The wildest things

We live in a suburb surrounded by a rural area. This means we can get McDonald's or local free-range eggs in three minutes, depending on which direction we turn out of our subdivision. Living, as we do, on the threshold of all things soul-crushing and toxic and all things verdant and purifying, can make one feel mighty schizophrenic at times. Like when we mow the dandelions we'd rather be eating so we won't get letters from the city, which are mailed when our neighbors call and lodge complaints. Or when we find ourselves lost and anxious in the maze of the local Wal-Mart, which we whisper when we are home again, huddled in our bed, that we will never ever go back to ever as long as we live, but we end up back there, crazy in our heads from the lighting and the sprawl and the weirdness, because they have the best price we have ever been able to find on fair-trade coffee and organic maple syrup.

I hope you're laughing right now, because we are. It's hilarious. We careen between meals of organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and gorging ourselves on Taco Bell, wiping the last remnants of that delicious horrifying neon cheese out of its plastic cup with the edges of our burritos, and it makes my head spin. It's contradiction, it's celebration, it's laziness, it's self-acceptance. Radical, radical self-acceptance.

This duality is not new to me. A woman who loves women, who has babies with men. A person who wants to free Mumia (is Mumia passe now, all you armchair anarchists?), who almost married a cop. Not just any cop. A Fed. For serious. For real. My two favorite cookbooks are The Voluptuous Vegan and Nourishing Traditions. I am an inveterate feeder of both wolves, and they fight and fight while my children grow in this strange doorway between worlds. They are doomed, my poor babies, to this undefinable life, to their Gemini dads, to their shameless water mama who refuses to freeze.

I hope they won't hate us. And I hope they build homes where nobody gives a fuck what they do with their dandelions.

Sweet and Spicy Pumpkin Seeds

Although plain roasted pumpkin seeds are delicious and packed with nutrients, these fiery and sweet seeds elevate a humble snack to a whole new level of yumminess.

3 cups whole organic pumpkin seeds, raw, picked clean of pumpkin flesh, rinsed and drained
1 tablespoon red Thai curry paste
1/4 cup organic maple syrup
1/4 cup organic extra virgin olive oil or more depending on how much is absorbed by seeds
Sea salt to taste

Mix all ingredients thoroughly in a large mixing bowl and turn out onto a greased cookie sheet. Roast at 350 F until seeds are crisp and starting to brown, stirring several times and adding more oil if needed to keep seeds from sticking to the pan (and each other, although some sticking is inevitable). Allow to cool, stirring every few minutes, at least most of the way- they're actually quite lovely when eaten still slightly warm.

My Three-Dad Baby

"Cherokee looked like a three-dad baby, like a peach, like a tiny moccasin, like a girl love-warrior who would grow up to wear feathers and run swift and silent through the L.A. Canyons." Francesca Lia Block, Weetzie Bat

The Kidlet was born in a little house at the foot of a mountain in Tennessee. Her father, by whom I mean the man who helped me make her, was there to witness her birth. We spent most of my labor alone with each other due to the swift progression of The Kidlet's arrival- the midwife and doula arrived just as I was ready to push her out. Our relationship was quickly drawing to a close, but despite that, we had a blissful birth experience and I remember it as one of the few times during that period that I still felt the bond of our friendship.

He held her, took baths with her, read books to her, took endless scores of photos of her, sang to her, slept with her between us in the bed we all shared. He wasn't perfect. He wasn't everything I wanted or needed him to be. But he was her father.

Then I left him. The months that followed, which stretched into years, plunged me into a depression marked by bewilderment, disorientation, fatigue, and physical illness. I sleepwalked through a year of school and then continued my pattern (now broken) of seeking abusive situations and started working for people who I allowed to take me for granted, treat me like crap, and underpay me. Through all of this, I continued attachment parenting The Kidlet and practicing natural family living to the best of my abilities for the situation I was in at the time. During this period, I am not ashamed to say that I needed help. There were times when I was too tired to hold her, much less play with her, after trying to nurse her to sleep only to have her pop off the breast and start bouncing around the bed, happy, full of milk and ready to party long into the night.

It was at these times that her grandpa -my stepfather- would take her into the kitchen and hold her in his lap at the table while he drank coffee and watched Westerns. Sometimes he would get down on the floor and play with her. Sometimes they'd eat cinnamon toast or share a Popsicle, or sing songs, and as she got older he'd play games with her and let her pick what to watch on TV. He didn't always make the decisions I would have made- in fact, he often did things I disagreed with. It wasn't a perfect situation for me. But as I lay in my borrowed bed with arms, hands, and back throbbing from an overdemanding bodywork schedule, dehydrated from breastfeeding, sweating all day in hot massage rooms, and inadequate self-care, I knew The Kidlet was safe and loved. And so did she.

Then we moved, and for the first time there was no "Daddy" figure for The Kidlet to latch onto. It was just her and me, trekking to markets, eating sandy guacamole at the beach, dancing to T-Rex with our roomates, and sleeping curled up together like a mama bear and cub in our (still) borrowed bed. We grew closer in ways I never expected as I grew stronger as a mother and began to stabilize.

And then a thing happened. An amazing, terrifying, life-changing thing. I met a man and fell in love- a deep, true love that became a searchlight that exposed my wildest hopes, my deepest desires, and my greatest fears. And in all of those things there was him, a grown man, an equal partner, someone who saw me and respected me and loved me in all of my deeply flawed glory, someone I could trust to bring around my kid. This was no small decision for me, a legendary distruster of men in general/several very specific men/The Man/the patriarchy- someone who not so very long ago had flirted with a life of rural lesbian separatism, now confronting the possibility of taking a man as a long-term life partner and asking him to help raise a daughter he didn't help to create.

I chose to move forward in love and trust and allow him to enter The Kidlet's life, and an even more terrifyingly amazing thing happened. She fell in love with him too, and he loved us back. We moved in together and became a family, and soon after that I heard my daughter refer to my man as "Daddy" for the first time.

So now she has three men in her life- her father, who she assigned the title of Daddy One, my partner, named Daddy Two, and her grandfather, who she recently added to her daddy roster under Daddy Three. I don't believe that my baby is confused, or that she doesn't have a real definition of what a daddy is. I believe she knows that, in the words of a wise mama I came across on a message board recently, "Love is not a cup of sugar that gets used up."

Mos Def- "Umi Says"

Redonkulous Short Ribs

Short ribs are an economy cut of beef and tend to be not terribly...well, meaty. Here's my take on a traditional Southern recipe, adapted for the crock pot, that stretches the meat with an amazingly flavorful gravy to serve with rice.

1 rack (approx. 8 bones) beef short ribs
1 medium onion, sliced
2 cups V-8 or similar tomato-vegetable juice blend, such as Knudsen's Very Veggie
1  cup water
2 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp dried rosemary, crushed
Salt
Pepper
2 tbsp soy sauce, tamari or Bragg's Liquid Aminos
1/4 to 1/2 cup of unbleached white flour

1 cup long grain brown rice
2 cups water
2 tbsp. butter or Smart Balance (optional)

Season ribs with rosemary and salt and pepper to taste. Sear in olive oil over medium heat in a heavy frying pan until thoroughly browned on all sides. Remove the ribs from the pan and save the pan drippings- you can do this by just covering the pan and leaving it on the stove or sticking it in the fridge. Line the bottom of a crock pot with sliced onion and lay browned ribs on top. Pour the juice blend and water into the bottom of the pot and sprinkle the soy sauce over the ribs. Cover and cook on low for about 8 hours.

40 minutes or so before you want to serve, prepare the rice, reserving the butter or Smart Balance. Reheat the pan from earlier and make a roux with an approximately equal ratio of  flour to the amount of drippings in the pan. Transfer the ribs from the crock pot onto a plate and whisk the liquid from the crock pot into the roux, thinning the resulting gravy with water or stock if necessary. Taste to correct seasoning and throw the whole mess back in the crock pot to simmer while the rice cooks.

Just prior to serving, stir the butter into the rice, spoon the excess fat off the gravy in the crock pot and give it a good stir. Serve the ribs and gravy over the rice.

This dish pairs well with dark leafy greens like chard and kale. I serve it alongside chard sauteed in a little oil with garlic powder, red pepper flakes, and a dash of salt, then season the greens with a little raw apple cider vinegar at the table.

Anthony Hamilton- Sista Big Bones

The Mama and Baby School of Magic

The Kidlet is being homeschooled using the Oak Meadow curriculum, which is Waldorf-based. I originally purchased the Kindergarten curriculum with the intention of using it as a home preschool program last year, but life happened, and the combination of time constraints, general unpreparedness, and the desire to let The Kidlet go at her own pace resulted in the books and materials being packed away until this year.

We are embarking on this adventure as a team, neither of us sure exactly how our story is going to unfold, both of us finding joy in the telling.

So far, we haven't established a schedule or a consistent lesson plan (Day 1 consisted of The Kidlet napping and complaining of a sore throat, Day 2 involved singing and dancing in the morning, followed by free reading time during which she sounded out words in books of her choosing, counting practice while helping Mama set the timer to bake a pizza, chalk art on her easel, and playing spelling and math learning games on her Leapster), but I'm sure that will evolve over time. We've done a little bit of work on creating her nature table, with some fall gourds and a wooden bowl with a jack-o'-lantern painted on it that belonged to The Kidlet's great-grandmother until she gifted us a bunch of her Halloween decorations.

So far, I'm just standing back and letting her show me what she wants to learn right now. It is amazing to me how she went through Day 2 seeking activities that stimulated her mind with no guidance from me outside of asking her to help me prepare lunch and count the minutes on the timer.

They Might Be Giants- The Mesopotamians

The Little Ranch-Style Schoolhouse

Before I met Daddy Bear, it was always my plan to homeschool. Daddybot (The Kidlet's father) and I both had bad experiences in school growing up, and after reading Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto and Guerilla Learning by Grace Llewellyn, I felt even more certain that homeschooling would be the best option for The Kidlet.

Now, part of Daddy Bear's Sparkly, Amazing Childhood of Awesomeness was that he actually liked school, liked being in the gifted program, excelled in most subjects and got good grades. So when The Kidlet and I moved in with him and school time rolled around, there was a lot of serious and well-reasoned discussion surrounding putting The Kidlet into the local public school.Through all of those discussions, though, my gut feeling never went away- the strong, magnetic pull of the lodestone in my belly saying "Sit down and hold your baby. You both need time to be where you are and put down roots. 'They' schools aren't where your baby needs to be..."

I put those feelings aside because I was trying to be rational. We all know that the strong mama (or papa) bear part of ourselves isn't always rational, and the misfortune of that is that sometimes Irrational Bear Mama has a perfectly formed, instinctive animal reason for wanting to protect the baby, and we ignore her in the name of rationality.

So, we went to the big box store and we bought her all the trappings of a school kid, and she loved the backpack and the lunchbox and the outfits and the new shoes, and we sparkled with excitement for our Big Girl, and we endured some bizarre rituals to get her in there (such as having to obtain a notarized affidavit stating that we are cohabiting since we aren't legally married, and signing their vaccination exemption form since they didn't like ours that said the same thing), and we told her she doesn't have to say the Pledge of Allegiance if she doesn't want to, and we put her on the bus on the first day and did the happy, proud parent dance.

We went to the advertised "Ice Cream Social School Info Night", which turned out to be a joyless cafeteria full of people hunched over plastic tables eating vanilla ice cream out of little plastic cups and sucking frozen sugar water out of plastic tubes and not talking to each other, and the only "Info" available was a pamphlet for some frozen, processed food we could buy to raise money for the school. We sent her to school with healthy packed lunches, only to have her come home reporting that she had chosen processed-cheese nachos for lunch, and when we sent her to school the next day with five dollars to pay for the nachos she had been given, the money was physically taken away from her by a volunteer aide, given to her teacher by the aide, and used by her teacher to set her up with a lunch card to purchase more of these horrid fake-food school meals on credit without our consent. We told her she had to listen to and respect her teacher, who followed up the lunch card incident by sending us a note describing The Kidlet's "behavior issues" using improper grammar. We told her it would take time to adjust to her new school environment, then discovered (after a week of attempts to contact the teacher in response to the note) that she had already been scheduled for "observation" to determine whether she should be in Kindergarten, without advance notice or asking our consent. Fortunately, by the day that revelation was made, we had already determined that The Kidlet didn't need to be there and the decision to withdraw her had been agreed upon. So she wasn't there the next day for her "observation", and after a little bit of crying about wanting to be able to ride the bus, she told us that she had thought it over and decided that home was the right place for her to be.

Even Daddy Bear, who sails through life unfettered by my paranoia and mistrust of all things created by the patriarchy, was appalled at what two short weeks of dealing with the public school system had wrought for our unsuspecting little family. Even I, who thought I was prepared for whatever crazy bullshit the system was going to throw at us, was caught off guard by the amount of the bullshit and the depth of the craziness. Even The Kidlet, who was excited to go to school and ready to learn, was ready to announce that she'd had enough after two weeks of frustration and bewilderment.




"Man, that school shit is a joke
The same people who control the school system control
The prison system, and the whole social system"

-Dead Prez, 'They' Schools

(yes, I'm aware that The Kidlet is a white girl- that doesn't change the point. 'They' schools belong to 'Them', whether 'They' represent racist white people to you, or a system of patriarchy, or of classism, or of creating a fertile ground for bullying and scapegoating, institutionally accepted and/or ignored homophobia, or wildly careening unregulated capitalism that marches blithely over the backs of the workers, or...)

Bob Marley- Mr. Brown

Lavender-Mint Hand Soap

If you're anything like me and can't stand the lingering chemical smell of most commercial hand soaps, this might work for you:

Equal parts Trader Joe's or Dr. Bronner's Peppermint and Lavender castile soaps
Hand Soap Dispenser

Mix soaps and pour into dispenser. Done!

These scents, or any other, can of course be used by themselves as a hand soap, but I stumbled across this rad combination when I didn't have enough of the TJ's peppermint soap to fill my dispenser and topped it off with the Dr. Bronner's lavender.

PJ Harvey- You Said Something