Ode to a Girl's Birthday

I want this post to be, for the most part, positive because today is Mina's birthday. Ten years ago my brilliant baby came out all head and hair. Papi, Maya and I were over the moon about her. Look at Maya's face with newborn Mina. You couldn't pry that smile off with a crowbar.
Here's Mina this morning, freshly 10, in her new birthday outfit with a Carmen accessory. Not suit, though. Not birthday suit. She probably would love to be photographed naked. She's a bit of a nudist when not adorning herself in high fashion.In honor of my girl -- both girls --I want this post to be a feminist one too --- wait, don't leave . . .we're reinventing this concept, haven't you heard? Pumping new life into it. We might even freshen up the word. We're having a meeting about it later, but the point is the cause can't be forgotten. Not as long as women are still being born, which they are, like, daily I heard. I know we're tired, sisters, but can't we keep up the fight just a while longer for ourselves, our sisters, our daughters? For our even more tired mothers and grandmothers? So many hard-fought issues have wilted over three decades and women’s rights issues get more and more blurry and we're left scratching our heads, at odds with each other, clinging to protective laws. I don't know about you, but as a mami to girls, I feel it my duty to put my girls on a seesaw while I sky-jump on the other end catapulting them into the stratosphere where they are not diminished or disempowered or told this and that about themselves. And if you're not a mami, you should want to jump on it with me too. Those girls were once you.

We watched Girls Rock! last night. It's a documentary about a rock and roll camp for girls ages 8-18. It was almost a great movie, and just from a film standpoint I think it missed some marks, but the concept of the camp had me choked up from when the beginning frame rolled. Seriously I wanted to burst into tears many, many times. It's that uncontrollable crying like when I watch the girls play basketball sometimes or when they used to do TaeKwonDo, or even at holiday pageants when they sing their hearts out. Something about the breaking down of self-consciousness to just let yourself be something. Kids are so pure about that and girls seem to learn to be self conscious and coy and withdrawn so quickly that when they are open without pretense in the most natural of ways, I get the waterworks. And this camp was all about checking all of that and breaking down and through what girls should or shouldn't be. I'm a stone-cold sucker for an awkward and unique girl. I can't help but think they are granted a halo of specialness and this camp was full of those types from troubled girls to girls completely on their own planet. I loved them all. The camp counselors floored me the most though. They were the coolest most patient and mixed group of women ever. They spoke to these girls like we all ache to be spoken.

The documentary would rattle off facts such as a boy will name a talent as what he likes about himself best while a girl will name a body part. And Maya and Mina would say, "Really? That's weird." Or a girls ability to say "I love myself" diminishes from 60% to 29% between the ages of 9 and 18. And Mina said, "Shoot, I love MYself." And Maya said, "I love MYself." And I said, "I love MYself." Or that girls tend to bottle up how they feel and I said, "Do you guys let out how you feel?" and they said, "Uh, yea." As in, duh.

And I'm left to wonder about the perpetuation of the squashed female spirit. How empty do the overused and well-marketed slogans of You Go Girl and Girl Power! seem? Does this still raise our daughters' esteem? I think so. But do they address any real issues of a girl feeling ok to speak up loudly in school or not keep crap bottled up or to not feel so self conscious. Do girls feel any sense of real entitlement yet? I'm not talking about the Queen Bees of school who bully themselves into that place of power. I'm talking about girls possessing a natural, comfortable, confident empowerment. Do any of us?

Why the hell not yet?

I wish the awesome rock and roll women from that camp would hold a national forum and help us change this. I mean, they are changing it 100 girls at a time every summer, but I mean . . .help, all of us.

I often ride the line of empowering Maya and Mina as girls and teaching them a solid sense of humanitarianism. I think being a decent human being is a priority, being thoughtful and respectful and compassionate and polite. And the fine line is teaching them that it is ok to be selfless yet still feel empowered. We are selfless and compassionate because we have enough power to share and NOT because we feel we are less deserving of anything, especially because we are women. If I had a son, I would teach him the same lessons of being a human. I would not teach him to be less selfless because he was a boy, and I say this because I want the girls to know I don't teach them these things because that's how girls should act, but anybody. I think they know that.

I think the girls have never felt disempowered because they are girls, but we are starting to navigate through the most tricky of territories, which is their observations of women in videos, on TV, in magazines and how these fabricated and cookie-cutter looks relate to their budding relationship with boys, and other girls frankly. Girls are told to be modest, be a lady for f sake, yet every woman on public display is tramped up. I'm trying to buckle on life preservers for my girls to wade through these treacherous waters. I tell them it is ok to reject what everyone thinks is the way you should dress or look. I tell them that this may not be easy. It takes a lot of bravery to be the awkward and unique one no matter how special you are or feel.

I can only have constant conversations with them about everything all the time. I can only let them know it's ok to question everything and have constant conversations about everything all the time. And this really is the only real gift I can give them.

Oh Mina, you are definitely my shining unique soul. Ain't nobody squashing you! I love you so much. Happy Birthday, baby.

And Sisters? I'm in your corner.

Seeds Were Planted

When I was nine, my mother rented us a room out of an apartment in Santa Monica from a woman named Jean who was an ex-nun. Or a former nun as my grandfather would say because ex means they're dead, he had said. The apartment was a run-down, first-floor dingy two bedroom place cluttered with a million years of Jean's stuff, but the apartment sat across the street from a bluff that overlooked the ocean. Inside, the place was grey and heavy and dark, but the windows revealed brightness and a sense of the spectacular.

My mother and I shared the back room off the alley which was sunlit during the day. What fit in the room was my mother's full-sized bed that we shared, our dressers and a thirteen inch black and white TV complete with wire hangers shoved into the rabbit ears. My mother hung every piece of art she owned or had painted on the walls and they covered it floor to ceiling. Every night my mother would watch TV from her side of the bed after I was told to roll over and go to sleep. I caught many episodes of Fantasy Island or the Merv Griffin Show with one eye open.

At the time, my mother was part of a team that put together the ceramic Heritage Floor of Judy Chicago's brilliant and feminist iconic art piece, The Dinner Party. The Dinner Party is a huge installation piece of a triangular table set for thirty-nine famous or impactful women in history. Each place setting features a cloth banner depicting some of their story, a plate, a challis-like cup and flatware; all made of ceramic. The Heritage Floor contains the names of 999 more women that have made a mark. The piece is on permanent display at the Brooklyn Museum and I highly recommend visiting it because when fully assembled it looks like God put the table together Herself. That entire summer, I hung out in and explored the massive warehouse-studio that was filled with the constant smell a fired-up kiln and freshly glazed ceramics. The plates were fashioned into the shape of colorful three-dimensional and flower-like vaginas. The glaze was often iridescent and without realizing exactly what they were -- though there was constant talk about the plates as vaginas -- I thought they were beautiful. Thirty or so women artists assembled the piece within the warehouse, all orchestrated by Judy's powerful vision and presence. I stayed clear of Judy as much as possible -- she scared me -- though I did get yelled at by her once when I knocked over some blueprints in a back concrete hall way. Of course I had bumped into them just as she was rounding the corner. The team of artists eventually taught me how to embroider a caterpillar for the Mary Wollstonecraft banner, which was terrifying. I did not know how to sew and my hands shook as I tried to make a perfect, shag-like caterpillar. During the process, I stared constantly at the scene embroidered on the main part of the banner which was of Wollstonecraft dying during childbirth. The satin crimson thread used for the pool of blood on the bed was a gorgeous color. It haunts me still a bit. Needless to say, this experience is a highlight of my life because the residual empowerment inherited to me locked into my young mind, and never left. Many of the women who worked on the project raged hard to reclaim this empowerment; they were boisterous and rebellious advocates of the ERA movement and of women's rights. They said things like "herstory" instead of history. They constantly sited how men were holding us down. My mother told me -- and they echoed -- that high heels were invented so women couldn't run from rapists. My mother also had a bumpersticker that read: "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," which is sadly ironic coming from her. But that's the point; these woman, including my mother, had to exaggerate a sense of entitlement to their rights to reclaim them, to even recognize what they were. While assembling The Dinner Party, we all received a tremendous herstory lesson that many of the women, no matter how bra-less or how much armpit hair they grew, still might not have known excised. And I, as a kid, absorbed it, without having been too tainted by sexism just yet. I was able to build a strong base of my womanhood first.

Jean The Former Nun didn't talk about why she had left the church. This seems a heavy and personal decision that would not be easily discussed with a child. I spent enough time with Jean for her to have had the opportunity to tell me, and I was still attending Catholic school which made the topic even more accessible, but Jean never did fill me in. I wish I knew now, but back then it didn't matter to me. I loved Jean nun or no nun. She was in her fifties and shaped like a ball. A ball with a short steal-grey haircut. She had two Siamese cats; a mother named Katrina and a cross-eyed son named Ivan who often fell off the TV when he napped. Jean worked at what was then called The Museum of Science & Industry and I would often go with her on the weekends she had to work. As she worked I would wander the halls of the museum alone for hours, staring at the kinetic energy display and the neon exhibit. The dental exhibit was one of my favorites because the set of teeth on display filled an entire room. I pretended to get eaten a thousand times.

Jean was a champion for me. A champion in an even stronger sense than my grandmother Mama because Mama never confronted my mother in regards to me, especially not in front of me. But Jean did; Why had she hit me for that? Why did she leave me alone? I couldn't believe my ears the first time I heard her speak up.

Months before my mother and I moved out of Jean's place, Jean had cleared out the front hall closet and crammed in a small desk for me to use. She clicked on the overhead light and said I could work in there, for homework or whatever I wanted. I said, "I can do what I like in here?" She said, "Absolutely." I promptly painted a portrait of Susan B. Anthony on the wall. I don't think that's what Jean had in mind, but she wasn't too mad at me about it. In that tiny closet, I tried to close the door with a chair at the desk, but it wouldn't shut all the way. I pretended anyway that I was in my own private office, and I decided then that I was going be a writer. I had written one small composition for my fourth grade class and it was the only piece of school work that the had nuns complimented me on. My teacher even read it aloud to my class and I temporarily soared out of by body for those few minutes. I sat at the desk in my closet, staring at Susan B. Anthony botched in acrylics. I never did write anything else in there, but the dreaming about it was grand.