Barnmaven

What a Boob.

Adrianne Curry gets my vote for biggest asshole on Twitter this week (so far).  Here's her post from yesterday:

 
I'm pretty sure she's figured out by today that offending millions of breastfeeding mothers and proponents across the globe is not only a surefire way to guarantee thousands of pissed-off emails in your inbox, but also likely to get you painted as an ignorant jerk.  Oh, and boost your pageviews.

It hurts to realize that we haven't come as far as I thought we had in normalizing breastfeeding.  Its discouraging and disheartening to see women shaming other women for feeding their babies.  Its frustrating that despite the ongoing dialogue about nursing and the abundance of facts and research available, ignorant people still wish to equate breastfeeding with a sexual act. 

I'm getting tired of repeating myself when it comes to this debate.  I frankly can't even understand why there IS a debate about feeding babies.  Women have been nursing their children anywhere and everywhere ever since human beings started having babies.  Its only here in the good old USA that nobody bats an eye at Victoria's Secret ad with women saved from nudity by only the tiniest scraps of fabric, but people still get their knickers in a twist at the thought of having to see what little can be seen of a woman's breast when a baby's head is in front of it.  

I'm no prude.  I'm not offended by women wearing revealing clothing or lingerie cleverly disguised as clothing.  If a girl's got assets she's got every right to show them off.  Breasts are awesome, no doubt.  As sexual objects go, they're hard to beat.  When I'm not pregnant or nursing, they play a big part in sex for me.  (At least, they used to, back in the days I actually HAD sex.  I'm not sure I remember HOW anymore...)  To me, one of the most amazing things about them is the dual purpose they serve.  The breast is a GLAND, folks.  All that yummy roundness and softness exists not just to titillate (sorry, couldn't resist) and excite, but to house the ductwork necessary to provide the perfect food for infant humans.  If humans weren't meant to breastfeed, breasts simply wouldn't exist. 

When I was nursing my kids, there was no sexual aspect whatsoever for me.  There was a lot of emotion tied up in it, the softness I felt in my heart when I a tiny little hand would clutch my finger and my baby would grunt and sigh and eat.  The hormones produced during letdown and nursing that help moms and babies bond created a tender emotional glow around the act of feeding my babies that is almost impossible to describe.  I felt so many things - joy and love so intense they were something that could be touched and seen.  Happiness.  Contentment.  Pride.  Love.  More love.  Love on top of love with a sprinkling of yet more love.  There was nothing more beautiful in that moment than my baby.  There was nothing remotely sexual about it.  It was motherhood in its most elemental form.

Pregnancy and birth taught me that my body was meant for more things than I realized.  Legs are not just for walking - they provide something to brace yourself with for the next contraction.  Hands are not just for picking things up, they're for crushing the fingers of your labor partner.  Ha.  Vaginas are great for sex and other things, but they are also the passage for babies to enter the world.  Breasts - they make baby food.   When we limit our understand of ourselves only to those things sexual we miss out on so much more.  Our bodies can be smelly and sometimes a little gross, but at the same time they are strong and amazing and incredibly multifaceted.    We are both base and sublime.

How sad that Adrianne Curry's is unable to appreciate and marvel at the wonder of a woman's breast.  How unfortunate that her limited thinking leads her to believe its only purpose is to provide sexual pleasure.  Its odd that while Ms. Curry seems to harbor no qualms about flaunting her own nudity in public venues, her public stance against breastfeeding is based on being opposed to OTHER women being (at best) partially unclothed.  

My job as a mother is to take care of my children.  Feeding them is not optional.  So long as babies need to eat mothers will nurse.  Women need not be relegated to bathroom stalls (ewww, unsanitary) or behind closed doors to feed their babies.  There is something wrong with a society that views THIS:

 as somehow being more acceptable than THIS:

 
Perplexing, isn't it? 

Round Peg?

I'm the first person to admit that I have a problem with impulsivity.  If I ever stick my toe in the dating pool again, I'd really like to meet someone who sees this in an optimistic, "isn't that cute" kind of way.  I've been told in the past that my impulsive nature makes me a horrible person to live with.  Its not that I try to bring home animals or make life-altering decisions...its more often that I can't seem to help myself. 

Eleven years ago after knowing J for four months, I sold nearly everything I owned, stuffed the rest into a U-Haul trailer and moved from Washington State to New Jersey.  Impulse, much?  And we can all see how well *that* turned out.  Three years ago, with a newly acquired bit of land, I bought the first horse I looked at.  Because she reminded me of another horse I used to have.  She couldn't be ridden yet, and she didn't like to be handled.  I've spent a lot of time and money since then trying to get her to be a trail horse, since that's really all I do anymore is trail ride.  My other horse, Zenon, is 20 now.  He's still fresh as a daisy after a five mile ride, thanks to his Arabian ancestry, and he's Mr. Dependable.  He's surefooted and a lot of fun to take places.  Miss B, on the other hand, while she's much younger and has a beautiful trot you could ride all day, is sadly not suited to trail riding.  She's quick as a cat, explosive, and reactive.  Twice this year I've been dumped by her, not on purpose but because a branch or a tumbleweed poked her and she just exploded sideways.  Being dumped on the trail is not only no fun, its dangerous.   I've kept trying with her, for many reasons, but ultimately I have to accept that she is not the right horse for the job I want her to do.  Worse, she's dangerous because I'm putting her in situations that she can't quite handle, and I don't' have the luxury of continually putting myself at risk of injury.  In the end, its not fair to either one of us.  I love her dearly, and I give a lot of credit to her, to our trainers Bill and Angie, and to myself even, for how far she has come from what she was when I brought her home.  She went from being a horse who was afraid, concerned and upset when being handled, to a horse who would walk up to you in the pasture and stick her nose in the halter.  But she's still a square peg, and I need to stop trying to shove her in the round hole.  She would be happier doing something she's better suited to - reining, possibly, or barrels.  With her speed and quick reflexes, she might make a decent cutting horse.  Who knows?

Michelle is my trail buddy.  We've gone trail riding together every Saturday this year, with only one exception.  She has been so good to me, coming by with her trailer to pick up me and my horse and bringing us back.  I'm lucky where I live in that I can go right down the street and ride for quite a way along the river, and I can head up the street and hit some of the open land north and west of town, but that's about all I can do from here and I'm not a big fan of trail riding in the city.  I like to get out of town where all you can hear are the birds chirping and the hawks scree-ing and the views are spectacular.  And riding alone, while occasionally good for the soul (or a great place to have a really decent cry when life gets a little too much) gets boring after a while.  Without Michelle, my riding life would look a whole lot different than it has lately and I am grateful beyond words for her generous spirit.  She loves to ride too, and I think its been as wonderful for her as it has been for me to have a friend to hit the trails with. 

Michelle and I have the same philosophy  on most things when it comes to horses.  We're both big believers in Natural Horsemanship, we like the same kind of big, stocky quarter horses, and we both have horses for the love of them and not to win ribbons or make money.  There are people in this world who make a living off of horses - but they are few and far between.  Michelle started breeding Quarter Horses years ago.  She has about 16 horses on her place, two stallions, a group of mares, "her" horse and then the few horses she is getting trained in hopes of finding them the right owner.  One of those horses is a big bay gelding called "Bugs."  That's his barn name - most registered horses have a name they're registered under  that you'd never want to call them in real life, and then they get a barn name, usually something short and simple, reflective of the horse's personality.  My second horse ever, a beautiful little buckskin mare, was "Norchas Super Fury" on paper, but to us she was just "Little Bit."  I'm not even sure what Bug's registered name is - I suppose I'll find out eventually.  Which is what I'm leading to with all this. 

Saturday when we were riding, Michelle brought Bugs along, and I, tired of hitting the ground so much, brought Zenon.  Somehow during the course of the conversation, we decided that I'm going to give Bugs a try, and so at the end of the ride, Michelle left him in my care and took Miss B home with her to go run around in an 11 acre pasture with the broodmares.  I feel a whole lot like its Christmas and my birthday all at the same time.  Its a rare opportunity, and I'm really overwhelmed and a bit verklempt over my friends generosity and willingness to not only trust me with her horse, but to take mine to her place.   If I do list her for sale, Michelle's place is a better place for her to be, since there's an arena and a round pen, and for someone to come look at her they can also ride her in a safe environment. 

This time I'm going to try not to be impulsive.  I'm going to really spend some time with this gelding and see if he's the right horse for me.  But its hard not to have a little bit of a crush on him - just look at him:

 
I hope he's my round peg.

Magic Box

I was trying to get some pictures of my new crush, Bugs, a longer story which will undoubtedly be written later this week.  As the guys were munching near the pasture gate, a chance sunbeam backlit them with the most amazing colors.  Somehow I managed to capture it.

 

This shot was from the Memorial Pool today, while we tried to beat the 92F heat with a little "water therapy."

 And finally, a closeup of Roscoe.  He has the sweetest eyes I've ever seen on a dog.

I hope you had a wonderful weekend; I truly did, and I'm starting my week with a smile.

Close or Far?

We took a little car trip across the mountains last weekend, "we" being my mom, my kids and I to attend a little family event. My oldest niece was having a first birthday for her daughter, an adorable little princess who seems poised to follow in her mother's footsteps and remain stubbornly bald until well past her second birthday.  There was another reason for the party, though - it was also a baby shower, because my niece is having her second child sometime in the next few weeks.

That's right:  A one year old and an infant, with birthdays less than a month apart.  Amost-Irish-twins.

At first I was, frankly, horrified.  I couldn't fathom having two in diapers at the same time.  I remember the energy involved with an infant.  I remember how hard it was to keep up with a child who needed to have two eyes on her constantly.  It was hard enough trying to nurse my son while I tried to brush her teeth or make her dinner, but at least she was able to play independently a little bit and I felt as a preschooler she didn't require quite as much supervision as a toddler. 

My niece is an intelligent young woman, with a good head on her shoulders.  She rarely does anything without thinking it through.  She told me that she knew she wanted to have more than one baby, and that if she had them close together they would be better friends than if she spaced them farther apart.  She also wants to compact the number of years that she has to deal with diapers and feedings.  She wants to return to the workforce when her youngest child starts school, so the closer the babies are in age the sooner she can start supplementing her family's income. 

I look at my own kids, three years apart, and consider their relationship with one another.  While they're improving, they spend an inordinate amount of time tussling over toys, whacking each other, pushing one another out of the way, and generally being competitive (and LOUD, oh my GOD the screaming).  My brother, who is also three years old than I am, maintains to this day that the worst day of his childhood was the day my parents brought me home.  We were not close at all as children, although we are good friends as adults.

I wonder how much of an effect it has on the relationship between siblings if you wait so long to have the second one that the older child is cognizant enough to comprehend that the new baby is a competitor for Mom and Dad's attention.  My daughter started shouldering for her fair share of parental love from almost the moment her brother was born.  Sure, there were those brief (and rare) moments when she would want to hold the baby or help with his bath, but for the most part, her life revolved in getting me to remove my eyes from him and place them on her.  At the ages of 8 and 5, if you left my children in a room with a set of Ginsu knives, they'd be more likely to slice and dice EACH OTHER than anything else.   How much, I wonder, is their penchant for animosity toward one another related to the years which separate them and not their personalities?

What about you?  How far apart are your children?  What effect do you think it has on their relationship with one another?  

Wishes

I had something lighthearted all written up to post today, I was just going to give it some last minute editing and then schlep it onto the blog.

But something else found its way to my heart to be blogged about today, I'm sure that happens to all of us from time to time.

Sometimes as a parent I feel confident that I know what I'm doing.  I know my kids, I get what it is they need from me, and for the most part I feel like I am doing a good job providing it.  The divorce is hard, on all of us.  I am confident this is the right step, for lots of reasons.  We've had lots of therapy with the kids and had assurances from the professionals, the people who are supposed to know what they're doing, that we are handling this in the best way possible, putting our kids needs first insomuch as that is possible, and providing them with much love and assurance to help them feel secure. 

I know, from talking to other parents, to professionals and through what I've read, that even when kids really understand that there are valid reasons for their parents to split up, even when they readily admit that they like living without the fighting, at heart they still always wish for their parents to reconcile, to have their family in one piece again.  And even though I understand this, intellectually, emotionally - its still extremely painful to be reminded that the decisions we make as parents have deep and unavoidable consequences for our children.

In addition to really enjoying writing stories, my daughter likes to make lists.  She makes lists of her friends, of her animals, her family members.   I don't know if it is a self-comforting method or just a way of understanding the framework of her life.  As I was putting clean clothes away in her room, I found this, her latest list.

 
 

The first three things are sad enough.  AT 8 my daughter already wants to be popular, and as a child with behavior issues, that's going to be difficult for her.  But the fourth?  I felt my heart sink to the ground and shatter. 

I know she needs to be able to say these things, and I'm not going to ever tell her that she can't wish for her mom and dad to be together.  But its hard knowing that I can't make her wishes come true.   Even though I believe that I am doing the right thing, reading her words makes me wish I had the ability to change history, erase time, start over again and do things differently.  And I just. cant.

Its that moment of I'm trying to do what I know is right for me and by doing it I'm hurting my kids.

Dad

**Note:  I started this post yesterday, but after traveling all weekend I didn't get final edits on it until today.  Late to the starting line and finishing fifty lengths behind the field, here is my belated Father's Day tribute.  Sorry Dad!

My dad's not big on father's day.  He doesn't want a present, he doesn't want a big deal.  He hates Hallmark holidays and all of the unmitigated capitalism they represent.  A child of the depression, my dad abhors anything built around getting people to blow wads of money buying things for other people that they really don't need.  In his eyes, time given is a gift to be treasured; a fancy watch or a new hose-reel is simply a gross expression of western privilege gone horribly wrong.

His attitude isn't surprising, really.  A child of the depression, my dad grew up poor.  I don't mean a little bit poor, I mean dirt poor.  The youngest of six, he never owned a piece of clothing that wasn't handed down, and warm weather represented a chance to save money because the children could go without shoes. His family left the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and headed West to Idaho when he was still small so his father could find work on WPA projects, building dams and roads.  When my dad was twelve he lost his own father, who drowned in a logging accident. 

Dad dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and found work on tugboats.  His older siblings were all working by then.  When he was old enough for military service he joined the marines. Like many young men and women of his generation, a good portion of his paycheck was sent back home to support his mother.  He did one term of service in the marines, eventually settling in Seattle and putting his maritime skills to use with the Seattle Fire Department, piloting the fireboats.  Dad was a firefighter back when there wasn't much money in the profession.  After he married my mom and they started a family, things were even tighter.  I remember him working pretty much all the time; on his off days he made ends meet by doing carpentry and painting jobs.  Every season he would go deer hunting in Kettle Falls to supplement the grocery budget.  He loved to hunt and fish, and my brother and I grew up on venison, salmon, elk and even bear. 

As a little girl, I knew only that my dad could fix ANYTHING and that when he was home from work, he was usually tired and staying off his radar was probably a good idea.  He was a hard-working man who was pretty much exhausted when he got to be at home for any length of time, and listening to quarreling children was not his idea of a great way to enjoy his down time.  Nonetheless, he could always be counted on to assemble a bicycle, build a birdhouse or put together a bookcase.  One of my favorite Christmases was the year that he and a neighbor built me a a dollhouse.  It was a beautiful dollhouse, two stories tall with columns and a massive staircase.  He put his skills to good use in other ways.  He volunteered his skills at our church, even though he himself is a lifelong atheist.  Church was important to my mother, and when they needed painting done or repairs or basic carpentry work, my dad always came forward to help.  He renovated our second home and built our third from the ground up.

Having a dad who was a fireboat pilot was kind of a big deal for us.  I remember one July 4th celebration.  After the boat completed its obligatory trip around Elliott Bay, spraying water from all hoses, the boat docked and while everyone else had to stay back behind the lines, my brother and I got to go on the boat.  I remember being six and mom and dad letting me and my nine year old brother take the bus down to South Seattle to go see dad at work.  He was at station four then, on the Duwamish river.  We had hot cocoa with the firefighters and they taught us to play cards. 

Dad retired from the department in the late 70's, and after he finished building our home on Marrowstone Island, he got a little bored with his retirement and he went back to work, this time as a deckhand for the Washington State Ferry system.  He worked on the ferries well after I finished college, but eventually he retired for good.

My dad was the person who taught me that the value of a human being has everything to do with character and nothing to do with color, culture or job title.  He taught me to treat people with respect, and he passed along his belief that it is everyone's job to make sure that people in our society have a good education, good health care and enough to eat.  He volunteered constantly, for the food bank, the local ambulance, doing repairs and assisting our elderly neighbors.  I can almost never remember a time when my dad wasn't busy either fixing something or helping somebody.  His deep belief in social responsibility has been one of the most powerful influences in my life. I like to think that he is proud that if I learned nothing else from him that I learned about equality and justice, about philanthropy and service.  He never insisted that we be just like him, but he set such a powerful example that I could imagine no other way to be.

 In his early retired years, he and mom traveled the world.  All those years of hard work, stretching a dollar and saving and investing paid off.  He has been able to enjoy a very comfortable retirement, and with the care and worry of those lean, hard-working years behind him, his sense of humor and fun was able to shine through. 

Dad has slowed down a lot in the last few years.  His health is in decline, and I know it unsettles him far more than he can admit.  He relies heavily on my mother's care, and I see the stress of this in both of them.  I wish that my children could see him as he was when he was younger, strong and hale. 

I admire and respect my dad so very much, I will never forget all that he has taught me.  On Father's Day and every day, my dad is one of the most powerful figures in my life.  I'm proud to be his daughter.

A minor complaint

Today has just yanked the stuffing out of me, pissed all over it and left it to dry on the sidewalk.  I didn't want to wake up when the alarm clock went off.  I didn't want any of the stuff I premade for my lunch.  One of the dogs crapped on the carpet.  My hair wouldn't comply with my most insistent attempts to tame it.  My son wouldn't wake up so he went to his dad's for the day in the same clothes he went to bed in, unfed.  I've been grumpy, tired, paranoid and overreactive all day.  I even mistook a minor request for some information  from my boss wrapped it around the knobs in my brain so many times I converted it into a suggestion to get my resume ready.  Then I cried about it. 

As I was on the end of hour two on what ended up being a two and a half hour conference call, ear cartilege begging me for mercy, bladder screaming for relief and voice cracking because I'd failed to fill my water glass before the call started, I put my hand to my face to shove up my glasses and rub my eyes.

Ouch.  What was that?  Ouch again.  Right there, next to my nose, what?  You bastard, a zit.

HeLLOOOOOOOOAH PMS!  Mystery solved; source identified.  You are well advised to steer clear for a few days.

Snapshots

I love this semi-rural life.  Its meaningful and powerful to me in a way that living in a city could never be.  Nothing against city dwellers...but the electricity and vibe of the big city just don't have the attraction for me as that of big sky, open fields and rustic Americana.

Michelle and Heiress on one of our many rides

A & C at the local roller rink.  Remember how fun it is to roller skate?

A giant pea-harvester at work.  This day I ate peas straight from the field and snagged some fresh onions from a neighboring circle.

The shed at Bill and Angie's Full Circle Ranch.

Sunset in the Palouse.

 

Is it any wonder I love living here?  

Inventory

I'm wrapping my head around a thought today.  You're shocked, aren't you?  Of course.  Not.

What's your reaction when someone tells you they think you're not a nice person?  Not a good person?  How do you react to criticism?

I have an old habit of taking criticism deeply to heart.  Obsessing over it.  Having endless imaginary conversations with the deliverer of the criticism, wherein I eventually realize what I wished I'd said to them then and kicking myself for not being smart enough to think of that response at the time.  I simultaneously buy into the criticism - not in an objective way but in an "I'm a terrible person" way, and I reject it.  That's the kind of stuff that makes you crazy.  It does.  I should know.

I don't think any of us see ourselves as others do, in both the very best and the very worst sense.  I don't believe the good things.  Rarely, anyway.  And what I think they are probably looking at as a negative thing usually isn't close to the thing that actually bothers them.  I believe, like many people, that I live in denial of my own worst nature.

I'm working, slowly, on changing the way I react to other people, the way I treat myself.  I want to ideally be the kind of person who looks at myself and acknowledges what's good and truthfully acknowledges what the problems are.  I know that only by really accessing those parts of myself that hurt and that are constantly reacting because of that hurt can I truly change them.  BUT.  I also have to have the judgment to evaluate and discard those negatives which aren't really true.  

I'm no different from a lot of people in that I constantly find myself taking other people's inventories.  Focusing on what's wrong with someone else is a surefire way to avoid dealing with my own stuff.  When we get to Step 4 (I will, eventually, I'm still stuck on Steps 1, 2 and 3), we stop taking stock of others and we enter a process that is at first painful and agonizing, but ultimately one that frees us.  We look at ourselves. We don't just pick a bunch of bad things and go with it, but we have to truly evaluate not just the faults we think we have, but the ones others have pointed out.  We sift for truth.  We acknowledge - and sometimes we reject.  We assess the impact our actions and words have had on other people and own up to what we've done that was unnecessary and hurtful. 

I believe that when this process is finished, many many years down the road, I'll be a much more enlightened and peaceful person.  I'll know my real faults.  When someone criticizes me or tells me they think I'm a bad person, I won't get angry or defensive.  I'll recognize my own truth and be able to let them work through whatever it is they're going through.  I'll acknowledge my own part in the conflict and make amends.  But until then?  I'm going to have to remind myself to stop obsessing over every cruel, hurtful word.  I have to remind myself that just because someone else thinks something about me doesn't make it true.  Because some things just aren't. 

Woman Eternally Conflicted

Even though I've suspected from a very young age that I have a mind that doesn't work quite the way a "normal" mind is supposed to, I still have the capacity to be surprised when others don't share my opinion.  I guess I'm just that naive.  I can't understand why anyone would hate another person because of the color of their skin, or how someone could fail to see the innate beauty in an egg fresh from the bidness end of your very own chicken or how anyone misses the fact that there is almost nothing in this world so breathtaking as a half naked child covered in dirt, grubbing away in the garden alongside you.  I just think you should all know that I think you think the way I do and I am shocked beyond belief when you just. don't. 

I've worked in transportation for a very long time.  And I've always worked.  I had a period of about two weeks in 1998 when I was unemployed, prior to that my longest time frame between jobs was 6 days.  There are two threads of thought interwoven into these sentences.  One:  I have throughout my career worked mostly around really crass, un-PC and mostly chauvinistic men who probably believe that women belong at home, and for my entire career I have worked my ass off to be respected by those men.  Part of my current job today is to make decisions about which trucking companies my company uses to ship product.  Don't think for a minute that I don't experience a little shiver of joy every time a trucking company salesperson comes to see if they can get my business, because 99% of these salespeople are men.  I enjoy very much that they need to earn MY respect in order to be considered, and I like watching their faces when they realize that they are dealing with a woman who is smart, knows her business, and has the temerity to be balls-out blunt  when the situation requires. 

Two:  I've always held a job.  I've never stayed home with my children.  I've never had that particular option.  I think in the biggest part that it is due to my own choices in life, some of them not so great, many of them selfish, some of them largely inescapable.  I've always been the breadwinner, even when I was married.  At some point in time him not working might have been an option, but me not working was never on the table. 

I have to admit, though, that when it came right down to it, I don't think I have the ovaries to be a SAHM.  At least when they were little - we lived in suburban New Jersey.  All I would have had to keep my brain from wilting would have been a baby and my house.  Possibly my internet connection would have kept me sane, but that's questionable.  I just don't know that I would have chosen to stay at home, even if I could have.  Nowadays, possibly.  I have a fair bit more to take care of than just the house - I could take a three week vacation and do nothing but repair fence & irrigation, catch up on eleventy billion chores, and for ONCE spend time working my horses more than one lousy day a week.  There would be ever so much to do - and I would love it.

Its not that my world doesn't revolve around my children.  I believe to my core that raising them is one of the most important things I will ever accomplish in this world, and that the price of failing at that task is higher than I can pay.  When I'm not with them I think about them.  I have their pictures and their artwork all over my office so that any direction I look, there they are.  When they are at J's house for the night and I think about going home to a house without them there, my heart turns over solidly in my chest and I get that sort of hollow sick feeling you get when you know something's not right.  I may not have been born to be a mother, but a mother was born right along with my daughter. 

I have  a liberal arts degree - a bachelor's degree in English, to be precise.  Or rather, imprecise, as I honestly believe there's almost nothing more useless in this universe than an English degree.  My liberal arts education did little to prepare me for a career in anything.  College itself provided me with an endless education in athletics and interpersonal relationships, the fine art of beer-bonging without spilling it on your sorority initiation dress and how to set a formal table.  There are, beyond those precious and banal skills, a few things that to this day make their impression known.

I had a roommate my freshman year, Becky.  Becky was the first girl I'd ever heard use the word "masturbate" out loud in front of people.  Becky encouraged me to take some of my general credits in the Women's Studies department.  I ended up with about three semesters worth of women's studies, grounding myself for a lifelong interest in women's rights and women's welfare.  I loved my TA in my Introduction to Women's Studies.   She was out and proud, smart, engaging, challenging.  She was first openly gay woman I had ever met, and she set cornerstone in the foundation of my viewpoint.  From her I learned to see queerness not just as a societal and cultural issue, but as a women's issue.  It was there, in that class, that I began to consider and question what it truly means to be a feminist. 

As a young college student, feminism to me meant the right to be different.  To be respected.  Wage equality.  To be safe from violence.  To have a voice. 

And then I got older.  I had friends get married, become mothers.  I married, divorced, married again.  I became a mother.  I advanced in my career, not to stellar heights, of course, but to higher levels of responsibility and respect.  And throughout that process, my views on feminism advanced as well.

In many respects, feminism to me is still first and foremost about respect, about freedom from violence and ignorance, about equality in the workplace.  But its about a hell of a lot more than that. 

Its about choice.  Its about all of us or NONE of us.   It means that I have to be glad to see the biggest crop of women running for higher office than we've ever had in the history of this country, even if most of them are diametrically opposed to my politics.  It means that I support a woman's decision to be a stay at home mom just as much as I support a woman's decision to pursue a career.  Really being a feminist means that I want all women to have real choices in life, choices to be or not be a parent, to get as much of as an education as we want to have, to have safe and adequate medical care, to be respected in our choice of religion.  To live our lives with dignity, no matter how we choose to live them.  To

One of the things that disturbs me most is when I see women tearing down other women's choices.  Moms fighting over whether you should stay at home or work.  WOHM's who think SAHM's are somehow less smart and missing something; SAHM's who think WOHM's are letting other people raise their children (an assertion with which I most heartily disagree).  Women bloggers who think "mommybloggers" are sellouts; High-revenue bloggers who think bloggers with low readership and no ad revenue are stupid; Moms who have the time, money and ability to cook everything from scratch who judge moms who work too many hours a week and don't. 

I'm left wondering where all of this gets us, as women, as mothers.  Am I better if I tell everybody I'm better than you because I have *this* job or *this* value?  Am I better if I insist you're not as good as I am? 

I have this thought about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a feminist.  And that thought is that we either ALL benefit or none of us do.  That to me part of being a feminist is fighting for the right of women not to be torn down by other women.  That a bigger part of it is for women, ultimately, to really have it all -- "all" being whatever it is they hope, dream, aspire to.  For one it is to be rich and famous.  For another it is to be president.  For another, to raise her children and to keep her house beautiful, care for her husband.  For another, to have the right to marry her partner and not be discriminated against because she's gay.  Ultimately, we all share something that regardless of color, culture or social status puts us in the same room.   Yes, a vagina.  More or less.  ( I had to say that, it was getting too serious in here )

Very seriously, though, I was reading a blog by a SAHM today, and for a moment I started to feel vaguely guilty, and left out - as if she was part of some exclusive club that thinks I'm less of a mother because I work.  And then I realized that NOTHING SHE SAID even vaguely intimated that she had a negative opinion of WOH Moms - she simply had a positive opinion about SAH moms.  I realized the negativity I was reading into her words really came from inside ME.  I understood at that moment that a great deal of the enmity with which we treat other women actually comes from within ourselves, from our own guilt and shame over all the things we are NOT because we aren't taught to value and celebrate all the things that we ARE.

Today, I AM a mother.  I am a career woman.  I'm proud of myself and I'm doing the very best job I know how to do, for my employer, for my children, for myself.  And that has to be enough.