Vacationland

There's a small child in that last one. Today: I swam in the ocean, lb splashed and shrieked, good friends visited, ice cream store after dinner. Vacation.

Maine Summer

Kid Lit Review: This Day in June

It's a picture book about Pride: something I hadn't realized we needed, but now know that we do.  This Day in June is a winner, and I'm glad that I bought a copy (a hardcover, no less).  I am not going to complain about gay kid-lit, because I'm glad it exists, but I will say that this book is so lively and energetic and refreshing, and it's also SO GAY and even SO QUEER.

The narrative part of the book is a series of couplets, for example: "Clad in Leather/Perfect weather" and "Artists painting/Sisters sainting".  So, clearly, this is not "my family is like yours, but a tiny bit different, but really alike."  This book celebrates not just gay families, but gay culture.  And the illustrations are fabulous, and very detailed.  LB was drawn to the "pink page," and B and I spend a long time looking at all the drawings.

There is also a reading guide in the back that provides background and history for all the themes explored in the book.  Someone in an online group I'm part of recently asked, "what does wearing leather and showing your butt have to do with being gay?"  Well, this book can give you the beginner's explanation.  And then we can all hang out and read Gay New York together.  [There is also a separate guide for talking to children about LGBT issues.]

As the LGBTQ tent gets bigger, and as it become more possible to both be gay and remain in the "normal" club, our shared history becomes less clear.  Almost everything I've read this year from the sort of progressive queer folk, with whom I share some political perspectives, has been wistful-thankful for a world where many of us (more so the LG&Bs) are not so marginalized, but wistful for past of shared politics and culture in the face of a seemingly ever growing contingent that wants to JUST BE NORMAL.  As an adult reader, This Day in June is appealing in part because it's Pride as I would love Pride to be.  It all the fabulous and quirkiness, with a mix of radicalness and staidness, without the cigarettes, cheap vodka shooters, and corporate sponsorships that make me shake my head.

Dana at Mombian has a nice review of This Day in June that puts it in LGBT kid-lit historical perspective.  Dana compares This Day in June to Gloria Goes to Gay Pride, a kid's book published in 1991 by the author of Heather Has Two Mommies that, like me, you may not have heard of before now.  GGGP is no longer in print, a key problem for kids "diversity lit."  Many titles are published through small or non-profit publishers, and if they aren't picked up by a major publisher they are out of print (gone) within a few years.  This Day in June is published my Magination Press, a division of the APA Press which is the press of the American Psychological Association (how far we've come).  Magination publishes books like Full Mouse, Empty Mouse: A Tale of Food and Feelings and The Boy Who Didn't Want to Be Sad.

I read a lot of kids books, and a lot of out of print kids books.  I think This Day in June could be a classic in some ten or twenty years, I just hope it stays in print long enough to have a chance (so you should buy a copy or three).

Short version: thumbs up (and let it be noted that I bought this book with my own money, although if someone wanted to send me some copies to share I would gladly accept).

Live Through This

This list has been making the rounds on the internets, re: dangers faced by children of the 1970s.  Aside from the Jarts, yeah, this was pretty much my childhood.  Except that goat would have been inside a VW bus (true story).  And once my parents stuck me in the back of a VW bug with a burlap sack containing two full grown, and very angry, geese.  Thus, one of my earliest memories is standing of the bag seat of that bug, pressed up against the window, screaming, while the geese thrashed and hissed at me.  Also, my mom read an article in a ladies magazine about a family that died in a fiery car crash, all accept one small child who had not been belted in and was thrown free of the car landing safely in a field. Due to that article, we were strongly discouraged from wearing seatbelts.

My mom tells another story about a time when I was a baby and had a very bad cold.  The doctor prescribed a cough medicine with codeine, so my mom drove with me to the pharmacy, left me in the car, and went to fill the prescription.  But the pharmacist thought she looked like a drug-seeking hippie and refused to give her the medicine.  My mom was furious that her character was being attacked, and she was correct that even though she and my dad looked like hippies they were really total straight arrows.  So she spent so amount of time arguing and explaining that the medicine was for her SICK BABY WHO WAS WAITING IN THE CAR.  In my mother's telling, the point of this story is that some people are judgmental jerks, and the baby alone in the car is a non-issue.

I thought about that story the other day as I was getting ready to take LB to daycare.  I had her in the stroller on our front walk, strapped in and ready to go.  Then she realized she didn't have her special blanket and it needed to be gotten before we left.  I briefly considered leaving her there on the front walk.  We live on a very quiet street that meets up with a very busy street, but LB can't undo the big clip on the stroller harness, so she wouldn't be going anywhere.  And it would likely take me less than a minute to grab the blanket.  But I didn't leave her.  I unclipped her, and hoisted some close-to-30lbs, and brought her into the house, found the blanket, back out the door, and then she climbed slowly, slowly back into the stroller and slowly, slowly clipped herself in, and we left.

I didn't leave her partly because I live in a world of paranoia, where the 1 minute in which you leave your child outside one block from a busy street is the 1 minute in which she magically learns to unclip the sticky clip on the stroller harness, partly because years of urban living have taught me that ne're-do-wells probably won't harm your small child but they might steal your expensive stroller (which is not to say that city people steal more than rural or suburban people, but that city people are more aware that they may be stolen from), and largely because I didn't want to end up like this woman or this woman.

The 1970s, when I swam alone on empty beaches without life guards, I can't imagine that I will ever experience that again.

Summer List

Thanks to Little Monsters and Mommies for the inspiration.  It's summer for real after the long cold spring.  Summer in Providence feels so crisp.  Baltimore would be like a warm damp sleeping bag, but here it's all puffy clouds and cool breezes, and only occasionally a moist, salty breeze that makes me remember we are the Ocean State.

LB and I were on our way back from the park when we ran into a neighbor who asked me to water his garden for a week in exchange for an produce we can harvest.  I said yes.  I don't know his name and I don't think he knows mine.  That's New England.

The List

Strawberry Shortcake Cake
Maine
Maine again
plant window boxes
swim at least once a week  (in progress)
Go to Pride [fail]
grill (in progress)
eat dinner in the mud room (porch) (in progress)
have a picnic dinner
4th of July parade in Bristol?
go to the beach and swim
go to the beach on a bad weather day
have dinner on the beach
Portland Oregon trip
Montreal!
get passports so we can actually go to Montreal
go car camping
overnight in a hotel (LB not invited)
babysitter/regular date nights
set up sprinkler
go to PawSocks game
go to Mista Lemon
have ice cream for dinner
make ice cream
go the RISD museum
go to an historic house museum
see friends!
walk in local cemetery we've never visited
figure out something fun LB wants to do and do it!
whitewater rafting (B only)

Intended Summer Reading

Fear of Flying
Moby Dick
The Burglary
Radical Relations
The Color of Success

Currently I'm following the doctrinal/cultural conflict within the LDS Church.  This thread on FMH is very sad.

Modest Preschoolers (or, My Daughter Wears Jeggings)

It's almost summer, and the issue of what toddler/preschooler girls should wear in the summer has been popping up all over my social media.  I'm having one of those moments where I feel like I was raised by (inappropriately dressed) wolves, and I have no idea what these rules are that other people are talking about.  It's like when I found out that a significant segment of society feel that babies should never appear in public wearing only a onesie, because it's like an adult walking around in her underwear.

These are the rules I have heard:

-No tight clothes
-No short shorts
-No big arm holes
-No faux-sexy styling
-No bikinis

LB is breaking a few of these rules right now: tight stretch shorts, with a tucked-in tank-top with big arm holes (worn backwards to maximize exposure).  And I have some questions:

Do people really think it's wrong for a preschooler to wear bike shorts as shorts?  I had no idea.  I feel like there should be a compendium of these rules just so I can know when my daughter's sartorial choices are offending the world.

LB's outfit of choice: Elmo and jeggings and to make it even better, her pants always ride down

LB used to wear such cute clothes: cotton rompers, bonnets, handmade sweaters.  Hanna dresses from Grammy.  And then she learned how to undress herself.  Now any clothing considered too soft, to scratchy, too big, or just NO is immediately ripped off.

The last outfit I ever forced LB to wear-doesn't she look happy (and I'm still not sure how the school picture company came up with such a glamour shot)

What I want LB to wear:

I'm still holding out hope for next fall!

She will never wear this before she outgrows it

And LB's choice:

She styles this shirt (I'm pretty sure this is the exact big-arm-hold shirt that the other mom returned) with tight pink stretch shorts.  Shirt tucked into shorts. Shorts pulled up high.  Socks pulled up high, with sneakers.  I call this her "Fire Island called and wants 1985 back" Collection.

As I write this post, Motherlode has published the post, "Whose Dress Code Is It and Why?"  This column gets at some of what I'm feeling.  If people look at LB and judge me because she's not modest enough, I will judge them to be prudish jerks.  If they judge me for dressing my daughter in pants that slide down her butt whenever she engages in strenuous exercise, and wonder why people start training their children to participate in the horrors of the femininity industrial complex at such a young age-well, then I will just hang my head in shame because I agree.

But it's LB's body and it's the clothes that grandmas bought her.  I am a feminist mom.  I want to be a feminist mom, but I'm not sure that means I need to be an authoritarian feminist mom.

In the Motherlode piece, KJ Dell'Antonia reminds readers that dress codes aren't simply about sexuality, they are also about learning a variety of other social rules that may serve us well in life.  The word that she doesn't mention specifically is class.  And that's where I get even more uncomfortable with the rules and hierarchies of clothing.

My parents were passing into the middle class as I grew up in the 1970s-not so much by money, but by practice.  That meant that while other kids wore new clothes from KMart, I wore second-hand smocked dresses and fair isle sweaters. Classy.

I loved polyester and bright colors and plastic headbands and shiny shoes.  One day when I was eight my dad brought home a pair of Timberland boots for me (way before they became Tims) and I cried and hid them in the back of the closet.

As a teenager in the '80s, I was one of those girls putting together outfits in thrift shops and trying to make t-shirts into skirts like they showed in Sassy Magazine.

Now I wear a deliberately boring and hopefully clean, mix and match, business very casual.  I like people who wear outfits.  I want LB to have the joy of expressing herself through clothing.  I never want to see her in short shorts with writing on the butt, but I don't want her to judge girls in short shorts with writing on the butt to be cheap whores, and I certainly don't want her to think that clothes make her person-for better or worse.

Dear LB, It's the content of your character not the clothes on your back.  And if you want to be a peacock, if you want your pants to sag, if your skirts too short, I will love you for it.  And I will also replace songs on your ipod with lectures on feminist theory.

"In her kiss I taste the Revolution"

This is the only back-in-the-day photo I can find (weirdly cropped to protect the innocent).  The year was likely 1997, I remember buying this dress at the Salvation Army-at least I treated it as a dress.  It was like a tiny lampshade, and my friend put a tuck in the back for me so it would fit.  I was into wearing white fishnets, and if you could see my shoes they would be super chunky.

B and I recently watched the documentary The Punk Singer about Kathleen Hanna and Riot Grrrl.  I really enjoyed all the performance footage, which definitely makes it worth watching.  As usual, I'm annoyed that a film that spends some time reflecting on the problem of stars within social movements would choose to feature random quasi-celebrities who had nothing to do with Riot Grrrl reflecting on Riot Grrrl, rather than some of the rank-and-file.  I also don't like it when RG retrospectives present the '90s as a vast wasteland for young feminists.  RG was something new and exciting, but existed within and alongside a variety of other feminist politics (in my humble opinion).

B's critique of the film was that the filmmakers could have make a much more explicit connection between "trashing" and other negative forms of internal policing within feminist groups in the 1970s and disputes about stars and media coverage within RG. B wrote her senior thesis in college on RG, and she wrote this paper about the Chicago Women's Liberation Rock Band, which you should read.  And then you should listen to the CWLRB singing "Papa Don't Lay that Shit on Me" here.

After we watched The Punk Singer, B and I were inspired to bust out some of our old records, and reminisce.  It was really fun.  I am eight years older than B, which is at least a generation in music time.  B grew up in the Pacific Northwest listening to gansta rap, while I grew up in the Northeast listening to punk.

B listened to Dr Dre, Ice Cube, and The Coup, and then branched out to Ani DiFranco and Elliott Smith.  The first album I ever bought was Roxanne by The Police and the first show I ever went to was  The Ramones (at the UNH student union).

At some point our music histories intersect.  I bought the Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear album, I think, while I was living in Seattle in 1993.  I loved that album, but I don't think I realized that it was a thing?  I don't know, my memory is so bad.  I think I probably found out about RG by reading an article in the New York Times-clearly I had my finger on the pulse.  B started listening to RG bands and going to shows while in college in the late 1990s, and then got really into Sleater-Kinney (and couldn't tell me precisely how many times she saw them-because I fact check these posts like crazy).

I realize I don't know exactly what was so appealing about this music for B.  For me, it was years putting up with jackasses at shows, being expected to hold the coats, and the casual and not-so-casual misogyny of the punk/hardcore/ska scenes.  And it was also never seeing women on stage for those shows.  It was so great to see and hear women making loud, aggressive music.

 Videos I've watched while writing this post:

Hole's "Pretty on the Inside" on college radio late in 1991 blew me away when I heard it on college radio in 1991.  I had never heard a woman make music that so represented the roiling and seething that I felt on the inside (which is not to say anything about the people who made that album).

Lone Justice, "Ways to Be Wicked," I've always like country music, but I was embarrassed to admit it in the 80s.

I had roommate who was super into SubPop, and I liked this song by a band I'd never heard of called Nirvana.  Nirvana, "Negative Creep."

My other roommates were super into Throwing Muses, and I haven't heard this song in twenty and some years.  It bringing back some memory that I can't quite retrieve.