So there’s this meme (see: Doctor Who, goths, The Little Mermaid, geeks, etc) that some people are just “not like everyone else” and it’s predicated on the understanding that “everyone else” lives these mindlessly mundane lives, and consumes and drones is a sheeple and in all ways is just dull dull boringly DULL, and YOU, angsty rebel nonconformist deep thinker YOU are NOT LIKE THEM (ie you are better), because their life isn’t INTERESTING enough for you. I was sort of raised like this, in the SCA, and we were cool because we weren’t “cool” because we weren’t the mundanes.

And while I think there’s lots of interesting stuff there, that it’s a pushback to being excluded for oddness, that some people are more inclined to be the adventurers and some the culture keepers, all that aside: more and more I think it is, simply, bullshit. Because we ALL, to some degree, long for/fear novelty and change, and we ALL sometimes think about boogers and whether we left the stove on, and we ALL get bloody bored with the washing up, and we ALL sometimes wonder “is this all there is?”

And this meme, of special non-mundane, non-sheeple, is just another bullshit way of dehumanizing the people around us, of making ourselves feel better-than, and thus it perpetuates kyriarchy.

I’d much rather spend my time enjoying both the ways in which I am traditional and the ways I am not, exploring the boundaries of what we construct as “mundane”/”boring” and investigating why we do, and connecting with real people who, like me, are complex and nuanced and ugly and boring and bored and amazing.

And the point, the POINT, is we are ALL real people, and it’s up to me to see that, to get to know others’ realness, instead of dismissing them based on my own false imaginings.

(After watching Quick Thoughts on “Until Abortion Ends”, I have been on yet another Jay Smooth bender today. I highly recommend trying this, if you have the time.)

Reasons 1-4

(Please forgive my horrid photography, though the disco pink is a product of the heat lamp.)

One week old

Allow me to introduce the Timechooks. Fore-left is Perpugillium Brown (Peri), and nearly hidden behind her is Melanie Bush (Mel). To the right fore is Leela of the Sevateem, and right aft, the yellow fluffball, is Nyssa of Traken.¹

Yes, they are all named after companions of the Doctor. Yes, I am unrepentantly geeky. Yes, I really am ok with this.

For context, because to some people this seems sudden — first I did not have chickens, and then I started talking about getting chickens, and a week later, Timechooks! — but in truth I have known I wanted chickens for longer than I knew I wanted children. And a mere 8 years, 2,500 miles, 4 houses, 1 mortgage, and 2 children later: chickens!

I am more than a little excited. Allow me to show you an interpretive dance of how excited I have been the last month:

Excited like Leela with the Doctor's permission to cut someone

But that is not all! Oh no! That box Leela is doing her Dance of Joy in, under Nyssa’s calm and watchful eye? That would be during an early stage of…

Reasons 5-6

Gardens galore

Veggie beds! And portable strawberry beds²! And no dog poop!³ A month and a half ago, this corner of our yard was grass and shit and sun. Because for once Portland in Springtime has been cooperative (yay sunny weekends!), and because I Was Determined, there are now two fully installed up and running vegetable beds (and strawberry beds!). Although obviously I hope we are able to harvest food from here, at this point I almost don’t care⁴ because I am so very proud of how much I have been able to do.

How proud? This proud:

So very proud. And hammy.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

Reasons the next

Having acquired chickens and installed a vegetable garden, the next several weeks will be spent building a coop to house the chickens and a fence to keep the two apart. And somewhere in there I have to finish painting my office (friends are staying with us in a couple months and would probably appreciate having some place other than the cupboard under the stairs⁵ to do it in), cook, clean, parent, and, y’know, not go crazy.

And I want to tell you about why these things are/are not amazingly good for my mental health, the joy in finally putting in to action desires I’ve had for nearly a decade, the satisfaction and pride of completing a project I’ve set out to do, the humility in realizing I cannot do it all (at least not at once), the sheer fun (and feminist implications) of working with power tools, and so much more –

But if you’ll excuse me, I have to go buy lumber.

Losing My Words

Words are just about the most important thing in the world to me. I make my living with them, I breathe them in, all day and all night. Sometimes I am so engrossed in my own flow of words, I can’t even hear the people around me, it takes them two or three times to get my attention. But this post, I am sad to say, is hard for me to write.

I don’t mean emotionally–though it is that–I mean literally. For the past five years, I’ve had chronic migraines of various kinds. I have the regular ones, the skull-splitting oh DEAR G_D NO SOUND OR LIGHT FOR ME TODAY migraines, at least once a week. I also have hemiplegic migraines, migraines which mimic a stroke, which are truly terrifying, though these are mostly under control with medication. And lastly, more lately there’s the possibility that I have vestibular migraines which are affecting my balance (I’m still having tests on this, I don’t have a dx on that yet).

My neurologist does a pretty good job with all this, providing me with an array of preventatives, painkillers that keep me roughly functional. Chiro and massage help immensely.* My case, she says, is just one of those tricky ones where it’s more pain management than cure. Which is okay, as far as chronic illness goes. I know it could be much, much worse.

But. I’m vastly diminished from the time I first started having regular migraines. Besides the obvious pain and exhaustion, I walk around in a brain fog a lot of the time, which dulls my critical capacities, my ability to form sentences (let alone coherent arguments). And worst of all for me, I have a mild form of aphasia, meaning that when I reach for a word, I often pull out another word that my mind has mentally related to it as similar. Or I use odd tenses, rearranging sentences into odd shapes, like a Cubist writer. The meaning is clear but the expression is unorthodox.

As a wanky theorist person, this is occasionally fascinating in the way it recalls Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that language is differential, that words have particular relationships of difference to one another. As a writer with a disability, however, it mostly just fucking sucks.

There are times where I have sent work to a journal, thinking it was fine, only to have the response suggest that I check my work first with a native English speaker. As a native English speaker, and once with a PhD in English to boot, I can’t tell you how mortifying that is.

Worse than even the blow to my pride, is the feeling that I am losing my sense of myself, the very fibre of my being. I feel a tremendous sense of loss, of the person I was. Sometimes I mourn for my lost quickness. Indeed, I’ve begun to feel dispossessed from language itself, the very medium we use to convey our relation to the world of objects and each other.

There’s a fear lingering at the back of my brain, what if this gets worse, what if I end up losing my ability altogether? It’s not an altogether unfounded fear – my neurologist tells me there is markedly increased risk of strokes for people with hemiplegic migraines.

But for now, however painful and slow the process is, I am still writing. Given time and patience, I can still write. I take longer, and I make many more mistakes, and the attention of a good editor/friend certainly helps, but I can still do it… and I will continue to write until I can write no more.

*I hear Arwyn is a Trained Professional in that area, you Portland people should request her services. [Ed. note: I was threatened with pain of pain if I removed this footnote. It was emphatically Not My Idea.]

But right at the end (let’s call it the Inspiring Rhetoric portion of the evening), he argued that everyone has the capacity for mental/emotional disturbance including psychosis (true), that we — humanity — have amazing capacity for resilience (true), that societies play a significant role in both creating and healing mental/emotional disturbance (true), that we have never found evidence of a gross, simplistic “chemical imbalance” for mental illness (surprising, but true), and thus there is no need for stigma, because there’s no such thing as a Broken Brain.

Now, my hard moments aside, I am the last to argue that I am a Broken Brain — but setting up this false binary (either we buy the theory of the Broken Brain or we are crazy-blind¹ and sing Koombaya we’re all exactly the same lalalaaaa) sends me to sputtering at speakers, sounding remarkably like the babbling baby tied on my chest. Except rather less cheerful.

Because it is a false dichotomy. We can, and must, recognize the humanity of psychiatric patients; we can, and must, acknowledge the truth that our unjust society has significant influence over who experiences “mental/emotional disturbance” and that it’s often more a case of bad luck (to be born poor, or female, or trans, or nonwhite, or or or — or especially and and and) than of bad genes whether one winds up needing intensive psychiatric assistance; but in doing so let us not erase the existence of those of us who — while not fundamentally different than anyone else — are more prone to psychosis, to mood swings, to obsessive thoughts, to bleak outlooks.

Because while I am not some inhuman Other, some untouchable with wholly different (broken) neurology, I am not the same as the neurotypical/emotypical either. Everyone has mood swings; I swing harder, and faster, and more frequently. Everyone has worries; I have fears that stop me in my tracks and race my heart and quicken my breath and will not be dismissed with a simple shrug or rational risk assessment. Everyone has high energy days; I have nights I cannot stop my brain or my body from circling ceaselessly and uselessly, expelling energy I do not healthfully have. Everyone has wonderfully human, quirky, interesting, imperfect brains; mine is just more so.

I work exceedingly hard at achieving stability, at reducing the difference in functioning between my mind and “everyone else’s”. But I will never be “normal”. I will never have a brain without the tendency to take the entirely human capacity for emotional experience to a near-unbearable extreme. I will never be not-bipolar.

The revolution I long for isn’t one that erases the amazing ways in which I am different; it is one that embraces and celebrates those differences. The revolution I long for doesn’t homogenize everyone and pretend we are the same; it humanizes everyone even though we are not. Like nearly all those who attended Whitaker’s lecture last night, I am not content to accept society’s stigmatization of people like me; unlike many there, I will never accept a “revolution” that erases me.

And what is it, pray tell, that you do all day?

It starts at 10am EDT (I’ll be talking with Avory for the first half hour of the program) — which, for those keeping track, is indeed 7am here in cloudy Portland. Never say I don’t do anything for you people.

Sorry for the late notice, but I do hope you can join us. Unless you’re sleeping. In which case, enjoy it. For me.

Also check out the rest of WAM! It Yourself’s schedule. It runs through the end of March, featuring sessions in cities across the USA² and online.

Last week was your fifth birthday. We made carrot cake and sang you happy birthday just the once like you wanted and opened so many presents from family who love you fiercely despite being so far away. We bought you a bike and a raincoat and I cooked breakfast and lunch and dinner (and did I mention the cake?) just like you asked for and I marvelled at how very fast you are growing up.

There’s someone I’d like you to meet. I don’t know if you’d like him, or vice versa. He was born twelve years before you, which is too much of an age gap to be peers, but maybe he was the type to like kids. I don’t know, and we will never find out. I would like you to meet him, but you won’t, because eighteen days before your birthday, he was shot and killed by a man who looked at a black kid in a sweat shirt and saw a threat. He was killed by a man who is walking free still, nearly a month later — after your presents are losing their luster, after your bike is no longer quite so new — because of racist gun laws and racist police departments. He was killed by a man who mistook vigilantism for protection, violence for justice, and a kid walking with candy in his pocket for a no-good criminal.

Millions of parents across our country are holding their sons closer now, with this one thought echoing in their heads: that could have been my son.

You’ll forgive me I hope if I hold you tighter tonight, if I snuggle you just a little longer, kiss your hair just that bit stronger. But the thought in my head is: that will never be you.

You will never be seen as suspicious because of your skin color. You will never be coded as a violent criminal because of your race and your gender. You may one day know persecution, may one day be subject to epithets and violence simply walking down the street — you may be a fag or a tranny or a crip — but this, this will never be your fate.

But I am aware, I am so very, painfully aware that you might be on the other side of this. You might be the one wielding the gun¹. You might be the one looking at the dead kid and seeing a corpse, a criminal, a cause for gunfire and “self-defense”. You might be the one letting the killer go without testing him for drugs or alcohol. You might be the one lobbying to pass laws that are disproportionately harmful to black and brown communities. You might be the one opining that it’s all so tragic but the kid did look like a thug after all and he shouldn’t have been out walking where he didn’t look like belonged.

When I hold you tight, I am thinking, praying, begging: don’t be them. Don’t be them, please, child, my beautiful boy: don’t be them. Don’t be the one that black mothers are afraid of tonight more than usual. Don’t be the one that lets this happen without trying to make it better. Don’t be the one that cracks a joke, that thinks of it as their problem, that doesn’t bother to care. Don’t. Be. Them.

You are, no matter how much I wish it otherwise or how much I work to prevent it, going to be infected by racism. It will — is, has already — pervert you, damage your ability to see others’ wholeness and humanity and (says your theist parent) holiness. You live in this society, in kyriarchy; it cannot not touch you and make you rougher.

But you don’t have to let it make you them. You don’t have to let it turn you into Trayvon’s murderer and his family’s misery. You have to not. You have to resist. You have to find a new way.

I’ll help you child, as much as I am able — how can I do else when there is a family without a son and without justice for their loss? — but as much as I want, I cannot shape you as I will, cannot fill your tabula with my anti-racist scripts (nor would I know the right things to write there, even if I could). I can only whisper in your hair, pray to whatever gods are there, write to a you I hope will be ready to listen: don’t be them. Don’t inflict this pain. Remember a boy you will never meet, and for him, for his family, for every family knowing it could be them: please, be better.

For Trayvon Martin. For so many others. Please.

Yours always,
Arwyn

Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America

Over two years ago, a new Twitter-friend of mine told me of her mother’s research, into the history of American children’s clothing generally and of pink and blue as gendered signifiers specifically, and of a forthcoming book on the topic. I have been bouncing in my seat — my capacity for patience, never very high, at its lowest — ever since, nagging my friend (or Twitter-stalking her mom) every few months: “Any word on the book? When’s it coming out? What can I do to help??” (My eagerness matched only by my hubris.) Finally — finally! — I have it sitting next to me, notes scribbled on nearly every page, showing wear from two children, two pets, a pencil wedged beneath its cover, and a week of being carted around stuffed in a diaper bag, and I can say: read this book.

A Costume History (it Doesn’t Mean What You Think)

Paoletti, an Associate Professor in American Studies at the University of Maryland, is first and foremost a textiles, costume, and consumer economics scholar. As she points out, “costume” does not mean Halloween dress-up, but rather simply the collective clothing and accouterments that humans use to protect and adorn ourselves. Thus, Pink and Blue is primarily a costume historiography, with primary sources of baby and advice books, paper dolls, and advertisements. It focuses on children’s clothing from birth through age seven or so, from the mid-1800s (though she does stretch back a bit farther for reference) through 2011, particularly the ways in which their dress did — and didn’t — signify gender.

Critiques: I have them

Before I tell you why you should buy and read and share the book anyway, let me tell you of its shortfalls.

First of which is: as a book, Pink and Blue is not that great. Which is not to say the writing is bad: it’s at worst fine, and often ascends to quite engaging or enjoyable. But it lacks the cohesion and polish of a really excellent, thoroughly readable popular text; though it approaches this in many places (especially toward the end), it is uneven. The first chapter, for example, appears to have at one point been written as the introduction (p 8: “In this introduction, I will focus… but in each chapter, where appropriate, I have incorporated…”), and certainly it reads like a book with two (each well-written) intros.

Pink and Blue is, as she says, “several overlapping and interconnected narratives” (p XVI), so there is a significant amount of repetition of information: because of this, and because there are only so many times I can read 1865-this and 1868-that before my eyes cross, I found myself wishing again and again for an overarching time-line, perhaps in appendix or introduction, that covered all the key dates mentioned throughout: the introduction and cessation of “the white dress”, the start of bifurcation in toddler wear, the Little Lord Fauntleroy fad, the Time Without Pink in department store catalogs. Though these things are all rather fuzzy, Paoletti does successfully attach dates to many of them: to lay them out chronologically, and then explain their research and ramifications in the text, would be so helpful in the reading and absorbing of her ideas.

Finally, on the topic of trans and gender non-conforming children, I found earnestness and good intentions but a few cringe-causing comments nonetheless, including cissexist pronoun use and centering of assigned-gender as “real” (as in “a boy who insisted that he was a girl” p 13) and conflation of gender nonconformity and transgender experience¹. This is not the main focus of the book, however, and so the few failures are irritating imperfections, not prohibitive problems.

Read It Anyway

If you’re interested in gender, parenting, and the societal forces influencing these — that is, if you’re a regular reader of this blog — odds are excellent you’ll enjoy Pink and Blue. I certainly did, frequently exclaiming over a new thought, a clarifying detail, or a novel approach to historical analysis. It’s not that often that I read a book on gender in which I learn something new to me (rather than learning more about something I already knew): Pink and Blue is a refreshing exception. Even in the places where I disagreed with her analysis, I felt engaged rather than put off.

One of the most intriguing (and novel) ideas in the book is Paoletti’s theory of the generational, developmental evolution of children’s clothing. That is, “[t]he fashionable infant of 1900 was the fashionable schoolgirl of 1908 and the fashionable young miss of 1914, and the fashionable woman of 1920 might become the grandmother in a polyester pantsuit in 1973.” Paoletti asks, and to some extent answers, “what connections might there be between children’s clothing of one era and the adult clothing of the next?” (p 15)

It is this question that most fires my imagination, as I clothe my children; it is this especially that compelled my fascinated flip from page to page until the last; it is this that will guide me as I seek, in whatever small way my writing and activism allow me, to affect the next generation’s gender health; and it is wondering what answers their historians will find in my work that fuels me.

Thanks to the groundbreaking scholarship of Pink and Blue, I have no doubt there will be historians working in this rich and fascinating field for years to come.

***

If you can’t find it at or don’t want to trek to an independent bookstore, support your local blogger and buy Pink and Blue from Powell’s or Amazon.