Family – Page 4 – Feministe

I Don’t Have a Title For This; I’m Too Busy Being Angry

Trigger warning: sexual harassment, groping, erasure of victims/ survivors.

I have two beautiful children in my life, whom I enthusiastically co-parent. I am not partnered with either parent of these children. Instead, I am called their Auntie, because calling me Miss [name redacted] is way too formal. It’s a nuanced relationship — I am an authority figure, sponsor of fun time, shoulder to cry on, homework helper, and food exploration specialist. I’m what Patricia Hill Collins would call an “other-mother.” The eldest of the two, Brianna (not her real name, I won’t be using real names here), is thirteen. Her baby brother, Patrick, is three. Because Brianna is so much older than her brother, she often lives a drastically different life than he does. She goes to and from school by herself, has a course of study at her magnet school in NYC, and is beginning to explore the world around her in ways that Patrick cannot/ doesn’t. Because of her age, I’m always pondering how Brianna processes media and various experiences that she has. She’s a black girl in a huge city where it’s easy to become invisible, for a million different reasons. I worry. I ponder.

A few weeks ago when I went to visit Brianna and Patrick at home, Brianna told me that she’d just come back from one of those send-the-poor-brown-kids-to-the-mountains-for-a-week camp program things. I asked her if it was fun, if she missed her brother, mother, or stepfather. She said that she missed her brother, but was glad to get away, and then she exclaimed. “Auntie, I got really tan! And I swam and played in the sun. I had a good time for the most part . . . But they called the cops on me yesterday on the way home.” I shit you not, my head almost exploded. I asked Brianna to repeat herself and explain the circumstances to me.

Brianna said that there was this kid about nine or ten years old at camp, Michael, who had been bugging her all week. She said that it began with hits and pinches, pokes and staring. The usual bullshit that I think most kids are exposed to. But, she said that his behavior escalated. That Michael began saying things about her growing breasts and her ass — and that when she spoke to her group leader (an adult), she simply told Brianna to “Tell him to stop it.” No action was taken by this adult. Brianna said that she felt bad that nobody stepped in — but the excuse of her group leader was that Brianna is “older and bigger” than this other child. So, he chilled for a bit once he knew that there was an adult watching him. On the last day of camp, as the kids piled onto a bus to come back into the city, the harassment resumed. This time, Michael decided that he was going to touch the parts he’d been commenting on. Brianna warned him, shoved him away and told this same adult — who was supervising this bus trip — what happened. The woman told Michael to leave her alone, and did nothing else. Brianna told this woman, “I’m gonna beat him up if he touches my chest again.”

He did it again; she socked him square in the face. The group leader rushed to this boy’s aid and called the police, citing Brianna’s age and size as reasons why she should not have hit Michael. The adult had the bus driver pull over, and she called the fucking cops. On a thirteen-year-old who acted in her own defense. Thankfully, the police never came. But: this woman did not follow camp procedure (no incident report, she did not contact Brianna’s mother or the other child’s primary caregiver). She called the fucking police. Who, thankfully, never came.

I was livid. I began to think of all the ways Brianna’s needs for safety and protection had been invalidated by someone to whom her care was entrusted. I thought about all of the possible points of contention. Here we had a white adult and a large group of children of color in a setting that is more or less based on the assumption that these are Kids Who’ve Never Been Anywhere or Seen Anything Worthwhile. The fact that this woman did not address the core issue — the continual, escalating aggression of this little boy — is not lost on me, nor is the fact that she left Brianna to handle it herself. Reading the urban child of color as “tough” is typical, even when a person of color is the one doing the reading. It’s the same kind of thinking that causes folks to treat the reports of missing and/ or assaulted women of color differently than they do white women’s reports.* And the rush to involve police with two children of color — do I even need to go into that? Black folks and police have not ever been the best of friends. Why do that to either of them, but especially to Brianna who was defending herself from unwanted advances? What did this teach her? She said that she understood the actions of the adult in this situation as less than ideal. She said she didn’t expect support, but that she was shocked that this woman called the police.

To realize that Brianna had already internalized the idea that she was not worthy of protection (even by her own means) was absolutely heartbreaking for me. Already? She already knows nobody will give enough of a fuck? I felt betrayed. I felt all of the rage from my own experiences with street harassment and groping. I identify all forms of unwanted touching, especially in what I call the bathing suit areas, as sexual assault. And sometimes I forget that not everyone does. But, whether you think of these actions in a particular way or not, I have to ask: WHAT THE FUCK? Why make the child responsible when they’ve come to the clear realization that adult intervention is needed? Isn’t that your job as a fucking camp counselor or group leader or whatever title you’ve got?

I’m still processing this. Brianna and I did have a talk where I affirmed her choices to stand up, and I did not question or cast doubt on her narrative. I believe her. She deserves (a) to be believed, (b) to be affirmed in her feelings, thoughts and actions, and (c) to have the assistance she requested when she requested it. I made sure she knew that, and I offered my empathy for her having been mistreated so. She thanked me, though I had nothing to do with any of it.

I’m proud of her. Proud as hell. It doesn’t remove the sting, though. I hate that I feel so helpless, that I literally cannot jump in and fix it. But, that’s part of parenting and loving. I’ve got to roll with it.

______________________
* See the story of Romona Moore and the victims of Cleveland, OH serial killer and rapist Anthony Sowell for an idea of what I’m talking about.

Adoption as a Feminist Issue

There is some really excellent discussion happening in the comments of my last post, “Pregnancy: a Public Affair,” in which I wrote about how society allows and encourages people to make pregnant bodies their business, and how that has affected my thoughts on whether or not to ever become pregnant.

One topic that has come up in comments is the ethics and justice of adoption and adoption as a feminist issue. People seem pretty interested in discussing this topic, but it’s not directly related to the original post. So I thought I’d go ahead and open up a new post dedicated to adoption issues.

To start the discussion, I have some questions:

Does every child have a right to be raised by the people whose genetic material helped create them?

Does every genetic parent have a right to raise their genetic children?

Do people who are unable (though biology or circumstance), or do not desire, to conceive children have a right to raise children?

If you believe adoption is problematic, what circumstances would make it less so?

Since this is a feminist blog, let’s try to make this a critical discussion, rather than simply an airing of personal grievances. (Personal experiences are the foundation of feminism, so I encourage sharing them. But I ask that in this thread we use them to engage with others, build understanding, and provide insight.) And as always, please be respectful!

ETA: Links and resources are greatly appreciated. However, your comment will get mistaken for spam (by the spam filter, which is not human) if it contains 5 or more links. I may eventually fish it out of the spam filter and make sure it gets published, but you might want to limit yourself to 4 or fewer links per comment, just to be safe.

On maternal desire

I wanted to contribute more frequently during my stint here at Feministe and to talk a bit more about fat in particular but, well, life happened I’m afraid. Thank you to those who’ve read and commented on my pieces; I am very grateful for the opportunity to give my perspective.

I have identified as a feminist for about fifteen years but I’ve only really understood what that meant, to me, in the last three. Because of my relative privilege I am somewhat sheltered from the worst effects that kyriarchy can have — has — on families. But I became acutely aware even before my daughter was born that my convictions were going to be tested more than ever by the experience of motherhood.

As I wrote in Feminist Mothers, there are still many ways that becoming a mother is (generally) a socially sanctioned choice in the culture in which I live. And insofar as it is a choice (we know very well that not every parent chose to be a parent or chose the circumstances or timing!) it is generally sanctioned by feminists as well. We have the right to choose, right?

And yet, the desire to have children and to spend time with those children, the yearning for it, even if that means having one’s career or other markers of ‘freedom’ and ‘success’ eclipsed by child-rearing, still gets kind of a bad rap from some feminists. Or rather, perhaps it’s become a bit of an unmentionable. It’s not uncommon for high-profile feminists to characterise babies and children as little tyrants. Freedom-suckers, equality-trashers, self-actualisation deniers. And whether they intend it to or not, this often leads to a characterisation of middle and upper-class mothers, particularly those who choose to practise a form of attachment parenting, as selfishly indulgent, or tragically duped and downtrodden, or both.

This doesn’t come from everybody. Asserting that choice means that the owner of a uterus has the right to say yes as well as no to pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding is important to many, I know.

And yet.

I think sometimes this dismissive attitude towards certain types of parenting is just a slightly more genteel manifestation of a latent fear and loathing of mothers, of maternal bodies, of any woman who doesn’t conform to ‘what women want’ or appears to conform too closely to ‘what women want’. This is otherwise known as misogyny.

A while back a joke about Michelle Duggar circulated amongst some friends of mine, some of whom self-identified as feminists. It included the words ‘vagina’ and ‘clown car’. Add that to the ‘humour’ leveled at Nadya Suleman, and it becomes pretty clear that in my culture, women who willingly choose lots and lots of babies are treated as a heady blend of ridiculous and monstrous. A slur about clown car vaginas can hurt any person with a large family or multiples and, frankly, it’s awful. It doesn’t need to be said that it’s pretty anti-feminist. (I’m not endorsing the choices of Duggar and Suleman here, beyond saying that as a pro-choice feminist I believe their bodies are their own, their wombs are their own. Some critiques of the phenomena attached to these women may well be legitimate but there is no value in shifting critiques, even obliquely or accidentally, onto all women who have or desire to have a lot of children. And there’s definitely something wrong with humour that implies maternal bodies are gross.)

Does this treatment of women who are especially fecund belie attitudes to mothering and childbearing in general?

I have heard, more than once, young women describe themselves as ‘bad feminists’ for aspiring to motherhood. I don’t think this is only because of ingrained notions of feminism meaning a focus on career and financial independence (although feminism sometimes still means these things and that’s not always a bad thing.) I think it’s also because women who love babies are liable to be stereotyped as ditzy, unambitious or sentimental at best. Sometimes they are seen as emotionally voracious or, well, gross.

Perhaps part of the problem is a lack of articulation of what it is like to want children, and the ways in which this interacts with one’s feminism. Although my approach to motherhood is quite cerebral, my experience of maternal desire and ultimately maternity was very much in the body. The experience of childbirth was for me transformative and empowering but it is not easy to convey that convincingly without sinking into cliche. Breastfeeding my daughter taught me more about misogyny, feminism, community, consent and a million other things that I could never have imagined. It made me want to write poetry (and a blog) about milk! But how does one put the physicality of parenting up to the spotlight, without fueling terribly harmful essentialising narratives? How do you stand in awe of the experience of parenthood without teetering towards being a ‘bad feminist’? (You don’t pretend for a second that your experience is universal, is the short answer, I think.)

Perhaps what we need is more interrogation of these experiences in unexpected places. Parents — mostly mothers — are often accused of being boring. What is infuriating about that is that we are saddled with this label without regard to the societal forces which might make this so. Mothers are frequently left with all the extra work but little of the recognition and then reviled for even the slightest sign that we are living ‘vicariously’ through our kids. Additionally, parents and non-parents often peel off into cliques, partly because we have been herded into distinct consumer groups, and because we are encouraged to keep to discrete family groupings in a culture where individualism is prized. And online we can be confronted with twee marketing-laden speak (‘momversations’ — ew) which, frankly, puts me off too, in place of real dialogue between women who may or may not be mothers.

‘Boring’ is often shorthand for someone whose passions do not match one’s own. But when the day-to-day reality for many women is mothering, it makes sense that a passion for women’s rights is aided by an insight into parenthood.

I am hopeful that we will find new ways to negotiate the experiential divide between parents and those without children, especially in feminist spaces. I hope that ‘admitting’ to either a desire to mother or to be child free can be less loaded, less fraught, more free in all kinds of spaces. And I hope that we can come to more readily expect not only the right to choose, but the right to be actively and meaningfully supported in each instance.

“I don’t have kids. Deal with it.”

It is true that people can be total assholes when it comes to having/not having kids. Asking someone why they don’t have a baby, or slipping them the number to a fertility doctor, is not polite! And I agree that more people should actually think through whether or not they want children; it would also be nice if we lived in a society where having children wasn’t assumed to be the Best Normal Thing once you hit a certain age and marital status.

But you know what rudeness toward child-free is not? It is not “almost the last remaining prejudice.” It really really is not.

The feminist naturist. A.k.a. the “naked grandmas” post!

This is one of those guest-posts I’ve been promising to write for many an age now. I hope you enjoy…?

I became a naturist in a totally feminist fashion – all due to a man.

When he told me that he believed that genuine nude beaches were the best, my initial reaction was, “Um, hell no. Wtf?!”

Roughly 24 hours later, I was standing on a nude beach, having been dragged there. I was really tired, due to the dragging and whatnot. We were camped out near a group of naked strangers, most of whom were middle-aged Ukrainian men. They were busy roasting something over an open fire. A couple of little boys, also naked, really wanted to be part of the roasting experience. “Alright, who farted?!” One of the naked men yelled. “If you little bastards are going to cook, you’ll need better manners!”

It was at that point I decided that I had absolutely nothing to lose in this situation. “Can you untie these?” I asked my guy, and offered him the strings at the back of my bikini top. He untied them for me, and then I slid out of my bikini bottoms as well, and walked into the sea, naked as a jaybird. After I was done floating and watching the seagulls and clouds and marveling at how much better my body felt without the bikini on, I sat on my towel and stared at the waves. People on their way through to a different beach, people who totally had their clothes on, kept glancing at me as they passed, but not in any way that made me feel uncomfortable.

“Hm, wow, this is kind of awesome, actually” I thought to myself at the time. And so I became a naturist.

Where are you from? Part 7

That is it, there is no more. Thank you for participating in this project. Writing it certainly helped me to clarify and work through a lot of my thinking and pain around this question, and I feel a lot easier within myself. I hope it was helpful for some of you, too.

With all that in mind –

with opening thoughts on what belonging can mean,
figuring the components of fromness,
who gets asked the question,
always being from elsewhere,
feeling like you’re home,
and casting our gazes into the future

– with all that in mind, how has your fromness changed or been made more clear over the course of the last few weeks? How has your thinking around this question developed?

Where are you from? Part 6

Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5.

I wonder what the future looks like.

I am thinking about what “where are you from” will mean in my family’s future. I wonder what it means even now, because we’ve all moved around a lot. My family is, by a combination of choice and being forced, as transnational as it gets, but we’ve all got a sense of where we’ve been. What will happen when we get further from those homes as the years go on? Will we belong in those places, or increasingly nowhere?

And I think that maybe I’m from no one physical location, but am located in this web of family relations existing ever ready to catch me and bounce me back if I get lost. We’ve been remarkable in keeping in touch all around the world across the years. But what happens if we stop? What happens if the passage of time, the lost information between generations, means that we lose touch with a branch of the family, and another, until we forget that we are elsewhere, too?

I hope we’ll always belong to our history, and to each other. That’s what I’ll be teaching my children when they realise their peers won’t quite let them belong. You belong with us, my dears.

I have plans to try and keep up with as many family members as I can reach, across language and national borders. I think that if I don’t, I’ll lose whatever chance I have to make solid and manageable this implacable yearning for home. These people are as close as it gets. This is how I belong, not where.

Where am I from? I don’t know, but I’m from us. I’m from my family, and I’m from those children who are going to learn their belonging from me.

Where are you from? Part 5

Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

How do you relate to where you are now? Does it feel like home? Who lets it feel like home?

I have lived in this city all my life and it still feels transient. I’ve never quite understood the feeling and rhythm of this city, never known where and how to be and how I might fit in. There are places I’ve visited that feel vastly more like home. Maybe it’s that coldness with which Sydney is so often characterised, or maybe it’s finding that the Australian mainstream likes to alienate people like me, but I never have felt quite settled here. It’s kind of awful and fascinating that this place which has been my place of residence as long as I’ve been alive isn’t home. If not here, where? I might be “from” this city, but I’m not really “of” it. The belonging implied is as insubstantial as smoke.

Sometimes I think that it’s not so much that I have a different culture, but that the mainstream culture here is so actively hostile to other cultures. Supposedly, Australia is a multicultural society in which people of all backgrounds are accepted, but the trade-off is that we have to give up our cultures, our foreignness, ourselves. And we give it up not to be absorbed into a mix of cultures, but a specifically Anglo-Australian one such as is constructed as racially and ethnically neutral.

I’m still not sure what makes a hometown, or a place of belonging. Have you found that sense of home in where you grew up, and where you are? How is that influenced by whether you share a background with the people in those places or not, or how accepted you feel?

Grandmothers

This isn’t the post I was going to write today.

I was going to write about the right to fuck up in feminist/progressive/social justice communities. Maybe you’ll get that one later in the week.

But this morning I woke up late and the first thing Twitter told me was that Elizabeth Taylor had died. I posted a brief comment on my Tumblr.

And then my phone rang. And my father told me that my grandmother had died last night.

She had been sick; I knew it was coming. Still, it hurts.

When you lose someone the immediate response is to think about all the things you didn’t know about them or the things you didn’t tell them. The time you didn’t have.

My grandmother was in her nineties–she had outlived her husband, the grandfather I never met, by over 30 years. Most of that time she lived alone, first in the house where she raised her kids, then an apartment and finally in a nursing home. She sewed me doll clothes when I was little and peppered her speech with French expressions and the occasional dirty joke. The last time I saw her we drove past a classic car and she made a joke about dating when she was young and kissing in the backseat. I wish I remembered her exact phrasing. I know it made me giggle.

On that same trip my mother and I got drunk and talked about boys and she told me about the guy who broke her heart before she got married.

We too often don’t share personal stories with the members of our family–our adult lives, our politics drive wedges and we spend less time together. Our infinitely busy lives get in the way.

So it becomes easier in a way to mourn celebrities whose lives were lived in public. We know more about Liz Taylor than we do our own families.

This week is the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Women led a general strike in 1909–mainly Jewish and Italian immigrant women. I’ve been thinking about those women a lot in the past couple of weeks, since I watched the documentary on PBS.

I watched it, and I didn’t really write about it other than to encourage people to watch it. Because it’s our history. It’s MY history, as a third-generation immigrant on either side, a Jewish woman, a worker, a rabble-rouser, a very-occasional organizer.

We are so often separated from our history. From our grandmothers. They are old and dead and gone by the time we are old enough to talk, and people our own age are more interesting. Books and dating are more interesting. We remember that history on anniversaries or birthdays, when grandma comes to visit and we cover our tattoos and button that extra button on our shirts, when we read a book that reminds us, when we watch a movie that our grandparents grew up on.

My first tattoo was a maple leaf, for my French Canadian heritage, gotten with a girlfriend who has a matching one and matching Quebecois family. My second was words from Les Miserables, in my maternal grandmother’s French but from the book my paternal grandmother gave me when I was nine and dared me to read. My most recent one is words from Emma Goldman, my favorite (Russian-American Jewish) revolutionary. My kitchen walls have framed photos of Liz Taylor, Jane Russell, Gene Tierney, and Rita Hayworth.

Even as I carry them with me, I am often too wrapped up in my own life to stop and think.

Elizabeth Taylor. grandmother. Emma Goldman. grandmother. Clara Lemlich. grandmother.

My grandmother loved to play Scrabble and warmly accepted my gay cousin’s boyfriend and my tattooed, Muslim-convert ex. She ate chocolate after every meal and drank beer with her pizza. But still there is so much I don’t know about her. So much I only thought to ask as she was older, sicker, not able to share those stories so well.

So much, today, I wish I could ask her. So much history she saw.

What do you wish you could ask your grandmothers (whether they’re blood grandmothers or otherwise)?

Where are you from? Part 4

Previously: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

Where are you now? Is it home? Is it a place you can’t see your way to it being a home?

Sometimes identifying a place as where you’re from isn’t just about your personal history there, your associations, and memories, and how well you know it, and how much time you’ve spent there. It can be about whether other people accept you as being from there.

And that’s something particularly fraught when you’re tossing racism into the mix.