Bringing the Barter Back

There are a lot of reasons why having a wife instead of a husband is super awesome. My friend Erin recently flew across the country, with one baby and two small children, by herself (I know! she's such a show off) only to get to the airport and realize that her husband had taken the stroller out of their vehicle and not returned it. She's convinced that this wouldn't have happened with a wife. I couldn't really get past the fact that she was travelling across the country, with a layover, with three children, by herself, to begin with, so I'm not really sure about the whole stroller thing.

Anyway, I was in the middle of writing this post and wasn't really sure what the other good reasons for having a wife instead of a husband were so I asked Facebook. Here are some of the highlights (click over to read the rest):

As it turns out we really don't have much of an advantage on our straight counterparts. Tracy can rock a man cold like nobody's business. And she is incapable of seeing anything that is not directly in front of her face. Also, it's a pretty rare day when my clothes make it to the hamper before the floor. But nobody leaves the toilet seat up. So there's that.

Nonetheless, we're pretty happy in lesbian-run domicile. But there are a few times when it would be totally rad to have a husband. Tracy and I suck at opening jars. I once knocked on my neighbour's door and asked him to open a jar of salsa after all the run under hot water, hit with a knife, pray to the salsa-Gods, tricks didn't work. His super sweet mother-in-law then purchased us one of these:

They totally work. And since I'm stealing their image I should probably tell you that Williams Food Equipment has them on sale today (they didn't pay me to say that). 

So, with the jar opening problem taken care of, we were mostly getting along fine husband-less until two of our faucets broke at once. 

***The truth is that I know plenty of lesbians who could have easily fixed these faucets. I know a few straight girls too. And some of my straight friends told me that their husbands couldn't fix a faucet either. But telling it this way makes for a better story so can we just live blindly in a world of stereotypical indulgence for a moment until we get to the end of this post? Thanks for that. ***

So we were about ready to call a plumber to replace them when an episode of Barter Kings came on and it occurred to me that maybe some handy husband/wife/single person would want to exchange a family photo shoot for some faucet installation. 

I put the call out and got quite a few bites right away. Which was super neat. Erica volunteered her works-in-an-office-but-loves-being-handy husband. 

That Friday evening they arrived and in no time Mark was taking off his plaid shirt and rooting around under our sink while we stood back and watched.  All damsel-in-distress like. Except for Tracy. She really can't pull that look off. 

Lots of banging and some power tools... 

And then.... 

... there was water!

And we all jumped up and down and screamed. OK, we didn't do that. We just thanked the kind strangers who came to our house. 

Many thanks to Erica and Mark for coming to our house, fixing our faucets, and letting me paparazzi the whole thing. I can't wait for your photo session! 

And now.... what else can I barter for? Suggestions?

www.mondayswithmacphotography.com

The Lesbian Recognition Nod

She was cute. In a teenage boy kinda way. The girl across the coffee shop. Her hands were shoved down deep into the pockets of her baggy jeans and her head tilted shyly toward the floor while her eyes looked up in my direction.

I looked behind me to see if there was another lesbian in sight. There wasn't. This sort of thing happens when I'm with Tracy. The lesbian recognition nod. Tracy plays the part well. I become visible as her wife but on my own I tend to blend into the heterosexual background.

There was a brief time in my twenties when looking gay became high priority. I quickly learned that it was all about the hair. It's hard to find a girlfriend if you have straight hair (as in not-gay not not-curly). So I dyed it random colours that can't be found in nature, shaved bits of it, and faux hawked it from time to time. It worked and life got less lonely.

Once during that time some man yelled dyke at me while I was walking down the road in Kingston Ontario. When I looked around and realized that he was talking to me I felt a strange amount of satisfaction. I must be having a good hair day. 

With my friend Jon at an academic conference on the 60's. Check out my faux hawk and t-shirt that reads "Best Female Performance." I was all kinds of Post-Modern-Judith-Butler cool. 

Pink hair and sitting next to transgender activist Leslie Feinberg. Doesn't get much queer-er than that. 

But then I got married, and became somebody's mother, and stopped using my energy to find the perfect lesbian haircut. So it seemed strange to me that this girl was still staring in my direction.

She was already on the other side of the Starbucks line waiting on her order. I placed mine and moved over to where she was standing. I'm a happily married woman. Of course. And this girl looked at least a decade younger than me. But still. It was nice to be noticed. I straightened my coat and ran my fingers through my hair.

"I'm sorry to stare, but it's just, you look really familiar." Her eyebrows crinkled while she tried to place me. "Have we met?"

I knew we hadn't so I thought maybe this was a new kind of pick-up line that the kids were using these days. I half expected her to follow it up with "maybe it was just in my dreams."

I told her that I didn't think so and she continued to look puzzled. She introduced herself. Amanda. And then got her coffee and took a seat. I wondered if perhaps she became less interested when she saw me up close. A year and a half of parenthood have etched lines under my sleepy eyes.

With my coffee in hand I was headed toward the door when I heard her call out my name.

"Kristin! Do you write Mondays with Mac?"

So I'm not young and cool. And she wasn't checking me out. But people read my blog. Which is way more flattering.

Something awesome happened on the way to the Time Magazine cover

Yesterday Time Magazine released the cover of their current issue. The contents were still not available but the cover showed a picture of 26 year old Jamie Lynne Grumet looking defiantly at the camera while her almost-4-year-old son stands on a chair to breastfeed. The provocative headline reads “Are You Mom Enough?” And the side text works to pit attachment parenting against more mainstream mothering as well as “the French rejection” (which is a veiled reference to Élisabeth Badinter’s Le conflit). 

I cringed when I saw it. What does it mean to be mom enough? What benefit will it serve to position mothers against each other in some kind of machismo mommy-eat-mommy duel? I have a deeply feminist heart and my desire is always (always!) to support other women and especially other mothers. I work to stand behind those women who parent in ways that reflect my own style and those who parent in ways that are completely contradictory to my own way of thinking. 

I have developed a parenting style that reflects what is in the deepest part of my heart. And for me that has included co-sleeping, (breast) feeding on demand, and pleasant night-time parenting.  However, I will fight with all of my mama-bear ferociousness for other moms to practice crying-it-out, formula feeding (whether by choice or necessity), and crib sleeping without judgement. I will do that because other moms are my community. It is in their company that I am building my home. And it is by their side, as they exist in both my physical and online communities, that I have found my village. 

So when I saw the Time Magazine cover, with it’s attempt to fan the dying flames of the supposed mommy wars, I felt an instant need to protect our community just as I would if a predator was attacking my home. My instinct was to bolt the doors and close the shades. We aren’t home Time Magazine. Please peddle your ineffective inflammation elsewhere. 

And you know what happened? I wasn’t alone. Instead of jumping on the my-parenting-is-better-than-your-parenting bandwagon and dividing our community into waring sides, moms (celebrity moms, blogging moms, working moms and stay at home moms) instead focused their critique on the media’s representation of the supposed battle. 

We, all of us moms, those who serve their children organic kale chips and those who open cans of Zoodles, stood as hostages for only a brief moment. Like contestants in the Hunger Games we were being asked to fight against one another for the enjoyment of those overseeing our struggle. But like Katniss, Peeta, Finnick, and Johanna, we instead banded together and refused to play the game.  Moms who would never consider extended breastfeeding took to the internet to defend those moms who are still nursing happy toddlers. And, in turn, those extended nursers raised their keyboards to fight for the rights of non-nursing moms to feed their children without shame or fear of judgement. 

Our village stood united. And for that I thank-you my Mamas-in-Arms. With this kind of solidarity and support I think that we can resist the conflict that serves only to divide and conquer us. Today we were a fierce bunch of warriors. And I think that the odds are ever in our favour. 

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Marriage (Things I Hope for my Son)

I wrote recently about wanting my son to believe in a higher power. To be honest, I struggled with admitting that because I didn’t want to be that mom who maps out her child’s life before he says his first word. I want him to know that he can do anything and be anything he wants without disappointing me. And yet there is this list of wants that pulls at my heart.

I have come to accept that it is OK for me to have hopes for my son as long as he also knows that he is the captain on his ship of life. His mom and I will be his first mates, while he will have us, until such a time that he finds a new first mate and then we will happily let ourselves be demoted to a less laborious task. We will mop the floors and repair the hull (I don’t even really know what a hull is. Perhaps I should quit this ship metaphor before this gets embarrassing). My point is that he is in charge of his own life and we will be there in whatever supporting roles are appropriate. He will be at the helm (OK, that’s my last shipping term. Promise) but hopefully he will allow us to point out some routes on the map.

And with that, welcome to post two in my unplanned series entitled Things I Hope for my Son. On my mind this week is marriage. If you are in Canada you have probably noticed that same-sex marriage has been in the news recently. The short version is that an American couple came to Canada to get married (something they were prohibited from doing in their home country) and when the marriage failed they returned to Canada to get divorced. Once here the Department of Justice argued that since their marriage had no practical validity in their home country it also wasn’t legal here.  Outrage filled the twitterverse and facebook newsfeeds everywhere.  It turns out that the situation was slightly more complicated (you can look all that up if you are so inclined but this isn’t the point of my post so I am going to move on now).

Whenever same-sex marriage gets brought into the media it makes me narcissistically reflect on my own marriage. The truth is that I LOVE being married. I love that we have promised to be spend our lives together and promised to do the (sometimes hard) work of nourishing and protecting our relationship so that it will last a lifetime. I love that we made those promises in front of our friends and family so that they would know just how deep our commitment to one another truly is. I love that I know, in the deepest part of me, that there could not possibly be another person in this world who could ever know my heart from the inside out the way she does. And, more importantly (so much more importantly) I am immeasurably grateful that she feels the same way. Because, as some of us (painfully) learn, loving someone and being loved by that person are often mutually exclusive. But when they come together, when you love the same person who loves you wholly and completely, that THAT is where the magic is. And I have it.

Photo thanks to Jeff Green

Photo thanks to Jeff Green

But I didn’t always feel that way. I was in my early twenties when same-sex marriage became a federal right in Canada. I was not in love and I had no interest in marriage. It wasn’t my fight. In fact, I fought (ideologically at least) against it. I wrote a substantial master’s level paper critiquing the fight for same-sex marriage. I argued that queer activists were ignoring more important issues in our community like the bullying of gay youth and fight for trans rights (I am still critical of a singular focus on same-sex marriage as the litmus test for equality but I have come to realize that there is room at the table for all of our fights and that forming a hierarchy of oppressions is not particularly productive). And as someone with a deep commitment to feminism I felt that participating in an institution that had historically oppressed and devalued women would stand against my very understanding of myself.  I was also critical of the need to afford certain government sponsored benefits to people participating in monogamous romantic relationships while denying those same benefits to single people, polyamorous folks, and those choosing to form primary relationships not based on romantic love (for the record I’m still critical of this aspect and am supportive of projects that work to overhaul the government’s relationship to marriage both gay and straight). I did not think I was the marrying kind and, besides all that, I was much more concerned with perfecting a haircut that would let other lesbians know I was on their team than I was with lending my hand to any form of queer activism.

But with time, and love, that all changed. I fell in love with someone who made me feel like the world really was made of sunshine and pride parades. I sunk deeply into a never-ending sea of late night giggles, serious conversations that nourish a soul and the kind of love that makes you feel like your heart could literally explode. The kind of love through which you come to understand not just your partner but yourself. And when that woman, the one who had my heart as her very own, asked me if she could share her life (the rest of her whole entire life) with me I said, unequivocally, YES.

And then we got down to the business of planning a wedding. Which was fun, and exciting and frustrating and scary. We poured our hearts (and our bank accounts) into one magical day and made all of the promises we had made a thousand times before. But this time we did it in front of our family and friends and when we were done we signed a piece of paper that probably said a bunch of really important legal things that, summarized, meant that she had no intention of ever not being my partner and that from now on I could call her my wife. And I did. I called her my wife every day, one hundred times a day, for weeks. And, if I’m being completely honest, there is still a small part of me that gets a little thrill when I say things like “let me introduce you to my wife.” Because it means that she chose me and that I get to spend my life with her. And that is amazing.

So, while I can understand the critiques of the institution of marriage I am nonetheless grateful that I can choose to be a part of it in my own way. The world is full of cynicism and hate and criticism.  But in my marriage I find magic and love and peace. And if I can make a wish for my child it would be that.