i’ve learned
the quiet doesn’t mean
silence.
nothing shuts up
blue jays
cackling after the sun
rises above the pine tree line
just beyond the hay field.
even the sun
melting over the night-wet grass
like burning sugar
crackling awake the doe
to sprint across pell-mell
leaping into the dew fog
and gone.
i’ve learned
that quiet is–
so often–
LOUD.
Filed under poetry
I took my first kayaking trip May 2000, and I can still hardly believe that it was 13 years ago! 
After a morning of “hard” missionary work, I think we painted the inside of some cabins; we headed down to the beach. Of course, there was a beach. It was my senior trip to the USVI, St. John to be more specific. We roughed it with questionable showers, doors wide open at night to let the breeze inside along with every bug, lizard, mongoose, snake, or an ROUS or two.
When the travel magazines talk about white sand beaches, they’ve clearly been to St. John. We walked down a long trail through lush coral pinks splattered amongst jungle greens, then white sand and sky meeting water–blending perfectly. We grabbed borrowed snorkel gear and rented kayaks, and perhaps, we paid attention to the five-minute lecture and we zipped into the warm, lapping water. We paddled and practiced falling out of the kayak. Looking down at least 80 feet, the sand looked just as white and lovely. We swam with the tropical fish and marveled at the coral, then paddled back to shore so the next group could go. Easy, right?
Perhaps, I should have been more cautious about paddling in the middle of North Carolina on a river.
Last Thursday on the spur of the moment, we decided paddling down Deep River(it has nothing to do with the depth of the water but the height of the banks, cool, huh?) a couple of hours before sunset sounded fun. The river high from storm water, boat ramp slick with new mud, we lumbered down the hacked out stairs towards the water. Two kayaks, one for a friend and the other borrowed for us slid easily into the river. I wish I could say I gracefully entered the kayak, but I resembled one of the hippos dancing in Fantastia. It was not pretty.
The river slicked brown, muddy, smelling of rich earth and honeysuckle. We paddled into the current and down, down, down we went. Sun setting perfectly behind our backs. We paddled alongside a beaver who promptly smacked his flat tail at us. Invaders of his river. A warning, maybe? We paddled on past baby ducks and geese. Trees casting long shadows over the river. Each bend closer to the end of our trip.
Then we found the beaver dam…perhaps, we should have heeded the beaver’s warning.
Sun behind the trees, we paddled hoping to stay away from the dam. It didn’t work. Our kayak wedged tightly against one log; we steadied ourselves so we didn’t capsize. Being sucked under the dam and drowning would have really sucked, but we played it smart, stayed calm, paddled backwards toward the bank, paddled like our lives depended on it across the river. More mud, more exiting and entering the kayak like hippos. Now, long past twilight.
After dark, those cute beavers sound like alligators or pythons or ROUSes jumping into the silent river. I sat still in the front of the kayak, barely paddling, holding the light away from my face. The bugs were on suicide missions to dive into my eyes, ears, anything exposed. We listened to the frogs, watched for glowing eyes on the water or the banks, paddled hard with the water splashed like a large rocks tumbling down into the molasses dark water. Two miles paddling this way until we saw the glow of streetlights, the river side park, and the ever so welcome sight of our friend’s truck.
One adventure done…now, a hot shower and television.
Filed under Simple Stories
I’m done.
Done with the clichés, the desperate attempts to force family into a suffocating box. I don’t fit anymore. I’m done. 
This Sunday, we’ll celebrate one aspect of women’s lives with pink cards and red roses and lovely dinners. Our churches will have all of us mothers stand, and we will applaud our collective efforts of this past year. The kids will make some popsicle stick craft with far too much glitter and glue, and every mother is supposed to feel loved and cherished in this microcosm of community. Not all do.
But then, we will go home. Back to our non-traditional family, back to the every other weekend hurry up and do the laundry before it’s time to go lives.
Here, Mother’s Day isn’t as glamorous. Sometimes, it downright hurts like hell. My hands still sticky from glue and glitter that will never, ever, ever come off my clothes–I’m informed that being a stepmother isn’t a “real mother” so the kids give away their crafts or cards or whatever school or church made. The Mother’s Day bitter pill, swallow, carry on doing the work.
For another 364 days, we’ll hide behind how many laundry loads we do or how many doctors appointments we go to or how many mini-van loads of children we shuffle around to Scouts or gymnastics or dance or sports. We’ll bring out the big guns with puke we have cleaned up or snotty noses wiped.
But inevitably, birth mothers will lord over we stepmothers how hard it was, you know, giving birth. Believe me, we stepmothers know it isn’t easy. Somehow, pushing a baby out of your body negates every contribution another woman makes for said child. The ultimate mommy trump card.
We continue the cycle of mothering competition; a competition built on wiping asses and driving kids around. The constant barrage of “she doesn’t understand” or “she’s got it so easy, just every other weekend.” Enough. Just simply enough. No one will ever fully understand, nor can we base “ease” on how frequently the children sleep at another set of parents’ home.
I’m done.
Done with the bickering, the fighting, peacock posturing, cat claw meanness, justifying the work I do as a stepmother or yours as a mother. I’m done.
I’m calling in a truce for Mother’s Day, for the next 364 days, for the lifespan of every stepmother, birth mother, life partner, aunt, grandmother. A truce to celebrate the hard work of mothering. A truce to thank the community of women and men who mother our children. A truce to appreciate the contributions of another woman. A truce to give ourselves a break from the hard work. A truce to break down the walls of competition. A truce to raise our glasses high and say:
Yes, the job of mothering and step-mothering is hard. We’ve hurt and been hurt. We know the long nightmare filled nights, and we know the endless cycle of wash/wear/repeat. We know how to stain our pillows with tears when kids break our hearts. We know; we understand. We are mothers.
3 Practical Ways to call a Mother’s Day truce:
Filed under Step-parenting
If I tell you where I’ve been…
I’ve been hiding behind piles of student essays pondering how one teaches writing. Some days, I have no idea why the words I string together like beads on a necklace create something beautiful; or why some days, I can’t write a coherent sentence to save my life(or use cliches for that matter). Yet, I taught my writing courses anyway.
This is the one strange quirk of being a teacher–I will never know how well or how much of a “difference” I made. Perhaps, none at all save the assignments which allowed said students to pass a required course. I hope for more than simply that, but I know the teacher who first walked into those classrooms is not the same one who walked out. I’m changed. I learned. I hope they did as well.
If I tell you where I’ve been…
I’ve been hiding behind my computer screen clicking-clacking keys into letters and ideas until they form stories and characters and plot lines. Rolling around behind my eyeballs, stories of Southern life and its quirky, beautiful people keep coming like bowling balls down the lane until I must write them down on lose those stories to another writer. Slowly, I’m forming my mish-mash stories into a collection that I will finish by the end of summer (someone hold me to this, okay?).
I’ve labored through drafts and classes and characters who won’t shut up until I finish their story, or sometimes, those characters sigh and step into the shadows for awhile. One of the odd quirks of writing fiction really, I can’t force my characters to speak or show me something knew when they want to nap or sip sweet tea on the front porch. So, I wait too. When they are ready, I put their lives on the page as they would have wished to known to this world.
If I tell you where I’ve been…
I’ve been reading and writing and cooking and living and remembering. This is where I’ve been for the past four months, and now, my words are here again. Thank you for your patience.
amid–
the scrag,
the underbrush,
the brown-green pines–
red buds burst out
in violet rage
against winter’s hold.
Filed under poetry
Skin 
knuckle rough, heel cracked
brush off the dried up
white to the floor–
such a waste
of good currency!
bought the bus seat,
no questions,
bought the truth,
come the trial,
bought laws and police and—
enough!
let it go
down to dust,
peel back those cells,
fabric binding us together,
see? the same pulsings beneath.
Filed under poetry
when I learned to whisper-shout
to be brave, to use my voice,
to speak truth to first my heart
then yours.
and i’m still getting used to the sound of my voice.
and i wished for all the right answers
but feminism isn’t
how to live for dummies.
reading and crying together,
we opened up a space to be safe
(as safe as we are on the internet)
this is the moment,
feminism became more real, more tangible.
when we became more aware of our
differences,
sameness,
oppressed hearts,
silenced voices–
this is the moment,
feminism brought us together
we talked and laughed and screamed
but came back to listen and learn.
we haven’t shied away from our insecurities
about who we were, are, will be.
right now,
i still have questions
about how to fully live my feminism,
how to teach my feminism without oppression,
how to be comfortable in my skin but not its privilege.
i don’t know, but continue to learn,
let’s continue this journey together.
I wasted twenty-five years hating my body.
Before the boys-are-icky stage and damn-he’s-fine, I had my first crush on my next door neighbor. I remember his slightly pudgy middle, taller than I, and delightfully dark bowl cut hair. He was the cutest thing in the second grade. Sitting cross-legged on the brown basement carpet, I told his sister that I thought her brother was cute. I liked him, well, I liked liked him(if you don’t understand the importance of the double like, it translates to crushing or whatever the current vernacular is).
But his sister told me, seven year old me who hadn’t hit her growth spurt yet, I was too fat. Her brother wouldn’t like like me back if I didn’t lose my tummy. And we began jumping jacks and sprints around the basement trying to melt away my baby fat middle. It didn’t work. Next, I snuck Slim-Fast powder and made the meal shakes. Nothing changed. I still had the body of a seven year old girl, but my body had become the enemy.
I spent so many years covering up bulges and skipping meals and crying when boys told my friends: ” isn’t she kinda fat?” When I turned my gaze toward the others girls, single sizes and flat bellies, my body suffered even more. Being the right size became a spiritual issue because my body, my temple was too big. So even God hated my fat body. It was my fault for having large hips and breasts. Being a woman.
I wasted twenty years hating my voice.
Photo courtesy of Alejandra Mavroski and Flickr Creative Commons
Now, I don’t mean how my voice sounds. I have a strong speaking voice; I know how to fill a room with sound. But I learned to hate speaking up for myself. I knew how to keep my head down, follow the crowd led by the outspoken males, disagree in the quiet of my bedroom where I wouldn’t be criticized or listen to some ass take my idea as his own. Quiet became my solace.
My voice shriveled with disuse. Perhaps, fear poisoned it. Fear of being too loud and opinionated, potential husbands don’t like that quality in a wife. I shouldn’t speak up in my college classes because it intimidated the boys, and if I turned in better papers or test scores, I should downplay my accomplishments because men have egos to nurse. But I spoke up too many times and earned better grades and wasn’t missionary/pastor’s wife material. Single became my death sentence, and I licked my wounds teaching English in a so-called “Christian” school. Again, my voice silenced so male agency could take center stage.
I wasted too much time hating myself when I should have poured my fear and insecurity into something bigger than me.
Because in the grand scheme of things, my body, my voice, myself are not the enemy. The enemy is a system of power fueled by patriarchy running rampant in the media, in the church, in our places of higher learning. This power represses engaged dialogue, lies to tender-hearted girl, oppresses the poor. Power corrupts, but we have drunken the forbidden wine and are choking on its poison.
What’s even worse, we have become so blind to power’s over-reaching effects.
We allow normative gender roles to influence how we decide custody of children. We praise a system that defines all women as nurturing mothers, and all men as fathers who just foot the bill acknowledged for their sperm donation. And we say nothing.
We allow the poor to wallow in the in the hope that MAYBE they can do enough to move beyond food stamps and government housing. But the reality? Minimum wage is not the same as a living wage. And we say nothing.
We allow our prison system to overflow with minorities who haven’t had a fair shot at justice. We cross the street to avoid a passing African-American man because society has made us fearful of them. And we say nothing.
We allow rooms full of men to debate if women can have access to birth control and OB/GYN care. Women still are being silenced when they have courage to speak out against their rapists. And we say nothing.
We allow preachers to point the figure at women’s bodies as property, women’s minds only good for the Noah’s Ark themed nursery, women’s voices silenced in discussion. And we say nothing.
We need feminism because too many bodies and voices and selves are being abused, hated, and destroyed. We need to stand the fuck up and say something.
Because women’s bodies aren’t the enemy. Because women’s words and voices and ideas aren’t the enemy. Because the poor and oppressed and the othered aren’t the enemy.
We need feminism because our silence is the enemy. This is what’s at stake for me right now as a feminist to speak against power and repression, to rail and fight against those perpetuating harmful gender stereotyping, to dust off my soapbox and proclaim loudly for human rights.
This is why I need feminism.
I learned to love my body’s bulges and stretch marks and to feel good in my skin. I learned to look in the mirror and say kind words to my reflection. I learned to speak up for myself, for my ideas, for what I believe. And lo, there are men who want smart, out-spoken wives, who have no problem thinking for themselves. Hell, I married one.
This is why I need feminism because I don’t want another person to waste so much time hating herself or himself.
Filed under Feminism
When I say I’m a feminist…
I see the blank, awkward looks. Toes scuffing the dirt; you shuffle your weight and stare at your shoes. Perhaps, you sip your latte/soda/water and wish the awkward pause away. But the F-word hangs in the air like smoke from a Pall Mall cigarette. Neither you nor I can escape it, and I don’t want to. It’s who I have become, who I was, who I’m constructing myself to be.
Every time, I label myself with the F-word; I see the gap between us open wide like a moon crater. Maybe, you will change the subject. Something comfortable like the weather or politics or faith. Something to move away from this label because we’ve weighed it down with images of bra burners, men haters, radicals. And I don’t fit that description.
So when I call myself a feminist, you’re never sure what to say or do. The word carries such a burden, but what great “isms” don’t? Somehow, we have this metaphorical dance of awkward pauses and gaps, but what we really need is to sit down and listen to what I mean when I say I’m a feminist.
When I say I’m a feminist…
I want you to see the little girl struggling to unify that Jesus loves everyone equally, but only men can preach and teach. The important church things. Women just take turns in the nursery. There’s a “natural” trajectory for a little girl’s life–grow-up, marriage, babies. The same for all little girls, doesn’t matter if they want to do something else or worse still don’t even want babies or marriage. It becomes hard to reconcile such a Creator who gives us all talents and gifts, but expects the same life plan for half the population. I struggled as a teenager to overcome my body and hide it at the same time. Too much knee, too much neckline, I cause others to sin because I have breasts and hips and a body that refuses to look good in ankle length skirts.
I want you to see college girl who learned early to shut up, be quiet, your voice is worthless. For the first time, an English professor with red curls and ice blue eyes tells me that my voice, my agency matter. She takes me under her wing and allows me to spend hours talking about poetry and novels and writing in her office provided I overlook the piles of ungraded papers. She listens and treats me as an equal. When she labels herself a feminist, I do too. A bit of a bandwagon conversion, but if feminism allows me to speak up for myself, for others, then I want in too.
I want you to see the graduate student. Far removed from her childhood faith, diving into theory and literature, breathing in the intellectual discourse like oxygen. Christianity and church fade into Derrida, Foucault, then bell hooks, Elizabeth Flynn, and Adrienne Rich. All of my professors treated my words as important and worth listening to. When I wasn’t treated as an equal outside of academia, I could find solace within its graduate seminars.With each course, I began hearing the cries of my feminist foremothers begging for me to speak, to use my agency, to rail against hegemony. In this time, feminism reconstructed my tarnished and battered view of being a woman, how a woman relates to the domestic and public spheres, how woman lives in the tension of place and purpose. Slowly, as feminism taught me my worth as a human, not just as a woman, I found my way back to the faith that I threw off so haphazardly.
When I say I’m a feminist…
(Maybe, I should have begun with this caveat. This is my practical vision of feminism rooted in the theories of bell hooks, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Flynn, and Gaytari Spivak. I understand that feminism is far from a perfect ideology, but if we can accept the messy and brokeness of the church, I think we can accept feminism’s incongruence as well.)
No one definition embraces its full scope. No one woman embodies its full vision. No set of words capture it—no matter how raw, graceful, or elegant. It does not exist in unified form; yet, it serves to unify the silenced, the abused, the First World, the Third World, the lesbian, the housewife, the academic, the high school drop out, the faith-filled, the agnostic. Underneath its wings, women grow stronger, more self-aware. They find voices to speak back to power and hegemonic authority. They find the strength to push against the wall of patriarchy and its abuses. Couched in all of its ideological weight rests Feminism. Loved and shunned. Embraced and rejected—Feminism.
Refusing to be hemmed into a succinct definition, feminism’s history is a piece quilt of the women who embrace it and who shun it. We feminists revel in the glory of suffrage. Our fledging step onto the stage of the public sphere. We take pride in those women who broke through the gender role barrier during the 1960′s. Those women who sought for gender equality give us hope. We celebrate the women who forced academia to consider gender differences in learning, to rewrite the literary canon so women writers could take a seat, to allow more women to showcase their intellectual triumphs.
Yes, these are wonderful depictions of feminism, but they don’t fully show the daily tension that I live within. I’m always already in a place of power and being othered. As a white, heterosexual female, I live with the tension of privilege and power in one hand, but the experience of being silenced in the other. It is not an easy tension to negotiate or to make into some semblance of an ordered theoretical framework. Quite frankly, I feel like my understanding of feminism looks like a patchwork quilt with crazy blue and red and green and purple squares. If you’re hoping that I would definitively explicate the theory of feminism and its truest meaning, then I’m sorry to disappoint you. But this is how I frame my feminism, this is what I want you to hear.
When I say I’m a feminist…
I embrace the experience of being a woman. Not limited to gender roles, but neither excluding those women who choose to stay within society’s prescriptive mandates. A woman has the right to choose her path without fear of scorn for her choice.
I embrace the grand meta-narrative of humanity. Both female and male voices speaking together without clamoring over one another. A beautiful dialogue of harmony, peace, and love.
I embrace the mystery of faith. A faith grounded in love. A faith rooted in the ideology that we speak up for the poor, the widow, the orphan.
I embrace ethical living. My lifestyle should never inflict suffering on others within my immediate community, my home nation, or the world.
Filed under Feminism
I believe in radical self-care.
There, I said it. After years of relying on others to make me feel good about who I am, I stopped and began taking care of me so I could take care of others. Perhaps, you think I’m selfish. Fine, your opinion. But I need to sip my coffee slowly, dance in the falling snow, read poetry and novels and plays, write out my feelings even when I know there are some who can’t wait for me to say/do/write something that they can use against me. Fine, your prerogative.
But I believe that radical self-care begins by establishing boundaries even on the internet.
I understand that Google exists. That we can search and find the dirty dark bits, the tweets of rage/depression/joy/whining. The Facebook posts begging for spa days and an end of homework agony. I know how easy it is search for the ex and his wife or the best friend who spited you or that ever so perfect family member who you just wish would mess up so royally. Isn’t that the glory of the internet? To search for all the hot mess and shit so we can feel morally superior, then crash into a wall of anxiety because those people may actually have a better life than we do!
But the truly sad thing is this: we keep up this behavior, hoping for different results, hoping to feel better about who we are. It will never happen.
And we get more of the same. Always. We compare our behind the scenes with our nemesis’ on stage performance, and it hurts because deep inside, we crave all the bad, all the mess to be showered down on those who wronged us. Perhaps, this is why we have no respect for boundaries on the internet. Cyberstalk your ex’s significant other’s blog? Perfectly justified. She’s probably just as wretched as you dreamed her to be. Comb through tweets looking for all shitty things happening to a former best friend? Of course, she deserves it.
When we justify our cyberstalking ways or crossing internet boundaries, we essentially poison ourselves with bitterness, fear, and anger. For what? So whoever it is will feel awful? So whoever we truly loathe will just *poof* out of existence? Let me be the first to tell this: no matter how much we cross boundaries on the internet, we only hurt ourselves. Most of the time, the person we try “hurting” has no idea. Completely clueless(granted most bloggers do use some form of analytics tool to show where their site traffic comes from, so in that respect, they may know. If they keep writing, said blogger doesn’t care. Think of it as they are flipping you off with their persistent words).
Behind this self-harming behavior, I think we keep crossing boundaries because we want to feel better about ourselves without actually doing anything differently.
We take the repressed pain from broken relationships, failed attempts at happiness, and disenchanted dreams and channel all of this mess into hurting others. But do we really make ourselves happier? No. It’s like having a headache and simply looking at the Advil bottle then hoping the pain will stop. It won’t. We have to take the medicine. We have to stop trying to bolster our self-esteem by digging up the shit of others.
Our medicine may look like therapy or writing or walking in the crisp winter cold. It may be saying kind words in the mirror or reading poetry in bed. But we must stop our cycle of self-abuse. It begins by respecting your boundaries and those of the people whom you really want to hurt.
I believe in radical self-care, and I believe we begin by respecting our worst enemies.
Filed under Musings
Avid reader, quirky writer, faithful thinker and floundering through life with the rest of humanity
