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Sent to you by moya via Google Reader:
honestly, it takes me while to process things sometimes and to find the words. so in time i may have other things to say, but for now…
–i can look back now. read the first two posts that caused such a ruckus. and realize that i still do not have a clear idea why people got their panties all in a twitter. i understand that it happened. i accept that. but honestly, i do not understand the motivation of people to come onto a blog post after the first hundred comments or so and say the exact same thing that twenty other people have already said. what is the point of that? do people really think i am going to have a conversion experience: woah. dude. i just hadnt considered what a horrible, selfish, entitled person i am, thanks for enlightening me comment number 547.
–you do not have the right to child free spaces. you have the privilege of being able to choose child free spaces. it is a privilege. it is not a right. there is a difference.
–i had a hard time with the comparing pwd with children. but no i dont think it is able-ist to compare pwd to children. no more than i think it is racist to compare the treatment of black folks to the treatment of pwd. it is only able-ist to do so, if being compared to children is an insult. and then we need to interrogate why being compared to a child is an insult in our culture.
–i am still resistant to explain that children are an oppressed class of people. it just seems so fucking obvious. and i refuse to do 101 for folks, unless i am getting paid. so. please go google it, if you still do not understand why the united nations and nearly every other organization that does human rights work, classifies children as a protected class based upon children's inherent vulnerability and our civilizations exploitation of children.
–i get so sick of critiques of 'parents' of children in public spaces. its not 'parents'! its mothers. it. is. mothers. mothers, women, are the ones who are primarily doing the childcare. so when you insult 'parents' you are really insulting women. women. women. women. and srsly, that there are literally hundreds of self identified feminists who can insult women in such a vile manner and then ask me why i dont identify as 'feminist' blows my fucking mind. srsly. fuck you. its not some genderless parents. it. is. women. who you have made it clear that you can't stand.
–i try really hard not to control my kid. the definition of control is: To exercise authoritative or dominating influence over
i model, i talk, i explain, i make jokes, i relate, i listen, and listen some more, i play with, i describe the social rules of a give situation, i listen, i laugh, i distract, i make paper puppets, i walk with her outside, i calm her down, i ask her what she needs, i pay attention, i listen, i listen, i listen. i love, i cuddle, i teach.
but even when it is really tempting, i do not want to control her. i do not want to control any human being. i do not want to dominate or be authoritative over another person. especially not my daughter.
–and yeah, she has been to a bar. ha ha ha.
–simply because you are child free does not give you the right to childfree spaces. no. being child free give you the right to live in a world without having to bear or parent children – i will put my body on the line for your right to decide if and when you want to be a parent. but, it does not give you the right to get to have public spaces where children and mothers are ostracized. that, as i said before, is a privilege. not a right. i really do not know why people cannot make this distinction.
–honest truth? only once living on this planet can i remember being taken aback when i thought i was trying to help a kid and a mother stepped forth and asked me not to. she was a bit snippy about it. i was 9 yrs old. i shrugged it off, figured huh, she has difft boundaries than the other mothers ive known and…ta da!…went on with my life. with my human life, in which i try to helpful to other human beings the best i know how.
now countless times i have smiled at babies and made silly faces to get them to calm down long enough for their mother to calm down. i smile at mothers who are obviously having a hard time, because i know that she probably thinks that everyone is judging her thinking she is a bad mother because her kid is making noise, and that (accurate) worry is adding to the stress level. and if it is annoying for me to have to hear her kid cry, i know it is ten times worse for her, and i want her to know that there is one person who isnt judging, one person who gets it. and yeah a lot of times it helps. the mother calms down, the kid calms down. and my head stops hurting. ta da!
–i have no idea where people got the idea that i was saying you had an obligation to identify as a mama. or that i insist upon calling you one. god. no. im not even sure how to refute that idea, because i have read the post over and over, and cannot for the life of me figure out where folks got that idea. hell, even bfp doesnt identify as a mama, and that was clear from the original post. god. srsly. folks. i dont live in your totalizing hegemonic worlds.
i did not say if you are a good person, then you are a mama. i said, these people identify as mama. and so do i. it wasnt an invitation to join us. it was an invitation to think about why you identify as you do, what does it mean to be feminist, and why do you think others should identify as you do in order to respect them.
see, i dont need you to identify as i do, in order to respect you.
–and one of the more bullshite claims made in that whole feministe two week blogging stint was that people had gotten all riled up because i am a bad writer, who did not explain herself or her life well enough, so obviously people were going to make assumptions and that is all my fault, because if i was a better writer then the verbal abuse would not have been so bad.
how much of my life details did you need? how much of my private life are you required to rummage through before you will not make abusive assumptions about me? how much of my trauma do i need to dig up and lay before your altar of feminism before i can be allowed to simply speak my truth as i see it? you need to know about my stint in prison? about sitting in a room with over a hundred rape survivors as they cried? about the racial epithets aza has endured?
or did you need to know that we have lived in chiapas mexico as well as cairo egypt? that aza saw subcomandante marcos in the flesh when she was nine years old? and used to hang out with sweet boys who were also ex child soldiers and slaves and current members of refugee gangs in cairo and they loved on her while they painted flowers on the pink walls of their schools?
or do you need to know what exactly it means to live in egypt? that no bar i know of could make enough money to stay open if it only served alcohol, because this is a fucking muslim country, so most of them end up serving a lot of soft drinks, coffee, tea, and birrell (the non alcoholic beer of cairo). as well because it is a muslim country, stumbling drunk doesnt really happen, cause a lot of times the bar tenders wont let you get that far into your drinking. and that i know that aza is often the quietest in a room full of inebriated souls, because most of the time she falls asleep and we put her in a bed in a private room, because here people are much more likely to get drunk in their homes than out in a bar.
how much of my life did you need displayed before you, so that you could assume that my life is different than yours? and what kind of person are you, that you just assume that everyone else's life is like yours unless you are given explicit evidence to the contrary? it is an incredible mark of privilege to be so myopic as to not, on default, assume that others lives are different, vastly difft than your own.
and it is just fucked up to assume that i deserved that kind of verbal abuse, because my writing required that you not center your life experience in the reading. but, it was mighty mighty feminist of you.
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