The gender badge vs. the gender vadge

Dear Females,

I apologize for travelling along the third wave feminism road.  It was the road called equality and it seemed to logically follow the road my mother and grandmothers fought for. I apologize for calling it equality and erasing liberation from the nomenclature of feminism.

I apologize for believing that in the 21st century women had a right to choose to sell her body. I apologize for thinking porn helped further sexual liberation. I apologize for thinking pro-choice = reproductive justice.

I apologize for thinking that women and men were wired differently and I somehow won the genetic lottery by earning the right to call myself a mathematician and an engineer despite being born female.

The road to my enlightenment was long and twisted and admittedly, privileged.

My privilege came from a mother determined to not award gender badges to her daughters. A mother who allowed me firetrucks and my sister cowboy regalia. A mother who encouraged a love of learning and a love of math. And a father who 'allowed' this freedom and even (gasp) changed our diapers in the late 1960s. A father who 'allowed' my mother to be the primary wage earner and he even cooked our family meals during the week and took us to lessons and medical appointments. There were no gender badges awarded in my family growing up. And when my sister came out as a lesbian in her early twenties in the early 90s, my parents embraced her despite their catholic upbringing and a church determined to erase her reality.And we did not seek to give her the gender badge of butch dyke or femme lesbian. She simply loved women and we accepted that without needing to label her beyond lesbian.

And now my privilege is being slammed because I also have the audacity of having a gender vadge. I am a female that calls herself a woman and I happen to also have a vagina. The fact that my parents tried so hard to eliminate the gender badge from my life - as did other freethinking parents who saw the harms of boxing in their children into prescriptive gendered roles while children - is now considered irrelevant and even dangerous to third wave feminists. Flaunting the fact that I have a vagina and others born with one need liberation is deemed cissexist. Saying that someone born with a vagina is more likely to be penetrated in a violent act whether for money or torture is called sex-phobic. Telling people that I want access to female only space is pronounced transphobic.

The only thing that seems to be relevant today is what gender badge you feel like you have and the quicker you identify your gender then the quicker your "problem" can be solved if you don't have the right body parts to match. The solution ultimately  involves lots of drugs and genital mutilation surgery. But, if caught early enough, the gender badge will be awarded.

My vagina is not gendered, it is female. My brain is not gendered, it is human. My feminism is not gendered, it is about females. My privilege is not gendered it is about socio-economic class and education and race.

Ultimately I am sorry that it took me so long to wake up to our female born reality and what the true liberation of females entails. The road behind is only a couple of centuries old and I fear the road ahead is much steeper than it was before gender badges and gender vadges become priority #1 in First World Feminism.

The penance for my own third-wave feminism fiasco will be that for the remainder of my life I will cry every time I see another female shame another female for anything.

And I'm crying a lot these days.

Sincerely,

A 46 yo womens liberationist.

There are no rats in this race. None.

This missive serves as a formal thank-you note to the parenting warriors I know.  And no, you do not need to be a parent in order to be named a parenting warrior.

All of us wear, as a public front, the results of our parenting.  So if I directed you here I was informed by you and your actions as to my own parenting choices. I likely talked about you with Daughter in the form of "There is this really cool person I met from a food thing/school thing/random thing (including the internet)...this is their story or why they are cool". And some of you I know more intimately than that but I might not have directly named you in my story telling.

The internet allows me to mask identities with Daughter if I have intimate knowledge of something and I was to pass along a great story but not reveal true identity.  More often than not I have chosen to share stories of action rather than stories of identity so I guess that means I've fully rejected most notions of idolatry .Which also happens to make me a really great atheist, eh?

There are tumultuous times as parents. Birth. Toddler. Preschool/early school. Grade 6 (for estrogen heavy children especially). And then, finally, the holy grail of parenting: Teenagehood. A last childhood stage that hopefully finales with a goal towards further education (formal or otherwise) and intelligent voting (I'm not joking).

Daughter moved away to university yesterday. She and I both entered a whole new world. One where my role as a parent will have shifted away from one thing to another.  And, according the to the God (Dr.) Seuss :  Ah, yes of course. Thing 2 would like to clarify that just because he wears the number 2 does not imply in any way that he's inferior to Thing 1. 

And like everything else in this world, when life is tumultuous one tends to turn to others in order to support and inform. And sometimes literally carry you (extra long hat tip here to The Parents, luckily both still alive and healthyish).

So whether or not you knew it, if I've directed you here then you were part of my own personal strongly social media infused Information and Support Team: Parenting Branch. (Brief Aside to an interesting fact. I first went online in 1993 seeking out parenting support after a devastating miscarriage. This makes me an original netizen).

You were the people on whose backs I often trod. And most of you know I'm kind of addicted to learning so many of you were just plain teachers. But the best kind of plain teacher is the one that you actually learn from. So thank-you for teaching me even if you had no idea I used you for my parenting role model (especially if you are not a parent lol).

Parenting was the biggest challenge I ever took on and I had heaps and heaps of learning to do on the subject since I was not part of any large familial structure as a first generation Canadian. An extremely grateful Canadian, now.

Some of you I do not or can not name because our interactions were so brief I failed to obtain a name.  And some of you I do not name because you do not getz the social media internetz thang (remember, I am 45, GenX - we GASP wrote snail mail in our youth and many of us still do...not me though lol).  But I might actually snail mail a few of those sorts of characters.  And, of course in the age of social media, some of you I name, but do not know face to face since we have never actually met.  And sadly, there is one dear friend who I especially wish to thank but she recently passed on. She was, ultimately, a fatal victim to her own childhood demons.

Memory, being what it is, will forget some. And memory, being what it is, will enlarge some.

Be that as it were, I now attempt to name you here via various sorts of social media avenues including good 'old fashioned' email. Because, you see, in the land of social media I can now name my not-necessarily-blood-related-clan. And not only name you but sometimes to also publicly thank-you, without a face-to-face ceremony. And ceremonies traditionally employ food and it just so happens that I've broken bread with most of you. And much of it good healthy AND tasty food at that :)

I am transitioning to stage II parenting now. And I certainly feel a ceremony should occur. So this is mine.

My transitioning parent ceremony will occur over the course of the entire month of September and I will attempt to blog here regularly about my reflections on parenting as I drive across Canada from Vancouver to St. John's along the Trans-Canada Highway.  I'm also hoping to get a few cross Canada harvest food related stories up on my newish food themed blog (but not recipes: they are here).

Namaste and again, thank-you.  Go forth and multiply the intelligent and humane sorts of folks that we are capable of creating.  Be a seed, as it were.  Plant yourself, flower and prosper.

Darwin's Penetrative Force

"OMG, I allowed that man to orgasm in me. Without protection!  I wantonly willed it!"  My (68 yo) mother and I (45 yo) shared these thoughts together, yesterday on the phone.  We have both marvelled at the wonders of the biological clock over the years and at the choices we made when our own clocks were a buzzing.

"that man" is my XHusband (and "that man" for my mum is my Dad, her XHusband).

My mother, the slut (sarcasm alert), conceived me before an actual wedding date was set.  So my very being necessitated a hasty marriage to my Dad.  A marriage that was prompted by a cleverly planned emigration from Ireland (so no one was told of my conception).

This forced-marriage-emigration ploy by my parents was followed by a turbulent 15 year marriage.  An emigration to Canada (wtf? why not somewhere warm and kewl, like Australia or exotic like South Africa?).  All of which was finally sorted, for me, in my thirties (yup, it took me twenty years...longer than their feckin' marriage).

XHusband and I were married nearly 3 years when our first child was conceived (I was 26, he was 27 and this was the early 90s, so quaint).  The child that miscarried.  He impregnated me with Daughter a few months after that miscarriage but also started his dating life with his current wife.  I was very needy after that miscarriage.  I know he tried.  But he wasn't in it for the long haul and today, after 17+ yrs, I have to admit that I wasn't in it for the long haul for the right reasons either. BTW, it is only hindsight that allows me to admit this.

XHusband texted Daughter this week asking if she needed the money he had for her upcoming university gig.  He, a 46 yo grown man, texted his 17 yo daughter and asked her if he was allowed to use her university money for house renovations.  The house renovations that involve eliminating a bed in his house for her. A renovation that leaves her homeless if her other parent, moi, chose to do the same.

And today, all I can think of is:  A mother's instinct never fails.

Daughter needs protection from this imbecile I allowed to impregnate me.  And so, I will.  Continue to.


In whatever way I am able.  Just like my Mum has done for me.  


And I'm the first one to admit that I'm not perfect and I'm not enough.  But it's all we got.

Freedom 105?

Father called a short while ago.

"I didn't want to worry you."

Fuck.

He has been eight days in hospital.  This is his third trip this year.  No answers as to why he is passing out other than it has something to do with his heart, they think (!?).

One more test Monday and then they might be putting in a defibrillator.

Both of my parents are 68 and in moderate states of health.

My dad, up until last Friday, has been working full time at a seasonal job since April and was really pleased that he landed this full time job so that he can collect employment insurance throughout the winter and return to the job next spring.  My mother has basically never not worked since arriving in Canada in 1967.

So far, each of their retirement years have been spent paying off debt.

They are not together and haven't been since 1982.  I often refer to their continuing state of employment (well into what should be their golden years) as one of the perks of divorce.  Or penances.

I'm not alone with this view point.  I can't think of one divorcee that has had an easy time of it financially even if it meant downsizing into a luxurious condominium from the family mansion after divorce proceedings. I have also personally lived this reality and have come to accept there is no golden years future for me too.

If my father's health now means he will no longer be able to work I fear for his mental well being, with good cause.  He has shown himself to be unable to 'do nothing' and today I am left wishing that I could support both of my parents so that each of them could pursue more leisurely activities at this stage of their lives.  Travel for my father.  Writing and travel for my mother.

As someone who currently is not gainfully employed these are pretty lofty goals.  But as someone who also just witnessed the passing of a similarly aged neighbour I am not rationally processing my fears at the moment.

Damn.