I just packed for my partner who has a camping trip with 20 teenagers this weekend. It’s a division of labor that suits our nearly 17 year relationship; she hates to pack, I kind of like it, love her by doing it. This afternoon, my two kiddos, comfortably stripped down to boxers for their annual pediatric exam, so gorgeous in their transitory states, so comfortable with mom-as-witness, I, breathless with the honor of being theirs.
And then I think about the relative who has been calling me more, and I think it’s because he has disappointed and offended the rest of my family too much recently, and I’m a safe bet. Makes me think about the kind of companionship that comes from decades of bouncing off the same soft walls of family together: distance, proximity, alienation, recognition.
Just read this post about a mom who wanted to have a natural labor, and breastfeed, and found childbirth and parenting anything but how she expected it; ended up a bottle-mama, felt the pangs of derision calling out from magazine covers touting “Breast is Best.” Had the opposite experience with her second, found joy and derision there too. She has visited both worlds and finds some sense of comfort in the undefined gray where most of parenting lives. Speaking of that gray gets me thinking about Rev. Renita Weems’ recent ponderings about the power of dads, and how that fits with my chosen-niece’s dad-free family, and my own kids’ four parent variety (and the nuances of gender and roles it creates).
And I’m considering the question posed by queerradical when he wonders whether there is really anything radical about poly-kinky sex and invites us to create spaces for collective sharing of sensuous skills. This, against the backdrop of a recent Massachusetts bill that aims to protect the disabled by making sexual images of certain adults with disabilities illegal, members of the disability and sexuality performance troupe Sins Invalid are not so sure that the law would protect them.
Which reminds me of how much trouble one can get in mentioning breastfeeding and your own kids in boxers within the same few lines that you mention kinky sexuality. And maybe rightfully so, because those same soft walls of family have done some serious damage to folks in the way of sexuality: distance, proximity, alienation, recognition.
And yet here we are. Brought together. Bonding in all sorts of inexplicable ways. Embodied. Here we are embodied.
I meditate on that quite often. So many times I have said to myself “but I have a body, I still have a body.” I dismantled my whole sexuality, deconstructed all attachments I had built up for myself even around my supposedly liberated radical poly kinkiness. I took it all apart like so many lego pieces scattered out on the floor in front of me. And it was awesome. And now sometimes I see myself like a shell cracking open and myself, light-soul-essence flowing out. But when I went to reconstruct the pile, it still pretty much amounted to the same me.
As Catholic feminist theologist Mary Hunt says, “Bodies Don’t Lie.” And if that’s the case, what do we know about how we bond? How our bondings continually ebb and flow, wax and wane, except - do they ever really die? And what does that tell us about the meaning of life?
Haven’t seen my partner now for what feels like days, I’ve got to go show her the suitcase, what I have packed, and then sit down to enjoy a little LOST before she’s off for the weekend. In the meantime, I’m still tinkering with the legos…
I am realizing there are dozens of directions I could go with this post: how do our different bodies impact our course of bonding; how does sexuality interface in healthy ways with parenthood; how does where we come from impact who we become and what our options are; as social creatures how do both joy and derision shape us; what does a life challenging root-causes of oppression look like; does how we are born really impact how we live; does how we live impact how we die.
But the thought I want to interject at the moment is that as much as I have a preference for natural childbirth and breastfeeding, I advocate for those things not so much because I think they are right, but because I think life requires a certain proportion of that gray that comes from multiple perspectives. And if 99% of the people born in this country are born in a hospital with procedures and routines that are the same regardless of your body what’s really at risk is not necessarily natural childbirth (begging the age old question of, to human kind, what is natural anyway?) but diversity of life experience, knowledge, room for gray.
I grew up in a large family, someone was pregnant from the time I was two pretty much until I was twenty with a few gaps here and there. I was going to have children naturally, breastfeed, you name it. I was unable to have children and so we adopted. And we adopted older - my daughter was 21 months and my son was 3 1/2. And we adopted children who were not white. It could not have been a different picture than I painted for myself… I always thought my kids would bond to me inside me and it would not have to be something that I consciously ensured occurred. But that was not how it was and we had to hella work at. The process has made me question nature and nurture and choice and fate and faith.
And the image that speaks to me the most in your post is the image of the child transitioning standing in boxers… My children showered with me well in to elementary school and had me help them in the bath as well and I loved watching their next selves emerge… sad that today it would cause many to raise eyebrows - even more so because they are not “really” my children…..
You’ve got me thinking…
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Have a nice day
Thanks, you too!
I have been looking looking around for this kind of information. Will you post some more in future? I’ll be grateful if you will.
Hi! I like your srticle and I would like very much to read some more information on this issue. Will you post some more?
Where did you take from such kind of information? Can you give me the source?
This one has a lot of references built into the links within the post - otherwise - I’m not sure where to begin, I touch on a lot in this post. An all time favorite that relates broadly is: Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (The Crossing Press 1984). And/or let me know which subjects in particular you would like to follow up on.