ElementalMom

On one of my mommylists, for parents struggling with altering the family diet in response to child allergies, a woman stated that she was buying cartons of nut and rice milks, because she had no time for preparing food. This is my response to the idea that we don’t have time.

I wanted to address this some more, not to pick on anyone, but because it’s a really common refrain in our culture, and it’s something worth thinking about really carefully.

I used to be too busy to prepare food too. Amusingly enough, it was before I had kids. I lived on packages; top ramen, powerbars, mac n cheese.

Now, I work fulltime, I have a nearly five year old and a two year old, I’m the Publications Director for ICAN, I am in the process of fixing up my house and getting it rented while my family moves onboard a boat. I have two freelance editing contracts and two book contracts going right now, and I’m a moderator or leader/contact on four different email lists. And I make two or three meals a day, pretty much every day.

A very wise person told me, “either you spend time in the kitchen, or you spend time at the doctor, but one way or another, you’ll spend the time.” When I was young and invincible, I thought she was crazy, but now that I see the people around me going down for one health complaint or another, and I see westerners as a people accepting higher and higher levels of disease as “normal”, I see what she meant. What we eat, and how we eat, as a culture is killing us just as surely as the frog in the slowly-heated pot.

The Carol Flinders essay, “The Keeper of the Keys” that is the introduction to Laurel’s Kitchen has got to be, hands down, the best expression I have ever read, anyplace, for why spending time in food preparation is critical not only to your physical health, but to the mental health, and the heart, of a family. It’s worth the price of the cookbook, even if you can’t eat most of the recipes in there as a GH/CF/DF person. I keep the book for that essay alone, and I read it whenever I freak out about being the kitchen slave. Whenever the siren song of our culture, about being “too busy” starts telling me that I could just buy one, and then I’d have more time.

The learning curve involved with preparing food from scratch is really steep. I have been at this for five years seriously, although I grew up in the country, and I have in fact eaten a hamburger whose recipe started with :”first, go butcher the cow… then grind the meat… then grind the wheatberries for flour….”. I have bought cookbooks that rocked, and some that sucked. I have cycled through crap appliances and things I would not be without. Some recipes went from the bowl to the plate to the compost bin, and some have become family favorites. Our eating habits, our shopping habits, our kitchen supplies, the entire way we think about food has changed completely. It has been maddening, and frustrating, and intriguing, and enlightening. My entire relationship with food has been reworked, for the better.

This does not happen when one allows corporations to feed one’s family.

You know the whole saw about doing your chores, about “Do it happily, or don’t bother doing it”? Same deal with food. I don’t think that someone in an assembly line can make food for my family and have it be energetically the same as the food I prepare. I know that food prepared with care is totally not the same as food prepared for the masses.

There’s a selfish component as well. I have yet to meet commercial food that was even close to as yummy as what I can make. Fresh almond and rice milks are so superior to the stuff in the cartons, it’s ridiculous. Not to mention greener; no carton, no trash, no power to make the factory go. Making them, my process is down to five minutes; it takes way longer than that to earn the money to go to the store to pick up the carton to wait in the line at the checkout and to drive back home again. I think it’s a false economy to always buy what you need, but it’s a thought pattern that has been carefully nurtured in our culture for a very long time about all kinds of things.

I think that one of the finest things about this list of Monica’s is that we can help each other not have the hellish learning curve that I had, share tips for making it faster, more bearable, more accessible, when pretty much the whole rest of the culture is encouraging us to work more to get more money to spend it on suboptimal dietary choices so we spend more on doctors and pharmaceuticals and the whole economy keeps spinning on our graves.

Maybe I’m overly cynical. It wouldn’t be the first time. But if I can encourage you to do no other thing, please think about it really carefully, and see if you can’t find the time. Maybe we can start a revolution with nutmilks…

Yesterday, I went to a highly-recommended salon, to get my hair done. Generally, this is a pretty soothing ritual, wherein I get two hours to chill the heck out and read brainless magazines I’d otherwise not be caught dead reading, and indulge what little vanity I have. My family goes grey early, and I totally refuse. Better living through chemistry! The woman who was doing my hair was not a native english speaker by any stretch, and since conversation was a little difficult, I generally kept my nose poked into my magazine. That was, of course, my first mistake.

I was reading the current issue of Rolling Stone, which featured an interview with Al Gore about Live Earth, and “An Inconvenient Truth”, and a blow-by-blow investigative report by a Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson called “The Secret Campaign of President Bush’s Administration To Deny Global Warming.”

I have an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies with an emphasis in Marine Interpretation, and all but a thesis’ worth of a master’s degree in the same thing. I am a bona fide, documented, card-carrying kelp-hugging freak. Always have been. I read Al Gore’s first environmental book, “Earth in the Balance“, while in grad school. Being a student rather than a politician, and having rather more latitude in my opinions, I was disappointed by it, as it didn’t seem to go nearly far enough. People, I thought, just didn’t get how bad things were getting.

Well apparently, they’re coming to the party. I haven’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth” yet. I already understand that we’re rapidly making the planet uninhabitable, by our current standards, and that we’re so somnolent that most Americans are still arguing about it as if it might possibly not be true. It’s in our Netflix queue, though.

In every other place I have traveled to in the last five years, upon discovering that I was mainland American, someone has taken me aside, and earnestly said “what is it going to take for you people to realize what’s happening? Here where we are….” and then they go on to talk about the very real changes they’re observing. In New Zealand, the seasons have shifted several months. In Puerto Rico, the rainy season is longer and longer, and the heat is, well, hotter. In Hawaii, they’re seeing erosion, and the cumulative effects of eustasy.

I guess because we’re continental, we can afford a little more cluelessness, a little more obliviousness. I guess that denial feels good.

Me? I sat there in the chair and felt cold.

A few posts ago, I talked about how Cindy Sheehan has given up on America as a political institution, and I agreed. Giving up on a nation is painful, but doable, as the world is filled with other governments that have a lot to recommend them. But giving up on a climate? On a planet I’m very fond of? That’s significantly harder to do, without ending up sitting in a corner, in the sort of shock that renders you actionless.

For part of my childhood, my family hung out with survivalists. And from them, I learned a lot about what certain paranoid mental states look like, and I also learned a lot about basic survival, what it looks like, and what you need to be prepared to deal with. I read Dmitri Orlov’s “Closing the Collapse Gap” and howled with laughter, because he manages to state, with humor, what I generally see around me anyway. Collapse of this system, this empire, is eminent. It’s not a question, in my mind. I am pretty sure that it’s something my children are going to have to deal with.

So if the empire collapses, and the environment collapses… what then?

What then is that even to myself, I start sounding like a paranoid nutcase. I enumerate the basic necessities, I think through means of securing supplies of said necessities, I think about the relative mental and physical fitness that’s required to ensure that one copes with what comes in as reasonable, equitable, and fair a manner as possible. I don’t believe in hoarding, I think that’s ridiculous. I once knew a survivalist who’d built himself a bunker and stockpiled 100 pairs of levis. I asked him what happened if his bunker disappeared, and how he’d cope without levis. And he was unable to answer. His security was locked in a certain coping response, and despite being a survivalist, which means that he’d self-identified as someone who’d faced the idea that things could indeed get very bad, he still wasn’t to a place where he’d given up the need for certain material objects.

If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize that I just said that a nutcase stockpiling levis has more going for him with regards to connecting to current reality than our government does.

The reality, as I see it, is that as a culture, we’ve gotten fat, lazy, tired, and stupid. Most of us aren’t in good enough shape to walk for a mile, let alone sustain the sort of endurance needed to, say, acquire one’s own food consistently. We require copious quantities of sunscreen to cope with minimal sun exposure without frying to a crisp. We get bent out of shape when our little conveniences are denied us, even temporarily. Our routines have become us, and we are somehow incapable of interacting with the biological world we came from.

Buying a Prius and replacing your lightbulbs isn’t enough. It’s far too late for that. And if we were actually out in the real, biological, environment more, instead of safely cooped up in our little boxes, we’d see it as clearly as people in other places do.

We have some serious catching up to do, if we’re going to make it. We have to step up and face the big ugly. And yet, I believe deeply in my heart that we must do so without the hostility and violence that tends to characterize survival discussions. It’s not about guns, people, it’s about water. Even in a survival situation, you can live without a gun for a day, but you cannot live without water for the same amount of time. Don’t bother stockpiling ammo; learn how to harvest dew or how to make a solar still. And then teach every single person you know how to do the same thing. This isn’t about you. It is about us all.

And by the way? My hair looks great. Now I just need to secure a supply of walnuts, for after the fall, so I don’t show my grey…

I had a lot of fun with this one, and it’s been approved by a few bona fide Digital Natives. Enjoy!
http://lifewithoutschool.typepad.com/lifewithoutschool/2007/06/unschooling_and.html

On a list I’m on, a woman just asked a question about using IUDs. It got me thinking, which got me writing. I thought I’d go ahead and post this.

Right after my cesarean, the very thought of getting pregnant again was so completely horrifying, I got an IUD immediately (I’d had one before I’d gotten pregnant, I was familiar with them, blah blah blah.).

And it felt… wrong. Not medically; everything was fine. But on some deep psychic level, it felt weird and wrong and uncomfortable. Someone demanded that I get a copy of Taking Charge of Your Fertility.

I sat in my bathtub and read it. And cried. And screamed. And shook my fist at the sky, that there I was, a very-educated 33-year-old woman with a newborn son, and in all my life, I’d never known that stuff. It was frankly horrifying, how much goes on with your body that a few incredibly simple observations, done regularly, will let you understand, that no medical professional ever bothers to educate you about.

It was in reading that book that I realized that what felt “wrong” about the IUD, for me, was that it was a form of the allopathic medical community waging war against my body every single stinkin’ day. It was “liberating” me from having to really listen to my body, pay attention to its rhythms, and thereby gain wisdom.

I realized that for the first time in my life, I had the knowledge of my own body to know when the sexual act was likely to result in creating a new human life, and I had the ability to share that information with my partner. And we were free to choose.

I discovered that I didn’t much like the idea that the medical community thought it was OK to stick some hunk of metal and plastic into my womb, placing it in a state of constant irritation, all so that I would be uniformly sexually available to my partner whenever he desired. Oh, and of course, freeing me from the responsibility of having a baby when I didn’t want one. Cause that’s all my responsibility, right?

I used to think birth control was a critical issue in women’s rights. I believe that even more now, but I think we were told a half-truth, and we swallowed it whole.

I love NFP/FAM. Love love love. I love knowing, for instance, that the week before I ovulate I’m generally miserable, so I leave that week clear of meetings or heavy obligations. I love knowing that morning when I’m going to get my period, and being prepared 100% of the time. I love knowing what all those weird twinges actually mean, rather than taking all this information my body is giving me, and ignoring it.

I believe that medical control is false control, an illusion of control based on good marketing spin and brainwashing, just as surely in birth control as in birth itself. I don’t choose to be saved from knowing myself any longer, any more than I choose to be “saved” from my pain in labor, and so every morning, I take my temperature, I check my cervix and fluids, and I make my little marks in my chart. I know myself. And I don’t need any medical infrastructure to tell me anything about me. I don’t need to spend money on their drugs and their contraptions, I don’t need to be dependent on a medical infrastructure to prevent, or to create, a baby.

It’s a kind of freedom I was never even aware of before, at the other end of a little purple beeping thermometer. Who knew?

It’s been exciting at our house lately. Last Wednesday, our boat arrived in the Bay. That evening, Nana and Grandpa Al showed up, because Thursday was….drumroll please…

Kestrel’s second birthday.

I am pretty much the worst mother in the world. I was gone all day to Menlo, for back to back contentious meetings.

We haven’t done any big party things. Each of the three Grandmas brought him presents on different days, and each time, we sang Happy Birthday and he opened them. That’s it. Very low-key, almost a non-event. No sugar-cake-induced insanity, no meltdowns, no herds of polite adults ambling around making smalltalk and bringing plastic gifts we have no place to put on the boat. When I say it that way, it almost makes sense, but I still feel horribly guilty anyway.

I did my standard internal retrospective; at this time last year, I still had X number of hours of labor to go, etc. I still feel that his birth was one of the most triumphant moments of my entire life, and I’m still in awe of the events of that day. I don’t cry on Rowan’s birthday any more, but that’s a fairly recent thing. His first three birthdays, I woke up screaming at precisely 3:20AM (the moment the epidural went in). That seems to be over, thank goodness. It sucked. And definitely didn’t make for shiny-happy days following, that’s for sure. The body remembers. So it was really nice, for Kestrel’s, to sleep straight through the Blessed Moment.

At this point, I’m just hoping against hope that he doesn’t get older, ask where the pictures of his second birthday are, and end up in therapy.

There is absolutely nothing yummier in this whole wide world than a man who is a great father.

And even better, when he’s a father of two.

I am a lucky woman indeed.