V's Version

This is the (google swiped) view of Tahoe from Homewood - where Pk and Dani and all the teens (and 2 other advisers) are right now. I decided to sit this day in the cabin. The wind / cold conditions are too difficult for my skin and eyes. and besides, I am both a little sick with the common cold and a lot lot sad.

Several of the teenagers have been recently faced with death very close to them and I have spent a fair amount of time just being with them. Sitting calmly and openly with tears and sadness and the questions of fairness. - I am somewhat drained. I struggle not to advise. I struggle to just listen. I struggle not to shut down my own feelings. It is such an honor to be allowed so close to one's heart. I try to recognize that honor with my own authenticity. So I sit here with the sadness that was brought up after listening to theirs.

I allowed myself to grieve last night and today. I am so aware of how not-normal / not-human it is to cry with no tears. It is annoying as sinuses fill, my throat tightens, my face gets hot and the edges of my eyes get red and inflamed - and there is no cathartic release of saline. My hot dry face makes me weep even more. But it only distracts me from my deep sadness anyway.
I love love love my family and I am very content in our rhythms and patterns. On this - the 3rd anniversary of our coming together and on the eve of Dani's (much anticipated) adoption of Pk- there is no sadness in my relationships with Pk or Dani, none in my parenting, none in our home life. But just as survivors of an attack or a war cannot process that tragedy until well after the danger is over, I am now safe enough to feel. There is a yearning sadness that creeps in only when I let the last of the walls come down and I let the light into the darkest parts of me. It is like my charmed and glorious home life has a shadow on it. I am not sure what the shadow is exactly but I think it has to do with forgiveness.

P and I used to come to Tahoe with our church youth group each year - in California we call it "going to the snow." This is my 10th year. I am infused with memories of our shared time here in this special place. I am raw from offering a youth service on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Unitarian Universalist ways of cultivating faith to cling to in moments of grief. I have come to a place where I now know that I want a formal divorce from P.

Everything happened so quickly - too quickly for me. I was sick and focussed on surviving. I was not ready for that day when he told the therapist that it wasn't working out. I was not able to integrate his explanations to me on the couch or his statement that he had not wanted to marry me in the first place. I was too busy trying to accommodate his new lover into my own heart to actually feel the grief ripping through it. I was too angry about the ridiculous but necessary subject of money to really find solace in mediation. I was too busy fighting the cancer and going blind and wresting with government agencies to even know what I needed on the inside. I was too in love with Dani to bring up the welling sadness surrounding my break up. Who was I to look the gift horses of luck and love in the mouth? Move on - rejoice - count your blessings. Prayers and pushing toward the easier emotions of joy and wonder and gratitude.

But now I really have come a long way and I must practice what I preach. As I sit here on the banks of the amazing crystal waters of one of our country's deepest lakes - I reflect on the deep connections that I had in my first marriage. I regret none of my relationship but I do regret my naiveté, my stubbornness, my inability to listen with no agenda but compassion. I regret the ways in which I communicated. I yearn for forgiveness.

I grieve the loss of my own vision of family. I grieve the loss of the tenderness that P and I shared. I miss his touch - I miss his voice. I miss his wry laughter. I want witness and to remember those moments with someone. I don't want them back. We have our lives - we have made our own ways - but I want to connect with someone who can tell me that yes - they happened. I am not crazy. We were each young and stubborn and broken but we had moments of healing and love and mirth.

I grieve the loss of a clean break. Grasping the meaning of his words through the pain meds, the dissolving of our domestic partnership by a signature on my death bed, the whole way the negotiated resignation went down and how it affected us all - it was hardly clean. I cannot change the course of events but I can grieve them. I can name my sadness at the loss of integrity.

P and I were witnesses to a divorce ritual once and I remember saying to myself that there was no way that I could ever do that. I could not stand up in front of loved ones and ask to be released of my marriage vows. (Our vows from my memory: "I accept you as you are. Together we will walk the journey of life. In sobriety and without violence, with love and compassion, I will stand by you always as your lover and your friend." )

I meant those words with every fiber of my being. So how could I ever ask to be released of them? I couldn't then and I cannot now. But P asked me. He asked if he could be released and he deserves to be (which might be where my true love and compassion shows.) I could, now, after all this time, acknowledge and grieve this release in the way that the participants of that divorce ritual did. I doubt that P would ever want something like this and neither or us, I am sure, would want anyone else to witness it. And whether or not I will ever get a chance to be alone with him to look him in the eye - I do not know. What I now know is that I want to. I want to hold his hands, to thank him for all the lessons learned and his support and friendship. I want to ask him forgiveness for the behaviors I regret. I want to forgive him for the things he had to do to be true to himself. I want our hands to release and to hear these words uttered to each other: "I accept you as you are. I honor our separate journeys and look forward to when they intersect. In sobriety and without violence, with love and compassion, I will stand by you always as a co-parent and your friend."

Maybe she just caught me at a vulnerable moment (considering recent events). Maybe I am just up to edges of my patience with people sending me forwarded messages that I find meaningless - or worse - offensive. Maybe I don't want to be told that something is hilarious only to find that our definitions of hilarious are vastly different. Below is the response I wrote to her this morning.


With all due respect to my respected cousin - I cannot receive a blonde joke (or any other joke that systematically stereotypes) and let it pass by with no reaction.

I am spiritually and politically opposed to oppression in any form. So while I fully support your efforts to spread mirth, I want you to know that this joke was not hilarious to me. Not that the mixing of 710 and OIL isn't mildly amusing - it is. It is the perpetuation of a single stereotype and the real-life negative implications that those stereotypes represent for real people that I find hard to digest. One might say - can't I take a joke? Anyone who knows me, knows that I can. I just say to anyone who continues to spread "blonde jokes" -please have a little compassion for our blonde sisters (not all - but surely too many) who are targets of discrimination, teasing, rape, assumptions and ill-treatment due to hair color.

From Wikipedia:

In the US media and in culture, blonde women are often portrayed as "promiscuous." Because of this, many believe that blondes "have more fun." Blonde jokes are a class of jokes based on a "dumb blonde" stereotype of blonde women (or rarely, blonde men) being unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, or both.

Many blonde jokes are simply variations on other racist jokes, sometimes adapted to make them less offensive. Blonde jokes nearly always take the format of the blonde placing herself in a situation or making a comment that serves to highlight her supposed promiscuity and/or lack of intelligence. Like all humor based on stereotypes, blonde jokes may be found offensive by many people, not limited to their target.

Blonde jokes have been criticized as sexist* by several authors. Research shows that men find blonde jokes significantly more amusing than women do.

*Sexism is commonly considered to be discrimination and/or hatred towards people based on their sex rather than their individual merits, but can also refer to any and all systemic differentiations based on the sex of the individuals.

Please accept my reaction with the love and care that it is intended. How can we each change the world unless we make a stand when we feel that it is the right thing to do? If we continue to perpetuate sexist stereotypes and cannot even see how it genuinely hurts other women down the line - how can we ever expect to reverse it? While some (most?) of the people on this list might not consider themselves feminists - I'm just going to go on the assumption that everyone on this list would hope that their mother/ sister/ daughter/ wife / self would be treated fairly in employment, education, relationships, etc. That is all feminism is.

The very best to you, cousin. I know that the work you do will empower women to take control and that is what I am doing - with love, love love - Cousin V


Unlike the above Lampoon image of how women communicate, I received a very gracious acknowledgment from my cousin for which I am very grateful.

I'm in this weird in between place of over working and not working very much at all. Well - maybe the "not very much work at all" is what most people do normally. I'm not sure.

Today the Team Go-Go house was a-buzz with subjects and predicates. We used (and feel free to see the irony) both a 1958 edition of Paul Bunyan stories and a poem "straight" off the presses and in today's mail of Lex's poetry about being a gender super hero. This is one of the many things that I love about home schooling. Flexibility.

A friend called me a "house wife" the other day. It was akin to calling me a whore. Yeah - so - OK - there are grains of truth but it hardly paints the entire picture, right? I did laundry today. I shopped for groceries and took the dogs for a walk and bought bird seed. I made all the meals and took care of Pk's poison oak rash and taught a little English. I attended to correspondence and caught up on feminist news.



It is just bizarre to be out of the studio or not working on the website. I had this free time today when I pet the dog and I watched a bird in the garden for at least 2 minutes. I watched Pk's gymnastics routines and witnessed the moment by moment of a fort being built in the living room. The other day I actually called a couple of friends. For. No. Reason.

If creating and finding myself in the creative process were not so vital to me - I could really really get used to being a house wife. Until I needed more money.



Luckily - I do have a few commissions on the boards. It's only a temporary break. I could be working on Heather MacAllister's quilt but I just could not bring myself to deal with the grief of Lex and her friends' attack and Heather's death in the same week. So. Here I am.

But - hey - speaking of Lex. Here is her latest bulletin (she is still down playing though because her fracture is causing migraines and muscle seizures but I am just being picky):

Just thought I would give you all an update considering I have been absent from the computer for some time...

I want to say thank you to everyone who has written and responded to our traumatic event. I realized after I wrote the blog entry that I really had downplayed the event and the significance a great deal. I don't know why - perhaps I just wanted everyone to stay calm but truth be told this has been a very hard time.

I want to say thank you for all of the beautiful e-mails i have received, for all of the love and caring, for all of the thoughts and prayers... please know you have been heard and are appreciated beyond what I can say with words.

We are all healing and staying close together doing what we can to provide the support that we need for one another.

My bruises are healing and so is my fracture. I think my heart just needs to catch up. Thank you for everyone who really checked me and made me understand that it was ok to need help, ok to be hurt, ok to not be ok, and to know that I have a beautiful family of friends that are gonna support me....

thank you a thousand times...

Lex.

click for details

Below is the way condensed (and, in my opinion, way downplayed) public version - in her own words - of what happened to a dear, dear friend of ours. You may have met her at Michfest last year - or here in Santa Cruz. And then is my attempt at coping with this event. I have not been able to sleep easily - I have not been able to shake my worry. This woman is one of the increasingly small group of butches who have chosen to keep their women's bodies. That she should be injured (her soul as much - if not more - as her fractured skull) is frightening to me on so many levels. Keep her in your hearts, please.

Fierce femme – fierce friend
Fumbling around to find words to heal hurts
Words without fuss in the language of us

But the letters are churning and my eyes are burning
Donning Amazon armor and rushing to wage war
Knowing that the keyboard is mightier than the sword.

Poetry is my weapon of choice – giving anger and terror and sorrow a voice.
Words hurling - syllables swirling
Wanting to both protect and attack -
Fight back in this crazy game of sticks and stones
And fractured bones.

Fierce femme – fierce friend
Holding out a safe space for you
A quiet place for you
to talk or say nothing or just be a fool.

It’s a muddled mix of how and why –
Evil deeds and circumstance and it’s OK to cry –
A family hero fallen - hauled up by her tribe
A butch body shaken - holding shards of pride.

Poetry is prayer in the lexicon of love
But it doesn’t fix wrongs and no dilemmas are solved.
Phrases like “a quilt to wrap the soul”
Fly from my fingers as I try to cope-
Hoping that you can take shattered remains
And, in safety, slowly make them whole.

How can I be that kind of quilter?

Fierce femme – fierce friend
No way to avenge -
And how would vengeance alter our vulnerability anyway?
On the high road – with a compassionate heart is how I will stay.
“We are all worthy. We are all one.”
This cannot be undone.

Helpless to alter the past –
Here now offering ears and heart and arms outcast.
Moving on will go at a pace all it’s own
You just have to know that you don’t have to heal alone.

- V Kingsley, 2008
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It’s all I can do. Use words and offer a home.
I’m so grateful that I am just one person in your tribe and that you have many loving arms – many loving and safe places to find refuge. Please use all the resources available to you at your own pace. Team Go-Go is with you every step of the way in any way you want us. We love you very much.