NS April 28th, 2008

Saturday was gorgeous. I don’t know what the temperature was but it must’ve been in the high 60s or maybe even low 70s because I was too warm with a light jacket on at 9am when I walked to the bakery to buy pastries. To celebrate, we sat outside (The Noble Husband, The Noble Child and I — and, by default, The Noble Fetus) and dined on apple danishes, a jam doughnut and a blueberry muffin. TNC and I drank milk, TNH his blow-your-head-off-strong French Roast coffee.

It was so sunny and warm that we decided to have our first proper Let’s Work In The Garden and Be All Suburban and Domesticated Day. Hey, we’re new homeowners, what can I say? So TNH got our little electric lawnmower out of the shed and cut the grass (quite beautifully, I might add) while I kept TNC from becoming entangled in the cord and being sucked to her untimely death underneath the whirring blades. After that was done, we set up the sandbox and a few toys underneath a parasol so TNC could play and TNH could relax while I tended to the plants and flowers growing down each side of our lawn.

Now, if you know me or even if you read this blog on a semi-regular basis, you’ll know or probably have guessed that I am a complete gardening novice. I’m talking no earthly clue how to keep a plant alive other than knowing that they need water and sunlight. Because the problem is that I have no idea how much water and sunlight these things need, nor do I have the first idea about soil, pruning, weeding, fertilizer, trimming, etc.. Hell, I can’t even identify but one plant out there (the hydrangea) and that’s only because I had some of that in my wedding bouquet and when you’re paying that much for a bunch of flowers wrapped in a friggin’ silk ribbon, you remember what kind they were as you write the enormous cheque. But I digress…

I donned my gardening gloves (newly purchased last month) and rolled up a blanket to protect my delicate little novice-gardener knees as I knelt alongside each plant/flower/bush and set to work clearing out dead leaves and branches and pulling out what I hope were weeds. I can only be sure about the dandelions and I hope I haven’t accidentally ripped out a lovely, prize-winning azalea bush but I suppose I’ll live with the credo ‘ignorance is bliss’ for now. At any rate, I didn’t care much what I was doing. The sun was in the sky, my tummy was full of doughnuts, a warm breeze caressed my bare arms and my gorgeous daughter and husband sat a few feet behind me playing in the sand, laughing as they created piles and tunnels with the plastic gardening tools my parents bought her for her birthday. As it was, I ended up borrowing a couple of her implements to get to some hard-to-reach leaves pressed up against the fence and to dig out a particularly stubborn unwanted growth in the soil. I’m sure if the neighbours happened to see me using a tiny blue plastic garden rake, all of 4 inches long, to collect leaves from the ground as my pregnant belly hung over my still-too-big maternity trousers and I attempted fruitlessly to hike them up every time I moved along the ground to prevent plumber’s crack dreaded cousin, gardener’s crack, from appearing, they would’ve gotten a good laugh and a most horrific view. Let’s hope they were watching telly or something.

After I was finished, I felt a real sense of achievement and at one with the earth. To mark the occasion, I performed a pagan ritual involving the eyelash of a goat, sage and beeswax while dancing to the beat of an indigenous drum. I bowed down and kissed the ground while reading poetry aloud to Mother Nature and hand-ground some wheat for the organic bread I was going to bake later in my solar-powered oven while teaching TNC to speak Sanskrit. What, you guys don’t do that on Saturdays too? Pfft.

Alas, the weather turned to shite yesterday as the temperature dropped by ten degrees Fahrenheit and it pissed with rain. And for good measure, the train service was running like it was 1899 and it took me more than two and a half hours to get home from my friend’s place that morning in what should’ve been an hour’s journey. Ahhhhh, that’s more like it. The Jolly Green Goddess went back into hibernation and the Noble Savage appeared once more with a THUD! BANG! CRASH! to reality. Cynicism had triumphed once again. Blast! But maybe — just maybe — the gardening goddess in me will return with the sunshine once more. Whenever that may be.

• Home and Hearth , Miscellaneous Missives
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NS April 23rd, 2008

I don’t know about you, but I just adore being compared to a food product or inanimate object and looooove it when companies make advertisements filled with negative stereotypes and hatred in an attempt to be funny and hip. ‘Cause yeah, misogyny is hil-frickin’-arious. Even my husband was offended by these adverts and he’s not easily riled. Watch for yourself and decide.

Do these advertising execs have mental illnesses? I hope to find out because I have scouted out the phone numbers for their marketing departments and have left messages, along with filing complaints with the Advertising Standards Authority. Honda apparently is claiming that this video is not an official release, which very well could just mean that they paid for it and came up with it but let it ‘leak’ because they knew it would generate press and they could get away with their disgusting behaviour without consequence. And Pot Noodle? Well, they’ll have no such excuse since I saw it live on telly last night while watching a football game with TNH. I guess they didn’t think any womenfolk would be watching sports of all things. I suppose it was after 9pm so I should’ve been cleaning something or giving my man a blowjob.

Bastards.

• Feminist Fury , In The News
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NS April 21st, 2008

On Thursday I began having Braxton Hicks (practice contractions that the uterus performs to prepare itself for labor) and could literally feel myself stretching and growing. By Friday, I no longer fit into any of my pre-pregnancy trousers. By Saturday, I was asked for the first time by a stranger if I was pregnant. By Sunday, the bottom button on my jacket popped off. As of today, it is getting uncomfortable to bend over to pick things up off the floor and I have to take a deep breath before leaning over the edge of the bed to put my socks on.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a bump! It is ever-expanding, though still covered by a layer of post-my-last-baby-and-pre-this-one blubber, so mostly it just looks like I swallowed a small Yorkshire terrier and washed it down with ten gallons of Newcastle. And we all know that Yorkies can’t handle their booze.

But this means it’s official — I’m really having another baby, and in just under five months. Holy cannolli! I’m simultaneously extremely excited and terrified at the prospect of having two munchkins under my care at the same time (how exactly does one do that while staying sane?) but a little more of the former than the latter at the moment. Plenty of time for freaking out later, like after the baby is born and it’s too late, right? You women with two or more kids, just smile and nod politely and make reassuring ‘oohing’ noises. Unless you found becoming the mother of two children under three years apart so joyful and carefree that you have nothing but heartwarming tales to impart, in which case feel free to tell me how wonderful it will be from the get-go and how I won’t ever contemplate throwing myself off of a bridge while shouting “Whyyyyyyyyyyy???!!!!”

‘Cause right now I’m enjoying my little belly and would like to stay in a state of ignorant bliss for just a little longer. That’s not called denial, is it?

• The Noble Fetus
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NS April 17th, 2008

I recently finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It is a book about two Afghani women both thrust into the world of arranged marriage to a brutal man three times their age. The way that their love and self-sacrifice sustain them, even in the face of such evil, is remarkable and what I admire about women like them. I won’t go into details because I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone who has not read it and plans to, but suffice it to say that it makes for tough, though ultimately inspirational, reading.

On Sunday, nearing the end of the book and soaking in the bath, I cried. I shuddered and I shook as I allowed the terror of their lives to wash over me. Not because I identified with them or knew how they felt but because I didn’t, and never would. Their experiences, while fiction in this instance, are the experiences of millions of women all over the world, in both more ‘traditional’ societies and the Western world, but I have been lucky enough to escape the worst of it. These women have known and will continue to know suffering like I could never imagine. Beaten by fathers and husbands, raped by uncles and soldiers, sold to colleagues and friends of relatives, killed before they are even born, prevented from getting a basic education or having basic human rights…I read dozens of these stories every day and can’t help but notice that so much of womankind’s misery is brought on them by the men in their lives or the ones running them in government.

Deciding their fate (or more like sealing it) from atop their thrones of control and privilege, thrones they have sat upon since the beginning of time, these men never see women as human beings deserving of the power to direct their own destinies. To these men, women are commodities. Like acquiring an asset, they go after women in a systematic ritual of purchase, control, utilization and then disregard when they are finished with their services, be that cleaning their houses, satisfying their sexual desires, bearing and raising their children, cooking their meals or taking care of them when they are old and infirm. Except unlike carefully-guarded assets, women do not appreciate over time. As lines become ingrained on our skin, our value goes down and we are easily tossed aside. No one is so vulnerable as a female in a patriarchal society at either far end of the age spectrum. The very old, like the very young, being placed somewhere on par with the decrepit family pet whom no one has the heart to shoot and put out of its misery but is of no use to anyone on a practical level.

So as I lay in the bath and thought about these injustices and tragedies, played out daily the world over, I felt physically sick. Hot tears mingled with the steam rising from the water enveloping my swollen belly and I placed a hand over the space where my future child resides. And horror of horrors, I had a flash of sudden anger so severe that it overtook even my rational and maternal side. For a moment, as I thought of the little life I’m growing, I wondered what I would do if this child is a boy. Would I be contributing one more foot soldier in the war against women, one more bearer of oppression? Would my parental influence, love and guidance be enough to override what society will tell him is his birthright? Will I ever look into his eyes and see the indifference and hatred that fuels the perpetuation of inequality?

And then, at that moment and for the first time in this pregnancy, I felt a kick from deep inside that woke me from my biter reprieve and left me feeling simultaneously overjoyed and ashamed. There I was, blaming the world’s ills on an innocent being merely for the coincidence of what might be between its legs. Isn’t this how misogyny started in the first place? I thought about all the inklings I’ve had that I’m carrying a boy and how that, up until this fleeting thought, had always made me smile. I picture a little boy snuggled to my breast, tiny hand pressed palm-down over the rise and fall of my chest, looking at me in utter trust and adoration as I smooth the hair from his eyes. I imagine I will be the most important woman in the world to him and that the radiance of my love and the magnitude of my example will penetrate his heart and protect it from ever growing cold or being cruel.

While I will never stop feeling anger about these situations because anger is what gets me motivated and fuels me to help strive for change, I must remember that I (we) are fighting against an entire vast history, not individuals within it. Like a small boat that struggles to overcome a large wave, I must remember that the force of the water and the rise of the swell is the enemy, not the water itself or the creatures within. I have known numerous good men in my life and am truly blessed to count many amongst my friends and family.

I would be nothing short of grateful to experience the love of one more.

• Feminist Fury , Squish Squish , The Noble Fetus
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NS April 16th, 2008

I saw this meme over at What If No One’s Watching, who got it from Mostly True Tales. The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate in this blog game, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. Father went to college
2. Father finished college
3. Mother went to college
4. Mother finished college
5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
I have two uncles (by marriage) who are doctors. One of my dad’s sister is a professor.
6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.
7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.
8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
9. Were read children’s books by a parent
10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Swim lessons when I was younger, tennis lessons for one summer when I was about 12 and horse-riding for a couple years
11. Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively
13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
16. Went to a private high school
17. Went to summer camp
18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18
19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels
20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Not all of it, but the majority
21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
22. There was original art in your house when you were a child
23. You and your family lived in a single-family house
24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home

25. You had your own room as a child
Not as a young child but in later years, yes
26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18
27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course
28. Had your own TV in your room in high school
29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college
30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16
Once to go to Florida though that was paid for by a charity and once to D.C. for a school trip
31. Went on a cruise with your family
32. Went on more than one cruise with your family
33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up
34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

It’s good to do these sorts of exercises from time to time to remind us of how much we take for granted. While my family had some hard times financially and it was never easy, we always had a roof over our heads, nice clothes, books and education at our disposal. How lucky were you?

• Memes
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