My best friend Kimmy had a baby girl recently. Baby girls name is Winifred and I love to so much it hurts. I am surrounded by boys in my house with two male dogs, two sons and one husband who is also just a big boy (just ask him about his new chainsaw) so having this little girl so deeply connected to my life, brings out femininity in me I have not had visit before. I have never had a little girl in my life so close that I get to be the backdrop of her childhood. I will watch her grow teeth, learn to walk, speak her first words, make her first decisions, and grow into the little girl who will one day be the seed of the woman she is to become. I often think about the world I want her to be in. Where we are at and where I want us to be. I feel like I want to understand what I have unconsciously digested as my female role, but being so saturated with who I am and what I was taught to be by community, media, and family makes it hard to separate out the colors of me and the colors of coercion. Or are we one?

            Yesterday, I started reading a Naomi Wolf's book called The Beauty Myth. I have stepped from fiction to naked truth without realizing I was going down a road that would carve my experience of being a woman, into caught breath and painful realizations. I just started reading the book and don’t know how far I can go and if I can even finish. It’s not because it’s not interesting or important, I just get full. Filled with enough of what I can see of the picture.

I confess that I am reading this out of desperation.  I feel if I can understand the weight of being woman, I can help my little friend, Winifred understands as she becomes a woman. I bought the story of who me and my vagina were supposed to be and never questioned it, until I had grown so big, the stereotype wouldn’t fit. What if young girls could see the metaphorical dress we try to squeeze women into, and the nakedness of not having to choose? What if Winifred could be a feminist and a mother feel as if the two were in absolute harmony?  What if we could be wildly successful in our careers, incredibly wealthy, and not feel as though we had to slice away aging with surgeon’s scalpels?

Years ago I was at a stop light and a beautiful cream colored Lexus pulled up next to me. It had champagne tinted windows that made the cars occupants look as though they had just stepped out of the warm sun. I looked over through my cracked window, and heard my thoughts above the clatter of my muffler say, “I will have to marry someone really rich to be able to afford a car like that.” I heard it as if someone outside of me said it. I was shocked and after the shock subsided I was left with the aftertaste of realizing what I believed was possible to create for myself. I had adopted the idea that I was destined to continue the cycle of poverty in which I was raised. I didn’t know what to do differently. There was no epiphany. All I did was hear me, and that crack in my thinking became a constant place of picking. It woke me, and try as I might I cannot go back to sleep.

By the way, my first career job, I purchased a cream colored Infinity with champagne tinted windows that made me look as though I had just stepped out of the warm sun. Yes, I bought it myself.

Yesterday a group of Moms Rising met in Freemont to strategize how to increase our visibility and get more moms with their brilliant ideas on board. What I love about this organization is that when you have a good idea and tell us about it on Monday, by Wednesday we are following your advice. Democracy in action as Kristin says.

Gossip about island living:

I would say I am an intensely private person. I can give you personal details but they are prescreened and censored. What is interesting about living on an island is that your idea of privacy is altered because there is none. If you break down and cry because you joined a co-op preschool and they figured they had a new sucker for the last and worst job on the auction committee, and you cry not only because they cornered you but because they don’t want to hear that it’s too much, you have to interface with these people for years. YEARS PEOPLE! Not that this happened, but if it did you cannot just simply walk away. No, you cannot because they will be on your soccer team, in your child’s first grade classroom, and invariably they know someone whom you are just getting to know. Everyday the island gets smaller, and I get bigger.

I just received three magazines in the mail from Yes! Magazine with my photo in it, listed as one of the people they love. Taking a stand has it rewards, not only am I in a magazine and Loved, but was given three free good reads to pass around. Doesn’t that inspire you to want to stand up for Moms too?  Also, a few days ago Ken and I were sent an email with a link to an article including us in the London Guardian and today Paid Family Leave maybe on its way to the house. So things are getting busy like spring around here.

Yesterday I went to work for the first time since wearing the same logo everyday. I dressed Rosie up by layering a black T over a deep blue-green shirt. Kicky black slacks and dressy shoes completed my Rosie “goes to work” outfit. I am a 75% stay at home mom, and spend time consulting for the school district teaching parent workshops on drug and alcohol prevention. When the call came in from my district contact, and we talked about the scope of the project, I mentioned that I was making a political stand by wearing the same logo shirt everyday. After all I will be standing up in front of people who may not agree with Paid Family Leave Insurance, which is NUTS. My new boss said it was fine and so there I was, all business, with my hard not to notice shirt leading a meeting. I did explain to my team that I had many shirts, but they would see me with the same logo everyday until Paid Family Leave is passed. No one seemed to mind my shirt or our cause and I may have recruited a few more people to join us in this fight. Plus  I stretched my idea of dress attire. You can look nice wearing a t shirt. Just call me the Miami Vice of the new millennium.

Yes, we are still wearing our shirts. No, we are not tired of it. No, we have not slipped and wore something else from our closet. Yes, accessorizing helps. Ken and I have made the leap and are living on an island. Thus the radio silence. No shower for the first week so DSL was not even on the agenda. Then the water was shut off completely for a day and while I was wondering about washing my hands, my husband got the DSL hooked up. We have survived a remodel, a move and limiting our wardrobes to our babe slinging, Rosie. I wonder what’s next.

            A few weeks ago Ken and I gave a short speech at a MomsRising rally here in Seattle to House of Representatives Speaker, Frank Chopp. We had wrote it together the day before but had no printer, so had to scribe the whole speech by hand onto scrap paper as the box containing writing implements had not been unpacked yet. So there we are on a ferry, writing the speech, handing back snacks to our two year old, thinking about our twelve year old who is snowboarding for the first time without Us, trying to quantify why we would soldier for the MomsRising cause. It was nearly overwhelming how emotional it made me. I thought about the pay difference between men and women, women and mothers. I thought about the pay difference and how the gap is even wider when the statistics are based on caucasion women and women and mothers of color. I was recently given a link to a article on white privilege that made me weep (http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html). We as a nation are plagued by deep chasms of ignorance because we don’t know what to do with all the pain and suffering around us. I, Yvonne Monique refuse to do nothing. It may be stupid and entirely too simple but when was the last time you completely took your whole body and placed it behind a cause you believed in? I believe in the opportunity for equality. The way things are set up currently we are not just hitting ceilings but walking away from the accent.

            After a MomsRising planning meeting a few weeks ago, I got in my car and drove home in tears. I was surrounded by smart, witty, intelligent super-moms and women who could use words I didn’t even know existed. I felt as if I had stepped into the fast moving river of politics, which I know nothing about, and felt as if I would never get it. I tried readers. I threw out suggestions that would get a fifth grader elected class president, but would not even open a discussion on Paid Family Leave Insurance with politicians as elusive as the socks you lose in the dryer.  I left feeling as if I needed to let the powers that knew what they were doing, do it without me. I didn’t want to quit, I wanted to take a careful step back and blend and look busy wearing my shirt.

            That is not what I did however. I am not standing back and quieting my voice when women like Selena were forced to choose between returning to work four days after her baby was born premature or using the only precious maternity leave she had, to watch her baby through the incubator. I will not ignore the aging of our baby boomers and the financial strain their children will incur when they are asked to one day help care for their elderly parent or find care for them. Paid Family Leave Insurance is not perfect, as it falls short of what we truly deserve, but it is a start. A first step in the right direction. Please join me, join us and help bring humanity into politics and business practices. Even if all you do is wear the Rosie shirt, you will be advertising that Change is coming, and giving others the link to be a part of our movement. So how about it, MomsRising members will you join me?

She and I talked about the MomsRising movement and how important it is. She said it was about time mothers had the support that they needed. Mother Barbara mentioned when she lived with my father and his doting mistress, violence, that there was no where for her to turn. There were no battered women’s shelters or places to hide.

So he would break a broom over her back and she would

Stay.

He would beat her and stop only because his own hands were hurting and she would

Stay.

He would threaten her, belittle her, beat her children and she would

Stay.

She said she had no where to go although one day she left. Without us. I thought the night swallowed her up. She said she sometimes  thinks about a place she could open for women who are broken enough to hide. Her voice became girlish as she told me about this haven for battered women and how each woman would have her own suite. My mother didn’t say room or apartment, she said suite. The women would choose their own living and dining room sets. Each woman would select their own bedroom furniture and decorate their kids rooms. This furniture was Theirs to keep and would go with them when they moved out to start their new life.  

Barbara told me how all of the suites would overlook a Spanish courtyard where the children would play. And the courtyard would have a gate and the gate a guard. The gate would be the only entrance into the haven and it would be guarded twenty four hours a day! In my mothers Spanish fortress there would be a rule. The rule would be that if the women ever had to run an errand, the women would all have to leave as a group. No one would Ever go alone. They would all go in a group and when they were out they would feel safe because they were not alone. Suddenly she stopped, and the window in her I so rarely get to peer through closed. We somehow patched together a closing and a goodbye and I sat at my table aching for her.  

I had never considered the fear she must have felt being alone after she ran away from my father. She was so completely alone, with no overly protective parent induced ideology of this nice big fluffy safe world. Alone with her bruises, her empty womb, her emaciated self esteem. Alone and not knowing where her children were, but too afraid to look for them as violence was watching over us. I wonder why she wasn’t given a suite and a guard and a courtyard to watch us play in. Why wasn’t she surrounded by women who could understand, who survived, who escaped and who could go with her so she wouldn’t feel scared and vulnerable. Instead she found an anonymous truck stop to sew herself back together in, tending only to the pieces that were absolutely necessary. She surrounded herself with another mans arms that seemed safe enough, and filled her empty womb with my baby sister.

In case you are new to my blog, my husband and I are wearing the MomsRising.org t-shirts everyday, until Paid Family Leave is passed in Washington State. My hope is that it will raise awareness for MomsRising.org and garner support for the passage of Paid family Leave in Washington. Follow the links to learn more about MomsRising and or Paid Family Leave.

            Now let me take a moment to properly introduce myself and illuminate why I am taking on working for Change here at home. It would seem I am an activist. I suppose that this is true. It is not what I would have classified myself a month ago but upon my recent pledge to consider democracy as an action as opposed to a concept, has had me view myself differently. I have known for the last few years that a deep passion I hold is for the safety and welfare of our children. I say “our” as it breaks down to all of our tax dollars that take care of children who are publicly educated, on states assistance for financial or medical assistance, in foster care, or institutionalized in jails and prisons. I have tried to hold careers that have steered me away from helping children and their families but they are short lived and inevitably I am drawn back to the commitment that has come from my own pain and experience, of trying to make life better for kids.

            I am thirty three years old. I was raised in poverty by a mother who fled an abusive husband and turned to the state for help after her self esteem and self worth were beaten out of her and her five children. I say poverty and I wonder if you, the reader, know what I mean. It is a widely used word, and brings to mind many pictures, I want you to see mine.  Poverty was living in a school bus that was converted to be our home. Poverty was sorting through garbage bags of donated stained dirty clothing, to try to piece together at least one outfit that would somewhat fit. Poverty was knowing what days the area grocery stores would throw out the less than perfect produce and expired dairy goods and seeing the eyes of those who would put the best of the lot to the side for us so we wouldn’t have to go inside the dumpster to take what would nourish our bruised bodies from their concerned but helpless hands. Poverty was no store bought shoes. My father would make shoes out of worn black tires and rope which would rub our feet raw until the grass rope was worn smooth. Poverty was the dividing line between us and them. Poverty was colorful food stamps that gave us the scarlet letter of who we were and what class we came from. Poverty was a knife carving the hope and equality out of us. It was our prison and it held onto each of us children long enough to scar us deeply.

            After my mother left my father, she remarried, divorced again and moved onto states welfare. She went to work in the daytime and school at night. She was solely responsible for five children ranging in age from three years old to fifteen. At eleven my mother moved me into states custody. I left her and my four siblings to become orphaned in the state of Utah. I was put up for adoption which meant that at eleven years old, I was supposed to understand that I was Never Going Home, that My Mother Did Not Want Me, and that I was supposed to suck it up and keep on going. You can imagine what my teenage years were like. I think of the years between eleven and 15 as a violent movie on fast forward. I ran away and left states custody at fifteen. 

            I had my first son two months before my 21^st birthday. As heartbroken as I had been in my life, I was thawed enough to feel the immense and limitless sensation of motherly love. My son Orion became my beacon of hope, redemption, and a long walk back from hopelessness. He didn’t see me as poor, uneducated, tainted, or abandoned, he saw me as his future. I took that responsibility on and stumbled to be everything I thought he needed, everything I had needed that was so alive in me and still needing to heal. I tested and received my GED and enrolled in college (I had dropped out after my 9^th grade year and went back periodically but never completed). I applied for welfare to assist us with food and medical while I worked and went to school.  Orion’s father helped with childcare (we were not together) and a life was made and roots were planted.

            I transferred to a four year university and was doing odd jobs to support what my student loans and emergency student loans didn’t cover. I was doing everything I could to be a nearly stay at home mom, get an education and pay our bills. Because I didn’t have a full time job I was called in to DSHS to discuss my welfare benefits. A tired white man was assigned to review my case. He looked over my file and informed me that my benefits would be cut if I didn’t start interviewing for full time job. He instructed me how the day care supplement would work and how long it would last. I explained that I was in a fulltime student and if I worked fulltime and went to school I would never see my son. I just needed a little more time to get my degree and I wouldn’t need the states help ever again. The caseworker informed me that I could go to school and get help but I would have to switch to a trade school. I couldn’t get a degree and finally free myself from poverty, I would have to become a bank teller or a medical receptionist, not a doctor or a teacher. The state would assist me for some time with food stamps and with medical coupons for Orion but the state would not help me to graduate from a university.

This was a defining moment in my life. One where I had to find in me the strength to go on alone, not knowing if I would make it. I had always heard that education was the way Out, I had never asked where Out was, but headed there anyway. I crossed the line, and wondered how many others wouldn’t find a way out. Orion had a dad who would help raise him, but what if I was on my own? Overworked caseworkers, suffocating with stacks of clients in desperation, who would help them? Who would help us all?

I wasn’t an activist yet but the need for change seared me. I had fought for every step of a future that wasn’t offered to me and the battle to leave the sentence of poverty was far from over.

Writing this makes me sad. This grief is not far from me as I often feel as if I am an imposter in my middle class world. It makes me want to beg the people who are not willing to change the system to hear me, to hear my story and the millions of others and look us all in the eye and tell us you will do nothing to help. It makes me want to beg anyone reading this to join us, to unite and help lead this movement and save our children from their empty outstretched arms.

I am one voice. Can you hear me? 

I am finally feeling better after starting off my new year with the flu which means I have not been able to be out in the world with my MomsRising shirt. Yesterday on my way to an appointment, I stopped for a cup of tea. The woman who was waiting on me was around twenty and quickly looked over my MomsRising T-shirt. She looked less than amused and something occurred to me about wearing the shirt and its message. It advertises me as a mother and as a supporter of mothers. There is no hiding behind the bold colors of Rosie and the babe in her arms. There is no mistake about MomsRising.org branded across my belly. I felt silly for a moment, as if I had been found out. That although I had no children with me, I was a childless imposter and actually had some noise making little dirt monsters stashed about. Mostly, I felt as if being a mother separated us. Then as she was making my tea, I thought about the baristas future. I thought about a time from now when she may decide to have children or the possibility of her needing to take paid time off to care for a terribly sick loved one, and pride shadowed the silly. I am working to be a part of Paid Family Leave. A Change that she may take advantage of and never even think about those of us who are dedicating ourselves and our time to provide her with more options as her life changes. We will be forgotten and we will someday forget the work it took to turn this ship about, but the Change will impact women, and mothers and yes, our men too for years to come. And you know what? I can live with wearing the same shirt design everyday to stand up for what I believe is right. I can face my vanity, my wardrobe and the odd looks and varying beliefs and know I am doing something that may be thankless now, but will someday support those who cannot ally with me and their changes in circumstance. I didn’t speak to the barista about this grassroots movement but today I am wearing the shirt for her and the future she may not know she will need.

Let’s hope I am better tomorrow and can actually try wearing my new shirts out!

A new look for a New Year

At the end of every December, my family picks a theme to represent our upcoming year.  The theme is a way to help us focus on something we want more (or less) of in our lives.  Last year Yvonnes’ theme was “Start no new projects.”  Ken’s was: “Better balance between time spent at work and time spent at home.” At the end of the year, we keep looking ahead and find something new to work towards. 2007 brings us the first unified theme of our marriage.

This year we have a plan to increase our success rate by sharing a theme.  After seeing the Motherhood manifesto DVD in December we both were inspired to get involved.  Neither of us has really spent much time in political activism beyond merely writing a check or signing a petition so this year we pledged to go from passive activism to full-time, every day, social change animals.

We will accomplish this by becoming human MomsRising t-shirt wearing billboards until paid family leave passes in our home state.  Yep, we each will wear a MomsRising t-shirt every day, until a paid family leave bill is passed in Washington.  If we are going to the gym, we fly our Mom’sRising ripped muscle Rosie.  Off to work? MomsRising Rosie goes with us.  In mid January, when we are off to visit the kids’ great grandparents, we will be fitting into the Scottsdale Arizona social scene with our matching MomsRising Rosie. And that after the holiday fancy party at Ken's work, guess who is getting a little bit of craft glitter for Yvonne’s outfit? Right again, Racy Rosie our MomsRising mascot.

Oh and just in case you’re wondering, the only caveat to our new resolution, is we will not be wearing a MomsRising Rosie for weddings or funerals. So, don’t die but do keep those wedding invites coming!

Yvonne and Ken