questionaire

About My Family
i am a 32 year old woman. mother, wife, and spiritual basketcase...sometimes it is a very pretty basket with a lovely ribbon on it :) my husband is 25 years old. i try very hard to be a hippie . matters of interest to me are (unassisted) homebirth (of which i have done two...guess which), frugality, environmentalism, feminism, mysticism, politics, and the internet

What are your children's ages and names?
sebastian roger (9)
river frederick jack (2 1/2)
bellaluna evalina (1)

Are you considering having more?
NO

How would you describe your parenting philosophy?
i am going to try to see how much LOVE my children can contain. we are very LOVING. every single day when each person wakes up, all the others are waiting to love them and excited to see them. (my childhood was QUITE far from THAT) i am quite unorthodox for our "environment" (town, state, nation, planet haha) so i do my best to encourage that in my children, so at least the five of us will be similar :) i also am trying an experiment where i try to mother like a "grandma" so that my children will never say that i was a shitty mother but a wonderful grandmother. i am hoping that turns out well!
to improve upon my childhood is inevitably simple. but i suppose that that is what is my inner gauge, whether i want t to be or not. :)
since we are a blended family (my oldest son is from my first marriage, his father has since passed away) we have a family name, MOONSTONE, which makes us one family under one banner. one of the wisest and smartest things i ever did! :)

What's your favorite parenting book (if any)?
spiritual midwifery, mrs. sharp's traditions,

What are your family’s favorite books and toys?
i am very very picky (or try to be) and have a very small screen with which these kids (and their relatives) can slip through toys from china or name brands or media charecters.

i own hundreds of books for the children (and myself) it is my prized accomplishment in the material world that i have built up a library for them (and our family)...

right now, sebastian and i are working our way through the harry potter books and the babies just enjoy getting them off the shelves and tossing them around. river likes the pokey little puppy rather a lot at the moment

What are you family’s favorite TV shows or movies?
we don't have cable television, only movies on vcr or dvd. and very limited ones at that. i dont really allow what i call "commercialized" television/movies. if there is a charecter you have to BUY (ie dora or thomas the tank engine, etc) i dont go there (and the grandparents are getting wise to it finally :) )

river has been watching the oldskool willie wonka and the chocolate factory for nigh on 8 days now....


What are your family's favorite foods?
i am a pretty good cook. better than fair, i'd say. so i make good meals and nice things that are each person's favorite.

the thing i am PROUD as hell about in the food department, is that i have been making bellaluna's baby food from (as) scratch (as possible) and THAT feels WONDERFUL!!!

What are your family's favorite places to hang out?
in our living room.
outside in the yards

What one adjective would you choose to describe your household?
MOONSTONE


What do you see your kids doing when they grow up?
sebastian- teacher....river- cassanova haha bella- i am not sure yet

Describe your most humbling parenting moment.
when sebastian's dad died and i had to help him with Death and Grief and at the same time being his only parent now

Who are you looking to meet on The Playground?
anyone really...

on which i type about going to college...and a lot of death

i am so jealous of people that have gone to college that i could commit suicide about it sometimes.

i won't, because i am weak...and i would probably get reincarnated as someone who didn't/doesn't/won't/can't go to college AGAIN.

i do not know what your mother did when you were a kid. but i can pretty much bet that you try not to do it and it is killing you.

(lots of death already and i have written three sentences. THAT is how much this hurts)

my mother went to college while i was a kid. therefore, i won't/cannot do that to my children. i don't even think it is a BAD thing, when i think about my mother and myself as PEOPLE. i am REALLY proud of her, in a politically correct kind of way, and even in my heart and mind i know it is a GREAT achievement. but, god it hurts like hell too.

i DIDN'T get to go....i COULDN'T get my shit together...the INSTABILITY and UTTER MADNESS of my childhood was FAR TOO INTENSE for my OVERLYSENSITIVE beingness.

i will take ALL the blame...and how! i will take ALL the disappointment at the pissing away, shitting away, vomiting away, drinking and drugging away, all the rotting and decaying away of the (supposed) POTENTIAL that i was BORN WITH (or aquired somewhere in the first 6 or so years of my life)...

don't think that is not what i am doing while you are at your job, or having your social life, or being otherwise functional and worthwhile. :)

there are as many factors to my DOWNFALL and BOTTOMFEEDING "life"style as there have been days, weeks, months, decades, seconds and years of my "life" thus far.

and there will be as many EXCUSES and SICKNESSES and PAINFUL moments, days, weeks, years, and milliseconds as humanly possible before i ever get myself put together. because i have a feeling that Steffy Dumpty fell off that wall a too long time ago.

When i was seven years old, my second grade teacher instructed her husband to build a six foot tall by 3 feet in length 3-sided wooden box. i would've LOVED to've been privy to THAT conversation...

(if there is a heaven, or an afterlife in which ANYTHING from this world is relevent, i am going to ask to SEE that man building THAT box....)

My "teacher" then brought THE BOX into the classroom and sat it up against the cubby wall. THEN scooted my desk into it...my tiny little second grade desk and chair...ever seen one???

When i got to school that morning, i WONDER so much what i thought. I will wonder for the rest of my life why i didnt fight back, or resist, or cajole my way out. but i didn't.

And for MONTHS i spent all my "classroom" time IN THE BOX...except for recess, where the kids would SCOURGE (i didnt KNOW that word, looked it up and it's right) me like you may have never seen a child be treated...lunch (where i am sure i binged...don't even think i didnt binge) and GIFTED CLASS.

Why? Why did this happen?! i spent my entire adolescence and early adulthood drinking bourbon, smoking weed and asking myself that question, whether directly or indirectly.

FINALLY when i was 28 years old, i asked my mother point blank (my mother who was in college to become a TEACHER while i was IN THE BOX)...

she answered thus:

"when you were in kindergarten i went to your first parent teacher conference and your teacher jumped my case because you weren't doing your M....Munchy Mouth papers...."

(i could READ at 3 years old....i picked up a book and READ it...think Mathilda, my mother's nickname for me)...

***my son, sebastian just walked into this room and said "that is a lot of typing you are doing momma. and what is it going to matter for. what good is it anyway, writing anything???***

So, yeah, the BOX...it really has EVERYTHING to do with me...EVERYTHING. and i have tried EVERYTHING i can think of to rid myself of it, but THAT IS WHO I AM ....i am THE GIRL WHO GOT PUT IN A BOX AND CANNOT HEAL HERSELF OF THAT.

i have been to therapy...THEY cannot HEAL ME OF IT either.

i have been to gurus...THEY cannot HEAL ME OF IT either.

it is who i am.

i do not know what has happened to you that MADE you who you are. but being isolated in a wooden box when i was a fragile seven year old impoverished beautiful starchild, who yes talked too much because i was bored...

THAT is why i can't/won't/don't/haven't/should/ain't gone to college.

It ruined ME...destroyed ME. and NOTHING will fix it. and NOW i have CHILDREN of my own, so i can't go to school. i won't because i cannot leave them. because they cannot ever feel ISOLATED or ALONE.

This has altered my genetic legacy. This has profoundly affected my mental well being and therefore my ability to be an outwordly good, rational, okay, organized, nice, educated, possibly socially acceptable person.

Who would i be if it hadn't've happened? I dunno. i am sure as stacked as the deck was against me (poverty, instability, family history of alcoholism and addiction, etc etc etc) if it weren't for THE BOX i imagine SOMETHING would've done me in.

Do i think that i would've gone to college and BECOME SOMEONE/SOMETHING if it hadn't've been for THE BOX? i doubt it.

what i know is that i read blogs alot and i read about STRUGGLING blogger/mother/freelance writers who have college degrees (and you can bet your sweet fuckin bippy have had CUSHIER lives than mine has been) who OPINE all day long about what a STRUGGLE their lives are. God, that hurts me sooooooooooooo badly. Like being beaten. With clubs.

but, here i go! there are dishes to be done and breakfasts to be made and bottles and SOMETHING for bastian- i hope! and a husband who is still here even though i am mean, computer addicted, and he has do deal with this fragile girl in the box eightthousandmillion times a day....

i wrap it all up in a box called Depression and TRY SO FUCKING HARD to tie any kind of pretty bow around it for decoration and i TRUDGE ahead through the muck and the beautiful.

don't we all???

guess who's coming to dinner

By FRANK RICH
for the New York Times
Published: November 1, 2008



AND so: just how far have we come?


As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn't seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was Hollywood's idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents' blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.
Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too "white" — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? "He's so calm and sure of everything," says his fiancée. "He doesn't have any tensions in him." She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to "be president of the United States and they'll all have colorful administrations."

What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama's own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In "Dreams From My Father," he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what's most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears "so calm" and without "tensions" — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being "clean" and "articulate," he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy's lines of 41 years ago.

Biden's gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama's candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." It's why so many got this election wrong so often.

There were countless ruminations, in print and on television, asking the same two rhetorical questions: "Is He Black Enough?" and "Is He Tough Enough?" The implied answer to both was usually, "No." The brown-skinned child of biracial parents wasn't really "black" and wouldn't appeal to black voters who were overwhelmingly loyal to the wife of America's first "black" president. And as a former constitutional law professor, Obama was undoubtedly too lofty an intellectual to be a political street fighter, too much of a wuss to land a punch in a debate, too ethereal to connect to "real" Americans. He was Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis or Bill Bradley in dark face — no populist pugilist like John Edwards.

The list of mistaken prognostications that grew from these flawed premises is long. As primary season began, we were repeatedly told that Hillary Clinton's campaign was the most battle-tested and disciplined, with an invincible organization and an unbeatable donors' network. Poor Obama had to settle for the ineffectual passion of the starry-eyed, Internet-fixated college kids who failed to elect Howard Dean in 2004. When Clinton lost in Iowa, no matter; Obama could never breach the "firewalls" that would wrap up her nomination by Super Tuesday. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the many who bought its spin noticed the take-no-prisoners political insurgency that Obama had built throughout the caucus states and that serves him to this day.

Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama "lazy," and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he'd have a "serious problem" winning over Hispanics. Well, Obama was lazy like a fox, and is leading John McCain among Hispanics by 2 to 1. Obama has also pulled ahead among white women despite the widespread predictions that he'd never bring furious Hillary supporters into the fold.

But certainly the single most revelatory moment of the campaign — about the political establishment, not Obama — arrived in June when he reversed his position on taking public financing. This was a huge flip-flop (if no bigger than McCain's on the Bush tax cuts). But the reaction was priceless. Suddenly the political world discovered that far from being some exotic hothouse flower, Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.

Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being "post-racial." Smiley pointed out that there is "no such thing in America as race transcendence." He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it's built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.

Yet much has changed for the better since the era of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, "Pictures at a Revolution," it was not until the year of the movie's release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film's final cut there's still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple's nuptials could be illegal (as Obama's parents' marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.'s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn't accept it.)

Obama's message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that's where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.

Still, the country isn't there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can't quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

After some 20 months, we're all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.

Obama doesn't transcend race. He isn't post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.

But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We'll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out

HUMANS (sunday church for steff)

the thing i am maybe most sad about, in a twisted way, in all of this POLITICS stuff, is that i feel that a majority of the population is questioning itself and its beliefs and even if they are being pigheaded, ultra(anti)-christian, racist low i.q. denizens of AMERICUH, at least they are thinking and conflicted and downright manic....

and that is giving me a bit of respite in the balance. because that's how i always am, and i am feeling some psychic relief from everyone else doing a bit of CARING and THINKING.

i think i am going to miss that.

and i want the weak little sprouts of positivism and hope and change to have a chance to grow and i am doing my best to THINK that the shit i am hearing that is negative and hateful and so anti-(the) Christ energy and message (and i am talking about You, here: racist, sexist, supposedly "christian", usually older than dirt but sometimes fresh as a daisy hate-filled closeminded Real americans)...is just what it feels like when taken positively, it is shit...manure.

any of you with any sort of that negativity and closed smallmindedness who cannot see that positive energy is REAL and that there are those of us who COLLECT it and STORE it and USE it as our main energy source are HURTING and SCARED and it comes out in your pinched off high-pitched terrified (because those with whom you have alighned yourselves with have TERRORIZED you for decades, but especially this last one) voices. Or your bullheaded bible verses and skewed mishmashmix of politireligion
which is not serving you but working against you and all that you hold dear.

there IS a heaven and it is here on earth. and the jesus in that book would not be an american "CONSERVATIVE". would NOT. period.

would not be an american "LIBERAL" either.

he would be JESUS the son of DIVINE.

and there is little to no place for DIVINE in american party politics, nor in america at all. trust me, i have looked.

and you have to understand that i am NOT, in any mindframe, looking at this as MCCAIN "people" are wrong and OBAMA "people" are right.

you have to've witnessed my mental anguish enough to know that i am not like THAT or saying THAT.

not even in my beloved Green Party (have you read the platform yet?) is perfection to be found, or even DIVINE (but golly lots more of it, in my opinion)...

But ALL AROUND is secularist flotsom and jetsom. on BOTH sides. but my goddess, the things and ignorance and fear and hatred and stupidity and intolerence and all-out shittiness that i hear from ONE PARTICULAR SIDE about its fellow HUMANS, not about the ECONOMY or TAXES or even LAWS or things that the GOVERNMENT is supposed to preside over EXECUTIVELY....

but about BLACK HUMANS
and SOCIALIST HUMANS
and MUSLIM HUMANS
and KENYAN HUMANS
and BIRACIAL HUMANS
and NON-EVANGELICAL HUMANS
and COMMUNIST HUMANS
and PLUMBERS
and MEXICAN HUMANS
and FELLOW AMERICAN HUMANS
and IRAQI HUMANS
and FEMALE HUMANS
and "LIBERAL" HUMANS
and PENNSYLVANIAN HUMANS
and RURAL HUMANS
and HUMANS WHO MAKE LESS THAN 250,000 DOLLARS PER YEAR
and HUMANS WHO MAKE MORE THAN 250,000 DOLLARS PER YEAR
and HUMANS WHO ARE RAPED BY THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS
and HUMANS WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY OWN THEIR OWN UTERUSES
and HUMANS WHO ARE ELITIST
and RED STATE HUMANS
and HUMANS WHO ARE WORTH LITTLE MORE THAN POLL NUMBERS

and on and on and on and on....

THAT is very very UNDIVINE, isn't it?

arise

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: "We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says "Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice."

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.



***julia ward howe

frugalmama tip 1: cheapass playhouse

MAMAS:

i recommend getting a 9.99 Rubbermaid brand "closet"...ours is for bastians clothes, but try telling that to river.

if it really WERE his playhouse i could NEVER get him out of it.

it has a polymer navy cover with a zipper.

cheapness and GOODNESS...

thought for the minute

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and over fifty for Miss America ?

dear twelve year old steffani

Dear Twelve Year Old Steffani...

yes, you! you in your powder blue bedroom with your oversized knockoff swatch watch wall clock and your white, pink, and seagreen boom box with pursestraps that incessantly plays R.E.M and other things none of the other kids have heard about...

you of the classical music and the miami university public access radio and the secret delusions of grandeur.

you of the sea breeze and sassy magazine....

someday when you are thirty two years old you will assist a physicist at oxford in england write the last sentence of his doctoral thesis. he will ask YOU if it is grammatically correct.

you will have regular communication with a lawyer four years your senior who absolutely and positively tells you that you are the most intriguing woman he has ever met.

You will have traveled this nation from one coast to the other to the other to the other and you will have driven most, if not all of the way.

one night in omaha nebraska you will be pursued by the lead singer of a rock and roll band who will steal pages from your notebook and write songs based on your poetry.

So much is going to happen to you in the next twenty years! It is almost a pity that so far all of this has had to do with MEN, for the most part. But you are sitting there wondering if you will ever find ANY one to ever love you or respect you or care about you at all...Girl, are you in for it!

Twenty years from now you will have been married, divorced, widowed, and remarried and you will be the mother of three gorgeous children.

You were right about the jesus stuff AND about the bush stuff. Good girl!

well, i have to go for now...two of those gorgeous children of Ours NEED us...umm...you! me!

:)

i won't tell you what they look like or even if they are boys or girls or such things as that! have fun dreaming up names!

if i told you that you are beautiful it could screw up the crooked, gorgeous path it will take you to get here...so i won't.

you'll figure that out, in the by and by.

All my love,

Thirty Two Year Old Steffani

ps

you live to see the end of the white patriarchy! but don't tell anyone! just keep that silent little grin to yourself!