There’s No Such Thing As Gender Equality

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

We dress our baby like a boy. It’s partly because the clothes were free, courtesy of her six-month old, male cousin. It’s partly because we like the clothes in the “boys”section better. (Monster suit, I’m looking at you!) But it’s mostly because, unless she’s in a dress or wearing neon pink (and sometimes not even then), people assume she’s a boy.

It’s not just other people. We do it too. When we put her in her first dress, for a party my mother in law had last weekend, I looked at my husband and said, “Wow, she looks like a girl.”

Babies are baby shaped. They don’t look male or female – they look like little balls of adorable. Any gender identification that we impose on babies comes from us. Including the default assumption that a baby is a boy until proven otherwise. This is at the root of our difficulties with gender, our need to dichotomize into girl/boy, male/female and all the baggage that goes along with that.

And there’s no way we can live in a world in which gender doesn’t come with a pre-packaged set of assumptions and norms, until we can let babies be babies. Without attaching a label.

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It seems that I’m not the only one thinking about gender norms and preconceptions today. Chuck Wendig has a great blog on the subject here, and Kat Howard’s thoughts are here.

New Year’s Wishes

On By BekkiIn Musings & Ramblings1 Comment

I wish for you to be challenged, and that you rise to meet those challenges with determination and perseverance.  That you find within yourself the ability to do what you always thought was impossible.  That you learn things about yourself that surprise and delight you.

I wish for you to be lucky. The kind of luck that leaves dollar bills on the sidewalks and four-leaf clovers in your path. That sweeps the unexpected into your life where it is most needed.

And, as always, I wish that you love and are loved and find new loves.

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See also Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s Wishes.

And the lovely Ali Trotta’s.

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I’ll link to other wishes as I come across them.  If you have one, or know of one I’ve missed, drop me a line in the comments.

Orange Tangerine Pearl*

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I’m writing this with a baby on my lap. My baby. She is a week old, and she’s perfect.**

I’m not going to go into all the labor details here, but there were a couple of things that happened during the birth that really interested me from an information processing point of view.

The first is that, according to my husband and our doula, I didn’t start talking about an epidural until after the anesthesiologist came in. My recollection is that I started talking epidural when the contractions became unbearable – query whether there’s any link between what I was experiencing before and after the hospital reminded me the epidural was available.

The second is that I wanted to do a natural childbirth because I thought it would lead to the best outcome for me and Zed. Everything I was reading and hearing pretty much said the less interventions you do, the better – less chance of a C-section, better breastfeeding, etc.

Suffice it to say, I ended up having two interventions – I got an epidural, and the OB broke my water. Both were exactly the right moves at the time, and both made the labor much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

The thing is, I was so focused on the potentially negative effects of interventions, that I hadn’t bothered to consider the positive. Although the teacher in my birthing class discussed pros and cons for everything, I didn’t really pay attention to the pros because my mind was already made up.

I didn’t do this consciously. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as very open-minded. But when I was thinking about the way labor had gone post-birth, I realized that I hadn’t really factored in the potential benefits of interventions.

It made me wonder what other things I might have missed because I only paid attention to the information that supported my point of view. And I’m hoping, as A and I confront the myriad of choices and decisions that is child-rearing, I’ll remember to pay afternoon to all the information out there.

*The color of our new car. Also our code word for “I actually mean that I want the epidural now”.

**In case you’re wondering, you didn’t miss the pregnancy announcement. A and I decided that we’d like to keep little Zed off the internet for the most part. So I probably won’t be talking about her here very much.   Incidentally, Zed is also the reason I haven’t posted much – for some reason, pregnancy has been my main focus for the past nine months.

Also, if you’re doing the math, by the time this goes up Zed will be about 2 weeks old. We call this the newborn effect – everything takes twice as long as it does in normal time.

To Ben McCoy, Wherever I May Find Him

On By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

An old friend of mine from summer camp died unexpectedly a few weeks ago.  I found out through Facebook, of course, where his sister had asked people to upload their old photos of him.  It wasn’t until I had all my old summer camp albums stacked on the dining room table that it hit me that he was gone, really gone.

I always thought I’d run into him again.

Sometimes, people come into your life and they change you, indelibly, unexpectedly.  I remember the music, the way it infiltrated those liquid summer nights, spiraling into the warm night air and settling around my shoulders like a hug.  I remember sunlight hitting bleached blond hair, and I remember summer girls in tank tops and denim shorts, and I remember a smile that went on forever, a smile that was yours, always and only.

I remember two questions.  Questions that book-ended the years I knew him.  Questions asked carelessly, in the middle of a crowded room.  Questions that still cut to the heart of who and what I am.  I never answered either.  I didn’t understand, until many years later, that I wasn’t meant to.

You could say I had a crush on him, but that wouldn’t quite be right.  I had a crush on the idea of him.  I was too shy, too awed by his popularity, too afraid of rejection to get to know him.  When I came across him on Facebook a few years ago I friended him, but I left it at that.  I didn’t think there was enough of a connection left for us to have any kind of conversation, for me to try to meet up with him when I passed through Boston.  I wish now that I had tried.

Because most of all, I remember a boy with mischief in his smile, and love enough in his soul that it was yours for the asking.

“The Whooshing Sound They Make”

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

The revisions have been going slowly. So slowly that I’d begun to think I’d set an impossible deadline for myself, that there was no way I was going to have the second draft of this ready by the beginning of August.  It was really starting to make me crazy.  After all, when I was doing revisions to Pomegranate House in January, I was blowing through pages and pages of material in each sitting. I didn’t get why I was having such a difficult time here.

Then, about a week ago, I finally figured out what was going on. I’m not revising, I’m rewriting.*  There’s a few parts, like the opening, that I’ve left largely intact, but almost everything else has gone straight to the chopping block.  Truth is, it’s been so long (over 6 years!) since I’ve worked on the second draft of a novel that I forgot what it was like.  And because this first draft was good — not great, but good — I somehow thought that would translate to less rewriting.

This new draft? It’s really good. Still not great, but it’s starting to sing. It’s also falling into place plot-wise.  There’s a big chunk near the end that I’ve been worrying over, because I knew I would need to cut out or completely re-write most of it.  It’s that chunk, in fact, that put me off revising for so long, because I simply had no idea what to do with it.  Now?  I’m not so worried by the fact that most of it is going to hit the cutting room floor and stay there.  In fact, I think the book will be better for it.

What does all this mean for my deadline?  Well, after seven weeks I’m about a third of the way through the original novel, but I’ve written an extra 10,000 words.   I also think my pace is going to pick up a bit, now that I’ve made my peace with the fact that this is a rewrite.  There’s no way I’ll have a completed draft in two weeks, but mid-end August might not be too far outside the realm of possibility.

 

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* I see rewriting as the thing that happens when you take your original scenes and rewrite them completely, adding or subtracting characters, text, dialogue, plot points, etc.  I see revising as the thing that happens when you tweak a word here or there, or maybe sprinkle in a few additional scenes, but otherwise leave the thing mostly intact.  I’m sure different people call these different things, or the same things, but it’s what I mean here, for purposes of this post.