the beginning of the end of an era

last night, and the night before that, rowan slept all night long.

she's been sleeping on a futon in our room for about 6 months, and we moved the futon to her room about a week ago. the first two nights were hell. i nursed her to sleep at the computer as usual, put her to bed, and put the baby monitor in her room and the receiver under my pillow. she woke and cried in the middle of the night and i went to lay down with her there and get her back to sleep--which was easier said than done. it took about an hour of nursing each time. uggh. but i was determined to do what it took to help her make it through the night in her bed, in her room. and it paid off--for two nights now we have both slept all night, without nursing or crying.

i took some proactive steps to help her make this transition--fed her TWO suppers, the latter just before nursing to sleep, so her belly was nice and full. and i've been tweaking the cloth diaper set up so she stays *really* dry at night. i'm still learning all the cloth diaper stuff since getting a new (used) cd stash of big girl sized covers and AIOs. (we cd'd when she was little, but when she potty trained during the day at almost 2, we switched to pull ups at night.) and i've been getting her into full length pjs so she doesn't get chilly legs when she kicks the covers off.

i'm ready for her to night wean, though i know she isn't completely ready to give up nursing altogether. and i'm so proud of myself for helping her sleep in her room without force or letting her cry--which is, in my mind, something akin to murder. i know some people feel they have to do it but it's just not a possibility for me. i have been blessed with two children who learned early on their needs would be met, period, and i've helped them to communicate as early as possible so that crying wasn't their only means to get my attention.

anyway, a small victory. i know i'm doing it right when we *all* are happy.

a few days of sweet freedom, then back to the mines

being out of school for a few days now has been positively ethereal. the house is maintaining some degree of order, we are eating 3 real meals each day, and the laundry and custome tie dye orders are caught up. if i were a cat i'd be curled up contentedly among the verdancy of our houseplants in the rare and beautiful late november sun streaming through our kitchen window. but i am most definitely *not* like a cat (i'm far too busy), and i keep finding other corners to improve, furniture to move, books that need to be re-organized...you get the idea. i'm positively domestic this week.

it's at times like this that i really feel ambivalent about my grad work. i want the freedom and career capital a master's degree will *supposedly* provide. but i want to end up homesteading, teaching my kids to keep bees and gather mushrooms, not sitting in a campus office. but i have an almost primal bias against quitting anything, so i plod on. there are definitely bright spots in the program thus far but each day i am faced with examples, writ small and large, of how my ideal life and my daily life do not, precisely put, dovetail.

the one shining light that i can still make out is the promise that my own research will eventually be able to be worked on. i owe that to the families i feel so much gratefulness and obligation to for taking the time and energy to help me flesh out exactly what this strange, and lovely throwback of a parenting strategy called attachment parenting REALLY is. boxes and boxes of data--about 2000 responses, each several pages long-- to be analyzed yet, but my current student/assistantship duties prevent me from taking the serious, big-chunk-of-time necessary to do that. when i get to the point that i can begin working on my thesis for credit hours, i can really concentrate on them.

:sigh:

a small break in the madness

it's midterms week for me and latt, and we just finished a belly dancing convention (shimmyfest) all weekend and are gearing up for an all weekend craft fair that starts tomorrow. furthermore, rowan's third birthday is thursday, and we have a Katrina evacuee couple coming to layover here for a few days this weekend.

in the midst of all this scurrying to and fro, my mama (bless her country heart) is here, visiting, doing laundry, cleaning countertops like i never seem to find time for, and most importantly, playing with rowan while we work madly. if she weren't here, rowan would be watching WAY too much kipper and dora this week!

as a lovely bonus, she stayed with the kids and latt and i were able to get a way for a VERY rare lunch date on sunday. we really never leave rowan, as we don't have those kinds of friends here in the area, so this was a really nice break. i got to flirt with my husband, have a conversation NOT interrupted a thousand times to keep rowan in her chair or keep jackson from just eating meat and bread, and even eat something with cheese in it (my kids are really sensitive so i usually opt out too, to keep things easier for them).

did i mention i got to flirt with my handsome husband?

heading south

i'll be out of pocket for a couple of days. it's my birthday on saturday and a friend has invited us to come play in honor of the occasion of me turning 31. a birthday party thrown just for me...i'm elated. almost takes the sting out of getting so damned old. i remember thinking 30 was ancient. but, now that i've passed ancient i still feel like an ingenue. i guess that's normal, huh?

from where i sit

this is the view from my computer chair. just one of the perks of marrying a starving artist.

down and dirty

I observed and wrote up the following field notes after visiting a local strip club with one of my professors as part of my work toward a master's in sociology.

Arriving at the club, I was coaching myself to just relax and enjoy myself. Since I had never before been to a strip club it was quite a new experience for me. When I went in and didn’t see my supervisor immediately I took a seat at the bar to give my eyes time to adjust to the dark, since I didn’t want to traipse around the very dark corners of the club looking for her. I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life saw a woman (to be honest, she looked like a girl) dancing for purely titillating purposes. Being a belly dancer, my preconceived notions of what "dancer" means were certainly tested by what I saw. The woman’s movements were more bump-and-grind than anything else—meant to simulate the sex act. There was a lot of writhing and leg-spreading and simulated masturbation as well. Furthermore, the term striptease really does not connote properly what the woman was doing, since she came out in a thong and bra and actually only removed her top. There was no foreplay, so to speak, no flirtation, no dance of the seven veils slowly revealing the mystery and beauty of the feminine form. I did not expect to see a purely pornographic display, and I was slightly embarrassed to watch, but didn’t know what else to do, given my circumstances. I was painfully aware of being the only woman other than the employees there, and could see the men looking at me, likely wondering about why I was there. This steeled my resolve: I was there to be a dispassionate observer and apprentice sociologist, so I determined to set aside my surprise and naive expectations and get to work.

Around this time my supervisor, M., arrived, having been stuck in traffic for a few minutes, and we took a seat. I was beginning to notice more details about the place we were in. It was much darker than most nightclubs I have been to in the past. It did not appear to be very clean, and it was quite small. I was reminded more of some of the bars I visited while in Beijing and Xian, China, than of the kind of bars and clubs in this area that don’t feature nudity. I had lots of questions and since M. had been observing, conducting interviews, and writing about the subject for years she had lots of pertinent information to share. The arrangement of the stage was such that there was a recessed level of seating around the "runway", and then other seats up a couple of steps with a few tables. More seating was at the bar; also a few steps up from the lower level nearest the stage. We were seated near the very end of the stage itself on the upper level. I noticed right away that all the patrons were sitting in seats relatively far away from the stage. I asked M. why no one was seated in the lower seating area. If they came to really see the dancers up close, after all, I would have expected them to be on what amounted to the "front row". Yet those seats stayed almost empty throughout the night. I assumed that the desire of the patrons to maintain the relative anonymity and complete observer status possible in the darker, higher-up seats was stronger than the more carnal desires that might push them closer to the action—but also into the "observed" area the rest of the club’s patrons all had their eyes on. I also wondered if research into primate hierarchy had any application here. Would there be "alpha males" or "silverbacks" willing to claim the seats closer to the stage and the women?

The dancers came out one after the other, announced by name. There were about 6 or 7 different dancers there that night. I noticed that the similarity in moves on the floor and "tricks" at the pole was striking. In belly dancing, each member of a troupe is expected to have her own style and to specialize in something—veil work, belly flutters, shimmies, etc.--while the most accomplished dancers have an entire performance (or more than one) full of mostly original takes on basic and advanced forms, choreographed into a seamless "dance". Here I was surprised at how many dancers did the exact same thing as the dancer before her. It left me feeling that what was expected here of the women, what worked best to get tips, was a cut to the chase, faceless display that was interchangeable from person to person. No one dancer left an indelible, memorable mark, due to the conformity. In belly dancing, the women make lots of eye contact with the audience—both with women and men. Here I saw some eye contact made by dancers with men who walked down to the stage to tip them, but almost none with us two women watching and talking intently. M. had said that the strippers would not know what to make of us—were we lesbians, were we somehow judging them, were we competition for the dollars and drinks men might otherwise bestow upon them? —and would therefore keep their distance from us, and she was right.

Soon a waitress who said her boss wanted to buy us drinks approached us. M. had told me to expect to be asked if we wanted jobs, so I figured this was the first step in what would become that proposition. I ordered water and she had a drink, and soon after began a conversation with the bar’s owner when he came over to chat. I liked her creed—"talk to anyone who will talk to you"—and basically sat back to watch her work. The first thing I noticed in her dialogue with him is that she took on a much more bubbly, less serious tone than I had noted in my conversations with her. Gone was the fairly serious academic woman I had met and spoken with, and in her place was an effervescent party-girl out for a good time who just loved hanging at strip clubs. I was so intrigued at this massive persona-shift that I had to ask about it after he moved away. She said she had learned early on in her research that if you go in like an academic, asking lots of questions and divulging your researcher status, people would shut down and tell you absolutely nothing. I wondered aloud after our observation how similar a process this was to what the dancers themselves do in their work. A highly empowered dancer who verbalized any genuine, negative feelings or thoughts about some of the things she sees, does, and has done to her, wouldn’t get tips or have a job for long, after all. Much more efficacious to play the part of a dancer who loves her work—loves to be stared out, and fantasized about. The club owner told us about one dancer onstage. He said she used to be a dancer at a big club in Houston and that she had made enough there to buy a trucking company, but that she was dancing again because "just can’t stay away from it". I asked, "Why do you think that is?" and without hesitation he shrugged and said, "She’s an exhibitionist". I wasn’t sure if he was trying to convince us, or himself, or if he truly believed it, but I had a hard time believing anyone independently wealthy would choose to dance on a Thursday night in a seedy dive in northwest Arkansas. But it must make everyone feel better about being there if they believe the object of their desire is there by choice, and even more so if she actually wants to be objectified as she plays out her own sexual fantasy of exhibitionism.

I said earlier that most of the dancers used the same moves in their performances, and several of them also looked the same. Though there were some exceptions in hair color and proportions, most were blond, slender, big-breasted (several had had breast-augmentation), "Barbie"-types. There were a couple of exceptions. One girl was very, very thin with long dark hair, and another was bigger than the others, with extremely short, brunette hair. Even her name was different—Shy. I was surprised to see someone looking so different (in reality, her physique was "normal", but compared to the other dancers she looked overweight). M. said she was new and when I asked how she knew (since this was her first time to observe at this club as well) she said, "Two things. She walks a little differently in her high heels, and she is bigger. If she is still dancing a year from now she will have lost weight". I thought her dancing style was a bit more explicit even than the other dancers’, and wondered if that was a kind of compensation for not being in the preferred, "ideal" physical state.

It was when Shy was performing that I first saw two men come down to the actual stage and stay there in seats, rather than just putting money on the stage and walking back to their seats.
They were mature men, in their mid to late 30s or 40s—the "alphas" I expected to see there, if primatological behavior has any application for humans in strip clubs. She "presented" a bit more openly to them, spreading her legs practically in their faces, and stroking herself. One of the men had a dollar bill in his hand and seemed to be taunting her with it, as she was prostrate before him. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but there was definitely a kind of teasing going on with the money. The dancer stayed on the ground writhing even more wildly and the second man also stood over her, as well. Their faces were hovering near her splayed crotch, and they were leering and holding onto the money instead of giving it to her, as if by doing so they could engage her longer, make her become even more revealing or somehow give them more than she already was. There was an overt dominant/ subservient aspect to the situation, and it was the only time I felt extremely uncomfortable and protective of one of the dancers. I really had to fight the urge to go down there and push them aside, which I know would have been wholly inappropriate on many levels. Had I been on the street and seen someone treating a woman in that way, no matter what her dress or behavior, I would have engaged the men angrily and put myself between them and her.

Soon after, we were propositioned by a very intoxicated man who seemed to assume he could have sex with both of us. Even after we said no thanks and let him know were married, he slurred "Me too, that’s ok". He was having trouble communicating in English. In my rudimentary Spanish, I told him no, that we were nice girls. His reply was so ironic that it really stuck with me: "That’s what I like, nice girls." We married women were being clumsily and repeatedly invited into a proposed threesome with a married man who preferred nice girls. It was surreal, and had I not been in that equally surreal space I would have responded with some choice words and possibly a physical reminder that my, and our, space was our own. Instead, we just moved to the bar. M. told me there that she was sometimes groped by such patrons, but I got the impression that she saw it to some degree as part of the job—the important thing being that she could continue to maintain her relatively undercover status and get more information for her research. Even as ostensible customers, some men seemed to think we could be treated with a standard of interaction far more cavalier than the normal rules of engagement between men and women on the street.

Here, I was confronted with the fact that all the rules were different, and no one—not the men, not the dancers, not M., and not even me--acted as they would have in real life, outside. As we stood in the parking lot talking, I felt as if I had just walked out of a small, dark factory created solely to feed some men’s desire for no questions asked, impersonal, mechanistic, assembly-line sexual titillation; a kind of holographic fantasy of someone else’s making, or a dream I had been having where I just couldn’t bring myself to act or speak. And I was just an observer. Knowing that questions of agency were important to M.’s work, I couldn’t help but wonder if there really were dancers who managed to feel otherwise.

acerbitas

or, poignancy.

For some reason lately I've been surprised to find myself actually, seriously, missing people from my past. I've searched out one friend on classmates and bought blackberry seedlings (to be delivered in January) from another college friend's family's berry farm. I haven't heard back from either though. The talking and laughing and talking I associate with them is strikingly compelling, and I'd love to be able to visit again and see what they are like now.

I don't know if this is happening to other people around my age; maybe it's a generational malaise.

On another, decidely less poignant note, this silk is something new and extremely vibrant. I love the apparent depth especially in the extreme center of the mandala.

ask me anything

saw this on my friend's journal (www.rabbitconspiracy.com) and asked something of her i have *really* wanted to know but never felt comfortable asking... so now i have to post this here.

* Ask me 3 questions.
* Any 3, no matter how personal, private or random.
* I have to answer them honestly. I have to answer them all.
* In turn, you post this message in your own blog or journal and you have to answer the questions that are asked of you.

Bring on the probing.

like a weed

my son is growing up and out at a rate i previously associated with kudzu and bad tv. he's almost as big as me now and i'm a pretty big woman myself. i wear a size 11 shoes and he just officially grew out of my clodhoppers...which means he's in a men's size 10 shoes now. i've dated guys with smaller feet than my 11 yr old. geez. but he's always been big. he gained a pound a week ("good" growth is a half pound a week, adequate is 1/4 pound per week for a newborn) and was 24 lbs at 6 mos, 31 lbs at one year. now he's 120 lbs, 5'4". his dad, my ex, is a big guy, but we all think jackson is going to outstrip us. supposedly you can double the height of a child at 24 and 30 months and get a range for their adult age. going by that he's gonna be somewhere between 6'4" and 6'7".
at any rate, he's growing up fast, and we were goofing off yesterday and i *made* latt take a pic of us. it was the first time in a looong time he sat on my lap, and may be the last time ever. i love that kid.

about us

my kids are the biggest source of jubilation in my life. i am without a doubt 100% improved as a person for allowing motherhood to consume me for a few years with each child. i consider it as having bestowed on me an advanced degree in humanity. i am more sensitive, less selfish, kinder, and more intuitive for having done so. mothering has been the hardest and the best thing i have ever done. the knowledge that one is helping stweard a child into becoming a loving and well-loved adult who has been treated with generosity, respectfulness, and compassion (and can therefore treat others in those ways) is a real trip. marx's idea of the perfectly fulfilling, elusive "creative work" doesn't even come close to describing it.


here's jack, who is 11. he knows more about entomology (the study of insects and their intricacies) than some adults charged with teaching about insects i have known. he needs to get sweaty and work like an ox a few times a week or he gets cranky and surly. he has a natural wit and humor that surprises me sometimes in its sharpness. he and i grew up together in many ways and he taught me how to be a good mother. even when he is an ass i see the qualities (stubborness, self-confidence, ingenuity, curiousity, perseverance) that will serve him well in a pinch as an adult.

rowan is almost three. she is so much fun to be with. here she and i are "getting married". she is fascinated with ritual and order and harmony, and she has working plans for not only her upcoming birthday party but also her upcoming weaning party and a few other fiestas she wants us to have. she wants to know the right way to do things and she has a strong desire to make things better in her immediate environment. this makes her a desirable helper and an easy compatriot in most things we do as a family. she absolutely loves going to famer's markets and other events where we hawk our wares because it gives her a chance to socialize and dress up. i delivered her myself in a birth pool in our bedroom and i am crazy in love with her.

my husband latt is my best friend and a fabulous cook. he fixes me coffee at least once a day while i work at the computer and in my mind that's about as perfect as you can get. i'm wild about him and still not sick of being with him most of the time even after we've been working together in our stay at home business for a few years now. he also has great hair, an infectious laugh, skills too varied and exotic to explicate upon here, and impeccable taste in poetry and clothes...and none of that hurts his official status as best boyfriend ever.

and finally, here's me with some of our hand-dyed work on me and behind me. i'm a freak for color and symmetry and tie-dyeing, particularly now that we are dyeing silks and cotton with the mandala pattern, is great fun and some kind of therapy for me.

it's about time

that i joined the rest of the thinking world and have myself a blog.

just in case you are wondering:

1) impleo: to fill up; to satisfy or fulfill (wishes, hopes, prophecies, appetities); to make pregnant; to cover with writing. i love latin for tolerating such a beautiful word that covers all those far-flung bases.

2) yes, i *am* aware of the existence of the caps lock key. half the time i am nak (nursing at keyboard) and that means one-handed...the other half the time i am just trying to be consistent. :D

3) speaking of latin and why i am here now...i have a bad case of cacoethes scribendi that i'm hoping this outlet will help me scratch.