"Eema, please read me another book."
"You can see Eema is getting dinner on the table. Eema and Tatee need food now. Little boys need food, too."
"Little boys need books!"

Waking thought: I must feel Safe to feel Sacred

Halakha As a Coral Reef

Halakhah as a Coral Reef

Halakhah is a coral reef.  
It is fragile-- care must be taken not to break it, but, more, it is alive, ever-growing, and responsive to its environment. 
Its growth pattern is measured in generations upon generations. 
It is its nature to become ever more intricate, more convoluted, more beautiful. 
Sometimes the most vibrant, dynamic, and important center of earlier eon will become quiet and overshadowed in its turn.
Minhagim are the ever-changing sealife that live amongst the coral.  
Sometimes they even become enmeshed in it.  
Sometimes they even break part of it. 
Yet, the reef is unimaginable without them, and all the more beautiful for them.
Halakhah is a coral reef.

Bleeding Rage

I have been using reusable menstrual supplies for over twenty years. I began by giving myself an infection. This was at a time when I was feeding two adults on twenty dollars a week. One of the reasons I used to walk home from the UW Campus to Ballard was to increase my chances of finding spare change to add to our food budget. I could no longer stomach spending money on something to be thrown away. There was no Internet to speak of, I had no one to discuss the necessary details with. My first effort was to safety pin a folded washcloth into my underwear. I didn't understand that the safety pins would need to be boiled, not merely "cleaned off", in between changes. I gave myself a painful infection, and that ended up eating money, time, productivity. After that I saved up the money to buy a sampler pack of "mooncloths" from a homesewer in Canada who'd placed an advertisement in one of the tiny homepublished queer women's mags that I always stopped to read when I could find them. I've been copying her design ever since.

When I read this article, I became so angry that it felt like I could not breathe. Yes, I was angry that other low income people are going through this. As Bianca always says, "Take it [the feeling] and put it in the work." But I was most terribly angry at myself.

The article opened up a can of worms inside me... because I suddenly realized, I had never thought about this.

I went through what I went through... and never thought about this.

I've been so thoroughly conditioned that other people's menstruation is not appropriate for me to even think about... that I didn't even think about it.

Even after I learned about Days For Girls six years ago, I never thought about poor people here. I never thought about being poor and menstruating in the crucible nastiness that is public middle school, being poor and menstruating through the rigors and inherent humiliation of most "entry level" jobs.

I am terribly angry with myself for failing to think about what I know.

Put it into the work.

http://www.marieclaire.com/politics/news/a25464/congresswoman-grace-meng-menstrual-equity-bill/

I am Not Impossible

I am Not Impossible

I am clinging to the memory of a failure right now.  
I am clinging to it for hope.  
It is a memory of staying at someone else's home, trying to be a very good guest, and failing, because I was trying to sleep, in their bed, and failing.

The bed was a charming nest of various favorite blankets... and I could not fall asleep with different textures on different parts of my body.  
I needed a single, smooth sheet against my body.  
And then I needed that sheet spread flat, so as to actually cover my whole body.
And then I needed that sheet tucked in, so that it kept covering the whole of my body when I moved over the night.
Then I could not sleep because of the different weights of the tangled blankets above the sheets, the different weights pressing differently on different parts of my body.
I needed to have the blankets spread so that each of them covered me evenly.
I needed to lose the twin-size blankets that were too narrow to make an even layer.
Then I couldn't sleep because, although I had even texture all over and even weight all over, there was no longer *enough* weight for me to relax.
And then... I needed to have the blankets all tucked in, so their weight didn't shift through the night.

And that...
after all that... 

...I could sleep!

We were astonished. 

By that point, not only was my host obviously indulgently humoring me, but I myself had become convinced that I was being "impossible", that my mind was going to keep on "fixating" on one triviality after another and my body was going to continue complaining for the sake of complaining to infinity and beyond.

But that was not true.  I needed what I needed, I needed all of what I needed, and I was in a situation that was many layers removed from what I needed.  It was that simple, and, it was that complicated.

The thing I remember most about the day, years later, that I learned that I was neurologically atypical-- the day so much of my life suddenly made sense for the first time-- was my boyfriend's incontrollable crying because now he was actually going to have to take my limits seriously.  
To quote Laurie Penny, "the hurt in their eyes when they realise you’re a real person is not something I ever want to see again."  She wrote that in "I Was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl", one of those lovely, life-saving pieces of writing that I cherish because I may not have written it, but I've certainly lived it.  (You think playing the ukelele is twee?  My legal name is Treebyleaf.  Welcome to twee on steroids.  I have to study books to learn to recognize normal the same way some other people on the spectrum need to study descriptions of facial movements to learn to recognize emotional expression.)

I still have to struggle with those around me and myself to believe in my own needs.  I still have to fight through layer after layer of very real wrongness to create any environment where I can function.  I still feel "impossible", and humored.

I still make it all worse, and more drawn out, for everyone. because I still approach every situation in which I find I cannot function by trying not to be a bother, by trying for the very least amount of change, adjustment after adjustment, instead of just coming in from the get-go insisting on setting things up in a way that I know will work from me.

It's been years since I learned what I need to sleep,
and I am still so tired out from it.

"Happy Lovers' Day."
"That's Tu b'Av. Or tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?"
"When all the chocolate goes on sale."

I'm trying for "Eat Pray Love" but I'm managing "Slurp Poop Bus".

I Can't Talk About It

My Peanut Gallery

Waking up is white privilege for me. I am alive because I fought like a lion to live-- fought not only my disease but also fought through the dysfunctional medical system. I fought to be seen, fought to be listened to, fought to be believed, fought using friend's computers, the library's books, my parent's money and negotiating skill, every single ounce of resources and stature I could call upon, and I just barely survived. My gut was almost sealed shut when they cut a hand's length of it out of me. If it had taken a few weeks longer to jump through all the hoops to finally get to the right specialist, I would not have made it. I have no black sisters in this experience, I have no sisters among the first people, I have found no women of color who have been through what I have been through and survived. Instead I have found only stories of how they died fighting to find a doctor who would listen. I am brutally conscious, from my own life, from my own direct experiences, of the reality that tens of thousands of people of color are being killed every year by doctors and by social workers who refuse to believe in their pain. My top white privilege is getting to wake up every morning, and the absolute least I can do with that privilege is to see, to listen, and to believe.

Last Monday was a snow day, and today there were wild daisies growing by boichik's preschool.

I am aware that the humor of this age is relentlessly scatological, but, I was not prepared for this level of inventiveness.

"And all clean?"
"Clean and naughty! Clean and naughty! Clean and naughty!"
"You have... a naughty butt-hole?"
"YEAH!"

10 minutes later:
"Bee's butt boy! Bee's butt boy! My butt is made out of honey-- I'm the bee's butt boy!"

Snowmale

Made my second-ever snowman!

Sort of.

Okay, so actually that one time it snowed an inch and a half in the desert when I was five it was pretty much my father who through superhuman effort cleared the entire apartment lawn to make me a foot and a half tall snowman.

I have no actual snow-packing experience.

Today it became very clear very quickly that I have no idea how to make big round anything.

I tried to just mound it up but the snow kept falling away at the sides so I concentrated on packing it tight around the remaining core.

I ended up with a kind of wonky column that I did manage to get as tall as boichick.

Then it was time to make a face and with all the effort it took him to get one leaf-eye fixed in place he decided that was good enough.

So basically we've got this yard-high erect firm one-eyed snow- um, ahem.

Not posting a picture.

Some folks are at work today.

Apparently there's a key developmental transition between when your child is two and four when you go from seeing something good to eat and thinking where's my child to enjoy this to seeing something good to eat and thinking where's my child okay the coast is clear.