Seeing Myself in My Son

I was cleaning the office and found one of my baby pictures.

It was eerie. I compared my picture with Isaiah.

Oh my...

Birthing a New Feminism

On December 20, 2009, I gave birth to two things: a 9lb. 7oz son and a new feminism. It was the third time my reproductive organs had encountered surgical metal; twice to remove ovarian tumors and cysts and once to remove a breathing boy.

By nightfall, I was vomiting from the drugs administered to my body for my c-section. After an excruciating vomiting episode, my head hit my pillow in utter exhaustion and my newborn began to cry out of hunger.

I looked at my body. Like a meticulous and tedious film director wanting to capture every detail of a flowerbed with a camera, I surveyed every inch of my body. I started at my feet.

My legs were buzzing numb, still, from surgery. To keep from forming blood clots, my legs had been strapped to a pumping machine. Two pieces of plastic swathed my legs. They hissed when they squeezed my calves and lazily loosened after three seconds of tight holds. The noise prevented me from deep sleep and made my legs sweat.

A catheter was inserted. I saw the bag full of my urine with taints of blood. It was a horrendous sight.

The dressing over my surgical incision covered the most tender and vulnerable part of my birthing body, the exit wound of my baby.

An ugly red rash had exploded onto the top of my chest. Its bumps were just as unsightly as they were itchy. A reaction, maybe from the hospital gown? Or hormones?

My left hand was a splotchy mess from a messy IV insertion. Mounds of clear tape awkwardly held in a needle and dried blood itched under the surface. It was hooked to a machine, beeping and regulating my body. Bags of I don’t know what dripped into my arm.

My right arm held Isaiah as I tried to breastfeed him. His desperate attempts to latch on were beyond painful, but with the help of countless nurses and my husband, he drank.

Gulped, really.

My normally brown face was gray with remnants of drugs and fatigue. No food. No water. Only ice chips. My water was taken away when I drank too much too soon and vomited into the pan again.

Later, to help stir bowel movements, an enema was inserted.

And I surveyed my body, every orifice of my body was either plugged, bandaged, bleeding, dry, or fatigued. And as Isaiah drank, my breasts ached with new agony, unfamiliar with this new demand of nourishment and, suddenly, as if my leg pumps, catheter, IV, and surgery scars weren’t enough, I began having more contractions. My uterus throbbed with an intensity that made my eyes close.

The hormones stimulated by breastfeeding will cause contractions. This will help your uterus descend and go back to its normal size.

And Isaiah’s latch intensified.

Never, in all the days of my life, had I ever undergone anything so life-giving. Never had I myself been so life-giving. Every part of my body was simultaneously healing and giving.

But I was in much pain. The lactation consultants were so beautiful and caring, I wanted to weep into their laps.

They gently touched, massaged, and handled my breasts. The nipples, swollen and red, screamed with pain at the slightest touch of a hospital gown. Maya, a middle aged woman from Russia, was sharp, informative, and decisive. Her teaching was fast, her hands careful, but her eyes were business. She recognized the pain, she knew how hard this was. Myra understood that I was thisclose to losing my sanity.

She understood that while the vagina or, in my case, the abdomen, was the door to life in the womb, it was the nipples that were the entry point of survival for my son.

The body, my body became a poem, a poem of survival.
______

I stayed in the hospital room, save two hours to walk down the hall for a parenting class, for four days straight. My dreams were in neon and my breasts were engorged. What I remember about that period in my life was how unbelievably gentle and kind people can be when you are in pain.

Briefly, like a loose leaf lightly touching a windshield before moving on, I thought about Feminism. Now a mother. Never again like before. Never just I. My life just took the most radical turn. That morning I had made myself chocolate chip pancakes. Six hours later, I was a mother. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye. And in that change, I came to a realization that there were two kinds of feminism. The Feminism of issues and the feminism of our lives.

I realized the Feminism that is perpetuated in mainstream and mainstream-like media is not the feminism of our lives. It is the feminism of commerce. It is the feminism that picks and chooses the winners and losers, the visible and invisible, and accessible and ignored. It chooses what will sell and what sells focuses on status climbing, material wealth, and westernized independence. Things that bring pleasure, not transformation.

The Feminism that has stepped on the backs of women of color and ignored the backs of trans and disabled women is the Feminism that camouflages itself with diverse panels and collectives but neglects to modernize its definition of social liberation in the era of digital media. It is the feminist theories stuck in the academy with no implored action. It is the round table discussions reserved for annual conferences that result in no true connection or building blocks.

This is the Feminism that has the time and luxury to ask leisure questions such as, “Why don’t you identify as feminist?” and “Where are all the women of color bloggers?" The same Feminism that circulates the energy over the same privileged circle of the educated, the employed, or as I call it, "the Sames;" the ones who stand an inch into the outskirts, banging on the "equality" door but who also ignore the women whose heads are in toilets cleaning their bathrooms or nannying their children.

This is the Feminism of fruitless banter and recycled conversations. The space to bring these issues up could be a hopeful sign of progress, however, the repetition of those conversations and the predictable accusations and defenses serve no other purpose than keeping the pendulum swinging in balance. Aka, the status quo.

This is the same Feminism that haunts the academy and academic support offices such as Women’s Centers and elite conference gatherings. The conversation of the privileged becomes priority over decision-making. Consciousness-raising is imperative for transformation, but it cannot begin and end with questions. There must be forward motion, however slight.

Simply putting 50% of women into anything male dominated may alter the demographic, but that’s not necessarily transformative. Putting a woman’s face where a man’s once was, without any sort of critical change, is not equality but appeasement. And before Linda Hirshman takes that quote of mine again out of context, let me explain further.

The purpose of feminism is to end itself. Andrea Dworkin called it one day without rape. Others have other land posts measuring feminism’s victory. The purpose of feminism is to one day find ourselves where we don’t need to fight for human rights through the lens of women’s oppression. Note: I didn’t write that the purpose is to bring down the man. The purpose is not to have a female president. The purpose is to transform the infrastructure that holds kyriarchy in its place. Replacing men with women – of any race, ethnicity, creed, or ability – who refuse to acknowledge the insidious and mutating face of gender oppression is not forward stepping. It’s a perpetuation of history.

And so the question comes: how invested are you in the liberation of women?

Because if you agree that the liberation of all women carries more weight than the identification as a liberal feminist, the feuds over whether feminism is dead becomes irrelevant. The uproar should be about dying women, not a dying Feminism.
_____

There was something so entirely miraculous about those four days in the hospital. I witnessed myself birth life. Bones from my bones. Blood from my blood. Life from my womb, I brought a person into the world. From two, I grew my family to three.

This awesome mystery/reality settled itself in bits and fragments.

My father told me that the birthing woman is different afterward. Her power is different. She herself is different.

My power is different.

For months, nearly everyone I encountered – friends and strangers alike – offered their opinion on what parenting should and would be for me. It was in that hospital room, where Nick slept uncomfortably on the couch without shaving and I, hooked to monitors and machines, understood a profound difference.

Parenting is the responsibility that we both shared. Together. It would be the late nights of feeding, rocking, and soothing that we’d walk together, he and I. But mothering, becoming a mother, was an entirely different bond. To me, motherhood is a yearning helplessness. Yearning to love more, yearning to teach better, yearning to make the world right – however impossible that might be. And recognizing that impossibility often made me cry.

I suddenly had this crazy urge to clean up the world for my son. I needed to organize.
___________

The feminism of my life unfolded in a love story that resulted in the birth of my son. Gathered at my bed was my mother, the woman I’ve thought of and written so much about. The woman who I have processed more than any other human I’ve met. My father kept stroking my hair and muttering concerns over my state.

The feminism I had begun to build was a house of love that no longer shunned my parents out of frustration, but embraced our difficulties and disagreements. Filipino culture was not something I needed to understand to live, it was something I needed to live out.

Nick held the can for me while I vomited. He wore scrubs and, in the delivery room, wore a surgical mask. The shade of the scrubs made his hazel eyes deep green. I saw him between hurls. I saw my son. Our son.
____________

Anything that I would dedicate my life to had to include, even demand, men. It may prioritize the lens of women’s experience for the liberation of all, but men had to be there. Where was I going without my son? What was I creating if not for him? I didn’t want to go where my family would not belong. It no longer made sense to separate myself and be alone. There was no division between the world I wanted to build and my son’s participation in it. I wanted freedom. Mine and his.

The Feminism of issues serves its purpose well. It informs us of the problems. But we’re more than issues, are we not? Isn’t our life worth more than the issues?

The feminism of our lives is the story of love, survival, testament, death, and epitaph. It is what we dedicate ourselves to and what we will pass on as truth to our children. Whether or not we identify as “feminist” is a sandbar to the oceanic movements of feminisms.

In my community, there is so much work to do, so much silence to break, that for the brief minute of a life where I get to use my voice, I am not going to expend my breath on explaining whether or not I identify as feminist. And the back-breaking work of so many women and men who never use the word feminism is not qualified or standardized on the arbitrary use of the word either.

The awareness matters. The intentional work toward eradicating inequality matters. The feminisms of my life matters. The use of the label does not.

Listen. Listen closely. Can you hear it?

The revolution will not be a movement. It will be Birthed.

APAD 2 (A Poem a Day)

Food is the miracle

What we do with it -
How we do it -

cook
distribute
grow

will determine our revolution

Spring for Brownfemipower

For my dear BFP,

Depending on what camera you have, all factors can play a critical role in the colors popping in your pic.

I went out for a walk and was eyeing the same tree. I took a few shots and got the effect I think you are talking about -- lighter sky, deeper flower color -- and I got it by playing with the shutter speed. That's my area that I always play with.

I have a Nikon D80 with a ProMaster lens, 17-50mm.

Keep playing around with yours until you get it. The colors will come!

APAD 1 (A Poem a Day)

Thanks to Mamita Mala for this idea. I'm late, but I'm going to try and do this...

I'm going to try and get over my fear of perfection (because that leads you to a brick writing wall of paralysis) and just WRITE.

So, heeeeerrreee goes...



Lolo and Lolo
I never knew my grandfathers
- grand clocks who stopped before my time -

My Lolo Fernandez rode the train
and loved basil gardens

My Lolo Factora believed soup bones
healed birthing mothers

One Spanish, One Filipino
One engineer, One soldier
Two invisible vines
encircling one garden

When my mother smells the basil in the grocer
Or moves her face into the wind, she says
I'm thinking of my father

In early December, my father grows quiet
And wordlessly heads to a morning mass
He's thinking of his father

They never speak much of them
But I see their eyes change
when Lolo moves in their presence

And the stopped clocks tick one last tock
through my parents

And I listen to their memory.

The Changes of Spring

And suddenly, in Isaiah's world, this THING happened. There was no build-up. There was no transition. HEAT appeared.

And just like that, I had to explain it to him: SPRING is here. Or as Nick says, "Just tell him that each day is the best day of his life because the weather keeps getting better and better for the next six months." That's true if you were born on December 20th.

Isaiah's legs are suddenly bare, no more extra onesies and winter caps. The warmer has been removed from his car seat to keep his skin air cool and his plumpy aura pleasant. It's suddenly warm and the first day it went from the 40s to the 80s, Isaiah slept almost half the day, as if his body went into some sort of confused mode that drank all of his energy, "I have to regulate the temperature of this big baby, we need to shut down," is what I imagine his cells and neurons communicating to one another.

It's been about three and a half months since Nick's and my life took a radical turn. And things are indeed different, as I reflect on the past year. I believe Isaiah was conceived during this past week and, if you believe that life begins the moment of conception, Isaiah is technically a year old already. He friggin looks like a toddler anyway, so that feels appropriate to write.

When he's fussy or won't stop making noises, sometimes I pick him up and go outside and show him all the signs of new life in the world. The tulips springing out from the ground in our back yard, the tiny budding flowers, and the tips of green beginning to open themselves into leaves on the trees. Isaiah's fascinated by the color and the wind on his face and I start laughing to myself when I look at him look at spring. For me, Isaiah's the ultimate sign of new life and here he is, grazing the new spring grass with his chubby foot.

The gorgeous weather has also permitted us to go for long walks together and that has made ALL the difference during the day. No more being cooped inside the house, no more praying for the snow to stop trapping us indoors. I feel free! Boundless! And I'm enjoying it while I can because I know in a handful of weeks, my allergies will bound me to the house once more and I will be unable to take meds because of nursing Isaiah. This will definitely be interesting. I'm going to look like a bloated, congested goat.

Isaiah's life keeps changing our world and the worrying, planning, and mild anxiety doesn't seem to stop. Ironically, accompanying all of this is a deep serenity that I was not prepared to find in parenting. Sometimes, when it's just me and Isaiah, and I'm singing him to sleep, I kiss him on the top of his head and can feel the soft spot. A physically vulnerable place on his body revealing his pure youth - his skull is still fusing together, his brain is still growing. And in this place where I rest my mouth, I can feel his heartbeat. His heartbeat. I can feel his actual heartbeat at the top of his head. Something about that often makes me cry. In so many ways, Isaiah is this utterly dependent little thing of a human who can only wiggle around, half roll on a couch, and yelp for his needs. And yet he is his own person. He's a completely separate human being from me and Nick, a person who will grow into his own, and experience his own choices and trials, failures and triumphs. He has his own heart. He doesn't need mine or Nick's.

That realization startled me. Isaiah is his own person.

Somewhere in the future I see myself struggling to let him go. Whether that's his first day at kindergarten, his first boy/girl party, his driver's license, or college decision, I don't know. I can't fathom how this little miracle is someday going to leave us and show us his own heart's identity.

For now, I'm just enjoying those moments of realization and relishing in all the little epiphanies he brings me on a daily basis. For now, that is more than enough.

Isaiah is a gift that is endlessly unwrapping.

Happy Easter

My Little Super Hero, Part 2

My Little Super Hero

My Feminist, Good Friday Homily

Today, I will be fulfilling a life long dream: to deliver a reflection during a church service. Because Good Friday service is "technically" not a mass, lay parishioners are allowed to give a "homily."

When I was growing up, I always knew better than to ask my mom if I was allowed to do anything during Holy Week. On our refrigerator, she would post the church bulletin and with a highlighter, go through and underline every single mass, reconciliation time, and service offered. I was the youngest of four and all of us were expected to attend, no matter what was going on. No exceptions.

It got really difficult when I was in high school. And since it was Easter break, people would have all kinds of get-togethers and parties. And since we were on vacation, you knew everyone was going to be there. Everyone, that is, but me. One time, though, I did get the nerve to ask my mom if I could go to a party. She just raised her eyebrows at me and say, “Lisa, are you going to a party on the day of our Lord’s death?”

So, you can imagine, I did not go.

I didn’t want to be a party-goer during Good Friday, so I just thought to myself, “This is just a sacrifice I’ll make by staying home.” All the while, though, I was wishing I was with my friends. Remember, as a teenager, staying home on a Friday night of vacation was a really, big deal.

My mom was right. Today is a day, among many things, about grief. It is a day typically marked with solemnity, a sobering awareness that’s almost palpable. Good Friday is when we relive the most intense story in the gospel – the Passion. It is a time that we, typically and appropriately, regard with mourning and reflective hearts. It is, after all, the day that Jesus dies.

How do we move into these hours? Is it with heavy hearts? Spiritually, that makes sense. But is there more to Good Friday than just the quiet grief and observation of Jesus’ death? Good Friday is more than just staying home and self-sacrifice. It is more than just the quiet 3 o’clock hour.

Personally, I know that I am able to move through this darkness because I know the light of the resurrection is but stone roll away. I have heard the sounds of Easter before, I have seen Easter lilies bloom. I have the strength to move through the darkness of Good Friday because I know and believe that today will pass. Friday passes into Holy Saturday and Holy Saturday gives way to a Sunday miracle.

But, is that what I want my Good Friday to be about? Waiting for Sunday? What is your Good Friday about? Perhaps Good Friday is the opportunity to find and witness someone else’s passion. Who in your world, who in your life, who in your heart do you know is dying? Who are those people in your life whose tomorrow, next week, and all the days of this year will be Good Friday?

Today we gather and remember the suffering of Christ. It’s easy to be overcome by the physicality of Jesus’ suffering: the scourging, the crown of thorns, three falls of Christ. But what haunts me the most about the Passion is that Jesus, who walked in the knowledge, faith, and trust that he was God’s son, believed that he was abandoned by God. Jesus! I cannot think of a more crushing anguish or more profound loneliness than to believe you have been forgotten, even forsaken, by God. The very God who created your existence.

Somewhere, someone today is going through precisely that; that division from God, believing that they are forgotten. Beyond these walls, or maybe within these walls there are those who are living the Good Friday that Jesus experienced. I don’t know any one in my life who endured the brutal violence Jesus did, but I do know people who are going through the psychological and spiritual trauma Jesus did. In my world, I see my friend Katherine who is ostracized from her family because she is a lesbian and is no longer invited to her family’s Easter celebrations. I see a place called Payatas, a community I visited in the Philippines that lives at the base of dumpster where the people sift through the garbage with their bare hands for food that can be recooked for their families. I see my friend Emily who has been trying but has not been able to conceive a child for many years. I think of my mother who is walking with her mother in the last stages of life.

Who in your life is in the darkness? And who are we to be afraid to bring light to them? If Good Friday is anything, it is a day to put aside any fear we may have, and let the light of God move the stone from someone’s tomb.

How do we do that? For myself, I write letters. I send handwritten letters on ordinary days. I try not to wait for holidays or birthdays or anniversaries to remind someone they are not forgotten. This may seem very small or just a crack at their seemingly insurmountable suffering, but I am often amazed at how much light comes through one small crack. But what is even more astounding to witness is how much darkness is dispelled by that crack.

To truly follow Christ is not just observing his death, but remembering why he died. Jesus was killed because he brought light to those in darkness. So, perhaps today is more than just brokenness and sacrifice. Perhaps it is a day not to enter, not be enveloped, not become one with the darkness, but to be the light, however small.

I would like to leave you with one question and I hope you can come back to it often as you move through your Good Friday: What will you do to dispel the darkness?