppet Show on DVD. We watched the Rudolf Nureyev episode twice today and the Bernadette Peters episode once (much as I remembered loving the Swine Lake number, both Politica and I thought it a tad misogynist upon later viewing--and the cane-as-machine-gun closing doesn't quite seem so funny, either. I guess the Muppet Show isn't as completely timeless as I thought).
Very Crowded, Very Beautiful Town on the End of the Cape has quite the mix of people here. Tons of folks in town for Family Week, so lots of kids of all ages with various constellations of parental units. Lots of young, beautiful gay boyz, lots of muscle shirts. Lots of lesbians with long baggy shorts, sensible shoes, and short hair. Lots and lots of kids. Curious Girl is quite taken with the show hawkers who play with hula hoops on the main drag, and she's enjoying the spectacle of it all.
I don't have long baggy shorts, and I'm glad at my prime number age that I don't much care. Although really, I have never cared too much about my fashion (which is probably an after effect of the fact that I don't have much fashion sense).
There's a lot of ice cream here. I think a milkshake a day on vacation is a good thing.
Travel tip: if you're thinking that you might eat lunch soon on a long car trip, don't say, "well, we'll eat just on the other side of Major Urban Area." Eat first, so that if you run into traffic in said urban area, no one will get grumpy.
I spent much of the day walking around with a girl wearing black high-heeled shoes with a bow on the tie. Nothing says summer birthday celebration than a pair of fancy shoes.
Spectacle overwhelms me, but CG and Politica seem to groove on it. I'm rooting for some quieter exploring one of these days. Although I do enjoy watching people do hula hoops that light up. I'm glad we have a quiet place to retreat to.
I had some Bigger Ideas in my head, but I'm so tired I'm simply going to wish you all a good night.

Slow Blogging, Airport Style

2009-07-15T19:32:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting in the airport, en route to a small summer conference, having missed my connection due to air traffic control. Despite a valiant run through a crowded concourse (I'm faster than a slowed-by-crowds airport cart!), I missed my connection and ended up with a five hour layover, long enough for what we might characterize as apples (a black and white cookie, some good coffee, some good pizza, some good beer, time so skype with Politica and Curious Girl) and onions (a sobbing Curious Girl who just wants me home, and a very, very expensive beer, and a rescheduled flight that itself now seems to be slightly delayed, and a missed meal at what was reputed to be a very fine restaurant in conference city). So I'm tired, and feeling working mother guilt. But hey! I'm also blogging.

What am I blogging about? Just musing on some things I've been tossing about in my head this summer, which has been surprisingly stressful. The academic year ended for most faculty, effectively, in May, the month in which finals ended, the month in which the union contract ends and thus faculty disappear. We're not paid in june and July, and most faculty are nowhere near campus here. It's like a ghost town in the main academic building--much more so than any other campus I've ever worked on. They all slow down in the summer, yes, but there are usually more faculty around, sometimes, than there are here.

May for me, though, was chock full of workshops, and then June was full of administrivia--important administrivia, like figuring out how to do my first annual report for my new program, hosting a consultant, and working out a major bureaucratic shift of a related unit into my small unit. That's an unbloggable shift, and doesn't really increase the functional size of my little unit, but it protects the time of my most important colleague and hands-on ally. So lots of political learning going on, and lots of memo-generating. On the home front, lots going on with the house--painting, contractors working on converting a dysfunctional greenhouse into a workable extension of our bedroom, my 25th college reunion, new camps for Curious Girl every week. So lots of transition. (And my office keys: lost. Now that I've blogged you, lost keys, feel free to show up, ok? No hard feelings.)

So I've been stressed: less patient than I usually am, less creative with Curious Girl's emotions than I usually am, and I'm realizing that I've developed some habits I'm not proud of. I often respond to requests from Politica or Curious Girl with "sure, just as soon as I finish X." Now, sometimes I probably do need to finish X before starting whatever they want me to help them with or join in with, but a lot of the time I don't. And I don't want to be that person who's always too busy to pay attention to other people. And I don't think I've been a very good listener around the house of late. I'm hearing myself reflected back in some of CG's tantrums, and it's not pretty. It's good, if humbling, to realize one's own flaws; I'm working on some changes, to get back to being the person I want to be. It's not all bad--I've had plenty of good times making jam and pickles this season (even if my bread isn't quite behaving as I want it to). But it's not quite right.

I'll write more about self-help books when I finish this career-renewal workshop that I'm helping to run tomorrow. In some respects, given the introspection I just described, I feel like the last person who should be facilitating a career renewal worskhop: I feel badly in need of renewal myself. But then, a good faciliator learns by faciliating, too, so I think tomorrow will be good for me, too.

I still love my views of mountains and water: this place I live sustains me, even in a somewhat sad, somewhat stressed out state. I'm looking forward to vacations soon. When I get back from this conference we're headed out into the country to stay with some former neighbors whose family have a summer house in our new neck of the woods, and then we're heading further north to visit with other friends to do some kid-friendly touring. Then a week at home, and a week away, just the three of us. I'm looking forward to that break, to spending time with just the three of us, time away from our home and work routines. Curious Girl has been emotional, but I realized (again!) that with enough sleep, enough food, enough advance warning of routines, enough YES! with the limits, that she's a delightful girl. I want to bring more YES! into my adult relationships too. More YES! all around.

Such are the thoughts swirling around these days.....and now, off to the gate. Thanks for reading and listening. Even when I'm slow blogging, I'm aware of this space, and aware of you, and grateful for you.

Who Needs a Self-Help Book when Perfection is at Home?

2009-07-08T13:34:00.004-04:00

Overheard at breakfast:

....because Mama, how perfect am I? (slight pause) very perfect! I am very perfect.

Perhaps she'll one day write a book to share the secrets of very perfection with the rest of us.

Random 411

2009-07-06T22:19:00.002-04:00

This being my 411th post, I thought I'd post some handy, if random, 411:

upon receiving 2 credit card solicitations from airlines today, and one for Curious Girl from an airline, I discovered that it is possible to call frequent flyer programs and tell them to remove a name from their mailing list for solicitations. It's not possible to opt out on the web (at least not with any easy links), but phone operators can help.
butter works much better than olive oil for greasing bread pans (and facebook is a great source of bread-baking tips when problems mount up)
garlic scapes are a great addition to white bean puree (3 scapes chopped up, 2 oz olive oil, 1 can white beans, 1T lemon juice, all whirred up in a food processor)
summer camps with baby goats are lots of fun
life is better when everyone in the house gets enough sleep (and while that might seem obvious, I had to relearn that lesson in the last month)

Some things I'm wondering about:

what's on other people's summer reading lists? I got a gift card to a bookstore from CG's kindergarten class and can't decide what to use it for (CG suggested I buy her some books, but I'm holding out for something for me, something that's worth buying as opposed to getting from the library).
what sorts of self-improvement books do any of you read? I've been browsing around in various self-improvement/self-transformational books as a tangential part of preparing for a workshop on career development I'm co-running later this month. I've become intrigued with Rosamund and Ben Zander's book The Art of Possibility, which skirts the line between impossibly rosy "just imagine a positive thoughts and positive things will happen" and an interesting challenge to ways of thinking that create more problems rather than solving them. On my summer reading list is Jennifer Neisslein's Practically Perfect in Every Way, the chronicle of two years spent following every self-help book she could find, which sounds like a smart and funny response to the trend. And I've been thinking about Peter Walsh's book on decluttering (It's All Too Much), which did help me re-think a bit of my attitudes about stuff as we got ready to move a year ago. He gave me one or two ideas, and one or two ideas that stick seems like a not-bad result for a self-help book. What sorts of experiences have any of you had with this genre?

And of course, anyone else with a random tip or piece of info is welcome to leave it in the comments.

Kindergarten Reading Roundup

2009-06-02T22:02:00.000-04:00

I'm here, blogging in my head more than on the screen. Some book posts are pushing their way out, though!

I've been reading every Wednesday, just before the end of the school day. Here are most of the selections, not in good order:

Wemberly Worried, by Kevin Henkes. A great story of a little mouse who's veeeerry worried about the start of the school year.
Tree-ring circus, by Adam Rex. What happens when circus animals escape? Read this joyously illustrated book and find out!
Ookpik : the travels of a snowy owl by Bruce Hiscock. Curious Girl's class uses a phonics-exploration program that has a snowy owl puppet (Echo the Owl) as a prop to lead the kids in their letter/sound correspondence chants. CG loves Echo, and this book about the journey of a snowy owl who heads south to look for food was a big hit with the class. Full of great facts about owls, and with great, big picture spreads.
Chester's Way, by Kevin Henkes. I heart Kevin Henkes. Both Wemberly and Chester's Way have lots of little side dialogues in the illustrations, and they just hit on the adventurousness and intensity of kid-friendships and explorations. This book is about the challenges facing Chester and Wilson when Lily moves into the neighborhood (yes, Lily, as in the marvelous Lily's Purple Plastic Purse).
The Family Book, by Todd Parr. Like all of Parr's work, this raucously colored book celebrates diversity--this time diversity of families (some of whom look like each other and some of whom look like their pets, for example).
Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek, by Deborah Hopkinson and John Hendrix. This fictional tale of Abe Lincoln describes an outing he might have had with a boyhood friend on an afternoon's play by a raging river. Hendrix' illustrations are so vivid, and the text plays with the illustrations, talking to the illustrator as though he's drawing the pictures while we read. The kids loved the idea of a president as a kid.
John Coltrane's Giant Steps, by Chris Raschka. We love Raschka's illustrations and words--Charlie Parker Played Bebop is another family favorite, and this book about John Coltrane uses words and pictures to give the feeling of Coltrane's classic Giant Steps.
Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, by Agnes Rosenstiehl (translated from the French). This cartoon-paneled book is just plain fun. I brought in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home just to hold up to show the kids that even grownups read paneled-books too.
365 Penguins, by Jena-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet (also translated from the French by an uncredited translator). This delightful oversized book tells the story of a family who get, mysteriously by mail a penguin a day, and go through amusing bouts of trying to house and feed them. Lots of math fun is mixed in with the story, and the illustrations rock.
Leo Loves Round, by Eli Goldblatt and Wendy Osterweil, an out-of-print book by my friends Eli and Wendy, whose son Leo has now graduated from college. But this book about all the round things Leo loved as a boy is just a delight: Leo loves round. He loves balls that bounce, roll, float, and fly..... If it's in your library or at a used book store, pick it up.
Borya and the Burps, by Joan McNamara, a Russian adoption story that looks at the disorientation a baby might face and the little things that help families connect
Through Moon and Star and Night Skies, by Ann Turner and James Hale, an adoption story about an international adoption
Sammy Spider's First Rosh Hashanah and Sammy Spider's First Hanukkah, by Sylvia Rouss. The Sammy Spider series is a lovely, colorful way to introduce kids to Jewish holidays, and the singsong repetition of "Silly Sammy! Spiders don't [insert holiday action here], spiders spin webs!" always makes for good group participation.
Martin's Big Words: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Doreen Rappaport and Bryan Collier. Interesting comments in the reviews at Amazon, which focus on objections by some readers that there aren't any women or white people in the illustrations. (I think it's a good thing for white kids to read books without white kids in the illustrations, some of the time--for starters, that's a mirror of the experience that children of color have quite frequently in picture books, and it's a good thing to upset that white reading privilege. Lack of women might be more problematic, but I'm not reading this book as a big history of the whole civil rights movement, but rather a way into a good biography, with an emphasis on MLK's language.) The illustrations are gorgeous.
Ann and Liv Cross Antarctica, by Zoe Alderfer Ryan and Nicholas Reti, a story of the first women (Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen) to reach the South Pole, packaged with a lot of kid-inspiring messages about the importance of following one's dreams.
A River of Words, by Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet, a biography of William Carlos Williams, with fantabulous collage artwork and a great presentation of a young boy who loved words who grew up to be a doctor and poet. This is a book that will work for kids of wide age ranges, as a fair bit of poetry is built into the illustrations and endpapers. Most of that poetry was over the heads for kindergarten so I didn't read it all--they were more interested in the biography. After we read this, we wrote an imitation of his "This is Just to Say," as the kids came up with ideas for a couple of places in the poem where I'd left blanks for them to fill.
Munschworks: The First Munsch Collection, by Robert Munsch. This volume contains The Paper Bag Princess, The Fire Station, I Have to Go!, David's Father, and Thomas' Snowsuit. I forget which of these books I read first, but the class loved it so much that they asked for another, and we ended up reading all five books over two or three weeks. Munsch is very funny, and Martchenko's illustrations add great visual interest for a readaloud. If you have the chance to listen to Munsch read his own work (which you can do on the author link above), you'll appreciate the humor even more. He reads very well.
Skippyjon Jones, by Judy Schachner. If you've never read a Skippyjon Jones book, run to the nearest library and borrow one. Skippyjon Jones is a hysterically funny Siamese cat who has a rich fantasy life in which he is a chiuaua who runs with a gang of friends, beating bad guys. The mix of Spanish and English, and the rhythmic punning, is awesome. This book just begs to be read aloud. CG's teacher had never read any Skippyjon Jones, so I was happy to introduce her to him.
How the Ladies Stopped the Wind, by Bruce McMillan and Gunnella. I didn't like this one quite as well as McMillan and Gunnella's first book, The Problem with Chickens, but that's only a slight problem. Do they really sing to animals in Iceland? Learning more about Icelandic folklore is on my summer reading to-do list. In the meantime, check out this fun book about resourceful ladies who know how to solve a problem.
Where the Sidewalk Ends, by Shel Silverstein. CG loves "Sick" and the one about the dentist and the crocodile, and so many kids in the room had already read some Silverstein that the connections they made to the poems were lots of fun.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few (I think we read some Mo Willems, and one of the Leonardo the Terrible Monster and one of the Knuffle Bunny books), but this gives you a sense of what I've been doing on Wednesdays at 2:00 this year. Only two more Wednesdays left: tomorrow, it's Peggy Rothmann's The Day the Babies Crawled Away, which has got to be one of the most beautiful picture books ever. I'm still debating about the last book of the year. Maybe something silly like Catalina Magdalina Hoopensteiner Wallendiner, or perhaps something new. I'll give each kid a bookplate from My Home Library. Today, at the parent volunteer breakfast, each volunteer got some bulbs or a plant from a local nursery. I was happy to get the plant (strawberries!), but truly, reading each week has been as much fun for me as for the kids. Kindergarteners are such an enthusiastic audience. I love watching them get so excited when they have connections to the books (which can be rather random, as in "my mom has the same first name as the illustrator!") and when they want to tell me about what they're reading, or about what they know about the books already. They're so happy in school. I hope that feeling lasts into grade one.

About half of the books I've read this year are ones I read sometime last year in my weekly reading gig; it's been great to see how a year makes a difference in the way kids listen to and interact with a book. I'm excited that CG has learned to read this year, and that she's interested in beginning chapter books, but picture books are really suitable for kids long past kindergarten. The complexity of the words and pictures offers a lot, and I am in no hurry to leave the world of picture books. I'm encouraging CG to collect both easy readers and picture books as we visit the library. This year of picture books in kindergarten has been just tons of fun for me--perhaps something here will make your summer reading fun, too.

Young Obama Fan, or How to Get Your Girl to Make Her Bed

2009-06-01T08:30:00.002-04:00

Curious Girl--like most of the rest of us--has been quite charmed by the Obama girls. While she still tells people that she tried to get her mothers to vote for Hillary, but they wouldn't, and while she still wishes Hillary were president (and takes great pride in the Hillary for President sign Politica got her, which hangs by her bed), CG loves seeing photos of girls with the President. (And, she'll tell you, it's a good thing Obama got elected, because John McCain didn't want pets to go to the vet. So she's supportive of the new administration.)

CG loves to see Sasha and Malia in the news, and she's been particularly interested in learning about what the Obama family is like. We've been in the habit of playing apples and onions at dinner (where each of us thinks back on the day and says one apple (something that made us happy) and one onion (something that was not-so-happy in the day)). I read somewhere that the Obamas do that, too, although they call it roses and thorns. So now, often as not, we play roses and thorns, as well. Sasha and Malia make their own beds, she learned. So now she wants to make her bed in the morning (usually with help, but hey, it's a start, and CG is a small girl with a big bed). She was excited to learn that Sasha and Malia have alarm clocks, because she has one, too! Now all that's left is for Woman of Many Talents, who lives in DC after all, to make friends with the Obamas and arrange a playdate.

In the meantime, CG is enjoying getting her Obama fix through the young reader's edition of Obama: The Historic Journey, published by the New York Times (a free copy of which came to me via Mother Talk). It opens with a short chapter on election day (in which it's reported that Malia's question upon learning that her father would run for President was, "Shouldn't you be vice-president first?"), and then cuts back to two chapters about Obama's childhood and early political career, and then four chapters cover the election through inauguration. The text is designed for young readers (older elementary school); CG treats it as a picture book, and goes through hunting for her favorites. What does she like, you wonder? The photo of Obama in the water in Hawaii; Barack and Michelle's wedding photo, because they're fancy; pictures of Michelle on inauguration day (because she was fancy); any photo of Sasha and Malia; the photo of Hillary and Obama. What CG would have had the Times leave out: any photo containing McCain or Bush.

The photos are stellar, drawn as they are from the Times coverage. The Obamas are a photogenic bunch! (If you're interested in photos, check out Callie Shell's photoessays, and fans of Michelle Obama's fashion have probably already found Mrs. O, which I confess to looking at every now and again even though I think the focus on Michelle's fashion is a bit OTT. But beautiful.)

So, need a way to encourage your kid to make her bed? I know at least one of my friends has a kid who likes to pretend to be an Obama girl. Whether you've got kids interested in the kids in the White House, or you just want a beautiful photo tour of the campaign, it's a good read. Available, no doubt, at your local public library, your local independent bookstore, or Amazon.

I actually liked Callie Shell's Obama photos

More Marriage News!

2009-05-06T19:15:00.004-04:00

It's a trend sweeping New England: Maine has become the second state in the country to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples through legislative action. Pam's House Blend has a good post with reactions from various other marriage equality groups.
Via Lesbian Dad, this moving video of testimony last month before the Maine legislature. If you're the cry-at-video sort, grab the tissue box now: This reminds me of everything I love about PFLAG people. My own parents--very loving and very generous people on a daily basis to me and Politica--have religious views that apparently prevent them from taking up gay rights as a personal issue. I'm so touched by parents who are moved to advocacy on behalf of their kids. (Lesbian Dad has a pretty darn cool dad, too, btw.)

My favorite tweet of the day, from @lizschlegel: "Dear New Hampshire, Just vote Yes! We promise, all your opposite marriages will not disintegrate. Love, Vermont, Maine, CT, MA, IA
Once the euphoria fades in Maine--and perhaps before then--there will be a lot of work to be done on the ground. Maine's constitution provides for a voter veto option that can force the marriage law onto the ballot next fall (and if enough signatures are garnered in the 90 days after the close of the legislative session, the implementation of the law will be stayed pending the election results; otherwise the law goes into effect 90 days after the close of the session). Maine has a mixed record on gay rights laws at the ballot box, so the election would be hard fought. Pop on over to the good folks at Equality Maine to thank them for their organizing, and contribute, if you're moved, to their continuing efforts to build support for the marriage law. The legislature passed it, the governor signed it, but grass roots activism will be needed to keep the law in place.
One Iowa has been doing bang-up work in the wake of Iowa's court decision extending marriage rights to all Iowans. Visit their site to see the ad they're running now that puts marriage equality in the context of Iowa's long-standing commitment to being a place that welcomes everyone seeking freedom. Vermont Freedom to Marry will also be continuing its education campaign at fairs and events during the summer. There's a lot of organizing going on here.
Andrew Sullivan wrote eloquently about how suddenly ordinary it seems to be announcing that another state has opened up marriage rights. He notes: "what has made this remarkable, I think, has been the way in which ordinary people and families found the courage to testify and argue and stand up for the truth in their lives. That is a psychological and spiritual achievement - to see one's own worth in the face of widespread hostility and to fight for it until majorities are persuaded. It is not without its costs or risks or moments of deep anxiety. But that's what courage means." Lesbian Dad, in the comments on her post today, notes that the impending California Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of Prop 8 might well not be the news we want to hear, and the political battles will continue in California. Marriage equality is on the way in this country--but how long, and at what cost? I guess we'll find out.
Marriage equality isn't a political battle I ever expected to be involved in. Since the moment for the movement has arrived, I'm happy to participate. But let's not forget that marriage equality benefits coupled people who want to get married. People who eschew marriage for whatever reason, and people who aren't married, lose out in terms of the benefits that flow through marriage in the US (health insurance being perhaps the biggie). Shortly after the Vermont legislature acted on marriage, Shannon had some very smart things to say about the virtues of making marriage matter less.

What'll be going on at Amazon on Monday morning?

2009-04-12T21:03:00.003-04:00

If you're on twitter, you've probably noticed the #amazonfail trend, tweets about Amazon.com's decision to strip sales ranking info from lgbt books (b/c of their "adult" content). Metafilter reports:

Within the last few hours, a trend on Twitter has emerged in response to Amazon's removing the sales ranking of books they consider to have "adult content," which also keeps those books from appearing in search results. However, while seeming to unilaterally de-list any books with gay themes and characters, many books with adult heterosexual content were left untouched.

There's a move afoot to googlebomb amazon (described here) by generating links to a new definition of amazon rank. The info in the twitter stream is providing fascinating combination of wit, snark, and info about titles which have been delisted (or not--Lady Chatterly's Lover has lost its sales rank, but Lolita hasn't). And there are a host of interesting blog analyses of the subject, all with other links in them. (Becky Howard just tweeted that google news is still unaware of this story, although metafilter is reporting it.)

I'm thinking that there will be some early morning meetings at Amazon about this. Wonder what the corporate response will be. Hard to understand what they were thinking, really.

Photos from Vermont....and what's next

2009-04-08T10:19:00.004-04:00

Vermont photographer Karen Pike has a wonderful set of photos up from the Vermont statehouse, capturing lawmakers before the vote and the emotional reaction from the crowd afterwards. I am particularly moved by the shots of Vermont Freedom to Marry's Beth Robinson, and the shots of a couple who have been together for 42 years.

One of the lessons from Vermont is that marriage equality comes after years of work. It's been a decade since Vermont, with its civil union law, became the first state in the US to offer same-sex couples the state-level legal benefits associated with marriage. The civil union law emerged after a court case (litigated by Beth Robinson and Susan Murray), and that court case emerged after years of foundational grassroots politicking. Vermont Freedom to Marry has been a presence at fairs, parades, and town meetings all across Vermont for years now. It's made movies, trained speakers, and lobbied. It's placed letters in favor of marriage equality in local newspaper all across the state. It's organized business people and clergy all around the state. It's gotten the message out, in a small state that prizes local governance, that marriage equality is good for all Vermonters. It's easy, when you read about the court decisions or the Vermont legislature's vote yesterday, to miss all those years of organizing. My hat is off for Robinson and all the other staff at Vermont Freedom to Marry, but also to the thousands of people they've been in contact with over the years. They changed things in Vermont one person at a time, and that's impressive.

What's happening in Iowa now shows that court decisions alone can't change things. There's been an immediate on-the-ground backlash calling for an Iowa constitutional amendment to define marriage as between a man and a woman (that amendment wouldn't be possible until 2012, I think, but the process could start now). One Iowa is marshalling folks to contact their legislators to urge them to take a stand respecting the court decision. If you're reading this in Iowa, please call or write your legislators.

I'm going to be writing the Iowa governor and Iowa senate majority leader--to let them know how happy I am when I think about Iowa this week. They don't need to hear out-of-staters tell them what to do, but I imagine they'd like to know what a positive impression the Iowa court decision is making in my part of the woods.

Vermont Freedom to Marry, by the way, is encouraging Vermonters to write and thank all the legislators who voted for the override (particularly the 3 who changed their votes, voting for the override after voting against the original bill). That's good follow up.

My favorite tweet on the subject: "The Green Mountain State goes rainbow."

Marriage in Vermont!!!

2009-04-07T11:07:00.003-04:00

Breaking news from the Vermont Statehouse: the legislature just overrode the governor's veto of the marriage act.

I'm so overwhelmed I hardly have words. More later.

Kudos to the fabulous people at Vermont Freedom to Marry. They've been working for more than a decade, since Vermont enacted civil unions, to lay the groundwork for this legislation. Vermont is the first state in the United States to permit same-sex marriage through legislation (as opposed to marriage proceeding from court decisions, as was the case in Iowa earlier this week).

What I've been doing lately

2009-03-28T22:36:00.004-04:00

besides blogging in my head, that is:

I performed surgery on a 29-year old stuffed koala whose job, at night, is to stay awake and watch over Curious Girl while she sleeps. CG cut one of his seams open in the midst of a big ol' fit, and then felt so horrible about that that she spent another half hour being hysterical about the fact that none of her animals would stay up all night with her because they all thought Ted the Koala should do it (but he couldn't, because he had been removed from her room to the Koala Hospital for a night of rest before the surgery)
I had a conversation with CG in which she--rather worked up--yelled that she wanted to break my arm. (Fine to be very mad at me, I said, but not OK to try to hurt me.) Then she said that she wanted me to go to the hospital so that she and Politica could visit me there. (If I'm in hospital, of course I want visitors, I said.) Then she got hysterical in another vein because what if Politica said she couldn't visit me in the hospital and she had to stay home alone? what if she cried and I wasn't there? Anger, fear of abandonment, love, adorableness--almost seven is really rather amazing.
I've been skiing every Sunday. I love the woods here. I think I will get in one more ski tomorrow.
I've met a lot of faculty, and listened to lots of stories about teaching and learning
I've walked through a sugarbush, listening to leaves crunch and mud slurp, smelling spring
I've gotten our bikes all ready for spring
I have been much missed by CG when I've not been at home, but much ignored by her when I am.
I'm trying to decide what is special or unique about me, to answer a trivia question on a questionnaire for my college reunion this summer. For some reason, this question is tripping me up.
I have bought two pairs of mud/rain boots (the first were too warm for warm weather) and listened to CG singing a little song she learned at school about how wonderful mud is. We're not in Old State anymore.

Some/Thing New

2009-02-11T19:32:00.002-05:00

This post is part of Robin's Some/Thing carnival for Freedom to Marry Week, and Mombian's blogswarm on the same subject. Freedom to Marry's event page can help you find local events: get involved!
So many new things of late:

new house
new renovations going on in my bathroom
new office
new colleagues
new bike-commuting lifestyle
new school
new job
new Farmer's Market
new friends
new feelings of loneliness when thinking about old friends who are now far away
new foods
new views
new courses
new texts
new bureacracies
new president

So much, so new, I barely have time to reflect on it all.

And so much new homework sitting next to me: time for a new activity--finish the grading before going to bed.

Something Old

2009-02-10T19:36:00.004-05:00

This post is part of Robin's Some/Thing carnival for Freedom to Marry Week, and Mombian's blogswarm on the same subject. Freedom to Marry's event page can help you find local events: get involved!

Something old. We don't have a lot of old things in our house. Politica's parents emigrated as adults; my grandparents emigrated, and they didn't have much. Neither of us comes from families rich in tactile history--there are photographs, of course, in our parents' houses, but not a lot of old things.

We don't have a lot of old traditions in our house, either. We've been conscious of the new for so much of our relationship. When we got married, we designed our Quaker ceremony to include some music (before the silent worship period). We designed the program to explain the ceremony and its context to our guests. We created new rituals to celebrate holidays together, eventually opting together to join a new faith tradition as we solidified our sense of family. It's all new.

We had to represent something old at our wedding. We did have one relatively old guest--Politica's father, who is so delightfully clueless about gay marriage that he only learned that it wasn't actually legal when we got married. (And for years thereafter, he'd ask, every now and again, "so, how's the marriage issue coming along out there, as though our former, extremely conservative state was going to shift any day now. This even before marriage equality seemed to be picking up steam in the states.) We had to find a way, though, to represent the broader sense of old at the wedding. We used old language. Our wedding rings have an inscription in Politica's Family's Ancestral Language, matching the inscription on her parents' wedding rings. We list ourselves as daughter of all four of our parents on our wedding certificate, even though my parents didn't attend and her mother was long dead.

We see ourselves as creating new--but sometimes, I miss something old. I wish we had more things around us connecting us to generations that came before. But our new will someday be Curious Girl's old, and I sometimes think about our family rituals as things we are creating and polishing, creating and softening, readying them for her to take and use as she will, in her life and her family someday. Old will come, and I'm happy to have Politica by my side as it does.

Seven conversations in seven days is a Freedom to Marry program designed to promote creative talk about marriage--click on the graphic to learn more.

Freedom to Marry Week

2009-02-09T20:35:00.005-05:00

It's Freedom to Marry Week! And there are two interesting blog carnivals going on. Mombian and PageOneQ are co-hosting a Freedom to Marry carnival, and Robin (at The Other Mother) is once again sponsoring her Some/Thing Carnival, with five days of themed posts (something old, new, borrowed, blue, and Celebrate Love to cap it all off).

I've written a fair bit about marriage already this year. I've been writing about marriage to my local representatives and to my governor. I've been having wedding fantasies, living now in a part of the world where it's possible to imagine marriage equality arriving sooner rather than later.

We've had two ceremonies so far: our Quaker wedding, which has no legal significance, and our Vermont civil union, which has legal significance only when we happen to be in Vermont. Anywhere else, it doesn't matter. The lack of mattering matters to me. With all the gains and losses in the marriage equality movement lately, I'm more aware than ever of the marriage rights I don't have.

Politica just called me to find out what size butternut squash to buy for the stew I want to make this week. We spent this weekend hanging out with my sister and her kids; we walked around outside, doing winter things. We all went to a science museum together. We ate dinner. We exchanged Christmas presents, finally. We laughed. We admired our giggly girls. We made plans for more visits.

All of it, so ordinary. And yet to listen to some marriage equality opponents talk, you'd be led to believe that this sort of ordinary life is going to be the end of civilization as we know it.

Not hardly. It's just ordinary people with an ordinary life. Check back here for some more stories this week--and check out the participants in the carnivals, too. You'll meet good people.

Even in Australia, with Chocolate: A tale of emerging literacy and anger management

2009-01-19T22:22:00.003-05:00

We were on the road this weekend, visiting Politica's father, and Curious Girl was an awesome travel companion. Until about 4:00 this aft, that is, when she got out of the car for an early dinner, climbed into a snowbank, and promptly found the cold air + wet tights to be deeply distressing. I reached into the car for the handy bag of extra clothes, and we whined our way down the street to a restaurant, wherein CG decided that she was simply Too Miserable to be Helped. As she wound up, Politica and I decided that it was the better part of valor to leave the restaurant and get back in the car with bagels to go from a nearby coffeeshop. CG found this Not What She Wanted, and turned into Angry Girl. I carried her into the car (tucking her under my arm so as to keep her from pulling my hair and pinching me), somehow got her buckled into the car (while she pulled my hair bigtime, and was generally loud and obnoxious), and through a series of threats about future activities to be cancelled and empathetic comments about the Terrible State of Affairs and The Great Restaurant that We Will Now Miss, a semblance of calm returned to the car. Although as we pulled away from the car, CG opined that she was mad at me, "because you ruined my life, Mama." I just let that one go.

After a few minutes, though, I heard "here!" from the back seat, and turned around to see CG handing me the white board that has become our new favorite car toy. Sometimes, she draws on it, but sometimes, she and I write back and forth on it. Here's the correspondence that ensued:

Hi Mama, Im vry sore that I puld yor hare and tuggd on your niplz. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, I'm very sorry you hurt me, too. My head still hurts. I love you, Mama.

Hi Mama, Im rely sore. I fel bad that I hurt you. I wish I kud hid in my sweatshirt. Love, Curious Girl.

Dear Curious Girl, Sometimes we try to hide when we make a mistake, but the best thing to do is make it right. If you hide in your sweatshirt forever, I will miss you forever. Love, Mama.

Dear Mama, I want to et. Love, Curious Girl.

At that point, we took a break and ate a bit, and Curious Girl turned back into her charming traveling self. She took her pointer and white board and started teaching a kindergarten class (in which I noticed she had to correct imaginary Curious Girl several times--I guess she was working out her own inner discipline).

Curious Girl is a great kid, and it's been clear to us from very early on that she needs help dealing with her emotions. All kids do, of course, but CG seems to easily get to a place where she can't calm down by herself. I think of her sometimes as my little Vulcan resonator--if I get angry when she's having a fit, she just feeds off my energy to ramp herself up. If I can stay calm, she can usually latch onto my calm and get herself back under control. Rachel's post on parents and anger led me to Laura Markham's parenting site, which has a ton of great information on anger. I've been reading it tonight, trying to figure out what is the right response to CG when she gets to physically angry. Markham says that tantruming kids are looking for something from their parents, and that empathy is the best way to help them name and act on their feelings.

In the midst of CG's tantrum today, I managed to distract her a bit by threatening to go through the week and cancel various activities, starting with tomorrow's play date, but that didn't really do much besides transfer the object of her anger (her cries shifted from "But I wanted to stay at the restaurant!" to "But I want to go home from school with My Friend tomorrow!"). I finally said, after one more yank on my hair, "fine, no playdate tomorrow. Keep it up and you'll lose your skating lesson on Wednesday," while thinking "a. this is not going to work: she will not remember this transaction the next time she gets mad and b. I wanted to work tomorrow afternoon. What am I doing to my own schedule?!?" While not threatening about the playdates, though, I was calm, and tried to tell her that she could calm down, that she was in charge of her body, and that it would get better. And eventually, it did.

Later on, Politica and I having conferred somewhat on the ways in which removing-playdate-consequences really aren't helpful here, we turned back to the conversation with CG, and I tried to explain the difference between feeling sorry and making something right (if you broke something of mine, you could say you're sorry, but then you could fix it, or get me a new one, to make it right.) This led, eventually, to another round with the white board, where CG made a list of ways to make things right with me. I didn't see the spelling here, but here's her plan:

step one: say I'm sorry
step two: find out if she's OK
step three: try to do something to make it better
step four: find out what hurts the most
step five: figure out how not to do it again

She was adorably into naming all these "steps" (which she thought of on her own) and figuring out how to write it all down so she wouldn't forget. Then we ran through all the steps, and on step 5, decided that "mad jumps" (jumping up and down 5 times after saying "mama, I'm mad!") might be the thing to do, rather than hitting. This let me say that I was going to let her have her play date after all, if she was ready to take responsibility for trying to calm down her anger. (We're also going to make a new Feeling Box for home, so she has paper and crayons specially for drawing when she's angry or sad.) She says that she'll let us remind her about jumping or the Feeling Box. I hope so. We had some success with the Feeling Box for a while last year, but when we moved, CG announced she didn't need it anymore. Clearly not.

It's relatively easy for me to empathize with CG when she's angry or sad generally--but when she gets so physically angry, it's harder. It's hard to know what to do with a raging child who's trying to hurt me and escalate things. I 'm taller and stronger than Politica, so I can carry CG even in a tantrum; Politica's already hitting some of her own physical limits with CG's size and strength. At the moment, I can restrain CG while she flails, but she will eventually get too big for that (sometimes even now, it's not practical to do that--she was able to hurt me today because we were in the car, and I couldn't easily get her in front of me.) I can shut myself in my own room to get away from her, but I can't reliably get CG to stay in her own space when she's angry. I'm just not sure what the natural consequences are for fits like this--and I'm not sure how to practice empathy with someone who's pulling my hair. Laura Markham doesn't comment on this anywhere I found. I'll be rereading How to Talk So Your Kids Will Listen and Listen So Your Kids Will Talk, and looking up another book Markham recomments (Smartlove, by Martha Pieper). And I'll be thinking hard about how to balance empathy and efforts to reach out to CG in her own vulnerable anger with how to keep my scalp happy.

I'll end by saying that these kinds of tantrums don't happen very often (although we've had two this month!) and Curious Girl feels awful afterwards (as evidenced by her note that she wanted to hide in her sweatshirt). I'm writing about it in such detail because, as Rachel's post noted, it's hard to find information about what parents do when we're angry. I spent half an hour in the car today worried that CG's behavior was totally abnormal, but Politica assured me that these things happen to other people, too, only they don't talk about it. So I'm writing about it, so if this happens in your car sometimes, you can remember this post.

One more observation: as I was trying to remember all the good ideas in Rachel's post on anger, which is titled "I want a chocolate bar," I remembered, I did have a chocolate bar! So we ate some chocolate, and that was good, too.

Welcome Home

2009-01-14T22:05:00.002-05:00

If you've spent any time at all reading any of the adoption blogs out there, you've probably seen the complications that arise. Those of us who adopted internationally might encounter travel delays, embassy problems, or mysterious court requirements. Posts by adult adoptees and first mothers and adoptive parents alike show the ways the losses involved in adoption resonate throughout all our lives.

Sometimes, though, I just want to push all of life's complications aside and smile: Erin and her daughter Azucen@ are coming home together, from Guatemala, where Erin has been living for almost 2 years, weathering various twists and turns. Erin has been writing about all this and more at Jesus Was Not a Republican.

Welcome home: enjoy this next phase of adjusting to each other. I bet there will be more good stories to follow.

Guest Fiction

2009-01-07T21:48:00.003-05:00

I am remembering, these days, that Ellen Goodman stopped writing her columns when her children got old enough to read them. I'm wondering just how to tell Curious Girl stories in this space, wondering when it's OK to tell her stories here, when it's not.

Here's her latest story, an opportunity for you to work out your invented spelling skills. I am loving watching her learn to read and write down her own words, and at the moment, I'm letting my enjoyment of all that wash over my ongoing ethical debate about what of her words it's OK to post here. So, for your pleasure (and my own memory), some guest fiction (focused a bit more on setting than plot, but hey, it's kindergarten):

The Bav Princess, by Curious Girl
Wuns upun u time ther wus a brav princess. She liket being a rav pinses. She live in a kasl. I love my kasl she said, the prinsess. The end.

[self-portrait of Curious Girl]

Theis book is dedkdid to Susan and hr dodre Politica.
[editorial comment: CG asked me if I wanted her to write a story. Of course, I said. What kind of story did I want? one about a brave girl, I said. She offered me a brave princess, and I said that was fine, and so she set to writing. She gigglingly said, at the end, that she was pretending that I was the mom and that Politica was the daughter. I guess she was the house bard or something.]

New Year's Meme

2008-12-31T22:29:00.007-05:00

As seen around, most recently at Dawn's. Happy New Year, everyone!:

1. What did you do in 2008 that you’d never done before?
Drove more than 1000 miles without another adult in the car (and did all the driving myself--usually I navigate).

2. Did you keep your New Years’ Resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I don't think I made any New Year's resolutions last year. Some years, I write down my hopes/fears/expectations for the year, but I didn't do that last year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Yes! Historian Friend had a delightful baby on my half-birthday in February, and Neighbor Friends had a delightful baby in the summer, shortly before we moved.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Quiet Friend. I miss him. This time last year, I was blogging about his medical problems.

5. What countries did you visit?

My only travel was in the US (unless you count Disneyl@and as a world unto itself).

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008?

A legal marriage to Politica.

7. What date from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Election Night. The night we got to Germany. The night Quiet Friend died. I may not always remember the precise dates, but those are all nights I recall with intense clarity, because on each of them, my world changed.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Moving, and getting settled into certain kinds of new routines here in Germany.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Hmmm....not sure here. December's spate of bread failures comes to mind, but surely there was something bigger? Had some family-of-origin boundary/holiday issues.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
A Stokke chair for Curious Girl (on craigslist!) and panniers for my bike, so I can ride to work now.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Curious Girl: an exemplary traveler.

Lesbian Dad: an exemplary blogger and activist, who wrote a lot of beautiful words about marriage this year.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
The K of C, the LDS, and everyone else who supported Proposition 8.

14. Where did most of your money go?
Into houses: our current one, and the one we are still trying to sell in Old State.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Marriage fantasies. For the first time in my life, I'm having wedding fantasies, though they are followed by periods of dejection on marriage, too.

The election.

Germany.

16. What song will always remind you of 2008?
"Best Days of our Lives": the soundtrack to my drive from Old State to Germany (see the link above on question 12).

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? happier, I think. I'm missing good friends prodigiously right now, but I'm glad we've moved.
ii. thinner or fatter? About the same.
iii. richer or poorer? Richer in terms of income; more cash-strapped in terms of the unsold house. .

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Writing. Sleeping.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Mindless websurfing (usually too late at night, and addictively unsatisfying). Fretting about personnel matters at home (when it doesn't add anything to my ability to help matters)

20. How did you spend Christmas?
At home, with Politica and Curious Girl.

21. What LJ users did you meet?
Like Dawn, I'll amend this to how many online friends did I meet for the first time in 07: Artsweet, Shannon, Dawn, and Jenna. And Rev. Dr. Mom, and That Silly Mommy.

22. Did you fall in love in 2008?

As Dawn said in her answer to this question, I think I fall a little more in love with Politica all the time.

23. How many one-night stands?

I'll quote Dawn here: "This is for the younger blogging set, isn’t it?"

24. What was your favourite TV program?
The Daily Show, Dr. Who, and Xena.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
No. I don't really hate anyone.

26. What was the best book you read?
New mystery authors I'm enjoying: Archer Mayer and Sarah Stewart Taylor. One of the most compelling books I've read was Jennifer Boylan's She's Not There, a memoir that Joyce recommended to me (there are uncanny parallels between Joyce and Jenny Boylan, although R!chard Russ0 is not Joyce's best friend, and Joyce (and before her, George) is a friend who grows more likeable over time. The narrator in She's Not There (which is one presentation of the real Jenny Boylan; I'm sure there are tons of things she left out of her transgender narration) got less likeable to me over the course of the book. Some of the major contours of their lives might be the same, but their personalities are quite different).

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?
That ocarinas are great fun in the car.

28. What did you want and get?
A house in the neighborhood I wanted to live in.

29. What did you want and not get?
An architecturally interesting house in said neighborhood. An office with a real window.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?
I'm not even sure I saw a film in 2008. No, wait, I did: the post-apocalyptic film with Will Smith in it whose name I forget. I re-saw Charlie Brown movies in 2008 and enjoyed them.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
46 last August, and I was in Charming College Town, celebrating with Historian Friend, her lovely boys, and Curious Girl. Politica was already in Germany, dealing with the house. We had wedding cake for my birthday and Messy Boy's birthday, and I missed Politica. Last week, on a day when I was missing Historian Friend, we designated another day The Official Birthday, and we went out for breakfast at one of my favorite breakfast restaurants.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
If my best friends and CG's old school had been magically transported here. I miss them, big time.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
If I could describe it, I'd probably have more of one. I have been wearing more earth tones. And I'm happy to have moved to Germany, where my clothes seem to fit in better than they did in Old State. I'm not much for fashion.

34. What kept you sane?

Twitter (which surprised me--when I first read about it, it seemed pretty useless). Politica. The lake. Bike rides. Snuggles. Friends in the computer. Pseudonymousless Friend, Historian Friend, Mississippi Friend.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Not sure. Which blogger riveted me, though: Lesbian Dad. Not sure that counts as fancying (in fact, does one fancy butches? why not? It's an amusing juxtaposition, the fancy and the butch). But her words this fall: quite captivating.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?
The presidential election, generally, and marriage equality.

37. Who did you miss?
Quiet Friend. The world is a poorer place without him.

38. Who was the best new person you met?
Joyce, my new/old friend. Runner up: all the great connections here in Germany and we're so grateful for them!

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008.
Location, location, location. It's good to live in a place you feel connected to.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

If I wait to answer this question, this post may go up sometime in May. But if I hit post now, I'll probably think of a great answer during dinner. So I'll come back to this later.

Read, Kiddo, Read! (a Mother Talk Review)

2008-12-22T21:13:00.004-05:00

I've loved to read as long as I can remember. My parents' stories suggest I loved reading even before that: my father would stand up in the kitchen, reading the newspaper at the counter, trying to carve out some time for his own reading, knowing that as soon as he sat down, I'd be climbing into his lap and saying "book! book!" One of the pleasures of the blogosphere is book recommendations. Between Library Thing, book blogs, and just posts about books by the bloggers I read, there are tons of sources of info about all kinds of books. Live and learn!

Turns out that despite my personal love of reading and my professional focus on reading and writing, there are a few major trends in the current fiction world that I've missed. Take James Patterson, for one. I discovered today (on his website) that Patterson (whose name did sound familiar, at least) has sold 1 out of every 15 hardcover books in the US (in 2007) and has written two of the most popular detective series in recent years (Alex Cross, and the Women's Murder Club). Mysteries were the first genre I really got immersed in, and I don't think I've read any Patterson.

But I'm blogging tonight about one of James Patterson's other achievements: Read, Kiddo, Read!, a website designed to make it easy to find basic book recommendations for children. (Patterson also writes young adult fiction.) RKR is a nicely organized site--the front page lets you select from great illustrated books, great transitional books, great pageturners, and great advanced reads. Each area is then further subdivided (so the great illustrated books, which focuses on books for the 0-5 or 6 set, lets you browse books for babies, story books, transitional books, and nonfiction books). The site's visual presentation is great--it loads quickly, and it gives a lot of info. For each book there's a good summary, links to places to find the book (independent booksellers as well as big box stores), snippets of published reviews--and my favorite part, the "if you liked this book, you might like...." list.

The books themselves are good. I like the detailed plot summaries (once I hit publish, my next click will be to the town library to request a copy of Keiko Kasza's The Dog that Cried Wolf--the plot sounds great, and we love a couple of his other books, like A Mother for Choco) The "if you liked this book..." lists contain lots of books I don't know. So I'm looking forward to checking out a few new-to-me-books (like Sara Swan Miller's Three Stories You Can Read to Your Dog).

Patterson has also established a Read Kiddo Read ning community. I don't regularly use ning, so maybe I'm missing something, but the community portion of the site seems underactive at the moment. There are a few groups set up, without a lot of activity in them, and there are a few blogs associated with the site. There's an interesting post with suggestions for books for boys--I'm not sure I buy the gendered logic about boys' reading preferences, but the books listed there are superb (and there are, indeed, tons of gendered issues about boys and literacy). It's not easy to see how to get back to the RKR main page from the ning community (you have to understand that the "back home" button on the community page means "back to the main RKR page" and not "back to the ning community home page."

Another quibble--I always have a quibble--I wish the "if you liked this book, you might like...." lists didn't list multiple other books by the author of the first recommended book. Wouldn't readers of Knufflebunny figure out pretty easily that they might enjoy Knufflebunny Too as well as various other works by Willems? (all of which rock, I should add. He and Kevin Henkes are two of our current favorites around here.) I suppose "find another book by the same author" is a good strategy to teach people about how to find other new books, but still.

All in all, a good site. I'll be browsing it when looking for good book suggestions (especially for kids who are much older than CG, where I'm not so familiar with the new literature). So put Read, Kiddo, Read! into your bookmarks, along with the Cybils site, and Librarian Mom, and maybe Chicken Spaghetti, and you'll soon be pulled away from the computer and into some wonderful books at a library, bookstore, couch, or bed near you.

Happy reading.

This review was sponsored by Mother Talk; I received an Amazon certificate for the review. While most Mother Talk blog tours are summarized on the MT Blog, this one doesn't seem to have a page up yet--but if you google Mother Talk and Read Kiddo Read, you'll find plenty of other posts, like Art Sweet's.

Choosing Adoption

2008-12-15T22:38:00.007-05:00

I was reminded of Shannon's Pregnant? Considering Adoption post when I read today's post over at Mama PhD (which is an excellent group blog at Inside Higher Education. I'm purposely not linking to the post I read today because I don't want to stir up commenting trouble on a blog I lurk at). I left a long comment over at Mama PhD, but the post has stayed on my mind. My thoughts are rambling here, but I'm going to put up my musings.

edited to add: adoption changes lives, in all kinds of ways. There's the obvious: someone who had a child, doesn't live with that child anymore. Someone who didn't have a child, does. But adoption can change much more than that. My own thinking about the relationship between birth families and adoptive families has gotten so much more complicated as I've read more, listened to CG more, talked with other mothers (birth and adoptive). I come at this post from where I am today--six years ago, while I was then very respectful of CG's first family and birth families in general, I liked to think, I couldn't have written this post. Six years from now, things will be different, again. So I want to be gentle with the writer of the Mama PhD post, even as I clearly want to move in a different direction.

************************

I'm haunted by Curious Girl's birth mother. I've been reading Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away, a fabulous, heartbreaking history of women who placed children for adoption via maternity homes in the 1950s and 60s. Story after story tells of women who were pushed away by their families, coerced in various ways to relinquish their children, and who didn't stop thinking about, loving, and missing their children. I'm thinking, as I do every day, about CG's first mother, who has literally no voice in adoption literature. In our adoption paperwork, there's a handwritten relinquishment letter whose language is so oddly formal that it must conform to some legal specifications. It hardly feels like a personal letter, and it won't answer most of CG's questions when she sees it. I've looked some at academic studies of adoption, and I don't see much scholarship on women who place children for adoption in Eastern Europe (just as there's not much written that gives voice to poor women in this country. When Shannon, Dawn, Jenna, and I had the chance to speak at an adoption conference last year, Shannon's talk was partly about the ways in which her children's first mothers have no public voice.)

*****************************
I don't know what forces led CG's mother to relinquish her to state care. I used to think that what I would say to her, if I were ever to have the chance to meet her, would be "thank you." But thank you strikes me as precisely the wrong thing to say. She didn't give me CG, and CG wasn't, literally, a gift (although she certainly is one metaphorically). These days, I would say, "hello" and "isn't CG splendid?" (although were I to have the chance to meet her, I'd likely be speechless with emotion). The post that's got me thinking here asks women who are pregnant to consider potential adoptive parents and the joy that adoption brings. It's true: referral calls bring shrieks of joy. Five years ago today, in fact, I was sitting at home, looking at photos from our just-completed first trip to meet Curious Girl, just starting to think that I might really become a mother. Adoption has brought me such joy: being a mother is one of the best things I do, day in, day out. I love it. I love CG. And I love parenting with Politica.

And yet day in, day out, I think about CG's first family. I grieve her loss--and I know CG grieves, too. These days, she's thinking hard about the siblings that likely exist out there somewhere. She's processing the fact that maybe, someone else might have adopted her, or she might not have gotten adopted and might have stayed in her orphanage. She's trying to understand why she's small, and not tall like I am. I wish I could take all this away from her--but her shadowy past is her own story to live with, and so I answer her questions, I talk to her about what she imagines and what she feels, and I hope I help her heart fill with love and hope.

********************

The Mama PhD post is a request, of sorts, for people to consider adoption as a good option. For some women, adoption might well be a good option. But I thought I'd repeat here a piece of my comment on that post. Much as I love how my own family is formed, I know from my perspective within adoption, as an adoptive parent, how complicated navigating grief and loss is. That must be even moreso for women who relinquish their children. So here's what, in my view, women who are pregnant and considering adoption might do (Shannon's post, and Jenna's blog more generally, on the subject is a big inspiration here, I should say at the start):

1. Do your best to find someone to talk with who has YOUR interests at heart (many adoption professionals have their interests aligned more with adoptive parents than with women considering adoption).

2. Talk with other women who’ve made this choice. Relinquishing a child for adoption is a difficult choice, a choice that causes grief and loss. There are birthmother blogs now; there are organizations like Concerned Birthparents United.

3. Consider what support you might have for parenting. You may want to place a child for adoption, but being young, being not quite financially settled, being untenured, being surprised by a pregnancy are not necessarily reasons to relinquish. Take your time and carefully consider the option of parenting your child.

4. Know what your legal rights are (childwelfare.gov offers state-by-state overviews). You are the parent of your child until you relinquish.

*********************

I love my daughter, who joined our family through adoption. Yet I am haunted by the thought that her birth mother might have relinquished her due to coercion of one sort or another. I love my daughter fiercely; I can’t imagine loving her more. I know she is happy here and now-but I know she, too, grieves the mother she never had the chance to know, and the other family she can only imagine.

*********************

Those of us who adopted internationally have little chance to communicate with the other mothers of our children (although increasingly, some birth parent contact is possible. There's a yahoo group or two for searching adoptive families). Precisely because I know so little about CG's birth mother, I write and think about her a lot. I wonder about her, for GG. In writing here, even when there is little to say for or about her, I write to note her, and to honor her. I don't know her--except for what I see of her in CG--but I don't want her, and the other women around the world who have placed, or lost, children to adoption to be forgotten or elided.

**********************

I love my girl. And it breaks my heart to listen to her talk about the family she may never know. She loves me, and she loves the family she has here. And we all of us have to come to terms with grief and loss. But I got to wait a little longer before dealing with such big emotions. She hasn't. She's doing a great job, little processor that she is.

Airport Blogging: A cool video, a cool book

2008-12-09T11:31:00.005-05:00

I've been away, at a symposium in honor of Grad School Mentor. I'm blogging in my head about that, and grad school, and mentoring and scholarship--I'll aim to find time to actually type said thoughts later in the week.

For now, as I have a few extra hours before my plane leaves, some recommendations:

the Dance your PhD videos on youtube, especially the study of dancers, communication and touch. I heard about the Dance your PhD contest on NPR. I've always loved assignments that ask students to translate work from one genre to another, or to use wordless formats to convey a project they will complete with words.
American Band, by Kristen Laine, a narrative about a year in the life of a high school band in northern Indiana. I've never met Kristen, but she's married to one of my college classmates and I talked to her on the phone once for 40 minutes when I called, trying to reach my classmate for a piece I was writing for our class newsletter. She told me then about the research she had done for this book (which involved moving her family to Indiana for a year so that she could immerse herself in a high school band's classes, rehearsals, and culture). This book is lovely: great writing, fascinating exploration of coming-of-age themes (looking at the role of religion in some kids' lives, looking at the drive for independence, looking at the role of teachers and mentors--typical themes, maybe, but handled with such care and detail that you can really see how complicated it is to be a teenager). It's smart, readable, and fascinating. Kristen was nice enough to send me a copy of the book (inscribed!); I googled it and discovered she had won the Winship/PEN New England Award last year. I wrote to congratulate her and she offered to send me the book. So she's a Really Nice Person as well as a Really Good Writer. Looking for holiday break reading? or a gift for someone? Check out American Band. (I'm also plotting ways to use parts of the book in class: it's got great examples of using narrative, observational sources--good stuff for teaching research skills and researched writing.)
Links on the American Band website led me to this foundation which provides musical instruments for schools. If I can't find a good German outlet to make a donation to this year, I'll give here; Kristin was nice enough to give me her book, and it's reminded me how important music can be for kids. So I'm going to be making an extra donation to a musical organization this year.
On our Hanukkah tzedakah night, we'll choose between the Heifer Foundation, Maria's children (which does wonderful art programs for Russian orphans), or the Bebor school in Nigeria (which provides stable education for kids in an unstable area, through a localized effort started by one of our friends). (Shannon's strollerderby post reminded me about this.) What charities do you like to support?

More Musical Fun

2008-12-03T18:55:00.002-05:00

A hilarious and musical summary of arguments about marriage equality.

Holidays and Conferences

2008-11-24T22:18:00.002-05:00

I just spent 3 days off line. There's something to be said for that, although I'm having fun catching up with all of you friends-in-the-computer.
We stopped at the National Bottle Museum. I love quirky museums, and I love Politica, who stopped to park even before I'd finished my "It's open!" sentence as we drove by. And Curious Girl clapped when I said we were going into the bottle museum, and wondered whether she should bring in the blue water bottle she'd been drinking from.
Curious Girl's first report card came home last week. We have a teacher conference in the morning. I'm looking forward to it: kindergarten is clearly going well for her, and her teacher seems to have connected with CG quite well. I'm curious to hear a bit more about CG's social habits in class, and I have a few questions about how persistent she is with challenging tasks at school.
I like CG's school quite a bit. But the report card? Spectacularly uninformative in some key ways. The scale refers back to the state standards, for several reasons, including that "A standards-based report card gives "parents a clear understanding of what their children know, what they are able to do, and what they need to learn in relation to the standards." So the scale on the report card is "Exceeds/meets/nearly meets/fails to meet standards and then "little evidence." Problems here include:

"little evidence" is not actually on the same scale of exceeding-to-not-meeting any given standard. There might well be little evidence of a student meeting a particular standard; little evidence sounds like a comment about what there is to evaluate, not an actual evaluation.
the report card does not actually point us to anywhere where the actual standards are explained. I remembered that there is an explanation of the report card on the school website, but the explanation there focuses on the transistion from the old (2 years ago) format of report cards. I had to google the state standards.
the school website does gloss the scale, though, and says that "little evidence" means that "Student's achievement shows little evidence of meeting grade level standards."
When your kid "meets the standard" in October, does that mean she has met the (end-of-grade) standard? Or that she meets the where-we-think-we-are-with-this-standard-in-October-standard?
CG "exceeds" the standard in music performance. (Yay! I got a 5! she said as we looked at the report card together. She has no clue what the numbers actually mean but clearly has solidly grasped the notion that 5s are bigger than 4s, and at the moment, bigger is better in her book.) On the state standards site, the document I found about arts standards says that there aren't kindergarten level music standards.
All of this is more philosophically troubling me to me than parentally troubling: CG is having a fine time in kindergarten, and we already knew that this is totally the right time for her to be in kindergarten. (Anyone reading here who's obsessing about whether to repeat a year of pre-K: do it. CG wasn't ready for kindergarten a year ago, and she is in totally the right place now. I could have obsessed about something else during her first year of pre-K. It was such the right call.) So it's not like I have serious questions about what's going on in kindergarten. She's learning to read, she's loving math, she's quizzing us on what are living and non-living things (the subject of the science unit this fall). She likes school, and she's making friends. That's pretty much my idea of good kindergarten outcomes right there.

I really need to come up with a good Thanksgiving entree. But not tonight. Magpie suggested a potato pie, but I am hoping for something with protein (to go along with the turnips braised with maple syrup, and turkey and traditional trimmings my sister will prepare). I'll make bread or rolls of some sort. But what protein? Time to get decisive.
Except it's time to go to bed. So decisions will have to wait until tomorrow. But comments on non-turkey Thanksgiving options are welcomed!

Soggily Slogging towards Equality

2008-11-15T20:20:00.003-05:00

Check out Andrew Sullivan's blog for a series of posts that start "The View from Your Protest" for first-hand reports and photos from marriage equality protests around the world. It rained today in Germany--hence all the umbrellas and rain gear in the photo above--but we had over a hundred people, maybe 150 people, at a rainy little rally. It was hard to hear the speakers, but Curious Girl had a great time playing with an 11-month old puppy. The moment of silence at the end was very moving; otherwise, it was an oddly quiet gathering, just a series of speakers, no crowd involvement, no chanting or singing. But there was exhortation to get involved with our state marriage equality organization. And given that Politica and I haven't ever bothered to tell Curious Girl that we're not legally married, perhaps the quiet gathering was just as well. I don't know how to explain the odd (un)legalities of lesbian family life to her just now. I'm not afraid to tackle hard issues with her--but she's young enough to expect everyone to be kind and fair, and I just can't think of a way to explain to her that the way her own family is viewed in the eyes of the law here is profoundly unfair. As far as she knows, we're married, and that's all there is to it.

Here's the letter I've written to our governor, which I will be revising a bit to send to my state legislators, too:

Dear Governor _____________:

We met last August when you attended the reception for new faculty at German State University. I was impressed, then, at the way you've set up a tradition of being so personally involved with German State University and pleased to see the ways in which you make it a priority to attend events like that, which allow you to make personal connections with Germans. I'm glad you value the personal as well as the policy sides of governance. Politics is ultimately personal: the choices you oversee in the executive branch affect the ways in which Germans get to live their lives.

My partner, daughter, and I relocated to Germany late last summer because of the remarkable professional opportunities German State U offered us. More important that those professional opportunities, however, were the state legal protections Germany's domestic partner legislation offered our family. In our previous state, Politica and I had no legal relationship to each other. Here, as far as the state is concerned, we are legal next of kin, and we enjoy all the legal, state-level benefits of marriage.

However, we don't enjoy all the social benefits of marriage, and we don't enjoy all the legal benefits of state marriage that would be recognized in other states. While we are grateful for what Germany offers, I hope that someday soon, I will be able to join Politica in a legal marriage. This would be important to me for several reasons: first, marriage means something in America that domestic partnership doesn't. "I got domestically partnered last summer" just doesn't have the same ring to it that "We got married!" does. Secondly, as our daughter gets older, I don't know how I'm going to explain to her that Germany doesn't think her two mothers are married in the same way that Germany thinks her aunt and uncle are married. In our extended family, there's really little difference in how our family works and how my sister's family works: we work, we love our kids, we enjoy our surroundings. Yet my sister's marriage to my brother-in-law is recognized very differently than my relationship to Politica. My nieces' family has considerably more legal stability than my daughter's, and that troubles me greatly.

Politica and I travel outside of Germany quite frequently. Were we married, an increasing number of other states would recognize that relationship. Unfortunately, our domestic partnership--and the other legal documents we carry with us, such as health care proxies, might not be recognized by officials in other states. When Lisa Pond suddenly fell ill on a cruise ship off Florida and slipped into a coma and died, hospital officials in Miami refused to let her partner of 18 years and their 3 children in to see her, saying that Florida did not recognize their family. Without the benefits of legal marriage, lesbian and gay families depend on the kindness of others to keep their families together in times of stress. It is easy for hospital administrators or other officials to ignore a gay or lesbian partner and turn instead to a sibling of parent for a decision in a moment of medical crisis or death. I hope, should something happen to me, that no one would question Politica's relationship to me. I hope, that should someone question it, my sister and parents would defer to Politica. I hope, but I can't ever be sure. A legal marriage would settle those issues.

Full marriage equality in Germany won't solve all these problems; it will take decades, doubtless, for all 50 American states to arrive at marriage equality. But marriage equality in Germany would be an important step towards that day, and it would be an important step in improving the lives of all Germans. When our daughter runs off to kindergarten in the morning, she mixes on the playground just like all the other kids. When I come to read to her class once a week, I'm just another parent volunteer. When I pay my taxes, I'd love to be just another married German paying her taxes. There's no need to create a separate legal category for some Germans. If you have the opportunity to sign a marriage bill into law, please do it. You'll be making Germany an even better place, for all of us.

Sincerely,

Susan

Speaking Out

2008-11-12T19:46:00.004-05:00

Saturday is a day of protest over Proposition 8. There are demonstrations scheduled in every state, and even abroad (although question to organizers: does it really make sense to call Puerto Rico an international location?). There have been many protests in California already, with thousands of protests taking to the streets. It's stirring, the sight of so many people continuing to demonstrate for marriage equality. Andrew Sullivan says it's the beginning of a gay awakening in the US. He comments, "I've long believed that the moment every gay person truly wanted the right to marry, and understood the depth of the injustice, we would win. That moment feels much closer today than it did a week ago."

There's been a lot of divisive commentary over Prop 8--accusations that African-American voters coming out for Obama put Prop 8 over the top. Nate Silver's analysis puts that to rest quite clearly. The reason Prop 8 passed was because too many Californians voted for it, period. Too many Californians who fit into lots of demographic categories voted for it. As Silver notes, if people over 65 had stayed home from the polls, Prop 8 would have narrowly failed. So in another 8 years or so, marriage equality should fare better at the California polls (although it is rather difficult to get things out of constitutions once enshrined. But still, time is on the side of marriage equality). In the meantime, we should all read some very fine posts on the relationships--or lack thereof--between the civil rights movement and the marriage equality movement. Lesbian Dad says: "Surely a silver lining will become evident in the clouds over us (dueling recriminations: homophobe! racist! bigots, all! meanwhile the powers that be at the LDS and the Knights of Columbus lean back, and smile). Lordy at times it feels like not just hard rain, but frogs and locusts are coming down. "

Frogs and locusts, but also lots of protests. The thing is, I can't quite figure out what all the protests are heading towards. In California, there's so much pent-up emotion over Prop 8: protests there make sense to me, as a way of communicating frustration and as a way of working out where to go next. But what does it mean to have nationwide protests about Prop 8? Or a boycott, as some have called for? (boycotts make no sense: gay Californians, those most directly affected by Prop 8, have no ability to not spend money where they live, San Fransisco has long been pushing, and providing, equal rights for queers in areas where the city had jurisdiction, so why boycott SF? plus see an excellent set of arguments over at An Accident of Hope.)

I can't figure out whether there's going to be a protest here in Germany or not. If there is, I'll probably go. But I want a better formulation of what the protest is aimed at: whose opinions are we targeting? What actions do we want to see? In the meantime, here's what I'm planning to do in the wake of Prop 8:

checking out the marriage equality organization here in Germany. (want to know who's working in your state? Check out the cool stuff going on at Equality Utah! I can't find a comprehensive website listing all the state equality organizations, but HRC is one starting place. Marriage Equality USA has chapters around the country There's also a Jews for Marriage Equality group. Freedom to Marry is another source of state-by-state info. Google "marriage equality" and "your state name here" to find out what's going on in your neck of the woods.)
writing to my governor to let him know what marriage would mean to me and my family
writing to my state legislators to let them know what marriage would mean to me

I live in a state where it's possible to imagine the legislature enacting marriage equality. And what legislators--and governors with veto power--need to know is that a) their constitutents support marriage equality and b) they won't lose their seats over supporting it. One of the reasons marriage settled reasonably well in Massachusetts is that legislators who opposed civil unions tended to lose seats in the next election; legislators who supported them retained their seats. When legislators understand that their seats aren't at risk over their votes, they are less timid about supporting an issue. Even if you live in a state that already extends legal protections to same-sex couples, write your elected representatives and let them know how much you value those protections. We need to speak up, and speak out.

For Lesbian Dad, with readings

2008-11-06T19:00:00.008-05:00

Even with all the hope in my heart before the election, I never assumed we'd win on Prop 8. Polling always overestimates support for gay rights initiatives (on marriage, on employment, on housing) and when the pre-election polls had the issue at 49% opposed, 44% in favor, I figured we'd lose in the voting booth. So for about a week now, I've had one question rattling around in my head: what am I going to say to Lesbian Dad? As anyone reading last week knows, I've been channeling her words on the California election here. What to say to someone who's been working so hard for equality, whose marriage has just been rejected by a majority of voters, and who's been writing so beautifully?

I still don't have the words I want. Despite the incredible joy associated with Obama's victory, the success of Proposition 8, not to mention the marriage bans enacted in Florida and Arizona and the Arkansas straight-people-only adoption law, have just left me feeling rather hopeless, and hopeless isn't very motivating for writing. Hopeless is ridiculous, as I know the demographics are with us. Younger voters are much more in favor of gay marriage than older voters. In California just 8 years ago, 61% of voters approved a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. A shift of 10% points in 8 years is pretty good. Change will come. Just not this week.

Anyone on the losing end of such an intensely emotional, personal political fight needs time to recover. I'm sitting here, on the other side of the country, frequently crying as I read news reports about California. But I'm also moved at the vision of California I've seen through Lesbian Dad in the past weeks. Her prose: incisive. Her analysis: spot-on. Her humor: always there. Her generosity: omnipresent. She's been working hard to get out the vote and to raise money, and she shares credit with her readers and fellow No on 8 volunteers. Her posts have been tributes to the amazing ground network the No on 8 coalition put together. Lesbian Dad's writing let us see just how hard the No on 8 folks were working. There's criticism emerging (see Andrew Sullivan) over the political tactics on our side in California--but whatever the political postmortems on strategy turn up, there's no denying that tens of thousands of Californians mobilized to give their time for marriage equality. Millions of dollars were raised to counter the LDS-led donations for the other side. And we came close, so very close, to fending it all off.

The world I want for my child is a world in which all our marriages are legally recognized (hell, that's the world I want for me!). The world I want for my child is one that will be shaped by Lesbian Dad and countless others like her: articulate, loving activists who will fight for equality. Our families are built on love, and some day, that love will be legally recognized as creating a family. Someday.

Today, to Lesbian Dad and to the countless others who worked in California, I say, simply: Thank you. You did good. You make my world better. We stand together, and together we will do the work that remains. Together, we will make it better still.

*****************************

From Half-Changed World, lines from Marge Piercy:

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain

From Elswhere:

The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Like Anne Frank's quote about people being basically good at heart, I'm not even sure if that's true. But I can only hope so. It makes a good prayer, anyway, if one were a praying person: Please, Spirit of the Universe, if there is such a thing, or if not, then combined spirits of all of us together: Make the arc of history match that of the moral universe, and bend towards justice.

And bend it as soon as you, or we, can.

From Equality California:

Victory was not ours today. But the struggle for equality is not over.

Because of the struggle fought here in California — fought so incredibly well by the people in this state who love freedom and justice — our fight for full civil rights will continue.

Activist and writer Anne Lamott writes, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

We stand together, knowing… our dawn will come.

From Andrew Sullivan:

If we had won this, this civil rights battle would be all but over. Now, it isn't. So we get back to work, arguing, talking. speaking, debating, writing, blogging, and struggling to change more minds. The hope for equality can never be extinguished, however hard our opponents try. And in the unlikely history of America, there has never been anything false about hope.

More Hope

2008-11-04T19:44:00.003-05:00

This post at Andrew Sullivan's made me cry the first time I read it. I am so holding my breath about Prop 8.
Nerdy playdate: Curious Girl and her friend today wanted to see a photo of Barack Obama's grandmother. They noticed there were movies on the Obama website, too, and wanted to watch them. As they stood there watching the Obama bio video, this conversation: "This is not a boring movie. This is a good movie!" "yes, this is a good movie." "Oh, look, that's him when he was a baby!" "This is a good movie."

Hope for Today

2008-11-04T00:00:00.003-05:00

For California, for marriage equality for all of us. Please vote no on 8:

For America, for the world:

Obama Says He Opposes Prop 8

2008-11-03T09:33:00.002-05:00

In an MTV interview, Barack Obama was asked directly whether he supports Proposition 8. He doesn't.
Pam's House Blend has a good analysis of the Democratic politics on marriage equality in general and this election cycle in particular.
And no one but Lesbian Dad could see--brilliantly!--the political inspiration in 101 Dalmations. All dog alert, indeed.
If you have friends voting in California--or if you are voting in California--please do your best to make sure people know which way to vote on 8.
Here is the latest video from No on 8:

Here's what No on 8 says about their latest ad:

Everyone you know needs to see this video. Use our easy spread the word tool to blast your contact list.

Over these past few months, I know I’ve asked a lot of you. You have sacrificed so much—your time and your money. And you have responded so incredibly, building the largest grassroots movement to defeat an anti-equality ballot measure in history.

If there is one last thing you do (before voting NO on 8 of course) it’s to take 30 seconds to watch this video and make sure everyone you know votes no.

• Donations in California still matter. Given the fact that Obama's MTV interview (which does state his opposition to Prop 8) also hands the other side a nice sound bite about his opposition to marriage, ads will continue to be important. Those of us outside of California can continue to write, and continue to give.

Now, time to get the work week started. Happy Monday, all.

Happy November!

2008-11-02T16:02:00.006-05:00

Some more news from California: No on 8 has released a new ad countering the latest from the other side, who are trying to make it look as though Obama supports Prop 8. Obama does not support Prop 8 (although he, like most other major Democratic candidates, supports civil unions rather than marriage--see Pam's House Blend for a very fine post analyzing the problems with the Dems' maneuvering on marriage). Here's the newest ad:

It will cost about $10,000 to keep this ad on the air over the weekend. The Lesbian Dad fundraising goal has been upped to $18K (thanks to the generosity of LD's readers, and readers of the various other blogs on what she's taken to calling the LD Love Train. I feel so groovy!). Thanks to any of you who've contributed. Emergency contributions this weekend will pay for additional fliers, phone banking, and a call to California voters by Magic Johnson. The political organizing going on in California is incredibly creative--please do what you can to support it.

Remember, those of you reading in California: please vote, and please get your friends to vote, and please vote no on 8.

Reading about some of the political tactics employed by the other side on 8 really challenges my faith in humanity (that said, I've got another post brewing about the way this debate has pushed me so quickly to hyperbolic rhetoric that arguably demonizes the other side--I have persued a few personal blogs by writers in favor of 8, and some of them seem like nice people who seem regrettably taken in by arguments that can't possibly make sense. Like the argument that a state's marriage laws will prevent them from teaching morality to their children. I am trying not to demonize: can't we all agree that we don't need the law to represent everything we believe? There are plenty of things that people reasonably disagree about that we don't need the law to regulate.)

I digress....despite the challenges posed by some of the political tactics of the other side, it's felt exciting and at times exhilarating to be even peripherally involved in the fight for marriage rights. Watching fundraising totals creep up, reading comments here and over on LD--it's good. The Equality California blog today has a roundup of some interesting editorials (including one from a Mormon historian who points out that the LDS Church, given its history with persecution, really ought to be leading the fight against discrimination on marriage).

Let's hope we prevail on Tuesday.

Bonus Obama pumpkin shot:

And thanks to all of you reading who are following along with this spurt of single-focused blogging leading up to the election. I just can't get Prop 8 off my mind. No no no no no no no I keep sending out into the universe.

But after Tuesday, one way or another, I'll have other topics to write about. And tonight, I have a date! Politica and I are off to see one of our favorite singer-songwriters, and Curious Girl finally gets a babysitter here. Life is good. Happy November.

Good News, Bad News

2008-10-31T20:37:00.005-04:00

Good News

Halloween in the new neighborhood was pretty fun. Curious Girl and the neighbor kids ran up and down the streets. She gleefully counted her candy: 64 non-chewy pieces!
My Obama pumpkin looks mighty fine.
Via Lesbian Dad, news of a challenge grant: philanthropist Tim Gill and his partner will match donations to No on 8 up to $100,000.
I'm helping to plan a roast for one of my grad school professors. Turns out I like event planning.
Cousins come tomorrow!

Bad News

I remain increasingly concerned/obsessed/drawn into Proposition 8 coverage. No on 8 is polling slightly ahead of the other side, but past experience suggests we need a 10% advantage in the polls to feel sure of victory. This is going to be close. I liked it better when I thought this election was just going to be about Obama happies.
A commenter on one of my recent posts pointed out the Halloween tactics some yes on 8 folks are using: giving out postcards to trick-or-treaters that are ridiculously misleading (telling children that "your mom can be a man" if Prop 8 doesn't pass: let's bring a little transphobia into the homophobia, shall we?). The commenter left a link to a pretty bare bones site, so I googled and discovered some additional evidence for the truth of it. Those singing children are a low, low, dirty, misrepresenting reality trick.
Guest bedroom is so.not.ready.
Younger cat ran out the door when some trick-or-treaters came, and when Politica ran to get him, he wouldn't come to her, and just growled. He could be anywhere now.

Good news

That blogging adage is true! blogging about things really makes them happen. Younger cat came back!
We have a lot of candy left over. Not sure whether that's good news or bad news. Anybody want some?
Lesbian Dad is just a good, good blog. I'm channeling her this week for good reason. When you have time, click on over there and browse her archives. She's got a way with words--and at the moment, those words are flying for a righteous cause.

Get Out the Vote--Especially in California

2008-10-31T12:55:00.006-04:00

There was an article in the Times this week about the marriage debate in California, which quoted a Presbyterian minister on the concern that equal marriage rights will affect churches' ability to act on their differing articles of faith about gays and lesbians:

The idea that we would be forced as clergy to perform a marriage that was against our conscience, or that a church would lose its tax-exempt status, is ridiculous,” said the Rev. Karen Sapio, the minister of Claremont Presbyterian Church in Southern California. “If you look dispassionately at the record, there are a lot of churches with policies that are at odds with civil law.”
She continued, “I have not heard of a single Catholic church forced to marry someone who has been divorced, or a rabbi forced to perform an interfaith marriage or an evangelical church forced to marry a couple who has been living together.”

Civil marriage laws don't affect churches. They just don't.

New polling data in California suggests that it's pretty much a dead heat on Proposition 8, which means the race will come down to which side gets more of its backers to the polls on Election Day.

Around the country, polls have consistently overreported support for equal marriage rights (in the privacy of the voting booth, people vote in ways they won't admit to pollsters).

If you're in California, make sure to vote. Encourage your friends and colleagues to vote. Vote, and vote no on 8.

If you're not in California, you can help by financially
supporting the No on 8 efforts-- see the fundraising thermometer in the right navigation bar up top or the blue graphic at right to join the Lesbian Dad Love Train for No on 8, or click the red graphic at the top of this post to get straight to Equality California's pitch (both sites contribute to the same effort). Remember, the other side has outpaced us in fundraising over the last few months, and we're seeking to raise $3 million dollars by the end of this week (my previous post details some of what our side is up against).

In the abstract, there's a lot better uses in the world for all the money that has been spent on this election--but in the real world, I can't think of a better political fight to support right now. The future of equal marriage rights in America for the course of my lifetime is bound up in this election. I am just waiting for the day I can marry Politica, legally, and if Prop 8 passes, that day may never come.

See Lesbian Dad's latest for fuller commentary on all of this.

More on Proposition 8

2008-10-30T23:14:00.003-04:00

I trust you'll all forgive me for channelling Lesbian Dad this week: I can't imagine anyone writing more eloquently and more pointedly about marriage politics in California right now, and she's a great source of updates from the California organizations fighting the good fights. Here's the latest from Kate Kendall (executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights) and Geoff Kors (executive director of Equality California):

Beginning last night and continuing this morning a coordinated cyber attack on the No on Prop 8 website prevented some donors from being able to contribute. This attack is being investigated by federal authorities. Fortunately, there was no breach in security and we are again able to accept contributions online.

As if that attack isn’t outrageous enough, at a recent Prop 8 rally an official campaign spokesman actually compared the right of same-sex couples to marry to the rise of Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany.Watch the video.

This insanity needs to stop. Prop 8 needs to be defeated. It’s wrong. It’s unfair. The people supporting it are fanatical, intolerant, and willing to do and say anything to eliminate our rights. Period.

We cannot let them succeed.

Let’s do this once and for all. Help us reach our goal of $3 million by Friday.

Tony Perkins, national crusader in the effort to eliminate the right to marry, has said the battle to pass Prop 8 is more important than the presidential election. The result is that they have raised $4.5 million in the last two days and purchased another $2 million in advertising.

That’s how critical this fight is to the other side. That’s how much they care.

I believe you care more. So what more are you going to do?

Comments on Shannon's latest Strollerderby post show that some proponents of Prop 8 are voting because they've become convinced by the lies about what Prop 8 will do. I've been loving reading all the posts in the Write to Marry Day collection (more than 400!). I've been gratified to see Lesbian Dad's fundraising for No on 8 perk up so quickly in response to the current crisis. Thanks to everyone who is raising a voice, or a blog post, in support of fairness and equality.

This is, truly, a momentous election. I'm going to quote LD again to end tonight:

I’m not exactly sure what pacifists do when war is declared on them. I am not a happy user of the language of war, or its symbolism, or anything related to it, right down to but most certainly including its actual weaponry. But I do know that a lot of people are banding together here, in the name of love. A lot.

From the time of this post, we have five more days to either stand up, or keep standing. We can do it.

No on 8 Needs Money

2008-10-29T21:09:00.005-04:00

Mombian just updated her Write to Marry post with this update from Equality California, which is echoed on the No on 8 Take Action page:

On Tuesday, the other side reported donations of $2.2 million, dwarfing the $255,650 we reported, and called on their donors to contribute another $3 million.

With this enormous sum of money they are buying every available ad space on TV in California to blast even more of their hateful lies and prevent our messages from being seen.

Unless we raise $3 million in the next three days we will likely lose.

I'm heading over to make another donation via Lesbian Dad's links (which support Equality California, one of two major organizations leading the fight against Prop. 8--you can get there via the thermometer to the right, although I encourage you to pop over to Lesbian Dad and read her wonderful prose). Please join me.

The Marrying Kind

2008-10-29T15:50:00.004-04:00

This post is one of hundreds written for Write to Marry Day, a blog carnival to support same-sex marriage and rally opposition to California's Proposition 8, organized by Mike Rogers of PageOneQ and Dana Rudolph of Mombian. I've written several posts on the subject.

The politics of marriage in this country have shifted enormously in the past decade. When I was in graduate school, I remember having debates about whether or not it was adviseable for lesbians to support marriage rights (why join an institution that so embodies patriarchy?). The debate was purely hypothetical, for none of us imagined that we'd see the day when American lesbians could get legally married. But marriage rights lawsuits proceeded, Vermont became the first state in the union to offer civil unions to gay and lesbian couples, and legal changes followed on the heels of social changes. It's a whole new world. If Proposition 8 is defeated next week, gay and lesbian citizens will retain the rights they--and every Californian--enjoy under the California state constitution. As the California court put it in their ruling last June:

[T]he differential treatment at issue impinges upon a same-sex couple’s fundamental interest in having their family relationship accorded the same respect and dignity enjoyed by an opposite-sex couple.

[T]he exclusion of same-sex couples from the designation of marriage clearly is not necessary in order to afford full protection to all of the rights and benefits that currently are enjoyed by married opposite-sex couples.

[T]he right to marry is not properly viewed simply as a benefit or privilege that a government may establish or abolish as it sees fit, but rather that the right constitutes a basic civil or human right of all people.

Politica and I got married in 1995. It wasn't a legal wedding--no government entity took notice of our relationship until our civil union in Vermont in 2000. One of the reasons--in fact, the main reason--we moved last summer was to move to a state that would recognize our relationship. We grew tired of the politics in Old State, where initiatives to amend the constitution to ensure that gay and lesbian couples couldn't marry were continually being pushed by conservative forces. And we grew tired, so very tired, of listening to news reports featuring "experts" who spouted nonsense about the effects of our family on American social culture. Let's get real: we love each other, we love our kid. I like to think we play a supportive role in our friendship community, and that we are generally a force for good in the world. But the fact of our relationship doesn't damage anyone else's. And if I do say so myself, our happy little home with our adorable kid probably manages to bring a smile to those who visit here.

I've been linking back to Lesbian Dad for the past week becuase her posts about California have been stunning. Yesterday, she wrote about a video taken of a pro-Prop 8 protest. The Prop 8 protesters attacked (verbally and physically) a woman who was observing their protest. We shouldn't have to walk through the world fearful about how hate will surface. We shouldn't have to turn on the news to hear about how some citizens are seeking to take away from us rights that exist in the constitution. The referendum process does a terrible job of protecting minority rights. That's the job of the constitution. Proposition 8 is rallying hateful rhetoric--and if you think that's an overstatement of what you might consider a rational disagreement about the extent of marriage laws, click through to that Lesbian Dad post and watch the video. Proposition 8 is rallying hate in order to take away rights from a minority group. That is just not fair.

It scares me to think about what will be the political fall out if Proposition 8 passes. It takes my words away.

Some lists

2008-10-27T20:23:00.002-04:00

Good things:

it's a good trip, when you arrive bearing apples, for friends whose refrigerator is full of apples, and they are happy.
it's a good host who obligingly makes your child the apple butter and ketchup sandwich she asks for, and who then enjoys watching your child eat said sandwich
it's a good sign when your new colleague comes into your office and says, "I don't think I've officially told you how happy I am you're here. I'm so happy you're here; you have a great temperament for this job."
it's a happy sound, the sound of the canning tops popping sealed after two more batches of applesauce are processed
it's a nice feel, warm fall wind

Um, challenging things:

it's a hard thing when your child loses it for 20 minutes on the highway. I kept thinking, "I want a chocolate bar, I want a chocolate bar," and let her scream out her demons.
it's hard to be six and almost-a-half and start thinking about your cat that is dying. Older kitty has chronic kidney disease. More news from the vet tomorrow.
it's hard to be calm in the face of kid anger. Two nights in a row CG has lost it at bedtime, two nights in a row she's gotten hitting/scratching/spitting mad, and two nights in a row it's hurt my feelings. I need to not let it get to me, the better to mediate on chocolate.
it's rather confusing to learn to communicate with new pediatricians. It's possible CG's doctor thinks she has asthma (which I don't think she does), and there is some seriously bad communication going on about what meds she's taking for how long.

Back to good things:

it's a fun thing to walk into kindergarten and hear the teacher telling another parent about how much fun the class always has on Mondays because they are just so focused.
it's a relief to hear a cough going away (even if the cough is the occasion for the poor communication above)
it's a very happy thing to have a new computer on my desk at work.

Another reason to love Macs

2008-10-24T22:41:00.004-04:00

From Apple's news page today:

No on Prop 8

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

I learned about this news via Dr. B , who also writes about an example of the politicking in favor of Prop 8: efforts by pro-8 supporters to shake down businesses who have contributed to Equality California.

Marriage is a civil rights issue. Voting no on 8 (or voting against any effort to roll back or prevent same-sex couples from legally marrying) protects individuals' rights to marry the partner of their choice. Voting no on 8 protects our families (which exist whether or not the law recognizes them).

See Lesbian Dad for a series of awesome posts about what it's like to be a politically active California lesbian family. (Donations to No on 8 through Lesbian Dad's fundraising efforts have topped $10K! making a real contribution to getting No on 8 ads on the airwaves.) Think about this from the point of view of gay and lesbian families with kids old enough to follow the news, or from the point of view of straight parents with older gay kids. As Lesbian Dad put it, we "cannot protect our children from legally sanctioned homophobia." We cannot protect our children from the hateful lies that yes on 8 ads are spreading about our families, and our families effect on our communities.

But if we beat back proposition 8, it will be a profound moment for the LGBTQ civil rights movement. There will be three states in which same-sex marriage is possible, and three states in which courts have ruled that civil unions are not equal to marriage. There will be a major victory in preventing efforts to limit our equal rights.

You can contribute to Equality California to protect marriage equality (and see their latest ad, made possible with donations) or contribute to No on 8.

I'm a one-issue blogger this week, it seems. But it's hard to think about writing about much else when I think about California voters choosing whether to strip families like mine of legal protection. It's hard to think about writing about much else when I consider how it just feels safer to raise my own child in a world where marriage equality is spreading.

Write to Marry

2008-10-24T11:43:00.005-04:00

If you liked that last post, please join in the efforts to fight Proposition 8 (and other efforts to take away the rights that same sex couples have to marry). If we lose the marriage rights in California, it will be a major setback in the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Please join me in blogging about marriage on October 29. It'll be Write to Marry Day. Thanks to Mombian for organizing it--but thanks in advance to those of you who will contribute for it.

Why Vote No on Proposition 8

2008-10-18T14:46:00.008-04:00

Updated to add: When I wrote this earlier today, I didn't know about 8 Against 8, an effort by 8 very cool bloggers to raise money ($8000) and awareness about Proposition 8. Hat tip to Robin for her post, and good going to Hahn at Home, Grace the Spot, Sugarbutch Chronicles, Pam’s House Blend, The Lesbian Lifestyle,Dorothy Surrenders, A Girl Called Automatic Win, and Lesbiatopia for getting this project going. 8 Against 8 donations support Equality California ; Lesbian Dad's donation site supports No on 8. Both are fine organizations doing very good work with the funds they are getting, which are being used to fund advertisements.

Proposition 8 is a California initiative that would eliminate the rights of California's same-sex couples to marry. As the most excellent No on 8 site explains, Proposition 8 is unnecessary,unfair, and just plain wrong. Lesbians and gays want to get married for the same sorts of reasons that straight people want to get married: we want to make a commitment to our partners; we want to assert our family status; we want our families to be protected in the event of tragedy. (Politica would also say that we want the courts to help us navigate divorce, but that's a pretty socially untenable argument, so we don't make that it public. But it is true, that a major benefit of marriage is access to divorce courts if you need them. Politica's scholarship is full of stories of gays and lesbians behaving badly in cases where divorcing straight people would have had much better access to courts that recognized our family structures. It's not happy reading. And then there are cases like Sharon Kowalski's and Lisa Pond's, where families or hospitals refuse to recognize existing family relationships in a time of medical crisis. Marriage matters.)

Here's a touching no-on-8 ad with lots of lovely photos of lgb families. The photos tell it all: lgb families just aren't that different from single parent families or straight families or blended families (and in fact, lgb families are all those things, sometimes, too). We love, we fight, we cook, we clean, we travel, we work, we snooze. We have big families, small families, and families in between. We eat meat, we're vegetarians, we participate in religious communities, or not. We live in the country and in the city. In the United States, we enjoy far more legal protections than at any other point in our history, but Proposition 8 could be a major setback to the marriage movement. If you're in California, today is the last day to register to vote. I've referred readers to Lesbian Dad's most excellent posts on Prop 8 before: her readers have done a great job pitching in, and she thanked them. I know at least one person got there via here, and I thank you, too. If you want to join the efforts to fight Proposition 8, you can donate via Lesbian Dad's site. If you're in California, you can volunteer in other ways, too.

One other thing lesbian families do: get ready for Halloween and write to distant friends--this goes to the son of Historian Friend (whose pseudonym doesn't feel quite right, but Messy Friend will do for now, as CG told him in a recent note, "I like when we play and get messy."):

Dear Messy Friend,
I hope you hav a fun halaw
en. I wnt to
no wat you
are be for hlowe
ne. I love
you Curious Girl
I will be tigr for hlowen

I hope all of you reading this have a fun halawen too: may it be a season of fun, but also a season of political power. This is an important era for gay civil rights. Use the power you have to protect what we have now, and increase it for the sake of all our children.

Early Morning News (and a translation for she who will help read the postcard when it arrives)

2008-10-17T08:20:00.003-04:00

Today's postcard is going out to Young Friend, the youngest child of Friend In Need of Pseudonym. It appears to read: Hi YOung Friend, I MiSS YOU. I BiG GOing To SCHL. I EM OLDR THiG YOU. Curious Girl. Had I a scanner I could more easily capture the layout--the lines slope down on the card, and the THig is right next to SCHL.

For those used to reading more conventional spelling: the two middle sentences are "I been going to school" (after I prompted her, "Tell him something you've been doing lately.") and then "I am older than you" (after she said, "It was his birthday. Is he 5?" and we talked about how no, he is 6 now, but her birthday came first so she is older.")

What passes for news in your houses this morning?

Cool political movies

2008-10-14T20:03:00.002-04:00

My youtube picks for this evening:

First, for those who are looking to understand the current financial crisis, let the wit and narrative explicative talents of Rachel, Els, Arwen, and Liz draw you into Richer Than God. ( funny, too, is the list of videos you tube will suggest at the end--a rather motley collection that gets increasingly tangentially related as it goes on). This will also get you saying ooblyboobillion over and over, enjoying the feel of the sounds on your lips.
Then, particularly if you're a musical theatre fan and Obama supporter, Les Misbarack (thanks to Shelli for the link)
And let Les Misbarack lead you to "Can You Hear the People Sing?"

Happies

2008-10-13T21:34:00.002-04:00

Something old, something new
One of Curious Girl's former teachers holds Fabulous Friday as a way to make a little extra money. For $20 or $25, she hosts a small group of kids at her house on a Friday night, from 5-9 or 6-10, feeds them dinner, has fun activities, and a movie. Her 11 year old daughter helps out, and the kids just love it. Curious Girl had the idea to have Fablious (as she calls it) Friday here, but we decided that Super Saturday would be better. So a week ago, we hosted our first Super Saturday. CG invited 5 friends, and had loads of fun getting things ready. Preparations involved random recollections of Fabulous Fridays past, the better to outline the very precise outline of the evening (parental preparations thus involved gentle encouragement about the need to invite friends and let them play). We decided on a craft (painting pumpkins), we decided on activities (playing in the park next door, having a scavenger hunt), we shopped for scavenger hunt prizes (criteria: cheap but not useless: I found some Halloween coloring books, headbands, and pencils at the dollar store).

The kids arrived and immediately started playing in our yard. A couple of parents hung out for a bit, and our neighbor brought over some slices of cake for dessert. CG wanted to serve sandwiches for dinner (PB &/or J, or grilled cheese; some kids opted for yogurt and sliced cheese instead). Politica and another parent took the kids to the park while I got the sandwiches and salad, and fruit prepped). The kids had fun decorating pumpkins with the paints and glitter and yarn. After dinner, we got out flashlights--CG insisted that the scavenger hunt have an outdoor, in the dark, component--and the scavenger hunt was a big hit.

Later that night, CG's former teacher called to see how the evening had gone. I loved having a group of kids over, without the added stresses of a birthday party. One friend asked Politica, "Does Curious Girl do this every Saturday?" and yesterday, after soccer, another guest was telling me his ideas for crafts for the next Super Saturday (not sure how well this would go over: the suggestion was to paint rotten baseballs!). CG was just bursting with pride about being a hostess ("I'll go out in the yard with First Arriving Guest, Mama, and then you can meet the other friends and send them back to me." Later on, she jumped up: "Mama, remember I said I'd help you serve water!")

We watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" after dinner (on blankets, with pillows and popcorn), and all in all it was a lovely night. I like being a family of three, but I love having the house full of kids. I am enjoying watching the friendships CG is forming now. But I missed her good friends from Old Hometown: I kept thinking how much fun it would be to have Historian Friend and Friend Who Needs a Pseudonym's kids over. I went to bed feeling both hopeful and nostalgic, thinking about old friends, seeing possibilities for new friends here.

And with a lovely abstractly painted pumpkin on the back porch table.

All hands on deck
I had the chance to meet up with Reverend Dr. Mom and BabyJ and her mother, which was super fun. You can see the hand photo we took on their blogs--proof that my girl is growing big! I can't believe how large her little hand is.

We had coffee and popcorn sitting at an outside cafe, and when a friend of Rev. Dr. Mom's walked by and said hello, we realized that the friend is also a friend of someone I know professionally. Small world. The friend asked us how we all happened to have met, and we all looked at each other, with a "ok, who's got a good story that doesn't involve spilling the beans about our pseudonymous blogs" sort of look. I said, "Oh, we have mutual friends," which is true. Curious Girl and Baby J got on famously--turns out Baby J loves to play peekaboo and clap, and Curious Girl was very encouraging of Baby J's clapping progress.

Moving is pretty disorienting, but a bloggy meet up was another reminder that this new place is a new source of friendships.

We're going to try hosting Super Saturday once a month. Next week, we're having dinner with a friend of Friend Who Needs a Psuedonym. Another friend has proposed that we trade babysitting monthly, so each set of parents can get a date every other month. We're creating new social routines here, and that feels good. The leaves may be falling off the trees, but I'm starting to feel a new beginning here. It's good.

Doing Good

2008-10-09T12:23:00.005-04:00

Three good things one might do today, if one were able and inclined:

become an organ donor, if you're not already. Shareyourlife.org has links to organ donation information in the United States, and you can get more information about organ donation at http://www.organdonor.gov/myths_and_facts.htm
donate blood, if you can. (the one time I tried to donate blood, I fainted, and woke up to a Red Cross worker looming over my bed saying "don't ever try this again." Not very inspiring.) But Annika is using a lot of blood today, and lots of other people need it, too.
help fight Proposition 8 in California. The No on 8 campaign is fighting to keep marriage rights for all Californians, straight and gay. The opposition forces (largely funded by the Mormon church) are outpacing our side on fundraising 3:2, and the proposition seems to be gaining in the polls. I just contributed via Lesbian Dad's excellent fundraising post. If you're in a position to help protect marriage rights for all of us, please do. If this proposition passes in California, it's likely to lead rollbacks in marriage rights elsewhere. One of the reasons Politica and I moved here to Germany is the better legal protections afforded our family. I'm still hoping for a legal wedding in our lifetime--and a legal wedding sure would protect Curious Girl more strongly, too. Please help if you can.

And thanks for reading my last post: readers help make writers, and knowing you're reading is encouraging.

One Year, Over Three

2008-10-08T23:04:00.004-04:00

This is the 366th post in this space, which strikes me as a kind of blogiversary: that's a year's worth of posts, at the rate of one a day, which would be three times as fast as I actually wrote them. I've been reading some interesting posts about whether blogging has moved past its moment. My selfish reaction to those posts was to worry a bit about the fact that my own posting has slowed, fearing that I'd stopped posting and accidentally missed the end of blogging as we know it (rather like I seem to have missed the Last Time Curious Girl Got in the Beloved Sling).

I started blogging because I wanted to write posts like the ones I enjoyed reading. My bullet lists of late notwithstanding, I like blogging little mini-essays. I love the beautiful writing I see in other people's blogs, and I wanted an outlet for that kind of writing. I also loved the interaction--thank you so much for reading and commenting! The academic work I do involves surprisingly little interaction. Articles or manuscripts get reader reviews, and conference papers get responses, but published articles get oddly little conversation going, and it's not nearly so immediate. So I love the immediacy of blogging. I also love the freedom to write, the ability to write about some academic issues, some adoption issues, some food issues, whatever.

I didn't think this blog was rooted in a place, but since we've moved to Germany, I've found it hard to blog. And found it hard to do lots of other things, too (like find the darn second set of car keys, although I have found my other recipe binder, although not before I had to search out a substitute rollout cookie recipe which turned out to be fabulous.) As I said in the last post, and many of you kindly commented, moving is hard. It's lonely, sometimes, and I've been struggling with that loneliness at work in particular. On the whole, although I loved being department chair, I'm seeing now how much time it took up each week. I get so much less e-mail now, and there are so many fewer people stopping by my office on any given day. I'm glad to have that time back, but I've not always been using it well.

Tonight I realized, though, that the time is now mine, and I need to start using it. I need to write, and let the ideas flow from the words. So this is my new year's aspiration: to use my time, and to write words.

All of which is a rather navelgazing return to posting without lists, but it puts my aspiration on record. I don't know why moving has seemed to freeze parts of my brain, but this post is an effort to start the thawing process.

Plenty of things here, I should add, are working just great. I've been reading once a week in Curious Girl's kindergarten class, which is a hoot. I'm biking to work, and loving that. It feels good to live here (even with a frozen brain!). I don't mean to sound all gloomy and stressed out about the move--on the whole, it's been a good move. I've gotten a lot done at work, too, and have written my fair share of memos and e-mails to move my new program along. But I've got to get beyond this sense of frustration about ideas that don't quite get articulated. And somehow, a navelgazing blog post seems like the first step in the right direction.

And on another topic: many people reading here are also readers of Moreena. Annika is having her third liver transplant tonight, and Moreena is updating her blog this evening. Fingers and toes crossed, and much love going out to all the Tiedes.

Losing my mind, finding a place

2008-09-22T21:05:00.003-04:00

Moving is hard. No matter how much organizing happens while packing, things don't end up in the right places in the new house. The rooms in the new house don't match the rooms in the old house, and we still haven't quite figured out where to put everything. We've made the strategic decision to spend a lot of time out of doors while the weather is good (figuring there's plenty of time to unpack the basement boxes when the weather gets cold). But that means we're living with a level of disorganization in the house that doesn't always feel easy. Politica and I are both coming home from work just bone tired, and that makes it hard to do what needs doing around the house--although I should say that Politica has continued to do a prodigious amount of painting.

************************

Some days, I think that my brain has ended up in a box that we haven't yet unpacked. That's one of the reasons for the bloggy break here: I keep looking at things, thinking "Oh, I could blog about that," and then I can't get the energy to get a thought developed. This too shall pass, yes?

**************************

Things lost, which have to turn up eventually:

car keys (the second set to each car, packed in a Very Safe Place that is apparently so safe I can't find it to unpack it
a silk screened long sleeved tee I bought Curious Girl at the Gorgeous College Town Farmers' Market, which has to have ended up in some odd place in the house or car
a binder of recipes, which must be in some box in the basement that is not labeled "kitchen" very clearly

Things I miss about my old job:

office staff. It's taking forever to get the staff search organized here, and there's a heck of a lot I don't know that a good staff person will know (or will know how to find out).
a hallway full of colleagues. My new space is a little remote, for now.
good tech support. New U has a somewhat slow process for handling technical questions, although I'm happy to have my new space located right next to the office that handles faculty technology/teaching questions. That will be a great partner for me, and it sure is nice to just bring my laptop over and get help with some things (if not some of the other things the Slow Central IT Office has to handle).
a computer on my desk. One is coming, but it's not here yet.

Things I like about my new job:

very cool new renovated space. this is the nicest office I'll ever have, most likely. My chair office had floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, which was cool, and a stunning view of downtown at night, but this office is all new, freshly painted, with brand new furniture! Very nice.
recycling. New U is way into environmental issues. We can recycle virtually everything on campus. In fact, here in Germany recycling is mandatory, and the program is so broad and easy. I'm amazed at how much less trash we're producing.
the view. My office doesn't have a view to speak of, but once I"m outside there are lovely views of lake and mountains.
the student culture. New U has a much younger student body and they are all busy organizing themselves with lots of public rallies and informational tables and activities. There is something profoundly unnatural about this many same aged people all together, but there's an energy to it that I'm really enjoying.
Wellness programs. The university wellness programs for staff and faculty are interesting--there's a masseuse who can be scheduled for massages in your office (which you pay for, but sometimes departments schedule her for the day to be available in the building). There's a program that will pay me $15 in credits (at the coop, or a bookstore, or a movie chain) for walking to work or biking to work 3 days a week for 4 weeks. This is a health-minded place.

*********************

I keep thinking to write a post about CG and kindergarten, or the feel of this place, or the feel of the house....but somehow, between the brain-in-the-box and the last stages of unpacking, the prose isn't flowing so well. That will change, too--but apparently, not tonight.

Mama PhD

2008-08-26T21:35:00.003-04:00

Two scenes from new faculty orientation:

An invitation to network
The administrator-in-charge introduced two men, fourth year professors, who explained that they'd realized it was easy to work at New U for several years and not meet anyone outside their department. They had decided to do something about this, and invited everyone to join them for drinks on the first Friday of every month, at a nice local pub. They were enthusiastic, and I admired their generosity in thinking to visit the new faculty (even as I thought that Friday afternoons aren't the best time for me to head out on a quasi-social, quasi-work event: Friday afternoons are kid time (often mood-management time) around here. "It's Friday afternoon, so it's a good time to meet colleagues in other departments, " one said. "And if you have kids," the other added, "it's a good time to get away from them."

Assuming you have someone to take care of them, I immediately thought.

Question about support
Later on, there was a panel discussion addressing "what I wish I'd know then that I know now." Several people who'd been at New U for 5-15 years offered various pieces of advice: about dealing with weather, about time management, about university bureacracy, about where to eat well on campus. In the Q&A, one of the new women faculty asked whether there were resources for faculty with young children who aren't yet in school. "Great question," one panelist said. "There's a university child care center, and efforts to expand it and create more flexible hours are underway. Child care has been at the top of the list of the faculty women's association for years now."

It was fitting that these scenes occurred the day I was due to review (for Mother Talk) Mama PhD , a collection of 35 essays about motherood and academia, edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant. Divided into sections addressing questions about whether to have children or not, or when to have children in an academic career; tensions and joys in the juggling of motherhood and academic jobs; experiences after leaving academia; and visions of the future, the collection is a smart, funny-sad-crazy making-amazing-wonderful set of pieces that had me nodding as I read. The authors come from a variety of fields, and a range of institutions. This collection is well-worth reading for anyone considering an academic career, and also for any administrator mentoring faculty.

Mama PhD won't surprise anyone who's a reader of academic blogs. After all, there are lots of outlets these days for reading good personal writing on motherhood and academia, and I wondered whether I'd find the essays redundant or compelling. They were definitely compelling, though. I read quickly, learning about the different ways institutions create barriers for mothers advancing in their careers, or make it easier for those with children to advance. These are eloquent accounts of what choices women have made to accommodate their kids and careers.

Academia is both the perfect place to be a working mother and a horrible place to be a working mother. I liked the way the essays examined both sides of this: for every story about unsupportive colleagues or chairs there's one about the ways mentors and friends eased the way. The contributions by women who had children in graduate school, too, opened my eyes to another dimension of academic parenting issues. It's the specifics of the stories that are so illuminating, and it's the stories that need to be shared. On any campus, it's easy for challenges of combining motherhood and academic work to be pushed under the rug. No one wants to admit to failure, after all, and we PhDs are the people who were good at school. It's easy to look at other people and assume they have the work/life balance thing perfectly honed. The contributors here show that nobody has it down pat. It's all too complicated. Whether we opt for tenure-line positions or untenureable positions; full time academic work, part-time academic work, nonacademic work, or staying home with children, the relationship between feeding the intellectual drive that led to the PhD and tending to the emotional relationships within the family just isn't easy. Every day is a work in progress, and every day opens up moments when we might feel that one part of our lives gets short shrift compared to another. Reading Mama PhD is a reminder that we needn't be alone in navigating those issues.

I bet my new colleagues have no idea at all how the idea of a Friday afternoon networking/friend-making session at a pub just isn't easy for a mother with young kids at home. And I bet the administrator who planned our orientation session never considered having a set of speakers talk about how they juggled their kids and their career. But New U might be an even better place to work if the people charged with welcoming new faculty took it as an institutional problem, not just a personal problem. And that's the conclusion you'll come to about whatever college or university is in your life after you read Mama PhD.

Random Sets of Two, Illustrating that Things are Coming Along, however slowly

2008-08-23T21:04:00.004-04:00

Two ways to tell we are not in Former State anymore: the local NPR station won the "best radio station" vote in the alternative weekly annual "best of..." poll; there was tofu, samosas, and felafel at the local fair (along with various permutations of fried dough that are the same the country over)
Two things I am happy to have working in the house: the stove and the washer
Two things we don't yet have: a shower that really works, and a dryer
Two things I'm happy for: drying clothes in the sun, and gorgeous geography
Two sports Curious Girl has played at since we've arrived in Germany: triathlon (the course designed in collaboration with our 4, 6, and 7 year old neighbors) and roller blading
Two things I'm envious of already: the enormous backyard of some friends (who host a Friday night marshmallow roast in the summer, now that their backyard-overlooking-the-quarry has a fire pit and amazing play structure all done); the 1920s era woodwork of other houses.
Two things I like about our not-full-of-character house: the weird glass enclosed entryway, which is an awesome place to grow plants, and the bathtub in the hall bathroom, which is long enough for me to stretch my legs out in
Two things I am hoping for: my work brain will re-emerge from whatever box I left it in, and the boxes will somehow get unpacked.
Two more things I am hoping for: time to write (school will start, which has to improve things), and time/space to cook.

Bonus adorableness: CG had a nosebleed around 4:00 this morning, and I sat up with her for about half an hour cleaning it up and helping get it stopped. Once the bleeding slowed, I had her just sit holding a tissue up her nose while we both started to doze a bit. She was muttering to herself, and I asked her what she was saying. "I'm just teaching my tissue a little Russian."

If She Could Read More, She'd Like Her Pseudonym

2008-08-08T01:06:00.002-04:00

more substantive blogging will return someday, when I have better net access and fewer boxes. But for now, lists and posts about my kid seem like the thing to do.

The time: 5:40 a.m.
The place: Curious Girl's bedroom, where I have moved after she came into my bedroom to find out whether it was time to wake up. I have suggested, strongly, that it is time to go back to sleep, and CG has made a short effort to snuggle and rest.

Curious Girl: Mama, I am awake. I want to wake up.
Me: CG, it's early, way early. It is too early to wake up. You were up late last night, and you need more sleep. Let's go back to sleep.
CG: But Mama, we are new here. I am curious about Germany! I am a curious girl. I want to wake up.

Settling In

2008-08-06T20:42:00.003-04:00

We have arrived in Germany. Curious Girl refers to all the children on the block as "my friends," even if she's not met them yet.
Tonight, a family we'd met the previous night on their evening walk stopped by to see if CG could play. We all walked to the park together for a few minutes of playtime, and the girls were busy making plans for an all-day play date tomorrow. We parents suggested they enjoy the little play date they were actually having and New Friend turned around and said, "But we just met and when you just meet someone you want to have playdates all the time!"
We now have rules about the use of an ocarina in the car.
The previous owners left behind a soccer ball. CG is way into the soccer ball, and we play soccer multiple times a day. We have a running game going now where she is the leader of the Red Team, and the Red Team is playing the Yellow Team. To get her into pjs tonight, I had to ask her, as team leader, to organize everyone getting into sleeping uniforms. She hopped to it.
Nothing in this house works right, unless it's been updated by Politica and the crack team of workers she's had at the house.
Politica totally, completely, utterly rocks. She has been working long days, overseeing tons of construction, and it looks awesome. CG's room is a thing of whimsical beauty, the new floors throughout the house are stunning, and her color choices on paint are great. I can't imagine how she has gotten so much done in so little time.
After about 5 minutes of driving here in Germany with CG (who had popped into some game with the ocarina, I think playing school so that she could explain what different whistle sounds represented in the school day), Politica looked at me and said, "how did you do that?" Clearly, we divided tasks well here, as spending three driving days with Little Miss Imagination was no big deal for me (although trust me, I'm happy to be out of the car).
I need to go unpack some more.
It is great to be back with Politica, who totally needs a splendid vacation.

Wonder and Mystery

2008-08-02T07:10:00.004-04:00

We're here in Gorgeous College Town. Curious Girl, chatty in the early morning, asks if enchanted is a bad word. No, I say, it means magical, and there could be scary magic or good magic. Oh, she tells me. "I was thinking about The Enchanted Garden and I didn't know what enchanted meant. From the story." Not quite sure what story she was thinking about, but it tickled me that she was laying there pondering vocabulary.

Onto the next subject: weather. "Is it summer here?" Why, yes. "Is it summer everywhere in the world?" No, just in the northern hemisphere. When it's summer here, it's winter in Australia and South Africa and other countries on the bottom part of the globe (with apologies to alternative map makers everywhere, she gets top/bottom better than north/south right now). "But it's summer in Where We Used to Live now." That's right, it's summer everywhere in the United States. "We are still in the United States? We are? Yay!!!!"

And she bounded happily up the stairs to find Historian Friend and kids (who clearly need pseudonyms!). Leaving me to sit here in bed and marvel at how kids make their way through the world so well, when clearly there are so very many ideas that make so little sense to them. I mean, can you imagine getting ready to move and not being sure whether you were switching countries or not (which for CG, is also all about what language people speak, which makes renewed sense of a series of questions about what words people use to say hello in Germany."

The Best Years of Our Lives

2008-07-31T22:16:00.004-04:00

Notes from the road, written after our first day (blogger locked me out of the blog last night and I couldn't post these then):

OK, this was only a day, and it only occasionally felt like a year, but I lost count of how many times Curious Girl and I listened to "The Best Years..." from the Shrek soundtrack. I figured if she was happy, I was happy. And we were both happy. Shrek had some darn fine driving music.
CG does have an ability to entertain herself. We didn't even play music for the first 2 hours of the drive--she was very busy talking to the cats, singing to herself, and doing Important Things on her Dora the Explorer lap desk I found at a used bookstore.
The trip was really lots of fun, except for the last 20 minutes of whiny wondering if we were at the hotel yet, and the 20 minutes of tears associated with The Tragic Accident of Beloved Baby Blankie. She made a tiny cut in the blanket when she was cutting strips of paper. I think it's repairable.
CG gave the cats awards (foam stickers on their cat carriers) because they were so good in the car. She also made up a game involving stickers and points for spotting cars ("Mama! look on the other side of the road. There are a lot of cars there. I know you can find a red one. You can!"). Keeping track of my points, stickers, and eligibility for prizes she was designing took up a lot of time back there in the rear of the car.
Really, it was the valium. I shudder to think what the drive would be like without the cats on valium. The cats are now taking up most of the king-sized bed in our hotel room (this sociability also due to the 1/2 dose of valium I gave them earlier this evening).
I had to adjudicate one argument between Curious Girl and Baby Sis, but eventually, Baby Sis helped CG with her coloring homework and all was fine. At the hotel, I met Belle in the elevator, and we magically got transported to Belle's castle to sleep. CG never goes anywhere without imagination.
We went swimming in the hotel pool when we got here. There was a little girl watching us swim, and she exclaimed to CG, "You are a beautiful mermaid! I know you are! You're a mermaid!" CG is quite delightful in water, it is true.
We at lunch at the Restaurant of Ronald McD. I told CG she designate one day of our trip for such a meal, and she was pretty darn happy about it. (me, I realized that eating a fil3t o' f!sh sandwich once every 20 years is too frequent.) But for dinner, she picked Japanese, and we had sushi and udon soup.
All our stuff is on the truck. Actually two trucks, as the ridiculously large truck the movers brought didn't hold all our stuff. And this after we have downsized! Ridiculous.
Younger cat is seriously picking on Elder (Very Aged) Cat. That is no fun.
At the dinner restaurant, there was a fountain. CG wanted a penny, but all I had were quarters, and I didn't want to sacrifice quarters for the fountain. "Have an imaginary penny," I said. She demurred, and I sadly thought that reality was crashing her fantasy world. "I can throw it?" she asked, though, reconsidering. "Imaginary pennies can make real wishes. Take this imaginary penny and throw it." Off she went, and came back somewhat outraged: "I made a wish and it didn't come!" What had she wished for? "I wished for Mommy to be here, and she didn't come!" I said wishes don't always come true right away, but we'll see Mommy soon. Just a few more days.

Now I'm visiting friends, and will take the weekend to relax and let CG get some energy out (while Politica toils on the new house, which is getting our stuff delivered in the morning. yikes!)

Randomness

2008-07-30T11:34:00.006-04:00

45 boxes of books have the movers thinking our shipment will be overweight
Overhead last night: "If you put your finger up your nose, you have to wash your hands before you touch the baby."
Also overheard last night: "I think it will be fun to meet new people."
The driver told me that reverends have the most books of anyone he moves. Reverends also have the lousiest furniture, he says, but that's OK because they don't seem to care about their furniture. But they do love their books. Songbird and Rev. Dr. Mom, any comments on that score?
Curious Girl is registered for kindergarten. Her teacher's name is kind of fancy. And our new street address is on Ornamental Tree Variety Terrace. When I told her the teacher's name, she said, "Oooh, fancy! I guess Germany likes fancy words. Maybe Fancy Nancy lives there."
I have about 60 thank you notes to write, which are clearly not getting written before I move.
I just drafted the last report I need to write.
The house looks a lot bigger with stuff moving out. As the movers take things, I'm discovering little chocolate easter eggs. A colleage had given me a bag for Curious Girl, and she found them and organized an easter egg hunt the other morning. We repeatedly divided them, hid them, and then searched for each others' eggs. Except she kept forgetting how many she had hid. Which is handy, because I'm a little hungry.
Curious Girl and Neighbor Girl have opened a lemonade stand. Lemonade is free to movers, but they wanted $10 from me. I gave them .30 each, and they said OK. CG has been dying to have a lemonade stand, so I'm glad she's having one today.
I'm having dinner with Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin tonight. I don't want to say good bye. I have really, really good friends here, and I am really, really going to miss them. I wish I could be more eloquent on this point, but I can't. This part sucks. At least we get to visit Historian Friend on the way to Germany (she's usually here, but is somewhere on the way, with her kids. Yay!)
But I do want to get on with all this. At breakfast, CG said, "Yay! we're moving tomorrow!" It feels good, now, just to be getting on with it.
Politica and contractors are making great strides on the house, which is getting nicer by the hour. I'm very proud of Politica for handling the house on her own.
Let's hope valium-laced kitties are happy travelers.
Elswhere is moving now, too. Let's hope we all have good moving karma.

Posts for the Days to Come

2008-07-23T19:45:00.002-04:00

We are really, truly moving. Politica is on the road; Curious Girl and I will be setting off in a week, taking the slow road to Germany. I'm running down the list of things to do before we go, and blogging all kinds of things in my head. As most of you probably can't read my mind, here's a glimpse at the mental blogging chez Granola:

Jesus and the Jonas Brothers: a post about all the things CG is learning out there in the world with little help from me
The Long Goodbye: what it's like to leave a place you've lived a while, with links back to a post by Elswhere in which she links to this amazing moving video of someone saying goodbye to his New York neighborhood.
My Vulcan Resonator: a post about children, anger, and parental feelings. Musings and questions about how to be angry with a kid, how to help kids deal with anger, and what's the next best thing to the cone of silence when your kid is itching for a fight.
Marriage Matters, and Lambda Legal is a wonderful organization. In June, Lambda filed suit on behalf of a woman whose partner collapsed on a cruise ship in Miami; at the hospital, she and their children were kept from their partner/mother for more than 8 hours, and after she died, both the county and state refused to release the death certificate to the family (despite the immediate faxing of the health care proxy).

Working, Mothering, and Success

2008-07-17T21:53:00.004-04:00

Those of you who enjoyed Curious Girl's last observation about what makes a good department chair might be interested in this conversation, which took place in the family bathroom at the pool:

Curious Girl: I don't like this bathroom (gesturing at puddle on floor and various stray pieces of toilet paper, the kind that always appear in pool bathrooms on busy summer days). It's too litter-y.
Me: Well, lots of people are here today, and it's hard to keep a bathroom clean when so many people are using it. (I notice she's done with her business.) Here, dry your hands before you pull down the toilet paper--that way it won't shred in your hands like it did last time.
Curious Girl: Mama, that is such a good idea you had! What a good idea! That is because you are an apartment chair. You are right about everything. You are right all the time, because you are an apartment chair.
Me: Actually, sweetie, I'm not right all the time. I make mistakes. I just try to learn from them and do better next time.
CG: You are the best apartment chair!

So what does make a good department chair? It's certainly not the ability to be right all the time! I've spent some time this summer doing some hard writing--a few documents that had to be written regarding some issues that some of us didn't handle very well (in some cases, that us is me; in other cases, that us is other people; in some cases, the us is a combination of me and other people). The documents I've written are all different (not to mention unbloggable in their specificity), but all attempt to look ahead and imagine ways that similar future situations might be handled with different effects. One reason I am a good chair, I think, is my ability to step back from situations (even those where I'm part of a mess up) and imagine ways they could play out differently. Good chairs need to be able to see administrative and personnel possibilities, thinking about different ways to move groups toward a goal. Good chairs need to advocate for their department and their colleagues--which means sometimes, pushing people, and other times, getting out of the way.

It certainly doesn't mean being right all the time, but I trust it's OK that I'm rather tickled at the impression Curious Girl has developed about my acumen. And it's true, a good apartment chair does have the opportunity to introduce little tweaks to the system that just might keep things from shredding during use. Not such a bad outcome for a day.

Yo, Yo!

2008-07-03T22:32:00.003-04:00

Early in her pregnancy, when Ianqui was thinking about a nom-de-blog for her baby, she saw a news item about yo evolving as a gender-neutral pronoun. It became the perfect blogname for the baby, and when she announced it, I thought, a) “how cool! bookmark that news item for future teaching use” and b) “Yo, Yo!” would be a great name for a blog post. Great title, but what to follow it? Recommendations for good children’s music (starting with Dan Zanes’ Family Dance, which contains “Yo Yo, Sweet Yo Yo”) or good books (starting with Chris Raschka’s Yo! Yes! and Ring! Yo! leading into Irene Smalls' Don’t Say Ain’t, the beginning of a list of kids’ books that are about language)? I couldn’t get those ideas to go anywhere…but I realized that the best baby shower game I’ve ever played is a great way to welcome Yo, and it’s in keeping with the title-in-search-of-content and Ianqui's carbon-footprint-reducing ethos (a game that generates no stuff!). Now that Yo has arrived, it’s a fine day to teach you all the best baby shower game ever—and Ianqui and Super G can pass the results on to Yo whenever they want. There are already tons of happy comments over at Ianqui's own posts on the subject, and I suppose Ianqui won't be blog-reading quite so frequently. But some of you might want to play along here, and I trust Ianqui won't mind an uninvited burst of bloggy enthusiasm for her wee one.

I learned this game when Uncle Quiet and Tante Mississippi were expecting Curly Haired Cousin, and their department threw a shower, so it has especially sweet memories for me. We also played it at Historian Friend’s shower. In real life, you’d use index cards, one for each guest, numbered 1 to however many you need for everyone present. On this post, we can just use the order of comments. All you have to do is tell a memory from your life from the age on your card/comment position (or something about what your world was like, if you don't remember anything from that year) and then make a wish for Yo for when Yo turns that age (so if you have card #7, or are commenter #7 on this post, you’d tell a memory from when you were 7, and offer a wish for Yo for when Yo is 7). I’ll do age one in the first comment, and anyone else who wants to join in can just do two, three, four, whatever. This is a cool way to learn a little more about other people; it’s interesting to see what different childhoods were like and what kinds of different wishes people offer, corresponding to different ages.

So Yo, Yo! Some wishes for you to soak up are in the comments. Welcome to the world.

A Good Chard Recipe

2008-06-28T16:43:00.004-04:00

Wondering what to do with all the chard you might be seeing at the farmers' market? Wonder no more! A while back, Ianqui turned me on to Jack Bishop's cookbook A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, which is a great, seasonal, everyday cookbook. Here's his recipe, more or less, for sauteed greens over a white bean puree:

Heat oil in deep pan, and then throw in 2 thinly sliced onions. Cook until the onions are tender. Add 4 garlic cloves (I used less, as that's all I had on hand), and cook 1 minute. Add chard and some salt (he says 2 1/2 lbs of chard--I have no idea how much the bunch I had on hand weighed, to be honest--it looked small, so I had only used 1 onion; wash the chard before you chop it, and discard the stem and thick part of the rib). Cook until the chard is wilted, about 5 minutes (he says to cover and cook, but I didn't notice that part until I started typing here. oops.) Taste, and add salt and pepper to taste. Once the greens are wilted, you can keep them in the pot for up to 10 minutes covered before serving. Or so he says. I kept them in the pot, covered, for half an hour while waiting for Politica to come home, and they were still pretty tasty.

Serve over white bean puree: Bring 1 1/3 cups vegetable broth to boil in a pot. Put the brother in a a blender or food processor, and puree with 3 15 oz. cans of white beans (rinsed and drained). (I tried doing it in the pot with my immersion blender and it didn't work too well--not enough liquid? Also, I had only 1 can of beans, so I cut back on the broth accordingly.) Heat 3 minced medium garlic cloves in 2 T oil, then add the bean puree to the skillet, stirring constantly (or as often as your child/pet/spouse/partner/house will permit, which in my case was far from constant). It will thicken up! Season with salt and pepper when it's at the consistency you want.

This was easy and yummy.

I'm off to visit my father tomorrow, back later in the week, no doubt with tales to tell! Happy cooking, one and all. (and happy Yo-ing to Ianqui, of course!)

Pizza (with a side of house)

2008-06-24T10:19:00.007-04:00

Woman of Many Talents was here last week, and we saw her briefly. She was on a business trip, attending lots of meetings involving people from various community, state, local, and federal agencies or organizations. You'll be shocked, I know, at her reports that so many agencies trying to cooperate to solve some complex problems were having a hard time. The agency she works for is a pretty high-up-the-bureacracy federal office, and she and her colleagues realized that it wouldn't do for them to be caught criticizing the ineptitude of some other federal agencies. So rather than discussing the poor decisions they witnessed, they would talk about pizza. It's a great code word for something you want to criticize without other people knowing what you mean.

We all went to the Post Office yesterday to get Curious Girl and my passports renewed (both parents need to sign a child's passport application form). The clerk reviewed our paperwork, and said, "I'll need her birth certificate." I pulled it from my wallet, noting that it was actually a delayed record of birth (which is the only thing our state issues for children born outside the US). This record has Politica's name in the father line and mine in the mother line. Politica's real name is pretty darn gendered. The clerk just looked at the document for the longest time, as though she needed to memorize every single piece of information on it. The document has all the same info as appears on a birth certificate, but it's a different size and color, and of course, some of CG's information may appear a little exotic, what with the female name on the father line and the far away in a city many have never heard of birthplace. The clerk never asked us anything, but she just stood here, turning the document over, feeling the raised stamp, reading and re-reading.

I turned to Politica and mouthed, "Pizza."

Politica thinks that she may never have seen evidence of a lesbian family before, and she just needed time to process the information before she could fulfill her legally-appointed duties with the passport application. She pointed to Politica's name on the certificate, and said, "Would this be you?" (even though she was holding Politica's driver's license at the time; easy to see that the names matched). She asked me for my license, and I said, "Here's my passport." It was already out on the counter. "I prefer the driver's license," she replied. I'm fixating on this as the most irritating part of the encounter. Parents need to prove their identity on the child's passport application, but the form lists several appropriate IDs, passports being one. But I passed her my license, since it never pays to upset a bureaucrat. Still, pizza.

Norway legalized same-sex marriage earlier this month. Eventually, the United States will, too. And eventually, legal institutions will be adept enough at recognizing the range of families that exist without leading to awkward moments that leave me muttering about pizza. We got CG's passport application mailed in, even with the clerk's odd reaction. She'll get her new passport, and we'll have plenty of happy travels, during which thoughts of this particular pizza probably won't cross our minds. But still: pizza, today.

****************

And the side of house: we reached an agreement with the seller yesterday on the inspection issues (she'll fix the small things like the slow drain and broken garbage disposal and give us cash back at closing for everything else we asked for). So we're just waiting on the appraisal now. So far, so good.

Update: so far, even better! The appraisal came through at higher than our sale price. Onward to the closing!

And my father continues to improve--thanks so much for all the good wishes, everyone.

The Updates, they keep coming

2008-06-22T08:00:00.002-04:00

Lists suit me at times like this
I can't tell you how relieved I am--and how comforted I am--to read the comments on my posts commenting on my own reactions to family events of late. Working out my guilty feelings about considering what I need to do for work and the move and considering the logistics of parental visits isn't easy, and it helps to read your reactions here.
One of my colleagues said, upon hearing about the surgery, "what are you doing here?" and that probably helped kick my guilty feelings into overdrive for a while.
We are still negotiating on House #2. We asked the seller to address 7 factors (a few relatively clear cut and likely not too expensive, like fixing the garbage disposal and getting the kitchen drain to work, but some others a little bigger, like properly grounding the house's electrical system and fixing the windows that are cracked, inoperable, or have lost their seal). The seller wanted to get estimates on the latter factors, and will have her response figured out by tonight. So Monday, all should be clear Her realtor told our realtor that we would likely be happy with the seller's response. She's already agreed to do the small things, and if she meets us in the middle on everything else, we're happy. In fact, even if she refused everything else we'll probably go ahead.
I like that I have a good realtor, dealing with another realtor, and a reasonable seller. House #1 sure was nice, but dealing with high maintenance FSBO sellers is stressful.
We had dinner last night with Historian Friend and her family. One of Curious Girl's latest stress relievers is to say that she is not moving, that she is going to live with Historian Friend (who she has taken to calling Mom, or Historian Mom). Over the past two years CG has gradually been asserting that she is Historian Kid's Big Sister, but this move to identify with a whole 'nother family sure is interesting. "When you move to Germany, tell my school that Curious Girl doesn't live here anymore. Tell them she moved to another family. But we'll come visit you every day!" she said.
Well, CG is up, so time to spring into breakfast/mothering action. Happy Sunday, all!

Success, so far!

2008-06-21T21:46:00.003-04:00

Dad's surgery went well: minor complication (in that the leg veins weren't suitable for the graft, so they used veins in the chest instead), but otherwise, things went great. My mom and sister saw him later and while he's heavily sedated, they did think he knew they were there. The nurses were all very encouraging.
I'm figuring out a little more of the odd family stresses: they're in the thick of it, getting tired from being at the hospital. So it makes sense that no one particularly wants to be on the phone very long with me (when I called my mom tonight, she basically said, "Dad is great, I'm exhausted, I need to eat dinner and sleep, I'll call you tomorrow.") In my normally chatty family, this sort of move is unusual. But it makes sense, and I remind myself not to take it personally.
My parents are deferring to my sister a lot, which makes sense. So all the substantive communication to me is running through my sister. This is good, as she retains a lot more of the medical stuff than my mother does (and really, anyone in the midst of a health crisis needs a helper to be the notetaker and rememberer). But my sister's also got a husband and kids there, and they get her primary loyalty--she's not mainly concerned with me and my needs/questions. She's not ignoring them, of course, but it's not her main priority. So it's a little weird, from my self-interested position, when the family dynamic shifts for a moment to put one child in the middle, when for 42 years the dynamic has been one of two equal kids with parents in the middle. this all makes sense, given the situation, but it's a weird adjustment.
Songbird's comment a post or two ago about the fact that the timing of any visit by me is likely not to feel quite right was so smart. (a blog benefit I'd never imagined: free and excellent pastoral advice!!) That started me thinking about all the ways in which I need to just see this situation as something that isn't going to feel right, all around. And I shouldn't take that personally.
And after all, there's a lot to be thankful for here. The surgery went well. And a few added insights into the family dynamic can't ever hurt.

Little Updates

2008-06-20T21:37:00.005-04:00

Dad's surgery was postponed today. Three emergencies kept his surgeons busy, and now it's probably going to be tomorrow morning (Saturday). I really appreciate all the kind words from readers and friends: thanks.

It's hard to be a far-away working daughter at a time like this. It's not easy for me to figure out what pressure I'm putting on myself, what stress is working out in weird ways in the family. I think I'll go back to my parents when my dad's out of the hospital, but I'm feeling a little guilty about not going sooner, for the surgery itself (which might be Monday, but then, my sister has a friend whose bypass got bumped off the schedule 4 times). My sister is right there with them, and I think it makes sense for me to go when I can help my mom when dad is home. But I feel a little guilty about waiting. And a little guilty about thinking about my own work and how to get it done in this period. This is an interesting variation on the parenting/work stuff I am much more familiar with balancing. Not sure I have much to say about it yet, but I'm pondering it.
For more wedding happy, head over to Lesbian Dad and read another account of the marriage scene in California that will just make you smile. And after a couple of days of worrying about my dad, I'm happy to relax with a post that makes me smile.

Work/Life Balance

2008-06-19T15:54:00.002-04:00

I'm at home today, working for an extra hour before we head to Friend Who Doesn't Want a Pseudonym's house for dinner. I found out today that my dad has serious coronary disease, and is going to have quadruple bypass surgery in the morning. This is a big surprise to all of us--Dad has had surprisingly few symptoms for a man whose heart is in the worst shape his surgeon has seen in quite some time--and I'm taking an extra hour before dinner to make progress on a paper that's seriously overdue. I want to get it done, first to just be done with it, and secondly, to allow myself easy travel out east to visit with my parents when my dad is out of the hospital (assuming all goes well tomorrow, knock wood, knock pixels.) Politica and Curious Girl are outside, giving me space to work. But the conversation that just transpired begs to be blogged, and begs to be remembered. So I'll write it here, and then get back to working.

Curious Girl: "Mama, what are you doing?"
Me: "I'm writing a paper."
CG: "What does it say? Who is it for?"
Me: "It's for other English teachers, to give them ideas about how to teach better."
CG: "That's a good idea. That's good, Mama."
CG: "You are the best! You are the best apartment chair."
CG: "Do you know why you're the best apartment chair?"
Me: "Sweetheart, that's really kind of you. Why am I the best apartment chair?"
CG: "Because you're a mother. Some other apartment chairs aren't mothers. But you are, so you're the best."

Maybe Lisa Belkin (against whom I competed in high school debate) should interview CG one of these days. And now, back to writing.

Two Thousand Words, and then some

2008-06-18T13:38:00.002-04:00

Two photostreams that have moved me to tears, for very different reasons:

Bilerico's California marriage slideshow. I'm just speechless, and while I"m not much of a cry-er, I'm getting a little teary again just writing this sentence and thinking about the photos. See for yourselves. (and for a wtf? moment, check out a Bilerico correspondent's report about what happened after a guitar playing member of the crowd collapsed. Those exchanges got left out of the mainstream media report. I hope the man is OK.)
The University of Iowa's News Service flickr photostream. I was impressed by the photos of volunteers working on the Iowa campus to move library books. I wonder how many academic projects are under water right now. I should note that at least one person who reads here is in Iowa. Boomerific got flooded out of her house in Cedar Rapids--she, Attic Man, and the Snapper are all well, and they will get by. She's not been posting much (what with the flood and all), but her last three posts are powerful.

30 minutes of legal gay marriages in CA, and the sky hasn't fallen yet

2008-06-16T20:26:00.002-04:00

For about half an hour now, gay couples have been marrying in California. Tenured Radical's post on the subject notes that the first gay couple married in San Fransisco will be Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. After 50 years together, they'll be honest women. I'm impatiently clicking on west coast newspaper sites looking for photographs. Several organizations are going to be photographing weddings--look for lots of good shots to be appearing at Bilerico as the week unfolds. Bil's post at Bilerico points to streaming video from San Francisco.

Politica is reading aloud from a newspaper article quoting the website of the W.e.s.t.boro B.a.p.t.i.s.t Church. The church members are planning to travel to California to protest, using bullhorns, to shout anti-gay slurs during wedding ceremonies.

I'm sitting here feeling giddy with anticipation of the news coverage of the weddings, though. For all that Politica and I viewed our original Quaker wedding as the one with the significance, and our Vermont civil union as a political gesture, I am so moved at the thought of government recognition of relationships like mine. So moved I can't even figure out a good way to wrap up this post, which I must end now to watch the video Politica just brought up on her computer.

The Last Books for Wednesdays

2008-06-13T16:00:00.000-04:00

Just to prove I can write about things other than houses.. here's the last of the lists of books I've read on Wednesdays this year in Curious Girl's class. (If you click on the "books fall open" tag, you can see the series of posts about books).

Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Wallandiner Hogan Bogan Logan Was Her Name, by Tedd Arnold. You can read this very silly book, or you can sing it (if you don’t remember the song from summer camp, music and some alternate lyrics appear at the back).
Fancy Nancy Bonjour Butterfly by Jane O'Connor. This is the 3rd (4th?) Fancy Nancy book, and this series is holding up well. Opulent (as Nancy would say!) illustrations lavish detail on each page, and the story of Nancy learning to overcome disappointment is a nice mix of happies and sads (as the girls decided after we read it).
The Seventeen Girls and the Two Teachers, by the lovely literate preschool ladies. A post about this will be forthcoming. I had a ball working on this group-authored/illustrated project.
The Day The Babies Crawled Away, by Peggy Rathmann. A lovely story about a big kid who saves the day when the babies get into trouble when the parents aren’t looking. The art is all done in silhouette, a very different style from her excellent other works (10 Minutes Till Bedtime or Goodnight Gorilla, for example). It is an awesome read-aloud.
Felicia's Favorite Story, by Leslea Newman. A beautifully illustrated story of a family with two moms and one daughter (born and adopted in Guatemala). When I was reading this one, and we got to the third page, where the picture of the second mom in the family appears, one girl said, "who's that?" and another said, "That girl has two moms just like Curious Girl!" Meanwhile, Curious Girl was at the back of the assembled group saying, "See, you can have two moms! People tell me you can't but it's in the book," which just kind of broke my heart while making me feel really proud, too, that she was asserting herself. We also had a small digression into why CG has two moms (short answer: because that's what our family has. Politica and I loved each other so much we wanted to be a family, so we got married, and then we wanted a child and Curious Girl came. That explanation works quite nicely for the preschool set.) (There's a whole other conversation here, about the fact that CG really has three moms and a dad, but I don't bring up the adoption angle with children who are curious about why our family has two mothers; I'm very conscious about keeping CG's first mother in a respectful place in my stories about our family, but I'm also conscious of the need to answer the question that kids are asking.)

Looking for some summer reading fun? Deesha's rocking post on princesses turned me onto a set of editions of fairytales that are on our summer list. And you must run, not walk, to your local library to check out Skippyjon Jones. It is one of the best read-aloud books ever! In fact, it won the EB White Read Aloud Award in 2004. I'd never heard of that award before but I'll be checking out some of its other winners and nominees.

Inspection

2008-06-13T15:09:00.003-04:00

A little house news: the inspection happened today, and we've gotten the summary by e-mail. It's a little discouraging, although I'm hoping that we'll rebound, as this house was feeling increasingly right for us. But the inspection report reminds us of all the reasons why Politica thought we'd never love th house: there are various hinges not working right, there are cracked windows, there are some rotting clapboards around the house, there are windows that don't open, and various other signs of a house that was not built incredibly sturdily in the first place and that hasn't been particularly well-maintained. We already knew we'd start redoing the bathrooms and kitchen appliances and flooring. The inspection report reveals problems with electricity (the biggest issue is that the main fuse box isn't properly grounded), and a host of various other problems that will take time and money to fix. Sigh.

We'll be working on our response to the inspection later--hard to know what the seller's going to want to do, but we'll find out.

Next, the appraisal. Still waiting on that.

We have an agreement

2008-06-09T21:33:00.004-04:00

to buy this house for 323,950. Almost halfway between what we offered and the list price. Next up: inspection and appraisal. We're not celebrating until we get through those steps, as we are still recovering from the premature happies on the last house. Not to mention the fact that we're regretting having sold the couch that couldn't fit in The House That Got Away. It would have fit in this one.

On the bright side, we have furniture coming our way, courtesy of the storage facility currently holding a lot of my father-in-law's furniture.

Not so bad.

And I got some writing done today, on a piece I've been putting off for far too long. I really like writing, and it's good to remember that.

Maybe I Should Just Start Twittering

2008-06-08T19:45:00.004-04:00

I don't know whether it's pathetic to feel like live blogging our negotiations, but here it is: the house lists at 329,900. We offered 315,000 earlier today, and the seller has responded with 325,900 and the news that she's replacing a shower head (whee!). We're countering at 320,000, and will get the disclosure info on the property tomorrow. I wish the seller had come down a little more (can't we get a break in this overall crappy housing market, which is clearly crappier here than in Germany?), but still, a promising enough beginning.

And on the "it can't possibly hurt, can it?" front, when people in my knitting group told me that I should bury a St. Joseph statue in the back yard because it would speed my house sale, I laughed, and then said, "well, why not?" One of my knitting friends brought me by a statue. Curious Girl looked at it and said, "please help our house sell, thank you" and put him upside down facing out in the rear vegetable garden. My mother is praying to St. Jude on our behalf.

Time to Update the Real Estate Scorecard

2008-06-08T09:27:00.003-04:00

Because I know you're all on the edges of your keyboards wondering what's happened, and because Politica and I truly appreciate all the comments on our housing posts so far--both the kind wishes for good decisions and the comments about your own housing choices and energy costs and whatnot--here's an update on where we are:

Before Politica left Germany on Friday, our realtor called around to our top choices to feel them out with verbal offers (since it was all verbal, we could essentially talk to everyone). So we leared a lot.
The realtor/owner of the 6 bedroom, asbestos-in-basement, high energy bill house was not willing to consider our offer. Tom is quite right that there might be other ways to reduce energy than by replacing all the windows (starting with turning down the thermostat!) but we were unwilling to pay top price for that house, given that the energy situation seemed like an unpredictable cost, at the very least.
The owners of the most expensive house were willing to deal with us. We had made them an offer of $30K below asking price, at a figure that was our very top mortgage figure (in a budget that still included quite a bit of monthly savings for travel, entertainment, and some other discretionary spending, as well as the indefinite carrying of our current mortgage). We found out yesterday morning that they countered with a price $5K higher than what we offered and a closing date of a week earlier (which would increase our closing costs with added interest).
So yesterday we spent a few hours trying to figure out what our reaction to this counter offer was. We had mixed feelings, and finally decided that our mixed feelings meant that this wasn't the right house for us. A couple of factors: this house is 3600 square feet, and that just felt too big for us. It's 3600 energy efficient square feet, but still, that's a big, big house. It's on a major-ish road, set back up off the road, and it consequently doesn't feel like it's really in a neighborhood. It's a gorgeous, showpiece house, but it just feels like not quite the right house for us right now. I'd love to have its kitchen, but taking on an enormous backyard (of the sort that might well lead me to higher a gardener for the first time in my life), and a maximum mortgage, for a house that is on a road big enough that CG wouldn't really be able to ride her bike around in the immediate neighborhood just didn't feel right. When we thought "What happens if someone else buys that house?" we both felt a sense of relief, even if it also felt kind of exciting to picture ourselves in the showpiece.
So we've reframed the not-expensive house in the neighborhood that I had originally wanted to live in. True, Politica had said that we'd never love the house. It's a 1968 construction with cheap pine doors and not a lot of built-in character. And we think that there are likely to be some inspection issues to deal with. But the house is on a quiet street, just a house away from a walkway into a city park with tennis courts and playground; it's quite near 3 families with kids who we already count as friends from the visits and playdates over the course of the past year; it's walking distance to the elementary school we feel really good about; it's only 2 miles to our campus, so I could ride my bike sometimes (once I get my quads in shape for that hill!) or take the city bus. It's a little far for walking (at least for a working parent who has to get a kid to/from school and wants a regular-sized workday in between) but it will require far less driving than the suburbs will.
This house is in the school area we most wanted to be in. We've toured 3 elementary schools, and while it's probably true that CG would do just fine in any of them, we had really positive reactions to one of them, and less positive to the others. They all use a responsive classroom model, but the one building just seemed so full of kid-centered, warm adults. The suburban school that everyone raves about (including people whose judgement we otherwise trust) struck us as too quiet. I liked its open physical spaces and the art/music programs, but the classrooms seemed too full of desks and not enough open space (especially for the K-3 rooms), and if CG turns out to need a lot of special ed services, we might well move there later. But it just didn't sing to me, and neither did the school in the walk-to-campus neighborhood, which cites student privacy as a reason why visitors can't see classrooms with kids in them. The work on the walls seemed cool, but I was left with a "well, this might work" feeling.
All that said, we're not considering this one over until it's over, and the written offer has yet to emerge. Our realtor should be writing it up today.
This house may not be the house of our dreams, but it's good enough. It's cheap enough, relatively speaking, that at some future point we could buy another house in our neighborhood and move--we won't be so extended with this mortage that we can't consider moving for a while. It's in a kid-filled neighborhood with built-in friends for us and CG. It's in the school area we feel drawn to. Looking narrowly at the house, this property is the least interesting of this current group. But looking at the house in its neighborhood context, it's a property that offers us the kind of life we hoped to get in Germany. It's a little dark, but paint and new flooring can make a big difference there, and we would have both a sunroom on the second floor and a Florida room on the first, and there's a playset in the yard for CG.
So I hope it works. Making this offer just feels like a me-and-Politica kind of decision in a way that the showpiece house didn't. It's financially conservative and attentive to the neighbhorhood's social ties and CG's school. And that just feels right today.

German Houses, Round 3

2008-06-05T23:16:00.004-04:00

ETA some significant potential negatives I neglected in last night's fatigue. AmFam, I'll try add a few photos into this post later today so you can see a bit of what we like.:

A disappointing turn in our house-hunting: the house we'd found appraised for way under the asking price, so we're back to looking for a place to live in Germany-the-pseudonymous. Politica has been househunting this week, and the options are:

a very expensive house in one of the best of Germany's neighborhoods. Very large (over 3000 sq ft.! more house than we need), but just beautiful, with a huge yard. Good things: lots of space, lots of light, lots of public and useable space on the first floor, all new windows, lovely kitchen, we could walk to work and walk to CG's school. Bad things: it's expensive, we're not sure we can get it for what we can offer, and it might require a gardener for the backyard. So some house maintenance costs might be in a higher bracket than we're used to. Price note: this house is expensive, but it's huge, and in terms of price-per-square foot, it's actually the second cheapest.
a not-quite-so-expensive house in a very good German neighborhood, same school area as the expensive house. Large house with 6 bedrooms (more than we need, but 2 are in the attic and we could just close that part of the house off or use it for storage). Good things: Politica just likes this house, it seems to call to her. Walkable to our work and CG's school. bad things: asbestos in basement, it's overpriced (one of the most expensive houses per square foot even if we make a low offer). What I forgot to mention in the first version of this post: this house has a lot of windows, and they're all old. The current owner spent $6000 on gas last year, and her reported electriciy bills are way higher than the other houses we're looking at. Replacing all the windows in this house would be a significant expense. Plus it's on a busy-ish corner.
a not-expensive house in the neighborhood we originally wanted, in our top choice elementary school area. Good things: location (right across from a walkway to a park, in the elementary school area we wanted originally). bad things: we are never going to love this house, and it's likely to have inspection issues. It doesn't seem well-built or well-maintained. but it's $100,000(or more) less than the other two houses.
a modern house in the suburbs. Good things: excellent value (the best value-for-price of all the houses Politica saw--way cheapest per square foot), lots of public living spaces, great master bath soaking tub, protected land behind the house. Bad things: suburban living (with apologies to suburban readers!): no sidewalks, need to drive everywhere, and just not what we envisioned when we thought of moving to Germany.

So wish us good deciding, please. Good house-selecting vibes gratefully accepted.

Here's Dreaming of You, George

2008-06-03T20:01:00.003-04:00

A public service announcement in a pseudonymous sort of way: if anyone reading here attended a Fancy Pants University that leads its alumni/ae to think fondly of having the rocks of New England in their muscles and their brains, please remember to vote in the alumni organization election; it's important. Only 21% of alumni/ae have voted so far, alumnae tend to vote at lower rates than alumni, and the alumni organization's leadership has the ability to affect FPU in some very real ways. Please vote--and that link above tells you where I stand on the current controversies.

Anyway. Back to business. I've been planning a post for a while now titled Same Same, But Different, but after I read my friend Joyce's thoughts on her old male self, this other title popped into my head. Or at least it popped into my head this morning when I remembered my dream from last night, which started at the (in my dreamworld) ranch that was the boyhood home of Writer Colleague, whose sibling had recently announced she had transitioned from male to female. The rest of Writer Colleague's family wasn't quite settled on this, but Writer Colleague was determined to support his sibling, and had written a little poem about how much good he wished for his sister, and put an American flag sticker on the poem, and ended the poem with the line "And may all these good things also flow to Joyce." [Point of clarification here: I do have a real Writer Colleague who really did grow up on a ranch, but not a ranch that looks anything like the mountainous ranch in my dream; Writer Colleague doesn't write poems for publication, doesn't decorate his work with flag stickers, and to my knowledge doesn't have a transsexual sibling.] Politica, Curious Girl, and I were all at a big dinner at the ranch, and CG was charming Writer Colleague's father while the sibling and Politica talked politics.

All of a sudden George appeared, and said, "Susan! it's great that you're here. Because it's snowing, we can head out into my hometown and I can show you around." Sure enough, in the magical dream ranch, it had started snowing. George took my hand, Politica and CG followed, and we went through a curtain of snow into George's hometown. I've never actually been to George's hometown, but I'm pretty darn sure it doesn't get much snow, magic or otherwise, and it probably doesn't have a lovely little canal winding through it with bridges and big stones for Curious Girl to excitedly jump across. We all walked around George's town, with George pointed out the landmarks, me saying things like, "George! You're right--your ranch was a great place to grow up. It's out in the country, but look how quickly we came into the town for all these great stores and things to do." I looked at George's old school, the opera house, restaurants, benches, and parks. It was a great walk. When I woke up I had to smile, because this little town in my dream was just green and treed and lusciously wet in a way that the general area George grew up probably isn't (but Joyce will correct me if I'm wrong, of course).

I had a lot of dreams about George when I first learned about Joyce, and it's odd that I'm continuing to dream about all this. Usually I'm a pretty rational person who talks things out while researching and reading. I dream a lot, but this is the first time in a while I've been aware that I'm dreaming around the same kinds of issues in a short period of time. I'm not entirely sure how to interpret these dreams yet--part of the series is more a dream feeling, dreams about freedom and energy. This dream seems to be integrating my past and present, bringing together figures from today with friends from long ago, with a personal tour of George's past, too; I think I'm mixing themes from our relocation and house hunt with my thoughts on gender in the world, too.

Joyce has been writing a bit about how to integrate George with Joyce--her metaphor for what George needs now is retirement. In the first post I linked to above, Joyce wishes George a playful retirement. I guess he's doing some playing in my dreams, and that's fine by me, as being in touch with Joyce so much more frequently these past few months has made me wish I'd been in more frequent touch with George. So dreaming George is just fine by me. I hope it's fine by Joyce, too. Maybe this post is one kind of postcard Joyce is hoping to get from George from his retirement on occasion. Who knows?

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I saw George in New Orleans (I'll say George, as that's what the nametag said, and that's what the male clothes suggested, even though I've been writing to Joyce, and using Joyce in talking with Politica and anyone else about Joyce-in-the-present). It was kind of anticlimactic, hence the "same same but different" title I'd planned. George looked almost giddy at times, but otherwise, it was really kind of just the same as any other conference dinner we might have had. Mary, George's wife, seemed a little more nervous, having had a little less practice telling the coming out story. But George seemed relaxed and happy, and that was just good to see. We had a great meal, a nice walk around the neighborhood, and I went home feeling happy to have seen George and Mary, looking forward to seeing Joyce and Mary.

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I'm so discomboulated this spring/summer that I can't remember whether I've blogged about the conversations I've had with Curious Girl regarding Joyce. CG hasn't met Joyce yet (nor George either), and while she's heard me and Politica talking about George/Joyce, I don't think she's really been tracking the conversations. A few months ago, though, we were driving around and CG announced that she was hungry. "My tummy is hungry. He says we need some food." She paused. "No, she says. My tummy is a girl." (she's often quite put out when her violin teacher refers to some of her fingers as "he," as in "tell your thumb he better move up here....") I laughed. "Do you think my tummy is a girl, too?" Yes, I learned. "Do you think all girls have girl tummies and boys have boy tummies?" CG said yes. I realized this was a great opening, and explained that I had a friend who was a boy on the outside but who always knew that he was a girl on the inside, that he had a girl tummy and was just a girl inside, and so now he was going to be a girl on the outside too. CG took this in, and asked how. Medicines and some doctors were helping him. "Will she still sound like his regular self?" was CG's big question.

This conversation has stayed with her, I've learned, in two ways. We talk a lot about what our new neighborhood in Germany is going to be like, and what CG's friends will be like there. We want to move to a neighborhood with kids, she knows. "I think there will be kids who live near us," CG pointed out recently. "Will there be girls?" Politica and I didn't know, of course, and we said we'd just have to see. "That's right," said Curious Girl. "They might be girls, or they might be boys, or they might be girls on the outside and boys on the inside, or boys on the outside and girls on the inside. We'll just have to see." Politica did point out that most people are kind of the same inside and out, but we all agreed, we'd just have to see.

Still more recently, CG said, "I hope Historian Friend's New Baby Boy is a girl when he grows up." I did some combination of "hmm. we'll see. isn't Baby great?" and CG said, "yes, and then he can go to the doctor and the doctor would cut him open and there'd be a girl inside. Yay!" So I leave you with the matroishka doll theory of gender identity, one which will doubtless get greater attention here in the Granola household in the future.

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I created the category gender matters when I first wrote about Joyce. Gender does matter, but one way it has mattered to me since I've been writing and talking to/about Joyce is that gender makes connections. I feel closer to Joyce now that George isn't keeping secrets. I introduced myself to Joyce's best friend in Bedford Falls at our conference in New Orleans, something I'd likely have been too shy to do had it not been for the gender matters Joyce has raised. Her best friend introduced me to his wife, too, and we all had a great conversation in the book exhibit.

I've been far away from Joyce during most of the overt struggle with her gender, so I've never had to stand by and watch George struggling with depression, fear, and the other truly difficult aspects of living with gender identity disorder. I hope my distance from those darker times, and my delight in a friendship so reinvigorated since this announcement, doesn't lead me to underestimate past difficulties here. But I just feel such delight at connections (re)established. It's rare that anyone has the chance to make a new friend building on such a long acquaintance with an old friend. To borrow a phrase from CG, Joyce is special to me, even though I've yet to see her in person (a feeling that's not strange to write out here in blogland, where we are used to making connections with people we don't (yet or ever) know in person). I wondered whether I'd miss George once Joyce fully emerged--and I don't, exactly, as George seems to pop up not just in memory but in dreams. I can't remember, really, whether Joyce was in my dream, too, but I have a feeling she was somehow there, too, hanging out with Writer Colleague's sibling.

So I'm dreaming, and thinking, and talking about gender. Nice to think about gender in ways that don't involve princesses, I must say. It would be nice to think about gender in ways that lead to a nice bloggy conclusion, but a conclusion doesn't seem to be emerging. That's OK for tonight, I think, so I'll just leave it here. More thoughts to follow, I'm sure.

Overheard at the End of Busy Day

2008-05-24T18:12:00.002-04:00

Curious Girl is whining a bit about how it's not fair that the child lock on the car door prevents her from opening it when everyone else in the car can open their doors by themselves.

Politica: Curious Girl, I have no interest in listening to you whine anymore.

CG: Well, I guess you don't want to be my mom anymore, then.

The Meme of Five

2008-05-17T20:01:00.002-04:00

Librarian Mom tagged me with the meme of five, so here goes! Per instructions:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags five people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they've been tagged and asking them to read the player's blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you've posted your answer.

What were you doing five years ago?
Let's see, that would be spring of 2003. I was on sabbatical, still getting to know the daughter I'd had in my arms for 4 months. I was going to feeding therapy with Curious Girl every week, having other Early Intervention folks in our home on a regular basis, and about a third of the way through the 43 visits to our pediatrician that would occur in that calendar year. I'd learned how to use a feeding tube, I'd played the cuckoo game with CG about a million times, and I'd spent a lot of time on the floor with her, making eye contact, talking with her, trying to figure her out. At work, I was talking with my chair, getting read to apply for promotion to full professor, and somehow, working on my sabbatical project on changes in writing program philosophy.

What are five things on your to-do list for today (not in any particular order)?
(It's 8:00 p.m. as I type this, so I'm going to think about my to-do list more generally)

1. Write an essay that I should have finished last November, the lateness of which is causing me much angst and indecision.
2. Organize receipts for some recent visits to German University so I can get reimbursed.
3. Start some laundry
4. Find things to recycle, freecycle, or donate.
5. Help CG write thank you notes from her birthday party (a fabulous event about which I really should post)

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1. Peaches in summer
2. Grapes. Really, lots of fruit, but never melon
3. Bread
4. Crackers and cheese
5. Nice cold milk. Or milkshakes.

What five things would you do if you were a billionaire?

1. Invest a bunch of it to ensure CG's future education/security and Politica's access to health care in retirement.
2. Give a bunch of it away--like Librarian Mom, I find it hard to say just what I'd give it to, but clean water, public health (malaria, AIDS, TB), education strike me as good places to start
3. Travel: there are really very few places you couldn't persuade me to visit. I love to travel.
4. Buy an electric car.
5. Hire a landscaper to develop the gardens around our house (and would I move to a better location in Germany? Maybe so; have to think on that one) and help maintain them.

What are five of your bad habits?

1. Staying up too late poking around the internet accomplishing nothing in particular and then being irritated at myself the next morning, doing it again, and then being doubly irritated the next day rather than just forming a new habit.
2. Letting the computer stay on a bit too often when I should be socializing with Politica/CG--I am getting better at the "just let me check my e-mail real fast before we...." but there's room for continued improvement.
3. Failing to focus my day so I get the big thing done first consistently.
4. Staying up too late when I'm alone at night (on the road or at home) because I'm afraid I'll be freaked out by house/neighborhood noises when I try to go to sleep, which only makes me more tired the next day.
5. Reading too quickly (which is sometimes an asset, but sometimes a problem).

What are five places where you have lived?

a small town in southern Ontario, a medium sized city in Michigan, a small city in west Texas, a small town on Long Island, a small town in Vermont

What are five jobs you've had?

1. phone surveyer for the phone company
2. camp counselor
3. library assistant
4. dishwasher
5. writing tutor

Tagging people: I hate tagging people, so if you're reading, and if you like five, have at it!

We Could Be Getting Married in the Morning

2008-05-15T16:41:00.004-04:00

A month from now, that is, in California. A few key excerpts from the majority opinion:

"The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples."

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry "will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage."

Bilerico has some good posts on the subject (including one warning about the socio-political-legal backlash that will likely follow. So once you're done doing the happy dance, get your activist shoes out and get ready to politic, ok?).

So Far, So Good

2008-05-10T16:39:00.006-04:00

Despite some despair on Thursday and Friday, it looks like things are working out with the house we want. We're paying a little more than we'd hoped (but within our budget), and we still have to do the inspection, appraisal, and close on the mortgage, not to mention the house. But we've agreed to the sellers' counteroffer, and that feels good. Mississippi Friend would say, "Don't put your mouth on it," and she'd be right. So I'm going with so far, so good.

In Her Heaven

2008-05-07T23:01:00.004-04:00

Curious Girl is busy with thank you notes for her birthday. Tante Mississippi and Curly Haired Cousin gave her a birthstone necklace, and here's what she told them at the end of the note:

I'm glad you're my aunt and Curly Haired Cousin is my cousin, and that Uncle Quiet used to be my uncle. Now he's uncle in my heaven.

We don't really talk much around here about heaven (except when CG is spinning theories about it), but it fascinates me to see CG's ideas about life and death playing out as she gets used to Uncle Quiet's death. Every now and then she'll ask me what Uncle Quiet is doing now, and I usually respond with the parental classic: "what do you think?" She has a lot of answers: "being dead," "taking a bath," or "sleeping" being some recent ones. (Yes, we have had a conversation about whether heaven has bathtubs. Haven't you? For the question of whether heaven is or is not like Facebook, I recommend you to the comments on a fabulous post by Arwen.)

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One night last week, Curious Girl woke up. As I snuggled her back to sleep, she said, "Do you want to hear a story about Uncle Quiet?" I did, of course. "Once upon a time there was Uncle Quiet. He was very kind. The End." I asked her if I could write that down for Tante Mississippi, telling her that I liked the story very much and that Tante Mississippi would, too. CG said, "Oh, and a joke, too. She needs a joke." She stopped to consider. "The pink tiara, was that at my party or Curly Haired Cousin's?" She was trying to remember where she saw Uncle Quiet playing with her sparkly tiara with pink fur trimming. We have a great photo of them together, being silly. Uncle Quiet had quite the silly side, which is really rather funny, as he was so very unsilly in many respects: he was the snappiest dresser of any male friend I've had, and reserved, and dignified. So the sight of him teasing Curly Haired Cousin and CG with the tiara was pretty funny. "I'll tell her a joke after the story. That will make her more happy." "Knock knock." (all together now..."who's there?") "Tiara." ("tiara who?") "Pink tiara."

She may have more social graces than comedy skills, I grant you. But she is awfully sweet.

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I miss Quiet Friend. CG's birthday party was the first social event at our house that he missed--Politica and I were always quite touched that he almost always came to events at our house even when he was super tired. But this time, no Quiet Friend. Mississippi Friend came, and we spent part of the party talking about the weather and cooking, trying to remember which was the party where she and Politica were at the grill, one cooking, the other holding an umbrella, and which was the party where Quiet Friend did the cooking in the rain.

Mississippi Friend is having a tough time of it, which is normal, I suppose, but as she points out, it's pretty darn irritating to have people say "Oh, that's normal," when she tells them something about her grief (so let me amend that sentence: what she's experiencing is so.not.normal: there's nothing normal about losing your 43 year old husband whose last 7 years included so much pain, fatigue, and medical procedures. It's not fair, is what it is.). It's clear from Mississippi Friend's stories that even the most well-meaning friends or relatives can say totally wrong-headed things. I've thought a lot about a thoughtful post Snickollet wrote on grief a while back, outlining ways people can do for their grieving friends. It's frustrating, watching a friend grieve: what she really wants is a whole re-do from the Universe, and we can't give her that. I can only hope that Politica, CG, and I are generally more helpful to her than not. I'm working on a letter that simply collects some of my favorite memories of Quiet Friend. One thing I can do, is write. So I write here, and will write privately for Mississippi Friend and Curly Haired Cousin, hoping my words capture some of the love we hold for her and Quiet Friend, here, and in our heavens.

Houses, Again

2008-05-07T21:31:00.003-04:00

We are in the midst of making an offer on a house, in the city neighborhood we want.
It's a FSBO, not yet listed anywhere, but our realtor walked through it this morning and says it's pretty much got everything we want. We've seen his photos and the photos the seller prepared, and Politica has driven the block the house is on. So we're going to make an offer.
Our realtor called the sellers this evening to find out a fact he needs to fill in on the offer, which is offering them full price. The only thing we're asking them for is half the closing costs (although I don't know they know that yet). The seller said that they would want two weeks to respond to the offer, so they can list it on the FSBO site on the weekend.
We are now feeling cranky about the sellers. I understand that sellers want to maximize the price they can get for a property, and I realize that the first people to see a house and make an offer might make the seller think, "oh, I could have gotten more." But it seems quite greedy to simply want to take time to see if a bidding war will ensue.
Our offer will give them until Friday. I hope it works out. This house feels like a very us house. I'll get to see it, I hope, next week, if things seem to be working. We've moved up quite a bit in the price range we decided to consider, but I'm not sure I want to move up higher.
In any event, thanks for all the house comments. Politica and I talk about these things endlessly, and it's nice to have you all listening and commenting. I'd happily throw an ice cream social for all of you, were you all here, rather than in the computer. (but hey, poke pro could take care of that!)