Still life from this weekend:

the chair capital of New England, singing, Olivia Newton Longjohns, squeaking creatures in the night, truth, greek yogurt, dog parkour, 8 hours in the car, snoring.

Shared with permission

I Am From
by The Teen

I am from Jen, [grandpa], [grandma]*
I am from ham and potato eaters, raw vegetable eaters, and bay leaves
From people who love to sing and play word games

I am from “love everyone” to “lieblings”
I am from Christians and Pagans
From a secretary, a president, a seamstress –but mostly from social working

From Munjoy Hill and the blueberry field
From gardens and deer surrounded by green

I am from bubbly, fanatical, but also confused and angry.

I am from tea, a bunny, embroidery and walking

I am from all over the world, but the best place is home


*I did not have their permission to link their names with this blog, so they are redacted.

Killah

She preys on innocent victims, waiting for them in the shadow of an alley, crouching under the stairs, lying flat beneath a car with a handful of knives.  Unaware, they walk about their silly nighttime business until she decides they've had enough; with the stone hand of an angel she reaches out and snuffs their small dreams.  But death is not enough for this yellow-eyed beauty.  She desires their screams, thrills in their delusions of escape.  She'll toy with them until they are exhausted and wild-eyed, and snap their necks with a casual smack. Then, with the wind tickling her ears, she'll drag her victim to the backyard, to display the gruesome work to her tall gods.

But they are indifferent to her bloody gifts. Each new body is disappeared into a silent grave, with no acknowledgement of her effort.  She decides to go for larger prey.  Perhaps the tall ones require more flesh.

Unspeakable

As noted, I never write here about the hard things until well after they're over.  In part, I am intensely private about strong emotions (the Tween claims that she has only seen me cry twice before these past weeks), but I also am hesitant to put down in writing anything that is unconsidered. 

So here's the short, but considered, update:

At the end of May, I had some surgery on my lady parts, hoping that they would be less excruciating for me in the long run.  The surgery itself was successful and my recovery fairly fast; I am now mostly back to normal, and the pain is much improved even over my pre-surgery state.  It will be some time before I know whether it was a total success, and I still get tired fairly quickly, but I am now almost completely healed.

Three weeks ago the Princess and I decided to postpone the wedding for a year.  This was a difficult and emotional process for me, since I am rigid in my thinking have a very hard time changing gears.  But truly, with a little time and perspective I am seeing that this is actually a smart decision; we may even be able to plan the wedding for the Princess' homeland, which is her true wish.  And I do like to grant princess wishes.

Then, almost two weeks ago, my dear aunt Becky passed away suddenly. In the absence of my mother, my father's sisters Becky and Cathy have been surrogates for me, together making up the most important adult female influence in my life so far.  I was, and still am, devastated by this loss.  Last week is a blur; there are big chunks of it that I don't even remember.  This week my weeping has decreased to about once a day, and I am able to be alone, but I still can't read the condolence cards my lovely friends have sent, and I still am stunned that I must wake up and go to work and eat and sleep.  

The result of all this is that I feel a little tilted; my little universe has undergone a fundamental shift.  I don't think that this is objectively bad, though it is subjectively excruciating.  Sometimes a change to the foundations of my life helps me focus on what is important, and often it helps me shed old, bad habits, belongings and ideas.  It opens up space I didn't know existed; sometimes I didn't want to know--didn't think I needed to know--that space existed, but there it is just the same.  The princess and the tween have been solid for me throughout this whole thing, and that has been an incredible gift.  It still sucks, though.  A lot. I would much prefer some low-level angsting about messy bedrooms instead of needing some hands to hold on to so that I can remember to breathe.

Just the same. We are here, you and I, moving forward. Still.

Legalities

The Tween's father and I never married. For that I am sometimes grateful and often annoyed. It would have been much harder to get out of that situation if we had been legally bound, but since we were never married the Tween has existed in a custody netherland for a dozen years.

Legally, he still has 50% custody of her, even though she wouldn't know him if she looked directly at him. Since he has no interest at all in claiming that 50% we've been fine until this winter, when there became an emergent need for a Tweeny passport.

The irony is that if we had gotten married, all of this would have been settled when we divorced. When kids are involved, the legal shortcuts of marriage are pretty handy.

So I've tried to file for custody before (these days they call it primary residence), but was unsuccessful because the father is SO uninterested in custody that he wouldn't sign and return the paperwork I sent him.

Today is our initial court appearance for this process, and I am nervous. I don't like it when I can see how the government intrudes into my personal life; I like to pretend I am an autonomous free citizen--though I am clearly not.

It's also difficult to stir up the ashes of this decades-old relationship. Like it or not, at one time I loved her father enough to have a baby with him. Despite all of the years of aggravation since, I did once want to get married to him. We were parents together of a tiny beautiful infant girl. My 19 year old self wanted to erase the trauma of my teen years by settling down with him and being "normal" together. Of course, we never were and never would be. I'm pretty gay, and we were really young, and he had issues and I had issues.

My feelings for him now are mostly ambivalent, tending towards irritation when something I want can't happen. I don't even know the man any more. Our parenting-together-selves were almost half my life ago now.

My resistance to this legal process has been manifesting, though, in my body (which is sore and tired and stressed) and in a wild disorganization of thought and paperwork which is entirely unlike my normal manner of operations. I keep hiding paperwork on myself, sticking it into folders where it doesn't belong, forgetting to bring it to appointments, losing it, procrastinating filling it out. I'm taking out my feelings on the paper. Luckily the paper doesn't mind.

With a little bit of serendipity this situation will be settled--for all intents and purposes, although there is more court later in the year--today. Please think good thoughts for us.

UPDATE: I got the temporary order. It'll be permanent after another hearing, to take place in a month or so. She's mine!

Sick Day Assignment

The Tween was sick this morning, so I gave her some tylenol, my Netflix password, and the phone, and went off to work. She was coming-down-with-something-sick, so I knew she'd be bored before long, and I didn't want her tubing out in front of Kim Possible all day. So my conditions were this: She had to watch a documentary--any one she chose--and write me a essay on it before she could go on to the fluffier stuff.

She chose Monster Camp, and I present to you her [spelling corrected] essay and review:

The movie I watched was called Monster Camp. It was about L.A.R.P.-ing (live action role playing). It was really good. My favorite person was the girl playing the Sea Elf. It was a lot like what [best friend] and I do. Everyone had a character. They were their characters.

The people LARP fights, mostly. It is not from a particular book; the people are medieval fantasy creatures. The people that go there say they LARP becuse it is a good escape from reality. The people in this movie are from ages 14 to 60. The movie takes place in (or around) Seattle. You don't choose your charater if you're a Monster, MAR (Movable Action Roleplayer), or newbie. COCs (Chooser of Characters) get to decide if you come regularly enough to stay a permanent character in the Plot.

The movie's 'message' is that it's OK to pretend, even if you are not a kid. My favorite part was seeing the costumes and makeup. My least favorite part was seeing a 30 year old man talking about how this was his 5th year of being a high school senior.

I would give this movie 4 stars for kids my age to watch. This movie made me want to LARP sometime.

As it turns out, she didn't end up watching any of the cable-tv crap I thought she'd like, because she ended up working on the movie and essay most of the day--and she seemed to like it. Which is just fine by me. Now it looks like I might get to teach my kid to play D&D.

Middle Schoolers Coming Out

The NY Times has a pretty long article about coming out in middle school, including some interviews with kids in Maine.

I was guilty of my share of [disbelief], too, the first time I met Kera — then a 12-year-old seventh grader — and her 13-year-old best friend, Justin, last spring in a city in New England. Kera had small, delicate features. Justin had freckles and braces. They seemed like kids. Yet there they were at a bookstore coffee shop after school, talking nonchalantly — when they weren’t giggling uncontrollably about one of their many inside jokes, that is — about their sexual identities. Kera said she was bisexual. Justin said he was gay. The effect was initially surreal to me, and before long I heard myself blurt out, “But you’re so young!”

It's a thoughtful article, and the author acknowledges his own prejudices; the basic message is that the world isn't quite ready for these kids, but it can't stop them. I like that.

Women's Work

I'm going through my own internal recession, I think; I've recognized that my personal resources (time, energy, happiness) are limited and am cutting back, reviewing what's necessary, laying off what's not.

I have finally accepted that I can't do everything. My limit seems to be two jobs, although I actually hold 4 permanent ones: housekeeper, mom, project assistant (this is the one that pays), cook.

This means that I constantly have to choose which two are going to get the focus. This week cook and housekeeper stepped back so that I could motor though my lengthy to-do list at work and navigate Daughter's schedule. But that means I only made dinner once, and it was from the freezer, and the dishes are taking over the counter.

I'm ok with that.

I could also probably also add to the "unpaid" or category:

• chauffeur
• laundress
• nutritionist
• child psychologist
• nursing assistant
• researcher
• freelance writer
• publicist
• gardener
• pet care specialist

(Hmm... is there a job for people who update their facebook statuses a lot? I'd have that one too.)

But my mental health seriously depends on being able to have reasonable expectations of what I can do. Jobs I have recently discarded:

• extreme environmentalist
• gourmet chef
• best.mom.ever
• literary genius

It's a relief to trim down my internal resume. I have always tended to be an overachiever (thanks, alcoholic parent!), and put pressure on myself to be the best at everything... which led to me not enjoying anything.

Being healthier has led to changes in my life that are far more radical than any of the politics in the days when I was marching in demonstrations every week. Liking myself, for example. Having a strong relationship with my kid. Enjoying being alive.

It's totally worth it, even with an internal pay cut.

Me, Nonplussed

Daughter was anxious for me to see this video. I saw it. I can't say that watching it helped.

Cough, cough

This has been the weeks of the sickness(es). Somehow I ended up missing seven days of work out of the past ten, for a series of completely unrelated events. I keep telling myself that I must be making a huge karmic down payment on something really excellent...

You can see some of the evidence on my flickr, but the most intense part has been the flu that I caught (probably at the doctor's office while having my toes x-rayed, and despite the flu shot I got in the fall). I can't remember the last time I was this sick, and I've never had the flu before. I can understand why meaner strains of it killed people.

In fact, most of the week is lost in a hot blur. Since I couldn't sustain concentration to read, I watched a lot of TV (including an obscene amount of Roseanne and many births on Discovery) and slept and drank tea and ate soy yogurt. I had a breakdown of sorts on Tuesday afternoon when I realized how sick I actually was, and had to call in the reinforcements so that I could get away to go to the urgent care clinic, but my friends came to the rescue.

This weekend my folks are taking Daughter so that I can sleep and sleep and sleep. And probably watch more Roseanne.

I will not be at all sorry to see this week go.

Crunchtastic

Last year's crunchy stress-relieving snack: Lundberg Brown Rice Lightly Salted Rice Cakes.

This year's crunchy stress-relieving snack: Tortilla chips and salsa. And I've moved up to "medium" salsa which, for a Maine girl like me, is kind of a big step. I wonder if there's some kind of significance to the spicing up of my snack choices? Freud would probably say so.

For my birthday yesterday I bought myself some shrimp cocktail and ate it all. Then I had chips and salsa, some adult soynog, and then mashed potatoes and a giant steak for dinner. Plus I bought myself a couple of books and received a very nice ginger-beer-and-little-lads-popcorn basket. But most importantly, I finished my holiday shopping. A lovely day.

More Holiday Anxiety

While having a tween daughter isn't all fun and games (ha. ha.), there is at least one reason to be grateful: she's (mostly) beyond the age of toys. Her holiday wish list this year is technology, clothes, books, stuffed animals, and music.

This morning's Press Herald article made me glad I'm not buying a ton of toys this year:

One of every three toys in a study of 1,500 products have been found to contain "medium" or "high" levels of lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, bromine and chlorine, the nonprofit Ecology Center reported last week in its Healthy Toys Guide.
...
A sampling of items that the Ecology Center says are dangerous are Disney's Hannah Montana two-heart necklace; the educational learning-game system by LeapFrog, Leapster2/Wall.E; Thistle Blocks, flexible nubby pads that connect together for construction; Little Tikes Bath Letters & Numbers; and Circo brand shoes.

Of course, the toys I did buy her for the past decade were probably full of toxins and poison, but at least I didn't know about it. I think lots of parents are going back to plain wooden toys and rag dolls. Couldn't we just ban plastic? Couldn't we?

Safe!

I had to stop myself this morning from saying "if you spent as much time on your homework as you did on your hair, your grades would be halfway decent."

But I did stop myself. Barely.

Sigh. My transformation into my (pre-breakdown) mother is almost complete.

Current Theory

People in their early adolescence develop a hive-mind--an unconscious group-think process--that renders them completely unable to think independently. They become linked by an invisible communications network that only works when the entire network is activated.

The logical consequences of thinking pattern are: hours-long phone conversations that follow hours-long visits, a complete inability to be alone, instant knowledge of whether something is cool or not--even before it's been experienced, Hannah Montana and the entire Disney Channel.

Why do they not hand out tranquilizers upon the maturation of one's daughter. Why?

Mwah Hah Hah

I'm headed off to the West End Halloween Parade tonight, put on every year by Shoestring Theater. It's the first year I've been able to go, because Daughter is completely terrified of it--and this year she's going trick-or-treating with her *boyfriend.* That's right.

In honor of Samhain/Halloween, I thought I'd share with you the opening lines of the best horror novel I've ever read, ever. And I've read a lot of them. No, really. Every other haunted house book written since is just a retelling of this one.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, 1959

Anyway, here's wishing you a safe journey through the darkness, and enough candy corn to put holes in your teeth.

Transgender Children

The Atlantic has a new article about transgender children. I'm only partway through it, but I'm struck by this:

This is the strange place in which transsexuals have found themselves. For years, they’ve been at the extreme edges of transgressive sexual politics. But now children like Brandon are being used to paint a more conventional picture: before they have much time to be shaped by experience, before they know their sexual orientation, even in defiance of their bodies, children can know their gender, from the firings of neurons deep within their brains.

I'm going to keep reading. Have you read it? What do you think?

More Kid Advice

Yes, a little glut on the blogging. Well, you know, lots of free time... and, it does look like the home internet connection will be over after this week, so I'll almost certainly be a little more spotty. So get it while it lasts. Or something.



For Daughter's birthday (in August) I bought her a subscription to New Moon, an alternative magazine for girls. Alternative, that is, to magazines like Seventeen, Vogue, Glamour, whatever. I don't think she won't read these magazines (she absolutely loves Tiger Beat, for example) but I'd like to give her some other things to think about.

Feministe has a great series of posts this week about how to address these awful magazines with your teen and tween girls.

Today's advice:

* Ask her what she thinks is real and unreal in each issue. It can be a game to score how much fakery there is from month to month - is the magazine getting more fake or more real?
* Are the photos altered? (Show her this example of how photo manipulation makes an average looking woman into the fake perfection we see in magazines.)
* Count how many of the total pages are ads (often more than 50%). What are the ads selling?
* In its subject matter, does the magazine leave out things that she cares about and that are on her mind? What are those things?
* Ask her what effect she thinks an article or ad is trying to have on readers.
* Ask her how she feels (different from what she thinks) after looking at or reading an article or ad. Listen without judging or arguing about what she says.
* Tell her how you feel (give her your feelings - angry, sad, afraid, guilty - not your thoughts) after looking at or reading a different article or ad.
* Express your opinions (thoughts) about the articles and ads.
* Provide her with alternative magazines like New Moon and Teen Voices by subscribing and keeping them in the house all the time. Having them available is like having healthy food in the kitchen. Even if she might always want to eat pop tarts, it’s not the only food we provide!

I like it. Of course, you have to take the time to have these conversations, look your kid in the eye, and listen to what they have to say. If you're doing that already, even if you don't use those questions, your girl will probably be fine.

Kid Vid

Now that Daughter is nearly a tween (a sign of this appeared on her bedroom door this week; it says "Please Knock" on one side and "Keep Out" on the other) I am having a hard time vetting movies for her to watch. My general policy is that anything rated PG-13 needs at best a pre-screening, but in practice it usually ends up being a co-viewing followed by discussion.

I tend to be more lenient about sex than violence (and a combination of the two is strictly prohibited) because, well, I don't think sex is bad, and I do think violence is. Of course, she'd rather die than watch any sex--any hint, suggestion, implication of sex--so it pretty much works out.

But the rating system is so weird. Last night I watched I Am Legend, which was rated PG-13 but showed scary zombies, the end of the world, and an exploding helicopter. But over the winter we watched R-rated Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and heard the f-word and a mild homosexual joke ("Those aren't pillows!"). So weird.

Anyway, so I've been using this site (via I can't remember who) to check out the movies in advance. Warning: their summaries are full of spoilers. However, it does list every single thing that any parent could find objectionable.

For Shrek, for example (a movie that I can't imagine anyone who wants to see has not seen), it warns:

SEX/NUDITY 3 - A man is seen in bed with bare shoulders and chest. There are a handful of kisses. There are a couple of attempted kisses, in two scenes characters pucker up in anticipation of being kissed, and a woman asks for a kiss. There are some mild sexual references during a scene describing three princesses. Two characters flirt in several scenes; one includes references to physical relationships. A dragon kisses an ogre's bottom (by mistake). A man kisses a woman's hand. A woman exposes some cleavage in a tight fitting gown. Some wooden puppets wear plumber's pants exposing painted bottom cleavage. A donkey urinates on a camp fire. A female dragon falls in love with a donkey. We see a shirtless green ogre.

So if you're worried about what your kid might see, well now you know.

I was thinking about going to see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull--rated PG-13--last month, and saw this rating:



So I thought, mmm, maybe a little too much. Maybe she'd like Prince Caspian--rated PG--better (we're Narnia geeks, subliminal christian messages notwithstanding), and got this rating for it:



We skipped the movies altogether. We've been playing Clue instead, which probably gets a rating for implied violence somehow.

"Multiple suggestions of murder. Multiple murder weapons listed: candlestick, rope, lead pipe, wrench, etc. People make accusations of murder. People laugh hysterically and mime murders with tiny murder weapons."

One of Those Days

You know that the day isn't going to be a disney musical when your first waking thoughts are, "oh, shit."

Last night was the Queer Youth Prom, and I volunteered to chaperone for the second year in a row. The theme was Out through the Decades, so my date and I dressed up as Secret Heavy Metal Dude Lovers, and I broke out my spandex and bought a leather vest for the occasion. I also used an entire bottle of sample-sized hairspray and wore red cowboy boots. Alas, I have no photographs of the occasion, but you'll have to trust that it was nothing short of amazing. The only think I forgot was to pack the spandex (which is funny, because it really, genuinely didn't occur to me) but I think it was a good choice in the interest of keeping things G-rated for the youth.

At any rate, it was an entertaining, if long, evening, and several of us chaperones decided to nightcap it off at a local drinking establishment. That would have been fine if the strong gin and tonics hadn't come in pint glasses, and if I'd eaten supper.

Long story short, I found myself walking to my car at 9:00 this morning, sipping on my coffee as gently as I could so as not to rattle the shards of glass that seem to be lodged in my brain. There is a complex series of broken blood vessels across my chest from the binding (to all of my trans and drag-performing friends: I'm sorry. I really didn't know) and I think I still have pillow wrinkles on my face.

I picked up Daughter from her friend's house, where she'd spent the night--probably getting even less sleep than me--and took her to acting class. I foolishly volunteered to help out at a bottle-drive fundraiser this afternoon, but being in a loud, clinking room full of the smell of rotten booze is, um, not my first choice right now.

Wish me luck. And a nap.

Unexpected Time

I spent almost the entire day on Saturday hanging out with some of the nicest people you can imagine in Ellsworth, Maine. That time, plus the driving time (about six hours total) counted as work time. And since I only work 22.5 hours per week, and there's a holiday tomorrow, so that leaves me with about 5 hours of work to somehow complete between Tuesday and Friday.

Fortunately I think I have an out of town guest taking up some of that time, and it's school vacation week. And I've created a list of projects for myself:

• build a clothes-drying space in the backyard (something like this that is about two feet wide because my yard, unlike the one pictured below, is about 10X10):
  
  
• bottle the apple wine I made in September
• build the raised beds in the backyard for herbs and veg
• go see Girls Rock at The Movies
• use the grill (got some chicken marinating as we speak)

Because it's unplanned, it's a delicious treat. Better than a full-on vacation with an agenda and lots of travel. Just hanging out at home.