Thanksgiving

This year I've been very, very proactive making healthy decisions in my life, removing people out of my life who are toxic or painful... Over these past few years I have taken many steps in my life, steps that I've needed to take, to make deliberate decisions about who is in my life. I just don't have the energy for that kind of toxic crap.

Regardless of how deliberate it is, it's still hard. I'm a Family Person. Although I'm generally very happy in my life and glad that I've made the decisions that I've made, there are certain times of the year when it starts to get to me. These holidays are those days for me.

It's already started. Lucky for me, I've got some truly wonderful and loving people under this roof and they've already been so supportive...

Today John was the one I was talking with. Among many other things he said to me, Mom, you ARE a family person. And, though we don't have other family now, we have us. And in a few years, there will be more of us, and you will always spend the holidays with my kids.

Like, yeah, he said that. He gets it.

In the meantime, I'm struggling a bit.
But Happy Thanksgiving to you.

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I'm Sensitive

You're too sensitive.
If I've heard it once, I've heard it, literally, a thousand times. Someone notices that my feelings have been hurt by something they've said or done so they shake their head, little frown, and say Aw, tip of the head, you're so sensitive.

I have spent a good deal of my life apologizing for being sensitive. I've had people minimize their own rudeness/unkindness by simply thinking it is my sensitivity that is the problem and not their own rudeness or their boorishness or their bull-in-a-china-shop-...ness.

This has been an ongoing and constant issue for me.

So I've been quite ashamed of that part of me for years. But no more and never again.

The truth is, I am. I'm sensitive.

It's a huge part of who I am.

I own it and I'm grateful to it because it makes me the kind of person that I am proud to be. So I don't just accept that part of me, I celebrate it.

If this describes you too, take heart.

* I know I post about this issue alot...it's a thing for me...

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Athiest Homeschooling Parents: DON'T MISS THIS!

A friend on Facebook just posted a link to this film Your Inner Fish, available HHMI: BioInteractive, a website for science teachers to share tons of media materials. SHARE THIS LINK!
It's absolutely wonderful. I've only been checking it out for awhile tonight, but I've already seen dozens of titles that are awesome and absolutely FREE!

So far with my quick look tonight, I think it's generally high school level and higher, but who's to say that your children aren't completely capable of understanding these concepts already? ALWAYS expose them to materials that you think might be "above their heads". It's one of the amazing perks of being homeschoolers.

Here are a few titles and links to whet your whistle:

• Floods, Doubts, and Foodchains
• Using Mathematical Reasoning to Quantify the Microscopic Scale
• Science Says: Sex and Gender Aren't the Same
• Red Tattoo - looking at ink pigments in the skin
• Serengeti: Nature's Living Laboratories
• The Animated Life of A.R. Wallace
• The Biology of Skin Color

Check it out with your kids and follow your interests...
then let me know of your experience!

What do YOU think?

Name for It: Misogyny

Just a thing on my mind.
It's been on my mind for years.

When I was young, I got pregnant. Right?
I had so much pain and judgement from that. People who labeled me whore.

But it was like it happened to me alone. I carried the stigma. I lived with the so-called disgrace. I was humiliated in a million different ways, and for years. In my family, I was smeared and stigmatized...I became the pariah. It was actually weird because I clearly wasn't the worst kid in the world, but being sexually active...oh geez, we can't have that! I wasn't even the only kid in the family (sibs, cousins, others, etc) who was sexually active. I mean, really, the stories I knew about other people... I was treated like tramp even though I was in a long-term relationship with the guy. Sheesh.

Anyway, both during and after my pregnancy I was person who was labeled; I was the besmirched name; * I was the ne'er-do-well. 

Guess who didn't lose either face or reputation.
My boyfriend.

Oh sure, he got some crap up front. Sure, his mother gave him the omnipresent Catholic guilt, but over all he was fine. The long run? He went on with his life. No problems with work. No problems with friends. No lingering problems with his family. He didn't even seem to have any depression, as I did for years. And no names. He was called no names. Not a single one.

Why is that?
No, really?
Why is it that the mother gets to be, as his mother called me, The Whore of Babylon? Why was he allowed to just skip away? No, I care enough for him that I truly didn't want him to have this same problem, but why is it this way? I carried that letter A for many years, many, many years, while he just walked away unscathed**. 

I don't know, just an old, never before voiced, rant.

In the meantime, the baby?
She was adopted as a newborn.
She's now 41 years old, married, mother of two. If she EVER comes here and sees this picture, she'll be angry. And rightly so. 
But here she is, my daughter and her beautiful family.   --------------------------->


* ME! I mean, do you know me? Geeeesh.
** Actually there is a name for this, it's misogyny, gender inequality, sexism.

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I Know Who I Am

I'm all for the government staying out of my damn life, if it can also make sure that people in need have the support that they need to survive. I'm terribly extroverted, unless I'm not. I'm deliciously introverted, unless I'm not. I've got get out of the house; when I'm not snuggled up on the couch. I'm extremely friendly, unless I'm just keeping to myself that day. I'm feet on the floor, until those days that the existential thoughts, again, swirl my mind. And I'm connected to some exceptionally people, as well as being completely in my own bubble on some days. I feel tranquil, yet driven.

I'm all of these things.
And do you know why?
Because I'm finally me. Me, in all of my varying degrees of things.

For many years I'd thought that I'd really known myself...turns out, I had no idea! But I can say that I'm finally beginning to know me. How weird is that? Turning fifty was a real turning point in my life. It was such a freeing thing, such an empowering thing. I've often heard older women talk about feeling empowered in their fifties, but I simply could not conceive of such a thing, until now.

How could I know that the freedom of reinvention would become a real presence in my life, that the deep love that I feel for people in my life would deepen, widen, develop quiet violence? Rather then sliding down that slippery slope, I feel like the world is opening to me. Rather than paddling and paddling to stay in place, doors open to me and people welcome me in as legit, no need to prove myself anymore. I own literally every single thing that I'll ever need and have no need to accumulate any more stuff. I am both invisible and powerful beyond belief out in the world.

Yes, I am that person who talks to you in the grocery aisle. I'll drive up, roll down my car window and have a chat with you on the roadside. I'll stop and give you the time you need. I'll greet the mailman at the box. I'll drop everything to spend time with you, with your kids, with your kids' friends. I wear comfortable clothing, hair up in a do, eating healthy, wearing sneakers and a cozy, warm sweatshirt with dangling earrings. I'm fitting into the smaller sizes and I often choose to dress up just for fun. I think fondly of high school rather than thinking of it as a cesspool of neurosis. I look at my slightly-greying husband and fondly think He's getting to be a grumpy bugger. I can identify with several different generations and I feel like I fit in comfortably with almost everyone. But mostly, I don't give a FUCK what anybody else thinks.
 
Being in my fifties is wonderful and freeing and expanding and, as soon as this Advil kicks in, I'm going to kick my heals up and party like it's 1999!

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Reaction Videos

I KNOW that there is something wrong with me!
Even though I'm busy as HAIL, I love and enjoy reaction videos, especially I love Jamel_AKA_Jamal at the moment. Jamel is a Youtuber who created content for fun, all kinds of videos, until now, he's doing reaction videos now, reacting to all kind of music.

While doing my work online I nearly always have music or TEDtalks or something behind me, occupying my mind. This propensity of mine to listen to a variety of content takes me on some weird journeys to videos that are far-flung at times. ANYWAY, somehow I started watching some videos of people listening to other videos and reacting to them. WTHeck? lol

I know.
I know.

Some months ago I stumbled on some videos by a dude named Jamel who was reacting to Led Zeppelin, The Moody Blues, Elvis, Rush, Queen, and Pink Floyd, to name a few. He seems to listen to many Spanish artists that are unfamiliar to me. I was binging on Led Zeppelin when I stumbled on Jamel. But it was his reactions to Karen Carpenter that made me really love him! 

Jamel's face when he's listening to Karen Carpenter is ADORABLE.

There must be tens of thousands of content providers on Youtube putting out reaction videos of every sort, and, interestingly, dozens of people who have reacted to Karen Carpenter specifically. But Jamel watching Karen Carpenter videos from 1972 has stolen my heart.


* If the crazy world of reaction videos appeals to you, check out these two dudes listening to Rush's Spirit of the Radio for the first time, and enjoy the discovery...again!


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Pornography

Here's another grey area for you.

Actually, maybe it's not so grey after all...

When I was growing up, my dad has pornography in the house. On the walls. In the closets. Sitting out. In the john, of course.

This was a house with one young boy and three young girls. This was a house where Mom left (GEE, Wonder why? ) and the kids were raised by this man. This man who thought it was OK to have pictures of nude women hanging around, who thought it was OK to have pornography (not the classy kind) just sitting around, accessible to these young minds.

Yep. I looked at it.
Yep. I was affected by it.

This morning I was thinking about what I thought about it all of those years ago and how I was affected by it. How I am, in fact, still affected by it. Let's start with a thing that happened when I was in the second grade.

I was in my second grade class, talking to some boys. They mentioned naked women and I said, "I can show you lots of naked women!" So we organized a trip to walk over to my house (literally 100 steps from the classroom door) so that these boys could see the naked pictures. I remember it being at least two boys (Tom an Michael), but I know that there was at least one other boy. We walked over to my house and into the garage. I turned on the lights/ the boys eyes lit up! The walls were covered with pictures. I felt kind of proud, kind of knowing, kind of generous. That is, until Mom came out and scooted us out of the garage. Until that moment I had no idea that it was a shameful thing or that there was something untoward about having naked pictures on the wall. To me, that was normal.

When I first became curious about the books and magazines around the house, I guess I was pretty young, in elementary school. Somewhere I ran across this old black and white dirty magazine of sorts. While most of Dad's pornography was of young women, this thing had an image of a naked dude standing there with a huge penis. As a kid I remember looking at that picture and feeling horrified at that hideous thing. I kept that picture hidden for months just so I could look at it with disgust.

As I got older, the message was always something like "Women are either virgins or whores." So any sexual activity, regardless of how freaking normal that is, was viewed as being a whore, being sinful, being unlovable. In fact, as soon as my sex life became common knowledge in the family (thanks to my brother reading my diary when I was 16 or 17...), my dad moved about fifty miles from me emotionally. From that moment forward, he never acted loving toward me again, and he died almost forty years later...

Imagine that weird dichotomy. Pornography all over the place, but we're not supposed to be sexual or to have sexual experiences. I was effed up about that one for decades...
What's normal? What's real? What's healthy?
All of these issues have reared their ugly heads because of the normalcy of pornography in my life.

Anyway, more stuff in my teens...somehow my boyfriends were from very conservative families, resulting in mothers hating me. Whore.
Yep.

And the pornography?
Somehow it gave me a weird, fucked up vision of women, of femininity, of sexuality. Using and enjoying pornography doesn't bother me. Use it if you like. Be in it, if you choose to. Enjoy it. Just use your integrity...your principles.

And, forgoodnessake, keep it off of your walls!

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