Gennnderrrrr

I have a sister-in-law who is very transphobic. It seems like every time I see her she says something derogatory about, well, trans women specifically. It's really bad, to the point where I was actually afraid to invite my trans friends to my baby shower because I don't want my s-i-l to say something hurtful to them, or about them. I still invited them, but I'm not sure they'll end up coming. For one thing, neither of them has a car and we're way out in the country.

Yesterday I got into a big argument with my s-i-l after she told me a story about one of her clients (she's a real estate agent) whose loan application came back saying she was trying to commit fraud because her social security number was previously associated with another name and sex. My s-i-l then confronted her about this and basically was a total asshole about it, and when she was telling me about it, she acted like it was totally ludicrous and dishonest of this woman to "withhold" information from her, as if it's any of my s-i-l's business what kind of genitalia her client was born with or currently has! She also suggested that transgender people be required to have identification stating their trans status on it. Like, it should be a category unto itself on driver's licenses and whatever. I told her that's ridiculous and asked my s-i-l if she knows what the leading cause of death of transgender people is, and she said, "Suicide, I know, it's just –" and I said, "No, murder."

And then I said a bunch of other things that I can't really remember because I was pretty emotional about it, although Pip (my husband, if you've forgotten, since I haven't mentioned him in like three posts or something) said I made all my points really well and she seemed to be listening to me. Basically her argument came down to, "Well, there's women and there's men and if you have a cunt you're a woman and if you have a dick you're a man," although apparently even if a trans woman does get "the surgery" she'll never "really" be a woman, which maybe doesn't make so much sense, but neither does the entire argument, so whatever. I definitely made some point about intersex people, and she was like, "Well, maybe they should be required to put down both!" and I just found the whole conversation extremely frustrating, because it seems like we live in two different worlds. She lives in this world where other people's genitals are her business and there are two genders that are equivalent to two sexes that are these rigid categories that define what you do, look like, wear, and think, and I live in this other world where people are people, there are all different kinds, and the only time someone else's genitals affect my life is if I am having sex with that person.

At one point she said, "Well, whether you like it or not, when people are born the doctor writes male or female on the birth certificate! They don't say, 'Let's wait for the kid to tell us!'" and why not? Obviously, it's because our entire society is structured around this idea of gender as a great organizing force. We have to know right away (or sooner, often before the baby is born) what category to put someone in, because it determines everything, first and foremost how we think about and relate to this new human. It's usually the first thing people ask me when they find out I'm pregnant, and it was the question asked by the first stranger who commented on my pregnancy.* I really doubt society, or even the "two-party system" as it were, would collapse if we gave babies and children a few years before we started heavily gendering them.

Weirdly (or maybe not), I think one reason my s-i-l has such a gender essentialist viewpoint is that she's been told for a long time that she's masculine. She flips houses a lot, which requires a lot of hard manual labor, spatial sense, knowledge of plumbing, wiring, et cetera, and these are all things that have traditionally been thought of as masculine. So I think maybe because of that, and because she gets a lot of flak about her appearance from her mom, she's like, "Well, at least I'm a Real Woman." I hate it how we uphold the systems of our own oppression by oppressing others. I feel like there has to be a way for us all to break out of this, but I don't know what it is. Do you?

*Which finally happened, hooray! It was a clerk at a grocery store, and I was totally spaced out and thought she was asking if we had a rewards card or something, so I just shook my head, and then Pip was like, "Honey, she asked if you're having a boy or a girl" and I was like, "OH! Sorry! We're having a surprise." So now I have confirmation that the outside world knows I'm pregnant, haha. I hope the stranger touching doesn't start soon, as navelgazingbajan warned. Maybe I should start practicing hand deflection techniques now.

Writing, Belly, Hair

It's like I started a blog and then like three people not related to me said they liked it and I freaked out and never posted again.

I titled my blog the way I did specifically so I wouldn't feel obligated to write long posts, or revelatory feminist posts, or posts about anything deeper than what I was experiencing and how I was feeling on any particular day. It's kind of like the trick of buying spiral notebooks to write in so you'll actually write in them instead of saving them for when you have something really meaningful to say (and then eventually giving them to goodwill because you never ended up having anything meaningful enough to justify sullying their lovely lovely pages). But then I actually worked really effin' hard on my first three posts! And I was like, shit, do I have to work this hard on every single post and make sure I actually have a point? And that freaked me right out, so I spent several weeks opening up Word and writing like, half a sentence, then closing it and doing something else: practicing Hypnobabies, going outside and hugging the horses (my favorite thing to do with horses, because they are so large and solid and smell so nice), exercising, playing Plants Vs. Zombies, chatting with the #teaspoons crowd, you know, whatever.

And now! Here I am! Actually writing again for god(dess(es)) only know(s) what reason, other than maybe I finally got over it and realized that writing is fun. So maybe I'll do this more regularly now! But on to something more relevant.

I think I'm finally showing! But still no one has mentioned it. I don't go out in public terribly often, just because the nearest anything is like five miles away and it's a gas station, and beyond that there are towns, but they're like ten, fifteen miles away. Even when I do go out in public, though, nobody says anything! I went to the Mall of freaking America, for duck's sake, and went into several stores and hung out with a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in like six years, and no one said anything! Even my friend couldn't tell. So maybe I am only showing in my mind. This sucks, because that Dr. Sears said it would be undeniable by the sixth month, which this is. My last period started on December 1^st, so June 1^st will mark six calendar months. If I'm not showing by then, I'll…you know, wait some more. My M-i-L calls my desire for people to know I'm pregnant just by looking at me vanity, but I think the deadly sin it's most akin to is pride. I'm growing a baby, damn it! I have more blood than I used to! My uterus is huge! There is a new human life forming in there! Zie is 13 inches long! Everyone who looks at me should be able to tell that, and be really impressed by my accomplishment.

In other news, I just found out about that Kate Gosselin person, and how her hair is widely considered to be hideous. This was slightly embarrassing to me since I shaved the back of my head a few weeks ago. Suddenly feeling ashamed of a haircut you liked up until then just because a bunch of people on the internet said a similar haircut was hideous? Now THAT'S vanity.

Disjointed Ramblings on Indianness

When I was little, I pretty much thought Diabetes was a consequence of being an adult. Sticking your finger with a plastic and metal device that went "sproing" and depositing a glistening pearl of blood on a little strip in a machine that went "beep" seemed to be just something you had to do when you grew up, like paying bills and folding towels. I'm told this is common for American Indian children. In fact, in my mom's Being a Responsible American Indian with Diabetes (BRAID, which is also the name of a video game about time travel) class, the facilitator asked everyone how they felt when they were diagnosed, "Did you feel sad; did you feel angry, cheated?" and the general response was that no, they were expecting it. They felt relieved because they had been waiting for it to happen since they were little and now they didn't have to worry about it anymore. The facilitator was disappointed.

My grandma is a Cherokee woman whose father despised whites (if family legend is to be believed, white men on horseback were chasing the wagon his mom was riding in as he was crowning and his first cries were drowned out by gunfire), but knew that whiteness made things easier. My grandma and her sister weren't allowed to speak Cherokee and attended a federal Indian boarding school where both majored in Home Economics. In fact, going through their yearbook I noticed that the dudes all had different majors like Power Plant Operation, Painting, and Baking (Incidentally, my grandparents went to school with the founder of Krispy Kreme. Makes sense, doughnuts are like sweetened frybread in a specific shape). Of the four women I found who majored in something besides Home Economics, three majored in weaving, one majored in Arts and Crafts, and all double-majored (three guesses what their other major was - yes, that's right, Carpentry! No, I'm just messing with you, it was Home Economics).

Anyway, my grandma fell in love with the only blond-haired, blue-eyed Indian in the whole school (half Chickasaw, half Irish) and they got married and had three children, one of whom was my mom. My mom married first my brother's father, and then my dad, both white men. That's how we got to me, five-eighths white and five inches taller than any of the other women on my mom's side of the family, with blue eyes like my dad's and long, narrow feet that would be swimming in a pair of Air Natives.

Pretty much everyone on my mom's side of the family has type 2 diabetes. I don't have it (yet), but I also don't take any chances. I stay away from sugar and white flour and get regular exercise. When I was about ten I asked my grandma when she thought I would get it. She said I wouldn't, because I have my daddy's good blood. Apparently, if you dilute Red blood with enough white blood, it'll stop being so full of glucose (and also turn pink, HA!). Obviously the entire point of Indian boarding schools was to "civilize" Indians and assimilate them into (white) American culture, so of course I don't blame my grandmother for coming to the obvious conclusion that if emulating whiteness could make her life easier, having the genuine article in their genetic make-up would make her descendants immune to all diseases of Redness: Alcoholism, Poverty, Diabetes.

But sometimes I do blame myself for continuing the trend of marrying white men. I know this is stupid. Both my father and my husband are wonderful, kind, funny people, and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Even so, sometimes it bothers me that my children will only be 3/16ths Indian. I feel guilty, like I am contributing to the genocide of Native American peoples that has taken so many forms over the last few centuries, from germ warfare to forced sterilization to this voluntary extinction by intermarriage. I wonder if, by taking advantage of the programs and services that will be available for my children as tribal citizens, I will be doing a disservice to kids with bigger numbers on their CDIB (Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood) cards. I wonder if my kids will be "Real Indians," as I was once told by a Caddo boy I wasn't.*

I privately think the same about people all the time, people who find out later in life, whose families keep their Indian blood a guarded secret or a treasured anecdote about a long lost great-great-grand-something, people who tell me as though it were some huge bond we share, "Oh, I'm part Cherokee, too!" when they've never learned a word of the language or danced to drums in blue jeans and a shawl or been to a funeral where there was wailing like singing and singing like wailing or listened to their mom make treaty jokes or their grandma stumble over the explanation of a tradition she absorbed but was never really taught or, or, or. I think these things, as though I were the arbiter of Indianness, as though people whose past has been willfully obscured have any less right to it, and then I get the fuck over myself and say, "That's great!" and encourage them to look into what clan they are, find out their family history.

I guess to me, the important thing isn't blood quantum, but culture. And that's one of the main reasons I'm moving back to Oklahoma, so my children can be part of their tribes, and part of a loose association of city Indians of all tribes. I want them to participate in a dance troupe like I did, visit the Chickasaw cultural center, study Cherokee and Chickasaw, and go to lots of festivals, reunions, and powwows.

Pretend I wrapped this up in a really interesting, insightful, and above all conclusive way. Thanks for reading, and thanks, Arwyn, for linking to me on your twitter!

*That others may learn from my mistakes: it didn't make me feel any more genuine to drunkenly yell at him about it when I ran into him in a bar years later. In fact, it made me feel like a drunken asshole.

On Breasts

I bought a bra! Two things precipitated this event:

First of all, my areolar regions, which prior to pregnancy resembled two tiny, unobtrusive pink mosquito bites and had remained largely unchanged since I was 12, have blossomed into these enormous reddish-brown mounds with pencil erasers poking out of them. As I told my husband the other day, I never felt like I had real grown-up nipples until recently. Before, as small as they (and my breasts) were (and still are, in the case of my breasts), a t-shirt generally satisfied any impulse towards modesty I might have.

The second, more important, change is in sensitivity level. Before, sure, if I was running around in a coarse acrylic sweater all day, going up and down many flights of stairs, there would be chafing. Nothing a camisole underneath couldn't fix, though. Now, the camisole itself would be unbearable. I've been wasting an inordinate amount of time applying various oils and creams, and attempting to scratch without actually scratching. What I really need is some kind of boob armor that hovers about an inch over my skin and allows nothing but air to touch the nips, which is what I told the salespeople at the outlet mall (or the Alamo, as my mother-in-law heard when I told her I wanted to go there).

I picked out a few different bras and tried them on. My husband came into the dressing room and giggled while I did the massively important Vigorous Rubbing Test. If my nipples hardened even a tiny bit, the bra failed. Five bras entered the Chaferdome, only one emerged. I am pretty happy with it. It makes my boobs look about a cup size bigger than they actually are, but that's a small price to pay to be able to just fucking exist in comfort.

Having my breasts look larger than they are bothers me because it took me so long to come to terms with them as they actually are, and to stop hoping that something (Prayer! Herbal supplements! The pill! Something!) would magically make them bigger. During my first appointment with my midwives back in Redmond, that was pretty much the only fear I had: that my breasts would get bigger and every shred of self-acceptance I had scraped together over the years would be swept away in a wave of flashbacks to my abusive teenage boyfriend pinching my boobs, saying, "When are you gonna grow?" Just acknowledging that fear, as is often the case, alleviated it. I'm accepting my body's changes as they come, and not expecting anything to happen in a certain way, although I'm pretty sure I'll never have large enough breasts to have to worry about people getting up-in-arms about my not breastfeeding discreetly enough.

The other day, my MIL, whom I love dearly, was complaining to me about the breastfeeding habits of my SIL (my husband's brother's wife), whom I also love dearly. There was lots of talk about shirts left up and catching eyefuls of the most hideous monstrosities imaginable, not to mention how incestuous it was that she would engage in this behavior in full view of her brother and father! I was pretty much horrified, for so many reasons. I'm a little tempted to just pull my whole damn shirt off every time my baby's hungry and I'm around her, but even then I don't know if I'd get the same level of flack. Besides, the problem isn't REALLY my MIL, although my personal world would be a whole lot brighter if she would cease her regular critiques of various aspects of other women's appearances and behavior (I am critiquing her behavior! Hypocrisy, oh my!). The problem is misogyny.

The whole thing reminds me of our classmates' perceptions of my best friend and me in middle school. We dressed pretty much identically (we shopped together and often bought the exact same clothes), we were both shameless flirts and made out with many different boys (and sometimes girls, but I'm pretty sure we both kept that under wraps for a couple more years), yet she was widely considered to be a slut, and I was widely considered to be a prude. The difference between us? Cup size. Double D versus double A. All this "discreet nursing" bullshit is just another version of that, combined with the ridiculous idea we get pummeled with so much in our culture that breasts are about sex sex and more sex. Any other function they could possibly have ideally should not exist, but if it must exist, it ought to be invisible. Tiny boobies are widely considered to be lacking in sex appeal, but (because of that) impart a virginal quality to the possessor, which makes any flat-chested ladies out there nursing their babies pretty much the mother of Jesus. Or "very discreet." Same thing.

I want nursing women to be able to nurse wherever they want, whether or not they're practiced or flat enough to do it so no one can tell. It's so hard, though, to figure out the first step to a world where women's bodies are considered to be as functional as men's, their incidental nudity as neutral. The only thing I know for sure is that requiring women to make sure every scrap of boob is hidden during breastfeeding (or the baby hidden under a blanket, or the nursing pair hidden in another room) is not that step.

It’s me: Chelsea! Here I am!

All right, first thing I have to tell you is, this blog is gonna be as trite as I want it to be, which sometimes is going to be trite as hell. Something novel might slip in occasionally, but it will probably be unintentional, and you probably won't notice it among all the descriptions of pregnancy and momliness so similar to ones you've read fifty-seven times before you'll wonder if it's straight-up plagiarism (but it won't be).

Now let's talk about me for a little bit (or for a really long time).

I'm an animator, or I would be if I were working right now, which I'm not. Okay, story time.

Once upon a time, about a year ago, my husband and I (this is where I come up with a cute nickname for my husband, like The Dude, or Hoopy Frood, or maybe I should just go ask him what he wants to be called. Okay, he wants to be called "Pip," presumably short for Pipi Lime, which is what he goes by on his blog) – I mean Pip and I – graduated from college, finally, with Bachelors of Fine Arts degrees in Production Animation. Pip had a job immediately, from having done an internship during senior year, but I, foolishly, had focused on my school projects and therefore had fuck-all lined up, work-wise. Thus began my vaguely epic jobhunt!

I applied at pretty much every game studio in the entire universe. And got no replies. Like, I don't even think I got any rejection letters, which is pretty damn rude, I think. So then, one magical day, I got an e-mail about a health and wellness web start-up looking for a Flash animator to do clickable maps and animations. So I applied for that, and actually got a response! I was amazed. They told me they worked out of someone's house, so I was expecting a regular house, you know, with rooms and maybe a driveway? What I wasn't expecting was a mansion with an indoor swimming pool, tennis court, and a garage the size of the house where I grew up, with mahogany garage doors. I believe I used the word "surreal" five times during my interview. I struggled to keep a straight face when the CEO said she wasn't out to get rich, and that they didn't have much money to pay me. For some reason, they hired me, and I worked for them for a while, mostly holding my tongue when they said racist, classist bullshit (although I recall a particularly ridiculous meeting with a powerpoint presentation where poor people of color were compared to intestinal parasites, yeast, and bad bacteria, and rich white yuppies were compared to probiotics. Gentrification of the colon, hooray! When I spoke up in protest, the guy who made the presentation was like, "Well, whatever, but think about it. Who would YOU rather have living in YOUR colon?")

Things went on about like this until December, when two things happened pretty much simultaneously. Our self-imposed start-date for trying to make a baby arrived, and Pip lost his job. Pip made A LOT more money than I did. Approximately 3 times as much. In fact, his job paid for our rent, groceries, car expenses, basically all our living expenses, and mine paid for our student loans. So clearly the reasonable thing to do would be to put off our babymaking plans until either Pip found a new job or my boss suddenly decided to quadruple my pay rate (ha!). We're maybe not the most reasonable people in the world, though, so we were like, "Nah, it'll be fine, babies bake for nine months! We'll be ROLLIN' in dough by then." Thus began Pip's vaguely epic jobhunt! It went sort of like mine, except that he hasn't found a job yet.

Then all life stuff happened, I got pregnant on our first try (TMI: like, we only even did the intercourse once that cycle, mostly because I don't really like that as much as other sexytime things), my parents majorly pressured me to come home, Pip's mom had to have hip replacement surgery, and my job became less and less reliable a source of income. All of this resulted in our begging a bunch of money off our parents, packing up all our stuff in Redmond, Washington (Microsoft land), driving a u-haul down to Oklahoma to deposit our stuff in my parents' basement, taking a bus up to Minneapolis, and being driven an hour or so North of Minneapolis to Pip's parents' farm, or farm-like piece of land with horses. We'll be here helping out with horse chores, cooking, cleaning, and miscellaneous tasks until mid-June, at which point we're going back to Oklahoma, where Pip will find a job and I will finish being pregnant. Then I'll have the baby in early September, and lots of adventures will ensue!

Oh, Geese, here's the part where I tell you about my pregnancy, birthing, and parenting choices. This is always scary for me, because I'm not doing it the mainstream way and I'm really sick of people telling me I'm doing it wrong and/or putting my baby in danger. I assure you, I've researched this shit extensively. If you still want to give me flack about it, I may very well delete your comment (or I might just be overjoyed to even have a comment, and print it out, frame it, and hang it in my bathroom). That's just the way things go. Anyway, here's my list.

I am:

• using midwives for prenatal care and birth
  
• not taking that damn glucose test where you basically drink a glass of corn syrup, or getting routine ultrasounds (which also means I'm not finding out the sex)
  
• using hypnosis for childbirth (hypnobabies, specifically)
  
• giving birth at home
• eating soft cheeses if I feel like it, and raw milk (although I'm probably not brave enough to do it in a state where it's not legal, and therefore not regulated), and sushi, and prosciutto, but not tuna, or any of the high-mercury fish
  

I am going to:

• keep my baby's genitals intact
• delay vaccines
  
• breastfeed for a long time (this one will piss off Pip's parents something fierce)
  
• use cloth diapers as a back-up for elimination communication
  
• babywear
  
• give my child access to and examples of a broad spectrum of gender expression options, and try to create a safe space for them to grow with as little pressure to fit a mold as possible
• actively discuss race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality issues with my child in an age-appropriate way
  
• unschool
  
• practice consensual living
  
• probably fuck up a whole lot
  

I'm planning to work once the initial period of "holy shit, I just had a baby, what the hell do I do now?" is past (so, what, 18 years from now? HA), but only from home. The place where I worked before has said I could telecommute and continue working for them, which seems like a good option, and I'd also like to start painting again, which I haven't done at all since I graduated. I've heard people sell paintings online sometimes, so I could maybe do that. We're in this incredibly privileged situation of having no rent to pay right now, and I am very grateful that my parents have the resources and the desire to help me out by letting my little family live in their basement until we can afford our own place.

So anyway, that's it! My introductory post! It was long and possibly boring, and had no pictures, but – oh here, let me add a picture.

I tried to sell these shoes on Craigslist, but no one wanted them. There. Now my first post is perfect.