Imbolc Resolutions

Happy Imbolc!*


Imbolc is a strange holiday here in Alaska, because even though the light is starting to return (2 hours since the Winter Solstice!), there are no other signs of spring return, nor are there likely to be any anytime soon. Until last year, I never really acknowledged Imbolc as it didn’t seem to fit into my seasonal cycle.

Last year it occurred to me that Imbolc is the perfect time to make resolutions. By New Years I am still whirling from Christmas and usually planning two birthday parties. This puts me in no place for real reflection. By the beginning of February, I have had time, and darkness, and quiet enough to think about what I want to bring with me into the year. Imbolc is celebrated in honor of the Irish goddess Brigid, and her double emphasis on home & hearth, and creativity already make me think about what I want to be and do better.

Last year at Imbolc I decided I wanted to learn to do some things badly. I have a tendency to only want to things I am good at and avoid anything in which I might not excel. I did learn to both knit and run badly – badly enough to hurt myself even, but I found both learning experiences enjoyable, valuable, and freeing. Kicking off the expectation of excellence was uncomfortable at first, but it allowed me to explore interests in a new way, and opened up whole areas that I had always felt were off limits. I also learned to be a service lay leader this year, and I hope I am not doing it badly. It is really important to me that I do that one well, or move out of the way and let someone else do it better.

Here are three things I am focusing on this Imbolc.

1. Learning to do last year’s projects well. While I enjoyed the liberation I felt in learning those new skills, I want to get better at them rather than coasting. I also want to learn to do new things badly. I’m not sure what those things will be yet, but maybe when I am ready, a teacher will appear.

2. I want to write more without worrying about the readers’ reception. I spend way too much time second guessing what people think about what I write and not enough time writing. This might even fall under #1 as well.

3. 2012 will involve a lot of changes in my house. Tall Daughter E will be an adult this summer and she and I will need to find a new way of living together as two adult women. This might be a big learning curve. I am not sure how to do this, but she is important enough to me to figure it out. Tiny Daughter M will start middle school later this year and I will have no more small children. I need to learn how to parent through this transition.

Here is to more learning, writing, and adjusting in 2012. Check out the 7th annual online poetry festival for Brigid here. For those of you who celebrate, what does Imbolc bring to you?



*Patricia Kennealy Morrison referred to this holiday last night on Facebook as Brighnasa, as the counterpart to Lughnasa in August. I like it, and may use it in the future.

In Defense of Pink

For one reason or another, the idea of gender was a major theme for me last year. One result of this is that I am defending something I never thought I would.


I am defending pink.

Between the video of the adorable girl criticizing the gendering of toys and the outrage over new Lego for girls it seems like the internet has blown up lately talking about toys for girls. I could spend all day linking to it all, or I could just let you Google it – there is a lot out there. I used to be in the same boat as these critics. I grew up a tomboy and my lust for Star Wars action figures instead of dolls was intense. I hated it when people tried to define my femaleness with traditional femininity. It did not fit me.

While pregnant with my first daughter I put a lot of thought into how I would raise a girl, unconstrained by social expectations of girliness. I was the parent who insisted on gender neutral clothing & toys. Barbie was absolutely forbidden. I ended up with an older daughter who almost totally eschews traditional feminine trappings. Aaaaand then we had daughter number two who is a frilly femme from her waist-length hair to her sparkly blue toenails. No amount of gender neutral propaganda is going to make this child not want to twirl around in lacy dresses and a tiara. And here is the thing – that should never be my goal.

I support gender neutral toys, but I no longer support the ghettoizing of pink ones. When we tell children that pink toys are bad, we tell them that femininity is bad. Girls and women should never be locked into gender stereotypes, but they also should not be denied their true selves if that self feels girly*. We ought not to tell children of either gender that girls cannot be chemists, but we also should not tell them they cannot be fashion designers. In an effort to support telling girls they can be whatever they want and make progress in traditionally male domains, I believe some feminists are painting femininity in a negative light.

One of the things I have come to realize in the past year is that my dislike of the color pink, and various other traditional feminine traits and activities are really my own unconscious internalized misogyny. That is painful to type, because I don’t want it to be true. When I go out of my way to make sure that people realize that I don’t do X, like other women, what I am really saying is that they way women do things is not as good as the way men to them. I’m saying I’m better than other women because I act more masculine. I am not OK with that. I am also finding that the older I get the more comfortable I get with my own femininity – I could not have written this post at 20.

I love my t-shirt & blue jeans daughter and my party dress diva daughter without any desire to make either one more like the other. I honor their true selves. I only hope I do them justice as they grow into amazing young women – with pink or without.



*I’m not ignoring the fact that these issues also apply to boys and transgendered people. I don’t feel as qualified to speak to that. Those issues are real and valid, but they are not the subject of this post.

Making Peace With Christmas & Solstice

In which I address steps that have helped to make this holiday season the best in years.

Since leaving Christianity I have struggled with how and whether to celebrate Christmas.  It felt false to cherry-pick parts of a Christian holiday while rejecting Christianity itself.  On the other hand, I did not want to cause further division in my family by refusing to participate, nor did I want to force my kids to be those weird kids whose mom won’t let them do Christmas.  I like Christmas and I wanted to keep it, but I always felt a little inauthentic about it.

As a humanist science nerd and a dabbler in paganism, I love the Winter Solstice.   The trouble is no one in my family celebrates the Solstice or has the slightest interest in changing the date of our winter celebration.  Every year when December 21 passed, mostly unobserved, it felt like I was neglecting something important, or missing out.

All of the pieces of this change have been in my head for years, but this year they clicked in way that is meaningful for me.  Christmas is the way my culture celebrates the Winter Solstice.  For me, that is it. It may be a few days late, due to a calendar clash, but that is far from the strangest thing about western euro-american culture.  This may be a big "duh" to you, but sometimes it takes a while between when you know something is true and when you feel its truth. When you look at the history of winter festivals, you can come away with a feeling that Christmas is somewhat false, but this year something has turned and it feels more universal.  I am not going to begrudge literalist Christians their refusal to see how much of their sacred day is borrowed from older traditions, but I won't let them interfere with my understanding of its history either.  Instead I will just view Christmas as one aspect in a web of winter holidays.  I will celebrate the Solstice on December 25 and call it Christmas.  The actual story of Christ's birth is not spiritually significant for me, but the long darkness and the reborn sun are. If I focus on joy and peace and warmth and beauty in winter, who cares if it is a few days late? This is Christmas and Solstice on my terms, and I don't feel like I am fighting either one of them anymore.

The second change I have made this year is in my expectation for my own performance on Christmas.  Our kids are getting older and understand why financially this will be a smaller Christmas than normal. Knowing that I will not be able to provide everything I want to freed me from feeling like I have to make the BEST. CHRISTMAS. EVER! every year. I am focusing on spending time instead of money.  This means watching Dr. Who Christmas specials with Tall Daughter E and cutting paper snowflakes with Tiny Daughter M.  It is hot cider with Husband S late on Christmas Eve and learning to knit gifts.  It means very little time spent Christmas shopping.

This Christmas is important.  It is the last Christmas when all my kids will be children.  It is the last one where I know for sure that the whole family will live together and race together down the hallway Christmas morning.  I hope Tall E is with us next Christmas, but she will be an adult then, and it is possible she will be living somewhere else.  I want to wrap my arms around this Christmas and hug it.

Yesterday I had a very frustrating afternoon and what should have been a vexing evening.  But as I killed time running errands and walking in the beautiful falling snow, I stared pondering this post and found myself so in love with the world, so happy not to be a neurotic mess.   I am not totally sure why I find myself calmer and less frantic this holiday season, but I am.  I find myself honoring the stillness of the season more than the joyous frenzy. I want to rest and dwell in this Christmas.  To everyone reading this, I sincerely wish a wonderful joyous and peaceful holiday, on whatever terms you choose to celebrate it.

Force Majeure & Gratitude

We had some pretty weird weather last weekend, and with it, some unfortunate force majeure type damage to our house. This has not been a fun experience as we are learning about construction and insurance policies, and figuring out how to pay our deductable and still manage Christmas. This falls under the category of character-building experience.


This happened right after I started a personal discipline of practicing gratitude in every situation. There is not a lot to feel grateful for when one is hearing the term “structural damage” about one’s home. For days my mantra was, “it could have been much worse”. I consoled myself with thinking about all of the terrible outcomes that didn’t happen.

No one was hurt

We did not lose our windows and have water and wind pouring in our house.

No big leaks in the roof

Our vehicle was undamaged.

This list provided some comfort, but things could be worse only carries one so far. Then I noticed that something had been happening since Saturday night – Husband S and I have been so close to each other lately. I shouldn’t be surprised by now, since adversity has always brought us together, but I am enjoying the effect, if not its cause.

Over and over this last week I am reminded of what complimentary skill sets S and I have. The areas where I excel are his weak points, and his strengths are in areas that leave me overwhelmed and frustrated. We don’t even have to discuss it anymore. One of us will take the lead and the other will either back them up or get out of the way. This week has left us both so grateful for each other. This stress and anxiety has all been worth it, having construction going on during Christmas if OK if it means I get to have this man in my life and we get to feel this way about each other.

I am not happy about the cost and the inconvenience, but I am so glad to have this opportunity to remember how lucky I am to have him.

Sex & Glee

Knowing what the subject matter would be, I almost didn't let my girls watch last night's episode of Glee, "The First Time", but I am really glad that I did.  This themed episode about losing one's virginity was a little bit after-school special for adults, but I don't think it was aimed at us.  I don't think most kids get to see these types of behaviors being modeled, but Glee demonstrated teens discussing using condoms; teen partners have open and only slightly embarrassed conversations about what they wanted out of intimacy, how long they wanted to wait for it, and why; positive and negative emotional outcomes of having sex in high school; partners resisting sexual advances from someone they loved because they were honoring their own feelings; a romantic relationship for a non-traditionally attractive character that was not played for laughs, but introduced the idea that not everyone is attracted to blonde cheerleaders; and a homosexual relationship that had just was much emotional and physical importance as the heterosexual relationships.

I wish that there had been a little more balance and someone other than the mega-uptight counselor and the bitchy ice queen advocating for why they abstain from sex.  In spite of some great West Side Story numbers, this will probably not be listed among my favorite Glee episodes ever, but again, it wasn't made for me.  Most teenagers don't get to go to OWL and the sex ed schools teach is often ridiculously inadequate.  If it takes a silly musical TV show to tell young people that they deserve to have their voice heard in intimate relationships, them I am all for it.

I am so happy with the way this episode approached sex that I am willing to overlook how annoying it was that not one, but two adult female high school staff members are virgins due to their hang-ups and that one of them even discussed this with a high school student.  I may be, ahem, singing a different song if the show pursues the choir teacher/student romantic storyline, but not now kudos to Glee.

Knitting & Neurosis

I am not a craftsy person.  I generally find most crafts to be sources of frustration rather than fun because I can't make things look like I want them to. I can picture or see how cool something could be, but my fingers are too stupid to make it work. I like to be good at things so I hate having lofty goals and amateurish results. So it is with real trepidation that I am committing to making all of my Christmas gifts for adults this year. I am committing here so that I will actually do it, and you can all hold me accountable. My kids will still get indulgent and wasteful stuff. If there is something I hate more than doing crafts, it is the stress and expense of Christmas shopping.

I had solved the holiday shopping problem by using Amazon. Sit down, click around, get a bunch of presents - no muss, no fuss, no traffic. Except that I am trying to reduce the commercialism & waste in my life, and I do my best to buy local, so a Christmas sponsored by Amazon.com doesn't really fit in with those goals.

More than anything else, I dread the idea of giving people cheesy, tacky, hideous, handmade things that they would never want or buy, even in their wildest dreams.  We've all gotten those gifts from well-meaning relatives and the thought of giving them makes me cringe. So next week I am going to learn how to knit.  I mean, I live in Alaska so who can't use a nice scarf? My BFF and knitting coach assures me that if I start now, there is time to re-do them if they are ugly.

Now, if I were a normal person I could approach the idea of learning knit as the simple acquisition of a new and useful skill without being all neurotic about it, but noooooooo.  I am not going to make things that simple; I am going to overthink everything instead. I have been intending to learn to knit for about three years, but have always helf off because of the emotional drama I spin around in at the idea. I know several really good knitters and it fascinates me. I like to watch them knit and it is amazing when they take some yarn and twist it around for a while, and magically it turns into a thing...a useful item. It is like yarn and stick-based alchemy. In my mind there is an intergenerational communion in practicing old skills, like the rare occasions when I knead bread and I feel in harmony with all of the women who came before me and fed their families with the work of their hands.  It might be a good thing to learn this relaxing and meditative alchemy.  It is probably a better thing to do with my hands than to continue to use them to shove Nutella in my face. But I digress.

As soon as I decide to learn the other voice speaks up. Do I really want to learn to be so domestic? I spent most of my life trying to prove that I was a female person and not that bogie-woman a girly-girl. Did I work that hard to be taken seriously only to fall into a stereotype now?  I mean, what kind of feminist knits for goddess's sake? I had the same thoughts when I learned to really cook and I love cooking now. But cooking is a little different - everyone needs to eat, but no one needs to know how to make their own socks.  If I end up liking to knit, am I telling myself that I am someone other than who I think I am?

To any reasonable person, the second point-of-view is stupid. The whole point of being a feminist is to be able to make my own choices, not to limit my choices to a different, less traditional, more masculine set. As I wrote this I could imagine the Buddha laughing at me.  Why would you not allow yourself to do something possibly useful and enjoyable because it might conflight with your identity which you, yourself created and isn't even real?  But those values of creativity, utility, relaxation, and humility are real, so why let my ego get in the way of giving knitting a try?

Grateful for Older Women

UU Membership is "graying"; we all know. In my short time as a UU I have heard and read a lot about why this is a problem and how to fix it. Demographically, I understand why aging memberships are a concern, but I have found a benefit to this lop-sided nature of our congregation. It has given me an opportunity to get to know a whole group of people with whom I almost certainly would have never interacted.

Older women.

I love the older women in my church and I am so grateful I have gotten the change to get to know them. There is the cheerful & bubbly woman in her 70s who did more than anyone to convince me that AUUF was worth looking into. She loves and welcomes everyone and embodies loving-kindness. I recently heard one of our board members whisper that he wanted to be her when he grew up, and I don't think he is alone in that sentiment. She also introduced me to her women's group and the wonderful retired teacher who turned 71 on our shared birthday. That detail is just one of the many things this second woman and I have in common. She has shown me how to remain yourself while embracing change, and that gratitude and contentment lay on the other side of difficulty. Her spirit make me glad to be around her.

The simultaneously bold and relaxed 60 year old who hosts our small group is such a role model for me. Every time I talk to her she makes me feel valued and appreciated while continuing to push me to be the person I want to be. She pushes in the nicest way possible, but still... you know you were pushed. These wonderful women take everything in stride. When things go wrong they laugh, do what can be done, and move on with life. I love this about them.

These are just the three who stand out to me the most. There are others who I don't know as well, but I look forward to learning what they have to teach. I only hope that when it is my turn to be one of the elders I will have gained some of their love and wisdom, expressed with their humor and grace. I hope that I can be to a younger person what they have been to me.