If I had been born at home, surely it would have been into a family bed. As it was, my parents brought me home from the hospital, where I was promptly given a place aside my mother in the bed which slept us all: mom, dad, my brother and I. I nursed until I was nearly four, when the arrival of a younger sibling forced shared privileges. I was not, as a rule, thrilled with anything that wasn’t mine alone and so gave up the breast and my place between my parents for slightly more independence on the outskirts of our small country. I slept on the edge (had my parents been a bit more intuitive, they may have recognized this as foreshadowing, and thus been more fully prepared for the journey of parenting a true Sagittarian daughter).

By that time, the eldest Dotson child had moved on and now slept in a wood framed bunk bed hand crafted by our father. In a family of five, he was the only to sleep solo. This left me as the senior child in the family bed, a title that lent me a certain amount of privilege, and these are the days I remember most when I think back to the last time I slept in the same bed with someone under the age of two. --read more >>

My mom says I was born tense. Tense and intense. When she tells the story of how I was born, amidst the drama and gesticulation, I feel a little sad to know that I am this child she speaks of. When she talks about the way she could hear me screaming day and night in the nursery just a few doors down, and of her helplessness in coming to my rescue, I feel the aftermath both of her helplessness and of my own. It's a feeling I can't seem to shake. When my incessant wailing finally subsided and my parents were able to hold me, as my mom goes on to tell the story, I still could not calm my nervous body; She speaks of the way I would never relax, how even in sleep she would watch me and my curled toes and clenched fists. And I have this vision of my young mother's eyes, peering in on her sleeping infant the way I imagine every parent does. The way I have watched my own daughter sleepily after midnight feedings when my eyes won't close again. And I think of the way my mother must have viewed me, that as she watched me sleep, she must have cried for so much love...--read more >>

1. Cross Hairs

The proof is there in the two blue lines. A baby blue plus sign confirms I don't have the flu like I'd hoped. I don't feel joy. I feel sick and not just from what I now know to be morning sickness. To me those faint blue lines look like cross hairs. I turn off the light in my bedroom, lay face down on my bed and wish it to go away. My husband walks in and asks me what I'm doing. No words come out as I hand over the white EPT stick.

"You are?"

"Yes." --read more >>

I consider my first marriage to be the friendship I have with Lori. We have been friends for over fifteen years, which is a lifetime in my transient world. We met while in college and immediately fell in love. We went out for margaritas one night and talked for hours. I came home to my boyfriend at the time and said, "Lori and I just fell in love under the full moon." This made him a bit nervous. --read more >>

My daughter strides through the doors of St. Something or Other, sits herself sideways in a seat at a low table, and starts to color. So begins her life as a school-aged child. Consequently, this moment also serves to kick the life out of my five year stint as her fulltime stay-at-home mom.

Well then. What now?--read more >>

2003

Sometimes when I get an idea for a story I do this thing called clustering. I write down my main topic in the center of a yellow legal pad and go from there. Today's word is CRACK. I am lying in my bed, head propped up on several small pillows. I shake my pen epileptically so the blue ink will continue to flow. One by one, I squiggle lines that extend from the center circle outward, then write a word or set of words and circle it. These extensions resemble sperm trying to escape of the edges of the paper into some unknowing sea. In the center of these balloons - How Life Was, The First Hit, Money, Dealers, Laptop, Diamond Rings, Watch, Treatment Center, Sex, Self Care, House, Friends, Jeff, Kids, School, Writing, Car, Bills. I daydream, wondering if crack addicts ever quit looking at white specks on the ground thinking it is some dope that they dropped. I went to my son's 7th grade conference yesterday and I saw white specks on the ground in the middle school parking lot. To me, they looked like crack. Who would be dropping crack in the middle school parking lot? No, it couldn't be crack. The rain and snow would have washed it away. --read more >>

"I don’t know how you do it," my neighbor’s girlfriend commented. My five-year-old daughter Siu Loong was at her father’s house and I had taken advantage of my free night to attend and photograph a march against police brutality, then stayed out till midnight developing the film I had shot.

"I dunno. I just do," I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

But that’s not entirely true. To simply say that leaves out the resources and community I’ve gained from years of being engaged in social justice work.--read more >>

My take on pregnancy and birth (home birth advocate) may have been the beginning to my feeling of alienation from the world of mommies. "Mommies" were always the other women I saw at the park, grocery store or at the zoo, I was just an imposter. Maybe it is because I don’t have all of the gear to make my mommy image complete or maybe it is because I seem to miss what other parents consider to be big issues.--read more >>

I don’t fit in again.

I am standing in the middle of the book fair at my 8 year old’s school. He has seated himself on the floor and is engrossed in a book based on the TV series "Dexter’s Laboratory". I am looking over the books designated as "for the parents". There are a multitude of cookbooks, Chick Soups for the various souls, and a large, coffee-table book extolling the gloriousness of the Reagan years.

I groan audibly.--read more >>

"You're just like Britney Spears!"

I froze. I tried not to let the polite smile dissolve into an expression of disgust. My face felt hot, and my teeth clenched. I feigned a chuckle as the teenage carousel attendant stood before me, clearly unaware that she had offended me, strapped my two kids onto the carousel horses. As she walked away, her words echoed in my head. Britney Spears?!

As a petite Indian woman, I couldn't understand at first how I stacked up to Britney. Was it my caked on makeup? Nope, no makeup today. My quickie marriage to my rapper/dancer boyfriend? Oh, wait, that was the trashie magazine I read yesterday. My inappropriately tight clothing? My protruding pooch and love handles? Ok, it's been a while since I went to the gym. But, then I knew, the teenager referred to me having two kids about one year apart in age. --read more >>

My daughter is 20 months old, and I have recently recovered from a breast infection. The clinical term is mastitis, but I tend to shy away from calling it that. Growing up on a farm, I have heard the term mastitis applied all to often to members of the bovine species. Maybe I'm a bit neurotic, but I cannot rid myself of the cow/mastitis connection. If I were to find myself uttering the words, "I have mastitis," I would feel like I was calling myself a cow! No matter what you call it, though, a breast infection, for lack of better word, sucks.--read more >>

On another blog it was suggested that I write a separate blog post about how I got away from the man who abused me. As you may know I have an outside hipmama blog called Beyond Battered that is about what I went through. I am getting my story out in bits and pieces...truthfully it is very hard to re-visit the mental state I was in at the time but I am finding it therapeutic.

I left after a 'minor' beating, meaning no skin breaking/bleeding,and no kicking. He 'just' pushed me into a wall, smacked me really hard several times and knocked me down. This was in response to him coming home and finding me on the phone. He had recently stopped taking the phone with him when he left and allowed me to use the phone again, so I thought it was ok to use the phone when he was gone. I was wrong in that belief and I paid for it that day.--read more >>

A couple weeks ago I traveled to New York City for work. It was my first visit to the city, and on my one free afternoon, I shot out of my hotel room and into the city like a pinball. I popped in and out of stores. I raced up and down streets. I bounced in and out of subway tunnels. I wanted to see it all: the visual assault of Times Square; the carousel at Central Park; the tiny, closet-like cafés in the Soho district; the children skipping through the fountain at Washington Square Park. I was so busy shopping I didn't even have time to buy anything. In the evening, as I made my way back to my room, I passed a street vendor selling t-shirts for children printed with images of pop icons. The shirts seemed like the perfect New York City souvenir for my children: hip, edgy, irreverent. For my six-year old daughter, I chose a purple shirt with Einstein sticking his tongue out for the camera. For my two-year old son, a bright blue shirt with Che Guevara's chiseled profile set against a red background.

I was pleased with my purchases, and so were my kids. The first morning after I returned, I dressed them in their new shirts. On the drive to my son's Spanish immersion daycare, my daughter amused herself in the back seat by teaching her brother to say the name of the man on his shirt. He caught on quickly. Over and over in the car, she pointed to his shirt and asked, "Who's that?" And he responded proudly: "Shay Gebaba," and all three of us giggled. When we arrived at his classroom, he ran up to his teacher, a soft-spoken Cuban woman who never failed to greet him with a hug. He pointed to his chest and squealed: "Shay Gebaba!" --read more >>

Good news! We're migrating to a new server so we'll have lots more space!

Bad news - we're migrating.....

The plan is to start with the smallest sites and build up to do GM and HM last. Everything will start tomorrow, with estimated finish about seven days later.

So there will be lots of trouble and troubleshooting. Please be patient with us -- we're hoping this solves the late week & weekend crashes, as well as a lot of the random problems that have been popping up lately. Don't forget to back up anything that you treasure just in case

Thanks!

addendum from techMama Lynn:

The migration is going better in some ways than expected--at least faster! So you may be seeing turbulence on HM and GM within the next 24 hours--"now" being 4:30 pm PDT on Friday. You'll see a migration notice go up on the site just before I start moving stuff. I need prayers, lit candles, good wishes incense, whatever it is you do for luck. My altar looks like the Fourth of July AND Guy Fawkes Day right now...

Only an hour after my D & E, still groggy from the anesthesia and reeling from the shock of the previous few days, I hastily exited the hospital where a few years earlier, I delivered two healthy, perfect baby girls. Just outside the sliding glass doors, the sounds of the city flooded my ears. The stench of smoke exhaled by hospital employees on their break and exhaust from engines impatiently sitting in traffic, hit me square in the face. Still in an anesthetic fog, I stumbled to the nearest trash bin perched next to a meter threatening to expire, and wrestled off my hospital ID bracelet, cutting off the circulation in my left arm in the process. I then tossed the only souvenir of my "visit" (aside from future medical bills) in the receptacle, and walked arm in arm with my husband and father to our car in the parking garage, where we left it just a few hours earlier.--read more >>

At seven weeks, Ben was thriving; nursing constantly through a growth spurt, alert and interested in the world, smiling at his dad and me. He had just gotten control of his hands and we laughed as we watched him wrap one hand around the other and, brow furrowed in concentration, push it into his mouth. Self-soothing! we crowed, and encouraged the behavior as best we could. It was hard to imagine a day when he would actually pick something up to put in his mouth.--read more >>

Someday I'll have to have the "where do babies come from" talk with my children. My oldest is five years old, and I try to work in basic plumbing information about uteruses, penises, eggs, and sperm. I've given him the basics about his parentage, which is a bit complicated. His biological father is not involved, nor is he interested in being. I am divorced from the Daddy he's known since he was born, and he lives with me and my partner, who functions as a step-parent to him.

Compared to what I will tell my future children, however, it seems quite boring. I can't wait for the day I sit my children down and say, "Now I will tell you the story of how Mommy knocked up Daddy."

My partner and I are queer, and we, like most queer couples, have to do an elaborate dance to get one of us knocked up. It almost makes me long for the days of, "Oops! The condom broke!" (...I said almost!)--read more >>

MARCH 2008 EVENTS

Jessica & China, zine friends together at last!
Radical Mama "Boots & Books" Book Tour
California - Bay area - tour dates

March 19 - Bookreading @ AK Press Warehouse in Oakland
March 20 - Bookreading @ Modern Times in SF with Tomas (Rad Dad zine) & Rahula (Joybringer zine)
March 22 - SF Anarchist Book Fair - tabling and Radical Parents Forum
March 23 - SF Anarchist Book Fair - tabling
March 24 - looking for a venue in Santa Cruz

MAY 2008 EVENTS

MOTHER'S DAY PARTY & VARIETY SHOW IN PORTLAND!--read more >>