Barnmaven

Girl things

My left shoulder hurts.  It has for years, but not like it has lately.  Lately whenever I try to put my arm up over my head, do pushups, carry hay or saddle my horse it really really hurts.  I went to see the shoulder guy at the Orthopaedic clinic, and he gave me a shot of steroids but that only worked for a little while, so I was back there this morning.  He wants to rule out a small tear in the rotator cuff before he puts me in physical therapy, so they're scheduling an MRI. 

I'm so excited.

I've never had an MRI.  And what if I have to have surgery?  Another scar to show off!  Cool!

Yes, I'm that person.

I'm the person who sees snow falling and I might pretend to be annoyed, because that's apparently what you're supposed to feel when it snows.  Inside, though, I can't wait for the adventure of driving in it.  There might even be an accident!  I might end up stranded in the wilderness and have to hike through the mountains and eat my companions to survive!

I'm the person who gets a scrape or a cut and the only reason I go looking for a bandage is so I can walk by my husband and kids and say "LOOK!  I'M BLEEDING!"  If the cut isn't bleeding enough I'll probably squeeze it a little to see if I can get more out of it.

I'm the person who hates needles and gets tattoos.  "How many hours did that one take?"  "Four two hour appointments."  "Didn't it hurt"  "Oh, yeah, it hurt like hell.  It was awesome."  And when I'm under the needle and the artist asks if  I need a break and I say that I'm fine and they respond with "Wow, most people would have had to take at least a couple of breaks by now," I'm all "FUCK YEAH."

I'm the woman who will smack a volleyball into the face of the guy on the other side of the net with barely concealed glee, run over the shortstop on my way to second base and barrel through the guy trying to set a pick on me when I'm guarding the guy who's driving the baseline.

I put on my coveralls and a baseball cap, put my truck up on ramps and change my oil, change my filters, refill my washer fluid and try to see if that pesky leak is just a loose bolt that I can fix myself.  I look like a greasemonkey, and I could care less.

And this may sound crazy, but at the same time I like that I can put on a fancy dress and get my hair and makeup all just so and knock my husband's socks off with my awesome female self.  I very much like my femininity and all that it entails.

I'm not alone in this.  So many women I know are just like me, strong and soft.  Tough and tender.  My daughter is one of them.

Pink, bright hot pink, is her favorite color.  She loves My Little Pony and Dragons, stuffed kitty toys and light sabers.  She wants to be a princess and a ninja. She has beautiful hair to her waist and she prefers jeans to dresses.  She came to me on Christmas day to talk about how upset she was when some relatives and friends gave her brother "boy" toys and gave her "girl" things like body wash and perfume.  She was upset to think anyone might think that she was a "girly girl." 

There is so much to love about being a woman.  While its a sure bet that my childhood in the late 60's/early 70's subjected my psyche to a great deal of gender role absolutes, I enjoy wearing makeup and dressing in clothes meant to showcase what I think is attractive about myself.  I care about how my hair looks, and I struggle like many women about the impossible-to-walk line between having fingernails that are neat and pretty or fingernails that allow you to do things like cinch a saddle, throw hay bales and repair fencing. 

In 1983, the year I graduated high school, 95 percent of autobody repair workers were male.  There must have been something brewing in us and the classes of women that followed.   As of a decade ago, the number of women in that industry tripled -- a 369% increase.  Other typically male-dominated industries have seen similar jumps in female workers - firefighting, millwork, engineering and law enforcement, to name a few. ¹  I've been a lot of things in my work life, but the bulk of it I've spent in transportation. 

I might have grown up watching Charlie's Angels, but I think I still understood at a very deep level that those women were still playing to male sexuality and that they represented very little that was real.  Anyone with half a brain knows that television and movies tell you lots of lies about how people look and what they say and do.

So when Amazon Girl complained about some of her gifts, I told my daughter that people weren't trying to be unkind if they bought her "girly girl" presents.  I told her even though she might not be a perfume and flowers kind of young lady that it wasn't demeaning for people to think of her as feminine.  Besides, isn't a gift is more of a reflection of the giver than of the receiver?.  But I get it, as might any woman who in the hormone hell of early puberty was mistaken more than once for a boy.  But I want her to know - to believe - that she doesn't have to be one or the other.  Both aspects of her exist together and there's nothing wrong with that.  There's nothing wrong about being a woman who can both take care of herself and look good doing it.

The dividing line between two worlds that were once very separate has become thin and transparent.  We may be very different physically, we may in large part have critically different ways of thinking and organizing our lives, but in so many ways we have broken free of the gender roles that at one time were used to contain and limit us.  I think thats a good thing for all of us, men included.

So hey, do you want to arm wrestle?

 

^{1.  Bureau of Labor Statistics 2005 Current Population Survey}

 

Thanks Blogher for featuring this post on Blogher.com!

 

 

War? or Distraction? Part 2

This is a continuation of my post from yesterday.  Read that first, if you hadn't already, then come back here.  I'll wait.

Caught up?

OK.

Now. Let's talk for a minute about this godawful mess.

Its pretty straightforward, really.  TIME's circulation numbers are declining.  The sensationalizing of a mother nursing a toddler was about nothing more than selling magazines by using a racy cover and getting women all fired up about attachment parenting and breastfeeding.  Breastfeeding's a hot topic, we all know that.  How better to stop the heavy bleeding than to boost your popularity with a Mommy War? 

Not to be out-wankered by TIME, Dell gave IT professionals in Copenhagen a remarkably transparent view of its company's disregard for women.  Christiane Vejlo's article in Elektronista provides a compelling narrative of a professional event where the invited speaker provided delightful entertainment with such cutting-edge statements as, "The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” and "We can thank women for the rolling pin."  He closed his speech by encouraging the men in the room to go home and employ the phrase "shut up bitch."

(Not that I'd buy a crappy Dell or that I was even thinking about buying a crappy Dell, but any potential prospect of me purchasing a Dell product has now dwindled from "improbable" to "over my dead, menstruating body.")

Why Dell would consider having Mads Christensen, a so-called "inspirational speaker" who is apparently infamous for his misogynistic views on women a) give a keynote at a conference sure to be attended by both men and women and b) not have any potential keynote address vetted for suitability? If they were trying to lend credibility to the notion that Dell is s corporation without a clue.  Or perhaps they're hoping to pick up some sales from US Senators and employees at TIME?

Two of these recent stories illustrate rather well how women continue to be marginalized and disregarded by our government, by corporations and by society in general.  I don't believe for one second, though, that we are in immediate danger of being shoved back into the kitchen with bare feet, at least unwillingly.  Maybe in our current economic situation we don't have as much choice about our careers and our families as we would like to, but in contrast with women who lived in a world where they were considered to be the property of men, our choices are vast and endless.  What's important is that we don't allow ourselves to be distracted from our long and diligent assault on the barriers that patriarchal and religious leaders have erected to prevent us from taking power. 

But the other two stories, these stories and the aftermath of them represent an enormous problem. 

Women, what the hell is wrong with us?  We are smarter than this and yet we are still allowing ourselves to be pulled into competition with other women over which of our choices as women and mothers are the right choices.

Why are we so eager to criticize and judge each others parenting choices?  Why do we even for one moment buy in to the notion that the Mommy Wars must exist?   Are we so defensive about our individual parenting choices that we must react every time the media attempts to tell us we're "not good enough?"

We are letting ridiculous conversations about how long we should be nursing our babies to drown out the conversation we should be having about how we make sure that our choices as women and as mothers are respected and upheld in society.  We should be talking about how over 50% of the middle managers in corporate America are women and how great it is that corporate America finally figured out what families have known forever, that women are terrific at herding cats.  (Kids, cats, administrative assistants, what's the difference?)  We should be talking about how we support families and children in this economy, when the line between eating and starving is growing wafer-thin.  We should be talking about how to ensure that our children are healthy and educated, in an environment where our politicians are taking money away from schools and children's services.  We should be talking about how to make sure our young men and women have an opportunity to have an affordable college or trade school opportunity.

If you look at the media these days, we're not having any of these conversations.  We're standing on either side of dividing lines that, relative to the actual problems we have, don't really mean anything.

Does it hurt you if Jamie Grumet nurses her three year old?

Does it hurt you if one mom goes to work and one mom doesn't?

No.

Change has been happening for a long time when it comes to respecting and acknowledging the rights of women and the contributions that women make in our world.  Not all change comes fast, and sometimes we see the archaic remnants of old and irrelevant attitudes tottering around and trying to get people to believe they're still in the game.  They're not. 

Unless we let them, which is exactly what happens when we  allow ourselves to mindlessly engage in finger pointing at other women because of invented controversies crafted by in increasingly irresponsible media.

If you really want to waste your precious time being mad about something, be mad at the media that manipulates us with their garbage.  Because being mad at other women just because they aren't being the women you think they should be is about as useful as an umbrella to a duck.

Do what it takes?

The Interwebs are abuzz over Catherine Hakim's new book Erotic Capital.  Hakim, a British sociologist,  is best known for authoring books and articles centered around women in the workplace and gender equality.  A self-described feminist, Hakim has made a career of attempting to understand and iterate the social, political and economic impact woman have in the workplace and how pressures of conformity and patriarchal values create challenges for women.

Given her background, many feminists are perplexed by the assertion she makes in her latest book, that a woman's best bet in the workplace is to leverage her sexuality in order to even the odds.

Yep, that's right.  A feminist telling us to use our looks to get ahead. 

Not only that, Hakim asserts that women who don't take the time to maximize their sex appeal via diet, makeup, wardrobe and options like Botox are being are simply lazy and counter-productive.

To be fair, I haven't read the book yet.  Its sitting in my Kindle account, waiting for my droid to have a 3G signal to download it.  However, the salient points Hakim makes via her interview with The Daily Beast, are worth discussion and don't require the finer points of the book to be open to debate.

"Anyone, even quite an ugly person, can be attractive if they just have the right kind of hairstyle, clothes, and present themselves to the best effect...This isn't a frivolous spending of money.  It has real benefits."

In and of itself, nothing about this statement is truly offensive.  I remember attending a seminar geared toward women in business back in the late 1980's where we were advised to pay attention to how the senior executives in our company dressed.  If we wanted to succeed, an easy way to demonstrate our "acceptability" was to dress the same way.  If the men wore suits and ties, women should wear suits and low heels.  If everyone wore solid colors - black, blue, etc - so should you.  If the environment was casual, be the best-casually-dressed worker in the office.   I don't think its such a stretch to encourage people to look their best at work, it demonstrates a level of attention and ambition that assures higher-ups that you are someone who's not just marking time at your job, you're in the game. 

Social research doesn't lie; people make assumptions about other people all of the time based simply on how they look.  It stands to reason that a competent employee who dresses like a slob is going to be less favored than an equally competent employee who dresses well, all else being equal. 

Hakim asserts that "Everybody should use all the assets they've got, and this is one asset that women have often been told is inappropriate to use.   I think women need to stop having a chip on their shoulder, or feel uncomfortable investing in erotic capital.  Attractiveness and beauty has real value."   She claims that things such as Exercise, tanning, coloring your hair and even plastic surgery are necessary evils for career success.   She identifies social skills as another invaluable asset.

Its disconcerting to have someone with Hakim's considerable research behind them to bluntly advise us that we must look better in order to compete.  But is it true?

I wonder if the reaction to this book would be different if the title were less threatening.  Looking good doesn't necessarily convey "erotic" appeal.  Dressing nicely and maintaining one's looks don't necessarily insinuate that a woman is exuding sex appeal.  Utilizing a word loaded with not-so-subtle visual imagery as part of her hypothesis is certainly one way to create controversy and ensure a greater number of book sales.  But then, without having read it, I have no idea whether Hakim is simply advising women to make sure they look good at work and not telling us to show off our boobs in low-cut tops and wear stiletto's to maximize the draw power of our legs and asses.  Because truly, those are completely different concepts.

I've met plenty of women in the business place that easily fall into stereotypical categories.  I've worked with women who were gorgeous and marginally competent, who slept with or sucked off whichever man was required in order to get a better salary, a better bonus or a promotion.  I've worked with women who were incredibly good at their jobs but who were challenged either by less-than-stellar looks or a timid personality or both, and heard them degraded behind their backs by coworkers and higher-ups based simply on the scale of their physical attractiveness.  I've heard people say things like "Oh yeah, she's really good at what she does, but..." 

Then there are those women - the ones who have it all.  Either blessed genetically with good looks or having earned them via a lot of time in the gym or under the scalpel, these women also have the brains and the personality to boot.  And frankly, they blow the competition out of the water.  They work hard, they get things done, and they look good doing it.  That's pretty hard to compete with. 

I can see it from both sides, honestly.  I value a person's ability over their looks, and as a manager I know that I want to hire people who will get the job done.  But as a woman in the workplace who is also interested in cultivating my own success, I often must consider how my physical appearance might benefit or harm me.  One button too low?  Does this make me look too casual?  Am I over- or under-doing the hair and makeup?  What is it I want to accomplish today and what meetings do I have where I may need to generate a better impression?

I have had the (mis?)fortune in the past of supervising stereotypical office bimbos. Women that reported to me but who were also sleeping with other managers in the company or getting massive boob jobs and distracting the entire office with their low-cut shirts, I can tell you quite honestly I'd rather have someone who is a lot more discreet in their clothing choices, regardless of the quality of their work.  Its not that I resent another women for being pretty or sexy, I don't.  We come in all shapes and sizes, and just because someone looks different from me or is younger than I am doesn't mean I'm competing with her.  However,  in my experience, a woman who openly flaunts her sexuality in the work environment becomes a distraction, breeds jealousy and resentment in her coworkers.  Even if she isn't sleeping her way up the ladder, if she's wearing micro-minis and being obviously sexual in her behavior, everyone will believe that she is.  

When you're managing people, you need teamwork from your people, and the pockets of overt hostility that such a woman engenders, unless she is staggeringly brilliant at her job, aren't worth it.  On that basis alone, I'm going to assume that Hakim isn't telling us to "whore it up" to get ahead, but that she rather means to look and act our best and that success will naturally follow.

I'm inclined to follow my natural instinct that the inclusion of the term "Erotic" in the book's title and the somewhat inflammatory nature of Hakim's comments in her Daily Beast interview are deliberate and designed to increase interest in the book itself, and that what she's actually proposing to her readers is something other than what the book's title suggests.   And if I'm wrong, and that's what she's actually suggesting, I will less-than gently opine that she's got it all wrong.  Crossing a certain line when it comes to what you wear and how you act at work will do you more harm than good.   And the more women that cross that line, the harder they make it for the rest of us to remind the corporate patriarchy that we are competent, we are personable, we are capable of success without using our lady parts to get there.

 Edited and added:  There is no question that our concepts of attractiveness are largely culturally defined.  There has always been an existing conundrum for the career woman who is also a conscious feminist:  How do I work to change cultural concepts while also surviving within them?  If I attempt to change the culture yet still conform to it, am I damaging my message?  Hakim's new book does little, if anything, to solve this dilemma.

Rock your suit?

Apparently it is Swimsuit Confidence Week.  Glad I missed the bus on that one.  Its not that I’m afraid to show you what I look like in a swimsuit…I just don’t want to.  OK, well, maybe I am a little bit afraid. 

I’m not as afraid as I was five years ago, or 15 years ago.  But I’m far more conscious of what I look like in a swimsuit than I was when I was 11 years old and I didn’t even realize that a swimsuit was supposed to do anything other than cover up the private bits so you could swim mostly unencumbered but not naked.  All I cared about then was the act of swimming.  I wasn’t self-conscious, I wasn’t even self aware.  Of course, I didn’t have cellulite, either.  So there’s that.

I think I have a subconcious desire to return to the days where I wasn’t so body-conscious.  When I didn’t even know what arm fat was, much less care if I had it.  When I wasn’t concerned about how nice my bewbs looked – mostly because I didn’t have any, to speak of.   At least not compared to now.

On an entirely intellectual level I find this Swimsuit Confidence to be somewhat of a dichotomy. I am not trashing the event, not in the least.   Women can always use more cheerleading to accept themselves and go ahead and live their lives in public, regardless of their shape or size.  I’m all for that, and I like seeing women shed their fears (or at least keep them at bay with buggy whip and three-legged stool) and show other women that its perfectly OK to have a normal body and be seen in a bathing costume in public.  I like that. 

What gets to me are the catalogs and the magazine articles and layouts and the jargon that crops up around the clothing they are flogging.  The swimsuits and bras and jeans and all of it.

Maybe more than Swimsuit Confidence what we need is Stop Telling Us We Look Bad.

I want to see more positive language around clothing and less of a focus on attaining the “perfect look.”  Read any woman’s magazine article about buying the perfect pair of jeans or finding the most flattering swimsuit, and every word of that article directs you to minimize your flaws. Your FLAWS. The catalogs and the photo shoots and the everything, they’re telling you that its OK to wear a swimsuit even though you’re not perfect.  So in other words, they’re telling you to feel okay about yourself WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY TELLING YOU YOU’RE NOT OK. 

That’s total bullshit.

Treating women as if their sole goal in choosing a swimsuit or a pair of jeans or a dress should be to make their butt look smaller or their boobs look bigger (or more lifted) or their waist look tinier or cover up their cellulite suggests that if we have any of these flaws, then we are not ok.  These are marks of who we are and how we are made, trophies of the children we bore or the scars we earned.  They are NOT badges of shame to be covered up, masked, and minimized.

I, for one, would like to see a magazine layout stop talking about our fucking FLAWS for a damn minute and start talking about our positives.  I think women should dress in what feels comfortable and good to them, not buy something someone else tells them to because it makes their ass look more “socially acceptable.”  Show me a woman who wears something because she feels good in it, and I’ll show you a woman who looks beautiful not because she successfully hid her “imperfections”, but because she knows she is beautiful exactly the way she is.

You have a responsibility to yourself to learn to treat yourself with love.  Don’t withhold love from yourself, don’t put a measurement on what makes you beautiful.  Don’t say “I’ll love myself more when I lose ten pounds” or “I’ll love myself more when this wrinkle cream finally starts working" or "I'd love myself more if I didn't have these scars and this cellulite."

Love yourself exactly the way you are now.  You are beautiful.  You deserve nurturing.  You are entitled to good things.  You are entitled to be happy, to exist just the way you are RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.  NOTHING about you needs to be changed for you to be beautiful and loved and love-able.

The more you love yourself, the better care you will take of the precious body you were given.   And the less you will worry about what you look like in a swimsuit. 

Swimsuits are for swimming in. 

More than Mommy

Last Thursday and Friday I was in a meeting room at a hotel that faces the waterfront in Portland, Oregon.  For two days I was sharing ideas and planning goals with our operations team.  Its a group of exceptional people, all very smart, all very good at what they do.  Listening to us collectively I was once again struck by how much I like each and every one of my peers and how well we collaborate. 

For a couple of days I was free as a bird, even though I was working.  S took care of the zoo, the kids were at their dad's for a couple of nights. No one was calling my name, needing to be let outside, demanding a snack or requesting my presence.

 

Even after things in my marriage got really bad, the thought of separation was terrifying to me.  It wasn't being on my own, it wasn't fear of falling into a financial black hole.  What I imagined I would not be able to cope with was spending nights or weekends or even longer without my children.  Merely considering being away from them made it hard to breathe.  So when the end of the marriage inevitably came, as much as it was a relief, fear remained.

The first night my children stayed with their father felt like the longest night of my life.  I couldn't concentrate on anything, sleep eluded me, and when I finally did sleep I had horrid dreams.  I'd already given up the role of being my husband's wife; now I felt like I was abandoning, however briefly, being my children's mother as well.

Throughout those first months, Friday nights were a struggle.  Mondays weren't so bad, I always had work to keep me busy and so much to do with taking care of animals that I didn't feel the emptiness of the house until almost bedtime.  But Fridays into Saturday mornings -- too many hours alone.  I didn't even consider going out or socializing.  For a few months, I immersed myself in the computer, playing games, the same place I'd escaped from an unhappy marriage became the place I hid from the bitter pain of missing my children.

Winter was long and it was dark.  It wasn't until spring came that I began the slow crawl out of that hole.  My friend had our trainer out for a clinic at her place, which got me out of my house and back on a horse.  That clinic led to weekly trail rides, led to me finding my dream horse, led to friendship and laughter and fun.  Fridays and Saturdays began to take on a new shape, no longer looming on the horizon as time to be endured but as something to anticipate.  I was not only finding a role for myself outside of mother, I was building a friendship, meeting other people who shared my interests, being outdoors.  Outside of my job I was meeting other people whose first impression of me wasn't that I was somebody's mom or somebody's wife.  I was ME. 

I started fostering for the rescue, and staked claim on another role for myself.  I began to understand that although being my children's mother is the most important job I have, even though its a job I will hold until I die, it also won't be as encompassing forever as it is now.  Someday my children will grow up and start lives of their own.  Between now and then, they will become more independent, finding their own roles in life, and they will need less of me.  As that gap widens, if all I have been is "Mom," who will I then be when they don't need me anymore? 

Women with children often get pigeonholed as being little else than mothers.  Women without children often get pigeonholed as women who are "missing" something in their lives.  Our reality can be - truly is - so much richer than that. 

I believe it is important for anyone, but especially for women with young children or careers to carve out space in their lives to do the things that interest them.  Music, photography, crafting, cooking, gardening, creating artwork, writing, carpentry, car repair, remodeling, horseback riding, karate -- whatever those things are that make you feel truly alive when you do them.  Find your groove and go do that as much as you possibly can. You will not always be your job, you will not always be herding children from school to dance to basketball games.  There will come a day when you will be at loose ends more than not, and if you don't have something to fill that void, I guarantee you will feel a greater sense of loss than the person who has already discovered their passion outside of work or parenting.

I'm no longer bound by fear of losing my role as a parent.  I realize that mothering my kids is something I will do to varying degrees throughout my life, but it is not the only thing I will do.

When I'm free of the responsibility of my life, for a few hours or a few days, I'm no longer stumped for ways to fill that time.  I'm not spending countless hours interacting with other characters in an online game -- I'm spending rich, immensely satisfying hours interacting with my animals and with other people in real life, taking part in activities that bring me tremendous pleasure.  It wasn't until I learned to honor my own needs and find my own niche that I was able to outpace the fear of loss that was holding me hostage.

I am a mother.  It is the most important job I have  - FOR NOW. 

I am also:  horsewoman, animal rescuer, singer, writer, musician, friend, bibliophile, manager, someone's love...and for a few more weeks, puppy chew toy.

Acceptance, then (maybe) love

At the very least, acceptance.

How do you feel about your body?

Love it?

Hate it?

Live with it?

Our lives are saturated by the images and messages that insinuate themselves into the fabric of our being.  "Thinner," whisper the voices.  "Bigger there.  Smaller there.  Cap those teeth, whiten them, whittle down those cheeks and plump the lips."  Wrinkles and gray hair and the inevitable trail map of life -- are they marks of wisdom and beauty or blemishes to be ashamed of?

I'll never be twenty again, or even thirty.  I'll be forty-five in less than a month.  My face and my body bear the marks of everything I've done to myself, both good and bad.  The scar on my left shin where the pointy end of a piece of driftwood punctured my leg walking on the beach in the dark.  The waistline where the chaps my mom made for me in high school for horse shows, the chaps that still zip up on my thighs, won't quite buckle after two babies did a number on my hips.  The freckles, the age spots, the wrinkles. The hands that are covered in tiny scars from so many accidents with kitchen knives. The scar in my palm where I learned the hard way that the best way to get frozen peppermint ice cream out of the bottom of a carton is NOT by prying it with a butter knife.  The scar on my lip where the bad mole had to come off.  The skin between my belly button and...well, you know...that wrinkles when I bend over because it never quite regained its elasticity after being so hugely pregnant.  Breasts that nursed two babies, not quite as perky as they used to be, but they still point in the right direction.  The other stuff that was always there - the junk in my trunk and the wonderfully strong and sturdy legs I inherited from my birthmother.  Peasant legs, I call them.  My hair, not quite as thick as it was ten years ago but still thick enough, graying on the sides.  Short now, because I no longer have the desire to maintain a long hairstyle for the simple sake of vanity. 

Do I love my body?  I don't know, honestly.  Some parts of it I love.  Some parts I used to hate, but somewhere in between the years of fighting it, hating it, exercising it and getting older in it, I grew to accept it.  It is mine, with all of its beauty and all of its sags, wrinkles, dimples and bags.  I work it out to keep it healthy and strong.  I keep it really super reasonably clean. It could stand to be thinner and stronger, but I'll be happy with strong enough.  I don't need to climb mountains or run marathons, but I want to ride horses, play with my children (and my someday grandchildren), ski, swim, walk, run, stretch and do my own yardwork until the day I die.  If I treat it right, it will get me there and I'll be grateful.

Put it in a line with a million other almost forty-five year old bodies and it'll just blend right in. (Unless you sandwich me in between Cindy Craword and Claudia Schiffer, then I'm screwed).

Beauty is not a number on a scale.  Beauty is fluid, individual, constant and timeless.   For every one of you that does not think that I'm beautiful, there is another who does. 

It really does matter that you are beautiful in the who of you.  Beautiful in the how and the why.  Your physical self, in its imperfections, its glory, its strength and weakness, all of it adds up to beautiful.

My wish for every girl, for every woman, is to celebrate and acknowledge her unique beauty.  To enjoy her body in all the ways she can, in loving, in caring for others, in working hard, in play and in rest.  To treat herself in the way that we treat someone we love, by being good to herself, caring for herself.   Whether she is a professional athlete or a mall-walker, lean or curvacious, tall or short, whether her skin is brown, bronze, freckled, pale or olive, I want her to know that she is beautiful.  I want YOU to know that YOU are beautiful.

 

This year an inspired group of bloggers, mostly women, came together to join their creative forces in a really wonderful project. 12 women of all different shapes and sizes bared it all to show just how diverse and unique and beautiful women are.  The proceeds from this project will (after printing costs) will benefit the National Eating Disorders Association.

I ordered my Blogger Body Calendar today.  Go.  Check it out.  If you have a daughter or a niece or a grandchild or a partner or a woman in your life that you care about, won't you order one too?

Don't tell me who I am

Back in the mid-90's, the company I was working for sent all of its key people to a leadership seminar taught by a psychologist (maybe a psychiatrist?).  Carl James was his name, and I wish I could find him because I'd love to tell him how much I still remember of the seminar.  I'm frankly surprised I remember a damn thing about it, since the night of the first day I received the first contact from my birthmother and went down that particular rabbit hole.

On the first day, we discussed a paradigm.  I can't remember the name of the chart either (wow, apparently I don't remember as much as I think I do!) but it was basically drawn into four sections.  The sections were to identify the following:

1) Things I know about myself that you don't

2) Things I know about myself that you know

3) Things you know about me that I know but I don't know that you know

4) Things you know about me that I don't know

I've never accepted #4. 

Literally, yes there could be things you know about me that I don't know.  You might know that my boyfriend (hypothetical because I don't have a boyfriend) is cheating on me and I dont' yet realize he's a lying piece of shit.  You might know that my boss is planning to fire me on Friday while I go about my business blissfully unaware of the pending doom.  Concrete, material things, yes, you might know these. 

But I'll never agree that there is something about me the person, something about my personality, that I don't know.  I might not acknowledge it - but I DO know it.  You might think "Geez, she doesn't realize what a bitch she sounds like."  But I do.  I think we all know everything we need to know about ourselves, where we get tripped up and screwy is when we start lying to ourselves in order to not have to cope with something we don't want to change.  Then we're strolling quickly down the slope of pernicious behavior, because a person who is coping by denying self-truth is a person in a constant state of de-stabilization.  Codependents do it.  Addicts do it.  Politicians do it.  Scary shit.   But few things frost my cookies like someone pigeonholing me and thinking they know me because of a simple self-described title.  One like "liberal feminist."

A post by Adrienne Royer discussing the rise of feminisim on the far right and lamenting how the liberal feminists have ignored or outright rejected conservative feminists was featured on Blogher today.  In it, she paints liberal feminists with a rather large brush.   I object to being classified in that way.  Not as a liberal feminist, no, because I am.  Both liberal and Feminist.  No, what primed my pistons was the way the writer degenerates into comparing looks and lifestyles.  Ms. Royer says that liberal feminists "eschew makeup and men" while conservative feminists are attractive, grocery-shopping mothers.  That we resent Sarah Palin because she's pretty.   Right then and there, she lost me.

Its not only that I object to being told that since I am a liberal feminist that I don't wear makeup and must be a lesbian.  Neither of those statements is correct, but that's not really the point.  The statement was problematic because of its insulting tone.    There's nothing ugly about not wearing makeup - all women are unique and beautiful regardless of the application of makeup.  Simply because one chooses to wear or not to wear makeup has little to do with whether she is a conservative or a liberal.  I know plenty of women on either side of the aisle who don't wear makeup.  A woman is not less of a woman or someone to be marginalized because she is gay.  Its the insinuation that these things encompass all liberal feminists, AND that these things are somehow ugly and unattractive.  I'm shocked to the core to hear a woman who calls herself a feminist pick up the misogynistic bullcrap the male entrenchment used to use to marginalize the feminist movement.   And Ms. Royer's implication that we don't take Sarah Palin seriously because she's pretty?  Project, much?

Sarah Palin IS pretty.  I don't resent her for it.  I could care less about how she looks.  I care far more about what she DOES and SAYS.  Politically, I am about as far from Sarah Palin in every respect possible.  That said, I'm going to step out on a limb and say that Sarah Palin has scored a big hit for the power of women in this country, whether I like her personally or not.   Feminism is about all women, not just liberal women.  If we truly believe that, then the circle is wide enough to encompass all of us, Sarah Palin included.  I think she and I have some differing opinions on exactly what constitutes equality and freedom for women, including our ability to control our reproductive choices, but there are certainly tenets upon which we both agree.  I bet if we spent two hours over a pot of coffee or a hike in the woods that we could come up with plenty of common ground, despite our obvious differences.

I wrote a couple of months ago 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."  To hear another woman call herself a "feminist" and then use pejorative stereotypes to imply that liberal feminists are less attractive than conservative feminists is preposterous.   I have to question whether the writer is comletely brainwashed, mean spirited or simply off her rocker.  Real feminists don't eschew makeup - we DO eschew looks-based stereotyping.  We work reject petty jealousy and spite. 

I got the sense that this writer felt left out by the feminist movement, and that she's assuaging her resentment, using her article to lash back at a movement she feels rejected by.  Perhaps she experienced some kind of rejection on a personal level based on her conservative politics.  I don't know.

What I DO know is that we all need to be careful about the language we use when we describe what feminism means to us.  At its core, feminism seeks to create equal standing regardless of gender.  That regardless of what role a woman chooses for her life, be it traditional or modern, that she be supported in it.  That she be have equal opportunity at receiving an education, at applying for a job, at being paid for the work she does.  That she be protected from violence.  That she have access to adequate health care.  That she be free, truly free.

I do believe that women on the liberal side of the Movement need to be more welcoming of our conservative sisters and that is a point on which I take no issue.  The political events of the last two to four years have proven that we need a new dialogue to address our differences and advance our cause.  What I would caution is that we be careful to avoid stereotyping women based on their political beliefs.  When it comes down to it, day to day life looks pretty similar for women in similar situations, regardless of their politics.  Career women.  Mothers.  Single Mothers.  Wives.  Partners.  Farm workers.  We all struggle for survival, safety, respect.  Let us focus on our similarities and not our differences, Ms. Royer.  Only then will we find a way to move forward.

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.  

Resistance is futile

I've never been a girly-girl.  From the time I was small, I preferred pants to dresses.  My mother would often torture me by dressing me in them anyway, of course.  Sometimes she would buy patterns and make us matching mother/daughter clothes.  Ugh.  Torture.  I didn't like Barbies either; I liked Breyer horses, and Barbie was useless because her legs would break off at the hip when you tried to force her to sit on the horse.  The few Barbies that I did have ended up being one-legged and inevitably discarded on the floor of my closet.

And shoes?  Hated them. When I was in first grade my mom bought me two pairs of shoes - a pair of saddle shoes for school and a pair of Keds to play in.  I LOATHED those saddle shoes.  I begged and pleaded to wear my tennis shoes, my pretty blue Keds with the white laces and the blue tab behind the heel.  Lovely, comfortable tennis shoes.   But my mother, being unreasonable and perhaps overly parental, insisted that I wear the saddle shoes to school.  I was so indignant about being forced to dress like a girl that I ran away from home.  For real.  All the way to my friend Kirsten's house, a twenty block ride on my bicycle across a very busy four-lane main road.  Over shoes!

As I grew up and got real live horses and played sports in high school, my distaste for "girly" stuff only deepened.  Of course I put on a dress for Prom and all that stuff.  But most of my life was lived either in shorts and high-tops or in jeans and cowboy boots.  And that's always been my style.  Once I grew up, I realized the value of looking like a girl (boys seem to appreciate it) and so some skirts and dresses inevitably found their way into my closet.  The problem is that I always seem to gravitate toward the somber.  People would ask me what my favorite color is.  "Black."  "Really?  Just black?"  "Yes.  Black."  All my early business suits were either black or navy blue, with a white blouse.  Even now, I tend to buy clothes in solid colors.  I've extended the palette to brown and sometimes even a fairly pale pink, but still.  Mostly black.  Mostly solid. 

Then I had a daughter.   A daughter who loves pink best in the whole world.  Who has a room painted pink, because she wants one.  And whose favorite pair of shoes is a hot pink pair of converse with clear sequins sewn on.  Without fail, every choice of clothing she is offered, she gravitates toward the pink like a moth to the patio bulb.  And she LOVES Barbies. For years I have watched her, head cocked to the side, eyebrows raised, wondering how this pink-shrouded pink-loving pinkity pink PINK girl came sliding out of MY womb.  What I didn't notice was the effect all of this pink frilly stuff was having on me.

It started with great subtlety.  One day I was getting a (rare) pedicure.  I always get either "french" style toe painting or occasionally, if I'm feeling brazen, fire engine red.  But one day, for no reason whatsoever (or so I thought), I walked in for my appointment and when my eyes landed on hot pink, I grabbed it.  And later on I looked at my hot pink toes and I thought to myself how really pretty they looked.  A year or so later, after a lavender pedicure and a mauve toe job, I picked pink again.  And I realized once again how very much I liked it.  I might have even loved it, a teeny little bit.  And then I was shopping for clothes and I saw this bright pink tank top, and I bought it.  And when I put it on?  I LIKED it.  Somewhere along the line, my daughter waved her magic pink fairy wand and invisible tendrils of Pink Lovewound their way into the fibers of my brain, where they seeded themselves, grew roots, and started to branch out and leaf.

On the day before Mother's Day, I was out shopping for clothes with my mom when I realized it.  I looked up, looked around, and laughed.  "Hey Mom.  You know what?  You know what my favorite color is?" 

She looked at me the way you look at your dog when it suddenly starts walking into the wall over and over again for no apparent reason.

"Pink, Mom.  My favorite color is PINK.  Can you believe it?  Me?  Pink!"  And then I let her buy me a new dress.

Don't laugh.  It happened to me.  It can happen to you.

You will be assimilated. 

Miscellany

I'm bummed because it seems not many hits on the blog for yesterday's post on help for Haiti, even though I FB'd AND twittered it.  I hope its just because people were too busy looking up their own channels of donating or doing something to come here and read my blog.  Its hard to imagine being worried about the ordinary minutiae of life when it seems that hundreds of thousands of people are trapped, injured or dying half a world a way.  It certainly puts things into perspective.

Personally, I could use a little perspective, since this week I've really felt up to my ass in alligators.  Or up to my caboose in crocodiles. Whichever metaphor works for ya.  Work has been a trial, and I often think I need a daily refresher in corporate politics.  I love my job, I really do.  I love my company and I love the people I work with.  I'm very fortunate in this economy to have what I have.  But even the best workplaces come with quicksand and politics and people who do things you don't like.  I've had my nose out of joint all week about something, and  I really just need to get over it and move on.  Monday I seriously felt like punching someone in the face.  I dont' get that way at work too often, and when I do it is not pretty.  I practically have to lock my office door and not answer the phone, otherwise I risk saying something really bad to someone. 

Top that off with the kids and/or dogs keeping me up almost every night this week, I've devolved into a shambling, cross-eyed shadow of my former self.  I've become so absolutely inane that yesterday when I heard what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson said about Haiti not only did I lose my temper, but I lost the ability to even TYPE.  I started to write something about it last night and the keyboard was all 87jk7hjjkoip*&9uiohjHUYU.  ZJH897hjaghadf.  38or7uzgknjvxjhauio;hgnlkjlKJL:J:HHH:OIIUUJ. 

See?  Inanity.

I don't even know if I can adequately put into words what an assbag douchenozzle I think Rush is.  That man has made millions off of riling up stupid people with stupid opinions.  He's not THAT ntelligent, he doesn't personally adhere to the values he holds up for the rest of the world, but I mostly dislike him because I think he's a bully.  There is always room in any government for opposition to the current status quo. That opposition is right and it is necessary because it helps keep things in balance.  It gives the politicians a gut check, and I'm all for outstanding reporting and fact-finding to help keep our government honest, no matter what party is running the show.  But outright lies and stories that are only meant to widen the difference between the citizens of this country get us absolutely nowhere.  Nowhere. 

I don't even want to talk about how big a difference, RUSH, there is between waiting three days to make commentary on a terrorist attack where no one was even hurt (well, perhaps the would-be attacker singed his testicles a little bit, but come ON) and getting the word right out there while hundreds of thousands of men, women and CHILDREN FOR FUCK'S SAKE are dying, injured, trapped.  Its like discussing the salient differences between peanut butter and oh, I don't know, CARROTS.  And as for Pat Robertson?  Does anybody even WATCH the 700 club anymore?  Apparently they must, since his idiocy made the news.  Either that or someone suffering from terrible insomnia was sitting on the couch flipping channels, they happened upon the Good Mr. Robertson talking about Haiti and thought "Oh, good, he's going to tell me where I can send some donations, I'll stop and listen!" and instead got an earful of complete and utter batshit idiocy.

See, I start to think about it and I'm all adfkjfdal;aerito;knj.uoit548u904tq09ujkcl and I have to keep backtracking to retype the words I've completely misspelled because I WAS SO FURIOUS I COULDN'T EVEN TYPE.  JJujutg89IOJ789t

45qtagjdas890tj.

So there.

People, PLEASE.  Help out our friends in Haiti.