Two Loves

The emotional roller coaster has persevered. I was once so even keeled. I keep myself that way because I know what lurks inside my placid shell. But here I am, living and exploring everything in here. Drinking beers all afternoon to keep me from exploding.

Being Ramona’s mother has been the biggest privilege of my life. I love her so much it makes me cry sometimes. I am in love. Only the second time in my life. Over the last couple days things have gotten really hard. When she is complaining or trying to get her way, I have found myself wanting to do things and say things I am ashamed to admit. For the first time in my life I want a break from being a mom. I want a week off. I want to explore and groove alone. I don’t want to have a kid to take care of. I just want to be all about me and what I want. I thought it might happen, that I feel like this one day, but I hate the way it feels to want to escape my own child. I have always loved how we are a team and have generally always had such a good time together, talking things out, keeping our heads, keeping respect…not like those other families. Last night, after I turned off the lights to sleep, I told Ramona I was sorry I haven’t been the best mom, that I am just stressed. She said, “I know you’re stressed, mommy.” In such a sweet understanding voice. I feel so lucky to have her, just hours after wanting to throw her out with the trash. I snuggled the little cutey. Emotional roller coaster.
Of course I can’t take a week off. Today, thank goodness, I do get to take a day off. I think I will be getting to take a night off as well. We are preparing to try having Ramona take her first night without me, at my mom’s house. I am going to the next town over for a show. I hope to stay out past 10:30 for the first time in 5 years.

Oh and speaking of 5 years, I haven’t even told the world I lost my mama virginity yet. (I love the benefits of a semi-anonymous blog). He had been flirting with me and trying to hang for a couple months. Then I saw him last week and he started playing with my hands when suddenly he says, “Oh, wow.” And looks at me surprised. And to my surprise I realize that I had grabbed his hands, and was holding them and stroking them. I just went with it. That night he came over after I put Ramona to sleep. My housemates were out of town leaving their bedrooms open to exploration. The next night we did it again, and the next. Then I realized I may already be over him. He’s 24. I think he grew up on porn. I feel like if I keep hanging with him, I might wake up trapped in some weird fetish porn and wonder how I got there. And I guess I think he is cute, but he isn’t really my type. Like there isn’t enough desire in me to propel me to do the things II know he wants me to do. So I am a little turned off for him, but the experience has just made me hungrier for whatever this is that my sensual core is aching for.

After five years of nothing, what more could I ask for than a sex-crazed 24 year old? I guess my job is to figure that out. He didn’t quench my thirst, but stroked the fire. Opened Pandora’s box unleashing all sorts of chaos on the world. I want enough girlfriends and boyfriends to make up for the 5 years of starvation. I’ve never been into multiple sexual relationships, but I wonder if I am now. I am realizing crushes I have had that I didn’t know about. This is why I was hesitant to get involved in the world of romance. I knew what was brewing just under my placid shell.

I met a guy named Ryan over a year ago, when he approached me I totally screwed up and he left without me and I regretted it all year. He was like a magnet, and we had been catching each other looking at each other all afternoon. . I emailed a friend of his to tell him I want to talk to him (since I don’t know how else to get a hold of him). I was too shy to do it last year. A little loving can do wonders for a woman’s confidence. Still waiting for the response.
So do I tell my guy that I am done? Or am I done? I guess I am not sure. I like him, but if I don’t even want to kiss him outside of the bedroom, I think that says something. But if I am using him, then it is mutual I think.

And all the while this is happening, the number of days until I have to move are ticking, ticking. Nerve Wracking. Three weeks left. And Petaluma is prejudice against people receiving rental assistance. I am really afraid. Running around frantically trying to not remember that I don’t have a place to live yet. And my housemates weird, Marin, middle-class, nuclear culture is really making me uncomfortable and miserable. But that is another story that isn’t about love…not really.

I want to run around, I want to get crazy, liberate myself. Fix all this love stuff. Think I will go crack a beer and feel selfish for a while.

Sunday Poetry: Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Went to the beach yesterday.

It was cold, so we spent a long time a little away from the ocean and walked up the mouth of the Russian River, where I then took a cat nap after getting little sleep the night before. Got some great pics though (take a closer look), and this is only one of them...can you believe that body belongs to a 4 year old? Tomorrow is her half birthday. She towers above other four year olds, though I guess it doesn't really matter. Only one of her friends is four.

Are We There Yet?

I can’t believe how the weather has finally turned so beautiful. It was bound to happen, but when it did it was still amazing, sweet success. Summer has begun, and likewise mine feels like it must be getting closer. My living situation has driven me to the brink of insanity; to bi polar psychosis. The gears are churning at such a painfully slow pace...it’s like in a dream, when you are trying to do something, run, get the attention of your lover as he/she is walking away, and it feels like you are trapped in sand or mud, your movements, even on step or gesture, so slow and labored.

As a person so familiar and infused with flow, movement, constant change, being stuck in limbo, stagnation, is so, so painful. For me it is usually the decision-making time that I slow down. I have made a decision, so what the hell is the problem, let’s get on with it!

I have to admit, I am a bit of an occultist and I consult Iching (How could Mom, Carl Jung and Pink Floyd all be wrong?), and it has helped me with my faith that a great place in which to create the home I need will show up, that I need not make any rash decisions and settle for something that won’t make a comfortable hearth. But the waiting is hard. Two thirds of my life is packed away in the garage, my daughter and I squished into a single room. We are artists, how can we create if we can hardly move? Where just putting something away is a chore because it goes in the box behind the other box in the closet.

As I have finally, for the first time found a great community in which I have chosen to lay down so roots, I now have this burning intense desire to create the home/hearth from which to thrive and conceive (no, I am not talking about children). But all has rolled to a stop. As I search for our home we exist in another’s home. I have for most of my life lived with roommates and in communal situations, but here is different, my roommates are very nuclear and the house is very normal. We work, create, learn, experiment, shake things up and live from our home. MY home is full of art, science, music, political commentary, books, dinner guests…not banal clutter, and all the regular furniture. This is not my home.

This town isn’t big enough to have 20 rentals to choose from. They trickle in and 2 property managers monopolize the market. It is hard to discuss section 8 vouchers with a corporation. They aren’t people and the middleman always makes all the rules.

So to escape all the pain of stagnation on the home front, I push my life forward in other areas. Picking up again my Zapatista, Latin America solidarity work. Picking up again my battles in the world of gender. And filling my life with others who say NO to school.

Spent the whole afternoon and early evening with unschoolers yesterday, on the Russian River. Already have three camping trips slated for the summer. Two with groups of unschoolers and another with some amazing, radical, super smart friends….one of which I realized I have a crush on. Though I would never tell her.

PS as I cut and posted this from Word to post up here, my roommate came home and told me she is moving...sooo I said go ahead and give 30 days...so now I have 30 days. Exciting and nerve wracking. Let the count down begin. 

I just say no to school

I was starting to get on board and just accept that I would be sending my daughter to school.  All her friends that are older than two are planning to go to school.  I hadn’t connected much with any parents in the Homeschooling Association here. And what single parent in their right mind, who has no help with this child raising fiasco, would forgo all that free childcare provided by the public school system?  Me?

Though I had planned from the beginning not to send my daughter to school, over the last months of chaos and pain, I had determined that Ramona would do just fine there.  I would have more time/freedom to research and create in solitary peace.  Ramona’s education and socialization needs will be handed to us on a silver platter.  And, well, what  makes us so special, that school isn’t good enough…but…every time I would meet someone who was ditching school permanently, my throat would tighten and my heart sink. Jealousy.  Compromising my ideals, yuck! I want the freedom they have and the guts to go through with it…I have that, don’t I? 

In the beginning I liked school sort of, but not particularly.  I complained about school starting so early from the first day.  I hated how people were so uptight and mean because I wasn’t like they were (actually was really painful).  I felt like I was wasting my time at school. By the time I was a teen and I realized that the person the designed the school I went to also designed the local prison I REALLY despised school. I hated that when I didn’t go to school, they would send the police over to escort me and threaten to send my mom to jail.  Whoa, fascists!  Compulsory public schooling to me looks like a lot of compulsory conditioning…first invented in Prussia in order to create good soldiers and citizens.  While some parents want their children conditioned to support and carry on the current social structure that happens to be coming unraveled at the seams, I see friends of mine spending a lot of time undoing the damage that the experiences of school creates for their children. 

I dropped out before the age of legality, to live my rebellious life.  Five years later, I took my GED and went to college .  That’s when I got even angrier at school.  I realized how much of what I learned was superficial as well as completely wrong.  In college I reconnected with my innate drive to learn, the one that nearly everyone is born with,  the one that school had wrung out of me.  In college I was treated with respect rather than a subject to be “taught” (conditioned) to some weird standard that was created by some shmucks who think they know what my child needs to live her future adult life. 

I know that school has changed some in some places since I was a child. I guess I just haven’t seen good results with reform, so I’m not a reformist. Some people like school…and it isn’t so much that there aren’t alternatives to the lame status quo mainstream classroom, especially here in Liberal Northern California.  My objections to school run much deeper than that.  They spring from the center of my being, which is where my activism, creative  energy and way of life also spring. Where once my activism emerged from resentment and rebellion…now it emerges from rebellion, hope and dedication to a better future.  Some magical experiences I have had involving Mexico, research and alternative schools; a collage of Zapatismo, Oaxacan rebellions and Gustavo Esteva’s writing and work brought me to this place. “Imagine the future you are dreaming of and fighting for in vivid detail. Now, build that future, in everyway that you can, miniscule and humongous, in the here and now.  Let every action be an action towards realizing your utopia. Live the future now.” The ideas snuggled in these words have salvaged me.  They have given direction to my creative and political energy and a voice and contentment to my innate self. 

If you crush it, smash it, tear this “white racist, homophobic, patriarchal bullshit paradigm” down, what have you but a power vacuum followed by more power grabbing and the “join me, join me” propaganda war? How can we change if we aren’t creating something to change into. How can we fight “power over”  without  cultivating personal power?  After spending years fighting and dying and screaming and crying I realized I had been ignoring the other side or more likely I didn’t feel the power to think outside the paradigm…but the Zapatistas have been trying it (they were a bit farther from our western controled paradigm already).  Gustvo Esteva has been working on it as well.  Two years ago I had the opportunity to study for a month at the so-called university that Esteva co-founded called Universidad de la Tierra. It’s about building.  Building connections, building alternatives,  building whole lives…defragmenting and decentralizing EVERYTHING. 

So as my life fell apart this winter and my inspiration stagnated, so did my desire and ability to build the new paradigm that is being built in a million tiny pieces and places all over the world and growing and growing (seriously, but much of what is going on ISN’T in the USA).  I want to struggle against fragmentation and centralization and for self-empowered people and communities.  Power from above centralizes as people power and self-sufficiency dwindles.  The power that we give to the government is the power that we give to the government.  Our relationship with our work, our food, our educations, our children, our health, out water, our environment, our lives are fragmented and we become helpless and dependent on centralized power to give us everything.  We know that this isn’t sustainable. The struggle for sustainability should be the struggle for self-sufficiency.

Schooling is synonymous with conditioning.  I want my daughter to learn in freedom.  I want her to learn from the real world, not about it.  I want her to know that (outside of math) there is always more than one answer, that are always more than two sides of a story and the truth isn’t always somewhere in the middle. To know that what is impossible to solve in one paradigm may be simple in another.  I want her ability to follow her bliss to stay intact. 

Funny thing is that while I often hear parents worried that their children aren’t being stimulated enough, I see children being over-stimulated.  So-called “stimulation” actually looks a lot like distraction to me.  Distraction from listening to the self and learning to deal withit. When my daughter is in preschool, she expects adults to always give her something to do; to keep her busy.  When summer comes, she goes crazy for a couple weeks (driving me crazy), and then when she realizes I am not going to give her everything to do, she will start being creative.  Finding her own things to do. She becomes amazingly focused and creates her best work.  Following her own passion, or at least discovering it.  If this is already obvious to me in preschool, I am afraid what happens in the higher grades. 

It isn’t that I don’t believe in the public good, or public education, it has more to do with schooling and conditioning of children. Ordering 25 seven-year-olds to a room for most of the day, day after day, accompanied by one adult and pressuring the teacher to teach to some Government standards based on making our country competitive in the global factory is not a good way to learn; it isn’t even safe (this is why so much of Teacher Training programs are focused on “classroom management.”) The structure of school requires hierarchical power structures and carrot/stick punishment and reward tactics to keep the peace and encourage students to fulfill government mandates.  What our children learn as children will profoundly affect the way they exist as adults. I know there are better, less costly ways to learn.  Ivan Illich had some good ideas about this.  His book “Deschooling Society,” touches on a lot of the problems with schooling, that I haven’t even began to go into in this blog, as well as a few ideas and solutions.  I also know that present day school is the better option for many children whose parents don’t have the capacity to put them anywhere better or even make educational decisions for them.  But I hope for everyone to one day have better options.  The more people say “no” and take a step out, the easier it is for others to do the same.  And as people find popular-based and local-based solutions, the humongo, centralized,  misguided federal government solution becomes less desirable.  Maybe I am a pioneer.  I hope I am a pioneer. I can’t do this alone.  I see more parent cooperative, community schools and free skools on the horizon.  At least for my daughter’s and my sake.

I recently started a homeschool/unschool Park Day in my town.  I think it was a hit.  I find more and more families are turning towards, “No More School” by the week.   And they mostly aren’t rich or religious.  Look at me.  The Crazy Anarchist.

If you have actually made it through that long post, and your still interested, well, I would like to share a couple links.  Here is a link to Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society online with notes and commentary…it is posted as a reading group on Wikiversity. http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Ivan_Illich:_Deschooling_Society

And here is the text of a speech Gustavo Esteva gave to some college students around commencement, that talks about some of his amazing life, thinking, meeting of Ivan and most importantly the thinking and actions that gave birth to the bad ass learning space in Oaxaca, Universidad de la Tierra. http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_future.htm

Also, this is an awesome awesome  awesome movement  in India, I really dig the “Walk-Out” campaign.  http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/

Today I ran into this small poem online:

I work consciously to return to creativity. In that darkness of standing still I discover stagnation and creation are two parts of the whole, each always moving into the other.

yeah, remember that lady...it will save you a lot of headache.