Stepmomming - Part Deux

Good morning, everyone. Today is Mother's Day, May 14, 2023. 

Today is also my seventh wedding anniversary to Erik, and the traditional seventh anniversary gift is wool. Friends, as a knitter, I proclaim that I WAS BUILT FOR THIS. All yarn gifts are appreciated, and if you give me a 100g ball of yarn, I will return it to you as a hat, or a pair of fingerless gloves (should your office be cold and your fingers still need dexterity for your keyboard). I promise!

As far as knitting, I have shelved the St. Jude sweater for now, because I am at a part where I need to concentrate and read. Neither of those verbs are compatible with my current state of mind. Instead, I just finished a pair of socks for a friend, and I started knitting a hex shawl with this Three Irish Girls yarn I have had forever. I am sorry I cannot stretch with one hand and photograph with the other at four in the morning, but please do zoom in on the colors and stitch definition. This yarn is just camelot through the fingers.

So, I became a wife for the second time on May 14, 2016. Wording it that way does not do my mindset justice; if you happen to be running across this post while sitting on your veranda in Lichtenstein, then you do not know I am about as feminist as they come. Instead of saying I "became a wife," it is more of my ilk to say that I entered a long-term, non-real-estate contract for the second time that day. Also, as I always look for an excuse to share the following photos, here is our Chicago-style hot dog wedding cake, courtesy of Chef Mindy Gohr of Bittersweet Pastry Shop.

This one was always my favorite, followed closely by the one taken when Erik and I went to Downers Grove South and took some photos there. 

I became a mom on July 15, 2018, three days after my own 43rd birthday. Stanley was already three and a half weeks early, but there will always be a part of me who wishes he came down that freaking birth canal a full four weeks early. Telling people I gave birth at 42 instead of 43 would have resulted in about 4% fewer ooh's and ahh's, if my calculations are correct. He is a good kid, though. Even now, with all of the turbulence in my house, he gets more joy from practicing reading than he does from acting like a punk.

Fun fact: Stanley was due on August 7th and named in honor of Chicago Blackhawks great Stan Mikita. Stan Mikita died on Stanley's actual due date of August 7th.

On January 11, 2023, I became a different kind of mom. I became a stepmom back on the wedding anniversary seven years ago. However, on January 11, my stepkids came to live with us full-time after they discovered their mom had died that morning, smack in the middle of Erik trying to rebuild from his previous three or so years of just generally giving up. 

Now, I was someone who was running a business, running a completely chaotic household, holding down a job, going from being a full-time mom to one kid to being a full-time mom to three kids, and my spare time (because calling it what it is - every single minute of the day while overlapping with the above - makes me sound a bit "extra") is spent turning three kids into good grownups. This does not count the constantly helping Erik see that what he knew about parenting was a foundation for dysfunctional abuse cycles (through no fault of his, obviously). In flits of transition, I have to figure out if my own identity is in there somewhere. 

I do not mind being a mom. I do not mind being a business owner. I do not mind even being a wife or stepmom, adult daughter, good friend, good singer, decent knitter, neighbor who watches your house, planner, or even failure. What I mind is that, while I acknowledge that life is a culmination and continuously-changing path created by our choices, I never wanted to feel like I had no choice.

Right now, I have no choice but to stay.

Please, for the love of all things woolly, do not infer from this that I had my bags packed, but now I have to unpack and stay until (insert deadline or milestone here). I choose to stay. I choose to make the best of what is currently a very, very challenging life. That said, part of the reason is because choosing to ditch everything and everyone except Stanley in favor of living in a cute condo in a big city far away from here presents a set of circumstances that are not any more appealing than the life I have been handed. Plus, I just do not have the energy.

What I can do, however, is I can make the best of literally everything. That also takes quite a bit of energy, but the reward is much more profound than the unknown. You know the old saying about needing to be careful what you wish for when you say things like, "I wish the boss would just disappear!" because the next one could be ten times worse?" Well, that is exactly my life in a nutshell. I have good people around me, some baseline stability, and a lot of yarn for the twenty minutes per week where we are all at the library, and I get to knit while the kids are checking out books. Packing up and ditching everyone for a new life would involve changing addresses to four mortgage companies, having a different type of contract in place with Erik, figuring out my job and business, blah blah blah. I think I will just stick to waking up at 3:15am every day and going to the gym, and then getting my coffee at 7-Eleven.

And, I choose yarn. I choose knitting. I choose to not take up yoga, cooking, piano, oil painting, calligraphy, vegetable gardening, mountain biking, or feng shui. I am sticking with knitting.

Today, we celebrate motherhood. I also celebrate marriage. Every other day of the year, however, I choose to celebrate just making it through the day, and doing the best I can with the choices I am making. Finally, while I may want to smack everyone who tells me, "Wow...those boys are so fortunate to have you in their lives!" I understand it comes from a sympathetic place, and I want you all to keep telling me. That one sentence helps me make the right choice every day, especially for the task of making sure as many people around me that need it can turn into good grownups one day. Thank you for reading.

Horrible People Running Things

 Good (early) morning, everyone! My routine is thrown off at the moment; I would normally be leaving the gym right about now, but my husband and stepkids are out of town. My little guy is sleeping, and I am (seriously) making my own coffee instead of going to the 7-Eleven across the street from the gym.

I have also been knitting! Socks for a coworker, mostly...he has big feet, so I am throwing a different color in the heels and possibly toes just in case it looks like I will run out of yarn.

The pattern which landed in the back of my friend Allie Pleiter's book, Knit or Dye Trying, also has a Super-Secret Symmetrical Sisters Washcloth, and the three-washcloth pattern can be found on Ravelry. This is the original one, but when it was finished, I thought it was too symmetrical. It was based on the idea that the sister relationship is a bit off-center, so I went back and made an off-center version for the book. You can see it on the Ravelry page or in my previous blog post.

Anyway, being a single mom for the weekend has given me plenty of time to think, to look at my almost-four-year-old son and wonder if I am being too strong, or not strong enough, of a feminist role model for him. I have also spent plenty of time contemplating the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 

Disclosure to any newbies who may have wandered here:  I am not an attorney, a judge, or a Supreme Court Justice. I am not a PhD in public policy. I am not anything, really. But I do spend a lot of time verifying things I read on the internet, using sources I know that still spend a great deal of time corroborating their stories' sources and checking facts. I am also a very, very vocal advocate for proper news sites, because indoctrination is a powerful media tool, and it has convinced extremists everywhere that the media can just hide big events from people. In a world where everyone at any major media event, great or small, has a video camera in their pocket. Come on, man.

Anyway, this may sound a bit tinfoil-hat-ish coming from me, but anyone who knows me can vouch for the fact that I am not a conspiracy girl.

First, there is a reason that ruling was handed down on Friday, even though opinions are typically handed down on Tuesday and Wednesday (this is per the Supreme Court's own website). In other words, I am certain I am not the only person spending the weekend thinking about the horrific ramifications of this case while the Justices are long gone from the bench, the Court, and probably even Washington, DC this weekend.

The US Constitution is a funny thing. Seriously. It actually has the phrase "white man" in it. When Roe was originally opined in 1973, it was based on the 14th Amendment, due process and privacy. When it was overturned, it was based on the 10th amendment, government overreach. The ruling, as any pretty-far-to-the-right Republican lawmaker will tell you, is based on the fact that it was ruled incorrectly in the first place, and that the federal government has no business making decisions that should be in the hands of the states. But, this is where the last decade becomes extremely important in our history.

The United States Constitution is based on white men who own property having all the rights in the world. Don't believe me? Skip over the amendments directly related to the Office of the President (and, as long as we are dreaming, the establishment of the senate). On its own, that makes sense because that's how the world was in the 1770's and 1780's. On the other hand, there have been little stakes pounded into the ground over the years to hold onto that tent, and the past decade has seen a ton of these. And it all stems on taxation without representation.

In 1929, the number of Representatives, and therefore the number of electoral college votes, was capped due to the government not wanting to do things like reconfigure office space and provide staffing for more people who would be representing their people. Since then. the population has more than tripled, but the same 435 House seats remain. This is why the census is a big deal.

In 2020, the census was a shit show (sorry, but there is no other way to word it). It was literally at the start of the pandemic, a citizen question was added (instead of asking a person's place of birth) at a time when people have had fear instilled in them over border security, people died and were made homeless in droves, and the response rate had initially been 4% lower despite people being able to respond on the internet, causing more work for the agency to verify addresses at a time where getting help in that agency was a challenge. 

So we now have a census that was a shit show, and the same 435 people representing over 700,000 citizens each, instead of the just-over-200,000 per Representative that we had in 1929. We have people of "questionable citizenship" not being counted. And we have a population threshold per state for this allocation.

Side-note: there have been 1.1 million excess deaths in this country since the pandemic started. By 2020 census numbers, that is 1.5 Congressional seats in today's figures (if using the metric system isn't your thing).

Moving on, Senator McConnell has stated that, basically, his life's work has come to fruition by blanketing the country with conservative judges. How that works continues to be a mystery to me, as the courts should be a place where interpretation of the laws and statutes should not have a political lean, but be that as it may, McConnell is very proud of his record. Then, voting rights have basically been stripped of people all over the country in conservative states. Broad statement, I know, but let me explain it this way:  if you live in a state where your lower-than-middle class district was gerrymandered, and you are no longer allowed to vote by mail, and you work two jobs where neither of the bosses have reminded you that you cannot be fired by going to the polls on election day during your work day, do you think you are going to vote?

Okay, so there is that as well.

Felons can't vote. But they are not exempt from paying their taxes. Taxation without representation.

Our prisons are filled with people of color who are incarcerated for things that white people get incarcerated for at a much lower percentage. No representation. Oh, and if you actually believe people of color are committing this many more crimes than white people, then do your research through academic sources, and not the talking heads on your favorite conservative cable news channel.

And now, literally more than half of women in this country, a quarter of the population, will be living in a state where they are unable to seek the healthcare they need because the providers are gone. I should note here that almost all of these laws are designed to punish the abortion provider and not the woman, but women are already being punished because...I mean...if a woman can't go to her doctor to terminate her pregnancy, then do you think she is just going to carry it to term and raise it and live happily ever after? The short answer, generally, is "of course not." And why should she? 

Except now, the person aborting the fetus is the person getting punished. Which means if an unsafe abortion is performed, it can be blamed on the mother. In Texas, it is a first-degree felony if the fetus dies (side-note:  laws written by non-doctors tend to involve language like this, as the fetus is not alive or dead in the same timeline or way a person is alive or dead, just like the "week-limit" abortion bans are not written in a way which conveys gestational age versus implantation).

Then, our previous president appointed three justices to the Supreme Court after the previous president was blocked from appointing one for his vacancy. The previous president told us in his campaign that he wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. So if you are keeping track, we have a Congress that did not want to expand because it was too expensive, a population boom, people of color and poor people continuing to be incarcerated and not counted in the census, and now women being set up to be felons. 

The amendments to the document, again excluding the ones specifically about the branches of government, are often to grant people rights that our founding fathers did not see necessary to grant rights (voting and citizenship, among other things). Supreme Court rulings have often granted people protections to the rights of life, liberty, and property as stated in the US Constitution, but being anything but a white man often requires that extra layer of protection. Like it or not, I should be able to own my own body as property, and that includes anything inside of it that is attached to me. If I choose to not get treated for cancer, that is a decision between me and my doctor. If I choose to terminate a pregnancy, that is a decision between me and my doctor. I should be entitled to medical privacy, and my doctor should be trusted to First, Do No Harm. Perhaps the medical doctors know more about biology than the writers and editors of the US Constitution?

If the US Constitution is not amended, then "government overreach" and that 10th amendment allows the white male land-owners in charge of us to interpret that document exactly as it was intended in the 1700's, so only the white male land-owners get everything. Seriously. If it weren't for the US Constitution being amended, black people are not full people even though biologists, medical doctors, historians, eye-witness testimonies, and common sense tells us otherwise. 

Read that again.

And guess what? The same thing will be happening to women (Roe, and then possibly Griswold and Eisenstadt), non-straight people (Obergefell), and possibly interracial couples (Loving), if Clarence Thomas were to either die or divorce his spouse. The US Constitution was set up to be a frame for the country, and while I used to think we were on the right path to progress, it is clear that, in the last decade, the people of power have been masters at preserving white supremacy and misogyny. And I am not having it.

Pro-...What, exactly?

Hello, everyone! I am working on a Pete the Cat sweater for my kid, and I can't decide if it actually looks like Pete the Cat. I am forging ahead, and then I think I will adjust the next size up if I don't like it.

The phrase "pro-choice" was trending on twitter this morning, because pastor Raphael Warnock (who is running for one of two senate seats in Georgia) said he was a pro-choice pastor. so I am offering my thoughts.

First and foremost, abortion should not be legislated by a popular vote, since the statistical majority of us in this country are Christian and abortion is a religious belief. It should not be legislated by our current contingent of mostly white men, because they (all due respect) have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to women's bodies, fetuses, or how those two symbiotic creatures are housed together.

It should be legislated by scientists and researchers, and economists. Yes, by people who know how money works.

On that note, judge women having abortions all you want. If you feel okay with referring to "those people" because you know someone who knows someone who uses abortion as birth control, then cool. But I am guessing there is a huge contingent of women in your circle who have distanced themselves from you not because they disagree with your beliefs, but because they had an abortion, it is none of your business why, and you have already preemptively made your stand clear that someone who had an abortion doesn't care about "the sanctity of human life."

In other words, you - a rational, grownup woman - are telling other rational and grownup women that they are shit because they made a medical decision that doesn't affect you. And you don't even know you are telling them that, because they didn't tell you they had an abortion. I mean...why would they?

So, the science piece is easy. The medical detractors, the ones who say abortion is not safe, that a fetus has a heartbeat at 18 days, that a fetus feels pain at four months...they are using their religion to justify their stand on the science. Their views are not accurate, not peer-reviewed, and not based on scientific research. Life begins at conception, sure. Tumors grow, fetuses grow, limbs grow, blah blah blah. But if sustainable life began at conception, then abortion would never be an issue. You could give birth at 18 days when you hear a "heartbeat," and that clump of cells would just grow into a person.

Also, life does not start with a heartbeat. You know this, because you have watched every crime and medical drama in the world, and checking for a pulse is the baseline for lifesaving measures. Also, cessation of brain activity is the baseline for stopping these measures (I am generalizing, but you get the idea). So there is no brain at 18 days, but rational, grownup women are convinced that a heartbeat is happening and that the fetus will just come out perfect, inexpensively, and will have a great life because of it.

So, let's look at the money piece. Why should economists be involved? Because you - a rational, grownup woman who is pro-life - don't want "illegals" here because they are taking your jobs and costing you too much in taxes. You don't want to pay reparations to black people because they are asking for something that happened 155 years ago (even though segregation and racism has been legal in your own lifetime...I'm looking at you, Ruby Bridges and Mildred Loving). You don't want your taxes to go up, but actually were alive at a time where someone working at the shoe store on the corner could work from 9:00am to 5:00pm and buy a house on that salary.

So, money is clearly a big deal to you.

Did you know that for every dollar spent on women's health and preventative care/family planning, anywhere from $3 to $20 in benefits is gained and saved from not spending money on unwanted pregnancies and babies?

That is a ton...a ton...of money.

Colorado offered a free IUD program for lower-income individuals and birth control at point-of-sale pharmacy instead of only with a prescription. Their abortion rate plummeted; they have had 10.9 abortions per 1,000 women in the state in the most recent years data is available. Georgia, which has almost twice the population, is at 14.1 per 1,000 with all of their restrictions. That is over three more abortions per thousand women, and with the number of restrictions in Georgia, how many of them do you think are causing people to go into debt and cause poverty? Well, here are the restrictions to get an abortion in Georgia:

• A patient must receive state-directed counseling that includes information designed to discourage the patient from having an abortion, and then wait 24 hours before the procedure is provided.
• Health plans offered in the state’s health exchange under the Affordable Care Act can only cover abortion in cases of life endangerment or severely compromised physical health.
• Abortion is covered in insurance policies for public employees only in cases of life endangerment.
• The parent of a minor must be notified before an abortion is provided.
• Public funding is available for abortion only in cases of life endangerment, rape or incest.
• An abortion may be performed at 20 or more weeks postfertilization (22 weeks after the last menstrual period) only cases of life endangerment, severely compromised physical health or lethal fetal anomaly. This law is based on the assertion, which is inconsistent with scientific evidence and has been rejected by the medical community, that a fetus can feel pain at that point in pregnancy.

Do you think, perhaps, that it may be costing Georgia more money in medical costs (both privately- and publicly funded), more money in public aid with the extra mouth to feed, more money in public housing, more money in subsidized daycare and health insurance, than Colorado?

I mean...we are talking about the difference between the cost of birth control and the cost of raising a child. 

The bottom line is that everyone who is religiously pro-life should be legislatively pro-choice. Quit trying to figure out why women are having abortions. Just know that if you listen to the science, and you listen to the money, and pray for the lost souls of the unborn to whatever god you pray to (I won't even bother asking you to pray for the mother...you are beyond that), then you can actually call yourself "pro-life."