In the heart of a mother

Minneapolis is justifiably proud of its many hometown institutions, but none are more precious than our parks and lakes. Coming in close second to these natural wonders might be the annual MayDay Parade, brought to us since 1975 by the artists who comprise In the Heart of the Beast Puppet & Mask Theatre. Back then, the company called themselves the Powderhorn Puppet Theatre, in honor of the large park that gives the neighborhood its name. To most people in south Minneapolis, my home and hometown, Powderhorn Park is synonymous with this yearly celebration of community, an event so grassroots you can see dirt under the fingernails of everyone involved.

Powderhorn Park is an urban neighborhood, to be sure, not an idyll. Peace, love and gigantic puppets rule one day out of the year, but the other 364 days are about just getting by.

Until the unthinkable happens.

Four boys, all 14-16 years old, attacked a woman and her two children in the park last week, sexually assaulting the woman at gunpoint with her children nearby. Police following their tracks in the snow discovered the boys in a nearby garage in the act of assaulting two teenage girls.

What's your first instinct when you hear about these crimes? After you black out momentarily from rage, of course. Do you want blood? Explanations? Systems to blame, like the talk radio men who wondered why this happened? (their conclusion: these kids should have been locked up in juvie the first time they shoplifted candy. That woulda learned 'em!)

I couldn't stop thinking about what drives a fourteen-year-old child to commit such a horrific act of violence. My life in feminist activism has been about exposing the hypocrisy of a society that claims to worship both "family values" and "individual freedom," even if the latter implies the freedom to be poor, to be desperate, to abuse one another.

But I write and think these things a mile outside of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood. No one has attacked me lately. When I shed tears of frustration reading an interview with Sister Helen Prejean in the August 2010 issue of The Sun ("To some extent violence is part of our nature," she said, "but compassion is too. Seeking justice for everybody is also part of human nature") I was on the treadmill at the YWCA, not lying in a hospital bed. What the hell do I know? Not much.

Yesterday afternoon, "the mother in the news" shared what she knows. Excerpts:

I find it ironic to have had this experience as I currently study nonviolence, restorative justice and the healing of childhood trauma. I got to put my studies and my practice of mindfulness into play as the incident unfolded. The
whole time I made a conscious choice to see the boys as human beings, not to see
them as evil or bad. I focus my attention not on the boys' actions but the pain
behind their actions. I see those boys as hurting, scared children who didn't
get the kind of nurture, love and care that they needed. I try to hold them now
in compassion and hope that they might get the support they need to reconnect to
their essential goodness. With the system of justice that we currently use, I'm
hopeless that will happen.

This is exactly what Prejean told David Cook, her interviewer: "as a society, we have to examine our belief that sever punishment is the way to restore order. The main objective of prisons is to keep society safe, not to cause prisoners pain simply because they caused others pain." Similarly, the Powderhorn mother wrote:

At one point the boys asked for our skis. I wish they could have taken them and used them and experienced the pure joy of gliding in the fresh snow, getting winded from exertion and breathing in cool, fresh air. Please send them all the love you can muster. I think they really need it.

To wish joy and love upon the one who has damaged your body and soul is an act of strength so confounding, so beyond comprehension, that it could only have come from a mother. Not a mama grizzly, mind you, a creature prone to violence and homicidal rage: A MOTHER. A caregiver. A nurturer. A person who is connected, not isolated. A mother is what I am, but it's also what I hope to be.

Thank you, Powderhorn mother, Powderhorn Park, and all in my Minneapolis family.

Tom Hackbarth, armed and jealous (but still pro-life)!

That my beloved home state has gone to the crazies is no longer news; the level of bizarre behavior, on the other hand, is what makes even a not-very-liberal-newspaper-anymore stand up and take notice.

From the article "Armed Lawmaker Stopped by Police in Highland Park" (StarTribune, November 23) by Chao Xiong:

A state representative said it was a misunderstanding when he parked his car in the Planned Parenthood lot in Highland Park and was later stopped by St. Paul police because of the revolver he was carrying near his waistband.

A misunderstanding happens over Thanksgiving dinner, when your relatives make snide remarks about your vegetarianism. When a pro-life legislator from waaaaaay out in the exurbs is found chillin' with a loaded gun in the parking lot of a big-city PP where surgical abortions are performed, even my carnivorous cousins know better. But let's allow Tom Hackbarth to explain himself, shall we?

[Hackbarth] didn't know he was at Planned Parenthood when he pulled into the empty lot so that he could look for a woman he had met online.

It's been a long time since I was in the dating pool, but I don't remember arranging rendezvous at Planned Parenthood. And I'm pro-abortion, remember??

Hackbarth said he had coffee with the woman on Nov. 15, and asked her to dinner the next night but she told him she couldn't because of a commitment she had with a female friend in Highland Park. Hackbarth said he felt that she might have been seeing a man instead, so he parked his car and walked around the block looking for her car. (The security guard spotted Hackbarth's gun when he got out of his car and put on a winter coat.)

I see the misunderstanding now. He wasn't threatening to shoot up the clinic, the doctors, the staff, the clients; he was stalking someone! That's cool, right? Pat Kessler, a reporter with the local CBS affiliate, connects the dots that Xiaong wouldn't:

Police say Hackbarth exhibited the behavior of a stalker: angry, looking for a woman, with a fully loaded gun.

Not much to misunderstand, there.

Hackbarth was apparently on the hunt for his girlfriend whom he’d recently met online.

Lest you misunderstand: I did not use the word HUNT in the sentence above. Pat Kessler did, the naughty boy. Hackbarth told him:

“She gave me some line of baloney, and I thought, ‘well, she’s fibbing to me.’ You could tell, and I thought, ‘well, I’m going to check it out.’ and I went there to see if she was around and her vehicle was not there. And I was just checking on her,” he said.

No misunderstanding here. MORE dirt comes to us from the St Paul Pioneer Press, the town that had the honor of hosting the arrest!

Police reports note officers found extra ammunition for the revolver, a map and binoculars in the front of Hackbarth's vehicle.

!!!!!

Hackbarth provided officers the name of the woman but said he had no contact information for her and could not recall the website where he met her. He said he uses "maybe three or four" different dating sites and couldn't remember which one..... He said the woman he was looking for was the only one he had ever actually met face to face through online dating. "You don't get a lot of responses when you say you're separated," he said.

Or when you're a really, really big asshole.

No misunderstanding here: a recently divorced jerk met a woman online who was wise enough to keep her phone number and address to herself. Said jerk, convinced that this woman could not possibly be immune to his charms, drove down to the big city to stalk her. Sadly, there are dicks like Hackbarth everywhere, armed or otherwise.

I don't relish the fact that a guy who votes with the Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life 100% of the time is shown to have little respect for post-born life. It happens all the time. To this crowd, a woman's body is property: of the state, of heterosexual men, and especially of heterosexual men who run the state!

As Minnesota gets nuttier, all I can say is: Jesse Ventura, come back! ALL IS FORGIVEN!

My thoughts on this thing called "mommyblogging"

...are reprinted below, originally written in reponse to a Blue Milk post on the subject, that was itself inspired by a post by Her Bad Mother that got a good snarking on Jezebel (whew, these ladies DO get around!):

Thanks to consumer culture, we live in a world in which it’s assumed that a woman with a child cares only about her nest--fuck everyone else. Thus the “mommy blog” label, which is useful for marketers who want to feed those insecurities with products that will ensure our children are the best/happiest/smartest/ babes in the world, which in turn perpetuates the myth that mommies must not be paying attention to the larger world around them, unlike the men who are writing about Important Things like Politics.

The job of feminist bloggers (like you and me and millions more) is to fight this narrow view of what mothers are tuned into and are capable of.

Now, to a REAL mommy blogging problem. I got so excited about all this stuff that I nominated myself for Babble's Top 50 Mom Blogs of 2010, an embarrassing thing to do much less admit to, but no more embarrassing than the horrible realization that when I filled out the form I SPELLED MY OWN WEB ADDRESS INCORRECTLY.

Yes, I did. The link up on Babble now sends you to a dead page in the interweb ether. I can type without using my brain, I guess--so much for fame, fortune, and/or a contract from Seal Press. I am so humiliated that, like Garfield, I want to hide under a lasagna until Monday is over.

If you care to surf to that site yourself to nominate me WITH THE CORRECT ADDRESS, I would appreciate it. I have some other, more Important Things to do today, which may or may not include Italian food and writing pissy letters to the StarTribune's editorial staffers. We mommybloggers have to get our kicks anyway we can.

I demand equal pay reparations!

Money! it's what I want! Specifically, I want the money that should be summarily deducted from the Republican women in the United States Senate who voted to block a vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act.

Have you not heard of this bill? You must be a white cis-man, then. For everyone else outside of that small but powerful category, here's the summary in bumper sticker form: EQUAL PAY FOR EQUAL WORK! Did you know that in the United States the wage gap for white women is 77 cents to every white man's dollar? That African-American women get 62 cents? That Hispanic women get 53 cents? The Paycheck Fairness Act is designed to help correct that. It would strengthen the existing Equal Pay Act of 1963 and would allow employees easier access to salary records without fear of retaliation. No brainer, eh?

Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Kay Bailey Hutchison have the same jobs that Al Franken, Henry Reid, Mitch McConnell and handsome former Cosmopolitan model Scott Brown have. The salary for the job is $174,000 yearly. All of the aforementioned ladies are white, and they are all Republicans who failed to break ranks to vote for this legislation (well, Murkowski didn't vote against it--she failed to leave her precious write-in ballots to show up for the vote. Same diff). The dreaded filibuster killed it. That must mean that these four women do not agree that women employees need this kind of legal protection. Hmmmm.......

GRAB YOUR CALCULATORS! What should Collins, Snowe, Bailey Hutchison and Murkowski be paid? And how much money do those four owe back to the federal government now that their hypocrisy has been exposed? I'll take an Ativan while I wait (the sheer stupidity of some people gives me anxiety attacks).

Ready? I was an English major, not a math major (I'm a GIRL, silly!), but my numbers tell me that each of these women should only be paid $132, 240 per year. Let's subtract that from $174,000 and see what we get. Oh mercy! These four, who do not believe that women have the right to equal pay, need to remit back to the federal government $41, 760. EACH. For every year that they have served.

I'm starting a campaign to get my money back, because $41K times whatever might be just enough money to ensure that my public library, its hours slashed due to budget cuts, could reopen on Mondays. Luckily, most of the staff are women, and we know they work cheap! Start dialing, girls!

Kay Bailey Hutchison: (202) 224-5922

Olympia Snowe: (202) 224-5344

Lisa Murkowski: (202) 224-6665

Susan Collins: (202) 224-2523

What we don't talk about when we talk about health care

I am going to repost the following blog that first appeared here in 2009, just as the "debate" (prolonged screaming match, really) about health care reform was really picking up speed. I think it's worth rereading not only because today is the third anniversary of Liz's death, but because there are still yahoos in this country who think socialized medicine is a bad idea. They voted in staggering numbers for leaders who want to repeal the teeny, tiny steps taken towards health care equality in this country, probably because they persist in the belief that terminal illness will never happen to them or anyone they love.

I recently had the pleasure of reading the new book Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir, written by fellow Carleton grad Sonya Huber, and interviewing her for an upcoming piece in Literary Mama. I can't recommend the book enough. Sonya writes beautifully, and her tale of cobbling together coverage for herself, her husband, and her infant son through a series of soul-draining but morally noble non-profit jobs and graduate programs will be recognizable to anyone living on the fine line that separates the almighty middle class from ....well, everyone else. Sonya writes with humor and grace, but also with urgency, painfully aware that lives are on the line--and deaths are, too. Liz would have loved it.

Gone daddy gone

August 9, 2009

Not long ago, Matt commented on something he'd read in the newspaper: "It says here that heart disease is the leading cause of death in this country," he said. "If that's true, then why do we know so many people with cancer?"

Good question. I wondered if it was because of our demographics--as thirtysomethings, we tend to hang with folks whose cholesterol profiles have not yet caught up with them. We eat cheese and drink beer with abandon. "That still doesn't explain all the cancer," he grumped.

This weekend Matt is on the east coast visiting a good friend and cancer survivor. It is a trip I made several times myself, before my own east coast friend succumbed to the disease in late 2007. This week alone we experienced both of cancer's schizophrenic extremes: a diagnosed family member received wonderful PET scan results, while an old friend from high school had a five hour operation to remove a tumor from her brain.

I'm at a breaking point. I AM QUITE LITERALLY SICK TO FUCKING DEATH OF ALL THIS CANCER. It doesn't help that the national nightmare that is health care reform in this country has brought end-of-life care and medical rationing into the debate.

I keep having flashbacks to the one time I accompanied Liz on her chemo day, at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. One tiny positive through her whole ordeal was the fact that her insurance picked up the tab for all of her treatments. Avastin alone, she gasped, would cost over a hundred grand to someone who didn't have insurance. Liz had Avastin, and a seemingly endless string of chemo drugs in addition to radiation, several surgeries, and many long hospital stays.

Liz was 33 and a half years old at the time of her diagnosis. She died two years later. How much did those two years cost her insurers? I don't know. What would it cost not to pay for them?

Take a guess. It's been nearly two years since she died and I can't type this without feeling the too-familiar panicky clutch in my chest, the stinging tears welling up in my eyes. I would do anything, anything, to have her back again.

I think about her a lot. At times I smile when I think of the venom she would spew at those who believe that a single-payer system would limit access to the treatments that kept her alive--she knew that these treatments were out of most people's reach already! Liz knew that our health care system was a moral disgrace. She had no doubt that thousands of other people with colon cancer would love to sit in her chemo chair at Dana Farber, but couldn't. She knew those people would die more quickly, less hopefully, and certainly a hell of a lot poorer than she would.

Of course, she never planned on dying at all. I last spoke to her on October 29, 2007, when she called from her hospital bed to wish me a happy 36th birthday. She sounded frail, both physically and mentally. I was too afraid to ask about this strange thing called "end-of life care", and she never mentioned it. All I could tell her was that I loved her, and that would have to be enough. She died two weeks later.

What DON'T we talk about when we talk about health care? Death. Money. Economic class. Equality, or the lack thereof. Fear. Mortality. Losing the illusion of control that we all hold so dear.

I can't think about "health care reform" and not think about all the fucking cancer. I can't hear "end of life" and think that death is going to happen to someone else. Death is coming, and death is real. Death is in the future for you, for me, for my children, for President Obama, for Rush Limbaugh, for everyone who panics at the idea of a single payer system. Death is a certainty. No one can escape it. The existence of death ought to humble us and make us more respectful of life. After all, if a dying woman can muster the strength to give a shit about the uninsured, why can't everyone else?

Today's writing brought to you by....karma!

I don't believe in a Santa Claus-style universe that keeps tabs on every little naughty or nice thing I do in order to sort out my just rewards, but I do believe that approaching others with positivity (or in my case, keeping my natural assholery in check) will reap benefits. But sometimes, you just get lucky. The November issue of the Women's Press is home-and-hearth themed, and my column acknowledges that it takes more than bricks and mortar to make a home: it takes a random group of strangers who are committed to being nice to each other. Or as one of my street-mates says, "it takes a village, but not the Village People."

My Street: It Takes a Neighborhood to Make a Home. Minnesota Women's Press, November 1, 2010.

Of course, my neighbors are more than just polite. As I note in my column, they are funny, smart, caring, generous, and most importantly, kind enough to keep silent about they times they've seen me naked.

I was polite, if not completely kind, in my latest work for Elevate Difference (formerly Feminist Review). But I was sorely disappointed in my subject, a book I hoped could provide practical advice and ideas to a burned-out social justice activist. Instead, I had to read 300 pages of warm fuzzies with all of the depth of an "ELECT ME!" campaign postcard. Ugh.

Review of Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America. Elevate Difference, November 9, 2010.

In the review, I note how guilty I feel for "nitpicking" a nice fellow like Alan Khazei for the crime of writing a boring book. I wrote the piece several weeks ago, yet the words appeared online when I was deep within a literal nitpicking of my own--my daughter brought home a infestation of kindergarten lice that upended our household for the better part of ten days. My husband, a neatnik who has learned to tolerate his wife's sloppiness, blew through our house with a combination of toxic shampoos and sprays that did little to prevent my karmic retribution. Yes, Alan Khazei, your nitpicky reviewer had to be nitpicked herself. Karma's a bitch!

Now I'm off to check my unpublished stuff for any hints of nastiness to come. I fear my manuscript may include cursing Michele Bachmann with an unending urinary tract infection....

A post-mortem on sanity (and my once-liberal home)

Who is this proud Minnesota political nerd? Why, your Radical Housewife, of course!

I'm only moments away from delivering a short speech at the Rally to Restore Sanity Minnesota on October 30, 2010. I'm so excited I'm wearing my new shirt from my favorite local store I Like You. The message inside the Minnesota outline? I CAME TO GET DOWN, natch. No one parties like a native blue stater.

At about one o'clock that afternoon I stood at the podium and gave the following remarks:

I speak to you today on behalf of the statewide membership of Minnesota NOW, an activist group that is strictly non-partisan, though as the Pioneer Press kindly noted in a story yesterday, we do have an agenda. Since NOW has been in the game nationally since 1966, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, but no less a political luminary than Sarah Palin lashed out at women’s rights activists a couple months ago, labeling us with the very peculiar term Cackle of Rads.

(This is where I paused for laughter that never came.)

Cackle of Rads was Palin’s strange Alaskan slang for women who, in her words, "hijacked" feminism from...I don't know, a roving band of grizzly bears or something.

(Silence.)

I know this rally isn't supposed to be partisan, and I agree with that noble aim. However, the truth is not partisan, and the truth is that Sarah Palin, no matter often she repeats it, is not, in fact, the designated mouthpiece for American women. Palin is also laying claim to speak for the protective mothers in American by coming up with another gimmick just as weird to me as the Cackle of Rads: the Mama Grizzlies. According to Palin, the Mama Grizzly is an uber-mom who will “rise up” to protect her children the only way she knows how… by voting for a woman like Sharron Angle who thinks pregnant sexual assault victims need shut up and use their rape lemons to make fetus lemonade. That’s totally insane.

(I thought "fetus lemonade" was really fuckin' funny, but the crowd sure didn't.)

We all know that Sarah Palin is a mother—it’s a big part of her sales pitch. I’m a mother too. My son is ten and my daughter is five. When I see the level of insanity that has infected our public discourse, the last symbol I as a mother want to identify with is a creature known for homicidal paranoia. I don't want to run back into my cave and hide, either! I want to do something to make the world a sane place for my children, your children, and the Palin children. In short, I'm not a mama grizzly--instead, I'm a mama cow.

(Crickets)

.I'm going to tell you a story that was shared with me by one of my feminist role models, a woman named Barbra Peterson who just happens to be a bovine midwife by trade. Barbra lives on a farm not far from Duluth with a herd of dairy cattle named after her own feminist heroes: Susan B. Anthony, Shirley Chisholm, Carol Mooo-seley Braun...

(This is where I finally realized that I was absolutely, positively, bombing and I needed to signal to my audience that I was aware of this fact.)

WOW! TOUGH CROWD TODAY!

Anyway, up north near the farm it's not unusual to be visited by coyotes or even wolves, all of whom would be delighted to chew on a slab of fresh beef. Barbra tells me that when the herd senses danger, the healthy mothers will gather the children and elders, that is, the most vulnerable in their community to attack, into the center of a circle that they form with their bodies. Barbra says that this circle of care is instinctive to the mama cows, and it's something very remarkable and inspiring to watch, especially for those who consider the cow a stupid creature good for dinner, shoes, and not much else.

Today, on a day when we celebrate sanity, I ask all of you to reconsider the language of grizzly bears, cackling rads (whatever the hell those are), teabaggers, head stompers, disgusting lemonade makers, and really just slow yourself down…be like a cow.

Be calm. Eat, sleep, and take care of each other. Thank you.

(Polite clapping)

At least I fared better than the next speaker, a woman from Students for a Democratic Society who had her mic unplugged and was yanked offstage. Apparently calling the USA a supporter of terrorism (in Palestine and elsewhere) wasn't a very sane thing to do.

In hindsight, this should have alerted me to the fact that the political climate in my state was worse than I imagined. On Tuesday, to the surprise of the Rad One and the rest of the Minnesota punditry, the Republican party scored a majority of seats our state legislature--the first such win for the Minnesota GOP in 38 years. I'm 39. I don't remember a time when my state wasn't majority LIBERAL. Mark Dayton could still pull out a squeaker in the governor's race, but that fact gives me no comfort. A squeaker?! In Minnesota? Really?? Did I hallucinate those votes for Paul Wellstone? WHERE IS MY SANE MINNESOTA?

I came to get down, unaware of how down things really were. 2011 can only get worse.

I'll cry if I want to.

Why cry when you can listen to Amy Winehouse singing Lesley Gore?

I'm extremely annoyed with the election results, but I'm not crying, not like I was in 2002 or 2004--those Novembers I wept until my eyes were dry. I'm irritated, yes, that Obama is talking DADT bullshit when I'm supposed to be watching All My Children. I'm beyond furious that my home state, THE LAND OF HUBERT HUMPHREY, a place that used to be ice-blue, will have a legislature under Republican control beginning in January, but I'm not crying.

I'll start crying later, for if the teabags have their way, you're going to see civil rights peeled back, tax money diverted from schools, libraries, and social programs and funneled into the fur-lined pockets of the rich, and "family values" hardening ever more into us vs. them, and gawd help you if you're not one of them.

THAT'S when I'll cry!