Women Can't be Farmers.

That's what Xir told me this afternoon as we walked home from a long outing.

"Most of the farmers in the world are women," I replied evenly.

"That's because they are tricking the men to think they can do it."

"Why would they want to trick the men? Farming is hard work. Women and men farm because they need to eat."

"Well I guess that is all right. Women should be doing most of the work anyway."

Well. I had been holding it together pretty admirably thus far, I should think, but that just hurtled me over the wall between reasonable mom and screeching lunatic. In the "conversation" that followed (meaning, in this context, a shrill rapidfire monologue coming from me and increasingly hunted and shrinking remarks he managed to sputter out when I drew in breath) I learned that

a) people in China think women should do most of the work.

b) a man's job is to have fun.

c) people in China are the smartest.

and he learned that

a) Mama is a screeching lunatic. And

b) NEVER say that thing again about women should do all the work.

I tried to lower my register and decibels at one point and describe, in a reasonable facsimile of my normal voice, a scenario in which his little brother got to play with toys all day while he had to cook, clean up, wash his brother's clothes, fix his brother's broken toys, etc. How would that feel?

"You got it wrong mama. We are both boys. That's not how they do it in China. WE would both be playing and having fun. If we had a sister she could do all that stuff."

AAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHH. Needless to say, the whole thing ended in tears. And I forgot, several times, that it was a five-year-old with whom I was dealing. A five-year-old who was merely repeating opinions he'd heard from Satan. I mean his dad. Whoops.

This whole cheerful frolic coincided with the loss of Xir's first tooth. I had always meant to make a special family ritual of this moment; rather than go along with thoughtless lies about fairies with toothy castles I would take my child out to the garden and we would plant the tooth under a special bean vine to put the calcium back in the soil. Then when that bean vine began to produce, we would cook up the beans, sing a special song, and he would eat them to complete the cycle.

Yeah RIGHT! There are so many fallacies in that particular fantasy that I can't even begin to address them. And I was so steaming mad that I went on and on about the tooth fairy just to get back at Xir's dad--whoops, I mean Satan--who hates, above all else, imagination of any kind. Except the kind where you imagine that someone will actually stay married to you when you hold an opinion like "women should do all the work".

After both boys fell asleep I decompressed a little by writing in my journal about the whole thing. And I realized why I had gotten so angry. It's because, as stupid and unevolved and ludicrous as the idea that women should be doing all the work is, WE ACTUALLY ARE. It is still happening. Innocent eyes looking around this world would find plenty of proof for it.

I know it is not just I who does all of the cooking, all of the cleaning, all of the childcare; whose husband (when we were still married) referred to his care of the children as "babysitting"; whose dreams and education were put on hold simply because I had participated in the creation of the next generation. Or maybe I am just still bitter about what a crock Mother's Day is when there isn't another parent around to coerce the children into expressing (forced) sentiment or better yet to just cart the critters off for the day.

But taking it out on my 5-year-old is not going to change things. I don't know that there is anything that could change things. Because the very act of being an involved mother removes involved mothers from the circles that make the plans, the art, the culture, the rules. We are invisible and so it never changes. Urban planners forget, for the most part, that children exist. Organizers of events. of parties, of entertainment, exclude small children as a matter of course and thus exclude their mothers from participation in the adult world. There is no job that I know of--including the care of other people's children--in which bringing your own children along is acceptable. It is entirely inhumane, and somehow almost completely unquestioned.

I know this is not news to anyone. Time to climb off of my soapbox and into bed. Oh wait. First I have to do the dishes, sweep the floors, prepare tomorrow's lunches...

and sneak a quarter under the pillow of a very special, very deluded little boy.

the little things life is made of

1) Xir saying: "Will you sing my Cyclopstaur (a horridly ugly plastic toy somebody gave him that he is completely enamored of) to sleep? If you sing Twinkle Little Star it will be just a minute to you but it will be a whole hour for him because he is in a very little world."

2) Anainn inventing a game in which he bends over at the waist and ducks his head under something---a curtain, the hamper lid, or one memorable time, yesterday's bra---becoming in this way "invisible", and then straightens up, beams, and claps his hands: Wow, look, I'm back!

3) Visiting a friend and having her answer the door with her face unselfconsciously coated in a mixture of mud, cucumber, and aloe pulp.

4) Discovering this video (in the course of my research about family sleep-ins, naturally): the camera pans around looks of shock and dismay on the faces of Uzbek nomads as they, in turn, watch a video about crazy American parents who isolate their children in SEPARATE ROOMS!

5) Cleaning a graze on Xir's knee and having him look up at me and say earnestly: "I feel like hugging you until I pass away."

6) Coming home after an impossibly long day of humping the (truly unportable) stroller, baby, kid, and kid accoutrements from bus to bus only to find flowers and a bowl of hot soup waiting for me, courtesy of the best landlady on the planet.

7) Xir's explanation of the difference between a kumquat and a loquat: "Now I get it. With a kumquat you are supposed to eat the peel but it is HORRIBLE. With a loquat you are NOT supposed to eat the peel but if you do, it tastes nice!"

8) Remembering the conversation with my old friend Rob on Wednesday, in which I learned that interesting lives may be hard on the one living them, but can prove valuable for those looking on.

9) Banana muffins with cream cheese.

10) Not being a vegan anymore.

11) Shelayna's one closet, one year blog and its wonderful information about midwifery, circumcision, and of course layering.

12) Having a friend whose only piece of furniture is a spinning wheel. Which she uses daily. And who is turning a pair of socks she knit for her beloved that were too large into slippers by affixing bits of leather (obtained for free from, of all places, a car upholsterer) to the soles and embroidering them with bow and arrow so that "as he learns to hunt he will shoot true".

13) Xir pilfering my headphones and sitting on the bus looking all chill; when I asked him what he was listening to he said "How to discipline your children". Oh yeah, I put those parenting tapes on there. He was really into it, too!

13) The scent of rose geranium.

14) Coming to the end of a truly difficult day and knowing that I learned something, that my children learned something, and that I may be on the right path after all.

SLEEP IS THE ALL AND ONLY

Here's the thing about sharing one cozy sleeping space as a family: it can get un-cozy REALLY fast. Like when the 18-month-old wakes, roots through the cupboard, and upends a cereal box over all the bedding while you sleep. Or when the same 18-month-old screams without cease for no discernible reason, and there is really no way of keeping the 5-year-old asleep. These things, simply, suck.

And speaking of sucking, WHY won't that same 18-month-old get the memo about being weaned already and stop the madness!

Sleep, it turns out, is the essential ingredient in sanity. At least mine.

How do all of those societies that have been living in one-roomed dwellings for thousands of years manage this aspect? I am going to research this. If I can stay awake to do it.

sprinting and surprises

For a day that began with a mile-long sprint in impractical shoes to catch the last bus of the morning---and continuing, therefore, sweaty and stinky all day---yesterday sure turned out to be a winner in the end. It was one of those days that reaffirms life as the joyous thing it truly is, underneath all the struggle.

After school I had an appointment at the Hammer to interview for this incredible collaborative project between an artisan and a psychologist. The lucky ones selected will go to the Hammer for eight weeks in succession and participate in group/Jungian therapy whilst creating needlepoint canvases of some of the Hammer's most illustrious works of art. These needlepoints will then be displayed alongside the original art pieces. This project was conceived of and paid for by an anonymous donor who wants people to have the opportunity to participate more fully in the museum experience, to be a part of the art, to breathe new life into it. The woman who interviewed me was merry, with that spark of life we long to see in everyone we meet, and knew what a Quaker was! I have a good feeling about this.

She gave me a guest pass for the museum (and--hurray!--an actual, literal gold star to wear for having cycled there) so I wandered through and found, side by side, Jung's ACTUAL RED BOOK and a very sensuous video installation called Minotaur.

I've been hearing about the red book for years. Jung was fascinated by mandalas and saw them as secret codes, or patterns, of our subconscious and the workings of the universe. So, in all of his spare time, he conceived an entire cosmology and worked it out in mandalas, wrote poetic sermons and discourses unveiling this cosmology, and turned it all into an illuminated manuscript of rich beauty. Naturally he did all of his own calligraphy, and the several hundred deeply colored and detailed illustrations. I never knew Jung was an artist. His art has a simplicity to it---reminiscent, almost, of the work of Antoine de Saint Exupery---but the lines, the colors call out as the best art does.

Most wondrous of all, there was Jung's own scribbled journal in the display case opposite, in his own hurried pencil. One entry read (I am paraphrasing the heck out of this):

O my soul! I have lost you for so long. I have wandered strange paths and made terrible mistakes, and now here I am. It has all been as it should because now I am here, and have found you.

Now I swear, I could find this EXACT entry---verbatim---in German, even!---in one of my old journals. To have a histrionic journal entry in common with Jung is very, very, heartening.

So then, reeling and in love, I stumbled into the Minotaur viewing room. It is dark, with beanbags. An old woman (the filmmaker) pages through a book of the sculptures of Rodin and stops at the Minotaur. The sculpture becomes two dancers, who then explore the emotional landscape of the work with their bodies. Which is an artistic way of saying, there you are sitting on the beanbag in a museum watching two naked people doing--you know--IT.

The power dynamic between the dancer playing the minotaur and the dancer playing his young victim alters subtly throughout, and in the end, in one long gaze, she shows her triumph, then her scorn, then her sadness at his ultimate lack of relevance. I know that feeling. That feeling ended my marriage.

I was so glad to have sat through it, because there were parts that had me squirming. It is really awkward to be sitting in a dark room watching people doing IT and then another patron of the arts wanders in, looks at the screen, looks at you watching the screen, and then scuttles the heck out of there.

Uh oh. I am creeping dangerously close to verbal vomit territory and there is so much left to tell! Laura can I have an exemption?

After this I had to cool myself down with a cucumber-and-rose ice cream cone at the Persian ice cream store. And then it was off to the Poufy Beige Sublet to finally conclude that saga. And that turned out to be...wonderful. We laughed, we went through a box of things I had accidentally left there (one of which was....drumroll please....a book by Jung!), and I was presented with my mail. 3 letters from the IRS. Sweet god almighty. But guess what? The first letter said, "we have found an irregularity...." the second letter said "here is why we have adjusted your figures..." and the third was a CHECK. For MORE than I had asked. They adjusted me to get MORE MONEY. (Pause for a little triumphant dance of pure joy and thanksgiving).

Then I had 20 minutes to bike from Brentwood to Culver City. Which, fueled by monetary and Jungian ecstasy, I DID! Then my friend took me to the most beautiful concert, a Carpet Concert of Persian and Uzbek music and dance and storytelling, in which all the patrons removed their shoes and sat on a carpet. And these patrons were all wearing handmade clothes, they stood up in the middle of the program to do yoga stretches, they broke out into ecstatic bouts of bellydancing in the aisles, I mean I wanted to go around with my notebook and start a mailing list of Potential Friends. And there were children there! Well behaved children in handmade clothing! Children so achingly beautiful in their handmade clothes that I was actually considering having another child just so that I could do a better job dressing them this time....

After the concert my friend and I put on bollywood music and belly danced for 3 hours. Then we collapsed in a happy heap and had Jungian dreams. It was a wonderful day. Here is what the program of the carpet concert said:

"Irrespective of the means of the household, many areas of the Middle East still maintain traditional furnishings consisting of carpets covering the entire floor and large pillows leaning against the walls. At mealtimes a large cloth is spread on the carpeted floor, and families come together to share their meals picnic-style. At night, the same area becomes a bedroom, with simple blankets spread out...food is prepared, children play, all manner of activities take place in the same multipurpose space while all are sitting on the carpeted floor."

Sound familiar?

an old friend's visit

continuing: remaining seen

there was a thread undone,

now woven in

and there is freedom here!

in being known

a freedom anonymity can't own

continuing a thing!

o it is strange

that there is one who calls me by my name

choice and consequence

One summer in the late '90s I volunteered at the Haw River Festival. We camped alongside the river in some open fields and during the day, busload after busload of second graders from all over North Carolina were dropped off to test the water, write poetry about the sycamores, eat the weeds, and watch puppet shows about water conservation starring a huge, handmade Mother Earth and a chorus of wooden flutes. In the evenings, we'd pull out our guitars and fiddles and banjos and play old-time music until the stars peeked out over the river, or engage in earnest debate over whether it's more responsible to spray out our toothpaste over a wide swatch of ground or bury it in a shallow trench. The evening that sticks in my mind as I write this, though, we had tired of our old-time repertoire and settled the Great Toothpaste Debate (spraying, it turns out.) So we all went for a walk.

We were a motley crew of aging hippies, idealistic college students, and traveling artisans. There were a lot of Guatemalan ponchos and no cellphones. That sort of crowd. As we wandered the dark streets of the tiny hamlet on the banks of the Haw I was struck by something: people in this town were all outside. Rocking on their porches, collecting fireflies, drinking in the backyard. None of the windows flickered with that sickly blue television light. In front of the one store in town, several older men had pulled wooden chairs into a rough circle and were pickin' the heck out of "Red Haired Boy". It was akin to stumbling backwards in time. Or forwards, to something better. I was so enchanted that I remember falling out of the conversation and wandering off by myself, up and down as many streets as I could manage before the light faded. Candles flickered in windows. Grandmothers read poetry aloud to grandchildren.

Later I discovered that on that particular night, the town had been without power. (Ironically, it was something to do with the hydroelectric plant on the Haw). At first I felt let down--there was nothing innately special about these people or this place after all!-- but later I learned to take hope from it. If losing power for one night was all it took to get folks fingerpickin' in the streets and reading poetry again, then we are not so far lost as it sometimes seems.

Tonight, walking the streets of Culver City, I felt that hope again. Tuesdays, the farmer's market spills out over Main Street, and the roads are crowded with people bearing sacks of produce, or biking home with kale tumbling out of their bike baskets. Folks smile at one another. Cheerful musicians gather on the benches and try to find songs in common. Children run laughing through the fountain in the central square.

I've been thinking all day about what I wrote in my last post, and wanted to clarify it somewhat. I don't believe that there are vengeful elderberry spirits lurking about waiting to exact revenge on unsuspecting humans. But I do believe that if one is careless with babies---be they of the berry or mammalian variety---eventually, a baby is going to get hurt. Likewise if one hurtles oneself iconoclastically through ancient holy places, one's path may very well intersect with that of a burly Greek farmer and his pitchfork. Oftentimes I've found that what I'd like to interpret as grand signals from fate are really the consequences of my own behavior, coming home to roost.

So, in the end it all boils down to choices. I can choose to be careful and respectful in my actions. I can choose to sit on the porch in the evenings, playing guitar, instead of staying inside. ( I could have chosen to not allow my children to teethe on my expensive digital camera; then I would have been able to take pictures to spice up my boring blog). I can even choose to have a lot of money if I'm willing to make the tradeoffs necessary. But if that's what I really wanted, wouldn't I have made those tradeoffs already? Hmmm.

Favorite thing about my house tonight: candlelight and solitude. not having to hear my own voice saying "no" all the time.

Least favorite thing: I'll have to get back to you. From where I sit, life seems just about perfect.

things get damaged, things get broken

So, I thought I had escaped the Poufy Beige Sublet with little more than surface wounds. I thought that I had managed to sign that 70-page legal document and weasel away from the whole situation nearly scot-free. Alas, it was not to be.

Yesterday I got a very pleasantly written email informing me that of the $1,000 security deposit I handed over in November, $300 is going to repair a minor crack in a shower door, $200 is going to repair a "shaky" aluminum sliding door, and another $200-odd is going to replace doodads like solar lamps, which admittedly Anainn mistook for baby-sized bludgeoning tools. Added to the nearly $100 I spent getting the carpet cleaned, and the gas and internet bills they are going to deduct, a hefty chunk of money I'd been counting on for summer rent just went up in poufy beige smoke.

I received this email mere minutes before setting out on an outing with the boys, an evening stroll celebrating Big Sunday during which we planned to picnic at the Ballonna Creek Bike trail and collect trash along the way. It was weighing heavily on me as Xir skipped along, chatting about dragons, and by the time we arrived at the bike trail only to find that some bastards had come along before us and cleaned up ALL THE TRASH, it had blossomed into a full-blown bad mood.

There is kind of a long back story to this particular outing. It started in Greece, eight years ago. I was a circle-dancing-organic-farming Yogini in my early twenties with a roaring case of Nasty-Spotted Hubris. Traveling with me was J., my long-suffering, violin-building, Italian-speaking boyfriend. We were poor circle-dancing Yogis (is there any other kind?), so our basic traveling strategy was to arrive at a tiny village, whittle away the hours until dusk eating Greek salads and casing the outlying meadows, then put up camp in some likely-looking pasture and try to disappear by dewfall the next morning. One of these early, fog-drenched mornings, I was unsuccessful in rousting J., so I set off up a nearby hill. This particular hill happened to be crowned with a ruined temple; the rock ended in perfectly symmetrical pillars and they ended in sky. A hollowed altar-stone took pride of place and offerings had been left here: candles, chunks of frankincense, wilted flowers. I had brought no offerings, so like any self-respecting circle-dancing Yogini I immediately danced a round of the Kritikos followed by a couple of sun salutations on the temple floor. Oh, and I happened to be menstruating at the time.

Flash forward seven years, a seven years in which pretty much everything I touched had turned to stinking doo-doo. I had met some friends who attended Sacred Fire gatherings in Santa Monica and had begun attending them myself, more for the potluck honestly than for any particular attraction to the Sacred. On one evening, after we had all offered our gifts to the fire and were sitting around contemplating it, we were honored by the surprise arrival of one of the foremost Shamans of the tradition. Folks asked him questions and were answered, and I nursed my baby, half-drowsing. Then he looked right at me and said

"People can get themselves into a lot of trouble giving inappropriate offerings."

Immediately the circle around him began to buzz. I was still oblivious. "For example, you have to be careful giving offerings to the ocean. Give the wrong offering to the ocean, you might end up with storms, tsunamis." People begged him for specifics, so he went on: "Stay away from chocolate as an offering. And for heaven's sakes, stay out of other people's temples, traditions you don't belong to. Especially when you're menstruating. If you offend the old gods, boy are you in for it." And then he looked at me again and shook his head, as though he'd heard there were people that stupid out there, but hadn't believed it until now.

He had my attention. I don't really believe in all that crap, but a recent incident had shaken me somewhat. I'd gone up to Malibu Creek Canyon State Park to harvest elderberries. They were so abundant that year, you could hardly stretch out your hand without knocking a huge umbel of ripe berries down. I was in a hurry; I had an overtired, red-faced 4-year-old in tow and a stink-bottomed baby in a sling. So I cut corners. I didn't ask the trees first, I didn't offer water, I didn't even harvest with respect, just tore berries down helter-skelter into my gathering baskets, sometimes tearing whole branches off in my haste. As I passed out of that grove a twig from one of the trees lashed out like a slap across the face, and I felt a weight settle into my stomach. I knew I'd done wrong.

Later, I was walking my baby in his stroller along the bike trail, a steep section that ran away down a concrete slope to the rain-swollen creek. I noticed an elder tree that stretched out across the trail and reached up to pick a cluster of blossoms. In that moment, the stroller spun away from my hand and raced, out of control, down toward the water. It overturned at great speed and by the time I reached my infant, heart in my throat, his head was horribly swollen and the side of his face was the color of elderberry juice. I had that same feeling in my stomach. I remembered that slap.

So, when I'd gone harvesting cattails last week, this incident and the warning of the shaman were strong in my mind. I made sure to offer water, and to ask before I harvested. And, noticing that trash choked the stream, I made a commitment to return to the trail and gather it up. Which brings us back to the bike trail on Big Sunday.

I had made a commitment to the cattails, and here I was in a horrible mood, with all the trash collected already. I brought out our picnic in silence. We sat, eating pasta and broccoli, watching the ducks and crows and pigeons in the concrete trench that used to be a creek.

"I feel sad," I said.

"I can take the sad feeling away," said Xir. He gave me a hug. Then he asked "what made you sad?"

"I think it was that email I just read. We have to pay a lot of money and that put me in a bad mood." He considered this for a minute, then said

"Are you sad too because all the trash is gone already?" I admitted this, and saying it out loud made me realize how absurd I was being. We laughed for a long time. Then he said, earnestly, "Well I asked the Earth about that and she said inside my mind that all she really wants is for us to go home and watch a movie. Because we are part of the Earth and what makes us happy makes the Earth happy."

So that's what we did. And on the way we gathered up nearly a full bag of garbage we hadn't noticed.

It turns out that money doesn't matter, that much. Really. A good laugh on the side of a broken creek is a pretty good substitute.

*****

favorite thing about my house today: the tomatoes and radishes are almost ready! and an unknown neighbor hung beautiful fish flags all along the lightposts which gave the neighborhood a carnival atmosphere.

least favorite: I'm pretty sure the neighbors are already rolling their eyes when they see me walk by with my sunburned boys and heavy-laden stroller. for the seventh time in four hours.