the injectors draft revisions to a 1970s sex ed book for kids

I've had these pictures of this old book that k's parents used to explain sexual intercourse and offspring creation to her back in the seventies. It happily reinforces heterosexual romance, sex and hetero reproduction.

about 8 months ago we were putting the finishing touches on willa's room (which she only uses on occasion, but will use more as she gets older). Some of the finishing touches included making her a kid's library. Her shelf of books is full up of books from both her pack-rat, hoarder mamas (yes, numerous books from our own childhoods) and gracious gifts from friends. She is well-stocked to say the least, but our special gifts of 1970s and 1980s kids' books knowledge is an excellent addition. It puts her collection over-the-top.


some of her many books piled on the floor...

I mean who can brag about having the following how to talk to your children about sex book in their own personal kids library.

Of course, I will have to guerrilla plant the queer version of things into this text before my daughter ever gets her hands (or eyes for that matter) on the book. Here are some feeble editing attempts thus far:

kid at heart

I rode home in humidity that seems to be breaking toward fall--My chin dripping, my arms coated in a nice sheen of wet, my pants splotted with sweat. I walked in the door to find my lovely lady in her panties and bra on the floor doing pregnancy pilates.

She is 7 months and 1 week pregnant and her belly is bulging--beautiful, round, and bountiful.


I can't believe she is growing us a baby, but that is what she is up to.

So, I walked in the screen door (totally unlocked) rolled my bicycle by my nearly naked lover and stood over her to drip some summer sweat onto her big belly.

I'm pretty geeked to be a parent and also nervous. I think we will be fun and ultra attentive. I mean I like being a goof and I do not even have a kid yet. See below for goofiness:


Yes, I dressed in a bee outfit and rode my bicycle in a parade. I love riding my bicycle in parades. It's even better in a bee costume; you should see how excited the kids watching on the sidelines get when a giant adult human bee comes peddling by.

And I love to hang out and watch animals.
See below:

a gold finch eating in the sunshine


my bees coasting home and coasting out to forage


lazing,sunning chicken lady

So, all in all, I got some pro-kid interests going on:) Some more things that make me a kid-at-heart:
drawing and making art
talking about bodily functions
watching interesting movies
listening to interesting music
riding my bike--a lot
riding my bike in parades
dripping sweat onto other people
swimming in lakes
digging holes in my backyard
swinging on swing sets (even though it makes me feel like i might puke)
laughing
chewing inappropriately (only in front of the right people)
walking in the woods
sticking my hands in my compost on a daily basis to test the heat levels
watching all of the various life-forms in the compost heap for hours and hours
splitting wood
chasing chickens
playing fetch with my dog
reading young adult novels and kid books (little house-series, anne of green gables--series, and bunnicula, just to name a few)
and much more...
see a kid just fits naturally into this little world of ours.

My grandmother's kitchen--a sedative

The last five months I have been battling chronic insomnia. I've said it before; I'll say it again: I've suffered from insomnia since I was in the fifth grade, but it usually comes in waves and does not hang on week after week for five months at a time.

A few weeks back when I was wide awake at 2 something in the morning, I started going over the contents and layout of my grandma h's kitchen in my head and then after awhile I found it worked in putting me to sleep.

From the fourth grade on, I grew up three doors down from my gram. We were tight. I saw her almost everyday of my life. I would walk in her backdoor (which she always kept unlocked during the day whether she was home or not) and pour myself a glass of her sweet tea and guzzle it and then set about on the rest of my afternoon. If she was home, we would sit and talk in her kitchen or hang on her porch and talk and people watch.

My grandmother is from southeastern Kentucky and she is (was) ultra hilarious. She has been afflicted with Alzheimer's for the last 9-10 years and if there is one thing I regret in my life it is my personal inability to deal with her mind's demise. I can deal with a lot. I can deal with dying loved ones; I can deal with conflict and upheaval and hurt, but I cannot handle the shutting down of a person's, who I knew so well, reasoning and personality capacities. When I do see her now, I spend time with her and stroke her head and every once in a while I witness a scant glimmer of the person who she was, but I rarely see her. I do not visit much. I actually mostly avoid her because of my own inability to cope (please understand if she was my mother or did not have proper caretakers I would be there all the time).

But that is not what this post is about. This post is about my grandma's kitchen and how remembering it--the smells, the organization, the late afternoon light slanting in the back screen door and window, the coolness of tea and lemonade and mountain berry kool-aid (which my mother never ever let us drink at home), the canning jars cascading over her small kitchen table and dining room table, the blow of the fan in the heat of the summer whipping around heavy humid air thick with the smells of cooking (always cooking)--help rock my adult insomniac-self to sleep.

I wish I could count the hours I spent in her tiny kitchen. Let me be clear her entire house is miniature. She raised 7 kids (she had 9 in total, but one died at age 4 and the oldest was out of the house by the time they all moved downriver) in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom and an unfinished Michigan basement. Her kitchen can sort-of-comfortably fit three people around the table. Usually two of us would sit at the table and then we would pull chairs around the doorway to the dining room and block the fridgadaire (that's what she called it) in.

My grandmother canned and cooked constantly. She instilled in me a love for cooking from scratch. My family ate at her house often; she was widowed before I was born and lived, alone, so we were her constant company in close proximity. She would fry potatoes in a cast iron skillet, whip up some skillet corn bread, cook down soup beans with lard and bacon all day, and fry salmon patties. Our clothes would stink of fish and grease long after we left gram's, but the food was to die for. Another favorite meal was biscuits and tomato gravy for supper. The gravy was thick and peppery spicy and her biscuits flaked off in our mouths. It was made with lard and homemade canned tomatoes.

As I got older, my Uncle Junior, my grandmother's bachelor brother, moved in with my grandma and I would often sit at the kitchen table with the two of them and talk about the mundane which in reality was really the sacred and today to me means more than I can say with words. It means a peace that passeth understanding when I remember and reflect on those times in the warmth of my gram's kitchen.

These reflections of the mundane hours spent with my grandmother cast a lullaby shadow over my restless mind in the night hours when I toss and turn. My gram scrubbing dishes so fast I thought she was a superhero dish washer, my gram chatting about tomatoes and beans with Uncle Junior, my gram's deeply wrinkled, agile hands wiping down her always table clothed kitchen table, my gram slicing watermelon and gently salting it (I can see her fingertips wrapping around her well-worn white plastic salt shaker), my gram commenting on how she, "wouldn't have another man if he had a golden asshole; if he had a golden dick." My gram always being on her porch; the reliability of seeing her there in the evenings and knowing there was more home to all my home.

These memories are like a sedative: sleeping over at grams and watching her get ready for bed then cozying up next to her night-gowned self and falling deeply to sleep in her steady bosom. Gram rising much earlier than me or my sisters and brewing herself coffee. Then us rising and finding her in the early dawn drinking her cup of coffee and eating a piece of toast with butter and jelly. Gram finishing up her food and making us a fancy breakfast of palachikas or pancakes or eggs (whatever we wanted). Sitting next to gram in her tiny living room and watching the grand ol' opry and the ralph stanley show. These snippets of memories--common and everyday, but sacred and substantial all the more--the beginnings of who I am today are forever (unless I inherit her brain-mush disease) fortified up in me.

But again her kitchen, the first feeling of fry grease splattering about that I ever did feel happened there. I watched her pressure cook beans, and chop pears, peaches, strawberries for canning. I mowed her lawn and hung up clothes on the line with her.

I husked corn with her on her front porch and snapped bean after bean. I helped her water her yearly garden. I listened to her stories of her childhood on the farm with her single mother. Her father died when she was eleven and her mother continued to farm without him. She told of hog killings, chicken neck wringing, dressmaking, and canning.

In her back yard I gutted my first fish with my Uncle Junior and brought it in the house and fired it in her cast iron skillet and ate it right there in that kitchen that has become my night salve--that healing comfrey balm for my mind.

The gifts that continue to bring me a calm and a smile are the minutes, hours, and years of time spent with my gram. Those regular everyday moments. Those foundational pieces of time that make me so in love with the earth and growing my family's food and building clothes lines and fishing and cooking and food preservation.

Last night, as I struggled wide awake from 2:00am on, my sweetheart said, "think of your grandma's kitchen; remember count on her kitchen."

So, the scent of her kitchen in summer came breezing across my nose and my eyes shut tight. The worn brown-stained sharp edges of her handleless cupboards drifted over my eyelids and fingertips; the rag rugs by her stove and sink wove their way under my small bare feet; my ears perked up to her twangy, southern voice, "Nat, I love that short hair of your's, Nat. Sis, you want some mustard on that ham sandwich; how about some potato salad?"

And, I drifted into other dreams.

displaced, but ok

my darling is 5 months and 1 day pregnant today. and, lately, i've been submerged in the in between space of that which is to come. of course, i am thrilled beyond measure about the insanely huge change that is looming like an enormous convergence of clouds on the heavy set fields of some horizon, but I am also feeling a little displaced.

everything as we know it is going to change.
all of you out there with kids know this and tell this to us and we shake our heads and say, "we know, we know."

But really, I do not know shit.

K and I have been together nearly eleven years. We have forged through the good times and hard times like two pieces of granite or two stalks of corn. We love our time together: alone and with others. But we are so use to being alone, just the two of us.

And so this is where displacement starts to come in. Soon and very soon, we will never (or rarely) be alone.

And the other piece of the displacement is connected to the idea of what each of us will be like as a parent. This is all new territory. We are talking about it and soon will be writing down our ideas about how to parent together with our very different backgrounds when it comes to involvement with infants, kids, and teens.

I desire to fall even more deeply in love with k as we both take on this new cloak of parenting.

I grew up heavily involved in church life--in the evangelic.al pres..byterian church to be exact. two of the best things about this otherwise mostly repressive church was the community of caring people and the responsibility for child care that was taught to young folks growing up in the church.

As a preteen and teen, I worked in the nursery with infants, the toddler room with little ones, and the preschoolers. I know how to change diapers very well and keep rambunctious wee ones occupied. As a young adult (age 19- to almost 21), I worked with junior high girls at a sister church in detroit and then with the high schoolers and also with the kindergarten kids. Quite a few of the kids i worked with in detroit had not had much parenting at all and some of them had witnessed atrocious stuff. A 10 year old named S had seen her mama shot in the head when she was five, ya, she was a handful with a good heart buried beneath her steely, complicated exterior.

But, I learned how important boundary setting was for these kids and I learned a bit how to set those boundaries and how to enforce the boundaries in gentleness. Example: 5 year old throwing fit, striking other kids, lashing out swearing; me holding kid as he thrashes about until finally he calms down and then is just held in my arms--quieted, calmed and well-loved.

K on the other hand has very little experience with kids and babies. I think her most involved interactions with kids have been with my sister's three children over the last ten years. and she has enjoyed it.

Here i am an anarchist politically and at heart, but who on a whole believes in the legitimacy of boundaries for children, teens, and adults, alike. KK is much more laid back than me about all kinds of things. I do not intend to be a fascist parent. I do intend to develop rules (not necessarily etched in stone or chalk or anything else) and parameters together for all of us to follow.

K is so calm and stable and i cannot wait to see this all unfold in our endeavor together as parents, but damn am I nervous.

Sometimes, I find myself standing in random places and a song or a slice of life around me will startle me to stillness and my throat will seize up with a tightness and my eyes well up with tears and all I can think about is the cataclysmic event hanging on the precipice of december. I am willing it to be wonderful but every now and again the wonderful also has a hint of doom shadowing the W and L of the word.

I guess this is where big change often leaves me, scurrying about wanting answers and plans when that is not the way of life and i know it. Sometimes i wish i could gut the calvinism (the theology of predeterminism) that is imprinted on the lining of my veins, even though i have rejected every bit of the theology of my youth in my mind, from under my skin.

in the meantime k and i will keep on loving as fiercely as we can and plan where plans need made and dream in the in-between places.

nothing left to say

since saturday, my dear k has been consistently bleeding.

it blows.

how many times have i said it here on this blog? those words, that is? or something like them? it blows. it sucks. fuck it. damn. hard times. suck. etc. etc. etc.

i am trying to be all in the present about it and all that lovely bullshit, but guess what, at this point in time, i'm over it. plain and simple over scavenging for remnants of dreams that are yet to manifest into concrete flesh and blood before my eyes. the day when i feel the little being's scrawny paws upon the tender, yet sharp, curve of my collar bone--when the soft little animal unfolds in ringlets of new skin before me--until then, i will curse the wind and the rain and yell out profanities to the stars and then reel myself back into the present, this moment and take it for what it is.

and what it is is this:

people, we are so fragile and fleeting. at anytime it all could stop for you. at anytime we could be the 25 year old pga pro golf player found dead in her home on a sunday. or we could be the one to be sideswiped by an 83 year old woman who should have had her license taken away 8 years back. (and hell no I am not an ageist; i am a fucking realist).

often, i want to really be okay with all of this passing on that happens before our eyes. i want to know that we leave some kind of imprint--for good; for bad; for always. we do, and still, we do not. we are flashing. we are leaves. we are strong and green and flapping in the strongest of winds and then we fall heavily to the ground and dry up and break down into something else. hopefully, always something life-giving.

but, how do i capture that moment of waiting to know if what is (or was living inside of kk) is still alive? how can patience fortify itself in a heart that desires more than anything to know. to know what is real. to know what is next, and still to understand that we can never know what is next.

i can remember being in the 5th or 6th grade. my parents were gone out for the night and, of all things, I sat on the toilet and started to cry uncontrollably cause i realized my mama could die and not come home. i realized one day the person i cared about the most in the world could and would be gone. i cried and cried and my chest heaved with sadness.

today, that person has shifted to my kk. and now it has shifted to the two lives before my eyes. the life of my lover--the upper quadrant of my heart and this other life trying to forge a path to our world through her womb. and so when the blood is made visible and this threat of new death dangles on the edge of her being, i am paralyzed and devastated.

and now, i have nothing left to say...

their small fingers dipped into the dripping honeycomb

the confused longing pounced on my heart like a stealth cat on the prowl for a helpless rodent. it came fast and furious--the ache. not quite empty; not quite loss--just a sadness fused with a smile for the memory of the moment that brought the longing.

their small hands--hands that are learning everyday more and more to draw and write and maneuver hockey sticks with grace and finesse--dipped excitedly into the oozing honeycomb. they scooped up wax and dripping, sticky amber liquid and chomped down on it with fierce laughter at the newness of the experience. and i smiled.

cause only at our house--this home k and i are creating everyday--could these young boys have this experience. the experience of tasting honeycomb in their aunts' kitchen. honey that was harvested only days before by me, a novice beekeeper, and my beloved, my kk.

and the longing hit, because the excitement of sharing this gift from the beautiful bees that live behind my garage and forage the neighborhood's gardens and sparsely wooded areas with our nephews brought up all kinds of dreamed desire for building our lives together with the honest yearning of our own children.

and then the longing retreated to a silent place in the long cavities behind my blood filled organs. and i remembered my thankfulness for all this life that has surrounded me these last many months. the lives of these bees and the chickens and walnuts, zinnias, turnips, beets, black raspberries,autumn-orange-brown oak leaves, and all that shines deep red orange in the morning sun and even deeper purple orange in the setting sun makes my heart full and lessens the ache to a dull thud that only surfaces in tiny moments.

tiny moments when small fingers fall into the sticky life of a honeycomb and small mouths turn up in amused smiles of wonderment and astonishment. smiles that adults do not know how to conjure up to our faces. smiles that we may be missing out on for ourselves...

My Dirty, Hardworking Daddy

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my growing up days. I’ve been reflecting on my hard working parents and all of the time and energy they gave to raising the three of us and trying their hardest to do it as well as they could with what they had in their arsenal of parental tools and tricks.

On this note of yesteryear, here’s a brief introduction to my dad as I remember him in my early years.

My father is a roofer. He has been a roofer almost his whole adult life—since he was about 21. He has only ever known hard, physical work. Before he was a roofer, he tried being a line worker at Chrysler—like his father before him—but he could not stomach working for the man. So he went to work for another kind of man, the roofing man. And then he eventually started his own roofing company; he still owns and runs this company in these thin and trying economic times.

As a kid, I remember my dad as a dirty man in the evenings. He was covered in soot and tar and asphalty stuff when he came home from work. And then he would take a shower and be refreshed, but there was always this sort of everlasting grit ground into his skin. His pick up truck stank of acrid tar-paper and hot tar and sweat and burnt things and dust. I remember longing to run my hands over the well-worn steering wheel and drive for hours with my dad to some far off destination just the two of us alone hanging out and talking. I wanted to go to Tigers’ games with him, sans sisters, in his truck and somehow catch the hard-working smell of his skin and hold it for always.


Dirty dad in his pick up

He provided for us. He used his hands until they were cracked and rough to cover other people’s houses and businesses and keep them from rain and wind and snow. He burned his nose over and over again in the blazing sun till it bubbled with infection and is probably now a fertile ground for cancer.

He worked 6 or 7 days a week—and he still does. And he always said to us use your minds not your hands to make a living. I find it funny sometimes that I was the only one who really listened. Both of my sisters went to beauty school; I’m the only one who went to university. They both use their hands to make a living. While they do not have to weather the elements and haul bundles of shingles or torch down or weld specialized products to roofs, they do use their hands day after day to earn money. And they work hard and long hours.


the injector with her dad as a kid

We all do. My father gave each of us the gift of knowing how to work hard. None of us have ever been slackers. I had my first job at age 15. I worked at the hockey rink concession stand. And then I worked at Keck’s Hardware—I was the first girl to ever work there. And then I worked for my dad for a few summers. And I acquired the smell of sun and sweat and tar skin.

And while I use my mind mostly to do my work, I pedal hard to get to work. I use my body to transport myself there and it is often my most favorite time of the day—riding in the sun and my beating heart pumping fast and hard. And then my next favorite time of the day is coming home from my paid work and working in the soil with my hands, digging deep and hard and being dirty even after a shower and cooking food for my darling and tearing shit apart when she asks me to do so and cleaning and scrubbing our house to make it feel good and comfy. Daddy did you know you taught us well? We all three know how to make it pretty damn okay in the world. We all know how to work hard and long and still grow our families well.

i will not crush her/his heart

I just drank a couple of beers and ate a super cheesy veggie burger at one of our smoky watering holes.

kk and i had a nice time sitting there talking to one another and sitting there staring at one another and sitting there listening to the not so delightful open mic in the other room.

my dinner came out with a mini-bag of better maid potato chips in the red plastic basket that held my veg burger. better maids always throw me back to my childhood. no matter what, i get sent down that rabbit hole of littleness. my ma ate the things by the handful. for the first years of my life (up until age 7), she lived on better maids, coca cola, and marlboro reds. yes, my mama was an avid smoker. she weighed all of 110 pounds and ran around like a chicken with her head cut off.

she was and is an excellent mother and grandmother. and i really fear getting into some of the sad parts of my past here in public, but there is a connection to the present.

and those damn better maids fueled this important conversation about childrearing over at the bar tonight.

my parents believed it was okay to hit their kids (they no longer believe this, but it is a little too late for me). so, one of the hard pieces connected to me really coming to the decision to have a kid with kk was the fact that i was raised getting smacked around by both of my parents, and sometimes that smacking did get out of hand.

couple the legacy of a childrearing style that i am deeply opposed to (that is the smacking and whipping and hitting of kids to keep them in line)with my huge-ass temper that was (i believe) birthed out of the violence i was exposed to (and subsequently inflicted on my sister, Eone,--we fought physically like angry wind up boxing dolls) and well...

while i know i could never raise a hand to a child, it is the raising of my voice and the brutality of the words that are capable of coming out of my mouth that have me still, to this day, concerned.

i have intense mood swings. kk is more than kind and puts up with the fierceness that piles up in my heart and then spills like toxic waste out of my mouth (and sometimes just my eyes or my body language). I go to dark places--places that only a few people, closest to me, see or know about or maybe even recognize. over the years these bouts of intense anger and depression have lessened, but still they do come on and kk asked me today," you will not crush our kid's heart with your words will you?"

and i promised, "i will not crush her/his heart."

and i do promise that. and i work everyday on lessening the legacy of the wounds of simply being alive among people who also were exposed to harshness and dysfunction as children, my parents. i hate to even use the word dysfunction cause all in all i believe that life itself is chaotic and many things are out of the path of reason and human understanding, but my parents did the best with what they knew and were exposed to and they loved me in spite of their anger and fragility.

and i will do the best with what i know and who i am and the support i have encircling me. no crushing here. i know this to be true, cause even though my heart may have been pinned down at times by my parents (this is true as a child and by the hurtfulness connected to their reaction and resistance to the revelation of my queerness), my heart has never been crushed. however, it has been tempered and tarnished, polished and pressed and now it pumps harder for what is right and good than it ever has before.