ElementalMom

Martial Law? Oh really?

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/congress/?q=node/77531&id=8902076

Tags: Congress, Martial Law

Yesterday, I received an email forward simultaneously from both of my favorite Jessicas in the world. They were pointing me towards a woman who had a bunch of frozen milk to donate to some worthy baby, and they both thought of Halima.

I pounced, and immediately sent the woman, Gal, an email asking for the milk on Halima’s behalf. And then went and read her blog, Growing Inside. For a while. And then I sat and held Aurora and cried (I’m actually crying again just typing this out now).

Gal’s baby girl, Tikva, passed away at 8 weeks old. That’s how old Aurora will be on Friday. And Gal has been pumping all 8 weeks, not knowing if she was going to be able to feed Tikva or not, and wanting to keep her supply going. So there are now three huge ice chests of milk for Halima, and Willa, another baby whose mother cannot nurse her for medical reasons. They are Tikva’s milk sisters, as Aurora is Halima’s.

Women are so strong, so tough. They go through so much just to keep the species going. I am struck by the fact that these little girls are all of different ethnicities and religions. At some place in the world, the men of each of their heritages are trying to kill each other. And here in the Bay Area, women, mothers are coming together in a heartbeat to nurture our young in the best way we possibly can, and take joy in the connections we can make.

Hope, apparently, and love, come through breastmilk.

Tags: milk siblings

The decision came out yesterday from the Cailfornia Court of Appeal, Second Appellate District, Division Three with regard to the In re Rachel L. case.

Yes, Virginia, you can homeschool in this state.

All the relevant info can be found on CHN’s website.

Now everyone can quit freaking out and we can file our paperwork this October, right on schedule. Oh gosh, now this means I have to come up with a good name for our school. Suggestions welcome!

Tags: CHN, homeschooling, In re Rachel L. case, Politics

Last night, we figured out that “King Corn” was available on Netflix’s instant watch, so we did. And I am still wigging out about it.

Rowan has been reactive to corn products since he was small, so we’ve been a corn-free house for a few years. I wasn’t expecting to go into this to learn anything at all (sorta like my experience with “Super Size Me” and “Fast Food Nation”.) Sometimes, when you’re the only person you know on the “know what you’re eating” bandwagon, (OK, other than my two fave food blogs, the Cleaner Plate Club, who reviewed the film here, and Ethicurean, who reviewed it here, and my peeps over on the foodlab list), you get kinda jaded about yet another film trying desperately to get the average consumer’s attention about what they’re putting in their mouths.

So it’s with no small delight that I report here that there was one, just one, fact in the film that just rocked my world. I’m still geeking out over it. Maybe it’s because I came late to the party (and the film) and the lunacy with food prices going on right now highlights this particular aspect of the corn madness.

Near the end of the film, our heroes, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, interview Earl Butz. Ethicurean says,

Many would argue that Butz, who was secretary of agriculture in the 1970s, is singlehandedly responsible for the corporatization of U.S. farming, the obesity epidemic, and the pollution of vast swathes of America by agricultural chemicals. But face to face with the nonagenarian Bogeyman of the sustainable food movement in his nursing home, the guys can’t quite bring themselves to come in for the rhetorical kill, neither in person nor voiceover.

Friends, this was the most horrifying part of the film, and I’m still metaphorically chewing on it. Butz says flat-out that Americans today pay a smaller percentage of their money for food than any other generation, and that’s the key to our prosperity. In light of the sustainable food movement’s take that we should be paying more and getting real food for it (see grist’s blistering critique of Michael Pollan and Alice Waters’ takes here and the New York Times here), the idea that Butz was able (with what support? Who knows) to make the decision that our health as a nation was to be sacrificed on the altar of prosperity makes me ill.

What grist and the NYT are missing (along with the vast majority of Americans) is that it’s not about dollars and cents; it’s about choosing to eat food which sustains health, and choosing to eat crap which will kill you and make a lot of money for the pharmaceutical industry in the later portion of your life. You will end up paying the money, the question is just whether you want to spend it on food all along the way, or in medical costs at the end.

And in grief and pain, of course. The film interviews a cabby in NYC, whose entire family is diabetic and/or dead from diabetes-related illness. It seems almost cruel and macabre to contrast his family’s story of early, gruesome death, with Butz sitting in his nursing home in his nineties. The man who decided that it was OK for us to eat the inedible and pay the inevitable health cost sits alone, well-groomed and clean into his nineties, while the people on the streets are slowly amputated to the point of choosing death.

Our family has always paid a larger percentage of our budget in food than pretty much anyone I know. When trying to plan last year’s household budget, I gave up in dismay, discovering that not a single budget recommendation I could find included an adequate food percentage (I usually transferred the allotment from “entertainment” and “clothing”, because being a Californian, there surely was no way to shed a dime from “housing”). The folks who deal in finance don’t see the difference between payments to a CSA and trips to McDonald’s; it’s all just “food” on the balance sheet.

This is not the only cogent point in the film; depending on your background, there may or may not be other bits that come as news. The filmmakers make the point that an acre of corn in Iowa touches “everything”, and of course, that alone comes as no surprise to folks who recognize that yes, it’s all connected, isn’t it? So check it out and see if there are any connections in there for you.

Tags: Cleaner-Plate-Club, Ethicurean, Fast-Food-Nation, King-Corn, Super-Size-Me

Over at The Cleaner Plate Club (sure as heck not by way of most mainstream media channels, sigh), I found this piece on the New York Times op-ed, My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables), by a farmer, Jack Hedin, who wanted to grow vegetables that could be sold at local farmers’ market. And was blocked by the government, who, you know, is here to protect you.

This led over to The Crunchy Chicken, who is so outraged she’s resorted to terms like “grinding my crackers”. Gotta love that. Also gotta love that she’s created clickable banners with which to encourage your readership to go do something about this. Here’s the code:

<a href=”http://crunchychicken.blogspot.com/2008/03/fix-farm-bill.html”> <img src=”http://bp0.blogger.com/_8ndgSYbdkZ0/R8ub_doK2GI/AAAAAAAABGk/Igsn3VHPWRA/S1600-R/FarmBill.jpg” alt=”Fix the Farm Bill”/></a>

…which will send people to her blog, where there’s a lovely sample letter to send to one’s Congresspeople, and links to several other letters as well.

So go out and do something good for your plate today.

This hit my feed reader this AM:

http://yellodyno.typepad.com/yello_dyno_blog/2008/02/realistic-fake.html

Realistic fake photos challenge child porn prosecutors.

Each week, about 100,000 sexually explicit images of children arrive on CDs or portable disk drives at Michelle Collins’ office.

Although challenges to digital photos come in all types of criminal and civil cases, they are especially pronounced in child-pornography cases because of a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down a ban on computer-generated child pornography. Defense attorneys are trying to use the ruling to introduce reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds about the images’ authenticity. And many law-enforcement officials worry that the time and money needed to withstand any challenges will only grow as technology improves and makes it more difficult to tell a computer-generated image from a real one…

Some of you work in the this arena. Please give us more insight into this issue so we can help to ensure children’s safety.

So please, if you have the talent (and the heart) to help, please contact Jan at YelloDino.

There’s nothing like a pregnancy to make you start really thinking about your eating. Again.

We are already pretty “different” about our food. We did a phase of hardcore raw, but then fell off the wagon what with the move onto the boat, and then my pregnancy. And of course, cold weather does not encourage a raw diet, it just doesn’t. And it has been cold this year.

But you know, the question of “what” to eat is beginning to pale really, really fast, when compared with the question of “how” to eat.

I stumbled into The Cleaner Plate Club a while back… she’s brilliant. Her “How I Taught My Kid to Curse and Why I Blame Big Food” is a work of genius, and I cannot read “The many things I can talk about” with a straight face (course, that’s my face wobbling between laughing and crying, but anyway, it’s a fabulous post.)

If you clicked on those links, you wandered off Cleaner Plate and onto The Ethicurean: Chew The Right Thing. She’s got a series of digests up right now that are anything but digestable. The two pieces about “accidental” GMO contamination of corn and rice crops both make me really, really nervous.

After a whole childhood colored by Feingold, the idea that diet impacts behavior is old, old news to me. Course apparently it is news to science, and a big study at the end of 2007, published in Lancet, indicates that really, I haven’t been insane for the last 30 years, artificial crap in your food makes you unwell! How novel! ::sigh:: I’m printing a copy of this study out, to beat people with who continue to insist that I’m making it up when Rowan freaks out from consuming HFCS or coloring.

So what’s my point? My point is that the more you read, from Downergate to Pollan, the state of food here in the US is absolutely abysmal. Finding real food to feed your family is getting tougher all the time, let alone organic, seasonally-appropriate, healthy food. Going to the grocery is a depressing endeavor, not because it’s so hard to find what Pollan calls “real food”, but because even then, there’s danger (like the time I saw a produce guy putting clearly non-organic broccoli in the organic bins, and who, when I called him on it, shrugged and said “no one knows the difference without the labeling.”).

So how does a gestating, lactating, mother of growing people, ensure that everyone’s eating stuff they really should be, and not eating the kind of yuck that is becoming more and more common in our food supply? It’s a trick, without being fulltime hunters and gatherers. I’d be interested to hear how other people are dealing with this…

Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War by Joe Bageant. 2007, Crown Publishers. 267 pages of sheer rampaging depression upon a backdrop of a subtly pounding headache you weren’t quite sure you had, but are now mainlining excedrin to try to relieve, unsuccessfully.

How’s that for the opening of a book review?

I was ranting to Beverly, our dock neighbor, about the hell my parents are going through, learning the lumps of the American Lack-of-Medical-System while it slowly murders my stepfather, the Bear, by inches. This isn’t something I’ve blogged about a lot, mostly because a great deal of the pain involved is way too close to the vest, and a bit much to discuss out loud in public. But sometimes, like this last week, where the Bear was in two different surgeries and several different dialysis treatments and not a little bit of psychological abuse, designed, as far as I can tell, to both dehumanize him and compel obedience, I was done with holding my act together, and had started ranting to poor Beverly, who simply had the misfortune to be the first person who noticed that I looked like crap.

She handed me Bageant’s book. And walked away. So in I went, as much for a hit of bibliotic escapism as anything else. And found myself being drug backwards through my very own history and background, through the socio-ethnic matrix that explains what the hell makes Americans capable of so much atrocity, so much mindless hatred, such willful, blind ignorance.

Page after ugly yet totally honest page, I found myself nodding, connecting the dots right along with Bageant, squirming uncomfortably, thinking “yeah, I’m related to those people.” Pretty horrifying moments for someone who thinks of themselves as a humanistic liberal. Apparently, there-but-for-the-grace-go-I. As a nation, we are either super-wealthy and utterly heartless, or we are overworked, sick, and incapable of reading well enough to string two original thoughts together. I finally understand how we could possibly have elected Bush twice. I finally have a window that makes a little sense into the fundies who are so sucked into the vision of the Rapture that they’re blowing the shit out of everything.

While I was writing this, my Mom called to tell me about a mutual acquaintance of ours, who after an 18-year career as a Sheriff in a small town, is tired of getting screwed over, tired of living paycheck-to-paycheck, tired of realizing that his family is up to their neck in debt again, after already filing bankruptcy once. So he’s signed up as a consultant to a heartless megacorp I won’t even name, to go teach Iraqis how to be police officers. I suppose the fact that he’s lived in the desert all his life, surrounded by nothing but lily-whites and Indians somehow qualifies him to pass along techniques that will work in the cradle of civilization. ::shrug:: It gets him away from his family for a year at a time, makes excellent money, and buys them another lease on their debt-go-round. Somehow, this exemplifies to me every last thing that’s wrong with the whole damn system.

I guess it feels so much worse, Bageant’s writing, because I’m at a stage right now where 3/4 of everything I say to people makes them tilt their heads and change the subject. EC, babywearing, extended breastfeeding were bad enough; now there’s homeschooling, food sensitivities, and living on a boat. The cesarean epidemic, global warming, godforbid I mention the political crisis in this country. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have enough soapboxes for eight people. And that right there is the problem. Why am I one of the few people I know who either knows about this stuff, or bothers to get in a twist about it?

Many years and two vehicles ago, I had a bumper sticker that said “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” So much has changed since I got that, about me, my politics, my worldview. And it’s only gotten worse. I have no stickers on my car any longer. Back in my Humboldt-soaked treehugger youth, I had this idea that it was just that people were unaware of the issues, and all you had to do was talk to them, and they’d be on board.

Isn’t youthful naivete adorable?

Anyway, I really recommend the book for anyone who’s still, in their heart, baffled by how America got to be the way it is now. But I recommend you pick up a stiff drink to have along with.

It’s been a long time, blog fans. I’ve been dealing with a ton of things I wasn’t emotionally ready to blog about, and they were all big enough that they kinda blocked out any other things I wanted to write about. So I’ve been having what singers refer to as “dark days”, where they spend their time being utterly silent, allowing their voices to rest.

Well, today, I’ve seen stuff I could not stay quiet about.

First, go read this article. Normally, I wouldn’t direct you to a Peggy O’Mara article, because I’m so pissed off at her antagonism towards EC, but this one is worth it.

OK, now go read this. And if you aren’t yet a member of PROTECT.org, sign up while you’re there. Oh, and since I’m on a tear, go watch this too.

So what’s the theme, here?

It doesn’t matter how much we love them. It doesn’t matter how much we care for and about them, whether we EC’d them, breastfed them and then provided them organic, locally-grown high-quality foods, coslept with them, put them in the carseats with the highest safety rating possible, researched their education options until we were cross-eyed, engaged only in positive discipline. It does not freaking matter.

They are under attack. Every minute of every day. If it isn’t for profit, it’s for sexual gratification.

Do I sound paranoid? Most likely. But I think Rep. Wasserman Schultz’s comments were clear enough. I do not think I’m exaggerating when I say that it does not matter what I do for my kids, if I fail to protect them.

Swimming lessons? Language, music, dance, art? Nope. Yello Dyno. Consumer awareness. And staying far away from people in white coats.

I have no wisdom, no great point. I’m as scared and as unsure of how precisely to make sure my kids are safe, as any other parent.

But I know this. I must not fail them.

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…

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?

I just heard a few minutes ago that Cindy Sheehan has resigned from the peace movement. This blog on Daily Kos explains why.

I don’t even know where to begin. I have watched her get attacked over and over, in increasingly ridiculous, harsh, and anatomically impossible ways, all for saying that a mother’s grief trumps a politician’s greed. Well it appears today, the bad guys have won. Cindy will no longer speak for mothers.

I am devastated by this.

I cannot imagine what it must be like to send off a living boy full of ideals about what he’s doing, and receive back a telegram telling you that your baby is gone forever. And to have the President who sent him off to die refer to you as “Mom” while your grief is still raw (does it ever get unraw? Ever? I can’t imagine that it would.) Maybe Cindy escallated, but maybe, just maybe, that man in the white house could have talked to her. Just once. Maybe he could have answered the question about what noble cause Casey died for. How hard would that have been to do? It’s not like he was constrained to tell the truth; he could have said anything. But in the end, for whatever reasons, he would not face her.

Personally, I arrived at the same conclusion Cindy did, but I did it years ago. This America is not the America I was raised to believe in. The Federalist Papers didn’t address the unchecked greed, the viciousness, the stupidity, I see around me. When my husband resisted voting because it was pointless, I encouraged him to come with me, to make it a family outing. And then George W. Bush turned that into a complete farce. Who won the election? Who knows? Not us, any more.

Where will my family end up? I have no idea, but I know it isn’t here, and I believe in my heart that while staying and trying to inspire change from within is a noble sentiment, I, like Cindy, figured out a little while back that this empire needs to topple; it cannot be fixed, not with all our might. And if this nation is going to be as violent, as vitriolic, and as hateful to the grief of a mother as it has been to Cindy, I have to ask if it’s worth being saved at all. And I find myself being very, very sad that the conclusion I come to, is “no”.

I do not think Cindy started out to be a voice of mothers, but to me, that’s what she ended up being. A mother who stood the hell up and fought the senseless death of her beloved child in a stupid war. I hope to God that I will have the same grace, the same strength, the same courage of coviction, and the same spark, that Cindy Sheehan has, should the time ever come when I am tested as harshly as she has been tested.

Thank you, Cindy Sheehan. You’ll never read these words, but I want them out there, to try to counteract, just a little, all the hate you’ve had to soak up. You have been a beacon to me, of what it can mean to be a mother of boys, and I will admire you forever.