A Virtuous Woman is Above Feelings



A couple of years ago, after a visit to their place, my stepmother sent some stuff home with me for the kids. When I got the bag home and looked through it, among the toys and clothes there was a magazine. My stepmom had written on it that it was for my mother-in-law. I looked at the cover, and something jumped out at me. See, the mag was called Above Rubies, which is a publication "to encourage women in their high calling as wives, mothers, and homemakers."  Oh, brother, I thought, no WAY am I letting my MIL see this crap.  I threw it away.

Recently, though, I came across another magazine while I was waiting for some work done on our vehicle. I skimmed it for any particularly offensive articles. Above Rubies followers believe their god should control their bodies, not their own selves here on earth. (Contraception? Goodness, no! Submission to husband in everything? Of course, silly billy!) and instead I found one that made me stop in my tracks. It wasn't offensive, exactly, but it was disturbing. The article is titled "I Almost Gave Up!" and is about a woman who read AR and threw her birth control away. Her second child was a sick baby who had jaundice and a milk allergy. The next two babies had kidney problems, and one of them needed surgery. Her husband lost his job during that time. Obviously this was all very stressful. So the wife asks her husband if he would consider having a vasectomy, which he would not. She begged him, then, "Well, how about just a temporary preventative method? I really need a break. I can't do this anymore."

Let's stop there. This woman has been through incredible stress and anxiety; probably she'd been sick with worry for YEARS. She's coming to her husband, her partner in life, for support.  She's telling him very clearly she wants a break from pregnancy, that she needs time to recover.  So how does her loving husband, her spiritual leader, comfort her?

He refuses to have sex with her until she changes her mind. Not, mind you, because he's a DICK, but because "He was not willing to compromise [their convictions]."

Then, this woman who obviously needed comfort and support, changed her mind. Her kids began asking her when she'd have another baby, and "I realized I was the only one wanting a break." 

THAT. is the part that hit me the hardest. She believes her own opinion doesn't mean shit. Her feelings are invalid. I'm all about reproductive choice for women, and not just when it comes to abortion. If a woman wants to have 19 children, who are we to tell her she can't possibly be happy having babies every year? Because we don't know what that woman is thinking. But here, we do know what she was thinking. She was thinking she needed time for emotional recovery. She was thinking her husband might support her in her crisis. She was thinking of her own personal emotional and physical health! She's the one carrying the children in her body, but her emotional torture means nothing even to her.  Gawd, that's just so fucking disheartening.

Celebrating International Women's Day Informally

I began a post for today, International Women’s Day, and I was going to list all the crappy bills being introduced in Montana that will hurt Montana women. That’s sorta my schtick, being pissed off, and I definitely am.  But I have already had bad news today and I didn’t want to bring myself down any further.  So instead, a happy list! I did some good things for women and girls over the past year, even if I couldn’t be involved in a formal IWD event (there are none here in Billings as far as I know).

 

1.       Being real. My daughter, 8, asked me how babies are created, and I told her! I had been planning a speech and I was going to get library books and it was going to be a whole thing.  Instead, one evening we were lying together in my bed talking, and she asked me. No one else was around, I had the time, so I explained how babies are made and born.  I believe her words were “Huh!”, and since then she has told me several times that she wants to have kids, but she wants to adopt, since she doesn’t want to go through “all that stuff.” I’m not sure if she means the sex or the pain of childbirth!  This led to a funny exchange a few weeks ago:

DD:                  Mom, do you have to do, you know, to have a baby?

Me:                Do you mean sex? 

DD:                 Yeah, that.

Me:                Oh.  Well, no.  there are other ways (I go on to explain about sperm  banks and surrogacy and etc.)

DD:                 Can you do that?  I want a sister.

Me:                …well, I could.  But Daddy and I could also make a baby by having sex, like we talked about, right?

DD:                   I guess…but do in PRIVATE and shut your door!

Me:                 …we usually do. 

DD:             Well, this one time in Spokane, I saw you and Daddy and you were naked and kissing.  I was supposed to be taking a nap.

Me:          Are you ever going to let me forget that?!?!  Also, next time maybe you should just take a nap.

2.       Girl Scouts.  The same DD mentioned above came home from school one day last fall with a Girl Scout flyer.  Could she join?  Sure, I said, and signed the slip saying I’d be willing to volunteer. That quickly turned into me being a troop leader, and I’ve been loving it!  We’re currently doing a project involving gathering healthy and diet-specific foods for our local food bank. 

3.       Volunteering.  My Brownies and I have volunteered at the Billings Food Bank twice as part of our project, and I have to say I love it, and am looking for more opportunities for us to volunteer around the community.  I never really learned as a kid how important it is to just help people—even if it’s doing a favor like babysitting for a friend or giving someone a ride to work, so now I’m doubling down, trying to make sure my Girl Scouts know it is important that we get involved, that it’s not only fun for us, but it helps someone, maybe a little girl just like them.

 So yeah, it’s been a depressing year with the War on Women still going strong even though voters told the GOP in no uncertain terms last fall to back the fuck off women’s rights.  But there’s still work to be done, and I think one of the most important things we can ever, EVER teach our children is compassion.  Empathy.  Teaching them to give a shit about people, not things or gadgets or money, but people. If the human race is going to be as amazing as The Doctor gives us credit for, we better get on that compassion thing.

My agnostic nativity

I’ve always adored Christmas.  When I was young, I would go crazy with anticipation.  We were fairly poor growing up, but my parents refused (I know now) to get public assistance.  My dad worked in backhoeing, and when the ground was frozen there wasn’t much for him to do.  Some weeks the only income we had was the $20 my mom got from helping an elderly man in his home, Mr. Parsons.  I was so thankful for Mr. Parsons.  Still, there were days when all I had to take for lunch was a couple slices of bread.  My mom doesn’t recall that and doesn’t necessarily think it’s true, but I recall it clearly.

            Still, at Christmas, we were spoiled rotten.  Through the year we didn’t get sugared cereal or pop or candy or toys.  Somehow, my parents were able to give us four kids fabulous Christmases.  We’d come down to a living room practically bursting with gifts.  And we got up so early that by the time it was light, we were done opening and ready to start playing.  I’ve had difficulties with my parents over the years, but I will always be grateful to them for making that time of year so magical for me.  They must have saved all year, bought presents throughout the year, and/or gone into credit card debt to do it.

            I was the kind of kid who believed in Santa Claus, hard, and could not be convinced otherwise.  It was the magic I loved.  Santa could be at my cousin’s house early so she could open her presents on Christmas Eve, and later come to my house so we could open ours Christmas morning.  The writing on the tags was different because Santa was in a hurry, for Pete’s sake; this was not proof enough to disbelieve.  I used to wish that I was one of our fish so that I could see Santa Claus just once.  But I NEVER EVER wanted to peek and find my Christmas presents.  I am all about surprises remaining surprises, the buildup and anticipation, all that.

Boobs and betrayal

I follow a lot of parenting pages and blogs.  Most of them are natural parenting type pages, and nearly all of them espouse breastfeeding, which I am all for.  I breastfed my first child for a few months, but I didn’t have any support, i.e. someone to show me what to do, how to do it, the pitfalls and how to avoid them, etc., so we only made it for two months, and then I pumped for another month.  Some of the bloggers I follow get a little bitchy about BFing, though.  It’s clear to me that breast is best—it provides the best of the best nutritionally and bumps up immunity.  It has lasting benefits.  But I also think if a woman can’t or even just doesn’t want to breastfeed, we should all shut the eff up.  As long as the baby is being fed, we should back off.  Still, if I have another baby I’ll (probably) definitely give it another whirl.

                I added the qualifier after reading Florence Williams’ book Breasts:  A Natural and Unnatural History.  Williams, who received her MFA through the illustrious MFA program at the University of Montana, breastfed her children.  “I was happily nursing my second child, blithely backstroking through that magic bubble known as the mother-infant pair-bond, when I stumbled upon a news report…I read that scientists were finding industrial chemicals in the tissues of land and marine mammals as well as in human breast milk.”  Being a journalist mama, she wrote about it, sending off her breast milk to Germany to be tested for flame-retardants, which hang out and build up in our fat, and have been shown to cause all kinds of problems in lab animals.  Her breast milk tested positive, higher than she expected, and 10 to 100 times higher than women in Europe.  Williams’ milk also tested positive for a jet fuel ingredient, among other chemicals and exposures that come from electronics, furniture, and food.  And that got her wondering about the ecosystem that is the human breast.  “What toxic load had I already bequeathed my children by nursing them?  What did it mean to their health, and to mine? Was it still okay to breast feed?  How did these chemicals interfere with our bodies?  Could we ever make our milk pure again?”  Breasts store fat, so they also store fat-loving chemicals.  They’re permeable, reflective of everything we eat, drink, touch.

                The book made me a little uncomfortable, which I take as a good sign.  Williams is a chatty writer, so she makes the scientific stuff understandable.   In parts it was a bit much for me, but not so much that I didn’t want to keep reading every second.  I particularly love the way she started the book off.  She took care to mention a theory of breast evolution—basically, it goes like this:  Men like big breasts, and find them useful.  Big-chested women were chosen for mating, the big boob gene got passed down, and well, there you have it, that’s why most men prefer a large dairy section.  Large breasts are a better indicator of age, the theory goes, so our ancestor males knew that once the boobs started sagging, either with age or after pregnancies, the males would look elsewhere for a mate.

                And then, to my delight, she pretty much pshaws that whole theory, pointing to glaring holes:  Frances Mascia-Lees, an anthropologist Williams spoke with, thinks the last fifty years of study about breasts and attraction has been a bunch of bull.  If men had so much to do with breast evolution, if they prefer women with large and firm breasts, why would our boobs be at their largest and firmest while pregnant and breast feeding?  Why is there so much breast size variation, and why are smaller-boobed women just as good at nursing and parenting in general?  “Just suppose for a moment, gentlemen of the academy, that breasts evolved because she needed them, not because her club-wielding cave man did.”  Ha!  I love it. 

                But that was all in the first few pages.  Now.  Basically, we know nothing about breasts.  What causes breast cancer, what REALLY causes it?  Young breast feeding mothers get less of it, older breast-feeders like me, a little higher.  The only thing that has been actually, without a doubt proven to cause breast cancer is radiation.  And the most commonly recommended screening tool?  Radiation, in the form of mammography.  Williams goes into a lot of things that I’m not going to do justice to, but I found this review that touches beautifully on some of the science.  What this book did for me, though, was make me more aware that I need to be more aware.  It’s exhausting, all the steps we have to take to get away from plastic, for example.  Carcinogens are found on the back of shiny receipt paper, for crap’s sake.  It’s incredibly depressing, but we’re on a need-to-know basis.  And it turns out we really do need to know. 

 

Cross-posted at Bark.