Coming Out in Light of the World Vision Kerfuffle

With my students I talk a lot about how we, I think as a culture, tend to define our things but what we are not, or what we don’t like. We might say things like, “I’m a Democrat,” but it feels more strongly like “I’m not a Republican, and therefore I have chosen the other box, default Democrat.”

But today, in light of the shitty week I had with the roller coaster of World Vision emotions (that you can read about how it started here and ended up here and some cool thoughts about it here), I thought I’d break a rule and tell you all:

I’m not straight.

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I fully recognize that I live in a world with a hetero normative story line. I am presumed straight by those who meet me, and ‘lie by omission’ when I don’t ‘set the record straight.” Because I am married to a man, I am assumed to be straight. Just like because I don’t have a wheelchair, or guide dog, I am assumed to be able-bodied (rather than looking at the invisible disability of chronic mental illness). This idea of ‘passing,’ is something I am familiar with on a daily basis, and get the privilege of choosing if, and when, and to whom I come out, if I do at all.

So last week I had drinks with a friend, and as we were discussing the World Vision drama, and all my frustration behind the big flip-flop, I said…

“I was telling Boof this, that people don’t realize. I have his protection in church. I am accepted and loved and welcomed with open arms because of him. They see me the way they want to see me, as a straight, married woman with a child. I am the walking white woman stereotype, in their minds. But without my husband, if I was on my own, and openly dating, or was married to a woman they would think very very differently of me. So this decision of theirs, it could affect me. I could not be hired because of who I am. “

And his response:

“Are you a lesbian?”

It wasn’t a question with judgment attached. He had been tracking my conversation and, since he’s in a relationship with a woman who identified as lesbian, seemed to be trying to understand. And that’s when I got quiet. Because no, I know I’m not a lesbian. I know that like I know I’m not black. But the question brought back memories, of being in high school, or after college with no boyfriend or ‘marriage prospects,’ and my sister saying to me ‘mom and dad think you’re a lesbian.” It brought back memories of being called ‘Sir’ when I had short hair and was shopping in the mall, or gasp, even wearing a bikini. I said, “no, I’m not a lesbian, but I’m not straight.”

My parents are deeply religious fundamentalists, and were probably part of the group of evangelicals that would take their money away from starving African children to prove a point. They will probably never know me beyond what they see on the surface. But I balk at the labels, because straight doesn’t fit, and lesbian doesn’t fit, and bisexual doesn’t fit either. A student once asked me if I was pansexual and I said I don’t know, because I’ve never been attracted to someone who’s trans. It’s not that I don’t like labels because they feel too labelly, it’s that I haven’t yet figured out what label actually fits. It’s like shopping for jeans, do any of them REALLY make my butt look good? I mean, for realz yo…

But what I do know, is that I’m not straight.

That’s the closest I can get to a label. NotStraight. Unless I tell you about energy. And how I am attracted to energies that complement my own, and that often means women. And sometimes men. And sometimes I’m not attracted to anyone at all (except of course my husband, right?). I’m married, to a man. If I weren’t married to him, I might be married to a woman. Or I might not be married at all. I might date a man, or a woman, or nobody. I don’t know. I don’t plan who I’m attracted to, or who ends up clicking with, and it goes beyond genitals, though those are fun aren’t they?

People who know me intimately will not be surprised by this news. It might give some an ‘aha’ to explain the previously unexplained. Some already know, like my graduate school peeps and some coworkers who I share openly with because it’s come up in conversation. This isn’t some big coming out manifesto, as I don’t even know what I would be coming out to or for, other than the fact that the World Vision kerfuffle affected me deeply. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of feeling like without Boof I would be less of a person in Christian circles.

 

A Picture’s Worth 1,000 memories

look at THAT FACE!

Having a toddler is much harder than having an infant, especially in the picture taking department. I take so many more photos that have a distinct blur from his movements. Though I’ve just now figured out that he will say “cheese” for photos and will result in a sorta smile on his end.

But we were out in the park the other night, to eat pizza and Doritos with friends, and to enjoy the Seattle sunshine. I managed to capture a few photos that really capture his personality. Like his fearlessness, as he launched himself off the platform and then hung there on the bars. I was far enough away to not be a helicopter parent, but was keeping a keen eye on him. I managed enough time to take this picture, mostly to teach him that sometimes being a daredevil means not getting rescued right away 🙂 He was no worse for wear, despite the side-eye I was getting from some lame brained parents who hover ridiculously around their offspring.

 

He’s a good eater, for everyone but me. Friend Mari brought raspberries, and he gobbled them up. I buy raspberries and he looks like I’m making him eat poop laced garbage.

his expressions are priceless

There really are no words for this last one. His expression is just hilarious here. I’m not sure exactly what he’s trying to tell me…

Alcohol as Mindfulness?

When I met my biological mom, she was wearing a bathing suit and a skirt. It was 10am and she was clearly drunk and had a beer in her purse. I had been warned that she was an alcoholic, couldn’t function without it in her system, and hadn’t held down a job forever because of the detoxing seizures and her inability to drive.

Last year my biological dad got a DUI, and felt shitty about it because I had recently told him that I was so glad that he was a ‘normal’ grandparent for Brewer. His daily drinking of a few beers was more on par with a blue collar norm than a ‘problem,’ though maybe there’s some justification going on…because anyone can have a problem once and not have an overall disease. But, I digress.

They say alcoholism is genetic.

I didn’t drink until I was 21 because of my ultra religious upbringing and my fear of the adoption unknown. I actually remember telling someone when I was younger that the reason I wouldn’t do drugs or alcohol is because I think I would like it too much. That’s deep for a tween, ya know?

All across time and space, people have been using substances to alter their experience. Beer has been around since cavemen, and has its place historically in so many ways. Little kids spin around and get dizzy, altering their experience, and we daydream or smoke pot or take peyote or chew chat or sniff poppies (yes, I know that’s not exactly how it works) to alter our experience.

And then there’s mindfulness. Meditation. To alter our experience of the moment, our relationship to the future and the past and our thoughts. It’s a mind altering way of being in the world. And one that I really intend to embrace in my life.

But can I be honest here? It’s busy season in the accounting world, and I haven’t seen my husband for close to 8 weeks because of it. He leaves at 6:30 and gets home at 8, except on Saturdays when he’s home by 6. I’m exhausted. And with only 1 kid, and a full-time(ish) job, I am often one straw away from the camel’s back breaking and crumbling all over itself.

The other day, Boof was teasing me about all the mimosas I’ve been drinking. And I got butthurt. Because it’s a sore spot for me. When I started drinking in college I had zero tolerance and would get blackout drunk. But I hated the feeling and so it only happened a handful of times. It’s been years trying to figure out how much is enough to just have a buzz and not obsess about wanting more and more and more.

His comment hit a nerve. I don’t like that I am excited to pour the OJ and champagne on a Friday morning with Potamus. I know enough about mental illness and alcoholism to know that I should be careful. And I am. I think. The nervousness and monitoring of my level of tolerance, desire, defensiveness as a coping mechanism are healthy. But it’s hard. Because alcohol is like mindfulness. There’s that sweet spot, when I haven’t overindulged, and I can focus on the present moment. I tell my students about the ‘beer goggle’ effect, and how more suicides and other issues happen under the influence, because we don’t have the ability to long-range think. But honestly, that’s kinda what I’m going for. Because I don’t want to sit on my couch watching another episode of toddler TV and think “3 more weeks of this.” That’s so fucking overwhelming to me. The fact that he was running 45 minutes late last night was so fucking overwhelming to me.

And mindfulness is good and all, but honestly, alcohol is quicker. Maybe someday I’ll be a mindful yogi who doesn’t have a glass of wine, or a few beers, at night to try and hang on for the next few hours until bedtime and daddy’s home. I know I’ve been there before. I know this is a difficult time for us as a family.

Drinking is a hot topic among the parenting community. Do you imbibe? Know others who do? What influences your decisions to drink or not?

Peacock

This is a picture of a peacock.

I touched his feathers at the zoo, which probably could have gotten me in trouble, but how could I resist such loveliness?

Take Time to Stack Rocks

With an hour to kill before dinner plans, Potamus and I took advantage of the Seattle sunshine to get out for a walk. There’s this housing development one street over, and at the end of the cul de sac is a drainage pond where some ducks congregate. Potamus loves the ducks, and got really excited when we headed in that direction. He kept shouting “duck! duck!” (which actually sounds more like ‘duh! duh!’).

Halfway down the block we came across a pile of rocks. Fascinated, Potamus spent the next 20 minutes stacking and unstacking rocks. And I let him. This rock stacking is actually a zen practice that you can google (and see amazing pictures) from around the world. But it was hard for me to stop and just feel the sunshine on my shoulders. I kept thinking ‘but, we’re on a walk, to see ducks,” because that’s my personality…goal oriented (mostly) and not always about the journey.

I’m trying to slow down. Because when depression and anxiety ramp up in my life I usually try to fill myself up with a lot of things that actually numb me out. And so instead of focusing on the ducks and whether he’d be disappointed if we had to turn around for dinner after only walking 100 feet to the rock stack, I let myself be in the moment. There was nothing more exciting for him than that moment. He was right where he needed to be. I was right where I needed to be.

Take some time today to stack the rocks my friends.

When Parenting Philosophy Butts Up Against Sideline Parenting

The look on his face was fear, and then it crumpled into pouty shame as he buried his face in the couch. I reached out my arms and pulled him close. There he buried his face and stayed until is breath returned to normal, finally calm. He came to me, his mama, for comfort, snuggles, love, and guidance. Because after he caught his breath, and was ready again to face the world, I spoke softly in his ear about what he could do and what he wasn’t allowed to do. I explained the rules. I explained what had happened.

He had been exploring I’m sure, as 2 year olds are want to do, and in that exploration he crossed an invisible line.  He’s learning about the world, exploring the difference between okay things and not okay things. There was a rule out there that he didn’t know, and so he had simply been obliviously doing his thing. My parenting philosophy is mostly that of observation and experimentation while keeping the BIG picture in mind. He’s 2. He hasn’t figured everything out yet. And just like how rules ebb and flow as we age, I am confident that my son will continue to be guided and molded into the person he’s supposed to be. But it won’t all be today.

He’s mischievous, curious, sweet, and mostly gentle. Or mostly mischievous. He’s got that Sagittarius blood flowing in his veins. He likes adventure and adrenaline rushing through his little body as he shouts “MORE, MORE,” when I swing him wildly through the air. He likes climbing. I like piercings. He likes jumping. I like tattoos. He likes splashing insanely in the hot tub. I like that too. We like adventure. We like excitement. We like exploration.

But parenting is fraught with challenges. Being an adventurer is fraught with challenges. In exploring the okayness to not-okayness blurry lines he has made mistakes. He’s learning that rules we have at home may not apply at school, the grocery store, or friend Mari’s house. Hes 2 and hasn’t figured it out yet. When he walks out of the kitchen proudly holding a serrated knife and grinning, he is focusing on his cleverness of figuring out the puzzle that is the kitchen counters, and has no concept that knife could cause him to bleed out if he stabbed himself with it. That’s the adult story laid on top of his actions.

I can’t expect everyone to parent their kids like I do. Because the freeing thing is that I allow myself to be myself as a parent. Because I am comfortable with him exploring the woodshed alone, and am aware of the consequences of what might happen if he were to get hurt, I go with my gut and let him explore. But the challenge in being my brand of parent is that there are sideline participants in our life whose philosophies on parenting vary drastically. For the most part this doesn’t cause conflict or complication, as Potamus knows who his parents are, but when I’m left with my way of being in the world with my son bumping up against another’s comfort zone in sideline-parenting (as in the above example), I scratch my head for what to do.

Because my instinct is to scream. My natural fight (vs. flight) tendency is always to unleash the claws, and it’s only intensified in my entrance into motherhood. My comfort zone for acceptable exploratory behavior is not the same as others, and so I am sometimes left in a position of biting my tongue while comforting my son. I’m battle the prejudice that I don’t have ‘rules,’ or that I don’t ‘discipline,’ while also battling the appeared belief that my child is ‘naughty,’ or ‘out of control’ or that children should ‘behave’ like little adults.

It’s easy to be on the sideline, to look in and say ‘I would do this,’ or ‘my kid wouldn’t behave like that,’ but those are lies. I sit with Mari and watch our boys run around;  they act like angels and dicks at the same time. And she gets Potamus to eat blueberries that I’ve been trying to get him to eat for months, and I get her son to try and play nicer with the baby. Being the non-parent isn’t hard, because it isn’t 24/7. And so to take that tiny snapchat of a moment and think ‘oh if I were blah blah blah parent I would blah blah blah’ is delusional at best, and damaging at worst.

I can’t save Potamus from all the hurt in the world. I can’t save him from being scolded, and shamed, and disciplined. But I’d like him to remain free from fear and shame for as long as possible. I’d like to be the parent who puts aside my jealousy that “when I was a kid I couldn’t watch TV” and confidently let him pick a show to watch. I’d like to live into the truth that his experience will not be the same experience as mine, that my parents will treat him differently than they treated me, and that just because his experience isn’t the same it doesn’t mean mine was bad or wrong (although it could also mean that there were bad or wrong parts). I try to set aside the cultural idea of controlling a child in order to make sure that he becomes a ‘good’ person, because I believe that he is already a good person. And I believe that freedom to explore under his mama’s watchful eye is how he will learn to be the most authentic Potamus he can be. And that somehow, just like me, he will make mostly-amicable peace with the idea that rules exist, and he’ll know when to follow them, and when to mindfully break them.

And so I won’t punch or scream or cuss them out, though in the moment I was seething with rage. Instead I will remember that the sideline, just like in sports, is where the people who sit who aren’t playing the game. And their opinions and rants and rituals have less effect on the outcome as the players and coaches on the field. I’m in this with him. We’re on the field. We’re playing our game. And it involves climbing on tables and getting tattoos.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;” Theodore Roosevelt

On Being a Half-Anonymous Blogger Who Writes About Real Events

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
-Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

I chose to be an anonymous blogger in an attempt at destroying my tendency to self-censor. Blogging is the modern equivalent to my scribbled teenage journals (of which I have an entired box filled), and I’ve been using this medium in various capacities since the early 2000’s. There was Live Journal in college, and Myspace blogs that I relied on heavily while travelling in India, and the Blogger account that I tried when focusing on art and poetry. All of those accounts were ME accounts, with varying levels of privacy.

And so, when I decided to start a parenting blog, I wanted to have some sort of anonymity in the great online world. Not only for professional sake, but also for the semi-privacy of Potamus. Because he will grow up in a world of social media, and these pictures of him will likely be seen, but I am telling MY story here, not his. So here I am, anonymously blogging, though I recognize that it is not, in fact, anonymous.

Because unlike scribbled journals, and my teenage self, I long desperately for my medium to convey my feelings within a community, which requires them to be read. And while I’ve connected anons who’ve transitioned to IRL online friends (shoutout to you Momaste!), I also have this hunger to be known by those I see in flesh and blood. So I’ve shared a link to my writing, in an attempt to connect. To bridge the online world of my mind and the fleshy world of my life.  But writing my truth, my experience, from my own perspective, is difficult for some people to read. My raw honesty about experiences has caused defensiveness or confusion in friends and family.

And yet I am compelled to write or explode from all the feelings. For while I don’t get paid to do it, I am a writer. I think about writing. I love sentence structure and the meditative quality that happens when I feel with my fingers translating those feelings into words that appear on my screen.

I would like to believe that I am telling MY story, and not anyone else’s. That of course there is room for two sides, or more sides, and the world will welcome the individual perspectives and stories. I tell MY side, MY feelings, and, at the end of the day, has no bearing on whether the others invovled are good or bad people or shouldn’t have made certain choices. It is simply my account of my life through my senses.

It’s why I like Anne Lamott so much. She writes brilliantly funny memoirs about her fucked up life as a recovering alcoholic with a screwed up family. Her truthiness shines through even though the rawness makes me (and I’m sure those she writes about) uncomfortable. I need to write my truth, my experience, my life, from MY perspective. And if it hits you in the gut, makes you uncomfortable, then start writing from your own perspective. And maybe our writings will interesect someday.

“We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason why they write so little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out…

Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.”
-Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Just a Phase

Potamus is in a straw hat phase. It started out as one of those dapper little Easter hats, but the way he pulls it down on his head…paired with sleeping in it every night for the past 2 (going on 3) weeks, it looks more fisherman/cowboy hat than the dapper dude I know him to be. He wakes up in the middle of the night saying “ha(t) ha(t)” and pointing to his head, until we retrieve it from the nightstand or out from under the pillow where he smooshed it in slumber. He gets many compliments on it when we’re out and about, and I look at people with a crazy eye because seriously, the hat has spaghetti sauce on the brim, and I love that he’s asserting his personality, but I wish he’d take it off for a few minutes so I can wash it!

 

momaste

There have been many so-called “phases” in child-rearing that I have enjoyed.  There have also been phases which I have NOT enjoyed, but this is a post about the former.

With my first child, I was not really in tune with the phenomena we parents call “phases.”  As a first-timer at the parent rodeo, I lacked that stuff called perspective, and mistakenly thought certain things would last forever- colic, teething crankiness, gummy smiles, sleep deprivation.  Well, I’m convinced that if you are a parent, sleep deprivation is an eternal phase (thereby not a phase at all), but you get my point. It was just as easy to live in constant dread of things that lasted maybe a few weeks to a couple months, as it was to take for grated other things that were fleeting in the grand scheme of things.

With Jack, we had some favorite phases–  Mister…

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The Illusion of Time: Flies, Creeps, Stands Still

A friend of mine is in the thick of parenting struggle, with sick kiddos, and a full-time job, and the stress of simply being a working mom in the 21st century. It’s hard. It’s really hard. And I know that it won’t be this particular hard forever. Because time is a funny thing, and with it comes new trials and tribulations for lack of a better cliche.

Last summer I wrote about being sick of breastfeeding. It was 18 months in and I.WAS.DONE. Sadly, Potamus was decidedly NOT done, and so we kept going. And yesterday I was reflecting on how easy it was to wean, and how long it seems since I hunkered down to nurse him to sleep. In fact, what feels like forever, has only been 2 months. Whoa. Time, you’re a tricky thing. And even this week, as I was bitching that I was still the only one to get Potamus to sleep at night, he fell asleep for Boof no problem. AND my picky eater at 2 slices of pizza for dinner, instead of his usual yogurt. Wow.

I happen to be a very in-the-moment feeler. I feel things intensely, and when they’re good they’re GOOD, and when they’re bad they’re everlasting. Eight minutes of screaming in the car on our morning commute feels like an eternity, whereas an extra eight minutes of uninterrupted sleep feels like nothing. I don’t know how to reconcile all of that, especially when it’s hard, but it’s nice to keep in mind, that things change quickly (and I mean quickly by lifetime standards, not moment-to-moment standards).