7 for 21: The poo story

Last night Catherine and I went on a date while Biffle was playing a gig elsewhere in town. One of the world's best babysitters was hanging with a sleeping Maybelle, who had apparently made some complaining--but not distressed--noises shortly after going to bed. This isn't a new phenomenon, so he'd listened to see how upset she was (not very), and let her be.  She'd quieted down and presumably gone to sleep.

Shortly after we got back home, Catherine heard Maybelle talking cheerfully to herself, so I went into her bedroom to give her the "Maybelle, it's time to go to bed!" stern speech.  As I opened her door, a wave of smell washed over me.  She cheerfully said, "Good morning!" to me, and I said, "We need to change your diaper."

And then I picked her up out of the bed, and realized that her back was warm and moist.  And when I brought her into our bedroom, where the light was on, I saw that her little hand was brown.  Something exciting had happened in bed, and she'd done some exploring

Catherine had to strip the bed, banish the stuffed animals, and confirm that the mattress cover had done its job.  I had to take Maybelle to the shower--it was that bad.  I scrubbed, and scrubbed again:  "Let's wash your hands one more time!"  Fortunately, Maybelle was very happy with the shower, and after she was cleaned, she was content to read Goodnight Moon and head to bed again where, her digestive system completely empty, she slept soundly.

I know others have far more dramatic stories than this one, but this was the most dramatic poo incident we've had in our household.  I'm not sure exactly what to do with some of the animals (how do you de-poo a handmade sheep?), but we made it through, and I'm hopeful that tonight will have no exciting incidents at all.

6 for 21

Yeah, so we've only posted six posts as part of the 31 for 21 campaign so far.  Our intentions were good, but...you know...lots of distractions in life, from random personal stuff like the internet being out to random professional/political stuff like books I read that clue me in to troubling phenomena in my city.

But here is a happy post about Catherine's visit to Charleston this weekend.  You can see what a good time Maybelle and Catherine consistently have together.  Maybelle hasn't seen Catherine since August but immediately knew who she was and has been very happy to see her (perhaps she's also picking up on my vibe about Catherine being here).

Hauling a happy Maybelle around the pumpkin patch

Swinging at the playground

This is just a picture that shows how damn cute Maybelle is.

Catherine is a speech therapist, and in that professional role, she taught Maybelle the phrase "Ta dah!" today.

Killing the Black Body

Yesterday I read a book called Killing the Black Body:  Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, a scholarly study from 1997 by Dorothy Roberts.  It's a book I should have read long ago, for a number of reasons.  First of all, it's incredibly important and often cited.  But I didn't realize that there were even more personal reasons I should have read it.

Here's how it starts:

In 1989, officials in Charleston, South Carolina, initiated a policy of arresting pregnant women whose prenatal tests revealed they were smoking crack.  In some cases, a team of police tracked down expectant mothers in the city's poorest neighborhoods.  In others, officers invaded the maternity ward to haul away patients in handcuffs and leg irons, hours after giving birth.  One woman spent the final weeks of pregnancy detained in a dingy cell in the Charleston County Jail.  When she went into labor, she was transported in chairs to the hospital, and remained shackled to the bed during the entire delivery.  All but one of the four dozen women arrested for prenatal crimes in Charleston were Black.

You know that when you're reading a book called Killing the Black Body, and it starts in the place where you live, that this is a bad, bad sign.

I knew a bit about this horrifying practice, because I would talk about it in my Women's Studies classes at Vanderbilt.  I'd talk about how racism affects reproductive rights, about the ways that racism and sexism intersect, and about how racism and sexism help to create policies that are actually bad for everybody.  I learned a bit more about it once I came to Charleston:  I learned that one of the women whose path crosses mine again and again, Susan Dunn, was one of the attorneys who helped bring this case before the US Supreme Court and get this practice to be recognized as unconstitutional.

What I didn't know until I read Roberts' book is that the Medical University of South Carolina, MUSC, enthusiastically helped to make this racist, sexist policy happen.  In fact, it was their idea.  This makes me sick to my stomach for a number of reasons:

• I gave birth to my daughter there.  (And I have some stories from that experience that will give you a sense of how they approach patients depending on the class stereotypes they're projecting onto them.  Perhaps I'll blog about some of that at some point.)
• I've had MRI after MRI there.
• Maybelle's wonderful speech therapist is there, so we visit an MUSC office once a week.
• Any other medical care Maybelle needs--like hearing and vision tests--we have performed there.
• Biffle has gotten ER care from them on multiple occasions.
• I have good friends who've completed their degrees there.

And they were behind this policy.  I know that good people do shitty things all the time--this seems to be part of being human--but it does make me feel so outraged and exhausted to think of medical professionals treating their patients as sub-human.  Yes, drug use during pregnancy isn't anybody's idea of a good practice.  But is the way to address that problem to yank a newborn away and send the mother to jail?  To chain the mother to a bed while she's delivering?  Apparently the women were given the "option" of drug treatment, but there were no drug treatment centers that treated pregnant women, and the drug treatment that was offered to the new mothers provided no childcare.

I'm going to go email my friends who work at MUSC, as well as Susan Dunn, and find out if MUSC has gone through some sort of serious soul-searching process and made amends for being part of a practice that shat upon black women and their children.

Internet and Flantor the Peno

For the last couple of days, we haven't had internet at our house.  Our cable modem has failed us, and despite the fact that our neighborhood is increasingly full of college students, none of them have unsecured wireless internet that we can glom onto.  We're very hopeful that this will be fixed by tomorrow.

I have some posts I've been working on, and I'll probably post something in just a few minutes, since I'm at work, where there's plenty of internet.  But in the meantime, enjoy this picture sent by my brother Trey, commemorating an incomprehensible--and yet brilliant and hilarious--joke by my brother Aaron.  Please note the shout-out at the bottom:  "Scridge one up for the Gridge."  Wow, were we an odd bunch.

Reasons why feminism is a good prerequisite for having a child with Down syndrome

This week I read another memoir written by a parent of a child with Down syndrome.*  As is the case with many, many of these memoirs, the first half of the book was a story of a parent struggling with grief and sadness, with loss, with the horrible, horrible bummer of having a child with Down syndrome.  I was so disappointed.  Haven't I already read that story a billion times?  Aren't we tired of that story and ready for a new one?  And for goodness sake, can you not start the story with a chapter that's about how great things are now?  You know that new parents are picking that book up and thinking, "Oh, no--this is just as bad as I feared!"

At any rate, one of the things that struck me while I was reading is that I didn't have the same year-long struggle that many folks have to adjust to having a child with Down syndrome, and at least one component of why I didn't have to struggle that much is the fact that I was already a feminist when Maybelle came along.

So, reasons why feminism is a good prerequisite for having a child with Down syndrome:

Beauty standards:  I'm already quite skeptical of them.  I want Maybelle to have her own, unique beauty, like so many of my students do.  I want her to look funky, distinctive--not to fit into the homogenous, stereotypically girlish mode.  Please see the picture on the left for an example of Maybelle's awesome looks.  I love all the ways that she's visually distinctive.

Activism:  It's not that I want Maybelle's life to have additional challenges, but long before she was born, or even conceived, I knew that she was going to be an ethical person in a fucked up world. What this means is that I'd always envisioned her as an activist, because activism is a necessary component of ethical humanity.  So she'll have some easy targets.  And we already have tools.

Recognition of social construction:  As you're all well aware, I'm into the social construction of everything. Before Maybelle was born I already had a scaffolding in my head of societal oppressions and how they operate.  Adding one new concept into this framework--the notion that disability is socially constructed, and that these social constructions can and should be changed--wasn't a paradigm shift.  It made perfect sense almost immediately.

What this means is that it was pretty easy for me to see Down syndrome as embraceable human diversity, not a problem, a flaw, a defect, not something to freak out about or want to "solve."  It's a component of who Maybelle is, a component that's embraceable.  All the bad beliefs and energy about Down syndrome are socially constructed.

Ready-made community:  Certainly our friends and families were pretty much, "Down syndrome?  Whatever--it's Maybelle!"  But the larger feminist community--my students, for instance--only needed the tiniest bit of coaching (like I did) to see things from a feminist disability studies perspective, and now they're all over it.  They see Maybelle and there's not a bit of weirdness.

*This wasn't George Estreich's The Shape of the Eye, which I'll review here very soon.

Oct. 13, 1991

Twenty years ago tonight, I was strolling through the University Center at Tennessee Tech with my friend Jennifer. Two guys we knew walked up, wearing very nice suits.  They looked good.  Jennifer already had the hots for one of the guys.  The other one was a guy I'd seen on campus a lot, and been sort of curious about.  Curious, but skeptical:  he seemed like trouble, like a slacker, someone who played a lot of music on the patio at Tech and didn't actually go to class.

But he had an energy, a vibe, that I found intriguing.  His whole presence seemed to sort of vibrate with it.  He looked damn good in a suit.  And he was eyeing me like, "Hey, baby."

In fact, he probably said, "Hey, baby."

They invited us to go to one of the few restaurants open in Cookeville, TN, late at night:  Waffle House (of course I had no idea then what significance this restaurant would have for me twenty years later).  Jennifer and I thought, What the hell.  Actually, I suspect that Jennifer though, OMG, I'm going to get to hang out with Wilhelm!  I know that I thought, What the hell.  I've got nothing better to do tonight.  And this guy is really attractive.

At the Waffle House we ordered some coffee, and the Waffle House meal I always got those days:  one piece of raisin toast, and a poached egg (really?  Yes, that's the kind of thing I ate back then).  And then we made out.  In the booth at the Waffle House.  Jennifer and Wilhelm went at it, and I looked at the guy sitting beside me and thought, again, What the hell?

As it turns out, we weren't all that skilled at kissing each other.  Even today, kissing isn't our strong suit.  But we were very, very interested in getting to know each other better.  I was the super rule following emphatically feminist good girl.  He was the guy who challenged all rules on general principle and wanted to explore all the forbidden spaces.  It was a terrible idea for us to get together.  Really, who would have thought that this could work out?

The next day he sent me a handwritten note inviting me to...let's just say, to come hang out with him.  He'd even written a song about it, which he performed for me (and others) on the patio at Tech.

And as of today, we've been together for twenty years.

Happy anniversary, Biffle!

A quick post from on the road

I'm writing from a hotel room in Mankato, MN.  I'm here for the Feminisms and Rhetorics conference, where I was invited to give last night's keynote address (which I ended up calling "Feminism and Zines:  An Origin Story (and why these stories matter)").  It was great fun, with a lot of interesting conversation with the participants both during my talk and in the Q&A after.

Special shout-outs to:

• Amy Mecklenburg-Faenger for being an outstanding scholar who helped me accidentally discover some of the historical feminist predecessors to zines.
• Heather Trahan for having a great post-lecture conversation with me in line at the noodle shop, and in our walk back to the hotel.
• Nina Krasnoff and Cate McCann for letting me show off their fabulous informal publications to a crowd of very receptive scholars.
• Cate Bush for taking a totally last-minute picture of the publication she and I produced as girls, The North Dixien, so that I could include it in my powerpoint (damn, were we adorable).
• Kirsti Cole for putting on a great conference, inviting me to speak, and then having some of the exact same questions/frustrations with social change that I'm having right now.  So we're going to keep talking.

And here's one final thought I want to share (Biffle, don't read this):  travel is incredibly luxurious.  It takes a long time to get from Charleston to Minnesota--I was in travel mode yesterday from 6 am until 2 pm.  What that meant is that I was sitting in airports and on airplanes for hours and hours.  And here's what I discovered:  nobody was calling me.  I wasn't checking emails.  No one was asking questions--I had no scheduled appointments to keep track of, no rescheduling to do because of unexpected emergencies or the needs of important people.  There were screaming children near me, but I didn't have one bit of responsibility for them--they could scream, shriek, run around, whatever.  Not my job.  All I had to do was what I was told:  line up for zone 3, go from gate B8 to gate B13.  Just being in travel mode felt like--feels like--an amazing vacation.