By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Friday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day. Sadly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Besides, how many people actually know what it is that the day celebrates? It surely is not equality. Women don’t have equality. Even I don’t have equality, and I am no pantywaist — but the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men? Oh my goodness, no. Women, as a class, have not yet achieved any of that.

What we have is the right to be oppressed by ludicrous expectations for our gender, including that ever popular slut-mommy routine straight men are taught to favor; by mass media representations that tell the world what is most valuable about women are our breasts and penetrable orifices; and by the often unspoken yet screeching mantra to suck it all up for family, god and country.

As for responsibilities, women are burdened with an embarrassment of riches. While we have the responsibility of providing one of the pro forma two household incomes that keep everyone in the latest cell phones (if we’re not toting that bale as a single parent), the onus remains on us for the vast majority of household work and child rearing — along with maintaining extended family and friend networks, managing household finances, negotiating service provider contracts, and distributing the intangible benefits of our core competencies. It’s akin to leading a business, except only 28 of the Fortune 1000 corporations have female CEOs. That they are paid 8 to 25 percent less than their male counterparts should not be considered commentary on their job performances, but, rather, a reflection of their body parts.

And then, there is the cornucopia of opportunities that are showered upon women like sweet manna from heaven. Actually, I’d say they’re more like the ammonia swirling from a unkempt pissoir. Among many, there is the opportunity to be denigrated for our emotions, our bodily functions, our weight, our femininity and our lack thereof; the opportunity to be sidelined with the label “bitch” for characteristics that earn men promotions; the opportunity to fend off unwanted sexual advances by those who interpret the length of our skirts or size of our boosiasms as an invitation to pounce; and the opportunity to earn an average of 80¢ to each dollar a man earns — whether he’s average or a numskull.

So, what’s a woman to do? I suppose it helps to point out such peccadilloes, but I’ve been writing about them for way too many moons. Last year, it was the Woman’s Day advertising campaign that touted vagina deodorizing as a career advancement tactic. In 2009, it was the fear of feminism that inhabits conservative male rhetoric and inhibits progress toward equality. Before that, it was the shunning of the term “feminist” and on and on.

Just how long does it take for folks to recognize the inequity of inequality?

It’s been one full lifetime since the impetus for Women’s Equality Day. Still wondering what makes the date so special? It’s the day in 1920 that women in the United States were finally allowed — allowed! — to vote. It took a constitutional amendment, and what actually changed? Well, in 1919, Great Aunt Cappie was studying to be a surgeon, learning to cut folks open from stem to stern and work medical magic with their innards. But she couldn’t vote: She wasn’t deemed to have the temperament for such decisions. Then in 1920, her mental and emotional capabilities, formerly belittled by men who feared women’s suffrage, suddenly received a constitutional upgrade.

In fact, Aunt Cappie didn’t change; it was an attitude adjustment and the presumption that women’s votes could be added to their husbands’, a presumption that lingers in some backwater bedrooms to this day.

But for the rest of us, what has women’s suffrage produced? Of late, it’s the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, who think deriding their political opponents just like the boys if not more so, opposing women’s and civil rights, and winking — or belatedly blinking — their mascaraed lashes make them prime female presidential fodder.

If only they respected themselves a bit more, but apparently one lifetime has not been enough. And I’m not sure which is the greater hindrance to equality: men who fear us or women who play us.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

Pissoir image from affordablehousing.org.

By Kristin Laurel

Who shall set a law to lovers? Love is a greater law into itself.

– Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524

Like October poplars that are first
to drop their leaves, I often find myself unprotected, exposed.
The one I love is more reserved,
like the Bur Oak that clings
to its leaves, perhaps there is a gentle sacredness
in not giving everything away.

We hold hands on the narrow path
while squirrels scuttle to bury
their hoarded treasure.
I read once, that they find only ten percent of the nuts
they hide; the rest go to seed and give rise
to trees. I stop to pick up
an acorn, press it between my thumb and forefinger.
It smells of musky earth, a trace of permanence.

Two joggers approach—
we quickly drop hands.
A few red maples glare, against a pale-blue sky.
And I am ashamed.
It’s the same when I cut a hug—
short, hide my tears
when I greet her at the airport,
or cover up our held hands with the bucket
of popcorn at the theatre.
We look around again.
No people. It’s safe.

My God, it is strange
how perfectly our clasped hands fit,
how this is the closest thing to God’s love I’ve known,
how other’s see this as wrong.

Sometimes, it feels like I was abducted
from the nice white straight world
and came back queer-colored and green.
She says, “In public turn up the friendship and turn down the love,”
but I say, “Why should we contain love?”

She treads lightly, doesn’t disrupt the forest floor.
I drag my feet and kick up leaves,
tearing them like tissue paper.
I let my shoes sling mud—

This morning, on Good Morning America,
they showed members of Westboro Baptist Church,
picketing at a dead vet’s funeral, holding their signs:
Thank God For Dead Soldiers
God Hates Fags
Jews Killed Jesus

Listen. I’m not here to preach.
I’ve been no saint.
I remember how, in college, I shared an apartment with Tammy
whose father was a pastor; how distraught, she confided in me:
“I want to get married, go to church and have kids,” she said,
“But I’m attracted to women.”
I moved out as fast as I could.

And I remember how once, in 5^th grade,
at Hesperia Christian, I called a kid a faggot.
Even though I didn’t know what the word meant,
Mrs. Thompson made me put my hands
on the wall and spanked my ass

with a holy paddle.

I have a few friends still “praying for my soul.”
And let them pray; I need all the help I can get.
My godmother is coming around
but I haven’t spoken to my father since I fell in love;
he drinks too much, and calls me a dyke.
Yet, I’ve had it easy.
I wasn’t court-martialed by the US military.
I wasn’t put on the stand to defend
my career and myself as a human being
for associating with gays like my friend Maria was, a decade ago.
I wasn’t disowned by my Christian family, like Donnie,
my mom’s cousin, who died alone of AIDS, back in the 80s.

Yes, I have a lot to be thankful for.
The people I now call family
support me and the one I love.
And yes, I’ve been in love with a man, and a woman,
so in case you are curious, let me tell you, love is love.
Sex is sex.
“But,” people ask, “what about the kids?”
Children have a way of seeing things
for what they are. I hold my daughter’s hand
sometimes when we’re watching TV. I hold my youngest
son’s hand, my mother’s, my sister’s, my grandpa’s—
my oldest son won’t let me hold his, but he’s nearly sixteen.
My kids love me, and they love my partner.
And yet I know what my mother fears. It has nothing
to do with what goes on

in my home. Maybe we all need to shut off the news,
and get close to a person with a label
we have nothing in common with.
Are we really a nation divided?
Don’t most of us all care about the same things at the core,
our kids, our spouses, our aging parents?
Maybe we all need to just take a walk in the woods.

In the safety of the car we head home, holding hands.
Tomorrow, she will leave, and we will be separated by
Minnesota prairie and North Carolina mountaintops.
I still have my little acorn. I twirl it around in my other hand.
It is face-less, and race-less; an oval shaped head, wearing a hat,
enclosing a single seed.
As a child, I wanted to plant an acorn,
but I was told, “You’ll be dead before it ever grows up to be anything.”

I’m going to give it to her before she goes,
have her plant it in some fresh, red clayed, Appalachian soil.

Editor’s note: Kristin Laurel is a divorced mother of three teenagers, employed as a nurse, who unexpectedly fell in love with a woman three years ago. She graduated this January from a poetry apprenticeship at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and has recently been published in Calyx, Main Street Rag, Hospital drive, Talking Stick, Prose Poem Project, Grey Sparrow Review and other journals. “God Hates Fags” is from her first collection of poetry, Giving Them all Away.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

You know that thing we used to have to do at the end of summer, the thing that whopped you upside the head with the brutal inevitability that vacation was over, that tar-bubble popping adventures and rhubarb-sucking loll-abouts were done, done and gone with the finality of a bee between your naked foot and the clover that enticed the insect to its death and you, to your hopping pain? You know, that “What I did for summer vacation” short essay assignment that taunted you from the dusty cool of the blackboard and picked at the mosquito bites oozing down your leg, making them itch all over again — as though defining your youthful joys would pack them away and yank from more distant springtime memories some mythically compliant learning mode?

Yep, that. I really hated that. Yet that’s what I wish I had to do right now. Being over and done with my summer vacation would be far preferable to what I’m actually doing right in the middle of it — studying families and gender and theater and social taboos.

What the hell was I thinking!

Well, what I was thinking was that it would be really cool to cram a cacaload of courses into a five-week intensive session. What I was not thinking about were the emotional repercussions of such an academic extravagance.

I was not thinking about our national descent into the ignominious status of having the highest poverty rates in the Western industrialized world, until I read a chapter from Sharon Hays’ Flat Broke With Children about a punitive welfare system designed to avoid making welfare payments; a system eager to drop families from its rolls and into economic oblivion when mothers are too sick to work or have chronically-ill or disabled family members to care for or they can’t keep jobs in a heartless economy; a system rich in self-righteous moralizing that calls denying aid to the impoverished success.

And now California will add to the rosters of the economically disappeared as mothers and children try to make sense of the 8-percent cut to their welfare-to-work checks, passed by the state legislature in last week’s budget bill. What do you suppose these mothers and children will do to fill the gap between the whopping $700 per month they used to receive and the new rate for a family of three — $640?

Neither was I thinking about the intimate pain of The Laramie Projec, until the play unfolded the linens of the town where Matthew Shepard was beaten and left in the darkness of homophobia to die; or the ambivalence of Matt’s fellow college student who played a gay man in Angels In America, yet mimicked the script of his church and parents that “Homosexuality is wrong”; or the 10-years-later perspective of the same young man, still ambivalent.

And now San Diego has a beating victim of its own, but this victim is homeless and gay, not a middle-class college student and gay. Will anyone write a play about Jason “Cowboy” Huggins, bashed in the head with a rock and not expected to live?

Nor was I thinking about wartime rape, until Lynn Nottage’s Ruined played unrelenting scenes of battling Congolese factions making war between women’s legs — with penises, sticks, gun barrels, bayonets, broken bottles…

And now, despite the United Nations’ 2008 resolution declaring rape a weapon of war, the ruination continues in the Democratic Republic of Congo — and the United States of America, where 3,158 incidents of sexual assault in the military were reported in 2010.

And I think I’ll stop there.

Perhaps the season’s joys can be salvaged. Maybe not. Maybe they shouldn’t be. But I could sure use a little break, a wee respite to suck sun-warmed sour from the neighbor’s purloined rhubarb or pop roadside tar bubbles in the summer’s shimmering heat.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted by the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

What a juxtaposition! As Father’s Day approached last week, the Pew Research Center released a report on fatherhood that indicated mixed grades for the U.S. rendition — or, more aptly, renditions — of the oft neglected, negated, nullified institution of fatherhood. Based on an analysis of the most recent data from the ongoing National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the Pew folks reported that the presence of fathers in the same home as their children has taken a big dive since 1960 — from 11 percent of children living apart from their fathers then, to 27 percent in 2010. But the data also indicate that fathers who remain are doing more stuff with their kids — eating together, helping with homework, playing together — you know, more actively parenting.

This is interesting because, as I recall, back in the 1960s, 70s and 80s — maybe more recently but less vocally — feminists asked fathers to take a more active parenting role, to share parenting responsibilities equitably, and what has happened? Some fathers did and some fathers ran.

Of course it’s not fair to assume a greater number of men now live apart from their children simply because feminists expressed concern about the division of parenting work, and the report doesn’t address the why of the data. Certainly the increasing divorce rate is partially responsible, that and the persistent social rule that women should take on the majority of parenting responsibility, which places the majority of children of divorce with their mothers. If anything is obviously to blame for fewer men living with their children, it is the white, male, dominant culture that invests its all in keeping women as the primary child caregiver. But whatever the dynamics behind the data, the report is as interesting as it is dismaying, and I highly recommend reading it: “A Tale of Two Fathers.”

One note, however: I found only one reference to same-sex couples in the NSFG (the basis of the Pew report), and that was in a portion of the questionnaire I found online. It read: “For the next several parts of our interview, the questions about marriage and other sexual relationships are limited to those with opposite-sex partners. In the final section of the interview, some questions will ask about sexual experience with same-sex partners.” I couldn’t find the final section of the interview online. I also couldn’t find indication that the NSFG questionnaire includes the same parenting questions for fathers in same-sex couples and those in opposite-sex couples, or a live person at NSFG to answer that question. And it’s a question that warrants pursuing.

In the meantime, after exploring and mourning the Pew report, I received an email message from the White House with the subject “Celebrating Fathers.” The message sent me to linked webpages jam-packed with hopeful and encouraging fatherly stuff. What a relief! There was a little fatherhood pitch from the President (whose father exited the family when Obama was two, so kudos to Obama and those who reared him!), an updated fatherhood.gov website promoting the Strong Fathers, Strong Families campaign; a new DadTalk blog intended to provide helpful fathering information; and my favorite page, which hosts the be-better-fathers propaganda commonly known as PSAs (public service announcements) — and I really enjoyed some of them. In contrast to the mass media in which men of color and many fathers are relegated to the roles of scary criminal, sex object or complete moron, what a refreshing treat to see them being themselves, practicing cheers and cooking dinner and just stoop-sitting with the kids.

However, after being inundated with a spectrum of daddy messages, I found myself wondering why men even become fathers. Are their motivations any different from mine for pursuing motherhood — biology, narcissism, errant rationalization? And what better way to find out than to ask them, which I did, and here’s what some of them had to say. …

This, from a local humorist: Why am I a father? Well, my wife looked so cute that night (she still does), and this reproductive urge just bubbled up. We mated. We reproduced, thrice. Now my kids are doing the same thing. Cute women — I guess that’s why all guys become fathers.

This one got into the meat of the Pew report: Like my father and his father before him and my mother’s father before her, I am a father by biological consequence. I had a collision with the mother of my sons, and fortunately for us, we have continued to have such collisions. But there’s a non-biological reason I’m a father. When things between my wife and I were not good, I decided to stay. Broken homes were pretty common when I was a boy. My wife’s parents divorced, too. So when we had hard times, as I suspect all marriages do, divorce was an option. I would still have been a father but the family would have been divided. I remembered how that felt as a son and decided to stay with my wife, which meant working with her because we could not go on as we were. After my parents’ divorce, my father drifted away. In a sense he resigned from the job. I’m a father because I spend time with my sons, and I can do that because I love their mother, which is how I became a father in the first place.

My friend of rosy hue once again focused on the positive: I am a father because my children fill my days with laughter, joy, and a sense of peace. They are also our most precious gift and best hope for a future filled with possibility.

This one always starts out with a joke, good or bad, just start with a joke: So, a very good question. There are of course some wiseass answers: Didn’t anyone tell you about the birds and the bees — or did you miss that class; couldn’t outrun the shotgun; whatever. But, I think my reasons are mostly self-serving. First, having the boys meant I didn’t have to grow up. Not that I would have anyway. There are so many memories that have filled my life because of them, and their pain has been my pain, their success my pride, their joy my joy. I can’t imagine that life would have been nearly as dear or as fulfilled had I not been a father. And the other reason is to attain immortality. We are all terminal. There’s no getting out of that one. And, for the majority of us, there won’t be a library or building named after us. But the legacy most of us leave behind will be our children. In them we can find the reason for existing.

This guy’s a writer — always has an artful beginning, a middle and an ambiguous end: My fatherhood was unplanned and found me 17 years ago in a moment when I already had more to manage in life than I knew how to do properly. However, I grew into it naturally and it changed me for the better. The bond I have formed with my daughter from infancy has made me stronger and more than once saved me from despair. I am proud of my daughter and what she is becoming. I am sure her achievements will surprise and amaze me in the future and continue to give my life more significance than I have been able to give it, hampered by my own doubts and failings, through my own lifetime of effort. Her future will be surprising and I have no dread or feeling of apprehension with respect to my child with the sole exception that the world she is inheriting upon her graduation last night from Fallbrook High seems precarious and degraded. I wish I could make it all better for her, but it is clear to me that I cannot and that all I can do is try to put a brave face on a dire situation and not discourage her or weaken her in advance of the challenges she will be facing.

This is from a fellow who fathered many more than he spawned: One of the most important things being a father has taught me is to check the oil. Sorry I’m late. I was coaching baseball with my son, for my father-less grandson. And I love/cherish every moment of it.

And this one drives it home to its core: Why am I a father?

– Because of some primordial drive to procreate.
– Because a man of my generation was expected to marry and have at least one child, preferably          more, (but not “too many”) if he was to be respected in the workplace.
– As I age, because I may need care if I do not have a spouse to do the “job.”

I suppose the why of it might not matter: I am certain what does matter is how we do it, fatherhood and motherhood, and how we do it does not have to be restricted to the binary choices our culture foists on us, choices based on location or sex or sexuality. We could simply choose to do parenthood equitably — for our kids.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.

Note: Stoop-sitting photo from the Maryland Historical Society.

Dear Readers,

On Wednesday, the Obama administration said the federal law banning same-sex marriage is unconstitutional, and the U.S. Department of Justice would no longer defend it in court. National Organization of Marriage’s Brian Brown said the news was shocking — shocking, I say! — and an “amazing display of arrogance combined with incoherence.” He begged his followers to demand that Congress “fight for marriage.”

This seems an opportune time to reintroduce a contributor to Excuse Me, I’m Writing: Brother Buddy from KGAP radio — not Satan’s store but God’s agape love! — the hometown station of Fallbrook the Friendly Christian Village.

Brother Buddy’s loving wisdom is kind of like receiving a blessing, a hug and poke with a sharp stick all rolled into one. Enjoy!

Love,
K-B

True Friends of Marriage, Take Heed!

It is with deep sorrow — but also with God’s abiding love and hope — that I’d like to chat with you, my Brothers and Sisters, about Brian Brown, executive director of the National Organization for Marriage (NOM).

For those of you unfamiliar with the man, Brother Brian has made a controversial career of preaching from the mountaintop that marriage needs protecting.

“From what?” you might ask — and well you should.

According to Brother Brian, we must protect marriage from homosexuals whom he fears will be the death knell of the hallowed institution.

And just how are homosexuals going to rend the sacred commitment of marriage from the prayerful hands of heterosexuals?

According to Brother Brian and NOM, “Marriage is under assault! Marriage is under assault!! Marriage is under assault!!!”

My, oh my, oh my! One would think from Brother Brian’s cultish rhetoric that gays and lesbians must be conducting a malevolent campaign to prevent heterosexuals from being married. That homosexuals are buying up all the wedding gowns and tuxedos for their cross-dressing parties. That they are barring entry to all the places of worship and rituals, all the perfect sunset beaches and the VFW halls, for their female impersonator AIDS fund-raisers. That they are hording all the flower arrangements and tulle for their own perverse use — and God knows where the Jordan almonds are ending up!

But, because common sense prevails, we must acknowledge, Brothers and Sisters, that such a scenario is idiotic — if for no other reason than that the bridal industry is not about to give up the huge segment of their market represented by heteros.

Well then, if homosexuals are not bent on destroying the heterosexual dedication to gift registries, honeymoon packages, and the inevitable second guessing — lying there the next morning, watching him or her snoring, halitosic drool pooling on the sheets — then we must pursue our query: Just how are homosexuals going to rend the sacred commitment of marriage from the prayerful hands of heterosexuals?

And it is at this point that Brother Brian resorts to reasoning that is shady at best. But, of course, Brothers and Sisters, he is counting on you, on your generosity of spirit, your wish to lend credence to a Brother, your inclination to let others think through the tough issues for you — come on, admit it, Dear Ones — yes, Brother Brian is counting on you to let his Orwellian logic slip by unnoticed, unchallenged.

Hence, our little chat.

First, let’s take care of a quick point: Brother Brian’s parent-baiting tactic. He warns that children will be taught about homosexuality in our schools.

Well, Jesus, Mary and Joseph! They are already learning about homosexuality — on TV, on the playground, from the furtive body language their parents reveal when encountering a homosexual. Better they should learn the facts in school, don’t you think, Brothers and Sisters? If only it were so. Say amen!

And, compared to the supposed biblical lesson likely perpetrated on the children of misguided “Friends of Marriage” — that homosexuals are an abomination — whose children do you think will turn out the more loving and accepting, the more true to Christian ideals? Those who learn of homosexuals’ natural existence or those who are taught to fear and revile them?

Next, consider a few of NOM’s “Marriage Talking Points.”

Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose; they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us. … Who gets harmed? The people of this state who lose our right to define marriage as the union of a husband and a wife, that’s who. That’s just not right.

Nor is it accurate. Contemplate the above statement, Brothers and Sisters, and find the wisdom so artfully excluded: When we have same-sex marriage, heterosexuals will still define their marriages as being between a man and a woman. Legalized same-sex marriage does not bear with it a conversion clause that all straights must go gay. (Besides, with the struggling economy, the homosexual recruiters are out of toaster ovens.) Legalizing same-sex marriage simply allows gays to accurately define their own marriages, while straights continue in happily hetero bliss (or divorce courts). But seriously, now, Brother Brian and his Newspeakers should not be so silly as to suggest that straight and gay marriages cannot cheerily coexist, because, in essence, they do. Say amen!

Next…

If courts rule that same-sex marriage is a civil right, then people like you and me who believe children need moms and dads will be treated like bigots and racists.

I have accepted the holy burden of speaking God’s truth on this issue, so, although it pains me to say it, it must be said: Brother Brian and his “opposite-sex marriage” marauders are indeed bigots. And God knows that gay marriage does not put heterosexuals’ parenthood at risk; only their ungodly behavior does that.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of tolerance and love, let me try to temper that sad news with this: In our great United States, Brother Brian and his “traditional marriage” cult have every right to be bigots, and we will continue to love them despite themselves — as we pray for their salvation from the sins of discrimination.

They do not, however, have the right to force the rest of us to join in their idolatrous bigotry. Try as they do, they cannot force the entire nation to kneel before the false god of “Marriage and Religious Liberty” they have so cleverly sculpted with words and hate and Beelzebub’s wily ways.

No, indeed, Brother Brian — and I pray you are listening. Leading your followers to vote away the rights of a class of people in the name of “Religious Liberty” is a thing of the Devil! Encouraging the fearful to celebrate their prejudice — presumably in God’s name! — is downright satanic, Brother Brian, satanic! And I fear for your soul. You are slip-sliding toward Hell in a bigot basket, straight toward Hell. The Evil One has tempted you with the sinister lust for white heterosexual male privilege, the craving for power, and you have succumbed. Your soul is at risk of an eternity of fiery damnation, Brother Brian. Repent before it’s too late! You must drop to your knees and pray to God. Pray for God to exorcize the demons from your heart. Pray for God’s great and abundant forgiveness for the sins you have perpetrated on the voters of Maine and California, New Jersey and New York, Delaware and Washington, D.C., Rhode Island, Texas and Illinois. Throw yourself before God’s merciful heart and thank Jesus for suffering for your bigoted sins. Repent, Brother Brian, repent before Satan’s snaky tail has an unbreakable grip on your soul and you are lost to his hellfires forever!

Yes, well, Brothers and Sisters, I am sure you can understand the need to bathe Brother Brian and his hornswaggled disciples in the truth and the light. There is no other way to save them.

Although — and I admit this because I remain only an imperfect child of God — it would be so much easier if the poor boy would get caught with his drawers down, figuratively speaking, of course. Come to think of it, the revelation of a spanking fetish would be so, so delicious! Say amen!

With love, your Brother in Christ,
Brother Buddy

By Lori Miller

I am listening to Dr. Laura, the famous talk show host-psychologist, give advice on her daily radio talk show as I drive through the canyon. I am thinking how open minded it is of me to be listening so carefully to her, after so many years of hearing about (and rejecting) her so-called “hard love” approach. There’s something oddly off-kilter about her advice I’d heard from friends I trust. But, I think as I’m wending my way towards the 15 freeway, my daughter-in-law swears by Dr. Laura’s advice and, as we’ve grown closer year by year, I’ve become more curious. What is it about the good doctor that my dear one finds so helpful? I’m willing to give it an honest try this day — there’s always more to grow.

A woman caller is on the line, a “regular,” she says, in need of advice because her sister’s daughter, a teenager who is only 14 years old, is pregnant. The father is also a teenager, but will not make a good parent, the caller believes. In fact, she calls the expectant father a troublemaker, although the only evidence the caller offers for this opinion is that he got her niece pregnant. The girl wants to have and raise the baby herself. The plan is for the teenager to remain at home and get help from her mother. The caller is in a quandary. She knows that her own three children, who range in age from 9 to 12, will certainly catch on that there’s trouble in the family. What to do, she asks Dr. Laura? How best to support her sister yet protect her kids from “bad influences”?

The talk show host doesn’t hesitate to say what she thinks. “Don’t make excuses for this girl. She’s a brat with way too much power. Look at the chaos she’s already brought into this family, and she’s only 14 years old. She’s on a power trip!” Dr. Laura is only getting warmed up. “She’s ruining her mother’s life,” she expostulates, “and she’d like to take the whole family captive, if she can. That teenage brat is a baby who’ll be having the baby — one fathered by a hoodlum. And I’ll bet he’s the type of guy who will lose his temper, and even shake the baby when it cries too much,” she prophesies.

Dr. Laura’s voice lifts and pitches. It takes on an ominous tone, now. “You know what you have to do. Your sister has been taken hostage to this brat, but you have a choice. You have to protect your children. You must cut that girl off, and her family with her. You have to. Don’t any of you get anywhere near that new baby, when it comes. It will probably die, anyway, of shaken baby syndrome. That teenage father will probably go to jail. And then that niece of yours will find some new, stupid boy to play into her power games. Anything so that she can be the center of attention. I know this is hard, but you must be strong. Protect your family. Cut that girl and your sister off!”

I realize that I am gripping the steering wheel too tightly. Memories of my own very difficult years as a teenager rise up in my mind’s eye. I push them back. I’ve come to the onramp at Deer Springs Road and Interstate 15. The soft, green hills roll away in front of me. A light rain is falling. It’s a beautiful sunset, but my stomach is churning. I am trembling with quiet rage. I try to imagine what it would be like if my daughter-in-law were sitting in the passenger seat, listening to this with me. What would I say to her, or she to me? Is this an example of the “tough love” and “family values” she admires in this infernal talk show host’s advice? I think of my dear son, her husband – a very good husband, let me add, and a loving father to two very wonderful, now teenaged sons. He is my only child, born to me when I was 17. Yes, indeed, I was a teenage mother, one of the “brats” Dr. Laura has so soundly condemned. Raised with the help of my mother, sisters, aunts, and my father, the boy turned out more than well.

This fine result is likely due to the acceptance, love, and support of my entire extended family, I think to myself as I pull onto the freeway. I am awash in memories. My baby was nourished by the generous, ongoing attention of aunts, uncles, grandparents, and by his father’s family, as well. His aunt Wendy was particularly helpful. She babysat while I finished high school. We were loved. We were accepted. We got through the trauma of a difficult beginning because the family stepped up, all of them. When I perched my two-year-old baby on my hip and went off to college, I became the first single parent to live in married student housing at the university. I was proud of myself. I knew I would make it, and I did. Not that it was easy, or that I was in any way perfect. Still, my son is now a family man. He and his family serve as testament to something — many things — going well. I wonder whether my daughter-in-law might have realized the implications of Dr. Laura’s advice here? Would she wonder what her husband’s life would have been like if advice like this had been followed? Probably not. But would she at least be able to recognize that taking Dr. Laura’s advice would drive a metaphorical stake through the heart of that girl and her unborn child? That abandoning a sister, a niece, and condemning them, is no part of “family values”?

In author Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Warrior Woman, the narrator uncovers evidence of a long-dead aunt whose name has been stricken from the family records. It turns out that the young, unmarried girl was raped and impregnated at the age of 14. Living in a rural Chinese village, the young girl was blamed for her misfortune, and great shame was brought upon her family. The village turned its back on the family until the situation was remedied. As is traditional, the family forced the girl to jump into a deep well before the baby was born. She drowned, her baby with her. As a final punishment, her name was struck from the family record, as if she’d never been born. That, I think grimly, may have been kinder than Dr. Laura’s advice.

Lori Miller is a writer, a teacher and a lifelong learner. She did her graduate work at USC and holds a doctorate in Rhetoric. Currently, she works as a freelance editor and teaches an occasional English class at the local community college. She lives in Fallbrook with her quite charming Russian Blue kitty. She enjoys walking in the foothills, indie movies, singing alto in the Fallbrook Chorale, reading novels on her new e-reader, and traveling, both figuratively and literally.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

My mother’s knees have become her bane. They refuse to keep her legs straight. They do not hold a bend. They fail her when she has the will to rise. They pain her when she rumbles in fitful sleep.

She crosses the country to flee her knees in the northeast’s cold and damp. But the pain flees with her, lurking in Southern California’s gentler clime, hiding behind the orb weaver webs, skulking beneath hummingbird wings, filling the floral mouths of birds-of-paradise, setting upon her when she dozes in the palm fronds’ jagged shadows.

And when it does, she says, “Oh, shit.”

Long after the sun has spilled its vibrant hues over the mountains to the east, Mother shuffles from the guestroom and falls the last inch or two into the dining room chair, its needlepoint seat stitched half a century ago.

She reaches for the newspaper, the small print swirling before her eyes. She tries to rise but gives in to assistance.

“I hate to need help,” she says apologetically, accepts her glasses, resting the frames on her nose. She takes a tissue from the box that is now a fixture at the table, dabs with stiff fingers, shifts in her seat and winces.

“It’s nice to be able to help you. Revel in it, Mother, while we’re all still able and willing.”

“You’re so good to me,” she chuckles and peruses the front page, sips her coffee with cream because at her age, why suffer with low-fat milk?

She looks up and out the window, soaring with a Cooper’s hawk in search of something.

“I miss your father,” she says softly, takes a fresh tissue.

“I miss him, too.” Her hand, tissue pale, is cool and dry and fragile.

She eats her yogurt, which she never liked when she was young, tries but fails to clear her throat, skims another article.

“So what’s new in the world? Any stories in there that aren’t infuriating?”

“Nothing worth repeating,” she laughs, sips the tepid coffee and doesn’t complain. “What one thing would you change, if you could?”

“Where’d that come from?”

“I was just thinking. What one thing would you change — anything — if you could?”

“I’d make my daughter happy.”

“But you can’t do that; that comes from inside.” She scrapes out the last of the yogurt. “Isn’t she happy? She’s so dear. I want all my grandchilluns to be happy — and my chilluns. … But what would you change?”

“I’d change our last trip through airport security. I should have pulled a John Tyner.”

“What do you mean?” She shifts in her seat and winces.

“When the TSA officer patted you down in your wheelchair, she invaded your crotch and breasts before I had a chance to impale her with the wheelchair tool. All I managed to do was blather ‘Wow, that’s intrusive!’ and all she did was shrug off her obvious discomfort.”

“Why did she do that to me?” She removes her glasses and waits to be reminded.

“Good question. Since September 11, airport security has become a trip to Fascistville. I suppose the main reason is that we’re not willing to ask travelers where they’ve been and where they’re going and with whom, but we’ll readily invade their genitalia. That’s a weird spin on privacy and civil rights.”

“Well, with everything that’s been happening, I can understand.” She pushes away the paper, the yogurt cup.

“I understand that we won’t stop terrorists by patting up 84-year-old great-grandmothers’ private parts and peeping at full-body-scanned images.”

She laughs and finishes her coffee with cream because at her age, why not?

“What one thing would you change, Mother?”

She looks out the window again, dabs at her nose with stiff fingers, shifts in her seat and winces.

She does not say she would rather be with Father. She does not wish away the pain of her knees or the fear of terrorism.

She says, “I wouldn’t have any disappointments.”

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Click here to visit John Tyner’s blog.

Crossposted at the OB Rag and San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Sometimes, if we are lucky, a gentle voice emerges from the monotonous babble to speak a truth, small or large, obvious or not. And as the political left and right wage mind-numbing word wars over U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, author Sue Diaz’ gentle voice rises above the fray and begs our attention — not with glennbeckian outrage, not with self-righteous bombast, not with armchair general postulating, but with the tender and sorrowfully sane tale she tells in Minefields of the Heart: a Mother’s Stories of a Son at War.

A collection of wartime essays, a mother and son memoir, a letter full of love and compassion, Minefields of the Heart is the result of Diaz’s unexpected march to war when her kind and meandering son, Roman, enlisted in the Army in 2002 and was subsequently deployed to Iraq in 2003. Indeed, despite Diaz’ opposition to the Iraq War, Roman’s deliberate decision to serve put mother and son on an irreversible path that damaged and enlightened them both. It was a path from which Diaz struggled to understand and support her son, as Roman replaced his youth with the mantle of a warrior, set to kill or be killed

As Diaz writes, when a son or daughter, a husband or wife, a brother or sister goes to war, their loved ones go with them.

“Every time an insurgent bomb blows apart a Humvee or a squad on foot patrol, the shock waves from the blast reverberate in small towns like Wheeler, Texas, and big cities like San Diego. A young private takes a bullet; back at home his father’s heart bleeds. A soldier loses a leg; his wife struggles in the days that follow to simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. A sergeant’s eardrum is perforated; his mother hears the explosion in her dreams, time and time again. Truth is, the casualties of war go far beyond the numbers from the Pentagon. Love leaves us no choice. … ‘We are there too, Sergeant Diaz. We are there, too.’”

At times, Diaz presents a disheartening recitation of the slow wearing away of morale of Roman’s unit, a unit caught in the horror of a war crime in the Triangle of Death south of Baghdad. Or she shares Roman’s words sent home electronically:

“I don’t know how many times we’ve been on raids, and we’ll be searching the house. One person pulling security on the men of the house, and one on the women and children. They’ll offer to make us tea, or ask for a picture (if they see a camera), and for a while we chill out in their house and play with the kids. It’s especially weird if we meet with resistance on the way in. I always bring candy in my pockets and bullets in my chamber.”

At other times, her imagination creates a sweet moment following the death of a comrade:

“‘Horton would have wanted you to have these,’ I hear the squad leader say as he hands a box of Marlboros to a private notorious for bumming smokes.”

And at yet others, she recounts the conflicted hope inherent in survival, the homecoming of one soldier, her soldier, shoulder-to-shoulder with the millions of others from wars past:

“‘Roman,’ I breathed.

“‘Mom,’ he answered.

“That was all.

“That was everything.”

Diaz’ book is not a grand or passionate characterization of a controversial war; it is so much more. Minefields of the Heart is wondrous and eloquent in its intimacy, in its simplicity, in the unquestionable stories of a mother and son entwined in a war that will be debated for generations.

Diaz said of Roman in a recent phone call:

“He’s doing well now. He’s in school. … He’s a full time student. He’s married. All things considered — considering the hell he’s been through — he’s doing well. But life is harder because of his experience. … War is a difficult thing, it’s a hellish thing, and it should not be entered into lightly, ever. It affects people not only in combat, but on the home front, the ripple effect. It’s not just a handful of people in a place far away; it really reaches all of us. I hope people will come to have a larger understanding of war’s impact on not just one soldier and his family, but on all of us — as a country. … It was quite something to live through. It was quite something to write about, and, now, I think it’s good to have the book finished and out there.”

Sometimes we are lucky. Because, in the wake of reading the book, the need to hear more of Roman, to hear his mother’s voice just a little more, the need to know that they continue to survive the war, to live and love, serves as the most compelling truth of Diaz’ book: as there is hope for her son, so is there hope for the nation.

Author’s website: www.suediaz.com
Publisher: Potomac Books 2010
Hardcover price: $17.96

Crossposted at the North County Times.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A sign declaring him a sesquipedalianist adorned his office door. How like him, the lover of one-and-a-half foot long words, to proclaim his eccentricity so proudly and chuckle at it with the same enthusiasm. He ushered me in, showed me his computer, the Mobius strip I’d sculpted for him proudly displayed on a shelf, a mounted segment of sharkproof fiber-optics cable — his latest delight. It was my first visit as an adult to the place that consumed my father’s focus, second only to his church. I looked for clues to reveal his character, to teach me who was this man I’d known only as a father.

Returning briefly from another life, the opposite coast, his prodigal daughter, I was presented to his colleagues, had lunch in the executive dining room — and worried that he had designed a chance encounter with one of the bearded young PhDs. But the tensile strength of such an unlikely coupling was not to be tested, for I knew better: “Never marry an engineer,” my mother said, “They’re a humorless lot, too anal-retentive, your father excepted, of course.”

As we traveled the broad halls of Bell Labs, I saw a man in love with the potential of the human mind to realize a vision. A man honored by his peers and humbly delighted with their affections.

But still, I did not know him, this man who rolled up his sleeves but left his tie in place to putter in the yard after work. The weekend warrior who spoke not a word of the broken bodies he flew home from Vietnam. The same man who taught me to ride a bicycle, to catch and cradle a lacrosse ball without flinching, to search for answers not his own, to embrace the written word, to dream of fairy tales while digging life’s ditches.

There were many visits after that, one or the other of us leaping the bounds of human mobility to soar into the other’s living room and reminisce, dance around discussions of religion, gossip of absent family members, dine on ice cream and other sweet succor.

And as we aged together, my Great White Father slowly gained human proportions. He suffered a dose of cancer with discomfort and graceful humor, sobbed at a loved one’s addiction, lamented his failure to produce a hellfire of fundamentalists.

In his retirement, he built a boat in which to scour the seas for adventure. While it sat in his yard, never quite finished, he rigged a chair on deck and enjoyed his morning coffee — not too hot and just shy two-thirds of a teaspoon of sugar — at one with his horizon.

And I, at last, began to know him, this man who wanted me to be happy but was afraid to ask if I were. A man who reveled in sharing tales of the women he met during the last Great War, of the love letters he saved for fifty years. The man who drew lush pictures of my mother reclining nude and handed them down to those who drew their own. The man who danced with the feet of youth and cupped the ears of an old fogey to catch and cradle my words.

Later, he talked fondly of lost war buddies regained. He remembered the dying highway commuter he held, whose last words of love Father carried to the man’s wife. He bemoaned the foolishness and brash decisions of his youth, his failures as a father, his walk with a God unknown to me. And he laughed at escapades survived, disappointments endured, offspring playing the fool.

At times, when we met halfway across the country, I struggled to feel comfortable alone with my father, uncertain intimates in an uncommon place. No meal preparation for distraction, no siblings to bicker over bridge or charades. Just the amorphous relationship between us.

And then I watched him sleep, curled as a child, and I saw the vast years spread over him: seventy-three years, more than half of which we shared. There were a few I spent determined to hate him, but now I rue that we share them no more, for Father is long dead. But he surely soared to rest in the succulent hues of an Aubrey Beardsley landscape, his boat set to sail, for his is the soul of an artist, a fearful, brilliant artist turned to Christianity to sooth his passions and direct his life.

He was an aesthete, he was a genius, he was a holder of patents and a builder of sailing ships, he was one of the truly faithful and he was forgiven. Though he was not at peace with his progeny, he was loved and adored by us as only a good and kind man could be. And I am grateful to whatever God guided him that the Colonel Father Sir was mine.

He once said to me, “I am a dilettante; don’t follow in my footsteps.”

So tell me: How can I help but become him? Why would I want anything else?

Love,
K-B

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

A short film by Constantin and Nikos Pilavios — thanks, Kim!