Mothers' Day 2014

Photo by Kevin Miller

Love to the mothers. 

Love to the ones that wake in the night, night after night, then stumble through the days, keeping on. Love to the ones that care for sick children, offering juice and tea, placing cool cloths on feverish heads, fluffing pillows and tucking in blankets. Love to the ones that pack the lunches, that launder the linens and clothes, wash the dishes, scrub the toilets, that buy the food and the clothing and the toothbrushes and then, choose a small toy or treat or longed-for thing, just because. 

Love to the ones who answer questions, who give advice, who say “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out”, who say “you can do it”, who say “no”, who say “because I’m the mama, that’s why.” 

Love to the ones who soothe hurts. Who give hugs and kisses. Who refrain from giving hugs and kisses in public because it’s embarrassing. Who see you past each heartbreak. 

Love to the ones at home with their babies, going a little bit stir-crazy, lost in a whirl of milk-diapers-nap, dreaming of taking a shower or talking with a friend or doing something, anything that makes them feel knowing and capable rather than bewildered and inept. 

Love to the ones who labor all day to provide for their children. Love to the ones who rise in the early hours for work, who carry still-sleeping kids to the neighbors’ or the sitters’ houses until it’s time for school. Love to the ones who work all night so they can see their kids in the mornings and in the evenings. Love to the ones who work part-time, at low pay with no benefits, trying to find a third way that works. 

Love to the ones who discovered unknown depths of sadness and fear during their pregnancies or after, who are struggling to return to the surface. 

Love to the ones who parent alone. 

Love to the ones who did not birth their babies, but took them in and gave them the families their birth mothers could not. 

Love to the ones who cared for their babies by giving them up because they knew they were not ready or able to mother their children all day, every day, for the rest of their lives. 

Love to those for whom this day brings pain. 

To the mothers whose babies passed on before them, who live with an ache and a void every day. Love especially to those whose babies were torn from them by unexpected violence. 

To the mothers who had their babies stolen from them by coercion or by force. Love especially to Nigerian mothers in Chibok who wait every day in sorrow and despair. 

To the children whose mothers could not or would not give them all the love they deserved, whose mothers carried an inner wound that they, in turn, used to wound their children. 

To the children whose mothers have passed on, for whom this day reminds them of loss. A missing that just goes on and on. 

Love to the mothers who, in the true spirit of this day, write letters, make phone calls, march in the streets to make a healthier, more peaceful world for all of us. 

Love to the mother beneath our feet, who gives us all life and sustains it. Who feeds us, gives us water, provides our very breaths. 

Ashé.

Feminist Quickies: My Own #365FeministSelfie Series

Tired Mama Working
Each word is its own feminist topic!
Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian

This winter has sucked. In spite—or perhaps because—of our record-breaking warm winter in L.A.,* my kids have been sick a lot, particularly with nasty coughs that linger and linger, sometimes disappearing briefly only to return with a vengeance.

During the month of December, it seemed that we all had one cold that we were simply passing back and forth between each other like some kind of high school basketball drill. Then in January, my grandmother (my last surviving grandparent) contracted a lung infection and spent about a month in the hospital, a forced confinement that made her lonely and depressed. Shortly after she was released, my son got sick again—this time with croup!—got better and attended school for a week, then caught another cold with nonstop coughing and was diagnosed with asthma.

I remember last week as one marathon viewing of the anodyne Canadian cartoon Caillou barely heard over the droning motor of the nebulizer. I didn’t see any of the episodes, mind you, because my eyes were fixed on my son’s upper lip, where I trained the hose spewing vaporized Albuterol.

So, I haven’t been writing.

I have been Facebooking, however. Ah, Facebook! The refuge of the exhausted, isolated mother, trapped with a sick child, yet able to participate in a quasi-social life stolen in five-minute snatches.

A few of my friends began the year pledging themselves to the #365FeministSelfie project, the brainstorm of Veronica Arreola. Arreola began the project as a rebuttal to a Jezebel piece describing selfies as a “cry for help.”  “Selfies aren’t empowering,” the writer scoffed, “they’re a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”

“But what about positive selfies?” Arreola countered. “Yesterday I saw a mom and her maybe-5yo-daughter taking a selfie.They were making silly faces and snapping pics. Those were memories being made, moments of love that both will likely remember forever.” She went on to describe other ways selfies could be feminist: “WOC [Women Of Color] rarely see themselves reflected in media, people over a size 4 are told to hide themselves, transgender persons want to be seen...”
 
I wanted to take part. Because periodically, someone has to write a clickbaiting column declaring feminism dead, again (too many links to embed, I’m afraid). The #365FeministSelfie project seemed like a way for women (and other-gendered people!) to simply and effectively preempt a 2014 Feminism Is Dead article while bringing up feminist issues in a new way. I wanted to be a visible mixed-race woman of color in the 365FeministSelfie roll call. But-

“A selfie every day?” I thought. “Ha ha ha ha.”

In February, my friend Jaclyn Friedman interviewed Arreola for her podcast. Together they were so convincing, I made for myself the more modest goal of a selfie a week.

Now it’s mid-March. I miss writing. I am having that kind of tired, sad, well-worn Cult of Domesticity feminist mom crisis that we all know. (Members of a parenting group I belong to—again, on Facebook—have titled our version Household Drudge, PhD... or MA, in my case.)

Since sustained writing, research, or even thought is quite beyond me these days, my goal now is to turn out a series of weekly quickie posts, based on my own #365FeministSelfie series. Tomorrow’s post will cover feminine performance, social capital, and body hair.

* Yes, I am sorry to rub it in your face, everyone suffering from the Polar Vortex. The downside, of course, is that we are going to run out of water this summer. Oh, and the earthquake this morning.

Are you participating in the #365FeministSelfie Project? What made you decide to join? Share in the comments below! And please subscribe to be sure to catch every post in the series. 

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

I am wrestling with an unscheduled post on race, body acceptance, and clothing. My younger child also caught an unscheduled virus, which means I won't be able to write tomorrow because he will be staying home from school, and I blew through my babysitting budget last week trying to Get Things Done and fulfill my activist duties.

But I promised myself to only take last week as a hiatus, so here's a quickie.

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to not beat myself up all the time over not being a perfect parent. Yes, I've read plenty of articles on being "a good enough parent," and I am working on embracing my imperfections. I know, intellectually, that being a "perfect parent" is not possible, nor even desirable if it were possible, but perfectionism runs deep in my family.

For me, parenting is a daily struggle to rewrite old patterns of behavior and attitudes that stem not only from my own childhood, but that have been reinscribed over generations. I am learning about epigenetics, and it helps me to understand how we carry our ancestral histories with us, within our bodies. (I will write more, much more, on this topic.) It can make me feel overwhelmed, that I am trying to swim against the tide of depression, fear, and anger from two separate lineages that meet in me. But it can also help me forgive myself when I fail.

At her preschool, my daughter decorated a small journal for me for Mother's Day. It's exactly like the composition books they use at school to record their thoughts (either dictated to a teacher, or "written" themselves), except in miniature, the perfect size for me to carry around in my purse.

This is where I jot down my thoughts and ideas to explore and flesh out later. I glance at the inscription to give me courage and to inspire me to be the mother my daughter deserves. It is a gift that she gave me, and it represents what a gift she is to me. Parenting has given me focus and purpose that I was seeking before her birth. Not to say that I feel like I was born to be a mother, because mothering does not come "naturally" to me at all, but—to quote Talib Kweli—if life is a beautiful struggle, then creating and guiding the lives of my children is my beautiful struggle, in all its messiness, heartbreak, silliness, absurdity, complexity, and grace.

Aftershock

Facebook post from Saturday, June 8 at 4:30 a.m.

My kids playing at Virginia Ave. park in
Santa Monica. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Can't sleep. Haunted by the events of yesterday—bullets sprayed at the park where my children play, a woman carjacked at an intersection I pass several times a day and forced to drive the gunman and watch while he shot other people, a student at SMC who assumed the gunman was police... until the guy started shooting at him. My friend's daughter is an SMC student, so glad she wasn't there yesterday. I can't help but imagine the fear and pain of people who lost loved ones yesterday, who were injured, or who witnessed the mayhem. The students who heard the shooting and were afraid they were next.

I want this kind of terror to stop. I can't describe the depth of my frustration and anger that we know what to do to stop this, but we, as a nation, just won't take those steps. I'm going to keep agitating for change, but I also can't help but wonder, What is WRONG with people (ahem, NRA leadership), with certain members of Congress? Have you no compassion? Have you no intellectual sense of injustice? Is a gun "right" really worth the deaths that happen every single day because of guns? If you believe in a Maker, do you honestly feel you will be able to face that Maker with a Second Amendment argument?

Guns and Anger, Coda

(I described the day my children were shut inside their school because of a man with a gun in Part 1. I discuss the gender politics of the NRA in Part 2.)
 
Of course, I recognize that not all gun owners—not even the majority—are as unhinged as James Yaeger, who epitomizes the kind of volatile personality that I’d like to keep as far away from firearms as possible. My cousins represent, to me, the opposite end of the spectrum: level-headed, generally chill guys who happen to enjoy hunting.
 

Salad. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

 My memories of Jorjorian family dinners seem to always involve my (liberal) dad and my (conservative) uncle trying to prove the strengths of their arguments mainly through the loudness of their voices while my grandmother shouted over them in her broad Long Island accent, “DOES ANYBODY WANT MORE SALAD?” Naturally, these arguments were pointless, since neither would budge in his convictions. Despite these clashes, my dad and my uncle clearly love each other, and their bonds run deep. They provided for me a powerful model—never let the little things in life like money or politics drive a wedge between family.

My cousins are older than me, so we were never close, and we inherited from our fathers our strong political convictions. But I always enjoy seeing them at family gatherings, and now that I am a mother, sharing in parenthood has given us a new connection.

I disagree with them about many things, but hunting isn’t one of them. I have eaten the venison and elk they have brought back from hunting trips, and it was delicious. I remember when I was about 12 years old, I said to them, “Deer are overpopulated. Hunting helps keep their numbers at sustainable levels.” (I was probably quoting from Sierra magazine.) I still treasure the looks of shock on their faces. “That’s right,” said my older cousin. “Wow,” said my younger cousin. “I thought you would be like, ‘Aw, the poor little deer.’” “No,” I snorted. (Because I wasn’t an “emotional” girl, but rational and scientific! Did I mention I was a tomboy?)

I recount this to establish my bona fides when I say: I am not against all guns.

But I want to stand up for my right not to have a gun. I don’t want to live in a society where everyone has to have a gun to feel safe because so many unregulated, illegal guns are in circulation due to lax gun control laws. I have lived in sketchy places in the U.S. and abroad, and I have been scared, but never—even when I heard shots and saw the flashes—to the point of wishing I had a gun. I can’t—and don’t want to—imagine how I would feel if I ever shot anyone in error, as an accident, or because I mistook a threat, or because I didn’t read a situation correctly. And if my kids ever died because they accessed a gun in my house, I could never forgive myself.

Ultimately, the “guy with a gun” turned out to be a 19-year-old student who turned himself in to the Santa Monica College psychological services department. He was unarmed.

I am not reassured that the threat turned out not to be “real.” Gun massacres now seem almost like tornadoes: random, unpredictable, terrifying, and inevitable. We know that, sooner or later, it will happen again, because we have had at least one gun massacre nearly every year since 1982.

I am tired of the irrational political calculus that makes gun law reform impossible. The unholy marriage of money and politics, the use of the filibuster to blackmail our democracy, and rampant gerrymandering stand in the way of meaningful change, and each of these is a campaign unto itself. And yet, when we look at places like Australia, it’s clear that reform could get done if politicians would stand by principles rather than by the NRA and their deep pockets.

I am also weary of action via electronic proxy. I send out e-mail messages and tweets, and I know an intern somewhere just checks a box noting my opinion and arranges for a form letter to be sent back to me. As I said in my letter, I am done with e-mails and tweeting. Remember the days when Senators’ offices would be flooded with mail from outraged citizens? We can’t all march in the streets (although we should more often), but we can send letters. On paper. Something material that has to be physically dealt with.

I’ll be participating in the Father’s Day campaign planned by Moms Demand Action. I hope you will, too.

CODA TO A CODA: Today, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw that Santa Monica College was once again barricaded. I arrived at her school to a parking lot eerily empty and quiet. 

The school was on lockdown again. This time, some of the parents had heard the shots, and one had even seen the man with the gun. We were all shut inside with our kids. My daughter kept whining that she wanted to go home, and I kept saying, "We can't go home yet, honey. What do you want to play?" 

My husband had texted that the gunman was in custody shortly after I arrived, but the lockdown remained. After about an hour, with our kids climbing the walls, most of us decided to try to leave. My son was at home, and I wanted us to be all together.

But it wasn't quite over, and the drone of helicopters constantly overhead grated at my nerves.

It's now 9:30 p.m., and the kids are in bed. It has been a harrowing day. Four people are dead. The gunman was killed on the scene. 

We can't live like this. It has to end. 

Guns and Anger, Part 2

So: More on that anger (continued from Part 1).

Less than two weeks before my kids were locked inside their school during a gun threat, Sarah Palin, addressing the NRA convention in Houston, accused President Obama and other politicians of using “the politics of emotion” following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, CT, to raise support for anti-gun violence measures. She said:

“Emotion is a good and necessary thing. Who among us didn’t feel despair, sadness, and that anger, absolute anger, after Newtown, and Columbine. We could use a bit more emotion, by the way, about what goes on every single day on the streets of cities like Chicago and New York. But here is the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Feinstein and Boxer, what those gals won’t tell you: emotion won’t make anybody safer. Emotion won’t protect the good guys’ rights. And emotion is not leadership. The politics of emotion, it’s the opposite of leadership. It’s the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. And it’s not just self-serving, it’s destructive, and it must stop.”

I am surprised to hear that Palin now cares about what happens on the streets of Chicago and New York, and while part of me is itching to unpack the racial implications contained in that sentence (“It’s those ghetto black people who cause gun violence, not the white ‘good guys’ like us!”—sorry, just slipped out), I’m going to try to stay on task and focus on the use of the word “emotion.” Robin Abcarian noted in the L.A. Times that the NRA seemed to have highlighted the word in their talking points for the conference.

I have certainly said things in anger that I regret. For me, the image of saying something in anger brings to mind a preschooler screaming, “I hate you!” And the proper response is not to say, “What?!? How can you hate your own mother?!?” but to sigh and say, “You sound really angry.” I know as a mother that my daughter doesn’t hate me, but what she is saying isn’t exactly wrong or untrue. She just doesn’t have the words yet at age five to articulate precisely the quality and degree of her anger towards me. Instead, she uses what she has.

When I’m angry, I express my thoughts and feelings in a way that is less delicate and more barbed than I would during a time when I’m calm. (Right, honey?) Issues that I have submerged can bubble over in a torrential release of grievances. Yet the actual things I argue over are not phantom complaints: finances, inequality in housekeeping or child care, miscommunications.

And no one can argue that gun violence in the U.S. is a phantom threat.

I detect in the way the NRA and other gun enthusiasts dismiss angry, “emotional” responses to gun violence a soupçon—or a ladleful—of sexism. In her speech, Palin named Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, but not Michael Bloomberg, and termed them “those gals.” (The best way to deflect the accusation of sexism? Have Palin deliver the message.) The words the NRA and their minions use—“emotional,” “hysteria”—are those typically deployed against women to discount or silence them. If stronger evidence is needed, any casual look at the comments to articles about Gabby Giffords will find the predictable invective: mannequin, whore, pet monkey, ugly, bitch.

Since writing my open letter on Facebook, I have joined Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I can only imagine that we are exactly what the NRA expects in a gun-control organization. And yet, as advocates for universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazine clips, and HR 2005, which would mandate personalized technology for handguns, we are not making an emotional plea, but rather putting forth the only solutions that have been scientifically proven to work. (Of course, I could strengthen this argument if the NRA didn’t block research on gun violence.) So sure, we’re angry, but not based solely on emotions, Sarah—based on the evidence.

So, who is employing “the politics of emotion” as defined by Palin?


 

QED.

(Tomorrow's post will be a coda: my huntin’ cousins, political barriers to change in gun laws, and thoughts on activism.)

Guns and Anger

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

On my way to my kids’ preschool on the morning of May 16, I found my route past Santa Monica College barricaded. When I arrived at school, a teacher told me that they had received an alert about a man with a G-U-N at SMC and so were keeping the children inside. John Adams Middle School, across the street from the college, and Will Rogers Elementary School, around the corner, were also on lockdown. I talked with other parents dropping off their kids. Should we take them home? Or should we continue with normal life and not alarm the kids unduly? The threat seemed vague, and our school was not within the lockdown perimeter, so we left the kids there. I came home and immediately went to the Los Angeles Times blog to learn that the man had specifically threatened schools. I kept refreshing the page until they posted that the police had arrested the man.

This is a tirade, lightly revised, that I posted on Facebook while I was waiting for the lockdown to be lifted. I wrote this in the heat of the moment, and it shows. In Part 2 of this post, I have a calmer response. But I wanted to post my initial reaction because I want to honor my anger, and the anger of so many other people who have suffered due to gun violence.

***********

Santa Monica Community College is on lockdown this morning because there’s a man wandering around the campus with a gun. Off the top of my head, I count three elementary schools, two preschools/day cares (including the one where my kids are), one middle school (also on lockdown), and two public parks that are always filled with children located within a few blocks of his location. I dropped off my kids as usual, and they are staying inside until we get the all clear.

On the east side of Los Angeles, in Monterey Park, schools are in lockdown as well because someone called and threatened to “shoot up” one of the schools.

So here’s what I say: Screw you, America. We tout being the “land of the free,” but hundreds of supposedly “free” children are confined indoors because one idiot managed to get possession of a gun. Is “freedom” blocked-off streets, refreshing internet news to see if the danger is all clear yet, and parents huddled in groups, wondering if they should just take their kids home?

I don’t call this “freedom.” I call it tyranny of the few. The few who are so afraid of “government tyranny” that they are willing to impose gun tyranny on the rest of us.

I’m not willing to let my children be sacrificed to an antiquated and outdated “right” to form a militia. My children are smart, and they are going to be well educated. They are, to put it in crude economic terms, money in the bank of the nation.

But apparently this nation doesn’t care enough about the health and safety of its future citizens to protect them from what is a clearly defined mortal threat with an obvious solution. There is no “debate” about whether gun control works—it does. And yet as a nation, we can’t muster the strength to pass the laws that will ensure that no child will die of a gunshot at her school, that no mother will be pierced by a bullet while dancing in the street on her day, that no teenager will be massacred in a movie theater. >

So screw you, United States of America. You’ve lost the right to my love, to my patriotism. Screw you, all you Senators who worked against gun control laws. I’m calling on citizens' groups to make gun control the centerpiece of your agenda. I’m calling on local representatives to show the courage of conviction that escapes our national politicians.

Because this is terror. I don’t worry any day that I send my kids out the door that a random extremist with a political agenda who hates our country is going to kill my kids. I’m afraid that a U.S. citizen with a gun and a chip on his shoulder is going to kill my kids. Take away the gun, you take away his power to end my child’s life in a fraction of a second. It’s that simple.

I don’t want this in another election cycle. I want this NOW. There are helicopters circling over my house NOW. We can do this NOW if we say: We won’t shut up. We won’t forget. We are watching you, and if this doesn’t change, we are going to force it. We will withhold donations. We will keep our tax dollars. We will stop work. We will take our kids out of school. We will stand in the halls of our government houses until gun control gets done.

I’m done sending e-mails and tweeting my reps because frankly, the only response I get back is bullshit. I’m ready to put my body on the line—in a demonstration on the street, in a sit-in in the state capitol, at the steps of the Senate—to keep my kids out of the line of fire. Who’s coming?

(To be continued in Part 2, in which I quote Sarah Palin and my 5-year-old daughter.)

Araña Mama - A Mommy-festo (Part 3)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I sailed across the Pacific in a rowboat. Which is to say, from week 8 to week 20 of my pregnancy, I felt almost perpetually seasick. I lay on the couch, eyes closed, trying to ride out the heaving of my living room floor. Suddenly, fierce hunger would propel me to the kitchen, where I would frantically stuff myself with whatever seemed tolerable. Baked tofu. Grapefruit. Yes, pickles. The little beast inside of me satiated, I would reel back to the couch, hoping to keep the food in its proper place.

My second trimester, I got poison oak during a hike. I smeared the rashes with Chinese medicine, covered them with gauze, and taped it down. The rashes persisted—eventually I realized I was having an allergic reaction to the tape. My third trimester, I had a sinus infection. In May 2008, I had my daughter.

It is so commonplace as to be trite, and yet at the same time it is profoundly true: Nothing upended my life as completely as becoming a mother. I say “becoming” because I did not transform into a mother all at once, when my daughter emerged from my body and started her life separate from me. Rather, pregnancy was a process of metamorphosis for both of us. I am still becoming: as my children grow, they force me to grow along with them.

The threads of my life converge on the moment of motherhood, then expand outward as my children take their steps away from me into their own futures. The complexities of my body—my womanhood, my racial mix, my queerness, my health and sensitivities—inform my parenting every day. Parenting puts a new focus on these issues as I struggle with the heritage and legacies that I pass on—intentionally and unintentionally—to my children.

Nuestra ofrenda (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

The global crossroads of my body are reflected and compounded by the global crossroads of my city, Los Angeles, which gathers people from over 140 countries. My cultural vocabulary has expanded to include Nowruz, the Persian new year; Día de los Muertos; and the Japanese Buddhist festival of Obon. I eat tacos sprinked with kim chee. My kids are growing up dancing to jarocho, Bollywood music, K-pop, salsa, mbalax, and whatever Ozomatli is.

In trying to convey the multiple themes of this blog, I wanted to name it after halo-halo, the Filipino dessert that brings together fruit, beans, shaved ice, sweet rice, condensed milk, tapioca, coconut jelly, and sweet potato—an unholy messy mix of things that synthesizes into a divinely sweet, complex, textural pleasure. I floated it with my audience: my friends on Facebook. Their reactions indicated that halo-halo seemed too culturally specific, inaccessible, and therefore limited in the marketplace of English-language blogs. I also would have to cope with unwanted associations with the English word “halo” (pronounced differently from hälo-hälo), as an accoutrement for angels and as a first-person shooter game.

Giving up on Halo-Halo Mama feels like a betrayal in some ways. In the past two generations, my family has given up our linguistic ties to our ancestral homelands. While Tagalog/Pilipino is the national language of the Philippines and, in many ways, the lingua franca of the diasporic Filipino community, Ilocano doesn’t have same the political and cultural authority to hold a place amongst global languages. Western Armenian’s status is even more fragile, now listed officially as an endangered language.

My grandparents, raising their children in the post-World War II era, pushed for integration into American society and so raised their children monolingually, in English. My parents nonetheless became bilingual—in Spanish. My dad, fervently opposed to the Vietnam War, joined the Peace Corps in 1969 and served in Costa Rica, and my mother joined him in 1971, although they weren’t yet married. In the earliest recording of my voice, I am counting slowly, “Uuuuunoooo, doooooos, treeeees...” And so our culturally specific languages gave way to two of the dominant global languages: English and Spanish.

I pass this on to my children. For days, my daughter has been chanting the Spanish nursery rhyme: “Un elefante se columpiaba/sobre la tela de una araña...” The image of a spider’s web has stuck with me (possibly because I hear it dozens of times a day). I saw my experiences being spun out of my body, weaving together in a pattern that can be elegant as an orb, or haphazard as a cobweb. In this blog, I hope to tie together, tangle, and unravel these threads. I may descend into a bit of tarantellism. But I also aspire to be as wise, gentle, and dedicated as that most famous spider mother, Charlotte, who has also been a fixation of my daughter’s.

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A mommy-festo is not a manifesto. I have no fixed purpose, no clarion call. I have scattered thoughts engendered by toddler-induced parental ADD. My natural disorganization is enhanced by chronic sleep deprivation. Just think of this journey as taking a walk with a small child. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but I’ll find interesting things along the way—and poke them with sticks.

Araña Mama – A Mommy-festo, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1.)

My chance at an uncomplicated life was doomed the moment my mother, at college at U.C. Berkeley, needed a pot to cook spaghetti. Her roommate said, “I’ll bet those guys down the hall have a pot.” She surmised this from the sign on their door advertising “Armenian and Chinese cooking.” So my mom, the descendant of Filipino immigrants, walked down the hall and met my dad, the descendant of Armenian immigrants, who was rooming with a Chinese-Peruvian. When I tell this story, I say, “Only in America.”

Past "the Mad Russian" phase.

As a baby, I was olive-skinned with almond eyes and a shock of black hair. My parents called me “the Mad Russian.” During the course of my life, people have asked if I am Hawaiian or American Indian, Mexican or Puerto Rican, Brazilian or Italian, Sephardic or Ashkenazi, Persian or Moroccan, Anglo-Indian or Punjabi. As was typical of biracial kids of my generation, I belonged neither with the Armenians nor with the Filipinos. Growing up in a very white community in Sacramento, California, I clearly wasn’t “American,” either. On forms asking my race, I had to check “Other.”

But race was only one thread. When I was 19, I came out as bisexual. During a suffocatingly hot East Coast summer after I graduated college in Connecticut, I shaved my head. Elderly women and men addressed me as “sir.” Amongst queer women, it was as if I had raised a flag signaling “potential date,” and my flirting rates improved.

While working on the “Relationships with Women” chapter of Our Bodies, Ourselves for the New Century, my co-editor introduced me to the term “chemical sensitivities,” which finally made sense of why fabric softeners, perfumes, and cigarette smoke gave me nausea, dizziness, and migraines—a condition that affects women more than men and so, predictably, was long ignored by the medical establishment and is still not well studied or understood. This discovery changed my perspective on the queer women’s community: a high concentration of women also meant a high concentration of chemical sensitivities, chronic illnesses, and alternative therapies.

Dancing with the women of a groupment,
an economic collective, in Diofior, Senegal.
(Photo by Janet Ghattas)

I spent my weekend nights in Boston’s dyke bars, but I devoted my weekday after-work hours to West African dance classes. The demographics of these two sites never overlapped. My five-evening-a-week dance schedule led to a year-long residency in Dakar, Senegal. On the westernmost point of the African continent, I transformed from a woman of color with middle-class means to a white woman with dazzling economic privilege. I weaved between my professional life as an English teacher amongst Dakar’s educated elite and my social life amongst dancers and musicians, many of whom had little formal schooling.

I can’t speak Armenian, Tagalog, or Ilocano, but I can speak French, Spanish, and Wolof.

Ultimately, cultural and class pressures as well as a conflict between my queerness and Senegalese society brought me back home to the U.S., and I moved back to California. I maintained a transcontinental relationship with my boyfriend, a refugee from the Republic of Congo, and I planned to go back in October 2001. I had tickets on Sabena, the Belgian airline. After September 11th, a Sabena agent told me, “We can get you there, but I’m not sure we can get you back.” I couldn’t get any promises from Swiss Air, Air France, or Alitalia. And then, the U.S. was at war. I used up two pre-paid calling cards to break up with my boyfriend. I was in Marin County, but I could hear halfway around the world a muezzin singing the call to prayer across a Dakar rooftop.

As a NorCal native, I never imagined I would move to Southern California. But I wanted to keep traveling to West Africa and studying dance, and I thought that UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures program would help me do it. My friend mentioned that her girlfriend’s step-brother was also in grad school for ethnomusicology at UCLA. A week after I moved, I invited every connection I had in Los Angeles to my housewarming party, and in perfect rom-com fashion, I met my husband-to-be.

During graduate school, I was plagued by recurring sinus infections. Over the years, I had developed allergies to several antibiotics, and avoiding them often meant weeks battling illness. I worried about my ability to hold down a job given my apparently fragile health. I finished my Master’s degree, then had my wedding. The stress of these two events gave me vertigo, and I spent the first days of my honeymoon with my head over the edge of a bed, trying to stop the spinning, and taking refuge in sleep.

Dressed for a wedding in Fiji.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

A few months later, my husband and I moved to Lautoka, Fiji, where my husband planned to research the music of Fijians of Indian descent. English colonizers had brought Indian indentured laborers to work the sugarcane plantations, and about a century later, many of their descendents still farmed sugarcane. When the cane was ready to harvest, the farmers burned their fields. The smoke permeated the air, and black ash covered every surface. I continued to get sinus infections every few months and developed an allergy to another family of antibiotics. Since I was periodically confined to our apartment, I was unable to get momentum on projects with local organizations. A friend in my graduate program asked for my help editing her dissertation, so I worked from my bed when I wasn’t watching Bollywood videos.

We returned to the U.S. My husband got his PhD. My department at UCLA fell into conflict, and the chair of my project left. I decided against continuing in graduate school, and instead I picked up more editing jobs.

And in 2007, I finally got pregnant.

(To be continued in Part 3.)

Araña Mama – A Mommy-festo (Part 1)

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

This is how we begin: mother as mundus. I nestled my firstborn against my chest—everything she was and everything she needed. Body, place, and belonging.

We can say that babies are perfect because they are the closest we come to pure being. A Senegalese friend once wrote to me that he and his wife had nicknamed their baby “Lekk Puup Nelaw”: Eat Poop Sleep. The barest essence of who we are. (The novel human’s novel.) The layers of identity, the ways that we know ourselves and our places in the world, lie in the future.

And yet: before I became a parent, I believed that environment and education, family and culture, fully shaped the individuals we grew into. Then I had a kid. I was astonished to see how early in her development my daughter expressed her character. My husband and I joke that we thought we had an easy baby for the first four months of our daughter’s life. When she woke up from the “fourth trimester,” we grasped the scale of our mistake.

Part of parenting is trying to figure out those lines between “Nature versus Nurture,” genetics versus environment, personality versus upbringing. In mothering, this question often boils down to, “Is this my fault?” Plenty of sources say “yes.” At any given moment, a mother can be insufficiently nurturing, independent, authoritarian, laid-back, present, absent, involved, hands-off, intuitive, communicative, Swedish, Chinese, African, or French. I’m pretty sure whoever coined “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” was a mom. (Sure, the official record says it was a male preacher, but how often does history record what some mother mutters under her breath?)

On the one hand, each mother struggles with her own mode of parenting. On the other hand, the cultural currents that often single out mothers over fathers for the problems of “children today” are tied into larger structures of prejudice and power. Sexism is an obvious first response, but “welfare mom” speaks to race and class in opposite ways from “soccer mom.” Hysteria over “anchor babies” brings in immigration, but only in reference to immigrants from the Global South. The question of gay marriage has come to focus on its effects on children and the redefinition of “parent.”

As I watch my children grow, these questions come up for me urgently as they discover and define for themselves the notions of gender, race, relationships (it’s too early yet for sexuality), and belonging/citizenship. Like any parent, how I guide them and converse with them on these topics has much to do with my own experience as a biracial, bisexual mother with immigrant grandparents.

This blog is where I explore these and other political and cultural issues that I grapple with in my role as parent and mother. But I feel a need to describe my background and trace the threads of my identity that inform my writing. Caught in the interstices between categories—Caucasian and Asian, straight and gay, immigrant and citizen, American and global cosmopolitan—I have few preexisting narratives to draw from. So I start with a history of my body—my origins, my travels, my experiences.

(To be continued in Part 2 and Part 3...)