Talkin' family values

I'z in Yr Radio....Again!

The Radical Housewife takes on Focus on the Family with WCCO Radio's Michele Tafoya.

Wow.

Radio interviews are tricky, especially when you do them at your kitchen table. While I spoke I kept one ear out for Miriam, who was barfing her guts out only a few hours earlier and seemed comfortable on the couch watching WordGirl, but could very well begin screaming at any moment, thus making me look like a big doofus on one of the Twin Cities' most popular radio stations.

But would that have been so bad? I do like to remind folks that I'm a mama too. Righties like Focus on the Family and the dreadful Jill Stanek act like we eat small children with our soy lattes for breakfast. According to Jill, when thousands of Catholic schoolchildren are bussed in for a pro-life rally, it's American youth bravely speaking out. When I bring my children to Planned Parenthood on Good Friday, they are "props" that are "disgusting" and "grotesque."


In Jill's eyes, Miriam (pictured in utero) and Elliott are not whole human beings, but are just "kids I didn't kill." She states that pro-choice moms like me "would be just as happy to see little [Miriam] dead." Talk about grotesque.

Note on the WCCO recording that I say I'm pro-choice. That includes supporting the choice of Pam Tebow to give birth to her baby boy Tim. Good for her! I love families! I love 'em so much that I have one! I don't oppose Pam Tebow's choice, for cryin' out loud. Whether or not she aborted that baby is none of my business. It's Pam's and Pam's alone.

The pro-choice movement asks that the same array of options be available to every other woman on this planet. No one should confuse one woman's outcome, in one very specific set of circumstances, with every woman's in a million different situations. The movement for reproductive civil rights seeks justice and freedom for every woman, not just a privileged few.

Ain't that a family value?

Shirley Chisholm: the cure for what ails us

Shingles is only one of my complaints this weekend, as early Saturday I had the pleasure of contracting the stomach virus that kept my son home from school on Thursday. Warning to all frazzled parents: do not wish for a sick day, convinced that all will be quiet and glorious, your children and spouse rubbing your feet and bringing you milkshakes. My diet consists of Gatorade, toast, and enormous Valtrex tablets that list nausea and vomiting (!!) as side effects. And the screaming, my god, the screaming.... only half a day until these three freaks get the hell out of my house.

On a positive note, while confined to the couch I have been able to finish Shirley Chisholm's Unbought and Unbossed, her phenomenal 1970 biography. I don't think I can adequately express how moved I've been by this book and this woman, not simply because every other sentence is a quote so fucking righteous that I want to run to Tweet it. It's because FORTY YEARS AGO she was railing against the same crap that is plaguing Congress and the Democrats today. Try this for starters:

The war in Southeast Asia was neither just nor unavoidable; it was an unnecessary war into which we stumbled, led by shortsighted stubborn men who could not at any point admit that they were wrong but who, on the contrary, concealed their mistakes by systematically lying to the country about the nature of the war and the prospects of ending it.

Substitute "Southeast Asia" with "Iraq" and what have you got? An idiot government that doesn't learn from its mistakes, and a complacent populace that lets them get away with it.

In 1969, when Rep. Chisholm was named honorary president of NARAL, then known as National for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, she noted the flack she caught from her colleagues in Congress. Did she buckle under pressure, like many Congressional leaders did when Stupak-Pitts loomed?

....I decided to shake them up a little with a feminist line of counterattack. "Who told you I shouldn't do this?" I asked them. "Women are dying every day, did you know that? They're being butchered and maimed. No matter what men think, abortion is a fact of life. Women will have them; they always have and always will. Are they going to have good ones or bad ones? Will the good ones be reserved for the rich while poor women have to go to quacks? Why don't we talk about real problems instead of phony ones?"

I LOVE HER.

Elsewhere she talks about how the Democratic party, with its endless compromises made in the name of expediency and/or graft (HELLOOOO, Sen. Nelson!) keep infuriating her, but she does not yet want to leave it. And a quick Wikipedia entry reveals that she stayed in the party until her retirement in 1982. What would she think about what's happening today? Would she be in a tiny liberal coalition with Dennis Kucinich, hoping that maybe my very own representative, Keith Ellison, will gather up the nerve to join them? I like my rep, but when it came time for health care reform, I thought it would be his very own dare-to-be-great situation. It wasn't.

Speaking of daring to be great, the next book on my bedside table is The Good Fight, Chisholm's account of her quest to win her party's 1972 nomination for President. I don't care that she failed; I care that she tried. She paved the way for Keith, Hillary, and Barack, but there are far too few people who know her name.


When I get healthy, I want to change that.

38 and counting

Tell me: is 38 young or old?

When my own mother was 38, I was a sophomore in high school, a particularly bratty time in any daughter's life. To me, my mom was OLD. She smoked Merit menthols and listened to the geezer sounds of Eric Clapton. Yet my friends remained impressed by my parents' relative youth--their parents were well into their forties and fifties, too square to smoke anything and thought Eric Clapton was "that bearded fellow."

Now I'm 38. I flatter myself that, grey hairs aside, I look younger. I dress younger, having hewed to the same fashion that I embraced in the go-go grunge years. I certainly act younger, as I still laugh when my kids fart.

Today I was diagnosed with a condition that I thought only afflicted the terribly old. As I child I remember an announcement, in hushed and sympathetic tones, that Grandma Rose was suffering a flare-up of the dreaded SHINGLES. I imagined her skin scaling into pieces, layering on top of one another until her back resembled a pitched roof.

As recently as last week, when I picked up the slew of medications that keep our family functional, I saw a pamphlet on the pharmacy counter that detailed the living nightmare that is shingles. Page after page showed senior citizens in emotional states ranging from concern to outright panic as they considered whether they ought to talk to their doctor about preventing it. Like poor bladder control and osteoporosis, I thought, this shingles is clearly only a problem for OLD people.

...until I had Matt check out the hot rash I found on the left side of my back. "Oh my god! Get that thing checked out!" he shrieked in typically supportive fashion. And I did, on Google, typing in "hot rash back lumpy." The diagnosis? Shingles. Shingles?!!


I AM TOO YOUNG FOR SHINGLES!

Yet when the nurse practitioner at the Minute Clinic took a peek, the first word out of her mouth was "herpes."

I AM TOO OLD FOR HERPES!

"Herpes zoster," she corrected. "The medical name for shingles."

Fuck.

I had to trot back to my pharmacy, the site of the gross pamphlet that remained in a stack next to the blood pressure machine (mine was 166/72. Is that good for an old person? Or bad for a young person?). The pharmacist, a wonderful guy, apologized for having to fill my scrip with a name brand, not the generic, as the latter was out of stock. "What, did everyone get SHINGLES all at the same time?" I cracked. I hoped to prove that being able to joke about my sorry condition proved that I was still YOUNG. The pharmacist said no, the drugs were all sold out because so many patients needed it for, y'know....the herpes. His tone was low, almost conspiratorial, as if he were welcoming me as One of Us. I like this pharmacist. He's as helpful as can be, but the man is 55 if he's a day. He's OLD.

I'd write more, but I have an oatmeal bath waiting. Then I get another Valtrex and a nice rubdown with my calamine lotion. I'm still YOUNG if I download my episode of "Murder She Wrote," yes?

Cheated.

I have to admit, losing the Kennedy seat to a tea bag in 2009 is not as bad as when we lost the Wellstone seat to a d-bag in 2002. Still, it rankles. But on a positive note, I thought, I can see this guy naked.

HEY! WHERE'S THE BEEF?!!

I'm having a flashback to another right-wing wang I wanted to see....


I want my money back.

Genderphobia!

Above is a picture of one of my babies, at the age of one year. Which baby is it? The girl baby or the boy baby? Those of you who know my babies well can guess by the eye and hair color, but otherwise, this baby looks pretty gender neutral, right? What would you guess about this baby?


Let's see: poufy pink dress, forced to hold a dahlia for the photograph....all signs point to a baby girl (I bet she even wants to be a cocktail waitress when she grows up*).

But wait a minute! Look at that BALD HEAD! Why, she's so bald she resembles Telly Savalas, whom we all know was a MAN! or Yul Brynner, yet another MAN!

Breathe, mama.... don't panic..... there is a way to remedy this situation....and it will only cost you thirty bucks plus shipping & handling...


A BABY WIG!

Before and after photographs are courtesy of BabyBangs!, a new company that will sell you the wig that your infant daughter desperately needs in order to stay gender correct. The sales pitch includes the guarantee that no one will mistake your little princess for a nasty, icky boy ever again.

Remember the prediction I made in "Childhoodphobia"? Babies forced to wear wigs will grow to be Girly Girls, wholly accepting gender rigidity, machismo, and the fact that Rihanna was being too bitchy and had her beatdown coming. May the mother behind this company come to her senses before this comes to pass.

*Reference to Mel Brooks & Marlo Thomas's "Boy Meets Girl" sketch in Free to Be...You and Me. As true in 2010 as it was in 1972.

Feminists are funny?!

My latest Women's Press column is now available in the mag's new humor-themed issue, under the suitably ridiculous headline AY CARUMBA! In the column, I dissect the similarities between Bart Simpson and Bart Stupak. For one thing, neither will ever need to get an abortion.

The Simpsons episode I reference is "Duffless," from the fabulous fourth season. Homer vows to Marge that he will quit drinking, and while sober he realizes (to quote the Simpsons Wiki page) "that beer commercials falsely state that beer transforms angry feminists into attractive swimsuit models who cling to ordinary men."

I can't find the scene on YouTube, not by entering "the simpsons feminists" anyway. The first clip I get on that search is a book reading by Jessica Valenti, a woman who may or may not be the Best Feminist in America as Determined By the Radical Housewife. I'm still mulling over the many suggestions I received on Facebook, though Cathy made a strong case for ME.

Ay carumba, indeed.