If Mama Ain’t Happy…

…well, you know the rest. Ain’t nobody happy. As I’ve previously mentioned, I work with a bunch of older people who find it baffling that I choose to keep my uterus free of further occupants. I had a conversation with one of these gentlemen last week. This guy, god bless him, is over 60, has one son, is still very involved with his grandson, and coaches all sorts of youth-league sports. He’s pretty awesome, and I like the guy. Except when he asks me if I’m signing my son up for sports, and I say, “No.” And I have to explain that my sanity overrides baseball.

Let’s get a few things straight. I am broke. Clearly, I’m not living in a Hooverville tent, making bum wine, and training my son to be a pickpocket to make ends meet. But a lot of extras need to be foregone. One of those extras? Pee-wee football, or Little League. The equipment is expensive enough, but did you know that my son grows about six inches every goddamn week? (That may be a slight approximation. I’m not that good at guesstimating.) It adds up. QUICKLY. Second of all, sports parents. They’re the worst. I dated a hockey player in high school, and the most terrifying experience of my life occurred at a roller hockey game when one parent threatened to “rip [your] head off and shit down your throat” when one kid checked another. I don’t believe in getting involved in scuffles between kids because it teaches them to giant weenies (clearly, with some exceptions). In sports? THEY ARE COMPETING AGAINST EACH OTHER. The point of the whole stupid game is for them to have a scuffle, at least on SOME level. Ugh.

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Feminist Friday: Pretty Is As Pretty Does

Pretty is one of my least favorite words/ideals/concepts. It’s a little word that brings so much grief, I wish I could banish it. It’s usually given as a compliment, as a word to value and cherish, as a point of pride, but it’s actually condescending and limiting. It’s a way to damage a girl’s self-esteem, one tiny “compliment” at a time.

I know there are people out there reading this and shaking their heads, tut-tutting silently, thinking “goddamn feminists, are you every happy? Can you ever take something at face value instead of shoving your hang-ups into everything? Quit your whining, be happy someone calls you pretty.” But that’s why it’s so insidious. It’s not big and scary and violent, so you don’t complain.

Pretty is a word used as a compliment almost exclusively for women. Call a man pretty and its an insult – you’re saying he’s feminine, delicate, fragile, ornamental, and probably not all that smart. Here’s the thing – you’re saying THE SAME THING when you use it to describe a woman. But we’re supposed to be proud of those things, because…vaginas? Pretty doesn’t carry the gravitas of beautiful, it’s a couple rungs down on the attractive scale. It has no power, no strength, no use beyond “I like the way your face/body looks.” And it’s given to girls as an accomplishment.
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Baby Daddy

It’s awful.  Shallow.  Frustrating.  Overwhelming.  There are so many things to think about.  There are a few things we knew, absolutely knew, when we started looking at donors.  Unfortunately, there are about a million ‘qualifiers’ that we didn’t even know we’d have to filter through.

You start the search and you think, “cool, this is going to be so much fun.”.  It’s not.  First you have to have to decide what kind of donor you want, known or unknown.  Then you have to decide if you care if your donor has a graduate degree, is working towards one, has been to college at all.  Why this matters I have no fucking idea.  Then race, which wasn’t so hard, we knew we wanted to have a mixed race baby, preferably with some Latino flair.  Then it asks you about RH factor and blood type.  Shit, I don’t even know my blood type, much less what an RH factor is.  We select ANY for both categories and move down the list.  Next you can decide that the donor is a certain height and weight.  Easy enough.  Weight we leave blank and for height we put in that he has to be at least 5’8″, short dudes are weird.  Eye color, hair color, hair type.  We put any for all of those categories, no big deal.  But, that’s just the initial search.

It comes back and there are more than a dozen that meet the specifications we put in.  Again, ugh.  At first we thought we were going to have so much fun with this, it’s not like everyone gets to read the complete medical history, education history and personality test results of their baby daddy.  It’s not fun.  It’s awful.  Because now, now we have to go through the dozen plus donors that meet our basic idea of what we might want out of a donor and WHAT IF WE PICK THE WRONG ONE.  This isn’t a cheap process.  More than that, we’re talking about creating a little tiny human.  A HUMAN.

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And, It Was Valentine’s Day

There’s a lot of information out there for lesbians who want to have babies.  It is 2013, there is information about, just about, everything, on the internet.  Unfortunately, most of the information, on this subject, is about the equivalent of a yahoo chat room.  Laws vary state to state and insurance company to insurance company and employer to employer.  Nothing’s cut and dry.  Being that we live in Virginia, conservative, behind the times, republican Virginia it’s not as if you can go to a government supported page and find out how to go about putting a baby in me.

Being intelligent, resourceful adults we bought a few books on Amazon that had good ratings.  We read a lot of blogs.  We joined the RVA Gay Parents Meetup Group.  We scoured the web searching for gay friendly doctors.  We contacted the sperm bank we’re using for recommendations.

We called and made an appointment, outlining the reason for our visit and our expectations for what we wanted to get out of the consultation.  We requested the day off from work so we could both go.  We told people how excited we were to stop talking about family planning and actually plan our first baby.  We filled out the five page form they sent in the mail.

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Counting to infinity

Within the first month of Ben’s elementary school career he was diagnosed with ADHD – combined type, which means not only does he have trouble focusing, he also has trouble sitting still or being quiet for long, or even short periods of time. Pretty much unless there is a video game controller, crayon, paintbrush or Lego in his hands he’s moving around, singing at the top of his lungs or laughing maniacally at nothing. Since the diagnosis, he has taken several different medications, different dosages and combinations of different medications with different dosages. I’m pretty sure any adult taking them would be disassembling and reassembling their vacuum cleaner just because. Basically, I went against everything I have ever said and drugged my child, bad mommy!

Cut to six months later and let me tell you…I am frustrated! More frustrated than October Road being cancelled and having no hope of ever finding out who that kids dad is! I am tired of the negative reports I get from his kindergarten teacher every day when I pick him up from school, just before she tells me he how much time he spent in the office that day. It really pisses me off that he is sent to the office on a daily and ends up missing out on valuable class time. And the teacher wonders why he is so far behind the other kids in his class. I am tired of the unanswered questions and not having the resources to figure out where to go and what to do next! I am not asking someone to hold my hand and skip through this wonderful world of IEP’s, 504 Plans, medication or support groups with me….just a little help.

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I STILL HAVE A UTERUS!

Really.  I do.  My oven, far as I know, is entirely capable of cooking a bun.

So, I always wanted kids.  Always.  When I was a kid and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would tell them I wanted to be a mom.  I didn’t ever think about the logistics of that or what my family, exactly, would look like; just like when you ask a six year old what he wants to be and he says, “Optimus Prime”, it doesn’t god damn matter what he will have to do or even what he’ll do when he IS Optimus Prime, that’s what he’s gonna be.

This longing to have children wasn’t just to be someone’s mom.  I wanted to carry them, birth them, breastfeed them.  As I moved from fantastical child into early adulthood I realized that being single, working in the industry I work in, that pays well, but not over the top, would present a challenge.  I was determined, none the less, and around 20 I started looking into lesbian (who doesn’t want to fuck dudes to get pregnant) friendly options.  There are numerous sperm banks out there and one relatively close, affordable and easy to work with.

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The American Dream, Strokes and Meeting My Mother.

My mother was supposed to be a stay at home mom.  That was my parent’s arrangement.

My mother made friends with the other military wives on base, where we lived.  She and her best friend, Vicky, were much ahead of their time.  She wanted to do more for her family. She wanted to look out for her kids, going against societal pressures.  She and Vicky joined the La Leche League, they led their own group.  My brother is not circumcised.  We wore organic cloth diapers.  We didn’t have strollers, she carried us around in slings close to her chest.  We coslept.  She gave birth at home, with an underground midwife.  We weren’t vaccinated.  She homeschooled all four of her kids for a number of years.  She was really, really fucking committed to this raising kids thing.

She would go on to start her own cloth diaper business.  It started out as a mail-order business.  She took out ads in Mothering Magazine.  She opened a small store front, in Maine, in a teeny tiny little town.  She employed a few women, Part Time, as business picked up.  She sold wooden toys, books, cotton kids clothes, and of course her handmade cloth diapers.  It only lasted a few years and she sold the business, along with her diaper designs.

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Staying At Home: I Have A Secret

Like pretty much every woman these days, I have a Pinterest account. I love Pinterest unashamedly. My boards are a ridiculous collection of delicious foods, beautiful clothing, whimsical DIY projects and gorgeous home interiors. I can and have spent hours lost in a Pinterest hole, much to the dismay of my husband who likes to do things like “have conversations” and “spend time together” when he gets home from work. However, beneath the shiny exterior of my Pinterest boards, I keep a deep, dark secret. I don’t like admitting it out loud, but it has to be said.

I suck at crafting.

I KNOW. I’M SORRY.

I feel like I’m living a DIY lie.

I want to be so good at crafting. Since I’ve become a stay-at-home mom, I feel guilty just sitting around doing nothing. The logical part of me knows that my life is the furthest from sitting around, since I am constantly doing laundry, picking things up, moving things, cleaning, chasing a toddler around, grocery shopping, etc. But the secret part of me feels that I’m not doing enough, so I have a constant need to work on crafts.

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Cuccinelli Needs to STFU & GTFO

We have MSNBC on all day, every day in my home. Scott and I are loud and proud liberals, which can be a little tough living in the Richmond VA area. We live in Eric Cantor’s (uugggghhhhhhh) district and there’s lots of Tea Party license plates and road signs along my daily commute. Our neighborhood is primarily working class African-Americans, which is awesome and means I don’t worry about my car getting defaced for the Obama stickers. But outside our little pocket, we’re surrounded by our political foes.

The Governor’s mansion is currently occupied by Bob McDonnell, or as Rachel Maddow calls him, Governor Ultrasound. A while back, he tried to make trans-vaginal ultrasounds mandatory for all women seeking abortion services, even when medically unnecessary and against doctor and patient wishes. The governor obviously has never had a trans-vaginal ultrasound, so he had no idea how invasive and uncomfortable the procedure is when it *is* necessary. That little attempt to diminish women’s reproductive freedom garnered a lot of national attention and left me angry and embarrassed of my state. But he’s just the tip of the intrusive, faux-conservative iceberg.

Our Attorney General, and Republican gubernatorial candidate, is Ken “The Cooch” Cuccinelli. He’s the worst. When he came in to office, he altered our state seal on pins and around his office because OMGTITTIES. I refer to him and McDonnell as faux-conservative because they are. They’re anti-“big government” when it comes to social programs and services – Medicaid, welfare, food stamps, Head Start, free school lunches and a whole litany of services that directly affect me and mine because of the whole autism thing – that I just can’t even get started on because I’ll have a ragestroke and now isn’t a good time for that. So, small government, nanny state, free market, job creators, blah blah fucking blah.

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Up All Night, Up All Day

The majority of my adult life was defined by insomnia. Scratch that – the majority of my life, period. Summer vacations involved a lot of reruns at 2am – which explains my deep, eternal love for Scott Bakula. Mornings were my enemy – to the point that I worked for several years on an overnight shift. It suited me – although I did start reacting to sunlight like Gollum.

I’ve been on all of the sleeping pills, the pills that aren’t for sleeping but have that as a side effect, herbal teas, supplements. I’ve cut out caffeine, tried meditation, set up a very specific schedule, exercised, and tried drinking myself to sleep. Nothing worked for more than a week, most not at all. I’d accepted my life would be lived in an exhausted haze with plenty of nature documentaries and QVC.

Then, about a year ago, I was suddenly cured. I was going to sleep by 10 and waking up at 6 like a proper adult. The change happened when I moved in with a friend – we’ll call her Shmauren – and her very energetic son, who we’ll refer to as Optimus Prime. Living with Optimus Prime was like living with the world’s most effective alarm clock. When he was up, so were you. And it became kind of awesome. I was getting a solid 7-8 hours a night; I was productive in the morning; I was ON TIME TO WORK.

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