One Mom Rising

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?