Amazing Babe

I wrote this piece two years ago and shared it at 2018 The Emerging Writers Festival at an event called AMAZING BABES hosted by the incredible Namila Benson. It’s still messy and was roughly dot pointed for me to read out loud. I’ve left it as it is. I like it messy and the sharing was a messy wholesome vibe. The feeling in the room that night was sacred and sweet and terrifying as I spoke something deeply personal and chest tightening-ly painful but ultimately liberating. Thank you to both my amazing babe birth children and my non birth children who continue to raise me. I could write a series of novels, one for each of my children listing the lessons they have taught me. This is only one chapter of an epic unending quest.

Shastra Deo, Idil Ali, Kate ten Buuren, Namila Benson, Yas Kai Lomai. Check out the full line up of Amazing Babes from this event here to follow, read, support and love.

The amazing babe I want to speak about tonight, is a young woman who has taught me about time travel. A young woman who taught me the value of biting through the thick bitter skin to get to the sweet flesh of the fruit. She taught me of the immense strength that lives in my own softness. If you believe time is linear and moves forward, then my amazing babe is neither my elder or my peer.  To explain the significance of my amazing babe I need to start by first telling you a bit about who I was before I met her…

I raised myself to be thick skinned. I learnt young how to push my yearning and desires deep down to a place where they wouldn’t be met with violence. I learnt very early how to gulp back tears, stiffen my face and make my breathe in audible. I was only small when I learnt that my boundaries and my body were not mine to reign over, that transgressions were my burden to carry and that the quiet ache of shame would live deep in my muscles and turn to a poison that years later I would try to cut out of me.  I knew how to keep a still smile on my face and shake inwardly. I learnt to navigate social spaces by speaking very little truth and smiling always.

When I was 19, I became a mother and gave birth to my daughter, Flav. The experience changed me, but only a little. This poor child was part of my knee jerking back at the world, my determination to have my own family, a better, safer one. A family I could control. I trained Flav in her infancy to fit into my world. She fed like clockwork, four hour intervals no less.. She slept through the night from when she was 8 weeks old, I trained her to sleep in a separate room from me because her place was in her own room, not to burden me in mine. She needed to learn to suck it up right? Cry it out, understand that I wasn’t always going to come to her. I couldn’t spoil her by attending to her every need.. She needed to fit into my schedule.. Into my narrative of being a ‘good mum’ with a ‘good baby’.

I managed to keep this up for three exhausting years.

And then she came.. my amazing babe, my second daughter, Diddy. She grew in me, like her sister had before her, but this time it was different. She has been shaking my insides long before she was born. She pummelled at my belly until I felt like a pregnant bruise. She came 11 days late and was born nearly 10 pounds of screaming wildness. 

It took 26 long hours to birth her and by the time she came out I felt like I’d been hit by a boulder. I was so exhausted and I didn’t recover from that fatigue for a long time. I got mastitis 5 times within the first 6 months of her life. For those of you who have been spared from the gore of breastfeeding.. mastitis is the inflammation and infection of milk ducts resulting in an awful flu like haze, engorged, painful breasts and cracked bleeding nipples. I would scream as Diddy latched on to me and grit my teeth as she fed, my entire body tensed. From very early on, nourishing her felt like torture. She didn’t sleep, she didn’t stick to my feeding schedule, she insisted on being on me. In ancient cultures the pendulous breasts of elder women were a sign of nobility, physical markings of the wisdom born from years of nourishing and nurturing others. Diddy grew my wisdom several inches.

I plummeted into a post natally depressed haze that lasted for her first year of life, leading to my separation from her father just before her first birthday. I was 23 with two small children and on my own. I was liberated and terrified and tired.

This might sound bleak and it was for a while. But in that bleakness, in the utter chaos of not knowing and completely losing control, of raising this child who would not be told... I learnt something extraordinary. The unwillingness of this amazing babe to fit into my delusion cracked me open wide.. enough to spill out.. to get messy… to look at my mess and grow..

I remember once as Diddy screamed murderously for a particular pair of shoes given in a particular order handed to her in  a particular way.. my friend Em said. “The thing about Diddy is.. She’s exceptionally good at expressing her needs”. And she was.

Diddy was so particular and wild and certain about what needed to happen next. And she screamed, and she cried, and she was reaching for something that I couldn’t give her. That I wouldn’t give her. I remember the war zone of bedtime with her right up until she was 2 years old. She wanted me.. it was like she wanted to crawl back inside me. She wanted the warmth of my body next to hers all night every night and she would scream for it. I remember peeling her off me with this feeling of disdain. I resented her needs so much. I wanted space from her. I felt smothered. I was so uncomfortable with giving her what she needed and I reeked of this disdain and she could smell it and we were trapped in this violent cycle of need and denial. I remember screaming at her WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?? WHAT DO YOU WANT??

She wanted me. She needed me.I had spent 24 years of my life carefully controlling myself and denying that I even had needs. My own small child self had learnt so early not to have needs.. and here I was at 24 confronted with these dangerous demands from my own child. Diddy screamed her needs so loudly that they echoed back through time and shook at the reality of my own child self. It made me so angry. I was SO ANGRY… but she insisted and showed me the way.. Because on the flip side of her wild wild rage and loud loud needs was the softest, sweetest, kindest, warmest caramel of love, cuddles, snuggles, nuzzling, needing and surrender. She taught me to surrender.. to time travel.. to heal.

When she would cry for me and beg me to stay near her.. I learnt to close my eyes, take a deep breathe and tend to my own small self who had rarely cried out loud.. when I opened my arms to embrace Diddy I was opening my arms to two little ones. It was almost as if Diddy wrapped her arms around my small child self and refused to stop screaming until they had both gotten what they needed. Each time I nurtured her I was nurturing me. Each time I stopped what I was doing, changed my plans to make way for Diddy I was prioritising myself. When I held her close to my chest and rocked her lovingly, I was cradling my own self, softening the heavy armour that had kept me safe for so long. I learned.. slowly and painfully and Diddy showed me the way. She never relented. I softened. I held her. I stayed with her. I learned to stop and crouched down to her level and listen to her speak..

It felt a bit like I had lost a war to her.. that I finally surrendered. but I know now that I won a war and that Diddy was fighting for me the whole time.

I’m not even close to done with this learning. Last year in the pit of winter I had a dangerously deep breakdown during which my girls moved to their father’s house for two months. It was rough.

I would get so nervous when I went to visit them because I felt so guilty for being so unwell. And how do you explain mental illness and dis-ease to a child? It turned out I didn’t need to. One day we sat in the cold on the porch she asked me when she could come home. I said I didn’t know.. that I was really unwell.. That it was hard to explain. I asked if she understood a little.

She said “Mum, I think that something happened a long time ago and you locked your heart away in a prison.. and sometimes.. you let it out into the yard.. let it have a little more freedom.. but then something will happen and you lock it away again. And sometimes you let people visit and speak to you through those weird telephone windows… but really you only ever let Flav and I in there.”

I was floored. Here was my nine year old daughter telling me, in perfect metaphor, of my unwellness.

“what would you do.. if you were someone who had locked their heart away in prison.. How would you get free?” I asked

“I don’t know.. Maybe practice coming out sometimes?”

A few weeks ago my now 13 year old Flav stormed out of the room and slammed the door. I exhaled, looked and Diddy and asked “How am I going to deal with this for the next few years of my life”. She replied “You need to deal with THISSS first” gesturing sassily at me.

For the past 10 years this amazing babe has been walking with me, truth bombing me, shaking me up and patiently waiting as I catch up to her. I am learning about beauty and make up and femininity and softness and strength, roar-ous rage and dark sorrow.. from watching the way she moves through the world. She is so kind and caring and smart and ask the most wonderful questions, she cuts to the truth so sharply it hurts sometimes. We have a long road to walk, there is much healing to be done for the wounds between us and though this is at times a tricky and tender journey, I sleep next to her most nights.. not because I have to but because I want to.

Rumi said -

“Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are.”

Diddy crumbled me.. and continues to water my wildflowers.

I wasn’t sure how to finish this piece so I called her and asked her for advice to which she replied I don’t want to talk about this, it’s weird and I can’t believe you’re not here tonight or last night I miss you when are you coming home. Which is a reminder to me to cancel some plans for this week, go home early, go gently, be kind to myself, snuggle her close and get some rest..

ON LOVE...

I have been thinking and feeling on love; love as a weapon, as a misunderstanding, love as an excuse, love as a cover up, love as a band aid, love as clinging to belonging, love as control, love as overwhelm. None of these descriptions resonate with my understanding of love but I have heard these utterances and whispers of love confuse the word and make me doubt if I even know what love is. Are we talking about the same thing? I don’t blame people, I mean, where would we learn love? Where could we? Who shows us how to stand for love? Walk with love? Embody love’s lush in our flesh and breath and gesture? I wasn’t shown explicitly. I’m figuring it out in the mish mash of my own life’s experience.

2007

2012

2020

My thoughts on love will likely continue to change with each moon cycle but I want to write these particular thoughts on love in this moment. Or rather, these thoughts on love are yearning to be written out of me. My beloved mentor and dear friend Quinn told me once that the body longs to write itself and I feel the shudder and clanging in my body as I churn and write this internal wondering out of myself.

Diversity and Inclusion >

I dislike this term because I associate it with performative institutional policy and procedure documents but I want to reclaim it as belonging with love. My understanding of diversity is lushness; a range of multiple, different, interdependent living things creating a robust, resilient, multi dimensional ecosystem. It brings to mind the permaculture principle use edges and value the marginal >

“The place where two eco-systems or habitats meet is generally more productive and richer in the variety of species present than either habitat on its own.”

— Permaculture Association

So diversity is lush and the margins are valuable and dynamic.

My understanding of inclusion comes from Gestalt Therapist Dave Mann who writes that inclusion is to soften the contact boundary and allow one’s whole self to be stirred by the experience of another. This definition of inclusion sounds like love to me. In coming in to contact with another if I soften myself to include, I am allowing myself to be changed by their experience - a beautiful notion spoken by Victor Lewis in his tender, incendiary monologue in The Colour of Fear.

“You know, I’m not going to trust you until you’re as willing to be changed, and affected, by my experience and transformed by my experience as I am every day by yours.”

— Victor Lewis in The Color of Fear

So if diversity is lushness and inclusion is to be transformed by another, then surely being changed by the experiences of a lush range of people is a commitment to love and growth? Another Gestalt writer, Mark Fairfield, writes

“..inclusion is also core to being human. In fact, we became human precisely because the most inclusive of our ancestors were the ones selected to survive. Inclusion became the human mandate.”

— in 'The Ground for Inclusion: Diversity and interdependence' in GANZ journal 14(2) pp 19-44'

I know that the more diverse the people I love and am loved by, the more dynamic and rich my experience of love becomes growing my empathy, strength, self awareness and well being. It becomes imperative for me to broaden my circles and experiences with other humans for each person stirs and awakens whatever is reflected in myself and to live in a mono culture is to rob oneself of the opportunity to grow into the fullest fullness of love.

Love from above > I would describe love from above as the act of only loving that which you have power over. Teacher to student, adult to child, therapist to client, strong resourced person to under resourced person in need, dominating lover to subservient lover, savior to victim and so forth. There is a comfort in loving someone you can control, someone who cannot hold you to account, someone whose voice is less strong. Sometimes people insert themselves into the lives of another and make themselves indispensable in their act of saving whilst convincing the object of their affection that they are small and need saving. Sometimes the vulnerability in love feels so dangerous that the only safe place to love from is one of control. My lecturer at uni said to me once “When we rush to save someone, we risk making ourselves bigger than them and the last thing a person who is suffering needs is to feel even smaller in their suffering”. I have not been able to think of love the same way since hearing this.

When I meet my students for the first time I do everything I can to share power, let them know I am in service of them and will be guided by their needs if they can share them with me. I notice it suprises and confuses most young people who are accustomed to being saved or condescended or feared or loved from above. I notice as my own children get older I find our love more challenging as they grow from being in my full control and care into flexing their agency, giving me feedback and growing closer to being a peer than a child. The delicious and ease-ful love from above I gave them when they were small has transformed into a battle of their autonomy versus my ego. They are raising me well and I am growing.

I am certainly guilty of practicing love from above. I certainly feel comfortable being loved as the less-than person or giving love as the more-than person but I have struggled with the dignified love between two equals. I am learning into this and being especially cautious of people who try to love from above me.

Desire for belonging in another >

I feel an eternal frustration with the idea that love can be found and fully satisfied in one person. I pretty sure love exists within and between and around and requires place and body and community. Having nailed the dream by the time I was 22 with a husband, a house, two children and two cars, I thought I had made it and yet I was so deeply dissatisfied and felt cheated by an illusion. I think within individualistic western culture, because we generally don’t live communally and find our purpose in communal care, responsibility and survival, it is easy to pour all of our expectations of belonging into romantic relationships and the dream of a happy nuclear family. To expect the deep longing of belonging with people and place and self, to be satisfied by a colonial hetero normative illusion is disappointing at best and dangerous at worst. Dangerous because when I had all I thought I needed and was so miserable and empty I took responsibility and placed the problem within myself.

I need more than the dream, more people, more purpose, more to belong with.

This quote continues to remind me of how I need to belong first with myself, which may seem solitary as bell hooks describes but for me, always includes my ancestors who are wise and powerful company.

I have since grown in and out of other relationships and different shapes of family. I find it easier these days to belong with myself and with my children and with my feet walking steadily toward my purpose of justice and liberation. Then if someone wants to walk beside me, that is a lovely thing, if someone does not, that’s ok too.

I love this line of Warsan Shire’s poem For women who are difficult to love. I am guilty of trying to inhabit the hearts of others I deemed to be safer, better, stronger than myself. I now make home in my own self and venture out from time to time to visit other loves.

Love = Becoming >

Bear with me, sometimes I attempt to simplify overwhelming ideas into info graphics or mathematical equations.

Becoming = Realness = Truth = Justice = Love therefor Love = Becoming?

bell hooks says >

So the dignified equitable love which is hard and beautiful. bell hooks also says >

“The heart of justice is truth telling”

— bell hooks

So justice is truth seeking and truth telling and truth is about what is real and to be real, as explained to the velveteen rabbit >

““It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ”

— The Skin Horse in Margery William's 'The Velveteen Rabiit'

And so realness comes slowly, you become. And love is justice is truth is realness is becoming.

So I am becoming.

This is what I want you to know about me: I am still learning love, growing into her fullness, turning my face to her warmth, shaking under her weight and floating in her weightless ease. And I am confused and step cautiously some days and with fierce purpose other days and some days I just weep and collapse from the grit and growing pains.

Onward I go in my lovegrowth, in my becoming, in becoming real and realer still. I hope you are lovegrowing well.

DOCUMENTING DECOL

This is me at 19 with my brand new baby girl. I knew nothing really.. and still don’t. This photo reminds me of all the learning that came and never ended, I’ve been unlearning and relearning and untangling myself for 15 years and there is no end in sight. Painful, challenging and worth every courageous moment. Much like decolonising, my motherhood journey started long before me and will continue for generations to come. I stand on the shoulders of queens as I make myself strong to carry my children and theirs..

I want to write and I’m so scared. I feel exposed. The riot and war that usually lives inside me is now everywhere I look and I know change is coming and it hurts and it should hurt and it never stopped hurting. This is a beginning..

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.”

— Audre Lorde

This may bruise but I believe it to be worthwhile. I write not as an expert, but as a learner. In my work teaching Cultural Safety and Culturally Responsive Practice, I notice that my ability to quote theorists, explain complex structures of oppression and pull potent quotes to punctuate my point are all useful tools, but not nearly as useful as my ability to talk about how many times I’ve fucked this up. I notice the relief on the faces of participants when I share that I too am learning. I’m a queer, brown, Indigenous person and this is my professional expertise and I still fuck it up regularly.

I am cis gendered, my queerness is not visible, I do not live with a disability, I am educated, I am a settler on unceded lands, I speak fluent English, I know my ancestry, my body size and skin tone are within a palatable range according to the dominant culture etc etc etc.. and so I have power and with that power comes the responsibility to constantly look around and see who else needs power. Not pretend power, real power. My mentor David asked once ‘What types of power nourish you?’ and now I try to ask myself this question every time I go to flex.

I don’t believe that reading and writing are passive acts. I want to think of this Blog as some ideas and observations that are open to feedback just as I am open to change and evolution. Please participate if you can and I apologise in advance for my missteps, for being culturally clumsy, for my lack of awareness around issues and experiences that don’t affect me directly. I am learning.

For me, the process of Decolonising is structural, internal, relational, political and spiritual. It is a journey of humility and self reflection and I believe it is imperative that we make the distinction between interrogating human worth and interrogating human conditioning. Our human worth is never in question, our humanity is our most precious gift and mightiest weapon in bringing down the de-humanising structures we live within. The conditioning that we have been soaked in for generations is in question. I never asked to be born into this body. I never asked to be raised in a world that values certain lives, ways of being and ways of knowing and devalues others. These ideas are soaked into my being to the point where unlearning is a confusing and painful process.

And so I am on a decolonising journey.. I resist this system and it’s web of untruths. Sometimes my resistance is direct action sometimes it is donating, sometimes it is unlearning, teaching, speaking, listening. Sometimes resistance is making music, making time for creativity, sometimes it is facilitating, sometimes healing, sometimes amplifying other voices, sometimes my resistance looks like understanding my brothers and sisters and fam when they forget that we have been conditioned to fight for scraps at the margins. Resistance is saying sorry and doing better, resistance is constantly looking around to see who needs resources and platforms and support. Sometimes resistance is simply holding my babies close and loving them, sometimes resistance means stopping my rage from hurting my family. Sometimes resistance is walking in the forest, diving into the ocean, resting, loving, holding, waiting. At the heart of my resistance is love. Love of people, love of justice, love of Country, love of ancestors, love of community, love of self, love for my descendants.. When I forget that resistance is an act of love my rage eats at my insides and I mis-use my power. So this writing is resistance, even though I’m terrified that my words could bruise or be misunderstood, I’ll remind myself it is an act of love and click publish anyway. Welcome.