Crunchy Mama Bragging Rights OR Doing the Green Things I Gotta Do

There is so much talk all over the web, especially on these homeschooling mama blogs that I frequent, about going green this and going green that and trying to be more conscious and more present and whatever else it is. I take an anarchistic approach to all this, with a little stylisitic anarchism thrown in because I'm not entirely into knitting and baking as the root of defining my soul (though I do knit and I do bake).

Well, I've been doing this shit for years. Part of that is that I was born into a family full of lefties who joined that back-to-earth movement (sort of) back in the 70s, so there was plenty of DIY motivation about in childhood. Later on, I became conscious, as my mother did, of more bits here and there of what to do to not destroy the planet, at least by minute little segments. So for more than a decade I've been carrying cloth grocery bags and using rags and cloth napkins and the like. Additionally, we

• make most of our own cleaning products, purchasing only detergents and soaps and oils
• grow gardens
• compost
• recycle
• hardly ever flush the toilet
• try not to randomly set things on fire
• maintain only one car
• walk
• buy local and organic
• eat vegetables
• volunteer with a Community Supported Agriculture Group
• buy used
• reuse glass and plastic
• convert old items to new ones
• use cloth toilet paper
• cloth diaper (when we diapered)
• breastfeed (when we breastfed)
• rely heavily on the library
• do not ever buy bottled water - we used to use SIGG bottles, but turns out they suck too (and that buying something we don't need to stop doing something we don't need to do doesn't make sense), so now we reuse glass jars
  
• make things from scratch
• develop plans for our organic unicorn farm where we will live happily ever after in a carbon-footprintless environ, free from the worries of modern life. For reals.

My life is perfect. What, yours isn't? And that's all stuff that we do that "saves" the environment. That doesn't even get into the details about how gloriously perfectly crunchy we are. My kids ran around in hand-dyed cloth diapers covered over with hand-knit organic wool longies eating veggies from our garden and drinking kale smoothies. I mean, clearly I win, right?

Not only that, but we do ridiculously crunchy things like homebirth and unschool. We go on hikes in the woods and volunteer together as a family. Lordy, if I were a better blogger, I could win crunchydom real easy. Especially if I had a DSLR, because then I could showcase our wood floors and nature trays and the crafting we do and crap and it would look so beautiful and perfect, which my life is, of course (that whole complaint list notwithstanding). Then all the moms in their houses could ooh and ahh at what an excellent mother I am whilst trying to keep a damper on the creeping feeling that maybe they're not quite as good as me.

Yes, that must be it. I might as well already live on that organic unicorn farm.

To counter all that complaining for no good reason, really - or one really good reason - here is the note I wrote to my husband for Valentine's Day.

I want to summarize the past twelve Valentine's Days or somehow distill a meaning from all those years together, but to arrive at conclusions seems impossible and somewhat naive. There are no possible ways to adjust or exact some grand narrative that would not always inevitably conclude with words that are faulty and imprecise. There are too many paths and processes to parse together, too much tragedy, hope, despair, triumph, and the stoic and altogether mundane soldiering on which occurred and occurs every day in this life together. There are too many words for all of it to grant it adequate meaning. It would be simply too much babbling on. And yet, I suppose, there is something simple and exact enough to suffice: I love you. Always have.

I'm currently reading Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Like all books that speak to things I already feel, this book is infiltrating my thoughts. Despite my past dabbling in Treasure Mapping, I really have always hated the idea of the secret laws of attraction, and Bright-Sided is the perfect antidote to that. It is appropriate, then, for it to worm its way inside my head and to encourage hearty "hell yeahs!" and occasional sharing of choice quotations with others. I think too, it may be appropriate to counter a world chock full of the encouragement of faulty thinking with a list of complaints. Thus...

I may very soon lose my health insurance and so will my husband. He is making more money this semester and we will no longer qualify for Medicaid.

We qualify for Medicaid because he has been in graduate school the last 7-1/2 years, which is incidentally how long our son has been alive, who is incidentally also a reason for which we qualify.

My husband's 7-1/2 years in grad school have resulted in something to the tune of $140,000 in debt. I think. That's a guesstimate.

He doesn't have a job yet.

I spent the months between May 2009 and February 2010 trying to get my son an appointment to get a palatal expander so that he can wear it for 6 months to a year before having it replaced with bone from his hip sewn into the roof of his mouth. He still doesn't have the expander, but has at least had the molds to make it done. Any day now...

I think I have a sinus infection.

It's hard for me to complain sincerely when I understand my immense privilege in this world.

No war is a good war. I can hardly imagine an instance where any war is a just war.

The inefficacy of our government is tiresome.

I hate cooking. Eating is something that carries great ambivalence for me. I love food. I hate preparing it and am extraordinarily picky, oddly. I cannot bear flavors that are too strong. No stinky cheese, no stinky beers, nothing too spicy. I like salt, sugar, carbs, and kale. I do not gain weight, or rather, mass.

It might be obnoxious to give each complaint so much context. They hardly read like complaints.

I fully believe that capitalism is derived of patriarchy and that both cause most of the problems in the world. It is unfortunate to recognize this and yet have it be the water I swim in.

My children are driving me insane lately. Nearly to violence. I have strong beliefs about kindness and community and collectivity and all things gentle and honoring of both the individual and the group, but lately I want to tear them limb from limb and throw them about. I'm certain this is the fault of February.

I loathe February. It is the longest month of the year, even though it isn't. It is agony to be in February, stuck, cold, sick, hating life, hating each other, hating everything, in the darkness, in the gloom, the gray glow of sunlight bouncing off the snow doing nothing for anyone, feeling, inevitably, ill at ease, itchy, aching for a better, brighter, more well-rounded and fantastic life.

Somehow, I've been feeling not at all accomplished, not good enough, glaringly imperfect of late.

Part of this glaring imperfection is the wanting to tear children limb-from-limb: it causes me great concern, makes me wonder if I am the only one not enjoying this parenting thing enough and if there is something not entirely wrong with me because though I am an unschooler, I seem to be doing very poor with the unschooling, or the exploring of the world, rather. Perhaps this is February and illness and crushing debt and joblessness and the immense privilege of sitting on high examining the problems of the world (and personal life) with a fine toothed intellectual comb, or perhaps I'm just a very bad pessimist and poor facilitator of life.

Self-doubt is particularly agonizing in the gray gloom.

My right hand, still mostly numb from having severed my median nerve three years ago, feels like a cold dead weight and makes it difficult to type (particularly the "m" key), pick up small objects, not burn myself, and impossible (I believe) to put a clothespin back together once it has come apart.

Sebastian is still not pronouncing all sounds correctly and it's making me worried that waiting him out is a stupid approach.

Aleks wants more interaction with other children. Sometimes specific children. If this is not fulfilled, it is my fault.

I am the only person doing much cleaning in our house these days. I am also the only person that takes the children anywhere ever. I also pay the bills, do the taxes, run all the errands, do most of the cooking, and stock everything we need. I also do the "homeschooling" and am heavily involved/buried in a volunteer gig outside of the home. This is highly irritating, but the only solution given certain circumstances.

I feel emotionally exhausted.

Thinking positive will do nothing to remedy any of that, except, perhaps, the self-doubt. Any foray into positive thinking to soothe said self-doubt may simply result in deluding or failing to motivate myself. That does not sound like a desirable outcome for my skeptic self.

There also seems to be an over-riding theme of general ambivalence. There are rationalizations galore available for all of the personal issues (though none at all for the global ones), but it seems impossible to pinpoint actual causes or to project results from a course of action.

I should also note that despite all the personal complaints, our life is genuinely excellent and complaining in the context of being a white-identified American is without a doubt, whiny and obnoxious. It is also, fortunately or unfortunately, the truth.

The Art 365 thing ended up being impossible due to scheduling difficulties. Or, rather, photographing the evidence and displaying it is an unwieldy task for me these days. Maybe one day.