Mother Power

My 4 year old son turns his trusting face up to me and asks, "Mom, am I smart and handsome?" For a brief moment, I catch my breath with the weight of this moment, the building of my son's identity. I don't want to get this answer wrong. The different studies and childrearing books I have read stream through my mind, a parenting ticker with multiple opposing views, at stake are my son's future happiness, self-esteem, chances of ever finishing college or marrying up.

"Don't hesitate, don't blow it!" I scream at myself. "Tell him he's smart if he works hard and never gives up in school, he's handsome if he works out and gets good at a sport but is confident enough not to care if everyone notices. Tell him that the Tiger Mother would already consider him a 4 year old failure for not playing any instruments. Or tell him he is the smartest and handsomest just for being alive and being my kid, setting him on a path to wind up as a 30 year old druggie living in my spare bedroom." There has to be an in between, a way to raise an independent child while also slathering him with all the love I feel for him.

I take a deep breath and tell him that I think he is the smartest and handsomest 4 year old that I know. This is true. He smiles for a second, then runs back to play, whatever little emotional crisis he was having has passed quickly, and he is once more the confident and rowdy little guy that I love. I can't help but marvel that my good opinion of him is all it took to restore confidence and security. What power we mothers have. May we wield it carefully and with love.

Originally posted in 2012

An open letter to Anti-Vaxers

An open letter to all my Anti-Vax friends: 

I would like to officially accept your heartfelt thanks for the fact that your kids are moderately safe because I and a strong majority of the educated, rational people in our country have vaccinated our children. 

You are welcome. 

See, I grew up in a third world country and watched a childhood friend's legs wither and twist with polio. I have watched babies grow weak and sick with measles and whooping cough, and two kids on my childhood street died from preventable diseases, one painfully coughing blood from rubella, and one favorite playmate who died extremely painfully screaming into the night with rabies (after being nipped by a cute little puppy.) I remember both of their names, and I clearly remember the look on their mother's faces as we mourned and buried tiny caskets. 

Yes, many children cry when they get vaccines. They also cry when we buckle them into car seats and when we make them wear life vests (those dang seatbelt and life vest on manufactures are making SO much money... there has got to be a government scam there!!!!!) 

So, I realize that you have no idea how lucky you are that "evil pharma companies" and the "gob'ment" are trying to keep you from experiencing the horror and sadness of losing a child to an easily prevented disease. You are blessed and lucky to raise your child in a first world country where the super nasty diseases are no longer the things that parent's nightmares are made of. You have no idea the tears and desperation that led our country to make eradicating these diseases a primary concern. 

You are being a good parent and are trying to protect your child as best as you can, but you are wrong. 

I can keep my kids safe and even yours when we are together, but I can't keep your kids safe when they are out in the everyday world or having a fun vacation at Disneyland and get exposed to truly scary diseases. I care about your kids, and I worry about the actual danger of your kids suffering terribly, not about the straw man arguments that have been posed by non-expert attention seekers and have proven false over and over. 

Stop reading fear-mongering blogs written by the internet equivalent of sidewalk preachers with badly spelled cardboard signs. Stop retweeting and sharing ignorant pictures and cute little celebrity quotes. Grow up and be an informed parent. Realize that when your child touches a cart at Target then puts their fingers in their cute little natural and unvaccinated mouth, they have been potentially exposed to germs from anywhere in the world. 

I hope to never attend another funeral for a child who died a horrific death from a preventable disease. I hope to never attend a funeral for a first world country child who died because of their parent's adherence to an ideological movement that flies in the face of all proven science and rationality. 

Don't dangle your child over the edge of a volcano to prove the existence of an imaginary angry god. They may fall in. 

After all, you couldn't even read this post if you didn't trust scientists to provide technology that has changed all of our lives for the better.

Protect your kids from the real danger and trust in the experts. Get your kids vaccinated.

About the author: I am a special education teacher and have spent more than 10 years working with children and families dealing with disabilities. I have no medical degree, but I do have two Bachelor's degrees from an exclusive private university, a teaching certificate with an autism specialist certificate and I am one class away from my master's degree. My years of education, experience, research, and expertise have taught me: vaccines DO NOT cause autism. However, when my children got their MMR shots, I was worried. I was afraid. Shame on the anti-vax movement for using fear to push an agenda that hurts children. Parents who do not vaccinate allow their children to be exposed to a myriad of dangers that FAR outweigh the slight chance of a vaccine complication. My three children are fine, and I am so thankful to be able to safely protect them from the horrors of diseases that have taken so many children away from their parents.

On being submissive...

I have never felt comfortable with woman's role as a submissive, third rung partner in the ladder of marriage. God > Man > Woman. Simple Christian math.

I believe this to be against humankind's nature, a tool of weak men who are afraid that without spiritual bullying, they will have no power, love, or respect. With the powerful masochistic trifecta of Judaism-Christianity-Islam behind much of the world's history and current laws, it's no wonder that religious women must fight internally every day to be more "humble" "meek" and "kind", while religious men of the world wage horrific wars in the name of God and oil.

How different would modern society be if women were accepted from the beginning as equal partners and had a hand in developing the religious traditions and beliefs that we cling to today?

As I privately wrestle with these and more questions, I found that Rachel Held Evans has been waging a more public, applauded debate with many of the same questions! Equalitarian vs. Complimentarian, two different models for husbands, two different ways of viewing men and women's relationships. As an English major, I nerdily fell in love with the labeling, the word dissection, the context clues, and simple truth of Rachel's arguments.

I am blessed to be married to a man of quiet strength, a man who seeks for and listens to my opinion, who shares equally with me all aspects of our lives. Gender roles aren't a concern, our relationship and our family is our focus. We are equal, we are partners, and we are still and always in love.

When I was seven years old, I had already seen oppression first hand. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of standing next to my parents in Berlin, Germany. The wind buffeted us as we stood on one of the bridges connecting West Berlin to East Berlin. The Wall stretched out from both sides of us, covered in graffiti and desperation. People hurried by us from the East to the West, and little to no cross-traffic hampered their journeys.

1986 marked the release of one of my all time favorite albums: Graceland by Paul Simon. I had the VHS of their African concert and attended rallies to end Apartheid. When I moved from the Middle East to the States as a teenager, I had little interest in shopping every weekend, I went to “Free Mandela” protests. I had felt the power of racism, and I hated it. In 1992 “The Power of One” was released and instantly became my favorite movie. I bought the soundtrack and sang along to every word. I hoped that my generation could be better and more accepting than our ancestors. I still hope and pray that every new generation strips away the prejudices and ugliness of the generation before them.

Injustice exists in the world, and not the kind we spend time complaining about here in America. Real, raw, life-crushing injustice exists, but so many of us (myself for the last few years included) can comfortably ignore it. I hope that like Paul Simon travelling to Africa and daring to record and film with exiled artists, our family can travel to a land plagued by natural disasters in order to restore hope, love, and the knowledge that ALL humans are connected, we are all brothers and sisters, and we all have a duty to care for each other. This is my life’s mission.

Birthday

The years crash over me like waves
Leaving scars and wrinkles, speckling my skin with sunspots
I am beginning to envy youth:
My bloom is fading into middle age
I look at women slightly younger than me and think that they look old
But not me I am still
Dancing through days, weeks
My life is ahead of me,
Not strapped into car seats behind me

 I wanted to dance on top of the waves,
Yet I find myself buffeted from crest to crest
And lately I find more lows than highs
Old, I am not
I am not old
My skin betrays me
Elasticity stretched too far
Wrinkles on my forehead
Sagging neck
 I think of my mother at my age, so powerful
She knew everything
And nothing
She was old always

The years keep coming keep crashing
I see a wrinkled woman in a car next to me
I will be her one day, old
But not yet, not now
I am not old

Freedom to write

Afghan women risk their lives to write poetry... and yet I stagnate, my heart churning with words, mired in apathy of expression.

I read this news article with shock, with tears. When her books of poetry were taken from her, Zarmina, young Afghan girl in the article, set herself on fire, a horrible way to die. She was shamed into stopping to write, and I suddenly remember, too clearly, what it is watch fire consume life. As a young girl stuck in traffic on a bridge in Cairo, I remember watching a man on distant roof pour clear liquid all over his body. I wondered briefly what he was doing, then he raised his hands to the sky, lit a match and set himself on fire. It happened so quickly, and I was horrified, a helpless observer, trapped by traffic and separated by rooftops, by age, by skin color. He was too far away for this to be possible, but I swear I smelled his flesh burning, melting, his heart pumping blood to fuel the fire. The last I saw of him were little flames licking the rooftop, looking for more substance.

“A poem is a sword,” Saheera Sharif said for this article. I couldn’t agree more. But what good are swords when their adolescent wielders have their bodies and spirits crushed before they are even fully formed, simply because of their gender?

At age eleven I had many Cairo girlfriends being sent away for arranged marriages. Some were only one or two years older than me. I remember one friend, smaller than me due to a lifetime of malnourishment, a sparkle in her dark eyes, sent to be second wife to an older man who took turns raping and beating her. I never saw the sparkle again, and I rarely saw her. I moved on, moved to the States. I grew up and got married to a kind man who cooks and does laundry. I sit in my suburban home, and I think about t-ball, about Disneyland, about redecorating, and about anything except for those friends I shared my early adolescence with. Girls who had all of the same hopes and dreams that I did, who taught me to bellydance and henna my too-light skin. My life has been filled with all the goodness this world has to offer, and theirs was cut short before they had a chance to bloom.

I feel overwhelmingly guilty. I feel terrible that long, happy days can go by without me even remembering them, the sisters of my younger heart. I am angry that nothing can be done, that the childhood home I had such great hopes for is now on the brink of plunging into Islamic rule. I am angry that girls can be born into the world with passion, grace, and beauty, only for their innocent lives to be destroyed at a man’s whim.

I am woman. I will make a difference for those who have no voice. I will make this world a better place for my own daughter to grow up in.

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/magazine/why-afghan-women-risk-death-to-write-poetry.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

Clover growing up
From a crack in the sidewalk,
Crushed under your feet.