As many of you have noticed, Global Mama has been on vacation.  It wasn’t really a planned vacation, more of a hiatus in a busy life.  But she’s back!

Truth is, I have been off doing other things this past semester.  For one, I had the privilege of being on pre-tenure leave from my teaching job, and boy oh boy, did I have some projects to work on.  And I did get a lot of work done.  Of course, not everything I might have wanted!  But then again, I never do.

You see, I tend to have big eyes.  I dream up projects and get terribly excited about them and then, somewhere between making dinner and driving my kids to ice hockey and working full-time and sitting down to a long conversation with my husband and trying to squeeze in phone calls to dear friends, I realize that I simply don’t have enough time.

In the past, I have compensated with one of two methods: not sleeping at night, and working during the weekends.  Frankly, #1 makes me irritable and cranky (I am a solid 9-hour-a-night sleeper) and #2 is no longer acceptable.  Weekends are for play, and my kids are no longer babies who take long naps and simply come along for the ride.  They can play by themselves and with their friends, sure, but it also turns out that we are a high-energy family who likes to go places and take hikes and play sports and spend time with one another.  Which means that working during the weekend not only makes everyone else (most of all my husband) irritated—it makes me cranky and feeling like I am missing out on all the fun.

So I made a very conscious decision to live my life with balance this past fall, and guess what?  I did.  I worked, but I also played.  I wrote in my journal.  I read books that have been on my reading list for years.  I took Spanish lessons so that I could help my daughter with her homework (she’s in a dual-language program, a topic that I wrote about here).  I went to all of the school events: the Halloween parade, the winter concert, the gingerbread house art day.  I even (horrors) found myself on a school committee.

During the (unseasonably cold) first- and second-grade Halloween parade (I think the weather was hovering around 40 degrees), which consisted of the kids walking around the concrete parking lot in costume while the middle school band played what they had managed to learn in two months of school (the same medley, over and over…), my daughter giggled the entire time.  This despite the fact that we had rejected her idea of bringing a light saber to the parade (per the school’s detailed Parade Instruction Note).  Even without her weapon of choice, she proudly strutted around, showing off her paper-thin Luke Skywalker costume.  (Her flourish had been to pull her hair back into a low ponytail, so that she looked just like a boy.)

I turned to another parent and asked, “Do they always hold the parade on Friday?”  And when she nodded yes, I realized: this was the first time I had made it.  I had missed, all those other years, because I had been at work.  I suddenly felt empty and hollow inside.  I promised myself not to miss the next one.

Now, before I get too sentimental, I will also say that as I walked to my car, wishing I had remembered to wear a hat, I was thinking about a couple of other things.  For one, being a mom who obsessively worries, I could not help but wonder: how many kids will get sick after parading around for so long in their flimsy costumes?  For another, what about all the parents who have no job flexibility to attend a Halloween parade on a Friday morning?  A lot of middle- and working-class families live in our school district, a lot of them Spanish-speaking, many of them recent immigrants who are working very hard simply to survive.  (In fact, a lot of families are working very hard simply to survive.)  Should we really be holding all of these events that many parents can’t attend?  They are, after all, fairly impractical and, from an adult perspective, unnecessary.

This last semester taught me something else, though: having fun is really, really important.  Kids need to play, and you know what?  Adults do, too.  (And based on all my reading this semester, I might even argue that art is a sophisticated form of adult play… but that’s for another day!)

So I have also promised myself to keep the spirit of play alive, as I go back to the classroom this semester.  Maybe I can’t require my college students to parade around in costume, but I can certainly work on figuring out ways of keeping it fun for all of us.

Arne Duncan and I have often held differing opinions when it comes to our children’s education. Considering that he use to run the school system where my seven-year-old attends school, I have years of experience of yelling back at my radio hoping that Duncan hears my cries. In December the results from another international test to gauge where the world’s children rank were released. The USA did not get an A+. Duncan bemoaned our results in math, science and language and pointed towards China as a threat to our intellectual dominance.

But I’m really not that worried about China.

No, I’m not happy that our kids had an average score. I’m not happy that we’re losing ground to other countries. What I really am worried about is that this news will fuel a new fervor to copy China’s method of educating our kids. And that’s the real bottom line isn’t it? How do we want to educate our children? What kind of children do we want to raise?

“Successful ones!” I hear you. But how do you define successful?

In China children spend all day in school drilling facts and perfecting test prep. Believe me, our kids are perfecting test prep here too. When my daughter came home from kindergarten with homework sheets that had bubbles on it, I nearly lost it. “Really? Are we already teaching them how to fill in standardized test bubbles?” And my daughter attends one of the best public schools in Chicago.

Of course some parents, like Amy Chua, are all for turning our schools into American Chinese schools chock full of rote and consequences. I’m thankful that the Wall Street Journal highlighted her highly offensive parenting style. Because it reveals the end of the path we have allowed our schools to start walking down. That is the true wake-up call. For all our desire to regain our global dominance, we have gutted our children’s education.

Gym? Cut for additional study time. Ditto for art, music and recess. All this despite the fact that music HELPS our children learn and appreciate math better. Research shows that children behave better when given a mid-day recess. The 30 minutes my daughter and her classmates get before school does not meet my standard for a real recess. Play allows children to engage in many things including their imagination, negotiation and of course fitness.

The reality is that while China and other countries may be beating us out on standardized tests, the USA is still winning the overall education game. The number of Chinese students coming to the USA for graduate education continues to climb. They come here for the superior educational experience in all fields, including education theory. The USA is winning in terms of innovation and ideas. We may not be making a lot of widgets in this country, but we are overflowing with ideas on what to make, design and invent. I am though in favor of extending the school day, but not to cram in more studying at the expense of their imagination and well-being.

Yes, we have a lot of work cut out for us here in terms of our education system. Even from my daughter’s very privileged school I can see it. But we aren’t going to rise in the rankings by just teaching our children Chinese  or by increasing their access to test prep. Rather we will, as a country, increase our scientific literacy and achievement by increasing access to early childhood education, making the teaching profession one where dedicated people will flock, increasing the number of science labs and ensuring that every single school has a library. A recent demonstration at Whittier elementary school revealed that almost 200 Chicago Public Schools do not have a library. How can we ever believe we will get our children to learn more and achieve more if they do not have access to a school library?

There are many things we need to do to get our education system in working order. Worrying about China isn’t one of them.

The first study of California’s paid family leave (PFL) program details just how well it works for employers as well as families. Through California’s Paid Family Leave, eligible employees receive up to six weeks of wage replacement at 55 percent of their usual earnings to bond with a new child or care for a seriously ill family member. It is funded solely by employees paying into the program.

You can read Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Eileen Appelbaum and UCLA/CUNY’s Ruth Milkman’s report for the details but here are a few highlights:

A representative sample of 253 employers and 500 employees using PFL were surveyed in 2009-2010. Appelbaum and Milkman found that an overwhelming majority reported good results. Here’s what employers reported:

• 89 percent said that PFL had either a “positive effect” or “no noticeable effect” on productivity.
• For 91 percent, profitability/performance was neutral or positively affected.
• 96 percent reported a positive of neutral effect on turnover
• 99 percent (!) reported positive or neutral effects on employee morale
• 91 percent said “No” when asked if they were aware of any employee abuses of the program.

And from workers, a few highlights include:

• 84 percent of those in low-quality jobs using paid family leave received at least half of their usual pay while on leave.
• Only 41 percent of workers in low-quality jobs not using PFL received any pay while on leave
• The rate of bonding claims filed by men has climbed steadily since the beginning of PFL.
• Duration of breastfeeding among new mothers who used PFL also increased.

The report explains, “According to California’s Employment Development Department, in FY 09-10, 167,253 Californians used Paid Family Leave for bonding with new children and 23,220 used it to provide care for seriously ill family members.” Even so, one of the biggest problems they report is that too few people know they are eligible to participate. According to the report, “half the workers interviewed did not know the program existed, despite having had a qualifying circumstance for which to use PFL; low-wage workers, immigrants, and Latinos were least likely to be aware of the program.”

-Virginia Rutter

“For decades, Barbie has remained torpedo-titted, open-mouthed, tippy-toed and vagina-less in her cellophane coffin—and, ever since I was little, she threatened me,” writes Susan Jane Gilman in her article “Klaus Barbie.”

This sentiment towards Barbie, one Gilman describes as “heady, full-blown hatred,” is familiar to many females (myself included) – but, so too, is a love of Barbie and a nostalgia for Barbie-filled memories.

Feelings towards Barbie often lie along a continuum that shifts with life’s passages –as children, many love her, then as tween and teendom sets in, she is tossed aside, forgotten about for many years, and then later, when children come into one’s life – through mothering or aunty-ing, Barbie once again enters the picture. For feminist women, the question of whether or not Barbie is a “suitable” plaything for the children in their lives often looms large as they navigate the toy-fueled world of early childhood.

Daena Title’s “Drown the Dolls,” an art exhibit premiering this weekend at the Koplin Del Reio art gallery in Culver City, California, continues the feminist tradition of analyzing Barbie, this time with an eye towards “drowning” (or at least submerging) the ideals of femininity Barbie embodies. In the video below, the artist explains her fascination with Barbie as “grotesque” and how her distorted reflections under water mirror the distorted messages culture sends to girls and women about feminine bodily perfection.

Title’s project and the surrounding media campaign (which asks people to share their Barbie Stories in 2 to 3 minute clips at You Tube), has garnered a lot of commentary. Much of the surrounding commentary and many of the threads have focused on the issue of drowning as perpetuating or normalizing violence against women. For example, this blogger at The Feminist Agenda writes,

“When I look at the images… I don’t so much get the message that the beauty standard is being drowned as that images of violence against women – especially attractive women – are both acceptable and visually appealing in our culture.”

Threads at the Ms. blog as well as on Facebook include many similar sentiments. While I have not seen the exhibit yet, the paintings featured in the above clip are decidedly non-violent – they do not actively “drown” Barbie so much as showcase her underwater with her distorted image reflected on the water’s surface – as well as often surrounded by smiling young girls. As Title indicates in her discussion of her work, it is the DISTORTED REFLECTIONS of Barbie that captivate her – as well as the way she is linked to girl’s happiness and playfulness – a happiness that will be “drown” as girls grow into the adult bodies Barbie’s plastic body is meant to represent.

The reactions thus far of “drowning” as violent focus on the project’s title alone, failing to take the content (and context) of the paintings into account – they are not a glorification of violence but a critique of the violence done to girls and women (and their bodies and self esteem) by what Barbie represents.

To me, Title’s work is in keeping with the earlier aims of the Barbie Liberation Organization who infamously toyed with Barbie’s voicebox to have her say GI Joe’s line “vengeance is mine” rather than her original “math is hard!” Her work adds to the tradition of feminist work on toys, gendering, and girls studies – a tradition that is thriving and continues to examine new and old toys alike (as here and here).

The negative commentary regarding Title’s work as perpetuating violence seems to me a knee-jerk reaction – one not based in critical reading of her work. While maybe Barbie (and the bodily perfection her grotesquely ABNORMAL body represents) SHOULD sink, Title’s work – and the critiques of Barbie it is fostering, deserves to swim…

When men have children they start earning more—it’s the “daddy bonus.” The size of the bonus? About 11 percent of average earnings across a wide variety of educational, racial and ethnic characteristics. It begs some good questions, and sociologists Melissa Hodges and Michelle Budig at UMass Amherst have answered a lot of them in their recent Gender & Society article, “Who Gets the Daddy Bonus? Organizational Hegemonic Masculinity and the Impact of Fatherhood on Earnings” (abstract).

For example, you might ask, is the daddy bonus because men who are better at earning are also more likely to have kids? This is called the selection hypothesis, and Hodges and Budig’s analysis says “no.” In fact, having children creates a reversal of fortunes, a case of “negative selection.” The dudes who have kids have characteristics that suggest lower earning, not higher earning. But they end up turning it around when the babies arrive.

Is it because dads start to work more? When men become fathers they do work more. But that doesn’t produce the daddy bonus. Instead, the authors found that being married to a woman (a marriage bonus) accounted for about one-half of the increased earnings. Unmarried dads? No daddy bonus.

Is it because dads benefit from the breadwiner/caregiver model? Research sometimes shows that when wives de-emphasize market work (part time work or staying home) this is associated with men’s higher earnings (you can see a case of it here). Not so for whites and African Americans in this study, though it was true for Latinos. The “marriage bonus” for all groups, however, may relate to having the benefits of the extra share of domestic work that wives tend to do regardless of labor market participation.

Does everyone get the daddy bonus? Yes and no. All fathers, regardless of race and ethnicity, gain a wage advantage. But look at this: white dads received an 8.3 percent bonus, black dads a 7.3 percent bonus, and Latino dads a 9.2 percent bonus.

The authors explain: “Most men experience gendered advantages in the labor market, but not all men are equally privileged…. Men’s ability to capture the ‘patriarchal dividend’–privileges and rewards accruing to men by virtue of living in a gender-unequal society–varies by their other status characteristics….” What they are talking about is “hegemonic masculinity.” Think of it as the “war within the sexes” – you can read more about it here.

Hegemonic masculinity is a big term for a concept that we all know intuitively: that being a good man gets blended together with other cultural norms to amplify male privilege for some men more than others. As Joan Williams has explained so well, we think the “ideal worker” (you can find a discussion of here) is gender neutral. But work is organized so that people who don’t have competing responsibilities–for example, for the kids–fit in better than people who have work-family conflicts. And those people, overwhelmingly (though not always) are men. Indeed, many of the cultural norms relate to work, others relate to heterosexuality. The effect is that it just seems obvious who has “earned” their rewards.

Hodges and Budig found that the fatherhood bonus is bigger for white men in professional/managerial positions, for white men and Latinos with college degrees, white men in occupations that emphasized mental activity more than physical activity, white men and Latinos in jobs that de-emphasized strength, and (as mentioned above) Latino men with more economically dependent spouses.

So, all men benefit from college education (though the benefits aren’t so great for everybody, as you can read here), and all men benefit from fatherhood. But fatherhood benefits for college educated white men is about 21 percent, Latino men 19 percent, and African American men is 7.3 percent (no different from the benefit for non-college educated African American dads).

The authors sum it up: “…the effect of becoming a father is another source of privilege for privileged men, but less so for men who are in more socially disadvantaged positions.” So, if you were looking for an example of “hegemonic masculinity,” now you have one.

-Virginia Rutter

The other week, Science Daily and then The New York Times reported on the growing evidence of a biological basis for gender-specific play in humans.  I’ve been watching my 15 month old b/g twins for signs of gender and while I’m thoroughly convinced by the science that shows differences in the way boys and girls develop fine and gross motor coordination at this age, I hate where the larger thread of cliché-ridden thinking—boys do this, girls do that—commonly goes.

I also find it confusing.

Haven’t our feminist foremothers, and now my own generation, been working tirelessly at leveling the playing field so that things between the sexes could be fair? What good is all that talk about equity and equality if we’re all just programmed gender bots from the start?

According to a new study appearing in the journal Current Biology, scientists at Harvard University and Bates College have reported some of the first evidence that young, wild chimpanzees “may tend to play differently depending on their sex, just as human children around the world do.”  Biology, it seems, has a larger role to play in the gendering of childhood than we’d known—or cared to admit.  While the evidence is called “suggestive,” it’s based on 14 years of data gathered on chimpanzee behavior at the Kibale National Park in Uganda and is being heralded as proof of “the first known sex difference in a wild animal’s choice of playthings.”  This work adds to a growing body of evidence that human children are most likely born with their own ideas of how they want to behave, rather than simply mirroring other girls who play with dolls and boys who play with trucks.

In one swoop, the news reifies what some of us might wish to think of as retired gender codes of yore and scrambles feminist expectation.

So what, precisely, did the researchers find?  Young female chimpanzees were treating sticks as dolls, carrying them around and treating them like infants until they had offspring of their own.  They slept with the sticks.  Some built the sticks a nest.  Some even played a chimp version of the “airplane game,” lying on their backs with their “offspring” balanced across their upraised hands.  The young males?  Not so much.

Previously, toy selection among humans was thought to be due largely to socialization.  Researchers have recorded robust sex differences in children’s toy play around the world, yet there’s been remarkable cross-cultural consistency in the choices boys and girls tend to make. The prior thinking was that this behavioral difference was due to the influence of peers, parents, and others in modeling gender-specific behavior.  If you’re a girl and you see your mother, sister, and best girlfriend cuddling and making nest for sticks, chances are you will too.

But not so, according to the new evidence.  Adult chimps use sticks for foraging or fighting. So the young females’ behavior in the Kibale National Park, it seemed, was not learned.  Once the female chimps bore their first offspring, they stopped carrying sticks.  The new findings clearly link juvenile play to adult behavior, since female chimpanzees, not males, carry infants more than 99 percent of the time.

Parlay the assumption to humans and you end up with the speculation that girls are biologically programmed to play with dolls.

Pretty convincing.  But here’s the catch: researchers hadn’t seen anything like this in other chimpanzee communities outside the Kibale National Park, which raises the possibility that the Kibale chimps were copying a local behavioral tradition.  “[T]his may be a lovely case of biological and social influences being intertwined,” one of the researchers said.

If you ask me, the conclusion that girls are doll-wielding gender bots seems a little premature.  There’s a lot we simply don’t know.

(I’ve started to gather thoughts about the gendering of childhood and how it’s playing out in my own petrie dish at the Tumblr I created called The Pink and Blue Diaries.  Come visit if interested!  I’m still mostly just checking the whole Tumblr thing out.)

Wishing all of you happy holidays — the very, very best!

May your fires be bright,

Deborah & the GWP Family

PS. Look for some exciting changes around here in 2011!

/* Style Definitions */
table.MsoNormalTable
{mso-style-name:”Table Normal”;
mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0;
mso-tstyle-colband-size:0;
mso-style-noshow:yes;
mso-style-priority:99;
mso-style-qformat:yes;
mso-style-parent:””;
mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt;
mso-para-margin:0in;
mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt;
text-indent:.5in;
mso-pagination:widow-orphan;
font-size:11.0pt;
font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”;
mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri;
mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;
mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri;
mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;
mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”;
mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

Dexter’s eye for an eye vigilantism came to a gripping season finale this week with Jordan Chase, serial rapist and murder, brought to a bloody end by Lumen. (If you are not familiar with the show, go here and here for two good feminist overviews of the series or see this series of posts here.)

Season five had much to offer feminist viewers.

For example, Dexter’s single dad status led to one episode with a mommy and me play date that revealed the ruthless world of toddler/parent interaction. As the lone dad, Dexter was the outcast amongst a sea of women – many who viewed him with extreme suspicion. The episode avoided demonizing the moms though, and instead suggested just how gendered the parenting realm is and how dads, when they walk amongst this “female world,” are outsiders in many regards.

And, the rape revenge fantasy at the heart of the season involving Dexter and Lumen allowed for a insightful exploration of sexual assault and violence against women. Lumen (played by Julia Stiles), one of two survivors of a murderous gang that raped, tortured, and murdered 12 women, joins forces with Dexter to bring the male perpetrators to justice. That justice in Lumen’s and Dexter’s book is vigilante murder may not seem in keeping with feminist aims for a less violent world.

So, why was this season good viewing for feminists? Yes, the violence is visceral and the blood excessive. The administered justice is very harsh – with murder on the agenda for those serial killer Dexter decides “don’t deserve to live.” But, underneath its brutal exterior, the show also presents us with deeper moral questions about a legal system that consistently fails to catch or punish serial killers, rapists, and child abusers – and, deeper still, about what type of society breeds such violence and, if indeed our legal system creates just as many criminals as it attempts to apprehend.

The depiction of Lumen – a female raped, tortured and nearly murdered who realizes that the violence done to her cannot be denied and will forever change her view of the world and her place in it – was extremely powerful and expertly played by Stiles. As noted at Feminists For Choice, “the show does an above-average job of accurately depicting the agony of rape trauma syndrome and PTSD.” Moreover, by suggesting the boy-gang formed at summer camp that ultimately became a group of male serial killers is related to the equating of masculinity with violence (and particularly violent sexuality), the show functions as a scathing critique of guyland and its codes.

Ironically Dexter, the serial killer at the show’s center, is one of the best models of masculinity in the series – he is a good father, partner, and brother struggling in a world that often rewards the wrong people. Jordan Chase, leader of the murderous gang is a prime example of this – as a successful self-help celebrity, he is rewarded with admiration and wealth. Yet, beneath his shiny exterior, he is the mastermind behind the torture and rape of at least 14 women.

Men such as Jordan impel Dexter’s “dark passenger” to dole out punishment in order to partially make up for the brutal murder of his mother, which he witnessed as a young child. Yet Dexter suffers with his compulsion, feeling more monster than human. Here too, the show grapples with the complexity of morality and justice, showing that, as Deb reiterated again and again in this season’s finale, things are never simple. This message was also emphasized in the recent episode when Aster, Dexter’s tween daughter, showed up drunk. At first viewers were encouraged to see her as selfish and immature, to view her drinking and shoplifting as sign of a girl gone wrong. Yet, along with Dexter, viewers slowly realize Aster’s behavior was spurred by her attempts to help her friend, who was being abused by her stepfather. Such storylines reveal that often the “crime” committed (in this case, tween drinking and stealing) has much deeper roots than an individual’s “badness.” Indeed, the show turns the entire “a few bad apples” idea, where society is harmed by a handful of “evil people,” on its head. Instead, we see that our society is pervaded with rot – from tip to top – and that this rot is intricately linked to the violence done to girls and women by males raised on an excessively violent code of masculinity.

The show also explores how the competitive model of dog-eat-dog individualism leads to workplace backstabbing, especially among the few women who have had to claw and fight their way to the top.

This was exemplified this season via the storyline in which Lt. Laguerta (Lauren Velez) betrays Deb (Jennifer Carpenter). For me, this was the most problematic narrative arc – not only because it smacked of the “see what happens when you give women power” meme, but also because of its racialized undertones with a lying Latina throwing a wrench in the career of white female detective. However, given the racial diversity of the cast, the series avoids demonizing any one racial group, just as it avoids suggesting only men are violent or only women are victims. To the contrary, the show reveals that no one is safe from the violence that pervades our world and this viewer, like the Feminist Spectator, “can’t help celebrating Dexter’s queer victories, and looking forward to more” – not only because the show transgresses boundaries and challenges a social system organized around a decidedly unfair system of power and privilege, but more simply because, as foul-mouthed Deb would say, I fucking love it.

Just posted: Five Things I Learned about Writing in 2010

What’d YOU learn?  Share! And spread the writerly love #shewrites2010

Also brewing: The She Writes Recomm-engine. Looking to give a book as a gift but needing a recommendation? Tell She Writers who you’re looking to satisfy and tap the hive mind for suggestions!

When Baby X and Baby Y turned one a few weeks ago, something changed in my brain. A window opened just a crack, enough to let in the crisp air that tells me a change of seasons has transpired. I started tweeting. I refreshed my Google Reader to incorporate my new focus on all things writerly and She Writes-y. I started playing around with a Tumblr (not really public yet, but maybe soon!). And last Friday night, I went on a date with myself—my first since my twins were born.

Give a girl some moules frites, a glass of Shiraz, a notebook as a companion, and later in the evening, an old friend and a book party with some fabulous feminists (Gloria Steinem! Eve Ensler! Shelby Knox!) and suddenly she remembers who she is: A thinker. A writer. Ah yes, that.

It’s not that I haven’t been thinking lo these past twelve months. It’s that my brain has been, as they say, differently occupied. Taking care of twins in their first year of life, along with a new start up that’s all about (did I mention?!) supporting women who write, takes a lot of brain cells. It made sense that parts of me went on hold to grow new things. It’s all necessary and right and true. But here’s how I know that the sleeping parts of me are once again alive and kicking:

1. When last week’s snarky New York Magazine cover story about a generation of women who naively “woke up” from the pill to find themselves too old to reproduce, I plugged back in to good ole gut-busting outrage. (See Jill at Femiste’s most excellent response, “Oops! I Forgot to Have Babies”).  And I also started compiling news round ups at She Writes, to merge my worlds–like this one, today.

2. I made a batch of Tollhouse cookies on the weekend just for kicks. I used to make them all the time (those who know me know that I have a penchant for cookie dough). I hadn’t made them in, like, a year.

3. I’m following TEDWomen via the shiny new TweetDeck app on my iPhone. My buddy Courtney Martin is there, and so is dear friend Jacki Zehner, and I’m feeling vicariously hooked in to the thought leading femme-o-sphere.

4. In the space between things, I finished a second draft of a personal essay for an anthology. The essay is called “Genderfication Starts Here” and is about, guess what, the first year of raising boy/girl twins.

5. I’m moisturizing again. And taking baths on the weekend with my favorite lavender gel. And lighting candles. And browsing Levenger catalogues before falling asleep. All things I did NONE of lo this past year.

I’m curious to hear. When a part of YOU goes on mental hiatus for a while and then resurfaces, what are the signs to yourself that you’ve returned?

Photo cred: Tayari Jones