The Mother Lode: Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered? Not our girls!

Halloween isn't a day in our household, it is it's own sub-season.  Sometime in early October one of us will see an unruly flock of ravens, or get caught in an unexpected tornado of fallen leaves, only to rush home, breathless, and declare: "The Ancestors are here!"  

In the weeks that follow we build an altar to those that we've loved and lost. We add photos, a special bone found in the woods, marigold garlands, love notes, purple fairy lights, poems, and most importantly quiet moments of reflection.  We also spend those weeks, of course, up to our eyeballs in costume creation.  Our moods of merriment and mourning take turns leading and eventually they dance us up to the threshold of the ultimate mystery.  On All Hallow's Eve we find ourselves dressed in disguise, slightly spooked by our anticipation, daring each other to be the first to step out into the dark.

Last year as we sat down to the drawing table, my daughter, age six, made a most remarkable choice in costuming.  I remember immediately running to call one of the original heroines of The Red Tent on Rose Avenue.  Shaking with excitement I quite fittingly blurted out, "You are going to DIE when you hear what Baanko wants to be for Halloween!"

A big green booger.

My heart swelled with pride.
I took it as a sign that so far we are succeeding in doing her girlhood differently. 
Last I checked I didn't see "sexy booger" as a costume idea being marketed to women this Halloween.  Baanko had proven me wrong.  Clearly they cannot make a "sexy" version of every halloween costume.  (Even though to my horror one company did attempt to pawn off "Sexy Offred"  this season!) While sexy cop, sexy Christmas elf, sexy nurse, sexy (insert any profession that has nothing to do with being sexy) may continue to haunt us for eternity I took pleasure in the small win that my daughter came up with a costume that could never be hemmed to mid thigh with corset and underwires installed to show off "the real treats" of the holiday.



In the early hours of her trick or treating  I caught a snap shot of her in her globby green glory.  I smiled when I saw that it was framed with Victoria's Secret in the background.  Right, in my opinion, where we should leave it and all the other ghouls that scare girls into thinking that their form is what will determine their destiny.  I thought about the question that guides our red tent project, "How would your life have been different...if there had been a place for you?"  and realized what Baanko, the booger,  really was: The place.  The other option.  The choice that so many of us have forgotten that we have.  She was the resistance, authentically.  Suddenly her hayride through our commercial trick or treating district looked like a victory parade to me.  I hoped maybe, just maybe, one other girl or woman might notice her unintended statement and remember their lives can still be different. Baanko for one magical night was a little green smear on our common cultural landscape.  True to function and form she was and is a booger; determined, actually engineered, to stick, to hold its ground - almost to an impossible degree of perseverance.

Baanko-the-booger reminded me of one of the most toxic cultural messages so many women have been haunted by their entire lives: At all costs, prioritize desirability over desire.  Or, in other words, your form is more important than your function to us.  Yes, you can be anything you desire to be in life, as long as you are still desirable to others while doing it.  The irony, of course, being that people are most desirable when they put function over form and allow themselves to be absorbed into that at which they naturally excel.  The painter, painting.  The runner, racing.  The mathematician, proving.  It is a state in which a woman is focused on the useful kind of critical thinking while navigating what she loves.  I've never heard a woman ask, while standing drenched in her purpose, "Does my butt look big?" 

When I think of the question "How would your life have been different...?"  I think of a massive power plant containing all the energy that I, and so many women that I've met, mistakenly squandered while under the spell of this particular message.  Appropriate for the season, it is a horrifying thought.  So, I employ the best trick in my bag and rather than bemoaning the ghosts of my own past I think of how I can make it different for our daughters.  I remember my own function and feel the familiar slide into flow.  The writer, writing.  I begin crafting a piece that I hope will help my daughter understand that the ability to enchant (and most other super-natural like powers) are the natural side affects of a woman who is following her bliss.  And, for the record, never once do I wonder if the butt I'm sitting on while I write is too big.

The Tending Tent: "Twas the night before the New Blood Moon..."

...literally and metaphorically that is and a night that registers at about a 4 am level of darkness and quietude.

I reached out to a friend this weekend during the protests over the confirmation of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and asked, "Why am I not out yelling in the street right now?"

"Outrage fatigue" was her reply with no punctuation at all, let alone an exclamation point.  I knew what she meant.  We are getting drained.  We are nearing what I remember a mentor warning me about when I was a facilitator in in-patient recovery:  We know how serious things are.  We know women are dying.  We see them starving themselves to death.  And because of that knowledge we have to be ever lightening up, or we, and those we are helping, will not have sufficient energy to see this momentous journey of recovery through to its promised outcome.  Recovering takes tons of energy.

That workshop with Dr. Anita Johnston was a turning point for me. Up until that moment in my work I had been carefully hemming in what was a very natural instinct for me, humor in the face of horror.  I thought levity would come off as insensitivity and that I wasn't taking our situation seriously.  Once I trusted Dr. Johnson's  guidance however, and started regularly allowing my outrage to blaze in a way that felt light and energizing rather than suffocating - everything in my work and my own life changed.

Another lesson from my days on those front lines is to never underestimate the benefit of being useful.  Whether we are very personally or sympathetically experiencing this moment in history, if we care we will continue to feel the urge to act, "what can I do?"  From my personal experience with victimization the need for an outlet to be of purpose, to fight rather than freeze, is everything.  Healing this cultural wound will be a fight, like personal recovery, that requires massive amounts of endurance.  When I look at the two coping techniques, continuing to rise up and lighten up while being of purpose, I think of women doing what I dare say they do best - circling up and tending.  Tending to themselves, tending to each other, and in our case tending to a culture long in need of an intervention.

Although it is our natural instinct, fueled by that amazing hormone Oxytocin, it has been my experience that since the red tent has long vanished from the common cultural landscape women tending together is something that must be taught and modeled.  The most common reflection I remember hearing under the red tent that I hoisted in the name of recovery was, "I didn't know it could be like this..."  The blank was filled in seemingly endless ways; that I could feel so safe, that other women aren't my competition, that I'm not the only one.

Although the red tent I'm raising this time around is not in the name of recovery but rather prevention it is tethered to the same principal - tending.  It will be a place where we can model ever lightening up and rising while being of purpose  along with many other things.  In fact, my notebook has quite literally exploded at the seams with ideas of how I can help make our daughters' lives different.  This and a recent internal broken binding has convinced me that now is the moment to fight.  Counter-culturally, but not counterintuitively, by the act of tending.

In the name of purpose and lightening up I'm inviting you to grab a guy line with us and pull with all your might.  Starting this Monday, on the new moon, I'll be pulling hard every week to unravel the guy line "I'm pitching a tent" from base locker room talk to a new inspired way of living that will benefit not just our  daughters but all that they touch.  You can join this weekly "Tending Tent" we're raising in person or by starting your own and sharing your ideas and stories with us.  We will be posting all of our ideas and experiences under "The Tending Tent" blog entries.

Wild Child Wednesday: Nature as healer.

This fall both of our children are "back to school" outside of the home.  It would be a breathtaking vacuum around here except that their departures coincided perfectly with our move from forest into town.  I'm spending these first few childless weeks unpacking from our life on Orcas Island and the rich nine months we were nestled in the Deschutes National Forest.  Each afternoon Baanko is assessing my work and staking her claim on pieces of that learning-rich time together that she is not willing to retire.  We are setting up a "project room" where The Warthog School and our Raising The Red Tent endeavors can continue to grow. 

Today we both took a pause from our new work.  We both had stomach aches. Baanko was weathering exposure to the ever changing microbiota of her shared classroom.  I was not weathering well my exposure to Dr. Blasley Ford's prepared testimony at the Senate Judiciary hearing.  The sun rose with a promise of what could be the last truly hot day before winter's inevitable coming and cast long early rays on our recently recovered radio flyer.  Baanko hatched a plan, packed carefully, and declared, "I think we can do Wild Child Wednesday even on a Thursday."  It was decided.  We both needed the benefit.

All afternoon we played on the river's bank.  She taught her dolly to fish and I sketched a scene that was all out of perspective.  Only my daughter's image at the center seemed to reflect reality.  Her image was complete, I realized, because she is still whole.  Her life is still on track to be different.   The little yellow boot, the fallen branch that she'd imagined into fishing gear, and her wind tossed hair all flowed from my hand with ease.  She is effortlessly all right.  Beyond her, however,  I am struggling to capture what is happening in this moment.

I decided, at least for the afternoon, to accept that.  When I did,  I realized that I am more than struggling to process what is happening around us.  "Struggling" isn't a powerful enough word to describe mothering with complex PTSD.  Especially when the complex of the trauma includes sexual abuse.  I am not struggling I am efforting.  Immensely.  Daily.  In all of the activities that are not deemed by our culture as important work.  I am grieving while protecting.  I am recovering while educating and preventing.  I am tending two young girl children; one who came through my body and is growing up in front of my eyes, and one that forever lives inside of my body ringing adrenaline alarms and ever waiting to be saved.  I am working for us within a culture of me.  It isn't a struggle.  It is a battle of a lifetime.

One from which I need to go AWOL from time to time if not for just an afternoon.  To follow the very advice that I used to give to women in recovery:  Find a way, whenever possible, to see beyond the common culture which is ever yelling and flashing its content loud and fast in front of your face.  I confidently promised each woman that past its dizzying and confusing display they would find a source of steady support for their most authentic sense of self - Nature.  To them it probably sounded like a fantasy world.  A place where cycles, like those in their own bodies that they had been trained to try overcome or at least ignore, are an authority worthy of trust.  Where tending and befriending, connection and cooperation, and all the instincts that are chemically coded into us from birth, are trusted and proven strategies for long term survival and success.  Yet the more they retreated to and reflected upon the natural world the more it became their reality of choice.  The number one observation I heard as feedback from them was that things were finally "making sense".  From my vantage point, I was observing women coming to their senses.  They returned from nature alive and enlivened in spite of all they had suffered up unto the present moment.

Our Wild Child Wednesday outings are a weekly "coming to my senses" and somehow Baanko knew I needed it this past Thursday.  The Deschutes River runs 55 degrees F late September and she insisted that I at least submerge my feet.  My attention became naturally absorbed; the heat of the last summer-like day, foliage warming our landscape with deep reds and golden yellows, the sound of geese migrating above us, the scraping of Baanko's two twigs enacting her imaginary need-fire to cook her imaginary fish, the smell of cool grass up close to the dirt.  By afternoon's end I was a sense-able woman again.  I had been put  back together by following the lead of someone who has never come apart.

Baanko narrated our walk home with expressions of awe about different trees turning new colors and animals she spotted on both river bank and neighborhood streets.  To the back drop of her wonder I marched a strong steady path back to the home that I am ever tending.

I am sufficiently recharged and ready to pick up what I believe to be important work.  I am ready again.  To be sensible. To be of use.


"To Be Of Use" by Marge Piercy.

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

without dallying in the shallows

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element,

the black sleek heads of seals

bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,

who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,

who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,

who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

Greek amphoras for wine or oil,

Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums

but you know they were made to be used.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.