Housekeeping (I Might Even Bake A Cake or Maybe Not)

When I was in nursing school, our anatomy teacher was a woman named Dr. Sparkman. She was also, at the time, the head of the entire nursing program at FSU. She ALSO had a PhD in music. And she was, to put it kindly, old and she looked it.

She had sparse gray hair she twisted up in a sort of bun, a false eye, and she was, well, lumpy.
But we adored that woman. She was sharp-tongued and funny. She demanded the best from us. If we complained about a test answer we'd gotten wrong with the words, "But I MEANT this..." she'd answer, "In nursing, you can kill someone by MEANING to do the right thing."

She taught us the liver, the heart, the electrical system of the body. She told us we should properly tell the people we love that we love them with all our kidneys because the kidney is the most amazing organ in the body while the heart is merely a pump.

She's the one who would stand in front of the class and say, with her fist in the air, "If you're going to sin, sin BOLDLY!"

And we would wonder what sins this old spinster had ever managed to eke out, while in our hearts we knew those sins might have indeed been quite interesting and probably bolder than we could imagine, back in the day when cars were called Horseless Carriages and she was a young thing with two good eyes and young, lithe body.

Anyway, she would often start class with the words, "Let's take care of some housekeeping," which meant she had something to say about upcoming deadlines or program-related necessary information.

Then she would ask us if we ever figured out why the shower curtain blows IN when you have the water running and none of us ever figured that out but that's another story.

So in the memory of Dr. Sparkman let me say that I have some housekeeping to deal with and here we go:
Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of this blog, this land of blessourhearts, this little piece of cyber real estate that I own, this window into my world, my soul, my heart. And blah, blah, blah, I could go back and point out what it has come to mean to me but since I feel I'm teetering on the need to go to rehab for bloggers anyway (NO!NO!NO!) I'm not going to do that. Today, anyway. Who knows about tomorrow? I may get all weep-whipped up and tell the world how much I love my blog and the fact that it's given me a way to communicate which still, after two years, gets me out of bed in the morning and has gotten me through periods of insanity and fear and loneliness and horror and given me so much joy and well...
STOP!

Stop the madness!

Okay. Breathe in. Breathe out.

So I mentioned last week that I was thinking about having a blogiversary gathering for me, myself, and blessourhearts on the day and tomorrow is the day and I've got to be in town to sign a contract (for the bar! the bar! the bar we'll be the landlords of, not the owners of! which means someone else will be cleaning the bathrooms!) and so I thought after that I might wander over to the Black Dog for some coffee and if anyone who lives in the area wants to meet me over there we can, as I said, become over-caffeinated (sort of like I am right now) and go crazy and scream in high-pitched voices and oh hell, I have no idea.

Therefore I'm asking- anyone out there think they'd like to meet up at the Black Dog around five tomorrow afternoon so we can put faces to names and names to blogs and so forth? Because I do NOT want to sit there all by myself with my little latte, pretending to read a book while my heart falls with each passing moment because no one is showing up, not even my children.

So let me know if you'd be interested in this little gathering. Okay?

Thanks.

And remember: if you're going to sin, sin BOLDLY and please, if you happen to know why the shower curtain blows IN when the water is running, tell me because I've been pondering this question for over twenty years now and still do not know.

A Boy And A Chicken

Since I have been sorely remiss in the daily chicken update, here is a picture I took today of Harley holding Suzie. His mother is helping because Suzie is more than a three-year old's handful these days.
I think she may be a boy named Sue.
I still can't tell which of those chickens are roosters and which are hens.
But Harley said something today when he saw them which I feel certain is true:

They're going to be real birds!

Yes sir. They are.
And Harley is going to be real smart.

Okay. He already is. And cute, too, not to overstate the obvious.

I Heard It On NPR

My goodness but it's been the strangest weather here. Yesterday was downright chilly. For us, anyway, who had already succumbed to turning on the air conditioner at night to sleep. We don't expect temperatures in the fifties at the latter part of May but here we are, reaching for the down comforters we'd already packed away, the jackets we'd thought we were done with for the year.
And the wind, it just keeps on picking up, like the bands that come before a hurricane, calm, still and then suddenly, it's as if a dervish had flown in to spin and toss and twirl the leaves and bend the branches, down and then up, over and around.
I am watching them right now and they are nothing if not dancing. A big clot of old branch just freed itself from the pecan and hit the roof, then tumbled to the ground.
Strange weather and so easy to divine portents and omens from such winds and chilliness, gray sky, calm then power, back to calm.
I listened yesterday while I walked to an interview with a woman who has written a book about the neuroscience of religion. Barbara Bradley Hagerty and her book is Fingerprints of God. She discussed how scientists have pinpointed the part of the brain where intense spiritual experience seems to come from. Not the part of the brain that makes you go to church on Sunday and sing hymns, but the part that the mystical, feeling-another-presence sensation comes from. The part that is activated quite strongly when Buddhist Monks meditate and nuns pray. The part that is activated during temporal lobe epileptic events, which is why 2,500 years ago Hippocrates wrote of epilepsy as The Sacred Disease. It caused visions and voices in the sufferers of the disorder, visions and voices which many thought came from god. The ones who experienced it often did.
The burning bush of Moses.
The voice of god telling Abraham to sacrifice his son.
John The Baptist, preaching in the desert.
Were these men epileptics?
Who knows?
But what amazed me about the interview with Ms. Hagerty was not what she had to say about scientists being able with electrodes to stimulate these same sort of visions and sense-of-presence that people have sought for eons with meditation, chanting, prayer, dancing, fasting, self-mutilation and who-knows-what-all. No, it was the way you could tell that she was using this scientific evidence to support her belief in god.
Her reasoning was that we humans are hard-wired this way by our creator to experience the presence of him. She referred to god as "him."
I found this very interesting indeed. She could be right. I'm not saying she isn't, but I am saying that this just goes to show that if you believe in god, you believe no matter what. I suppose this is what we call "faith" and if you don't, well...you don't.
To me the whole brain-thing proves that visions and voices come from right inside of our own brains and interpretation is all.
When I was seriously ill once, I had that very same feeling-of-presence. Raised in a Christian culture, I interpreted it as Jesus. It calmed me.
Was Jesus really sitting there in a rocking chair beside my bed in a hospital in Winter Haven, Florida?
I don't think so.
I think our brains are wonderful and amazing and when we are physically or mentally most challenged, they kick in with all sorts of good drugs and yes, even visions and voices that calm and reassure us. I mean, a scientist with an electrode-wired football helmet can recreate these things. This, to me, is not proof of god, but proof that we have evolved in strange and wonderful ways. I don't see the fingerprint of god, I see the firing of neurons of a stressed (or trained, in the matter of the meditators, the prayers, the chanters) brain to help us get through a dire situation, just as our bodies release adrenalin when we need to lift a car off a child.
But then, I don't have the god gene.
Which doesn't mean I don't find comfort and joy in the way things work. It doesn't mean that I don't feel the wind and see the rain and see the grandeur in them. It doesn't mean that I don't see the miracle in the seed, the beauty in the brain.
But here's the problem for me- if my brain doesn't work correctly and the wrong parts get over-stimulated or under-stimulated and instead of feeling the presence of god, I feel terror and anxiety when there is no reason to, would I then have to believe in the fingerprint of satan? Would I have to believe that I am possessed by an evil spirit?
Because if I am to believe that when the brain gives me this feeling of other-presence, this all-is-one, all-is-well message that this is god's fingerprint, when the opposite happens, how can that be just a brain dysfunction?
Have you ever injured yourself severely? Severely enough to feel that rush of morphine-like chemicals the brain floods the body with when it's hurt? If you have, you know that feeling of calmness which can overtake the anxiety and pain of the injury. I think this is a beautiful thing and a way the body takes care of itself but hardly proof of god.
Ah well. We all see the fingerprint of whatever we want to see. And I'm of the opinion that we really know so very little about how our brains work, how things relate and communicate from one quark to another, from one mind to another, from one plant to another. But I think we should be wary of interpreting what we do know to mean that god is involved.
Because for every person whose temporal lobe is activated who sees a loving god, who receives a message of peace and love, there is someone whose temporal lobe is activated who receives a message insisting that god wants him to spread the word that the infidels must die. Or that adulterers must be stoned to death. Or that women who were raped must be stoned to death.
Or that the world's end is at hand and we must all drink the Kool Aid.
We have to be careful with this stuff, this god-stuff. Your god might be loving and tell you to spread the word of peace, my god might be terrifying and spread the word of death.
And the wind could portend a coming storm or it could simply be the result of a weather disturbance down in the Keys which will blow itself out in a few days due to wind shears and water temperatures and other things I don't pretend to understand but trust that someone else does.
Which doesn't take away the ominous feeling the wind gives me.
I guess what I'm saying here is that the more information we have to help explain the things we feel as well as the things we see, the better off we are and that it's sort of ridiculous to me to try and use that information in rather twisted logic to explain that yes, there is a god, and in fact he left this place in our brain which can be activated to prove that.
Gotta be careful with this stuff. We still have all the lizard parts of our brains and we have all this more highly-evolved stuff too. It's all in there because we use it all and sometimes it tells us that god is with us and sometimes it tells us that the sky is falling.
And it can allow us to decide whether or not either of those things are true.
Amazing.
But not proof of god, at least for me.
You can read about the book and the author here.
Interesting stuff for our amazing brains to toss around and contemplate like the wind tosses the trees, like the sky contemplates the earth, like a soul contemplates the meaning of it all.

My Story, Part VIX. Perhaps The End. For Now.

Okay. So I've written about the sort of family that abuse can take hold in. I've written about being abused. I've written about how it has affected me as a child, a teenager, an adult, a mother, with my children, with my husband (peripherally, at least) and with myself.
What's left?
Not much, I would think, except for the fact that it has and will affect everything in my life for the rest of my life and I know it. But I do know it. And because I had a wonderful therapist and spent years going to a 12-step survivor group and because I am a thinking person and because I have done a lot of reading (and I haven't mentioned it, but the book The Courage To Heal is a mighty work of help for anyone who was sexually abused and is also helpful for anyone who loves a person who was sexually abused), I think I can recognize when I am reacting blindly to a situation because of my abuse and when I am not.
Most of the time. Sometimes. Certainly not always.
My therapist pointed out to me once that the anger I was feeling in the days in which she was treating me probably wasn't anger at all. It was sadness and sorrow.
"How do you feel when you're angry?" she asked me.
"Powerful," I had to admit. Because I did. Even though I hated waking up filled with an unreasonable and horrible anger and even though I knew it was toxic and harmful not only to me but especially to my children and my husband, I still liked, on some level, feeling that power that anger gives you.
"And how do you feel when you're sad, when you're very, very sad?" she asked me.
"Weak. Terrible. Vulnerable."
She sat back and waited for me to figure it out.
"Your anger was important when you were young," she finally said. "It served a purpose. It did make you feel as if you had power. But now- you don't need that power. You're the adult. You can allow yourself to feel sad about what you went through. You can allow yourself to grieve over the losses you suffered through the abuse."
Wow, I thought. Wow.
And eventually, and slowly, as I integrated this information, this insight, the anger dissipated. To be followed, of course, by probably a year's worth of grieving, of sobbing and weeping and gnashing of teeth and yes, I probably rended a garment once or twice.
Phew. The hurricane of emotions which overtook me for those years was something else. I had to go through it all. The anger, yes, and the sorrow and the grief and the sense of loss and the realizations- all of it. I had to feel every bit of it. There was no stopping it. Once you get on that train, you can't jump off before you get to the station. And you also can't get out of baking cupcakes for the children's classes for Valentine's Day and you can't get out of cooking dinner or scrubbing toilets or giving birth or doing the million and one things that life requires you to do when your ticket's been punched for the journey of life.
So I did it. I somehow managed to do it all, the journey of the life I was currently living and the exploration journey of the life I had lived which had led me to the current journey and I will frankly say that:
(a) I don't think I did a very good job as a mother or wife during those years, and
(b) I can't go back and do it again.

I also can't go back and say "What if the abuse had never happened? What sort of person would I be?"
But being human, I do. I wonder about that. Not too much. It's a moot point but I really wish I knew which parts of me are there due to my own natural soup of genes and which are there because I was sexually abused as a child. Or hell, what sort of person would I be if my birth father hadn't been a drunk? If my mother's father hadn't made her so afraid to ask for help? If my mother hadn't suffered depression or had been able to get help for it?
You see, it all goes back and back and back and at this point, I'm not blaming. I'm just...wondering.
Who would I be if my parents had been healthy people who could have had some energy left over to offer their children more affection and more positive reinforcement? If I had had parents who showed love and affection to each other instead of poisoned, thinly veiled resentment and, oh well, I'll go ahead and say it- hatred for each other?
Who would I be if I hadn't spent time on my knees praying for release from the abuse with no answer?
Who would I be if I hadn't spent years and years and years quite literally in a state of fear?
That's the main question I ask because that seems to sum it all up.
Would I be the sort of person who believes in herself and the world and has a little more trust? Would I be able to experience joy and pleasure as a human birthright instead of immediately looking around to see what horror is about to befall me? Would I be able to go through life feeling less guilty and therefore far more productive and capable? Would I be less afraid of change? Would I be less apt to be self-loathing? Would I have wasted so much of my life suffering for no apparent reason other than the need to suffer? Would I be able to love and give of myself more freely?
Oh. On that one- YOU BET! And I know it and I hate the fact that my abuser robbed not me, but the ones I love of my ability to love as fully and openly as I would like to, as they deserve.
I hate him for that.

So have I ever confronted the man?
In my dreams, a million times. I tell him to get away from me! To not touch me!
Physically and in real life?
Not really.
One Friday night, back in the days when Mr. Moon and I went out every Friday night and one of my younger brothers was with us, he told me a story about something his father (my abuser) had done to him. I don't even remember what it was now. But it made me so horribly angry, so violently enraged that I got up, went to the owner of the restaurant where we were and asked him if I could use his phone in the office to make a long-distance call. This was in the days before cell phones. He said, "Sure," and with my brother behind me, I got the number from information of my stepfather (I hated even saying his name out loud) and I called him.
I gave him holy hell. I told him that what he had done to me had scarred me for life and that what he'd done to my brothers had scarred them for life and that he was evil and that if he ever touched another child (and this was way too late, but I said it anyway) I would find him and I would kill him.
He was confused. He first said he'd done nothing to any of us. Nothing.
Then, when I handed him examples on a flaming tray of silver, he said something which seemed to indicate that I'd never really minded what he'd done. That in fact, I'd probably enjoyed it.
My blood boils as I type this.
I remember when I talked to my therapist about confronting. She'd said that to her mind, it wasn't necessary. That when confronted, abusers typically at first denied and then did exactly what my stepfather had done to me- try to shift the blame to the victim and then claim they'd enjoyed it.
So I guess the man had gotten the Sexual Abuser's Handbook and had the responses memorized but I'm glad I did that, made that call on a Friday night. My brother appreciated it. I know he did.
And isn't it funny that I could never find the courage to confront on any level for myself, but I could, for my baby brother?
I'm not fooling myself. I did it for me, too. But my rage for my brother fueled my ability to do it.

And I guess that's all I have to say about the subject right now. Maybe I'll write more later. Maybe twenty minutes after I post this. Maybe not for a year. I don't know.
But I do know that everything I write about, every thing I think, every action I take, every choice I make, every dream I don't allow myself to have, every dream I do, is in some way related to the way I was raised up and treated as a child.

That's the bottom line.

I hate it when people say to me, either right out loud, or as an inferred statement, that it's time I "got over it." That what happened to me has happened to so many. And so many have gone through much worse! And forgiven their parents! Their abusers! And have lived happy, normal lives.
I want to scratch their eyeballs out. I want to say, WELL GOOD FOR THEM! I want to ask them what they're hiding. Why they're defending my abuser. Were they abused and are they refusing to admit it? Or did they abuse someone?
I don't want to go through life crying poor, poor me. But I refuse to pretend that nothing ever happened to me or that if it did, it didn't affect me or even if it did affect me, it happened so long ago that really, I should let it all go.

I look at it like this: If you starve a child, quite literally starve her when she's very, very young and in the process of growing brain cells and bones and teeth, she will not develop as she should. She may grow up and she may even look normal when she begins to get proper nutrition. But that brain, those bones, those teeth- they'll never be as strong and healthy as they should have been. Never.
And children who were abused were starved of their rights to grow up without fear, without shame, without help, without hope, without joy, without knowing in their souls that love can be healthy and sane and good.
And even when they grow up and move out they will never have the true and real basis to recover all of these things.

I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just a bitter and unloving person and I would be, no matter how I was raised.
But I don't think so.
I think at heart, my heart is good. I think I have talents, I think I have a wicked sense of humor, and I think that I have even taken the skills and defenses that I needed to survive as a child and have been able to use some of them in productive and healthy ways. I think I have a genetic predisposition to depression that would be here even if I had never been abused or if my father had been a healthy part of my life. I think I have a wonderful, amazing life. I think I somehow managed to raise four kids who are the most incredible human beings I have the honor to know. I think I have, by some miracle, been blessed to have been loved by this man I call my husband who has stood by me through so much shit, offering his hand, his heart, his steadfastness.

I think I am luckier than most.

And what I want to say is that if one person who has read this has recognized parts of his or her own story and who can think to him or herself, "Oh. Maybe that's why," gets help then it will have been worth the weird pain I've experienced, going back to search my memory to tell it.
And if one person reads it and wonders if a child he or she knows is going through what I went through and does something to stop an abuser, to protect a child, then it will have been so much more than worth it.

Childhood sexual abuse was a hot, hot topic years ago. Oprah talked about. Roseanne talked about it. It got a lot of attention and there was a lot of light shone on the subject.
And then the next celebrity cause came about and it dropped off the radar again and people stopped talking about it.
But you know what didn't stop?
The sexual abuse of children.
That did not stop. Believe me.
And I don't know if it ever will. But the more people know about the subject, the more people can recognize the symptoms of its happening.
So here I am, saying this is how it happened to me.
Pay attention. Not just in your own family, but in the families of people you might know. Neighbors, relatives, that weird little kid down the block who can never look you in the eyes.
Please.
And if it happened to you, know that it wasn't your fault. It isn't your shame. And that if your abuser is still alive, he's probably still abusing and to not speak up is allowing him to do to other kids what he did to you.

Now. Thank you to every one who listened to this story. Who took the time to read it. Who thought about it. Who commented on it or didn't.
Thank you to my friends who have known my story but not in such detail, who have held me up when I was drowning, who have made me laugh when I was sorrowful, who have listened when they probably did not want to listen.
And mostly thank you to my husband and my children who have allowed this crippled woman to try and find her feet, her heart, and who have had to suffer through this awful journey with me and who still love me.
I beg their forgiveness for whatever mistakes I've made (and do still make), whether due to the fact I was abused or just the fact that I didn't give them what they needed through selfishness or blindness.
I thank my children for the healing they have given me in so many ways I couldn't begin to tell them but which started from the moments of their conceptions.
And I thank my husband who has put up with more shit than any one man should be expected to, who has definitely listened when he had heard it all before again and again and again and who has taken the punishment he did not deserve and who still claims to love me and shows that he does, every day.
I owe so much to so many and I honestly doubt I would be here without them.

All right. I'm not accepting an academy award and I'm not even finishing up a book. But acknowledgments must be made.
And now it's time to move on and do the best I can with who I am and try, each day to remember love and compassion and to pick up the trash and to cook the greens and to grow the tomatoes and to get ready for the grandbaby and get back to work on a book and well, just to be me.

And to write about it all. Every glorious, boring, amazing, prosaic, strange, lovely and plain day of it.

Thanks for listening.

And Then Some Days

I swear, some days you're feeling like the luckiest girl in the world and everything brings you joy on some deep level whether it's the rain or the blooming flowers or the fact that you've kept a freaking begonia alive for a year and then some days you wake up and feel like they might as well come get you and put you in a deep well or give you a hearth to scrub endlessly or put you in charge of cleaning out all the kitty litter boxes in the world because really, you ain't good for nothing and the world doesn't need you.
That's me today.
Count my blessings?
Nah. I'm counting the piles of shoes on the dirty porch floor and the magazines spread out all over the house where I got up in the middle of reading one article or another to go do something else completely unnecessary and hell- why read magazines? Not like I'm going to go to a party where I need to discuss the world economy or the dangers of Canadian Geese to air travel. Air travel? What's that? That's for people who go somewhere. Who do things.
I spent three hours yesterday evening- three hours- weeding a bed where I wanted to plant two flats of phlox I'd started from seed. Which I did.
Now what? So what? I'll have phlox taking over the yard. They're basically weeds, people. I weeded so that I could plant WEEDS! For three hours!
Pathetic. I feel pathetic.
I look at my closet, spilling over with clothes I never, ever wear. I think to myself I should really get in there and go through things. Get rid of things. Pack the turtleneck sweaters away until next fall. But here's the thing- when you're as old as me, fall gets here so fast that you've barely needed to shave your legs twice before you're wondering where your sweaters are. Which means Christmas will be here in about two weeks.
Speaking of which, I've let last year's Christmas tree die. The one that I bought because it was six inches tall and that was about all the Christmas spirit I could muster and then some? Yeah. It's dead. Figures, right?
I don't know. Hormones? Bad chemicals? Not enough walking? (There's a sure bet.)
Yesterday Mr. Moon traced a path through the dust on his mirror with a finger. A zig-zaggy trail of shame. "Clean me!" it might as well say. His dresser is filled with enough keys to start up a car-lot full of vehicles, random cryptic post-it notes, a box full of change, give-away pens, peppermint candies and and various listening devices. I'm supposed to make order out of that and clean the dresser beneath it? Polish the mirror? Why? Who wants to look at him or herself anyway? No movie stars here.
There you go. That's my life. Or as it appears today. A dresser full of crap I'm supposed to clean, magazines all over the house I'll never read, cords for this device and that one, shoes to weed in, shoes to walk in, shoes to wear out to the chicken house. Shoes without their mates because the dogs like to drag one at time out into the yard, never to be seen again. A face I'd just as soon not look at anyway. A dead Christmas tree.
Hoo boy.
Yeah, the magnolias are blooming. So the fuck what? The chickens are cute. Who cares? I'm alive. Give it twenty years, I won't be.
And what'll I leave? A bunch of clothes I never wore, random piles of crap I bought at Goodwill, a flashdrive full of books I never finished writing, a few begonia plants I managed to keep alive and a legacy of depression.

All right. That's enough of that. I suppose I should go take a walk in the gray, windy day. Maybe I'll find the rest of the turtle. Maybe the blackberries are getting ripe enough to start picking.

Maybe I'll get my head out of my ass.

We can only hope.

Let Cher Point The Way

So the person I wrote the Cher post for- yes, that post, the one that got at least twice the number of comments I've ever gotten on my best day- finally read it.
In the interests of showing the world that Daddy B is the funniest guy in the entire world and someone that everyone should know and who if you don't know him, is your grave loss, I am sending you back to the original post right here so you can check his comments as well as DownTownGuy's follow-up.
If you want to.
No pressure.
And why doesn't Daddy B have his own blog? I have no idea but I do know the world would be a richer, happier place if he did. And it would definitely have pictures of Cher on it.

This Is How Rich People Live

Those are the ingredients I made our supper from last night.
Salad greens, small red tomatoes, onions, peas, potatoes, two green tomatoes and grouper, just caught, just cleaned.
I picked the vegetables from the garden and Mr. Moon picked the grouper from the sea and if I've ever eaten a better meal, I don't know when.
Before I started cooking, we sat out on the porch and had a drink and I said, "I feel like one of the richest people in the world," and I did, sitting there on the steps and looking out at the trees, my old house solidly behind me, my man sitting there a few feet away, knowing I was about to go in and make a feast out of that food.
It had been threatening rain for an hour. Great black, bruised sky, distant thunder, and my daughter, when I talked to her on the phone said it was pouring in town.
"If it rains, I WILL be one of the richest people in the world," I said and then it began. A few drops, heavy, splattering into the dry dirt and then it came, great curtains of rain and we sighed with the coolness, the flat-out miracle of water falling from the sky onto these trees, this dirt, this tin roof.
I put my hands under a torrent of it as it spilled off the roof and caught some and brought it to my mouth and it was the sweetest water I ever drank, sharp and cold.
"Oh," we said. "If it would only rain for hours," and then it did. It rained all night, a soft pattering of it as we hopped through the puddles to go check on the chickens, cozy in their coop, sleepy-eyed and curious. It rained as I steamed potatoes and peas and it rained as I made a sauce of onions and red peppers and butter and flour and milk to go on them. It rained as I rinsed the grouper fillets and dredged them in panko bread crumbs and chopped pecans and laid them tenderly on the cooking sheet and baked them. It rained as I cut up the green tomatoes to fry and it rained as I made the salad, dressed it with olive oil and lemon juice and vinegar and soy sauce and toasted sesame seeds.
It rained as we ate all that food and it was so good we never wanted it to end.
And it rained as we went to bed and it's drizzling this morning and the air is cool and magnolia blossoms are opening on my tree and the train just rushed by, not slowed down one bit by the rain but me? I am stopping and being grateful for it.
I am listening to the sound of the earth receiving its holy waters, its baptismal rain, its miraculous wetness while the wind tosses the trees in its wake as it travels across the planet.

I am reveling in my wealth.

Pictures From May 17th, 2009 (Click, click, click)

Dragonfly on beginning-to-bloom blue hydrangea.

Oak Leaf hydrangea.


Cubanelle Pepper

Ripening Roma tomatoes.

Ripening another type of tomatoes.

Blue potato blossoms.

Beloved chickens.



Beloved giant begonia.

It's A Wrap

So we're done. We've killed Mr. Withers for the last damn time and we had so much fun last night, knowing it was our last performance. Our directors, those two beautiful people in the middle of that fuzzy picture, realized that they were no longer the directors, per se, but more like the zoo keepers because every damn one us, including the corpse, threw in ad libs.
Of course some of us had been doing that from the beginning but it took a while for everyone to warm up to the idea and throw off the constraints of the script and just let 'er rip.
It was in interesting night, I have to say. The audience was the best we'd had, happy but not stupid drunk, interactive but not creepy.
And there you go, done. Natasha can hang those heels on the wall.

I never once fell over, tripped or stumbled on them, which is a sort of miracle.

And now, back to the real life miracles of life here in Lloyd. Mr. Moon called at nine-fifteen this morning and I was still asleep. They'd fished all they needed to fish and were coming in.
He sounded happy. Very happy. The kind of happy that a man is when he's eaten red meat, fished well, and been with his buddies.
A successful weekend for him and a successful weekend for me. He's bringing in fish and I brought in laughs. A perfect metaphor for us. Everything he does results in something concrete and real whereas most of the things I do result in...uh. I'm not sure.
Clean laundry, yes. A meal, for sure.
But mostly what I do seems to result in ephemeral shimmers of this or that. Even the things I spend money on are never going to bring any result but pleasure or, well, a clean floor or a meal. But when he spends money, it's always an investment. A boat, a car, a motorcycle.

The man sold his first herd of cows at the age of five or something. Seriously.
He's been doing deals ever since.
When he first started selling cars I was slightly aghast. "Honey," I told him, "You can't be a car salesman. You're too damn honest!"
Turns out that's a good thing, even in a car salesman. The only problem is that the cars he sells to people last so long and serve them so well that they don't need a new one for years and years. Drat!
But when the do need a new one, they generally come back to him so it all works out.

There are a lot of things I want to talk about here soon. Friendships. True love. What we should look for in our true loves AND friendships. The miracle and magic of those.
Heirloom beans, my new car, spiders in the southern home, giant begonias...
Oh hell. I don't know.
And I need to finish up my story. I guess. Maybe I'm at the point where everything I write is a sort of continuation of it.
Probably.
Well, stay tuned if you want to hear about any of these things or well, chickens. There's always the chickens to write about.
And the weather. Can't beat the weather for a subject. My prediction for the weather here in North Florida is that it's going to get hotter every day until sometime next October. And we'll be worrying about hurricanes soon. Trust me on this.

Now I think I'll go wander around and look at my dirty house and try to make myself do something about it before Mr. Moon gets in with his fishy, salty bounty, his beautiful face and his sweet, long arms that I hope he'll wrap around me and then turn that beautiful face to mine and find my mouth with his for a real-big-man-comin'-home-from-fishing kiss.
The Methodists next door have gathered for their Sunday worship services.
Me too. I'm worshipping.
For hymns I have the birds' songs, the buzzing of the crickets and the stillness of the sweet Sunday morning in Lloyd.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. Or something like that.
Amen.
Amen.

Working On My Communications Badge

Saturday morning and a whole day ahead of me stretches out like a sky full of question marks and I don't need to be anywhere or do anything until I have to be at the Opera House at six.
Tonight's our last performance of this particular play and all I can say about that is thank god. I think we've all grown incredibly bored with it although the audiences (sold out!) are still enjoying it. They eat their diner dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes inbetween scenes while we sit in the director's office and eat cold cuts and crackers and sometimes hummus and also baby carrots with Ranch dressing and talk about how badly we suck that particular night.

Last night I had two complete brain farts and my mind was as blank as the side of a brand-new refrigerator and my brain was blinded by the great glaring reflection of light from its surface and how I could do this after all this time and with so few lines to begin with is beyond me but I did and I stumbled forward and the gears engaged again and the machinery chugged back into life and the play AND the world went on.

Imagine that.

Those were not the worst moments of the performance for me though. No, that particular honor goes to the moment in the conga line (yes- conga line- I told you this play was ridiculous although I have come to love the song Cuba Pete as done by Desi Arnaz) when I realized that some old man with a toupee had his hands on my body and didn't appear to want to take them off. Natasha, not me, shook him off roughly and stamped back up to the stage on her witchy high heels and took her place beside Boris, wishing the knife she had in her bag WAS NOT MADE OF PLASTIC.

Audience participation should only go so far in my opinion.

And I don't even want to discuss the crazy guy who asked me to bite his neck.
Natasha is NOT a vampire, folks. She's an assassin.

Ah well.

There were a few good moments, too.

After the play Kathleen and Herb and another fellow named David followed me home and Herb and David checked the perimeter and the chickens and all was well and it was peaceful in Lloyd and I checked my e-mail to find that a good friend was in the hospital with diverticulitis and that made me so sad. He'll be all right but it's hard for me to imagine this man in the hospital or even laid low at all by anything, he's such a force of nature. Such a fiery flinging of sparks.

And then I slept and here I am, sitting on the porch and the man who mows is here and I'm drinking coffee and a smoothie (recipe: about a third a cup of plain, nonfat yogurt, a handful of frozen strawberries, a little less of blueberries, a few pieces of pineapple, a half a banana, about an eighth of a cup of flax seed, a squirt of honey, some almonds- blend up with just enough orange juice to liquify the whole thing) and I've read the paper, even the letters to the editor including the one from a Boy Scout from Troop 51 who thinks that if Bush had put up some sort of barrier (not necessarily a wall) between Mexico and the US it would have prevented the swine flu and also, he is a conservative so even though he didn't "willingly accept President Obama's foreign policy" it is his duty to serve his country whoever is in office. He also apologized for his "horrid handwriting, spelling, grammar and views that could possibly offend" and you have to love the little guy for that. I hope he gets his communications merit badge which the letter was one of the requirements for.

And that's me today. I don't think I've written anything that would offend unless you're that man you had his hands on my body and I've given you a recipe and offered you the opportunity to view a fine video of a fine Cuban man and his beautiful wife, dancing and singing and displaying the reason they were America's sweethearts and so I think I've done my job here at blessourhearts. Spelling and grammar?

I ain't apologizing for shit in that department.

Go drink your smoothie.

And as Kathleen would say, "Have a lovely day."

Ms. Moon Gets Her Natasha On

Do you ever find yourself doing something and wondering, "What the fuck am I doing?"
Yeah. Me too.

It Rained. Let's Dance

Friday. Mr. Moon has the boat pulled out of the GarageMahal and is getting ready to scrub 'er down. He was hoping that last night's rain would do the job for him but since the rain was not very heavy and since the rain had no bleach in it, he has to do it himself.
But it did rain.
I got out in the garden yesterday afternoon and finished up the weeding where I wanted to plant the zinnias and then worked in some chicken shit and planted the tiny winged seeds. I tucked them into the dirt and patted them down and a few drops of rain began to fall. Nice. I love zinnias. They are as important to my garden as potatoes, probably more so than squash. They come in crayon colors, they are simple, uncomplicated flowers with happy faces and they cut beautifully and I love to bring them in the house and put them a vase. They make me smile every time I pass by where they sit.
So it was lovely to get those seeds planted in a fertile, cozy bed and then I made a good supper and we ate it and the rain pattered down and it was still pattering when I went to bed.

It's been a long week somehow. A funny one here at blessourhearts. My throw-away post on Cher got me far more comments than anything I'd ever written with blood, sweat and tears which is hysterical. As DownTownGuy pointed out, it's easy to talk about Cher.
Then I got everyone riled up talking about birth. I did not mean to do that.
But there you go.
I put out the words and god only knows where they'll land, which part of the heart or funny bone they'll tickle.

Speaking of which, next week is my blog anniversary. Two years. I was thinking of having a little party. Like, maybe at the Black Dog, for you people who live here in the area. We could all meet up and say, "Hey! I'm Wrecking Ball!" "Hey! I'm HoneyLuna!" "Hey! I'm Magnum!" or DowntownGuy or Lady Lemon or whoever shows up. We could all get hypercaffienated and discuss blogs. I think it might be fun. Or weird. Imput? Somehow it would be more fun and easier for me to celebrate the blog which is mine, all mine, rather than my birthday which is somehow tied to other stuff like How I Met My Mom (on the day I was born) and so forth.

Tonight I'll be putting on my make-up and jewelry and going to play Natasha again. Last week, while I was getting ready, I took a before and after picture and was going to do an entire post on "Why Women Wear Make-Up" and it would only be those two pictures. I think I'll post them here now.



Looking at these I realize I should put on mascara and lipstick the minute I wake up instead of waiting until I need to go onstage.

So that's it. Friday morning. I must go get my baggy shorts out of the dryer so I can get ready for yoga where I can now do a wide-stance forward bend and rest my head so comfortably on the floor that I could probably fall asleep there. I'm old but I'm flexible.

Happy Friday, y'all.
Put on your lipstick.
All the world's a stage. Dress appropriately.

Excuse Me!?

Wanda- Wait. You had twins? With your wife? Hold on. I wasn't ready for this information.
At least you had the decency to get married on my very own anniversary.
Congratulations, honey. You tart-tongued lady.
(Grumble, grumble, grumble.)

Wah-Wah, Part II, Oil On The Water

My loves- What I said in the last post was not about being critical of each other and our choices. Let's get that straight. We all make choices that we think are best for our children and which we are, out of necessity, forced to make, from the moment we know we have conceived until they lay us in our grave. That is what being a mother is.

NO! What this post was about is the fact that our system here in the United States of America which we use to deliver 99% of our children, is broken, while proven and far more cost-effective methods of doing the business of birth are available. AND that the very system which is broken has ensured that we are not aware of that, are for the most part not given the opportunity to learn about it easily, and that if people REALLY KNEW THE TRUTH, they would be up in arms.
I don't know if the AMA is the richest and most powerful lobbying group but I knew their bank account and efforts are not too shabby. Throw in the fact that they are hand-in-glove with the insurance industry (which probably IS the richest and most powerful lobbying influence in the country) and you have a Goliath which is going to take a lot of brave women to overcome.

That's what I'm saying. I'm also saying that everyone who has not seen this movie, should.

The whole topic is so sensitive because we all feel that perhaps we could have done better or perhaps we feel we were cheated or perhaps we feel judged and that is part of my point. There is research which proves that the best way to deliver babies safely and with better outcomes physically and emotionally for both the mother and child is NOT the way we do it. And that women do not know this. We have been lied to. We have been told that "the doctors will take care of everything."
And in their defense, I will say that they are not taught how to deliever babies naturally. They are taught to look for pathologies. They are taught to rely on technology. They are taught that natural birth is fraught with danger.

My favorite OB in the world, a tiny humble man here in Tallahassee told his son, when he was in school to become an OB himself, to "follow the midwives around." He told him that because he said, "They're the ones who know how to deliver babies."
Amen.
Very few doctors are this wise. But there are a few. And there are a few brave enough and educated enough to provide back-up for midwives. This doctor in Tallahassee has been one of those for years.
When I was going through a residence program for prenatal care years and years ago, I told "my" doctor that I was planning on a midwife assisted birth and he freaked. Absolutely freaked. He brought in this doctor, who was at the time the head of that residency program and had me repeat my desire to deliver at home.
"Okay," said Dr. Brickler. "If you run into any problems, come on into the hospital and we'll take care of you." He smiled and left the room.
My doctor stood there, open-mouthed.

But he learned something that day. I hope he remembered it. I will never forget.
Dr. Brickler was giving me options.

Which is what we should have, just like Miss Bliss said in her comment on that last post. She lives in Canada.

Not everyone wants a hospital delivery. Not everyone wants a home birth. Not everyone SHOULD birth at home. Not everyone SHOULD birth in the hospital either. There are many, many factors involved in the decision and they should all be considered wisely and calmly.

Which is how I would like this discussion to go. Wisely and calmly.

Like Dr. Brickler, bless his soul, his heart, his hands.

Now. Let's all step back and agree that all of us are doing and have done what we considered to be the very best thing for our children and that we should all have facts, not lies and made-up fear-based bullshit to base our decisions on. And THEN, we should be able to get the sort of help we need to have the sort of birth we want. We should not be angry at each other. We should be angry at the system which has failed us and which continues to fail us and which robs us of our rights, our power and the information we need and replaces them all with gleaming technology and thinly veiled threats.

And watch the movie. The Business Of Being Born. Just watch it. Whether you've had all your children or whether you've never had a child and don't even plan on having one. Because this is a discussion which needs to be had because the way we birth our children, the way we treat our mothers and our babies affects all of us in the end.

And the image above is from the movie.

Giving Me A Wah-Wah

Got the saddies today, as my friend Sue used to say, and I don't know why. Maybe it was my dreams which have been Wes Anderson-like in their complexity and casts of interesting characters and houses. Last night's were not so fun, although I can't remember much about them but know I woke up with a heaviness in my heart.

It's another beautiful day here, still with a fresh morning coolness, and blue of sky and that, perhaps, is part of it. We need rain desperately. A few months ago when the blackberries began their blooming, I was thrilled to see what looked to promise a bounty of berries. Vast plots of white-blooming bushes, and now they're setting the berries but with no rain, how can they end up being anything but hard and sour instead of bursting with juicy sweetness? Picking blackberries is such hard work. It's always way too hot, it's a snaky, buggy business and the thorns of the plants rip your clothes and flesh but if there is anything that makes me feel richer than having bags of frozen blackberries or jars of sweet preserves, I don't know what it is and so the work is always worth it.
And I was looking forward to that work. I was.

So there you have dreams and drought but here's another thing:
Yesterday HoneyLuna brought over the movie The Business of Being Born, the documentary made by Ricki Lake and Abbie Epstein. She had watched it the night before and wanted to see it with me. We watched it and it was great. Every pregnant woman should watch this movie. But I felt as if I had seen it over and over again already in my life. Nothing has changed in the birth business in over thirty years except that the medical interventions are growing worse and with them, the infant mortality rate in the US. I loved seeing the footage with Ina May Gaskin, the patron saint and goddess of birthing women everywhere in the world. They had old footage from when she was a realitively young hippie midwife, delivering babies on the Farm in Tennessee and new footage of her discussing birth practicies today. Her book, Spiritual Midwifery was the seed this movie grew from. Ah. That book. I know it like the back of my hand. I know it like I know the faces of my children. It inspired me, it enlightened me, it trained and advised me. It still does.
But I didn't learn one damn thing from that movie and you know why? It's all stuff I've been saying for over thirty years. That every intervention they do in the hospital leads to another which leads to another, ending up in a 40% C-section rate with mothers believing that the mighty doctors saved their babies' lives while if they had been surrounded by supportive and knowledgeable midwives who helped them let their bodies do what women's bodies were designed to do, their babies would have been born naturally and safely and they, too, would have known the feeling of ultimate joy and accomplishment and love that comes with the birth of a child. It makes me despair for the human race, it really does. Dr. Michael Odent was discussing the "love cocktail" of hormones that enfold a mother and her baby when birth occurs naturally and over its own time and I told Jessie that really, our society doesn't want women feeling the incrediblely passionate need to nurture and protect their young these hormones deliver along with the baby. Too many women would refuse to go back to work, leaving their six-week old infants in someone else's care.
And I really believe that.
Jessie, who is planning on going to nursing school and probably doing her time in L&D before she goes on to become a midwife asked me, "Am I going to have to go along with the way the hospital does things?"
And I said, "Yes. You are."
She asked, "Will I forget what natural birth is supposed to be like?" And I said, "No, you won't."
And she won't. Because it's in all of us, this knowledge. Hell, it's in our DNA or the human race would not be here now. And I honestly believe that a lot of our problems with postpartum depression can be explained by the fact that women aren't allowed to give birth the way nature worked out so many eons ago.

So that made me sad because women don't have the slightest idea what their bodies can do. They think "why have pain?" if there's no reason. Because no one talks about the reasons. No one talks about the ecstacy which follows it. And don't even get me started on how, if you try to talk about the incredible sensuousness of holding and nursing your child you're labeled as a sicko-lacto-Nazi, trying to push your weird agenda on others.

And then Mr. Moon is going fishing this weekend. Which I want him to do. It's time for him to get his Viking genes humming, to get out on the water with men and fishing rods and forget about the stuff that happens on land. I love it when he can do that and I love it when he brings home fish meat for me to cook.
Besides, I love having time to myself. Mr. Moon is a bit worried because of the recent crime wave around here. He wanted me to ask one of the kids to come out and stay but really- what good would that do? Kathleen and Herb (my Boris, her boyfriend) have offered to come home with me after the performances we're doing this weekend, which will be our last of this play, to make sure all is well here and I love them for that and it reassures Mr. Moon. Herb used to be a Marine and I feel certain he knows how to check a perimeter.
Plus, I have the dogs. And good neighbors. And a phone to call them on or the sheriff if need be.

And my magic turtle foot.

And I'll be glad to finish up this silly Killing Mr. Withers but I'll be sad, too. I'll miss my cast mates and our directors and our jokes and making the audience laugh. I will.

And one more thing- I went with my mother to see a neurologist on Tuesday. She's been having dizziness and headaches for over a year and her GP has sent her to the ear, nose, and throat guy, the balance and hearing clinic, and she's had MRI's and nothing has helped her and she suffers, she does. She can't go out and walk or play bridge or volunteer and it's making her crazy and depressed not to mention the fact that she's always in pain.
So we went to see this guy and he was as personable as, well, I can't think of anything with less personality. A rock has more interesting features, a bucket of dirt has the potential to grow worms or weeds or something. He offered his hand to me as if he were offering a wet tissue, and before I'd had time to barely grasp his fingertips he'd withdrawn his hand entirely, taking it back for himself.
He asked the questions, he did the pin-pricks, he said, "Follow my fingers, walk with your eyes closed," etc. And Mother did it all and I have to say I was proud of her, the way she responded and passed her tests and finally he said, "Well, this is very mysterious."
And suggested she get off her Lipitor and he'll see her in six weeks.
He left the room and Mother said, "I don't like him," and I didn't either. What a jerk. Would it be asking so much to show a little human courtesy to an eighty-two year old woman who has been in pain for over a year? And what if it IS the Lipitor and her doctor has sent her on all these adventures in medicine when the side effects listed for this hugely prescribed drug include many of her symptoms?
Ah. Back to the good old American way of doing health.

Well, as you can see, my canna lilies are starting to bloom and that is a sweet part of summer. The mosquitoes may be fierce, the ground may be bone dry, the heat may be intolerable, but the canna lilies bloom on.
And I may be sad and I may be having weird dreams and the medical system may suck and the fate of the whole human race may be in peril but I don't feel crazy. Boy. Am I grateful for that.

And much more importantly, Ina May Gaskin is still delivering babies, still writing books, still changing the world one birth at a time, and women are still discovering that what our modern way of birth is doing is not only making birth less safe but is also robbing them of the rights they have when it comes to having their babies- the most important thing they'll ever do. I am very grateful to Ricki Lake and Abbie Epstein for making that movie, for shining a lot on the midwives who still exist, despite a hundred years of the medical profession trying to kill them all with innuendo, smears, and lies. Midwives who drive the dark streets of New York City, even, to get to the mothers who labor in the night to deliver their babies at home.

And the world moves on and the chickens are growing and the clothes are hanging on the line and despite the drought, it's so green, so very, very green here in Lloyd. There may be criminals roaming the woods at night, jumping the fence and stealing our stuff, there may be weird gnawed off turtle feet on Main Street and the blackberries may be drying on the bushes, but it's okay. I'm here. And I'm glad. The cannas are starting to bloom, bright yellow in the yard, and I'm glad.

Some Days I Bring Home Flowers, Some Days I Bring Home Ferns

And some days I bring home a reptile foot from my walk.
Okay. This is the first time, to be truthful.
I think it is a turtle foot. A rather large turtle foot. Here. I'll do another picture.

Now who would cut off a turtle foot? And why?
So many mysteries in Lloyd. This one goes right up there with how the deer leg got into the little park by the post office last year.

If any of you think it's not a turtle foot and can ID it more professionally, please do.
Thanks.

Being Gay Is Not Evil. Unless You're A Politician.

Hey Charlie! Show us that wedding ring! That substantial band of gold which proves you're not a closeted homosexual. That Florida's own formerly dashing, preternaturally tanned bachelor-governor is as manly as any good Republican. Larry Craig included.

There's a new film coming out called Outrage which purports to have interviews with men who have had relationships (or at least sex) with politicians who have voted strongly against gay rights including marriage and adoption, who stand up in front of their constituents and promise to uphold traditional family values while living another life, a secret life, entirely.
Now if you know me at all you know that I am as supportive of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people to have every right that us heteros have as any one could be. This is not about that. If these politicians were open about their god-given orientation, I would say, "Go out and have all the sex you want with anyone you want. Not my business."
But when they refuse to admit who they are and hide the truth, it IS my business.

Why?
For several reasons.
One is that I like to be able to vote on a candidate based on at least some modicum of knowing who he or she is. And if someone is gay and doesn't come out with that fact, if, in fact, they get married to an opposite-sex person days before being short-listed to become a VP candidate during a presidential election, then there's a whole lot of denying the truth of who he or she is.
Now since Mr. Crist is a Republican, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'd vote for him anyway (to be perfectly honest myself) but still- a lot of people did vote for him who would not have if they'd known he was gay.

Which is disturbing but- dammit! If these personable, smart people would come out and say, "Look, I'm gay. I'm still a Republican, I'm still a good person," then perhaps the bigots would have to start changing their perception of what gay is. Instead, the whole issue is hidden and whispered about and treated like it's evil and the bigotry is allowed to go on. The subject is allowed to be ignored.

Mr. Crist's closeted lifestyle didn't bother me so much until he got married. That's when it really began to irk me. All this Republican talk about family values and here's a man in a completely sham marriage (I would assume) that has far less honesty and real love in it than a marriage between two people of the same sex who actually love each other enough to make that commitment honestly. While at the same time, denying those same-sex people the right to have a real marriage.
Or adopt children.
This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

I really wasn't even going to write about this until I saw that picture in the newspaper this morning with Charlie flashing that ring.
And you know what? I could be wrong. The makers of Outrage could be wrong. Perhaps Mr. Crist is as straight as an arrow, as hetero as Mickey Rooney, and I'm slandering him.

And perhaps Larry Craig just has a wide stance.

We've got an African-American president now. Or at least a man of color. Fifty years ago that would have been unthinkable. I am so proud of my country for finally getting past the prejudice which has enslaved us all for all these years and picking the most obviously qualified guy for the job.
And for all I know, we've had a gay president before. I wouldn't be surprised. But unlike being black, a person can hide being gay. And it makes me cringe to think that it's still something people feel they have to do to get elected. To be respected.

It just shouldn't matter. But in hiding the truth, these men are making it matter in a way that strikes me as plain old wrong. Hypocritical, dishonest and wrong. And it serves to shine a very bright light on the prejudices we still have because when these men become outed, as they are apt to be here in the age of cameras in cell-phones and outraged film makers, they find themselves in the million-watt spotlight of the media.

And they're standing there alone, having eschewed the support of the GLBT community by denying their part in it. And having also eschewed the support of people like me who would have respected them mightily for saying "I'm gay, get over it. Vote for me or don't but base your decision on my politics, not my sexuality."

And the worst part, the very worst part is that when these things come out (so to speak), it's all shameful and a scandal and reinforces, once again, the belief that homosexuality is evil and something which must be hidden whereas if the subject had been honestly dealt with from the very beginning, there would have been respect and support and integrity.
It is not evil to be gay. Or lesbian or bisexual or transgendered.
Just as women and people of color can and do achieve high office, so can gay people. Look at Barney Frank. He's as scrappy a politician you'll ever want to encounter and he's so out he takes his partner to White House functions.
HIM I respect.
HIM I admire.

Those poor guys who get busted having sex with other guys standing up there in the glare of the cameras with their shamed wives beside them trying to wiggle their way out of the obvious- those I do not respect or admire. They are only making things worse. Not just by voting against the rights that all citizens should have, regardless of their sexual orientation, but for being so self-hating, so sure that their sexual orientation would prevent them from being elected to public office that they have denied one of the most basic facts about themselves.

Look. It's no sin to be gay. It's okay.
But the longer our gay elected officials clothe themselves in the banner of straightness, hide behind heterosexual marriage and big old wedding rings, the longer it's going to take for a lot of people to get the message that being gay is just part of the wonderful diversity of humans.

Okay. That's my speech for today. I'm stepping off the soapbox now.

Feel free to step up and speak your piece.

Wordless Wednesday? Not here at blessourhearts. There's too much to say for that.

Cher, Darlin'. Let's Talk.

She's sixty-two.
Now. Is this get-up a beautiful and wicked fuck you to all the ageists?
Or is it....hmmm, slightly bizarre and freaky?
Or is it just damn wrong?
I'm having a hard time deciding. Part of me wants to say, "You go, girl!"
And part of me wants to say, "Oh, honey. Give it a rest."
I just keep thinking about all the surgery, the make-up, the wigs, the effort entailed in her being able to put this on and go onstage. I think about what she must look like after the wig is off, the make-up washed from her face and the body-suit and leather jacket stored in their trunk. Does she put on an old kimono, her real face tired and wrinkled and sit down to a nice bowl of Fiber One?
I remember years and years ago I would get really stoned and watch the Sonny and Cher Show and I would be mesmerized by the beauty that was Cher. Her face was all angles and big nose and cheekbones and she laughed at herself and there was so much realness there.

Well. I do know this- I'm pretty glad I don't get stoned anymore.

But what do you think? Daddy Billy, I especially want to hear your thoughts although there is the serious possibility that you will be so stunned with delight that you won't be able to type, so drunk with joy that you won't be able to copy your verification word. So joyous of heart that you'll find yourself floating on the ceiling, a goofy grin on your face, your beautiful real face.

My Story, Part VIII

Even before I even met C., I had a terrible body image. Mostly because I was fat and had been for as long as I could remember. My grandmother had all these lovely old-lady friends who really did love me to pieces but they gave me not-so mixed messages about my weight. For presents they gave me not only books but also things like jump ropes with the implied message that I should use them to "slim-down." I was about eight years old at the time. Believe me, the pressure to be thin wasn't invented yesterday.
The kids at school were not nearly so subtle. They just called me fat.
It was hard to find clothes so my mother and grandmother made me dresses. I have written about the pain of having to shop in the "Chubette" section of clothing stores and I don't think I'll ever quite get over that one. Chubette? The person who came up with that label should have been flogged until bloody.
Anyway, being sexually abused did not help with the body image thing. It was quite confusing, actually, to be treated in a sexual manner at all, having already, at the age of nine, gotten the message loud and clear that I was fat and thus, hideously unnattractive. Food and reading were my main sources of comfort and I could even combine the two activities which did not help. It wasn't so much junk food that I ate. My mother didn't keep much of that in the house. But I learned to cook at a very early age and when you can make a chocolate cake from scratch, you don't need Twinkies.
But here came C. and when he and Mother first started dating, he treated me as if I was as beautiful as any little girl on earth. I don't remember him saying this overtly, but somehow, I felt that. And I appreciated it. As would have any little fat girl. In fact, he made me feel special in all ways. He praised my cooking, he praised my intelligence. And so forth.
This is a very complicated subject. And a hard one to write about. But as I said before, even when a child is touched against his or her will, there is a part of the body which responds. Predators know this. They use it. And they also find the child who is so thirsty for praise and to be made to feel special that she will tolerate more than she should to get the praise and whatever is making her feel special. C. would take me down to work on the grove with him for the day and although that doesn't sound like much fun, it was something out of the ordinary and he would treat me as if I was an intelligent human being, not a bothersome child, and he would often stop and take me out to eat at a restaurant on the way home. I don't recall anything happening on those trips but I do know that after awhile, after the abuse had begun, I quit wanting to go with him and started refusing.
And then, when the abuse had finally stopped (the sexual abuse, at least), and I was just entering puberty with full force, my feelings about myself got very weird. Every time I would think about a boy I had a crush on, I would wonder if he thought about having sex with me. It seemed to me that the only reason a fellow would be interested in me was because there was some way to know that there was something about me that invited sexual feelings. Not that I was pretty or sexy but something that I did or some way I acted that sent off the message. Otherwise, why would my stepfather have done what he did to me? My fault, my fault. It had to have been my fault.
This is a common feeling, I now realize, and one I've had my entire life. What we tell ourselves, we survivors, is that our worth is in our sexuality and it ends there. Even when we're grown and no matter what we accomplish, we still seem to have this feeling.
It's called being "sexualized," I think, and whenever I see a very young girl acting in a way that seems to be far more mature, flirtation-wise, than would be expected for her age, I wonder what has gone on in her past. Who has taught her at such a young age that she can get attention and what she wants through this sort of behavior? Now don't get me wrong. I think all little girls have some idea of the power of the feminine but there is an innocence about most of this which is lacking in children who have been sexually abused. Girls who start having sex very early and relatively indiscriminately are also often victims.
Anyway, I lost a lot of weight when I had the creeping erruption and was no longer a fat child although I still felt that I was. Looking at pictures of me then, I see I was becoming, in fact, beautiful. But I had no idea at all. None.
But C. noticed. He kept telling me how pretty I was. How much thinner I was. This served only to creep me out and it's a wonder, looking back, that I didn't do everything in my power to gain weight and be fat again. I suppose I didn't because it hadn't mattered when I had been fat. He'd messed with me then anyway. And of course I didn't believe him when he told me I was pretty. Why should I? By then I trusted nothing he said, especially about me.
And besides, I liked getting attention from boys. I liked being able to shop in the normal-sized section. I liked, quite simply, not being fat.
In the ninth grade I achieved the stunning victory of becoming a cheerleader. Yes! Hippie Ms. Moon was a cheerleader. As corny as it sounds, I loved it. The try-outs were long and arduous. I practiced and practiced and practiced. And when I made the squad, I thought I had achieved the very tip-top of all and any aspirations I may have dreamed of. Fat girls do not become cheerleaders! And I loved my cheerleading sponser. She was our gym teacher and a mother and she was awesome and she treated us all with respect and humor and she took us seriously and she nurtured us. And hell, I loved being in front of a crowd. I loved wearing my coolio blue and red uniform to school on game days. I loved wearing saddle oxfords. They were so retro. I loved having cheerleading practice. I loved using my body in an athletic way for the very first time in my life. I think I liked that most of all. I had never in my life considered myself to have any athletic abilities at all. And here I was, doing back jumps and touching my head with my feet, doing splits, doing all this cool stuff and I was good at it! Back in those days, girls weren't given the opportunity to do much in the way of athletics. We had PE but that was mostly spent playing some hot, sweaty team sport that no one in their right mind would have enjoyed. Every year we had to do the President's Physical Fitness exam which was a nightmare for me and for most of us, I think. We had to do sit-ups, the flexed arm hang, run the fifty-yard dash, the one-hundred yard dash and do the standing broad jump. I sucked at all of it. Except the sit-ups. Those I could, for some reason, do.
But cheerleading was physical and I discovered I loved it.
I tried out again in high school and didn't make the squad. By then, I didn't really care so much and began to sort of disdain the whole cheerleading thing, although one of the coolest girls in my class and one I worshipped from afar, was on the squad. One of the biggest fakes was too.
It was about this same time that I got to go on a Girl Scout trip in the summer to a camping opportunity on a mountain in North Carolina. For some reason, my little band of Girl Scouts had no adult with us. Why? I have no idea. And we were in the highest camp on the mountain and so had to walk the longest way to tote our food up and down. It was terrific! We lashed tables and cooked on a fire and hauled water and bathed in an icy stream. We sang songs and we cracked jokes and I noticed that by the end of the two weeks, or whatever it was, my thigh muscles were amazing. This gave me great joy! I had muscles! Girls could have muscles!
Ah. The beginnings of Jock Girl.
And so I began to see that my body could be strong as well as not-fat. Big difference. And I liked both.
But I never, ever seemed to be thin enough. I never developed a full-blown eating disorder, but I flirted with it. I went for weeks, eating less than a thousand calories a day. I counted each stick of gum. I was proudest on the days when I ate less than five hundred calories. This went on all through high school. Counting calories. I actually fasted for several days before a prom. Not this new-age type of fasting either where you're allowed juice or maple syrup and red pepper or whatever that fast is. We're talking water. Now I know that starving oneself is a very inefficient way to lose weight but it was the only way I knew back then.
When I went back to school after having had mono, I was put in what we called "retarded PE" because it was for the kids who had physical challenges. I wasn't supposed to over-exert. Every day we played volleyball. Have you ever played volleyball with a group of kids who either weigh over two-hundred and fifty pounds or else have celerebral palsy or are dwarves? It loses its entertainment value quickly so I started walking the track with another girl who was in the class because she'd had some illness earlier in the year and never bothered to get herself out of retard PE. (Please- I don't mean to offend any group of people here. This was 1970 or something. We were not politically correct.)
Anyway, this girl and I walked the track and then we started running. I discovered that I liked to run. A lot. There was no teacher involved in this. No coach. Just me. And somehow I got in a track meet or something and ended up being the second-fastest girl in the school for the mile run.
I couldn't believe it. No one else could either. It was a fluke. I quit running.
And all my life, my weight has fluctuated. And I used to use what I realize now are punishing methods of to lose weight. Strict dieting, excess exercise. The usual. I never got into bullemia, thank god. But this continued into my adult life. Losing weight after having babies has always been difficult for me but finally I found Weight Watchers which taught me I could eat well and still lose weight. It was like dying and going to heaven for someone who thought she had to starve to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.
And I used Weight Watchers for a long, long time. I even worked for them.
But back to body-image and sexuality.
As I got older and the boys started paying more attention, I still felt that it was because they knew my dirty little secret. That's how it felt, as wrong as it was. I wasn't really pretty (I thought), I didn't have a pretty, cute little body, and so they must have wanted only one thing. And C.? He pretty much told me that all the time once I started dating. Mother somehow gave me this feeling too. That I used my sexuality to get boyfriends.
As if every sixteen-year old girl doesn't do that.
It was confusing.
Again, the hippie culture helped me out here. Bodies, in the hippie world, were all expected to be different and nudity was nothing special. When you're around a lot of nude people you realize that no one's body is perfect. At all. No one worked out in those days and and no one got plastic surgery except for Liberace and some women had tiny breasts and some women had enormous ones. Some women had tight little tummies and some women had bigger ones. Some women had no asses at all and some women had great, glorious ones. We were all different. We were all beautiful.
And we were. We were young.
And I started being able to see that my body was no more or less beautiful than anyone else's. When I got pregnant, I gloried in the way my body changed. For the first time in my life I loved having a big belly. And then- giving birth after twenty-eight hours of unmedicated, very difficult labor gave me a completely new and powerful feeling about my body.
I didn't hate it anymore. It had not only created life, it had safely and intelligently delivered it. I had experienced pain I didn't know I could experience, much less get through without drugs. I had, with my own body, my own work, my own sweat and pain and love and amazing strength, given birth to a perfect child. And then I managed to nurse that baby and produced enough milk for three, probably.
My body had given me the greatest love of my life- my child- and I was changed forever.
After all those years of thinking of myself and my body as tainted, as something cheap and not worth much, I had been shown quite startlingly and graphically that my body and my breasts could be used for the highest purpose of all- giving life and nurturing it.
That was the beginning of me respecting this gift- my own body. Of not thinking of it as something that was good for nothing more than a man's pleasure. Of believing that despite its "faults" it was beautiful.
And as I began to help attending other women in their home births, I began to see how amazingly well our women-bodies were constructed, how cleverly made, how strong they were, how infinitely beautiful, and I felt, for the first time in my life, that mine was truly as good as anyone else's. That no matter what had happened to me as a child, my body was my own and that I could use it for myself and share it only if I really wanted to. I had deserved that right.
When I say that my children have been my greatest teachers, I am not being sentimental or metaphorical. I am speaking what is merely the truth.
And the first lesson my first child taught me is that I am incredibly strong. And that my body does what it does incredibly well. And I believe quite frankly that having my children at home without intervention has been one of the greatest blessings of my life and has enabled me to believe in myself in ways I never would have if I hadn't.
And not only myself. When a woman is in labor, she becomes essentially a force of nature. She is a mountain, an ocean, a hurricane, a planet, the galaxy giving birth to a universe, and although things which have happened to her in her life may definitely affect how easily her body opens to birth, none of it really matters when she is in the midst of it. She is laboring with a power she knows is not entirely her own. It is the power of life.
Birth made me believe in life in a way I had never had before. All life. My own life, too.
I am still learning this lesson all the time. Even as I age, even as I have grown too old to have any more children. I am still learning how strong this body is, how even as it sags and grows wrinkles and does things with flesh and fat and tendons I would never have wanted it to do, it is still strong and can be made stronger. It serves me well in what I love doing.
And I can thank my children for that.
And I can thank Ina May Gaskin, too, who wrote and who still writes about the amazing strength and wisdom of women giving birth so elequently and well. And I can thank the women who midwifed me, who went before me in believing that giving birth at home was not only an option, but a great and spiritual experience. And also, it must be said, to the two husbands who have trusted me enough to allow me to do what I believed I could do. Who believed in me, too. Who helped me whole-heartedly.
Because of these people, because I was able to give birth at home, I learned that my body had not been ruined by my abuser. No matter how and where he had touched me, he could never, ever touch the core of my being in such a way to destroy my body's strength and even beauty.
And I don't think that if I had never had children the way I did that I would have known that.
I am blessed to have had the healing of giving birth.