I couldn’t wake up this morning
Sep 17, 2002 The Story of My Life
Do you ever do that? I *thought* I was awake, I thought I was in the shower but then I’d wake up a little more and realize I was still in bed. So I would get out of bed and go brush my teeth but then I’d wake up a little more again and find out that I hadn’t moved off my pillow. I think that I took 3 or 4 showers in my imagination. What would clue me in to the fact that I wasn’t *really* awake is that I couldn’t get the lights in the bathroom to turn on.
Generally I’m what they call a lucid dreamer because I usually know I’m dreaming. I’ll dictate what I want to happen next in my dreams or I’ll say to someone, “This is just a dream but please carry on anyway.” Last night I slept so hard that I didn’t know I was dreaming. I dreamt about bloggers.
I dreamt that Sarah came to dinner along with a friend here in town who “knows” Sarah from MangoMama. (She was over last week and she said, “Unicorn? Do you mean Unicorn? I love Unicorn!”) I also dreamt that Meagan was going to be featured on Oprah for her blog and upcoming book and when I saw her pic I thought, “Wow, she doesn’t look anything like I thought” but I was excited about watching it.
To interpret dreams, I think, you have to go to the underlying emotion to figure it out. The underlying emotion I had was anxiety. I kept saying things that hurt Sarah’s feelings and I kept interrupting my other friend. And then not being able to wake up made me anxious. Hmmmm, what am I anxious about. Hmmmm.
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Being paid to stay-at-home
Sep 16, 2002 Read/heard/seen
Montana Women Score Victory on Valuing Caregiving: Montana women who have incomes 150% of poverty level were able to get up to $384 a month for staying home with their infant children. It’s a small victory but important. I think $384 is how much a mom of one gets for welfare but the difference here, I believe, is that this isn’t considered welfare. It’s actually considered payment, honoring that mothering is valuable (well, that might be too strong a word when you look at the salary) and deserves monetary recognition.
At the shelter, we had a lot of moms who had to leave their own children in substandard care while they went to work at institutional childcare centers. Reeks of the old wet nursing arrangements, doesn’t it? Where the mom left her own baby sucking down cow’s milk to go give her breastmilk to a wealthy woman’s child?
I was all for welfare reform (tame the bloated bureaucratic monster) in theory but in reality “reform” was just another word for “screw poor women and their children.” Instead of combing through the needless piles of paper and the needless paper pushers, they shoved women away from their kids without consideration for the problems of real life families. Our clients used to have to go through crazy contortions to find care for their children (often inappropriate care) so they could go to “work training” programs. This included foisting the kids off on abusive ex-partners or crack-addict sisters. How can *that* be good for the country? But at least we got ‘em off the welfare roles, right? I quit before welfare reform hit in earnest (it was practice reform in my last year there) so I missed personally witnessing the results of the full-scale war on poor women.
Thanks to Ideas Worth Sharing for the link. Her blog is pretty damn interesting.
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Tags: Shelter
A question for y’all
Sep 15, 2002 Read/heard/seen
So how did you come up with the name for your blog?
Mine, obviously, I got from the Kate Bush song not because of anything the song says but because I liked the title. For a long time my personal web site was just “Dawn Friedman’s Work” so “this woman’s work” made sense when I started my journal in 1/01. I knew that I would talk about my writing and my kid, the two important “works” in my life and so it seemed appropriate.
I recently found another woman who is running a journal also titled This Woman’s Work; it’s very striking.
If you answer this at your own journal will you either let me know in the comments or ping me so I can go read it? ‘Cuz I’m interested.
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What Dirt said
Sep 13, 2002 Family
Dirt said:
I’m really interested in understanding the justifications that people make for their ill treatment of their stepchildren because I find it strange that people who are dedicated to attachment parenting, gentle parenting, positive parenting, homeschooling - whatever form of conscious parenting it might be - with their biological offspring, can’t extend the same kind of sensitivity to their stepchildren and the kids father. Because I think its through those justifications we can get to whether its societal or biological when it happens.
I have to say that I, too, have always been surprised by the way otherwise sensitive parents could be neglectful (even hostile) towards their stepkids.
I’m in my dad’s second family. He has a daughter from his first marriage who is 8 years older than me. I don’t know her at all. He has two children from his third marriage and is now divorced again. He has only been a father to the last two kids. (They’re 18 and 15; there’s 25 years between his first and last kid.) I’ve been on both sides of the fence, I guess. I asked my mom about this issue and she said that once she had her own children, it seemed like my dad’s first daughter was taking from her own babies. This was compounded by the fact that they (my mom and half-siser) were never able to build their own relationship for a variety of reasons. My father ended up allowing her stepdad to adopt her when she was 8 or 9. They have a relationship now but I hesitate to say whether or not it’s a good one. Strained would be an understatement. She lives across the country from me and I haven’t seen her since I was 14. Sadly, I forget that she exists most of the time.
My own stepmom was never an “evil” stepmom but she never liked us either. I don’t blame her, I blame my father. It may have been her pushing him not to honor his agreement to help the three of us with college (I don’t know, really) but even if she did, he’s the one who kept his checkbook in his pocket. He’s the one who wouldn’t pay my mom the back medical he owed her. He’s the one who blew us off for his new family.
I have no insight into this but wanted to comment on Dirt’s post only she ain’t got no comments.
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling, my dad, my mom
This woman’s regular work
Sep 13, 2002 Writing
Betsy (one of the editors/founders over at ePregnancy) has been reading my blog now and then and she liked it enough to ask if I would rewrite some entries for their Myria site. I was trying to do that and sent them something and then kind Betsy asked if I wanted to make it a regular column. 
She said we could call it “This Mother’s Work” and I said that was fine but I liked “This Woman’s Work” even better so I think that’s the title they’re going with. It’s going live late next week or maybe early the week after.
The good thing about a column is that it proves you can produce work regularly (this will be weekly) and hopefully(!) you get a following and then you can say to a possible book publisher, “See, people like reading me.” If you syndicate the column (and the generous Myria contract allow you to publish your work elsewhere after 3 months), then you can say that you’re seen in X number of venues. I’m not sure how that all works, though, so I’ll have to explore that.
I realized after talking to some savvier (and more successful) writers that if I want to write a book, I need to start building up a body of work that looks like what would be in the kind of book that I want to write. I’m hoping, too, that this will give me a more formal opportunity (this blog being the informal opportunity) to explore the topics I want to write about.