Yours and Mine

In the dark, I wait for You. Quiet, pensive, anxious. What do we have left? What will we create? What will we destroy?

Such is our relationship. We each bring hurts and weaknesses, despite our bravo and strength. We feed into each other, drawing out the vulnerabilities, teasing each other to taste the bitterness. Time apart dissolves, meaningless, when we meet again.

From Your bag, you pull a bit of leather and metal. A pittance, perhaps, but the memories are strong. Tears fill my eyes, grateful, joyful, yearning, and You draw the collar about my slender neck, claiming me as Yours, if only for the time that we have.

Two nights, and even that is not entirely alone. But it is what we have, and we explore familiar and fearful spaces. I bring you to your knees simply by asking and You break me in minutes with Your knowledge. We spend hours on the couch, talking, touching.

Departure comes, and we are each reluctant. Will the fears we shared this time haunt us? What infinite changes have we wrought? When will we meet again?

Those answers are only things that time will tell, but one thing is for certain. I may be Yours, but you are equally Mine.

How to be a gracious bitch

Jennifer's wedding day was fast approaching. Nothing could dampen her excitement, not even her parent’s nasty divorce. Her mother had found the perfect dress to wear, and she would be the best-dressed mother-of-the-bride ever! A week later, Jennifer was horrified to learn that her father's new young wife had bought the exact same dress as her mother’s! Jennifer asked her father's new wife to exchange it, but she refused. “Absolutely not!” she replied. “I look stunning in this dress, and I'm going to wear it on your wedding day.”

Later, Jennifer told her mother about the conflict and she graciously reassured her, ''Never mind sweetheart. I'll find another dress. After all, it's your special day.'' A few days later, they went shopping, and found another gorgeous dress for her mother. When they stopped for lunch, Jennifer asked her mother, ''Aren't you going to return the other dress? You really don't have another occasion where you could wear it." Her mother just smiled pleasantly and replied, ''Of course I do dear; I'm wearing it to the rehearsal dinner the night BEFORE the wedding.''

The Great Pear Experiment (or how I made Hearty Breakfast Pear Stew)

In the abandoned lot behind our house, there is a pear tree. I'm not sure if, in prior years, this tree was stripped early of its fruit or didn't bear fruit, but this year was bountiful. Beloved has been enjoying pears as a treat when he comes home from work, and it is the first place the kids want to go any time we get home from an excursion. Last night was no exception. Walking back to the house with a pear in each hand, Boy declared that he was hungry and wanted pear stew.

O-kay...well, naturally there is Google and there are recipes out there for Stoofperen, pear butter, pears with pork chops, baked pears, all kinds of pear recipes. None of them were quite the thing that I was looking for, nor did I have the ingredients for many of them. Thus, it is nearing midnight and I am stuck on what belongs in a pear stew.

For starters, I want to make it a breakfast thing. I want to have Boy come downstairs in the morning and be able to tell him that I made him pear stew. I want it to be sweet, but have a touch of savory. A good stew has a hearty grain in it. And then, there is the question of "what do I have that needs to be used up?" I pulled out the crock pot, selected a knife, and started opening the cupboards. Here's what I came up with:

Hearty Breakfast Pear Stew

Ingredients:
4 VERY crisp pears, cubed
1/4 butternut squash, peeled and cubed (yet another treat featuring squash from Rain's mother!)
1/2 vidalia onion, diced
1/4 c. steel cut oats
1 pkg bacon, diced (it was a disappointing pack...more fat than meat...after trimming I'd guess about 1 cup of meat went into the pot)
1 1/4 c apple juice
1/3 c honey (gifted to my by Tinman!)
1 tbsp vanilla
1/2 tea cinnamon
1/8 tea clove

Put everything in the crock pot and cook on LOW for 6-8 hours.

I'll let you know the final vote, but MAN it smells good!

About September 11th...risking outrage

Over the next week or so, the American people are going to gather in various places to pay homage to the events of September 11, 2001. There are candlelit vigils, parades, speaker events. There are articles about the "9/11 kids" (those 10,000 babes born on that day) or just how we should explain the meaning of THAT day to little children.

Me? I say Bah! Humbug!

These memorials and gatherings are surface polish that do not carry any real meaning. I see the list of upcoming events, and I see thousands of people wallowing in self-pity. I see just how much the terrorists WON.

* People remain afraid to fly. Security measures have become such that air ports employ body scanners and parents won't allow children to fly because perverts can get naked pictures of the kids. We end up buying shampoo, toothpaste, and body lotion because we can't bring our own on board. Hell, we can't even bring a factory-sealed bottle of WATER on board.
*People are afraid of immigrants and foreigners. What happened to the Land of Opportunity? Where is the "melting pot"? I have friends who have come to the US of A to learn, and they have shared their difficulties in finding housing because they are from Italy or Canada or Israel and have an accent. I know people who are afraid of visiting ME in my home because there are billboards printed in other languages.
*People are afraid of their neighbors. Every thing we do is on surveillance because we don't trust anyone. The crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."
* People are afraid, and they are reminded often that there is reason to fear. The massacres in Norway, Tucson, AR, Fort Hood, TX, NIU, Virginia Tech, Seattle, WA, Madrid, Spain, London, England, and on and on. We are no safer today than we were ten years ago. Terrorists are adept at finding weak points and exploiting them. And they have succeeded in making us weak through isolation. The terrorists have won. We now live with the understand that there’s a level of danger even here.

So...what are you going to do to "memorialize" the tenth anniversary of 9/11?

If you think parading about with a candle is a great idea, think again. The lives lost on September 11, 2001 and those lost in the wars subsequent to that fateful day are a tragedy. I, too, have lost loved ones and I know that mourning goes on through the rest of your life. However, we do not have to allow the losses to cripple us. Instead of being sad or angry because of what has happened, reach out. I have some ideas for you.

* Plan a picnic in a park with your family.
* Start up a softball game at the corner lot.
* Knock on your neighbor's door and introduce yourself.
* Sign up to take a class about another language, culture, or religion.
* Give blood.
* Go to a museum, cultural center, or tour your neighborhood.
* Organize a creek clean-up.
* Make an old-fashioned apple pie.
* Visit someone in a nursing home and ask them their story.
* Unplug the fricken iPod, phone, computer and connect with an actual person!

These are the things that make a great people! It is our connections and our willingness to be open to each other that makes us strong! If everyone knew the names of every person on their block, how much stronger, how much MORE could we do?

Season of change...I hope...

It's late, so I'm probably not thinking clearly. Plus I have a headache. But I can't sleep, so here I am, zoning into the computer and writing to you.

It has been a bitch of a summer. Battling depression in the brutal heat is much worse than it is in the winter. In the winter, you can burrow under the blankets and hide. In the summer, you don't even have THAT small comfort. wry smile I tried, and overheating drove me here to try again to sort out my life. Maybe when I'm done, I will fold laundry and take out the trash.

There's no space between my thoughts to THINK, let alone gain a handle on what needs to be done next. I have been putting one foot in front of the other, head bowed, trying to get through the day. I *hate* being here, but I am afraid to stop because if I do, I might drown. It's like quicksand...it's hard NOT to struggle against it. With nothing being clear, it is so damnably easy to point at others for their lack of clarity. When there is no established plan, it is too easy to lay blame for changing the plan.

Tonight, I fought with Beloved this evening, complete with raised voices and harsh words. It's been building for a while, and we are both at fault. I want to be so much MORE than I am...than I have been. Where I normally feel compersion, I have been feeling tired and irritable. I told him earlier that I felt like Mrs. Cratchit, and I meant it. He works too hard for too little recognition. It makes me bitter about his work, my lack of work, the state of the house, the overwhelmed days with the kids, and the time that is spent with Rain, which is now confined to visits every couple of weeks. And I lashed out, claws outstretched, and swiped at Beloved, at ShadoKnight, at Rain. I feel bad for it and I apologized but it hasn't changed the confusion and frustration I feel inside.

"You try to find yourself in the abstractions of religion and the cruelty of everyone else. And you wake up to realize your standard of living somehow got stuck on survive...When you're standing in deep water and you're bailing yourself out with a straw..." ~Jewel

I am tired of being told that I'm worth it, or that it's good to be of service because it is hollow to me. I do not feel worthy and I want to regain my confidence and drive to make others happy and comfortable. But I don't know where to strike the balance. I want to please, but I want to remain sane. I want to serve without feeling used. I want to be both strong and vulnerable...but...

but...

sigh Does any of it make any sense? I doubt it. So much is in my own head, viewed through a kaleidoscope of emotion and mood. I trust in the bit of therapy of random association and free thought. And I rely on time. Healing time.

"this strange season of pain will come to pass when the healing hands of autumn cool me down" ~ Indigo Girls

Storms swept through this afternoon, and it is a soothing 68F. The frogs and crickets are singing their hearts out and the house is quiet. Blissfully quiet. I should sleep...but I am loathe to miss the opportunity to be alone. To dance, because at the moment nobody is watching, and maybe I will remember the steps...and maybe...just maybe...I'll remember them in the morning, too.

so what do you do when...

you have been "out" with a family member for years and years, and they suddenly take issue?

We were invited to hide from the heatwave back at my aunt's air-conditioned house in July. At the time, my cousin was also staying at the house. We asked and were told that it was fine to have a friend with us. We even explained the relationship to the cousin, who then revealed HE had a V-relationship himself.

We were very conscientious and there was no sex, no play, nothing we had to hide from the kids (or anyone else, so we thought). We DID share the master bedroom between the three adults, although a child was often added or an adult subtracted because what else do you do when the kids wake up in the middle of the night? After our stay, we stripped and washed all the linens, restocked the fridge, cleaned the bathrooms, watered the plants, and left things in better shape than when we had arrived.

Tonight, I got a complaint, not from my aunt or my cousin, but from my sister, who says we took advantage of hospitality and are sending mixed messages to the kids and it's wrong.

*raises eyebrow* I am going to resist the urge to turn tables and point at flaws. I'm frustrated and concerned that the claim is "others are uncomfortable". I *think* it's just her being uncomfortable, but it is hard to tell because...well, family talks, right? I don't know quite how to proceed. If I have asked permission of our host to bring a friend, am I "taking advantage"? I feel like I am being forced to choose between my blood-family and my poly-family. Beloved and I have always prided ourselves on being able to balance vanilla and non-vanilla flavors in our lives. Have we been kidding ourselves all along?

The whole thing makes me grumpy.

Bright side, in writing this, I got distracted by looking for poly-themed kids books. There aren't many, but the ones I did find look cute!

Six-Dinner Sid
Else-Marie and Her Seven Little Daddies
Two of Everything

If you happen to know of others, I'd love to know...

Shattered

"The book is an attempt to reverse this flow of information, to find objective "evidence" for what she has discovered through private experience, that after the birth of her child a woman's equality is shown to be not the great evolutionary transformation of the modern era, but a kind of temporary, easily revoked passport into the world of men. In Shattered, the emotional becomes the factual and statistical; the private is refracted through the stories of others, elicited in interviews with parents up and down the country and abroad.

Why does a woman become angry when she has a baby? One answer is: because she has lost the power of autonomy and free will in her own life. From the first moment of her pregnancy, a woman finds herself subject to forces over which she has no control, not least those of the body itself. This subjection applies equally to the unknown and the known: she is her body's subject, her doctor's subject, her baby's subject, and in this biological work she has undertaken she becomes society's and history's subject too. But where she feels the subjection most is in the territories, whatever they are, that in her pre-maternal life she made her own. The threat to what made her herself, to what made her an individual: this is what the mother finds hardest to face down. Having been told all her life to value her individuality and pursue its aims, she encounters an outright contradiction, a betrayal – even among the very gatekeepers of her identity, her husband or colleagues or friends – in the requirement that she surrender it.

In fact, a woman is never more of an individual than in her response to the conformity of motherhood: it is her individuality, after all, that is being questioned. This is one of the things that makes the culture of motherhood so difficult to grapple with. Motherhood may look like a genre, but in reality it is an infinitesimal network of secret pacts and compromises, of private bargainings with the self. Beginning with pregnancy and birth, it is taxing in its solitude, as well as taxing of solitude; it takes away all the profit in being alone, and leaves mere loneliness. The new mother – and not just the new mother – is lonely, and yet never on her own.

Rebecca Asher is not wrong to see a general hazard in the adaptation of culturally equal, post-feminist woman to the time-honoured injustices of family life, but formulating a cri de coeur out of it is a delicate matter. Her own indignation has its genesis in the fact that after the birth of their son, the equality that she and her husband, both working professionals, believed they shared was proved to be artificial: with a newborn baby in the house, he was free to resume his old life and return to work, while she was not. Where, then, had this impression of equality come from? And who was responsible for its disappearance? Well, like many intelligent women of her age, no one ever told her that she wasn't equal: it was from outside that the impression came, from the attainments she was free to pursue, the liberties that were available to her, the achievements and jobs she was able to acquire. And no one ever told her husband that he was fettered by his biological destiny, that with the birth of his child his whole life would have to change. So while the old idea of woman had certainly been done away with, no one had thought to put anything in its place. The baby comes and everyone panics, looking for the woman who's going to take care of it, and like the doctor of philosophy summoned over the PA to attend a medical emergency, there's a case of mistaken identity. "Mother" and "woman" are at this stage still just words, but it's a crisis so she'll have to do. A year, three years, five years later she's become a mother, a woman, through hour after hour of experience – and now she really is different, different from her husband, and different from the person she was.

"The expectation that the mother is primarily responsible for the children and family home disfigures our relationships," Asher writes. It might have been better if she had said it had disfigured her relationships, for true as it might be, put so generally it is hard to know exactly what kind of truth it is. Among other things it is the truth of hindsight, of after-knowledge: it is knowledge born of experience. The lesson here is not about motherhood so much perhaps as about womanhood, womanhood not as something granted – and removed, should the necessity arise – by the cultural conditions, but as something personally realised.

The modern woman arrives in motherhood like a shellshocked tourist without a guidebook in a foreign land, and Shattered rails against the brutality of the transfer, the injustice of the new conditions."