Sunday Weigh-In: Round 3

Worry not. I shall come roaring back. Next Sunday is Easter Sunday and, appropriately, you will see a second resurrection in addition to Christ's.

Sunday Weigh-In: Round 2

The smack talk this morning nearly woke up Isaiah.

It's SO On

For those who know us best, the gene that determines competitiveness runs strong in both Factora and Borchers families. It has to. I've never met anyone who's more competitive than I am. That is, not until I met Nick.

Competitiveness comes in many forms. There's the obvious kind that reveals itself in sports. The Michael Jordan/Tiger Woods (sans sex scandal) kind of competition. This is the "I CANNOT LOSE. EVER." gene which makes athletes train twice as hard and cultivates a near military discipline that most of us civilians would find unbearable.

Then there's other genes of competition, more subtle but just as lethal. This competitive gene revolves around the oratory debate stratosphere, aka "I MUST BE RIGHT. I AM RIGHT." kind of thinking. It's a gene that makes its way into the most innocuous of situations - bowling, finding a parking space, starting a campfire, any household project, insurance claims...

You think these situations are not competitive? Move in with us for a week, you'll understand after that.

No matter what the situation, Nick and I often pit ourselves against the opponent, be a piece of stubborn firewood that will not flame up along with the others or a slow car in the Panera Bread parking lot who is blocking traffic. Everything's a competition. No dispute too small, no challenge too big. There are two trophy words uttered in our house that carry more weight than anything: I WIN.

Sometimes it's shouted, sometimes it's whispered into a billowing pile of laundry. Whatever needs conquering shall be conquered in our house.

So, you can imagine the kind of raised eyebrows and smack talk in our marriage when the competition is between us. It can get ugly, but it's always entertaining. Many people do not know that Nick is, as Keith Borchers said in his best man speech at our wedding, "an ego maniac who thinks he's sweet at everything."

Save opera and any form of dancing, this is true about Nicholas David Borchers. He hates losing. He can't stand being second. He likes strategy and mind-games during poker. He's all about focus and readjustment. Don't be fooled by his calm demeanor. There's a beast inside him called THE WINNER'S CIRCLE.

And then there's me. Don't think that I don't have my own monster and even according to Nick, I may be more competitive than him. There's a reason why I have the Rocky IV soundtrack on my iPod. Most people wouldn't see it coming, kind of like a CATEGORY FIVE HURRICANE that didn't come up on your weather outlook.

My competitiveness is often stuffed away because of its monstrosity. It can and has ruined moments of friendly game playing. While everyone else shrugs after a loss, I seethe inside. Competitiveness is like a constant search for perfection, which can never be attained. So, the desire to win or be right or dominate knows no rest. But, it's not always appropriate to be competitive so I, along with Nick, keep it to myself. We're like two man-eating sharks in a Sea World tank: it's in our blood and in our nature, but we're trained to be harmless.

That was a long introduction into the heart of this post, but it's critical for you to know the background of our competitive edges.

Nick and I have a combined goal to be and become healthier parents. Running around with Isaiah necessitates optimal states of health so we decided to commit to losing a few pounds. I need to shed my pregnancy weight and Nick, many months ago, invented a campaign called, "Don't Get Fat" because of his fear of rolling into a "fat new dad."

So we made a deal and the stakes are high.

Beginning Sunday, March 7th, we are having our own personal Biggest Loser competition. We adapted the show to our own lives and here are the ground rules:

Weekly weigh-ins on Sunday
Largest percentage of weight loss wins
Two goal dates: June 4, 2010 (our 5 year anniversary) and September 4, 2010.
Whoever has the largest percentage of weight loss on June 4, 2010 has the intermediate prize - winner gets one evening of their choice every week to go out and do whatever s/he wants while Isaiah is with the other parent.

If you don't understand the impact of that reward, go back and read it again. This prize is HUGE. This can mean going out with your friends. For Nick it can mean going to play racquetball with Books and Sam or going to the library for a few hours. For me that means extended trips to a coffee shop or taking my time at a farmer's market.

The ultimate prize, come September 4, will be individualized. Nick has yet to announce what his prize will be if he wins. If I win, I get to go to the conference of my choice in any part of the United States. (I'm such a nerd. I adore conferences on writing, feminism, media, etc...) Beside the fact that I want to shed my preggers weight, that conference-attending prize alone all by guarantees that I will win. Hello? Travel? Hotels? Learning? Meeting new writers and artists? That's what I was born to do.

This competition is huge and normally, I would not post something like this on our blog, but I figured if our friends and family - and God knows who else on the internet is reading this - is in the know, we are accountable to seeing this through. And we will.

It's man vs. woman. Focus vs. Passion. Tall vs. Short. Endurance vs. Intervals.

Choose your team now and place your bets. Nick is team blue. I am team green.

Cheers to a healthier Borchers/Factora-Borchers family in 2010.

(And, here's to ME, cause you know I'm going to lick this thing...)

Nobody Said Choice was Easy: Pregnancy and Vaccination

It's true when they say that the never unheated issue of abortion is the most visible skyscraper in the cityline of reproductive rights. Many other issues, although not as controversial or heavy hitting, are often left in the cool shadows, lingering on the minds of distressed women.

I'm inching toward my 7th month of pregnancy and the issue of the NIHI vaccine has been monopolozing my mind since flu season descended on my calendar, and straight into my big pregnant heart afflicted with tender worrying about my first child.

To vaccinate or not vaccinate that is the question.

Here's what I want to know: how do you trust ANYONE these days to give you correct information? For most computer literate citizens, there is no shortage of informtion. Thanks to trusty libraries, there is no question left in the dark, but, the question remains in my suspicious mind: How do I trust this information?

Maybe there are a handful of organizations or groups dedicated to unbiased information distribution, but, for the H1N1 issue, I'm pressed to find hard core facts that don't have some sort of agenda to nudge you in a certain direction.

This is my body and inside my body is my first child. The questions going back and forth neutralize my ability to make a decision. There is risk in doing something, there is risk in doing nothing, so I look at the facts.

Fact #1 - in my local community, there have been reported and confirmed H1N1 cases. To be exact, the local family care center 2 blocks from my house.

Fact #2 - 1% of the population is pregnant and yet, of those who have died from the the H1N1 flu, 6% have been pregnant women

Fact #3 - The vaccine is new and although people want to remain positive, the uncertainty of its effects are not known. NOBODY truly knows what the effects might be on pregnant women.

Fact #4 - Pregnant women have a weakened immunity system and those in later pregnancy may have more complications from flu-turned-pneumonia because of lack of sleep, irregular breathing patterns (baby pushing up against diaphragm makes deep breathes more difficult), and overall fatigue

Fact #5 - There is risk either way and regardless of what I do, my choice will be unpopular with someday in my life

My father is nearly sweating himself into dehydration because he wants me first in line for the vaccine. My mother is unconvinced that vaccination is safe. My dear Adonis keeps reading whatever he can, uncertain what is best and afraid to push me into getting the vaccine which he, underneath it all, thinks is the best option for our growing family.

I remain on the sidelines, swaying to the winds of news, gut, prayers, and hope.

So, after you've got choice, after you've got the information, what do you do if you still can't make a decision?

I've asked Isaiah what he thinks and he just kicks and rolls happily inside, his firing neurons building a system that utterly depends on the decisions I make with my body and our health.

Transformative Blogging: A Free Write on Pregnancy, Feminism, and the Internet

Three years ago, I started blogging.

I was newly married, working at a university, confronting my disdain for the midwestern common, and beginning to fall in love with photography.

Today I am 4 months pregnant, working at a spiritual center, combing through my complex relationship with geography and identity, and am a freelance writer and photographer. My dreams are more realized, I can humbly admit to myself.

This summer has been a fragmented blogging experience. I've loosened my ties with the online world after experiencing an avalance of its toxicity. But I know of the power of the internet, the power of online communication and exchange, and I know that I will never completely sever my ties with blogging.

The frequency of my blogging came alongside the confidence to speak my mind about mainstream feminism, kyriarchy, and the destructive practices of dominating US-identifed feminists in the field of gender, sexuality, and "feminism." Somewhere, in the Bermuda triangle of my mind, online expression became necessary strength-training for my feminisms. Online exposure - seeking external information from strangers and "experts" - became one of the most frequently visited gyms to exercise feminist discourse. Until now.

Pregnancy has taken me inward. Deep into the reflective tissue of memory, trauma, joy, and motherhood. It has taken me into these far off places of security and fear, health and death, responsibility and loss of control. I've retreated into my body, less focused on the rest of the world and simply in the world growing below my belly button.

This event, for lack of a better word, has transformed me again beyond any trip, research, or moving poet could ever shift me before. At no other time in my life have I walked more slowly, spoke less with more to say, and allowed to open my life to truly not caring about the world whilst still loving it deeply, wildly from my corner in Cleveland, Ohio.

Early pregnancy was very much like discovering the internet - information overload. There was story upon story of miracle (once infertile now fertile) to the heartwrenching (still born stories that made me weep for days) and more "advice" than I could handle. It left me staring at my ceiling in bed, convinced I was sick, was headed into an unhealthy pregnancy, and needed more medical attention than any other person who had ever given birth in the history of baby-making.

I harbored no trust, particularly for my own mind.

My early experience of feminism and the internet was similar. Three years ago, my blog was somewhat directionless. It was filled with thoughtful entries, some humor, and candid glimpses into my life, but it lacked any true identity. It lacked the substantial stamp of SELF. PERSPECTIVE. AUTHENTICITY. TRUTH.

The exploration of how to effectively use media, the internet, blogging, and feminism to transform ourselves and our pockets of the universe remains an unchartered course, a hike for which an infinite weight of rations is needed. This might take a lifetime. But I have learned that while blogging has been very much a gift - delivering relationships, realizations, connections, and insight - it is also a place that can sometimes take you away. Away from your body, away from listening to your own authentic creations. I realize one of the biggest differences in my writing over the past three years is that I write less reactionary pieces and responses than when I first began blogging. I was exploding like a firecracker to a zillion commentors and posts that led me nowhere except away from truly reflecting and moving within my own consciousness.

This gift of pregnancy has not only given me necessary reflection and work to emotionally prepare for a new role as mother, but it has deterred and sharpened my eyesight to be selective in who I choose to read and listen to. It has taught me that more is not always better and reading an endless parade of memoir writing about motherhood will never grasp what the experience means to ME. What is happening to my body, my brain, my bones right now.

It has been through pregnancy that I see "Feminism" with new eyes and I see much more red than I ever saw before. Red bias, red intentions, red discrimination, red narrowness...I see red. Reproductive health rights are arrows pointing to the majority of heterosexual, young white women. Sexuality and spirituality are rarely explored as an interlaced relationship. The conferences change names, but still move in their same agenda. "Liberal" and "progressive" are thrown around without much depth and review. Blog wars still flare from time to time, roaming from appropriation to racism, but after a few months of quiet, you'll still find the same bloggers rowing in the currents of mainstream thought and contributing to US-centric, heteronormative rhetoric that alientates and ostracizes "unpopular" issues like the fact WE ARE STILL AT WAR IN IRAQ, WE ARE NOT A POST-RACE SOCIETY BECAUSE WE HAVE A BI-RACIAL PRESIDENT, and the violence of poverty and rape still choke the life out of womyn everywhere in the world.

Maybe the point is not for the blogosphere to be transformed, but for me to transform according to my offline life, my quiet purpose. And just hope and pray that others are doing the same. Maybe if we all did that, our blogosphere, our world would change. Maybe we could all go through something similiar to a pregnancy where we witness new life growing in some way and we are drawn inward to listen to the new beat of existence, a changed way of being.

Maybe if we listened more, talked less, we could actually hear something other than the deafening needs of our egos and more of the muted chants of our yearning hearts.

Everything In the Sink: Writing, Health, Feminism, Poetry

In response to a piece of writing that moved me.

* * *
For $3.70, I bought a bagel and the most luscious hot chocolate you can imagine, and sat down to read the walking series between Jess and BFP.

For $3.70, tax included, I sat in a warm room and read Jess’ thoughts while I allowed the flowers of an Everything bagel to bloom in my mouth and the sticky sweetness of the whip cream and chocolate syrup avalanche everything in my mouth with sugar.

I’m celebrating.

It is the birthday of a friend. Jennifer, 32 today, an amazing mother and activist in the Philippines who fights a fight that would leave me scared shitless, but one that she levels with her eyes every morning in hot Manila. It is the day of her birth, entering the world so helplessly and, after a little over three decades, has exploded into a warrior for art, equality, understanding, and love in Quezon City, Philippines. I’ve known Jennifer for six months. I love and miss her dearly.

To celebrate, I read Jess’ work and envision her walks in Los Angeles. I hear her soft breath climbing the mountains of California and sense the spinning in her mind as she wonders what to write about on BFP’s site. I feel envious of their walks. No, that’s inaccurate. I feel envious of their partnership, the evidence that two people can agree to walk, think, offer... That’s more than what most people in this world will do in a lifetime.

I sneakily decide to walk with them. In my mind, I decide to stay a figurative block or two behind them so they can’t see me or worry I’m eavesdropping on them.

Monday
I get a library card from the local public library and rent Yoga videos for beginners. In the midst, I grab “The Namesake,” a movie I had already seen about the torrent of cultural identity and family.

To convince myself that I don’t care and it doesn’t matter if I can do the moves or not, I do the first video with regular clothes on and leave my hair disbanded. Everything’s loose.

Tuesday
I think about my quads. They feel stretched but not sore. Again, I put on un-Yogalike clothes and put a thin headband through my hair to keep it out of my face, but still lets it flow freely. I begin to fall in love with one move, the one where you pretend you’re flying. On one foot, I balance while I kick the other leg back. The upper body is surged forward, the back leg kicked straight out, the arms extended into wings. Hold the position. Breathe. My mind has wings.

Wednesday
I add an aerobic workout before yoga because I feel like sweating and wanting to build that fire again. My body feels differently. Like it’s been contorted, twisted, wrung. My blood feels thin and easy flowing. I try the relaxation pose and impatiently cut get up, hating it. I do not feel at peace.

Thursday
I have a doctor’s appointment for a hysterosalpingogram. The feel of metal in my vagina brings waves of violent thoughts that do no belong to me. I think of the literal and figurative bayonets stabbed into the bodies of women in a thousand wars.

I shake my head, the thoughts spill away.

The test is horrible, but the results are good. Everything’s clear and functioning. He hands me a towel to clean myself up. I look up and begin to cry.

Friday
I put on Yoga clothes and pull my hair into a ponytail. The balance is not there anymore and I waver, uncertain.

I try the flying pose again.

Looking down, I search for my focus spot and my eyes well up. There is no balance, only sadness.

* * *
Out of nowhere a 40 degree wonder sweeps Cleveland. I am loosely bound with one sweatshirt and gloves and take a long walk in the snow.

I pass a house boarded up where three little girls died in a fire one year ago, before I lived in the neighborhood. The surviving parents are pregnant again and want to eventually live in the house again, the home their little girls loved so much. My head shakes from side to side. Everything flows in seasons, even life.

I notice that I have stepped away from the internet because I have had reoccurring thoughts about Andrea Dworkin and how she wrote her life into death by sitting, writing, and barely moving. To be that disconnected from the body scares me.

I walk further.

There is a man my age at the end of his driveway. A hoe is grasped in his hands as he hacks into the thick ice. Our eyes meet and I nod and smile a greeting. The snow of his teeth show brightly as he smiles in return. I need more of this.

I think about Jess’ thoughts of perfectionism, depression, and achievement. Her honesty whispers louder than the crunch of my boots and I wish I had someone to talk to about my writing, my journey and relationship with its power and the purity I’m desperately trying to hold onto.

* * *

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was seven or eight years old. In my attic, I have bins of crushes, confusion, suicide, sex, and drugs preserved in words. Or, at least, I have them preserved in the way I thought they were.

On Saturday, I read the introduction of Audre Lorde’s biography by Alexis De Veaux. De Veaux writes that Audre never felt like she found a home. Never, even in her last days battling cancer, did Audre feel spiritually settled. Looking for what, no one knows for sure, but there was a mystical homelessness about her and I’d like to think that maybe I’m not alone in feeling the same way.

There is something restless about the creative spirit that yearns to be embraced, yet by its very definition cannot be comforted. And so the Spirit creates. It creates to survive because to be still, to stay in one place and consider the enormity of never feeling comfort is too real, too frightening. The possibility of what that eternal wandering could mean is too harsh to accept.

But Audre accepted it, eventually, writes De Veaux.

Thank God and too bad that I’m not Audre.

It is because of writing and this roaring for which there is no volume control, I am homeless.

* * *

I revisit Jess’ thoughts about achievement.

"I had no idea in that moment that not everyone defines human worth by work and work-related accomplishment."

What does that mean for me? I grew up in either a private institution or a private family that worshiped the credentials that came with academic achievement. Credentials, academic accolades, degrees, awards, intellectual distinction was not about superiority. It was about survival. Education meant survival. As immigrants, education became the means to provide for your family. Licenses to practice, exams to study for mean providing for yourself in the United States and making life a little bit easier for someone back home or for whomever you sent your money. For every degree, ten more people could be fed or another person could go to school. That equation wasn’t exact, but there was a sense of responsibility I felt to do well, to do excellent and one of the ways sacrifice is repaid is through the success of children. There was never room for anything but medicine, law, or, at minimum graduate school.

I wanted to be a writer.

Perfectionism is most certainly not a culture-specific phenomenon. It transcends race and ethnicity and plays out differently according to context and quality of measuring stick. For the Philippines, a country colonized first by the Spaniards and then by the US Americans, education became a golden ticket out of poverty. It was a privilege to even have the opportunity to succeed and if the opportunity rested on your door, who are you to not answer?

Educational achievement became a sweet addiction, how I imagine a post dinner cigarette tastes to smokers. It melted in the form of intellectual stimulus and in watching the widening of pupils when I listed my degrees, schools, and ease of which they came. It came in the small upturn of my parents’ lips. These successes, somehow, meant everything and nothing all at the same time. Addiction is like that.

Admitting how important education is to me and my family means revealing a colonized mind that I was ashamed to admit. Of course my parents thought education was important. “This country is about one thing: credentials. Without your degree, you’re nothing.”

How could I deny something so true to their immigrated experience? Each hostility, each slap, each shove, every cold shoulder they experienced somehow related to the fact that they were foreigners in this land that both needed them and despised them. The only way to stand their ground was to hold onto whatever was stable: education. That saying about your degree – once you attain it, no one can take it from you – wasn’t just about achievement, it was about defense.

What does it mean to admit a part of your very success, the goals you had set for yourself were set forth by a colonized agenda, a strategy to keep a people oppressed, a way to ensure the submission of servants and maids, garbage diggers and farmers, the sick and the dying?

And what made matters worse: I wanted to be perfect in that system.

That elitism, that view from the top from the tower, meant everything. It was never explicity stated as such, but it didn’t need to be. Watching what happened to my mother, without a college degree, a woman who traded in her life in the Philippines for me and my siblings in this country was enough evidence. 29 years of watching the discrimination against her face, her accent, her words, her perspective, her existence in the Midwest was enough lesson for me to want to screw the system by succeeding in it and calling it out on its racist, elitist bullshit. No matter what I felt – in addiction or anger – my plans always included extraordinary measured achievement. I always turned to structured pathways of the academy to prove my worth, “justify my existence.”

Then I found feminism.

"…I was still looking through a really isolated-individual lens in a lot of ways, and so unaware of all the ways privilege would have played out had I continued along that path, breathlessly pursued that book deal in my twenties, etc., etc."

How empowering to find feminism, I first thought. A human organized rallying for equality. And, look! You don’t have to have degrees, it embraces every individual, it both uses and questions theory and can be as personal as it political and as grand as a march or considering the farmer of your daily apple.

I found BFP’s blog when it was simply a gathering place for women of color. This was before I had any knowledge of the dynamics of internet organizing, media justice, or the trouble that could brew with one singular blog post.

To this day, I don’t know if I’m grateful for discovering the feminist blogosphere, something that I partition away from BFP’s blog, or I wish I had never found it. It was where I have laid many foundations of thoughts, but have witnessed more and more arbitrary and useless destruction – and it is competition among women by the way – for book deals, recognition, and speaking tours. It is cleverly covered with labels, “communities,” and learning curves. It has its good moments, but after so many years, the definition of “success” has morphed into a narrow and stubborn party of a few while the majority of women still suffer from sexism and violence. Blogging has the potential to teach and transform, but we’re not ready to accept that responsibility as organized bloggers and writers. That requires something more profound than vision. It takes listening.

Somewhere I found myself writing more and more but feeling less and less grounded, the opposite of my usual catharsis. I began writing about important issues because that’s what I thought mattered to the world, not realizing the world would be much better off if I write about what matters most to me.

In this ridiculous and unbelievably fast internet world, I have come to disengage with the feminist blogosphere as I dig more into my own feminism. The earth of my life, the soil which needs human hands, not my keyboard fingers, needs kneading. I’ve spent so much time confessing my faults that my line of creativity has bounced from productive to masochistic depression, measuring my worth with white, mainstream feminism which I don’t even like or agree with. And it’s not about blame. It’s just more of the same.

The longer I read blogs and the regurgitation of news that consistently licks the ethnocentric boot of US women, the more I am convinced I am on the right path of disengaging, ceasing my own internal battle to publish, publish, publish, and write a book, write a book, write a book.

I want to offer the world a compiled story of my experiences, of my life, not a reaction to my experience with feminism. All of this I now realize, 24 days before my 30th birthday.

The goals I had etched for my 30th were more about finding audiences, not my writer’s voice and building rails for my walking so that I walked straight, head up.

I walk. I walk in circles, with my head roaming the sky, behind my shoulder to see my boot prints in the snow, and sniffling from the cold, Ohio air.

bell hooks puts the geography of her writing into her writing. She asks and centers what it means to write from Kentucky. What does it mean that BFP writes from Michigan, or that Jess writes from LA? Or that most feminist mainstream bloggers write from New York, Brooklyn, or San Francisco? It matters. Our walks, where they lead us, matters.

What does it mean that I long to write from any place but where I am? How have come to be so ashamed of my Ohio place of writing that I feel un-credentialed, as if I have no authority over my own life? How have I come to deny myself in accordance to a colonized agenda as I read about colonization?

By measuring writing with a published book stick, the epiphanies that used to come to me like dreams and orgasms slowed to a dulling halt. No more reactions, no more opinions. Everything I wrote was first sanctified by my excitement and then nullified by a voice that whispered, “What do you know? You’re just another another.”

Another another.

Dreamer. Philosopher. Warrior. Poet. Yearning for truth with dripping insecurities.
And privilege.

That’s what made it even worse. I am a woman of color with intensely rare privileges.

How trite. How boring.

I’m tired of writing disclaimers of my privilege. I’m tired of apologizing. Even as I write that, I'm sure it reads RESISTANCE to acknowledging my privilege. But it's like, no matter what I write about, no matter how much I paint the elephant a traffic cone orange color and acknowledge it, point at it, sit next to it, and then I write my thoughts - someone, somewhere (usually "anonymous") comes in and reminds me, "don't forget - you're a privileged person of color. You don't have that much experience in oppression." Here’s the thing: I don’t know how to acknowledge it any more than I already have. And if I stop acknowledging it, I'm sure someone will call me a "leftoid cunt" again. I don’t want to spend my life writing about privilege. That would be a sardonic tragedy all on its own.

* * *
There is storm in its full state
everyday, plump,
- throbbing red -
birthing another and another
so I have a womb full of wind.

Its carnage bleeds out white women,
my husband, books, and screams,
but I never grow pale.
I have an endless supply of
angry blood, I suppose.

I’m waiting for it to stop.
Waitin’ for the sky to part,
for the rain not to be wet anymore.
I wonder if this is my Call.

To no longer seek the world
and its problems
and Write in observation of war,
but instead
to sift through my own debris
and believe,
with my entire mind
that it is good and I am whole.
And the debris
- the ugly wreckage of life –
is food.
-lfb

* * *

The relationship between health (mental and physical), writing, and practice of both are cyclic in relationship. The only thing that keeps my own destruction – my storm of depression, self-paralysis – in check is movement. That alone may sound unoriginal, but consider the trends of technology and season. The other day, I reached for the door knob before braving the winter, and paused. I could barely sense the skin on my stomach. I didn’t know if I was breathing in or out because it was buried in a bra, camisole, shirt, sweater, scarf, gloves, hat, and enormous parka. The weight and expansive coverage of cloth on my body prohibited movement. And that was just to my car where I would sit again.

My body couldn’t feel itself.

* * *

I waited for the groundhog to say good news.

* * *

Instead of waiting for external sunshine, I wrote this instead.

Letter #5

Dear Veronica,

"One disaster at a time." Those were the last words told to me by my doctor, one of my partners in this process of trying to make you into a cradling reality. Today, I had a hysterosalpingogram which is fancy word for shooting dye through fallopian tubes to make sure they are clear and functioning properly. Your only Tita, my wonderful sister, spoke her usual positive words when I told her that the discomfort was like getting a papsmear multiplied by fifteen, "Well, you never, ever, ever have to get that done again. Ever." And when I told her how they stuck cold metal up my Precious and then inserted a long application into me, and then filled me up with a fluid that made me feel like I was either going to die of cramps or explode, she replied, "Mhm. Sounds great - like reverse birth."

Humor, my dear, will be the key to surviving life. You'll learn that when you are born.

Your father was made to put on a safety apron because it was in an x-ray room. It was scarlet and tightened around his torso with a big piece of velcro. He looked quite anxious when he noticed stains on it, but he tried to keep me laughing. Or maybe both of us to relax before the horrible test I was about to have.

To distract myself from the pain, I tried to imagine what it might feel like to actually be pregnant with you. It's worked so many times before. The discomfort and sense of invasion was so thick, I could hardly get away in my thoughts. That's rare. I'm usually the kind of woman that cannot be followed in the secrecy of my mind. I can usually escape in a moment, but not today.

To make things even more complicated, I have some sort of tear in my - hold onto yourself - my rear end. A fissure, is what it's called, and feels like I am passing GLASS once a day. Yes, glass. More fiber, water, exercise, yoga. I'm doing everything I can, but the pain is so traumatic, so acute. Today it was so consuming, I cried in the shower for a long time. It's been weeks of pain, my dear, and with the thoughts that you may or may not be realized only makes me hold tighter to a thread of possibility that may not even be real anymore, but I still hope.

I have to believe that since the dye cleared my tubes, my surgery was successful, and I am surviving some of the most physically painful times of my life that I am a mother in training. I shovel snow, have my tubes inked, write manifestas, and cook mean meals that stick to your ribs. I am woman.

Hear me roar.

If you are ever born inside me, you'll be the first to hear it.

Love,
Mom

The Path to Pregnancy

It never ceases to amaze me how much has to happen for a womyn to become pregnant.

I've never been pregnant and decided, after much thought and deep prayer, that I want to be a mother.  My preference for beginning a family would be to have a biological child first and then adopt in a few years.  However, Adonis and I are completely open to all the different ways that progeny come about.

In 1999, I had a surgery that ended with a tumor the size of grapefruit being extracted from my right ovary and another cyst removed from my left.  Portions of both ovaries were removed, but I was told that children were still a possibility.  I was twenty and thoughts of children were frequent, but I wasn't ready.  Adonis and I, at that point in our lives, were passing acquaintances at college drinking fiestas.

And here we are, going to doctors and wondering what in the world I need to do to contribute to the global population.

Another surgery, apparently, is what needs to happen.

The road to health is a never ending bike path.  Once you think you can close your eyes and enjoy the wind, even for a split second, a bend in the road approaches and that moment of relaxation is put off for another mile or two.  And then another bend.  Sometimes, despite, our healthy habits, frequent exercising, and water drinking, our bodies decide to do things all on their own.  Mine decided to make tumors again and complicate my desire to have life beyond my own.

Two surgeries before thirty.  That's not exactly what I imagined for myself, but when I think of all the unexpected bends in the road, I accept this road as mine.  I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get through this time with promise and health.

ps - I am NOT moving my blog to be classified under "infertility" blogosphere or whatever some folks have suggested.  While I certainly appreciate the great resources of those blogs, and I will continue to expand my writing in other areas of the internet, this is my home here - as a radical womyn of color feminist.  I'm just a feminist who wants babies.

Call for Women's Right on HIV/AIDS

Today is World Aids Day.

What are you doing about the crisis?

A Fairy Tale Ending Eludes Separated Twins, NYTimes

Here is a story about a Filipina immigrant who came to the states with twins joined at the head. Four years ago they were separated and received national attention and international medical media, but today still face considerable uncertainty for their future.

All the harrowing fears face this Filipina mother whose worries encompass all the scaffolds of living here in the States as an immigrant - visas, finance, medical attention, and dwindling generosity.

Read more here.

The Moans of Woman

I called you, once, a throbbing funeral
And I was accurate, sorely accurate.
The way you pulse in my venus
with the color of over ripened strawberries
and tinges of red bruised vestiges,
you drop out of me
slowly,
then running-
sweetly,
then unabashedly-
soundlessly,
then,
without warning-
a moaning release of halfness,
of unborn,
and slippery relics
of what almost breathed.

I hear.
And cry into you.