Winter Daze
2024 begins- War is not healthy for children and other living things
Dear Reader-
War is not healthy for children and other living things.
I’m starting 2024 off feeling overwhelmed, exited, and a bit distracted…already confronted with visions of what I thought the New Year would be like and what it is actually rolling out to be…. so for month’s 5th of the month I’ve got no poem for you, just a long list of what’s happening in my daze, setting some things out in this form to clear my head before the projects ahead.
I am starting 2024 full of rage and grief.
Today- 15 or so things in paragraph list form - Mothering, Birth Work, Money, Renovations, Moving, Dating while Pregnant and Married, and Just Somebody That I Used to Know
CW: mentions of misogyny, racism, police, sex, war, tree slaughter, graphic language
But before I dive into my own corner of the world, here are things in the wider world that I am currently raging and grieving over….
War is not healthy for children and other living things.
“Niani Finlayson, a 27-year-old Black woman, was fatally shot by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy responding to a domestic violence call, authorities said Thursday. The same deputy killed another person in a similar incident three years ago.” -NPR
"A senior official in the U.S. Department of Education has resigned to protest the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza. Tariq Habash, who is a Palestinian American Christian and a Biden appointee, wrote in his resignation letter, “I cannot stay silent as this administration turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed against innocent Palestinian lives, in what leading human rights experts have called a genocidal campaign by the Israeli government.” -Democracy Now
"There is no defense for logging our last remaining legacy forests. DNR forest inventory records reveal that there are thousands of acres of plantation forests managed by DNR in Kitsap County that are currently available for harvest. Plantation forests hold more than enough timber to satisfy overall sustainable harvest targets for the current planning decade, and fulfill DNR's current commitments to generate revenue for the county and its junior taxing districts. There is no need to clearcut this forest. To be clear, the recommendation by Commissioner of Public Lands and the Department of Natural Resources to clear-cut this forest is a choice that is made by the Commissioner and DNR. DNR is not fulfilling a mandate or following best available science by logging this rare, century-old forest.” -Legacy Forest Defense Coalition of Washington
A long List of Winter Daze I am in right now…
I thought we’d be starting 2024 with Aubrey, my toddler starting pre-school!! The ONLY pre-school that takes 2.5 year olds of the TEN different ones (they are all wait-listed some with years long wait-lists) I’ve inquired with over the past 3-4 months seems to have ghosted me (Not responding to phone calls or text messages) after me touring, putting down a $50 deposit, meeting with the owner and her assuring me verbally that Aubrey would be welcome come January… so… next week I pay them a visit in person.
We are now scurrying for childcare - relying on my sister in law and a college student part time; we pay them $20 and $18 an hour respectively which is the low end of the going rate here. My sister in law just applied for another job so her time with us is limited, plus she works on an organic farm March-October so that limits her time too. And our college student is in school so can only work certain hours and days. I am grateful for ANY CHILDCARE!
Childcare right now and since last year has been one of the greatest joys and benefits to my mental health. I didn’t really have any with my oldest child until his father and I split and then my relationship to childcare was fraught due to low-income, need to work, and lack of options- I still have vivid memories of crying as I drove to work in my butter yellow 1983 Volvo having just left my tow headed 2.5 year old bawling his head off. BUT NOW I love it b/c I have people I like and trust come to my house and that makes all the difference. Childcare allows my child to have other people to love and take her places and do fun things with her. It allows me physical and psychic space which is crucial as a highly sensitive neuro-divergent parent! I can run multiple errands without the draining mental arithmetic of nap time and toilet training while grocery shopping and just the ins and outs of the toddler in the car seat. Had I known what childcare could be (I.e. when you can afford to hire a nanny), or had anyone suggested this to me in my late 20s as a young mom to my first child I wonder how my life (especially my mental health) would have been… instead when I looked around I saw women who relished their role of Stay-At-Home-MotherGoddess above all else or had endless and FREE support via local and very hands on grandparents. Unless I’m in SC visiting my folks I don’t and have never had an abundance of free local support for my kiddos. I do have some friends who’ve offered an afternoon here and there, and one of my goals of 2024 is to be better about asking for help and reaching out to folks I don’t normally turn too.
My parents in SC have always helped me as much as they can from miles away- they don’t like to get on airplanes- especially my mother, unless I practically beg them, but they have paid for airplane tickets home, alongside many other things I’ve needed help with over the years, and just recently my Father said he’d like to pay for my childcare expenses for 2024! So a big shout out to them. While yes of course I said yes, it’s still hard to say yes to this b/c it highlights 1. My access to white privilege/generational wealth and I feel guilty but grateful for taking this money while other people have nowhere close to this kind of ongoing support (and have never known it), which then, 2. Subsidizes not only this writing venture, but my work as as Stay at home Mother. I myself am unsure still how to quantify and thus value the work I do as a stay at home Mother and yet think on how most people and businesses and projects are subsidized by others….. in fact I will never forget reading that 80% of all wealth in this country is inherited (source forgotten), which completely blows to smithereens that dumb ass myth of America that I wish would die a quick death, otherwise known as "Self Made/ I did it through hard work,” that old fashioned prosperity gospel that most people in this country as still singing at the top of their lungs.
To highlight this point let’s say I started hustling right now for doula clients. As I am a newer doula in my community and dedicated to accessibility I offer sliding scale rates that are considerably lower than many of my colleagues. Thus, one birth, which includes multiple home visits of several hours, being on call, and several postpartum visits along with many other things- pays me anywhere from $900-$1300. For comparison, another doula I respect and admire, who’s been at it a lot longer than me charges $1400-$2200! The last birth client I had I was away from home for the actual labor and birth for close to 24 hours with my commute time. The going hourly rate for postpartum care in the Puget Sound area is anywhere from $35-$65 an hour- thus, if I was charging even the low end of that scale of $35/hour being at that birth alone should have paid me $840. And that doesn’t include the 3—4 prenatal visits and 1-2 postpartum visits, custom herbs I make up for folks, emails, research and all the education I’ve done.
Now- who cares for my toddler while I work? Birth work assumes then that I have a hearty care network for my children, because last I checked there is no daycare anywhere that takes your children overnight, or lets you call them at 6pm in the evening when your client texts and says "I’d like you to come now!” So yes postpartum work, of which I also do, is much easier in that sense as I can schedule my hours. But again, if I am paying someone $20/hour to care for my child and working with a client who can only afford the lower end of my rate $35/hour, I am only taking home $15/hour and that’s not accounting for mileage and other expenses… so… My husband has provided that back up support in the past and yet he’s been out of the state working since August- so I feel conflicted about working outside the home for money right now in this capacity. While I’ve come to accept that self-employment, like most work, requires hustle, and tons of free labor up front, I am already working as Mother and all I do right now is is work for free because capitalism has lied to us to believe that Motherwork is "natural” and therefore not worthy of compensation, despite the fact that Mothers and Birthers literally birth workers/citizens out of our bodies- sometimes going into massive debt in order to so. I hate capitalism I truly do.
AGAIN- caring for children is work and needs to be valued and supported and compensated as such, AND caring for and supporting birthing and postpartum people is work and needs to be valued and supported and compensated.
AND writing and naming these conundrums and inequities that permeate the worlds of Mothering, Parenting, Care work, Birth and Postpartum is also work that needs to be valued and supported and compensated. (and in the midst of writing this a much younger friend who I haven’t seen in 3 years texts me to ask what I recommend for a pre-natal vitamin b/c she just got off birth control and just got married and is starting her conception journey; I remind her I re-trained as a doula 2 years ago and I’ve got all the books and happy to share anything I know and yes she wants to have lunch soon to talk) and of course I will share everything I know and have learned and help her ask the hard questions and advocate for herself b/c OBSTETRIC VIOLENCE IS REAL and I will do all of this for FREE b/c this is information that people need and I don’t believe in gate keeping knowledge and b/c I want to live in a world where birthing people and their experience fucking matters and to restore midwives to their role as revered wise ones and reclaim birth to be back in the home and out of the hospital.
AND…
Amidst all this and my son going back to his dad’s after winter break here, and my husband going back to SC to work on our money pit of a 1935 fixer upper house next week, we are moving! Just upstairs, but still it’s moving! AND MOVING IS A LOT! Especially in the dark gray time of the PNW and 24 weeks pregnant with your 3rd child and right after the hubub of Christmas festivities and 6 weeks and counting of still unresolved bronchitis and and and…. Due to my mother in law’s declining health coupled with several falls earlier this year it was advised she moved downstairs with us. Thus, since August we have been co-habitating in 650 square feet! And most of that time it’s been me, my MIL and my toddler, and then every other weekend my son when he visits.
Having struggled with affordable housing my entire adult life since moving to WA state, I am well versed in sorting, letting go, and seasonal purges. So I am enjoying the New Year energy that is corresponding with it. As well as plenty of grumbles and gripes about sharing space with people who’s habits are different, aesthetic choices now and then, when 25 years ago they turned this former horse shed into a living space, and put up strange things like a canister light right over the toilet, or chose not to put a door on the bathroom. Sigh… and did I ever tell you how much I hate canned lights or carpeted floors?
SO…
October when my husband was home for 3 weeks he installed a new floor. Our budget didn’t permit wood, so I chose a linseed oil eco-friendly product called marmoleum- it was a click lock system and I helped him install it some places, and while it’s a bit massage studio/yoga studio vibe it looks great, is mildew resistant, sound muffling, warm to the feet, durable, didn’t off gas, and is easy to clean! In the midst of this we discovered the man we had hired to take up the 23+ year carpet (saturated with years of Nag Champa incense burning- did I mention how much I dislike Nag Champa? and of course urine from not 1 but 2 small brained never trained/ poorly socialized bane-of-my-existence Chihuahua mixes- aka my MIL’s main companions) did not use the proper tools or do a quality of work for the $40/hour under -the-table rate he charged us, thus, giving my handyman husband with nearly 30 years in the trades, even more work to do…
WHICH BRINGS US TO
December my husband spends his holidays PAINTING. You wouldn’t think I’d let us move into a 25 year old untouched apartment where Nag Champa was burned daily w/out a paint refresh do you? The space is around 1000 square feet but of course it meant cleaning and spackling and waiting for spackle to dry. Painting is so much more than painting right? And I had a near meltdown about the paint once it went up- even after testing it against other contenders in multiple places and YES I know to look at it in different types of light at different types of day!!! BUT HOLY SHIT I UNDERSTAND WHY INTERIOR DESIGNERS ARE CRAZY OVER WHITE! Yes we are just painting the entire upstairs white- a lovely warm white (or so I thought) called Wool White or something like that. BUT… in the dismal gray PNW morning light the other day out of the south east facing window by the Cedar tree window it has decidedly.. ahem…. fluorescent lime green hue to it. NOT the creamy warm white I was going for… yes there is definitely some yellow in it but it’s too green for my liking. Sigh… However, as one of my favorite interior decorator bloggers Laurel Bern says in a post all about white paint- at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter!
YET- did I lose sleep due to late night internet readings on white paint, and did I try to convince my husband, in good conscious, to splurge on yet another $200 in paint, and thus have him go over ALL THE WORK he has already done? Yes yes I did do these things. We are keeping the paint. I think by the time we put up warm curtains, plants, and rugs it will work out. AND of course a fresh coat of paint is still a fresh coat of paint.
The good, the really fun, the fuck this!
My children are all well! Any Mother worth her salt knows this is the great girder in her own health. So despite the Holidays and viruses running amuck- we are having a Covid surge all over this country so please take care of your vulnerable ones (long covid is no fucking joke)- my children are well! My unborn child has been wriggling and kicking and their middle name, I’ve decided, is Ronan, which is Scottish for "Little Seal” and I’m not sure yet about their first name; my favorites of late are Thea and Emmett.
I have, in my text inbox, not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, but 7 different threads of communication with different men I am currently dating or could go on dates with! Never in my adult life of dating have I had this kind of action. Ok… well to be clear no action is happening yet besides a little fling in October, who of course w/ the new year has popped up again wanting to rendezvous… but we shall see…. scheduling dates is a non-monogamists problem of privilege for sure. This flurry is odd timing to me, but apparently a 41 year old knocked up married woman who is "looking for new friends and lovers” is quite a commodity these days? To clarify- the majority of these exchanges are from matches that happened months ago, and due to work/schedule/illness/etc. I have yet to meet many of these said matches, so several of them will probably never get out of the inbox. However, I have now gone on 4 or 5 dates with a fellow married man, and it’s very PG and very nice. and uh… a wee bit slower of a pace for me? And did I, after talking to a fellow non-monogamous friend about it all, get up the nerve to text him, “So do you want to fuck me or what?” While also explaining that my femme conditioning has it so I am still defaulting to a man’s desire, and yet that’s also sort of a turn on and yet I’m in such a dry spell that I wonder even how to access my own desire for another person…. and then in the meantime the 28 year old from April is SnapChatting me do I want to come to Austin, but I don’t really believe him, but there is something to be said about a weekend rendezvous where you get your brains fucked out and then return to your every day life and walk around with the knowing of the things that went down over the weekend… am I talking too much or shall l go on?
I don’t want to write this one but writing has always been a spell casting spell breaking tool for me… so here goes… just over the holidays an ex of mine has resurfaced, back to his old tricks… blowing up my phone and hiding behind an unknown number and leaving breathy eery but mostly just annoying voicemails (once he left Gotye’s famous break up song-how is this song already 12 years old), he also just whines drunkenly on them, but never actually answers the phone if I pick up, as well as sending me a couple emails- the most recent of which he asked me to pay back money he gave me over 6 years ago. In 2020 (just weeks before WA state went into pandemic lock down) I won a protection order against this man due to a pattern of harassing behavior via phone and email and at least one incident of stalking. For those who don’t know, this type of protection order only lasts one year, and unless the victim specifically asks for it to be renewed (which it can be for an additional year), the burden of proof then rests once again victim, starting the process all over again; so with the renewal I had no-contact protection order for two years. How fucking telling that now that it’s lapsed he’s reaching out again… sigh…. I told the man I’m dating that I would tell him my police story and so T. here is part of my police story (because there are a couple of them). To be clear I am of the mind that police need to be defunded and we need a completely different paradigm and model of care for handling things like poverty, addiction, and violence. “As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general."- Conor Friedsdorf for The Atlantic. (read more about how they came to that number here) Thusk I mostly have nothing good to say about police. YET the police were who I called because that’s who you call when you are being harassed. AND b/c the police in the San Juans Islands had worked closely with their local DVSAS (Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services) they did not gaslight me or pretend that my distress and emotional fatigue were all in my head. When I initially called the non-emergency line the female dispatcher said “Oh, he’s not respecting your no. I’ll get an officer right on it.” Yes it’s a small community, but that attitude is radical and the kind women all over this country need to hear. In fact I remember the distinct moment in the fall of 2017 when I was fresh in grad school, barely treading water with the demand of it, standing barefoot in the kitchen of the community house where I was renting a room, and the officer said “I know this is taking its toll on you. I can hear it in your voice.” I’m thankful to him, my friend Laurie, and the other officer, who all encouraged me to pursue the legal route. So yes I was dealing with this for almost 3 years on and off - like a low grade virus you just can’t kick that rears its pathogenic tendrils just when you least expect it, and often, when you’re most likely to be taken down by it yet fucking again….I’m grateful to my now husband and my son who accompanied me to court that day. Some people might question my decisions to pull my son out school for a minor court hearing but I did it for several reasons 1. To witness the law and due process in action and 2. To witness this man, who had been in his life on and off for a number of years, be held accountable.
I can’t go on, I’ll go on
"I can’t go on, I’ll go on” so wrote Samuel Beckett in a novel called The Unnameable (and quoted to us often in the Orphan Wisdom School).
“You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
It’s apt wisdom for these times.
So I’ll go on if you will.
Some announcements!
I’m offering a New Year’s special on subscriptions. So if you’ve been on the fence about becoming a paid subscriber maybe this will inspire you to join us.
Paid subscribers get access to the full archives as well as curated and fun end of the month round up that I pour many hours into. Plus this year I’m starting a new interview series about some of the things I love- from midwifery care and birth work to grief tending to food growing; I’ve already got some interviews with birth professionals lined up- so stay tuned. Paying subscriptions thus will help pay for time and travel expenses to interview folks whose voices need to be amplified.
For 2024 I would love to grow this newsletter to become a bit more self sustaining- could I grow paid readership to help me bring in $200 bucks a month? Can you help me do that? Share this with a friend. That would be amazing.
Paid subscribers will also have first dibs to register for my upcoming animist themed grief tinged class- Are You My Neighbor? Times and dates upcoming.
thank you thank you for being here
Have you heard of the author Stephanie Land? I'm reading her newest book "Class" right now, it touches on topics like single motherhood, poverty, domestic violence, relationships/sex, education, and being a writer.