Minkgirl Muses

PROTEST

Yesterday, several thousand people marched on the streets of San Francisco to acknowledge and protest the 5^th anniversary of the war in Iraq. As the Chronicle noted, this was a drop in the bucket compared with the numbers that protested during the first few days of the war in 2003. A fact that one could find discouraging. While I did join the protestors in 2003, I’m pretty sure that if I had been in San Francisco yesterday, I would not have been among the people on the street. More likely I would have been one of the people stuck in cars trying to cross Market Street, craning my neck out the window to get a glimpse of what was stopping traffic.

If I’d been there, I would have seen some interesting things. I might have witnessed a group of 50 or so people staging a “die-in” outside Senator Diane Feinstein’s office at Market and Third streets (what a clever idea!) Apparently, because they were blocking traffic, most of them were arrested. But they also made an arresting image, one that is being picked up by media outlets across the country. Or, I might have witnessed a small group of young people chain themselves to the front doors of the Federal Reserve Bank, or a group of men in orange jumpsuits and black hoods kneel in a phalanx across Market Street.

These images are potent, as or even more compelling than the more standard protest image of a sea of people marching together. The committed and intrepid citizens who participated in yesterday’s civil action were exercising not only their blessed right of free speech, but also their creativity and ingenuity to get positive attention from the media and to articulate more nuanced and universal truths about the war. In talking about how organized, prepared and communicative the protest organizers have been with the media, Chronicle journalist C.W. Nevius commented, “Back in 2003 the protesters were angry. Now they're trying something new. They're getting smart.”

Now that is encouraging. While I never have been the kind of girl who stands on top of a newspaper box shouting slogans, I might be the kind of girl who dresses from head to toe in black and joins a long line of other women marching silently to express our solidarity with mothers everywhere who are losing their children to poverty and violence. Images like the ones from yesterday’s protest move me one step closer to manifesting the stirrings of my own conscience in more tangible and visible ways.

One of the photos from yesterday’s protest that caught my attention depicts a young woman shouting. I thought to myself, “who is she talking to?” Me. She’s talking to me. And anyone/everyone who, even though we agree with her, isn’t standing next to her with our own mouths stretched open wide. "This is America," said State Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco. "We are not proud. So we say to the world, to the people who are watching, we are Americans, we are against it, and we are sorry."

Thank you San Francisco.

Be well.

Labels: Community Muses

# posted by Christine Young @ 3:50 AM 0 comments

The human body amazes me. As I watch my son’s and daughter’s bodies grow, I am continually astonished by the complex involuntary processes at work. Teeth form and push through skin at just the right moment. Fat converts to muscle that lengthens and strengthens as it is needed. Digestive tissue milks the perfect balance of nutrients from food to meet metabolic demand.

The body is smart too. It knows more than the mind does about what a human needs to thrive, causing pregnant women to crave oranges (the white inner skin is a cure for naseau) and sick children to eschew dairy products (which cause mucus production.) The body carries all the experiences and all the memories that the mind has no room for. Like a gentle grandmother, the body gathers up forgotten or abandoned bits of self, knowing that you might want or need them later.

During my last year of grad school, both my grandparents died. My grandfather’s passing was an expected culmination to a prolonged tango with diabetes that we were all prepared for. But my grandmother died more suddenly and more mysteriously six months later of “heart failure.” Her daughter has always said she died of a broken heart.

My heart broke too when she died. She was younger than my grandfather by 7 or 8 years, and I thought that fact, coupled with my searing love for her, would ensure that she would live long enough to see my children be born. I stumbled through the end of grad school, moved back to San Francisco, and resumed my life and love affair with Lord Limescale. I put up prominent pictures of both my grandparents in our living room, so they could see what I was doing and watch over me. I talked about them and told stories with my family. I “processed” my grief and moved on.

But later that year, I had a massage. I was up at Harbin Hot Springs – an historic and hedonistic “clothing optional” retreat center in Northern California – with my good friend Artemis - the only person I could imagine enjoying being naked in public with! And this may actually have been the first massage I had ever had. The therapist started at my feet and made a slow and pleasant journey upward, paying extra attention to all my various trouble spots (“I’ve got really tight hamstrings….oh, my lower back is pretty tweaky…and I’ve got some scar tissue in my right shoulder…” etc.)

When she got to the back of my neck, she made a soft exhalation – a little sound of surprise. She said, “You’ve got quite a treasure trove here.” I loved that. The image that my knots and achy places were actually storehouses for important stuff my body was hanging on to. As she gently worked this spot, I started to cry. Then I started to sob. I cried and cried and cried. And the therapist never missed a beat. She just kept rubbing and kneading and breathing with me. “Oh,” I thought with sudden clarity, “that’s where I’m keeping my grandparents.”

The body knows. It knows when to hold ‘em, and it knows when to fold ‘em. For weeks, my body has been trying to get my attention with one complaint after another. My feet hurt when I get out of bed in the morning. My hips have been achy enough that I’m sleeping with a pillow between my knees, just like I did during pregnancy. All of my treasure spots have been sending out regular neural distress signals, like little homing beacons, whispering “here…here…look here…” So I finally got it together to visit a chiropractor this week. And just my luck, I picked the best one who ever practiced during the last 100 years. A gorgeous soft-spoken German woman with hands like fluttering doves. She spent an hour and a half with me during the first visit on Wednesday and 40 minutes with me today. She is not in a hurry. And she is not daunted by the vast amount of work that lies ahead to bring my body back into a state of alignment, harmony, and health.

In particular, she focused on gentle manipulations to my abdomen and my pelvis, which is surprisingly twisted and torqued, even considering what it’s been through lately. She’s also been working on relaxing the backs of my legs, which seem to still believe they have to work hard enough to keep me and the burden of my baby upright. In essence, my body is still behaving as though I’m pregnant. And I don’t think this is just standard post-partum repair work we’re doing here. I think that as chipper as I have been about the less-than-ideal experience of birthing Miss V, there are aspects of the trauma that have lodged themselves in my body, because there is something I need to know or learn about myself before I let them go.

So, I’m going to let the body take the lead for once (although I’m sure my brain will try to be a back-seat driver.) I’m going to keep visiting my chiropractor, do yoga, drink water, and lie around and look at the sky as much as I can. I think my life might depend on it. Not in the “I’m going to die young if I don’t do this” sense, but more in the “I’m going to wake up one day crushed under the weight of my own sadness” sense. Left to its own devices, grief tends to multiply, like mold in damp corners. What is a grain of grief right now may turn into a waving field of grief if ignored.

Grief. A word we seldom use, unless we have to. But like mold spores, it surrounds us and permeates us daily. Personal grief. Collective grief. Temporal and historical grief. And we make so little space for it, until we have to.

And you? What treasure stores does your body carry? What would happen if you took out those rusty keys and unlocked them one by one, took out the contents, and let it sift through your hands like fine pearls?

Be well.

Labels: birth, body

# posted by Christine Young @ 7:27 AM 0 comments

“Once upon a time, a boy named Gman ate oatmeal. The end.”

“Once upon a time, a boy named Gman said ‘No!’ The end.”

“Once upon a time, a boy named Gman got tickled. The end.”

We were all finding this hysterical. Especially Gman, who was giggling so hard he could barely breathe – a sound as pure as water bubbling in a mountain stream at dawn.

This giggle-fest was the climax of a long and funny morning, one which began inauspiciously at 6:30am, when Gman dragged me from my bed with the command “Let’s play!” During the winter months, he took his cue from the sun and stayed in bed until 7:30 or even the occasional blissful 8:00. But now, as the days grow longer, Gman seems to wake a few minutes earlier each day, and I usually find myself grumblingly roused before the sun is fully up.

I’m not very friendly when I’m awakened too early. I find it hard to muster enthusiasm, energy, and patience when I’m bone tired. But somehow today, despite my lethargy and the early hour, Gman and I fell down a rabbit-hole into a land of story-telling and make-believe that made our morning time magical and fun.

It started with wooden spoons. I was standing at the stove blearily stirring oatmeal, when Gabriel demanded to have my wooden spoon.

Gman: “And I need some eyes.”

Me: “Some what?”

Gman: “Eyes. For the spoon.”

Me: “Do you want to decorate it?”

Gman: “And some crayons. For the mouth.”

Me: “But honey, if you decorate it, then I can’t use it to stir the oatmeal.”

Gman: “And feathers.”

Me: “Honey, I can’t give you this spoon right now, I’m using it.”

Gman: “Where’s the glue?”

Me: “How about if we go buy some spoons for you to decorate after school.”

Gman: “No! I want to do it now.”

Me: “Well, sweetheart, I don’t have any other spoons that I’m not using, so why don’t we…”

Gman: “NOW!”

“Oh, here we go!” I thought. It’s going to be one of those mornings, where every little thing becomes a pain in the ass. But as our spoon conversation teetered perilously close to the brink of disaster, suddenly I remembered that Gman has his own little wooden spoon – part of a toddler cooking set. I dug it out and he immediately set to work decorating it. We got star stickers for the eyes, drew on a nose and mouth with crayons and glued feathers to the top for hair. Then I wrapped two pipe-cleaners around the stem for arms and legs. Gman was ecstatic. He spent a few minutes making his spoon (called “Kara”) dance around the table, and then he enthused “I want to make another!”

Oh shit. I started gearing up for a redirection campaign, but he was already rummaging in the utensil drawer. After a moment, he produced another small wooden spoon.

Me: “Oh! I forgot we had another one of those.”

Gman: “This one can be the Mama spoon!”

So, we decorated a second spoon (in between bites of oatmeal), who we named “Mama Spumoni Spoon,” and then we told a story about how she and her assistant “Kara” became tailors for the world’s tallest giraffe and fashioned him a special pair of yellow pants to wear to Bear’s birthday party. It was great.

And I found, suddenly, that I was using the best parts of myself (funny voices, knowledge of dramatic structure) to parent him through the morning tasks of eating, dressing and washing, instead of the worst parts (mean voices, knowledge of what makes a three-year old apoplectic.) It was all easy and effortless and good good fun. I don’t think we’ve ever enjoyed tooth-brushing or sock selection so much.

How did this happen? And why can’t it happen everyday? Why is it that some days all I can manage is to speak and act like a drone, while other days I actually relish pinning Gman under my booted heel as I force him to bend to my maternal will?

Laughter is like a miracle drug. It un-cramps the heart, de-fogs the brain, and dissolves conflict on contact. It delivers more sensorial satisfaction than any other substance on the market. And it’s free.

Now I am not a naturally funny person. In fact, some people might even call me a serious person. But I think it’s time to lighten up. I think I should start watching Comedy Central and reading comic books. I should learn some jokes. Because without a hefty dose of laughter in the mix, parenting is one long sorry slog through alligator-infested swampland. It’s Sartre’s No Exit on repeat play. It’s an endless turn at the rigged carnival basketball toss, where you miss again and again and again.

So my mantra for today is “Keep laughing!”

It’s much better than crying, arguing, begging, whining, ignoring, yelling, cajoling, banishing, berating, threatening, bartering, or beating!

Be well.

Labels: Family Life, Mamahood

# posted by Christine Young @ 2:15 AM 0 comments

Labels: Faith, Family Life, Mamahood

# posted by Christine Young @ 2:54 AM 0 comments