Entries from September 2010 ↓

Ainsley saved enough money to buy herself a mini laptop computer. She’s been emailing her friends and cousins, since we moved from Texas.

I didn’t want her emailing from my new Macbook. Nor did I want her using my computer to play Justin Beiber songs all day long and surfing Justin Beiber YouTube videos. So, I encouraged her to save her money and buy her own.

I am inclined to pay her for doing chores that I adamantly dislike – vacuuming for one. Can’t stand it. Bathrooms don’t bother me so much, but I get too much on my plate and need someone to help me out before we entertain guests.

So, she saved, for about a year, and bought a new knock-off on ebay a few weeks ago. The trouble is, buying a mini-laptop because it is cute and pink is an amateur mistake. She’s used to the lightening fast speed of my computer, so her slow as a turtle laptop has proved to be a disappointment. The other day I caught her checking her email on my computer, and changing my Pandora station to Justin Beiber. Annoying.

She has been talking about selling her new mini, for $200. I try to explain that once you open a computer package, the sell price – the fair market value – plummets, not rises. So, she wants to lower the price to $130 (she paid $105 including tax).

She’s saving for a faster computer now. (She mentioned that if someone wants to donate one – a fast one, a cute one – that she’d be happy to accept such a gift for her upcoming birthday Oct. 9.)

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Last Thursday I accidentally stopped recording the Redskins game while my husband was at a work dinner. I didn’t consciously do it, the DVR has an annoying habit of changing the channel I’m watching to record 20-year-old Seinfeld episodes. I just flipped it back and entered the protect code. He was seriously pissed.

Seriously murderous is how I will feel if someone changes the channel and stops recording the Farewell Season of Oprah which premiers today.

Oprah is my cultural icon of all time. You know that question, “One person, living or dead, who would you want to have dinner with?” Mine is Oprah. If there’s “one person you admire most in the world,” again Oprah. When she does those Oprah Hook-ups the only person I want to be hooked up with is Oprah.

My mother began watching Oprah when she aired after Days of Our Lives and Phil Donahue (which incidentally, I dreamed about last night). I was, and still am, pretty sure she’s the most enlightened person on the Planet Earth.

Over the last 20-something years I’ve spent 4 o’clock with Oprah. I sit down with my snack after a long, productive day and I cry or laugh, cheer and shout, and root for my fellow humans. I root for them to win contests, cry for their sorrow and root for their resilience and healing. I shout when someone makes a dream come true, literally shout in this teary, loud way, with fists in the air, as if it were my own dream come true (which, of course is, to be a best selling author on Oprah). I listen to people honestly convey why they did a crazy, stupid and wrong thing and I allow myself to recognize a piece of me that can relate. I learn about addictions of all kinds and I can relate a little too much. I get jazzed when the people loose the weight. I buy the books and read them like delicious glasses of white wine. I take the classes offered on the website and I listened to every author in Oprah’s Soul Series and took her A New Earth teleclass. Honestly, Oprah has educated me on a million things I probably would have known nothing about. I’ve even changed my health habits in response to her Dr. Oz shows. I’ve often ridden my elliptical machine while watching Oprah, knowing she’d be so proud of me.

Some years I’ve missed her because of work, but not since the DVR was invented. I’m glad my husband never bought me the 25th Anniversary DVD set, because I’m going to need him to buy me the one they market after this year.

She’s going to start her own OWN Network and I’m proud of her. Honestly, last year I was getting worried about her being so tired, not taking care of herself and working all the time. I kept thinking I should send her a letter, telling her we’ll be okay if she quits and takes care of herself. I totally plan to subscribe to OWN. I don’t really even care how much it costs. I like her “young pups,” but not the way I love Oprah. I wonder if she’ll have a weekly show or something that will give me my Oprah fix?

I suppose the next 20 years will be like the summer, when you have to make do with old Oprah reruns and it doesn’t really matter if you miss them. Sometimes they can still make you shout and cry (like yesterday when I saw Will.I.Am. pay off two people’s mortgages). After today, the Oprah Fall Premier will never come again.

This year, at 4 o’clock you’ll find me where I have always been: watching Oprah, eating my snack, and sharing emotional and psychic space with all the other millions of people in the world doing the exact same thing. I’ll be half-sad the whole time thinking, this is the last one exactly like this.

Honey, I’m so sorry I stopped recording the Redskins game. Please don’t take it out on Oprah.

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I started taking a small Feminine Presence class from a young woman, Anna. Another woman and myself have gathered in her basement studio on Wednesdays, around a candle to share observations and feelings. We relax and Anna tells us about ancient traditions in femininity from around the world.

We put intense focus on our womb space – the center of a woman’s (men’s too) creativity – the space in which all creativity emanates from a woman’s soul. This also known as the second chakra. When I first heard that the womb space was the home of creativity in women it struck me with significance.

The place where women magically transform two separate cells into a whole new person, a baby. The place where women cleanse their bodies with menstruation, the place which makes hormones that deeply impact our energy and intuition levels, the place that ushers us into the third phase of life with menopause. It makes so much sense.

It also didn’t escape my attention that this space is a cultural battleground with the issues surrounding sex, pregnancy, abortion, and cultural standards of body image.

” Located very near the stomach, the same place on my own body that I will sometimes envision fat being sucked out of, so it will be flat? How cruelly we’ve treated our most sacred creative space,” I thought.

I made the connection with rape, molestation, early puberty in young girls, the rise of infertility, the Mother Wars, welfare issues, the difficulties women have with menopause and the high rate of hysterectomies. There is perhaps nothing which suffers from so much abuse and political backlash than the womb space of a woman.

Anna told me to imagine a glowing ball sitting in my womb space or second chakra as I rocked my hips back and forth, side to side. The image that came to me was The Earth, which I lovingly rocked within my womb, tilting and tucking, looping and circling, meditating to melodies meant to relax and awaken our feminine energy.

“The Earth,” I thought, “could use more feminine energy.”

We’ve done meditation exercises to open up our Feminine Presence to learn how to be really be present, in the Now. We’ve imagined glowing lights in our heads, our hearts and our wombs, connecting them with a rod of light and emanating the glow outside our bodies.

At one point, my daughter came home from her new school upset that the other 3rd grade girls didn’t ask her to a slumber party. I hugged her tight to me and told her to imagine the glowing lights inside of her. She calmed. I told her she has the power to do this anytime she’s feeling bad or having troubles in school. I told her to attract the other kids to her light.

During the five weeks of my Feminine Presence class I’ve seen significant changes in my creative life, my ability to be present and experience pleasure and even in my relationship with my husband. He is pursuing me more frequently and more attentively. I love it.

My creativity reawakened around The Girl Revolution Book. I am creating the physical and time space to work on it, and I had a break-through in creativity to edit and weave deeper threads into it. I have made powerful decisions about how best to birth it into the world.

I’ve had a series of symbolic, deep, vivid, healing dreams.

The work has connected me more deeply to a deep, sacred part of myself, one which I was lacking words and form to adequately experiment with by myself. It has connected me more deeply to the holy feminine part of God – the Sacred Feminine – that I have been desperately craving as a I walk through and participate in a predominantly masculine world with unenlightened definitions of femininity.

The work has been so valuable to my creative life that I can’t think of a reason not to continue the class.

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Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner and MomsRising.org are supporting an update of the Toxic Substances Control Act, to address endocrine disrupters that mess with girls’ hormones in an effort to fight early childhood puberty.

According to the Journal of Pediatrics more than one in ten girls are starting to develop breasts by age seven, with even higher rates in some communities, Finkbeiner writes in her post “Puberty in Second Grade?”.

Also from her post:

One of the many contributing factors to the rise in early puberty is that young children are exposed to dozens of potentially toxic chemicals on a daily basis.  In fact, endocrine disruptors, which are chemicals that mimic and interfere with hormones, show up in a wide variety of everyday items including: household cleaners, air fresheners, cosmetics, canned foods, and school supplies. These endocrine disruptors can cause the early onset of puberty. [2]
Updating the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) is crucial to the health of our kids because, currently TSCA lacks a requirement that chemicals be tested to assess their ability to disrupt hormones.  This means that many of the chemicals we encounter every day have never been tested for safety.  In fact, since the passage of TSCA in 1976, the EPA has required testing of less than 1 percent of the chemicals in commerce!
The TSCA update would require chemical manufacturers to provide basic health and safety information for all chemicals as a condition for staying in or entering the marketplace. It would also, for the first time, make that information public. [3]

Take Action Now by sending a letter to your Congress person by clicking this link. It’s easy, takes a couple of seconds and will greatly impact the lives of girls.

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One of the things I like least about being a parent is being unable to accurately predict how my children will feel about my decisions or parenting style in the future.

If I behave this way _____, they will behave this way _____.

If I don’t do this ______, they will feel this __________.

I find myself attempting to change or alter my first-instincts on parenting or over-thinking my parenting decisions based on how my children might feel later as teenagers or adults.

This appears to make sense.

Until I really get that there is no determining how people will feel in the future. There is a whole rainbow of feeling flavors to choose from in every situation, depending on temperament, mood, influences and let’s face it: choices.

My kids get to choose how they feel about my parenting. They can even change their minds mid-way through and decide that something they have been fine with previously, now sucks for them. They can re-alter history, as children have been known to do, and pull out my parenting decisions later so as to use them against me as evidence of my flawed parenting technique. I know, I did this to my parents, my mother especially.

No amount of over-thinking or mind-changing or future-predicting can save me from this.

It might be the biggest bummer in parenting.

Some examples: I try to get my children to watch what they eat and exercise so they can have healthy bodies. While walking the tightrope of body image and trying to control whether they feel good or bad about their bodies. If I put too much pressure on this I worry my daughter might feel like I don’t think she’s good enough or beautiful, but if I put too little pressure on this, I worry that she’ll later feel like I was a bad mom for not teaching her the proper ways to eat and exercise.

The reality, of course, is that I can only put some good opportunities (I nearly said “the right opportunities”) out there for her, but ultimately how she chooses to feel about her body is her responsibility.

I will sometimes re-examine my parenting decisions in “light” of “how she might feel about it someday.” Which is really dumb, because I can barely predict how I might feel about something someday. Sometimes I can barely muddle through feelings I’ve already had in the past. Also, as I grow older and learn the art of forgiveness and letting go, I understand that feelings change over time and they’ve always been my choice.

I certainly can’t predict how another person will choose to interpret their experience. Will they use it as a building block for a foundation of future resentments or achievements?

I know this to be true. I know that I can only make the best parenting decisions right now, based on current circumstances and I should trust my gut. But, I forget sometimes and try to bring out my emotional crystal ball and then let it dictate for me what the right parenting choice is.

Am I alone?

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