MAU Live coming to town!!

CONTACT: Paige La Grone Babcock; paige@mothersactingup.org

***SAVE THE DATE: MAU LIVE! comes to Nashville Nov 2 & 3***

(M)OTHER HITS THE BOARDS

THEATRE FOR EMPOWERMENT PAIRED WITH WORKSHOP TO MOBILIZE MAMAS

“Once you get hooked on MAU’s positive breed of activism, the Nashville MAU community will be there with you to keep it going and growing.” –Paige La Grone Babcock, MAU Outreach Coordinator & Community Organizer

WHEN: Nov. 2, Friday at 7:30 PM

WHERE: First Unitarian Universalist Church, 1808 Woodmont Blvd.

WHO: Mothers Acting Up (MAU), working to ensure the health, education and safety of the world’s children by mobilizing the political strength of mothers.* www.mothersactingup.org

Nashville’s MAU community is honored and excited to bring MAU LIVE! and MAU co-founder Beth Osnes to town!! www.nashvillemau.blogspot.com

WHAT: MAU Live! Theatre for Empowerment: a one-woman performance by MAU co-founder Beth Osnes, (M)other explores what it might just take for the mothers of one country to authentically care about the mothers and children of another country. The fiction that the “other” is not part of the “mother” is washed away. What remains is a powerful affirmation of our interconnectedness in both our challenges and our solutions as a global community.

A Workshop for Empowering Mother* Voices: Nov. 3, Saturday 9AM-Noon, also at the First Unitarian Universalist Church

Beth Osnes will lead a workshop using theatre as a tool for developing our voices for effective public expression – of vital importance for any kind of civic participation. Goals of this workshop:

*teaching skills for effective vocal expression

*using our voices to ‘rehearse’ activism

*engaging all participants in actively devising solutions to obstacles

*conveying a model of activism that is positive and proactive

Background:
Mothers Acting Up (MAU) works to ensure the health, education and safety of the world’s children by mobilizing the political strength of mothers*. MAU inspires, educates and engages mothers (a gigantic force to be reckoned with) to prioritize children in our corporate and public policies through monthly Web actions, annual Mother’s Day events, field trips to elected officials, Girlcotts, and daily inspiration and tools found in a weekly calendar. MAU brings a new breed of activism to the political landscape; one that is positive, accessible and supports mothers in making informed personal choices, inspiring collective action and influencing decision-makers. MAU, founded in 2002, is based in Boulder, CO. MAU believes that when mothers lead, generations of global citizens will follow.

Let us:
whisper this to each other, sing it out in the streets,
yell it from our rooftops, declare it in our houses of government:
we will protect our children with our personal and political strength,
wherever they live on earth!

* mothers and others, on stilts or off, who exercise protective care over someone smaller.

Making words with letters.

The boy has been trying to spell.

Today he told me: " B-O-C. Backpack."


You should know, Backpack is what he says our last name is.

The humid tendril of your breathing.

from a letter dated april 2000, from my Mister, to me, this is the poem mentioned in the previous post when we were at the unraveling ends of other entanglements:

I was on the train the other day and saw this poem, the CTA dedicates a certain amount of advert space to culture --
still shocked by it occasionally, the thought of a corporation forgoing the
revenue for art's sake.... This made me think of you, like, instantly. I
tried to get all the punctuation right.......:

"Only your plastic nightlight dusts its pink
on the backs and undersides of things; your mother,
head resting on the nightside of one arm,
floats a hand above your cradle

to feel the humid tendril of your breathing.
There is space between me, I know,
and you. I hang above you like a planet --
you're a planet, too. One planet loves the other."

--Anne Winters

We should.

On his second birthday, Ziggy's days' long fever broke.

We nursed and nursed and nursed. In the morning, we looked at photographs from the day of his birth and of those just beyond. We played Dan Zanes and danced all around the kitchen cockadoodle doodle doo. We listened to Daddy Booty's self made CD radio show for the boy's gift.
Late in the afternoon, I took Ziggy for a walk and to a nearby park for the first time since our having moved to this home. He looked marvelous in tie dye and green sneakers, his peaked face a canvas for shining grey blue eyes.

There was pizza for supper. The boy picked the pineapple off to eat, his usually hearty appetite dumbed and dwindled by this latest viral bug. Gifts from the grands are unwrapped, the birthday calls come in, the bath is given. Our life: measured out by rhythm and routine, profound for two adults who spent so many years running from same for their own set of reasons, all of which makes things a greater challenge in the navigation of partnered life.



We keep trying, even though it's hard and we're often wrung out. Tired of each other, and just plain tired. There have been harsh words, from the both of us. I know from him telling me plainly that my Mister no longer likes or respects me. Much of the time, anyway. Admiration has faded, discontent breeds. Too often, I feel like an imposter in a life that doesn't fit quite right. I work on alterations of the pattern and the garment itself. And hope to rise to the occasion. Still, I am all too keenly aware of my failings. And mostly, I don't want to write about them or pretend that we're something we used to be but aren't anymore. I just want to let go enough to fix it.

Often, that means revisiting ideals to make adjustments like purchasing the jeans in a larger size instead of making do with discomfort. To meet the current day's challenges with new and different means. To wit, the Mother's Day Out program, a compromise to ideal that bows to wisdom and humble admission rather than vanity of affectation.

The Mother's Day Out program-- a break in the waiting list, calling our babe up to the Chickadees classroom-- has been staved off until next week. Ziggy's supplies: napmat, box of tissue, paper diapers in labeled zip lock, handsoap, hand sanitizer.... all await the big day in a basket on top of the bookcase by the door. Ziggy wants to see these things often. He wants to take them "to homeschool meeting," or "maybe a potluck."

My girlfriends, they want to have lunch, to get our toes done. I understand the loveliness of such things, but my own talk with myself several weeks ago, resulting in placing Ziggy on the roster for a hoped for place at this program (oh, it's a lovely one! and just down the road....) was brought about solely by my desire to work more efficiently, to hopefully bring in some greater income, to provide for my family. And to give Ziggy some attention and community activity during a time when I am unable to provide that piece. Additionally, I look for an intern, to find a solution as friend Maria says, to business-care, not just childcare.


And on these days of anniversary, and of illness, I am Mother first. "Mommy," as Ziggy calls me now, though he does, in fact, revert to his infant calling of me "NiNi" when he is ill or hurting. And on the night of anniversary of his second year of life on planet earth, he stirs and cries and calls "NiNi" many times before at last gentling down to sleep. My Mister lies there beside him.

We love one another across the expanse of space and time and child between us, and hope that somehow, though we have lost ourselves and each other, that we can perhaps find our way back. Not to the people we were, but to who we're supposed to become. There is rather a lot riding on our figuring it all out.



When shortly after we think he is asleep, the boy sits up suddenly and says, "We should go shopping!"the Mister's rough snore stops long enough for the boy to elucidate, "We can find some juice!" "We can buy some cow milk!"



Somewhere, beyond Mother, I am also just Woman, and Wife, Friend, Lover. Our boy is Child. And Daddy and Mister is Man. My man. We're this solar system of planets, separate, individuated, but connected. Always it is shifting, and sometimes, there are new rings and wrinkles discovered.

I remember a poem about lone planets loving one another. My Man sent it me long ago, when he and I both were intertwined with others but admiring one another from afar. Back in those days, we must have had a glimmer of the possibility embodied in this small jubilant being now at my knee telling me, "We should take a walk."

And so we go.

Thoughts on Sally and public passion.

Over at the Mothers Acting Up blog, I share on Sally.

Overly abundantly.

I can hardly believe I am the mother of an almost two year old.

Still nursing, still co-sleeping, still rocking our collective world with the amazing way his brain works. Still making us cry and laugh with abandon, still bringing us JOY abounding day after day, our Ziggy says to us, "overly abundantly." And that, friends, is how much I feel blessed.

In one week, two years ago, he was born. My sweet baby boy, who now says with regularity as he snuggles me up, "Mommy is my baby."

Cool Comic Alert.

Oh, this gal has it *going on*! Love it.

Despite having come late late late to the joy of comics (sure, I saw Archies and the like as a kid, but never knew of Julie Doucet or Megan Kelso or even Alan Moore's trippy metaphysical Promethea until my late twenties and into my thirties where I learned of them --respectively-- from an old beau, a chick crafting group, and a writer/editor pal).

Miss Malady I was introduced to via a writergrrls list I've subscribed to an participated in off and on for a whole bunch of years.

To be perfectly frank....

it's been a long, scorching, draining, and difficult summer. I feel like parts of me have dried up along with the parched earth and my abandoned garden at our former home. Try as I may to pull myself up by the bootstraps, I've just not had a whole lot to that I *cared* to write about. Part of that is that my openness seems now somehow compromised by other life circumstance, and some of that stems from wanting just to ride it out without a whole lot of input or extensive navel gazing.

Suffice to say, times have been far from their best.

Slowly, painstakingly, I've been moving us into the new place, unpacking the boxes, settling in, building up new garden beds for fall, keeping my mouth shut as much as I can when sometimes I want to simply holler and keep on hollering from a deep achey place.

Through it all, Ziggy has been a shining light and a source of tremendous joy. Being present for and with him, and staying focused on work and householding has taken the lion's share of my energies and then some.

This morning, I kind of woke us all up with an enormous scream. I'd fished my hand into the bleachy washing machine, the better to aid a thorough clean of our whites, when blam! a mouse (a mouse!!) leapt out of the water, onto my hand and I let loose with a blood curdling scream. I absolutely go all girly and screamy over mice, at least initially. Sure, I can see that they're quite cute, really, but that first sighting, particularly when it also includes the physicality of touch: Ahhhhhhhwwwwwwahhhhhhhhh!!!

Poor Ziggy, standing in the kitchen behind me, his mouth gone to trembling, looked ready to burst into tears and the husband flew past the bed covers and appeared ready for attack. Only my burst of laughter and shout of MOUSE! kept us on a slightly even keel. I grabbed up my Ziggy and hugged him tight.

The remainder of the morning, he has wanted to check out the brand new bleach hand print on my tee shirt and to find "another mouse, Mommy! We have to find another one," as he gazes beyond the sunroom windows to where we watched Daddy Booty loose the poor critter. (It ran, ever so quickly, into the layers of one of my garden beds, ever so carefully lasagna laden with cardboard, newsprint, compost, pine needles and soil.)


Wake up! Wake up. This is it. No dress rehearsal.


Come on, fall. I am so ready for your arrival.