take away

Have you read the book All About Love? I quoted it on my last couple of posts and it’s good in a feel-good-want-to-improve-yourself kind of way. You should read it. For real. We had our final discussion on it today in my class and reflected on what we would take away from the book. This is what I thought:

I learned that Love and Loving is an action and a verb.  It’s not something you fall into or just have by default, it’s a choice that you make. I want to practice active loving and love with intention every day.

Love and Abuse can not exist together. This is difficult. Most of us have been mistreated at times by those who profess to love us. We have probably mistreated people we profess to love. Cutting words, harsh statements, sarcasm, disrespect, name-calling, and lying can not coincide with loving.

I will do my best to treat everyone I love with respect and love and be careful with my words and my actions.

I will work very hard to forgive those who have harmed me.

That’s probably enough to work on for right now–must take baby steps.

~~~

A few things I’m grateful for today:

• That I managed to get through a fairly stressful day that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get through. I had two papers due and a midterm and was feeling very stressed about my Spanish class. I decided to start texting people in Spanish for practice so don’t be surprised if you receive some random text message from me about something silly. You’ll be helping me with school! Me gusta escriber un blog.
• My girls came home and we had a great evening together. I had a glass of Hawkins Cellar Syrah and we watched CSI.
• My wife.

What are you grateful for today?

“They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.”

That’s what angels tell you about love, according to bell hooks.

I’ve been away so long that my web browser didn’t recognize the address www.recoveringstraightgirl.com when I started typing it. That is a long time!

I’ve been around though. All around the town and other places too. I wrote a column piece for Just Out, it’s here. It’s not quite the same as picking up the newspaper at a conveniently located news box or place of business, so if you live here in Portland, you should get it.

HG’s team had a bout this past Saturday. Sadly, HG was not playing and her team lost (coincidence?) but it was still super fun. I’ve been helping out doing some viral media managing for HG’s derby league (follow us on Twitter!) and that combined with school (16 credits this term,) and writing, has left me little time for any of my extra-curricular activities.

Last weekend I was invited to be a guest speaker at a class of grad students to discuss being an RSG. I was sure to let them all know that I was not the only one and that many, many of us were out there, (and that we didn’t have horns or anything!) I’m pretty sure they were relieved.  They had interesting questions that I tried to answer as clear and honestly as possible. I hope they learned something and I didn’t babble on and on. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to fill the time but somehow I managed to talk for over an hour, it’s amazing how that happens. It makes me happy to have been able to talk to people about my experience and hopefully they will be able to take that information with them in the future and help other women who will be in the situation I was (and many of you) not so long ago. It was a dark and lonely place for me for a long time and I’m very happy to be on this side of the journey. And I’m happy to help others who find themselves in that dark and lonely and confusing place. So many of you have reached out to me, and I’m always happy to help when I can–it’s part of building a loving community.

My posts here may be a little less frequent for a bit, but I hope you continue to stop by. I can’t promise anything profound, but summer is just around the corner and maybe my profoundness will return then. I will hope anyway!

A Quote

“Religious fundamentalism is often represented as authentic spiritual practice and given a level of mass media exposure that countercultural religious thought and practice never receive. Usually, fundamentalists, be they Christian, Muslin, or any faith, shape and interpret religious thought to make it conform to and legitimize a conservative status quo. Fundamentalist thinkers use religion to justify supporting imperialism, militarism, sexism, racism, homophobia. The deny the unifying message of love that is at the heart of every major religious tradition.”

–bell hooks, All About Love

The Third

Kathryn is taking four classes this term and three of the four classes are the type that require the writing of academic papers. She has one paper due on Friday and another on Monday. The paper on Monday is a narrative and the professor suggested writing the paper in the third person, “To give you practice writing in the third person.”

Kathryn is not that kind of writer, and besides her status updates on the old Facebook, she never wrote a single solitary thing in the third person. This makes Kathryn quite anxious and she is grateful for the three things in life that help her when she is feeling anxious: her wife, her friends, and wine/Xanax as appropriate. (Yes, that is actually four things but the last two are never hardly ever consumed together at the same time.)

Kathryn is also trying to adapt to a new schedule and the fact that her three young daughters are growing and changing in ways that she often questions whether or not she is doing a good job in raising them. She realizes that their behavior is considered “normal” but somehow this does not give her much comfort. Instead she often views these three people in her life like alien beings whose soul purpose of existence must certainly be to suck the very life out of her and draw every amount of patience, energy and money from what little she has left at the beginning and end of the day. Often she feels as though her only worth in life is what she can do for these people, what she can buy for them, where she can take them and how much she can give them.

She wonders why Motherhood is so very thankless and wonders if it is the same for everyone?

All of this causes her to secretly wonder what life would have been like had she made different choices. She looks at the young women that she goes to college with and wants to take them aside and say, “DON’T DO IT! Don’t have one, don’t even think about it. Get an IUD, NOW! It’s not what you think, they grow up into ungrateful, selfish, entitled leeches that drain you of every ounce of identity and hope for the future!”

She remembers the days when she held them in her arms, nursed them, comforted them when they cried, dressed them in cute little purple and hot pink dresses with matching tights and binkies. She remembers rejoicing in their first steps, first words, first foods, and first days of school. She remembers all of the joy that they found in their lives. She looks at their pictures from years before and her heart smiles at how adorable they were.

Some of this gives her comfort during the mornings of fighting and tears and doors slamming. Some of it gives her comfort after she has a complete meltdown and truly wants to pull every strand of hair out of her head. Occasionally it gives her comfort when all she hears in a day is “I want, I need, Can I, Will you and Why not?” Rarely it gives her comfort when she hands over her last $20 bill and has $6 in her checking account and she is then asked, “I want to do ’such and such’ and I have to turn in the money by Friday.”

She thinks about the days to come in the future. Days that she will look back at these days and laugh a little and sigh a little bit of relief. She’ll look at the grandchildren they will bring over to see her and she’ll chuckle when her daughters tell her how difficult the grandchild is. She’ll say, “I remember when you were that age. It was tough, but not nearly as tough as when you were a teenager!” Then the grandchild will cry and Kathryn will hand the grandchild back to her daughter. “She sure is cute,” she’ll tell her daughter. “Have fun with her.”

And one day her daughter will have a teenager and she’ll call Kathryn crying, not knowing what to do with the ungrateful, selfish child who for some reason has this sense of entitlement!

And that is the day Kathryn will have her true revenge.

New beginnings

It’s Spring! Today was the very first warm day of the year in Portland and HG and I fully took advantage of the warm sunshine and worked our asses off outside. When we bought this house there was little more than a few boring shrubs that made up our “landscaping.” It is my wish to turn the little bit of land that we have into a beautiful garden oasis that we can enjoy together and as a family. We have added things little by little, as we can afford to and as we’ve had time to devote to the work and slowly we are beginning to see it transform. We had a hard winter and it took its a toll on our yard but today we helped to nurse what survived. All of the old remnants of winter were pulled, raked, piled and disposed of. Fresh new compost was spread around our plants, rose bushes and butterfly bushes were carefully pruned and fertilized and we are ready for new beginnings.

I survived the first week of the new term and am beginning to feel a bit more confident. I can do this, I know I can–I know I can because it is what I am meant to do right now. The other night I was telling HG how I’ve always known inside of myself what was right for me to be doing at any given time. Often I was challenged on this (particularly by my parents and my ex-husband) but if there is one thing I have tried to trust myself about is the knowing. After my divorce I knew that I needed to be thinking about what was going to come next for me. I needed to get a better job, I needed to prepare myself for living alone, supporting myself and the girls. I made the steps I needed to make but I was waiting for “The Right Thing” that I knew would eventually reveal itself. Opportunities came, I took them, I built, I networked, I trusted that I would end up right where I needed to be.

I met HG and slowly everything fell into place. We meshed, we built our relationship, and we discovered who we were as a couple and as a family. It certainly didn’t happen overnight, but we planted seeds and tried to nurture them and all along I waited and knew that my life, our life, would unfold.

The Spring came and we have enjoyed what has grown so far. We are still adding a variety of experiences and opportunities to what we have so far. We continue to plant new and exciting things and look forward to what they will reveal. And just as I trust that the sun will shine and warm the little plants in my garden, I also trust that what we plant and nurture in our lives will continue to grow and evolve. I know I am right where I need to be to let it happen.

Other people in my life have also had good things grow in their lives and I am so happy to be able to applaud their efforts and successes. I have the most fabulous friends and they are so very fancy!

LeLo’s new gardening column is up this week.

Melissa Lion and Back Fence PDX were written about in today’s Oregonian.

Oh, and I may have had a column in Just Out as well as a feature on The Rose City Rollers.

It’s so nice to see what happens with a little faith and a little bit of work!

The winter was long but a new season is upon us and I can’t wait to see what comes up next.

What will you grow this spring?

Earlier. I had inspiration.

>online casino I came home from school today full of knowledge about normative behavior and class distinctions and how aging doesn’t mean that we’re slowly dying, it actually means that we’re changing–some for the better and some for the worst and that the big question of “Nature vs. Nurture” is actually not distinctly answered but that both things mutually affect and influence each other.  And learning how to say simple phrases in Spanish to my classmates and feeling terrified that they’re going to think that I’m an idiot and then almost crying because I want to tell the teacher, “I can’t do this! I know how to write papers and give critical analysis of text and close read and examine concepts of Sociology and give speeches. I can’t do a different language, I’m FORTY YEARS OLD!”

When I came home with all of that in my head, I was feeling very inspired to write something profound. Unfortunately, I lost it the minute I changed my clothes and made dinner and before beginning the second part of my life of taking care of my daughters and making sure that they don’t eat too much sugar, and speak kindly to each other and realize that when they say nasty things about a girl at school who’s hair is “weird” and that “all boys are mean and stupid”  is sending negative energy into the universe. Adding to that, one of them put her elbows on the table and I want to shriek for the fortieth time to NOT do that but I remember that “values” (like manners, like which side of the street we walk on, and how we celebrate holidays) are not reality but rather socially invented.

Sometimes when I am feeling overwhelmed with school, I put on my Yale sweatshirt, which was given to me by my friend M.who lives in New York (like the city.)

I think I secretly hope that if I’m wearing my Yale sweatshirt I will somehow be smarter, even though I know that students who attend Yale are the same as students who attend an inner-city college with the only difference being the opportunity afforded the Yale student due to White Supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy.

My middle daughter, Halsey, asked me why I was wearing a Yale sweatshirt when I didn’t go to Yale. I told her that my friend M. sent it to me in the mail and she thought that it was weird that he did so. “Is He an old boyfriend?” she asked. I told her no, he was not an old boyfriend, he was a new boy friend or rather man friend. “Well, why would he send it to you?” she then asked. “Because he likes me,” I told her but she still seemed rather confused. This could be because “all boys are mean and stupid,” I’m not sure. (I’m fairly sure that M. is neither mean nor stupid as he did attend Yale and sent me a sweatshirt.)

In conclusion.

I really wanted to write something inspirational earlier and it went away so instead I graced you with all of this. All of these facts that I pretty much learned Today. Yes. I. Am. Serious.

I’m a bit overwhelmed by this term’s school schedule–can you tell? I am holding on to hope that my anxieties will be put to rest just as soon as I get in to a routine but if they do not, I fear that my brain will explode into a billion teeny tiny pieces all over the Portland State University campus.

And that would be messy.