About four in the afternoon, my friend and I were at a bar playing with these little plastic toys left in a basket for drunk kids like us. She had set up a wall of fencing with soldiers and cowboys, defending it from my wall of teepees and Indians that pointed their little bows and arrows at the guns. My toy horse was adorned with a hot pink cocktail umbrella.

It was Sunday and I was spending it doing what I always did - Bloody Mary's over Brunch, shopping at consignment stores, and happy hour. I loved life as a cocktail waitress, a life of 5am bedtimes and tequila and bar-hopping fun. I loved it, but all this was about to change. With bourbon in hand, I laid out my plans for the future.

Not long ago, I stripped Miriam of her jammies and reached for her shirt and pants combo of the day. "No," she said, waving away my hand. "Wear dress."

"No," I replied, "today we're wearing these." (It's an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that most moms refer to their children as we. Thus the inevitable stress when our children show any signs of independence. I wish I were speaking to my mother so I could apologize to her for this, but I'm not, for myriad reasons that could probably be boiled down to my need for independence from her. Gotta love that feedback loop.)

"No," Miriam growled. "Wear dress. WEAR DRESS!"

I suspected this day would come.

May 26, 1948- July 2, 2009

There's a kaleidoscope in the conservatory where I've stopped with my daughters. There's a circular bed of sand with sticks and rocks, and above, the lenses and mirrors. We shift the sand around and look, and each time the picture is different. If you look deep inside a kaleidoscope, what you see is the ocean of patterns of light, surrounded by a rim of darkness, curving away like night falling.

Trying to write about Bonnie Tinker is kind of like this. The ways in which Bonnie touched people's lives are complex, shifting and beautiful.

I'm writing this today, not because I see myself as a political activist, but because our daughter lives with an on-going, critical need for healthcare, and because I want everyone to be able to put a face to the idea of healthcare reform. And what better face than our goofy, gorgeous, brave baby girl's?

Anyone who has ever met my daughter knows that she is just about the most lovable and kind person ever born. But they probably don't know about the struggles that she has faced, nor those that we have faced as a family because of her chronic condition. We're pretty private about a lot of this stuff, because, well, it isn't really anyone's business but our own. But I feel like this is an important time for honesty.

We moved from Colorado to Tulsa in Spring, 2003. At that time Sophie was two years old, and was the healthiest kid that you had ever met. In the two years she lived in Colorado, she had one stomach virus and two colds. Within a month of moving to Tulsa, Sophie developed pneumonia. And then weeks after that, she had it again. And then weeks after that, she had it again. This was a frustrating time, but we weren't too worried. We just kept going back to the doctor and getting more antibiotics and steroids. What would any parent do?

When the smoke from the Columbine High School massacre cleared, fourteen students and one teacher in my school district were dead, and dozens were wounded. Fortunately, two huge bombs that had been planted in the building didn't explode. Shock waves rippled through the culture and our educational establishment. How had American education gotten to such a terrible and tragic turn? In the wake of Columbine, all of us teachers, veteran and novice alike, were forced to make brutally painful evaluations of our educational goals and means.

In response to an article posted on Bitch Magazine’s website ( Trippin' Out: Bristol Palin's less-than-successful campaigning), Bristol Palin is the teenager (gasp!) and single (gasp!) mother AND daughter of conservative Sarah Palin. Not only has her family completely exploited her situation as a single, teen mother but also there does not seem to be any support for her now. She is a mother and who knows what type of judgment she has received from getting pregnant as a teenager or the support that came or lacked from any type of choice she may have wanted.

At 19 I read Adrienne Rich as she struggled to put into words the isolation and terror of being the solo parent of small children all day. I saw her essays as the record of a historical moment, the cusp of change between an era of rigid gender roles and frustrated housewives, and my own time of working mothers and egalitarian divisions of parenting labor. I treasured her insights into how destructive the old system could be to the spirit of mother and child alike. Reading Rich and Audre Lorde, I appreciated their deeply feminist understandings that the children-- even boy children-- were not the conquerors in this system, but equally trapped and isolated.

The difference between me and Adrienne Rich is that she didn't get to read Adrienne Rich in college. She didn't enter into stay-at-home mothering already armed with a rich feminist analytical vocabulary to describe to herself exactly, precisely, incisively, why it sucks.

Back in the day, frustrated mothers were pacified with Mother’s Little Helper, barbiturates, to be cured of the restlessness that would later be diagnosed as the beginnings of the women’s movement. That movement was the reason I fell asleep as a child listening to Marlo Thomas sing “Some mommies drive taxis/ or sail on the sea, yeah/ Mommies can/ be almost anything/ they wanna be!” And I believed it. The restlessness and frustration had been cured by social change.

Thirty-five years after Marlo’s 1974 record, I’m navigating the labyrinths of 21st century HMO authorizations to ask a psychiatrist whether I need to go back on Prozac, or just wait for my son to start kindergarten.

I have a graduate degree. I married a feminist man. I am mothering a toddler at forty, when I might be imagined to have more resources than when I was younger. I even work outside the home; currently, on much the same terms my own “working” mother did, alternating full-time parenting with periodic part-time work scheduled around when my small child won’t miss me, usually while he’s asleep.

My adult life and identity are not defined by mothering. When I begin to wonder why I’m reading “Blue Hat Green Hat” for the ninety-fifth time straight, I can derive irony, but also comfort, from remembering that I’ve filled many other roles in other years, other decades. I’m not afraid that I’m only this. As an adoptive mother, I haven’t felt, as many birth mothers do, that parenting has redefined my body and my function in the world at the most basic physical level. When I am holding a bottle, singing “Twinkle Twinkle,” or hunting for an elusive pacifier, I am not worrying that the world has passed me by. I have only to fire up the Internet (another saving resource Adrienne lacked) to touch base with professional colleagues and old friends, all of whom validate that there are other sides to me than this, more dimensions of personhood than just Mama.

And I wanted so much and for so long to be someone’s mama. Every day that I waited, I found it incredibly painful to hear fertile women complaining about the burdens of mothering their babies—like listening to Warren Buffett complain about his taxes. What wouldn’t I give! I thought, to have their problems.

When my son was tiny, I felt like a brilliant mother. There were only three things he wanted: food, dry pants, and to be rocked to sleep. Miraculously I was able to provide all three.

Now he is two.

Five mornings a week, the door closes behind my husband, who will not return for ten hours. Minus a two-hour nap, whose beginning time is not dependable, that’s eight hours of solo parenting a toddler, five days a week.

It’s like standing in a hurricane? Lately I feel as if I’m walking into a stiff wind, all the time.

Here’s the thing that’s hard: my son has learned to walk, run, climb, throw, smear, and dismantle. He has not yet learned to construct sentences or follow instructions. He is not autistic, or developmentally disordered, or emotionally damaged. He’s just two. He wants to be Doing Something every second that he is awake, and he does not want to do any of it alone, and he does not want to do any of it sitting down. If I start him stacking blocks, and I walk into the other room, he leaves the blocks and follows me. If he is sitting at the table eating lunch, same thing. There is no autopilot with a two-year-old. He is doing what I’m doing.

When I focus on something other than him, he works at engaging either me or whatever I’m doing. This has its benefits: he’s learning to do housework while he’s learning to speak. My son is going to be a man who can’t remember when he didn’t unload the dishwasher, throw away trash, clear his dishes to the sink after meals—and so far, he takes great satisfaction in doing those jobs himself. But his single focus also means that when he’s alone with a mother who is thinking about something else—subtracting expenses in the checkbook, say, or cooking pasta for his lunch— he becomes increasingly desperate, grabbing the pen or the spoon, or my arm, or my face. If I persist in asking him to wait, I get a poke in the eye, which gets him a time out.

His father and I have absolutely agreed that we must teach him not to hit; that we must teach him with consistent and age-appropriate consequences; that hitting children to teach them not to hit is kind of problematic and likely to backfire; and that the appropriate consequence is a time-out for a number of minutes equal to the child’s age in years. My husband read that somewhere and it sounded sensible to us both.

After two minutes, a toddler has forgotten about whatever he was doing before you put him in a room by himself. After three, he’s found something else to play with. After ten, he’s flinging himself at the door and screaming because obviously nobody is ever coming to let him out.

After two minutes, the cortisol in my bloodstream is at pretty much the same level it was right after somebody hit me in the eye two minutes ago.

In these moments, I cannot recall a single exact quote from Adrienne Rich,while a line from the gothic thriller, The Crow, repeats in my head: "Mother is the name of God on the lips of all children." I'm all too aware that I am not just structuring my son's daily reality, but I am shaping his brain and teaching him about love and power. Am I teaching my son that God abandons him for five times as long as he can understand? Or that God is shaking with fury, unable to look at him?

Who decided that the two of us should be each other’s only companions for ten hours in a row? Who decided this was safe? Am I saying I’m a danger to my child? Am I saying I’m an unfit mother? Am I saying I’d better fill that Prozac prescription? Am I seriously saying that a forty-year-old woman with a graduate education in a helping profession cannot handle two four-hour blocks of interacting with her own beloved, long-awaited child?

I’m saying that by the time his father comes home at night, I’m so dissociated all I want to do is curl up in an office chair and drink margaritas until I fall asleep. Instead, I cook supper and surf the Internet while his father gives him a bath, a bottle, a book, and a bedtime kiss. “You seem so distant in the evenings,” he says, “I love to have my whole family together at night, won’t you come sit with us?” I think how lucky I am to have a husband who’s willing to come home from work and take over completely, who doesn’t mind diapering, picking out pajamas, giving piggyback rides. I think what a good dad he is, how fun, how at least my son has this pleasure to offset my gritted demands to eat one more bite of oatmeal or spit out a mouthful of playground dirt. I sit beside them on the sofa. I can’t remember what I was thinking about.

At 19, I thought naming a problem solved it. I never imagined reaching 40 and finding that while women have named and pointed and sometimes gesticulated wildly, I'm living in the same questionable circumstances that Adrienne Rich described before I was born. Market work has not changed, and policies and supports for care-takers, who are often also workers, are nonexistent. In our current culture, every family is still an island. Though I have co-workers and neighbors, and even a church, I still find most days my son and I are stranded without relief boats in sight and I am past the point of caring whether they arrive with on site day care or anti-depressants, as long as they arrive.

Anne Neville has lived all over the United States; both coasts, the deep south and in the great lakes region. She's worked in tech, retail, food service, office administration, education and health care. She's currently settled with her son and husband in a little yellow house on a sunny street.

My most powerful childhood memory is very simple, like all the deepest recollections are: as my mother leaned against the sink of our butter-yellow Minneapolis kitchen, I barreled into her and squashed my face her soft belly. I could have been no older than five, for my head reached no higher than the motherly bulge that bumped out below the high waistband of her 1970s-era jeans. I luxuriated in the warmth that lay there as I wrapped my arms tightly around the back of her legs. I felt at home. I was safe.

Did she hold me in return? Did she ruffle my hair? Did she have any idea of the comfort I felt in that moment?

I tried to tell her about this feeling much later. I was twenty-eight, and I’d just given birth to my first child. Afterwards, I saw that my body was different. I told her that I had the pooch under my belly button that she had, too. I understood now that the soft place I had loved was the place was proof of her motherhood: we were connected by the physical proof that we’d carried children.

When I told her this, she squirmed. “I’m fat,” she moaned. “I’m disgusting. You’re making fun of me.”

But I remember hugging you there, I said, and how important you felt to me. I remember how soft you were. You felt good.

She looked uncomfortable. I knew then that my hair hadn’t been ruffled. She had a different interpretation of the moment we shared; while I remember the safety of a mother’s body, she felt embarrassment and shame, perhaps blaming me for calling attention to what she saw an imperfection. Soon it would not only be her motherly body that was imperfect: mine would be too.

*

My mother and I no longer speak. Sometime after that simple hug in the kitchen of our old house on Dupont Avenue, our relationship changed. It took becoming a mother myself to realize that the chasm between my mother and her emotions was too wide for me to bridge. Too often the only way to gain insight into her feelings was to endure one of her blistering, white-hot rages, but even those seemed out of her control, too much like a furious id unleashed from an unsuspecting ego. My mother’s long undiagnosed mental illness did to her what gamma radiation did to poor Bruce Banner in my dog-eared comic books. The latter at least figured out how to use it for the proverbial good.

As I mothered my children with my body, I remembered something else: or more accurately, its lack. The aforementioned memory is my only one of spontaneous touch. And I was the one who hugged her, not the other way around. Today I pet my daughter and son with abandon, kissing them, hugging them, holding their hands, touching the softness of their unblemished cheeks, losing my fingers in the tangles of their hair. I have no such corollary. I can’t recall so much as a goodnight kiss.

Thirty years since that hug, I wonder what happened to that soft place I knew. Yet her hugs and kisses with my children, her grandchildren, seemed genuine. What had happened? Was it me? Did I have years of her affection that were inexplicably forgotten?

This thought gives no comfort. Which option is worse: lacking affection entirely, or having it only to lose it? The latter implies a change in one or both parties that affected the outcome, which also implies that there is someone who can be blamed.

*

As my son grew older, he grew difficult. “There’s something wrong with him,” my mother said more than once. She began to withdraw from him, preferring the company of his much cuddlier younger sister.

Watching this became unendurable. I had to let her go.

*

Touch imprints powerfully upon the memory. I remember one particular embrace, early in my relationship with the man who would become my husband. I tucked my head into his right shoulder and felt as a child once more. The sense of calm security was profound. I never doubted that this person would be my family for the rest of my life.

In the hold’s immediate aftermath, I panicked. Was I losing my independent, feminist principles in the arms of a man whom I wanted to take care of me? Did I have some warped infantilization in my admittedly fragile psyche?

Much later, I understood. I was feeling what I had felt that day in the kitchen. I flashed back to the safety of a loved one’s body. Inside Matt’s arms I experienced the unconditional acceptance and love that I hadn’t known since I was five years old.

*

In the bathtub, my two-year-old daughter touched my breasts. “Your boo-boos,” she cooed. Yes, I said, they are mine. “I have boo-boos,” she continued, “but mine are little.” I nodded.

I had to fight the urge to slap her pudgy hand away. My conditioning, it seemed, was complete. Nervous schoolteachers taught that bodies are not for sharing; the chill running through my childhood home enforced the same message.

I love my daughter with every part of my body and soul, and I know I want her to have what I didn’t. I give her access to my body when she needs it. I nursed her until I was physically unable. I answer her questions when she asks them. I let her touch if she needs to.

After her hands learned all that they needed to, they went back to her plastic boat. She was satisfied. It lasted three seconds.

*

My mother asked in an e-mail message that I return all of the family photo albums that were stored in my attic. She said that it was only fair -- before my son was born I had promised to reorganize them into fresh, acid-free books that would halt the degeneration of the nearly forty-year-old film. I said I would, and I didn’t. Now she wanted those memories back.

I peeled picture after picture from their sticky pages. I am playing on city park equipment, built of metal that scorched and wood that splintered, replaced long ago by fiberglass and plastic. In a delicate baptismal gown I am held by a series of elderly folk who determinedly clung to the Brylcreem and horn-rimmed glasses of their own lost generation. So many of the things that touched me once are gone forever.

Other hands, the thick-fingered North Dakota laborer hands she inherited from her father, have withdrawn for their own reasons. They wish to hold age-browned squares of paper instead of the hot, nail-bitten hands of a anxious little girl, and years later, her troubled little boy.

When I was done, I left the paper grocery bag of photo albums at my sister’s back doorstep. If there were any objections to the gaping white holes that skipped across every page, I never heard them.

*

In calmer moments, one can draw a clinical line from the sternness of the prairie farm people to the emotional reserve of their children. A trained professional and a stack of thoughtful books theorize that the illness coursing through her brain detached her from reason.

But reason isn’t in it, I seethe. Reason isn’t behind the cradling warmth that a child needs from her mother; that drive is instinctive. Parents embrace the children who need them. Parents don't seek out scientific studies proving that untouched babies fail to synthesize the hormones needed for growth and metabolic functioning. Among the reams of paperwork passing into the hands of fumbling new parents at the check-out desks of hospitals are no flyers warning that untouched babies will die. Unvaccinated babies, yes, or babies lacking car seats. To tell a parent that a baby needs touch sounds as silly as telling that parent to breathe, to eat, or to live.

At a certain point in their development, children lose the smooth softness that invites the instantaneous snuggle or caress. Baby fat melts into angles at noses and elbows. Their rounded flesh roughens; their bodies smell sour, not sweet. Their appeal grows complicated as they age, the inverse of The Very Hungry Caterpillar story that I read to both of my kids when they were young. And as their shells harden, perhaps the grown-ups around them do, too.

The therapist squinted, then pursed her thin lips. “This must have been very hard for you,” was all she could say.

*

My mother was right, after all: there is something wrong with him.

For my son hurts me. My scalp tingles for hours from the memory of the pull of his hands on my hair. I get kicked, in my stomach, knees, and face. I feel a dark and frightening id of my own bubbling to my lips before Matt intervenes and sends everyone, grown-ups and children alike, to their rooms for time-out.

Ten minutes later, I pad upstairs to his room, where I find him wrapped like a burrito in a thick comforter, still crying. His damp, red-rimmed eyes are wild with fear. He doesn’t know where this comes from. I have an idea, and months later another set of logical, reason-based professionals will prove me right. For now, his mind is not the battleground; my body is. Two models of parenting, from my mother and from my species, are at war over what I must do.

I peel away the blanket. His body lies curled into a fetal coil, his hands tucked beneath his tear-streaked chin. I creak the springs of the mattress as I ease my weight in beside him, pulling the blanket back over us. This cocoon feels good. I put my face into the tangled hair that still smells of the strawberry shampoo we washed it in.

Here Matt will find us, wrapped up together, our arms and legs touching, at peace.

*

What will my son remember of this moment? Will he recall the feel of my imprint? Of my shape curling around his? Will I tell him that I needed the relief of our touch as much as he does? When he understands that our family’s Incredible Hulk-like curse has fallen upon him, will he come to resent my needs as much as his grandmother seems to? Will he tear himself from me, or be torn? Can I hold on tightly enough to stop that from happening? Do I even have the right to try?

In any event, I can be sure he will ask one day about the loose pictures stashed in the Converse All-Stars shoebox. He will ask me to identify the young, red-haired woman holding me at the baptismal font. I must answer honestly: she is my mother.

Mother. How might his memory react to the mention of that word?

He might feel her thick fingers enveloping his plump little hand as he edged towards the new plastic slides at McRae Park for the first time.

He might even recall, as I do, the moment that she let him go.

Shannon Drury writes, parents, and agitates in Minneapolis. She writes a regular column and features for the Minnesota Women's Press and is currently serving her third term as state president of Minnesota NOW. She embarrasses her family and makes new frenemies at www.myspace.com/theradicalhousewife.com.

"Some mothers work because they have to -- others for their own fulfillment."

And there it was -- it might has well come in the form of a back-handed slap. Somehow because I am sensitive about my fulfillment -- that it's private and not for outside commentary, I felt like this sentence filleted me and left me for dead. I am overly sensitive for sure -- but on this topic, my sensitivity is off the charts. When pressed, do I have to work? Couldn't we downsize or live more frugally on my husband's income? Yes. Is my own fulfillment an appropriate reason to leave my son? Is that really the only purpose of my work? Somehow "my own fulfillment," sounded about as reasonable for a mother as a heroine addiction.

I was born and raised in the rural south, where racial difference was like oxygen. You inhaled it, you exhaled it and you learned about the function and composition later. While my family checked the white or caucasian box on forms, my county was predominantly African-American, a term that did not exist yet. I learned to say "colored", which my mother said was polite, and then to say "black", the term preferred by my classmates to whom it referred.

When I started first grade, my elementary school had been integrated for only three years. That year, we were grouped at our four top tables alphabetically and to create gender and racial balance, girl and boy, white and black until the teachers ran out of white children. People identified as white or black by the same one drop rules that governed slavery and then segregation. This continued throughout school.

Picking teams in middle school, the white and black team captains alternated choosing one black child and then one white child. In high school, the homecoming queen ballot always listed two white seniors and two black seniors. In the classroom, no one talked about moving beyond race. Black teachers and students wanted white students to recognize the achievements of their ancestors in the face of our ancestors' attempts to keep them enslaved and after emancipation keep them as far away from the benefits of education and elections and employment as possible.

Like many parents raised in insular communities, I wanted my child to have a broader sense of the world than her own backyard. At eighteen months my daughter, Emily knew more people from diverse religions and cultures than I did at eighteen years. We read myths and stories from many traditions and skimmed our huge book of photographs of families all over the world.

I read essays that warned that a child who thinks of everyone as different on the outside but the same on the inside becomes a child who defaults to thinking of everyone as "white". Coming from my necks of the woods, I didn't believe that was possible. Until last year when I discovered that the color blind children in my daughter's kindergarten class told a biracial classmate that she had to pick the "light" not "brown" skin color in a class art activity. The teacher intervened. At home, I emphasized the rudeness of challenging the classmate's choice, as a person and an artist. My daughter, Emily understood the artist part, but when it came to race she remained perplexed.

Honestly, so was I. As I age, more people use the adjectives "multiracial" and "biracial". What if I told Emily to use the wrong words? What if she hurt someone's feelings? Did I want her to start assessing and categorizing people? What if one day she rolled her eyes and corrected me on my archaic and racist language just as I rolled my eyes and corrected my mother. I did not want to teach Emily anything that would ever make her ashamed of me or ashamed of herself.

Over the summer, Emily's confusion about skin color came to a head. One morning on a remote island, we visited a museum with an exhibit honoring the 100th birthday of the last remaining member of that island's one African-American family. As Emily gazed at handmade textiles and family photographs, I read the commentary on the segregated school. I asked Emily to imagine being on that tiny island. Teachers come to your house in the afternoon, but the law says that because your grandparents were slaves from Africa you can't set foot in the school house where every single other child on that island spends their day.

In the afternoon while digging in the sand, Emily asked "Now that I am getting tan again, am I a brown skinned person?"

Without thinking I replied "No. Your skin color doesn't change when your skin color changes." Emily looked at me like that sounded as ridiculous as it sounded.

Then, I knew. There was no way around it. Emily needed the whole story. Trying my best to discern what was vital information from what was detail, I covered four hundred years of history in about forty minutes. I started with slave ships leaving Africa with captives who would never see their families ever again. I ended with me learning all this in my newly integrated schools.

I made it abundantly clear that slavery did not happen far away, but where we lived. And segregation did not end long ago, but in my lifetime. When I finished, Emily wanted to know - Who? Who were the people who believed that children shouldn't go to school together?

Those people were us; my grandparents, my mother, my brother.

I know I am not the only mother ashamed that her family resented the civil rights movement instead of embracing it. As a child, I struggled to understand the disconnect between what I learned in school and what I heard at home. My mother tried to change with the times, but her little triumphs over her prejudices only reveal how deeply ingrained those prejudices run. As a child, I saw this, and I became scared, as a mother, to speak for fear of my mother's blind spots and revealing a similar one to my child and then that became my blind spot.

My daughter's elementary school class does not resemble mine. There's more than two races; there's three just among the children from Burma. The students are assigned to tables based on who distracts who the least. Emily's teacher, an African American woman the exact same age as I, ended her lesson on Martin Luther King Jr. by saying that with all he dreamed, at the time, we could not imagine seeing what we will see today, the inauguration of Barack Obama.

As a child, I could not even imagine a Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday, whereas Emily can not imagine why anyone would oppose one.

Watching the childrens' increasing fluidity of interactions across gender, race and language lines and witnessing their unanimous enthusiasm for Barack Obama, I can almost forget that the people who drew those lines still exert influence, but I've learned even when their beliefs do not, the shame of them can, if we can't own it and speak of it.

At age seven, my daughter is beginning to understand the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and her heroine, Rosa Parks, but I still need to fill in the blanks about the challenges they faced.

I draw on my awful heritage of living among people who retreated into an engrained racism even when they attempted otherwise. Their language and thoughts, being simple, are far easier for Emily to grasp and reject than fifty cent SAT words like inferior and institutionalized.

She's also learned that her mother weeps constantly when reading books about slavery or talking about this year's election or watching the inaugural concert clips. I found underneath my shame, there was a deep grief and I may weep for the rest of my lifetime - and one day my daughter may weep that I wept. Or she may frown and talk about what an idiot I was. I've grown comfortable with that idea.

This morning, I am proud to belong to my generation and to celebrate the changes of our lifetime, but I am more excited about what is yet to come.

Maria Rowan lives in North Carolina with her husband and daughter, all natives of the state. This morning they are thrilled to have not just a new President, but several inches of snow.

Could it be that my mother is actually cooler than I am? On Halloween night she breezed off to some party dressed as Cruella De Vil, while I bundled up for a four hour "get out the vote " shift handing out Democratic sample ballots to early voters in Mclean, Virginia.

She had borrowed my clothes, makeup, and accessories in order to transform herself into a younger version of me, a vision she'd loathed at the time. My Siouxsie worshiping, two-tone coiffed, animal print clad, post-punker self created a huge rift in my family. It was the young woman I chose to become after a childhood and early teen years in Saudi Arabia. With our move back to America, in the late Eighties, Arab standards of propriety in dress and behavior fell by the wayside. While this confounded my parents, in a strange twist it bothered my Arab father less than my American mother, a lifelong Republican. Her ramrod ideologies clashed utterly with my enthusiasm for punk shows and leftist politics. Hurtful words ricocheted on both sides, and we rarely appeared in public together. She ordered me to conceal my Saudi and Islamic heritage; at all costs, do not bring shame upon the family. There was no mother-daughter bond to speak of, but I swallowed the hurt, and the Arab in me went dormant.

I became adept at white lies. With a name like mine, an introduction is typically followed by "so, where are you from?" I hedged around the truth; born in Beirut, lived in Egypt, extrapolate from there. It wasn't until 9/11 that I came out of the Arab closet. The extreme violence of that event, along with the discovery that the majority of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, shattered me. I needed to talk about the sleepy desert Kingdom that I knew, and the moderate community of dual citizens in which I was raised, so that I could process and grieve. I was acutely aware of my Arab-American status, and felt incredibly foreign. My family, at the time newly settled in Dubai, was half a world away from me, and I was living in the small American town that my father’s government job brought me to when I was a child. America had been good to us, but not, it seemed, anymore. The new visa process, with its fingerprint scans and other invasive requirements, discouraged my father from visiting. My American life took a turn for the dark side; fortunately, the fallout after the attacks brought dialog and curiosity before it brought surveillance, hatred, and mistrust from the state.

The cultural abyss created by 9/11 also transformed my mother. Mama Bear is how I describe the woman who reared up in support of her Arab husband and daughters. Guantanamo Bay, the invasion of Iraq and Abu Ghraib drove her from the GOP forever. As she discovered her new voice, I fell silent. I had marched in pro-Palestinian and anti-IMF rallies, but took a backseat in the anti-war movement when DC police began indiscriminate round-ups of activists, and all bystanders within proximity of the protests. My neon hair branded me politico-punk activist, but my name gave away my ethnicity; and who knew what trouble my other passport and dual citizen status would cause? As an Arab-American, would I be detained and questioned? And where, and for how long? I joked about being the first to discover if a female ward at Guantanamo existed, but I was terrified of the place. From 2003 to 2008, I stayed out of all movements; the news cycle confirmed so many fears. Life was surreal, often nightmarish. The divide between east and west that I felt within myself was mirrored in US foreign policy.

During the primary season, I voted for Barack Hussein Obama, a man with a life story similar to mine. He fostered a sense of optimism in me that I’d thought long gone, stirrings of hope even, but it took the nomination of fundamentalist Sarah Palin to get my cynical ass back on its grassroots feet. Until then, I thought that the bar on my personal and cultural misery could not get any lower, but after the RNC I could literally taste an America to come that was far worse than the one I already knew. I decided to put my passion and time into the Obama campaign, only to discover that my mother had done the same months ago.

Overnight, my mother, the Bush voter, had become my mother, the Mother Jones donor. My feminist, radical, anti-war self was at risk of being left in the political dust by my own mother. I wasn't having any of that. We became partners in a cause that neutralized all of our differences. She bubbled over with a positive energy that swept me up in its wake. Initially I joined her in voter registration drives at the Metro. With my tattoos peeking out of my sleeves, I sat by her side as she proudly introduced me as her daughter, "the writer ". On that first day together, as I gave my rote explanation of the origins of my name to other Obama volunteers, an older lady expressed concern about my citizenship, "But you're American right?" I learned that my mother had left out certain background information about our family; basically everything involving the Middle East. My mother, the superwoman campaigner, canvassed door-to-door, phone banked, and trained for the polls under her Catholic name, Mary Margaret; tall, Germanic, blonde, blue-eyed Mary Margaret.
When I asked her why she was concealing half her life, she denied the concealing and said it just never came up. Yet she nixed the idea of fundraisers at our house when I pointed out Persian carpets lay on the floors, and on the wall hung photographs of family members in Arabic dress, watercolors of the Middle East, and Quranic calligraphy. Everywhere the eye traveled, the house screamed, Arabs live here. She laughed with other campaigners about her Republican years while confiding to me that our Arab side would harm the Obama effort. It's a peculiar hurt, believing your heritage could have a negative effect on the campaign of the candidate who embodies your American experience, but it was unsettling to watch my mother bow to accepted racial norms. She seemed shackled by the east-west flavor of our family while I was loudly praising our fusion in every medium that I could write in.

The McCain camp's Islamophobic fear mongering ultimately proved my mother's instincts to be correct. It took lifelong Republican, Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama to right the deep sense of wrong I felt as Election Day inched closer and closer. When Powell asserted that America holds a place for its Arab and Muslim citizens, I sat down in shock and cried. He not only endorsed Obama; he endorsed my family.

On October 31st, 2008, my mother inhabited a Halloween costume I doubt many 62 year old women could carry off. I was touched that she'd asked for my help in assembling it, because in the past she had scorned any such association. All resentment from our turbulent years fizzled away and I told her she looked wonderful, because she did. She looked daring and hip, and I simply looked like I was missing out. We stepped out the door together, one very much like the other. Change had not just come to America, change had come to my family.

CSPAN ran footage of Majda Talal Gama and her mother, Mary Margaret waving American flags on the final night of Barack Obama's campaign in Manassas, Virginia. Majda is a poet living in the DC area. Her current itinerary is Dulles to Dubai via London and back again.

I spend much of my online time catching up with insane things conservatives say, and this election year has been more insane in that regard than usual. American conservatism imploded in 2008, and nowhere is this clearer than in the heights of fantasy and illogic reached in the political conversation of rank-and-file Republicans. You expect some lying and lunacy in these matters, not restricted to any particular ideology or party. This week, for instance, marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Jonestown tragedy, so old stories about clandestine government sponsorship of Jim Jones and People’s Temple are flying around. Many Americans of varying political stripes will believe any horror story – no matter how absurd - with the initials “CIA” attached to it. It happens.

What you don’t often see, even in presidential election years, is the grand scale panicked denial gripping US conservatives lately. You don’t usually see one party or another’s followers descending into a despairing willingness to believe and do anything and everything similar to their favored campaign. I have seen this everywhere, online and in real life as the McCain campaign crashed: conservatives making claims that negate themselves as they are saying them. I don’t know how many Republicans I’ve seen in the last month saying that George W. Bush wrecked everything he touched as President, he is also a socialist (no kidding) and he is simultaneously the second greatest US President (guess who’s number one). The desperation is palpable.

Which brings me to one of my favorite recent Republican scare stories, one combining fevered imagining about shit that just ain’t going to happen with instant self-rebuttal. There is nothing funnier than watching conservatives simultaneously condemn an imaginary monolithic "biased against us media" and piss and moan about one of their favorite fears, this year: “The Fairness Doctrine is Coming Back.”



For people too young to be aware of "the news" before Reagan and friends fixed it for us by getting rid of caps on media ownership and shitcanning the Fairness Doctrine, it didn't used to be this way. Even in the nascency of CNN and the "24-hour news cycle," anything like a celebrity journalist was rare and this was a distinction reserved for, say, the guys who broke Watergate and emerging attention whores like Geraldo Rivera. TV news was a staple, but not a particularly exciting one, like white bread or potatoes. And every news program featured discussion of controversial issues with the expression of opposing viewpoints required by law.



Americans' relationship to "the news" was entirely different back then, due largely to these standards. The news didn't consume us the same way, and this was really not about a lack of access and opportunity - that's increased wildly since, but you had a few cable and other choices if you wanted to sit around and take in news all day when you could be watching more amusing TV or seeing a movie or getting drunk, instead. Most of us did not. Satirical claims in Network to the aside, television news had not really morphed into an mass entertainment option, not yet.



Now it has, and this is a long-done deal, and this is what makes late conservative paranoia about the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine an absurdity: there is so much money made in TV and radio news programming at this point, often precisely because it's biased, just like we are. There's a lot of personal joy to take in listening to people who don't like Palin or Obama like you don't echo your own mockery of either. It's compelling. It keeps people watching and builds massive fan bases.

Broadcast news never made this kind of crazy-ass money before, and nobody’s giving that up willingly. 

It’s not like broadcast news was bereft of partisans, prior to 1987. Talk radio existed, shows pushing lines between journalistic and other network content existed. It's just that Joe/Jane Partisan broadcaster couldn't deliver a constant stream of his or her own opinions with no dissent. Try and imagine this: Rush Limbaugh has to stop for five minutes at the end of his show because yesterday, he spent all day calling Barack Obama a "socialist.” He has to provide a few minutes for somebody from the Obama campaign, or somebody who at least pretends to support Obama, to explain why that's idiotic and Obama is in no sense a socialist.

You can understand why this would be a big pain in the ass for somebody like Limbaugh - his act would not have worked. (Until Bush II, actually, a last vestige of the Fairness Doctrine remained, in that outright attacks on persons on news programs had to be reported to those persons by the network, to at least give them some kind of chance to respond, even though by then the station was no longer required to invite them to rebut. W. got rid of that one for Limbaugh and Fox first thing after taking office. What a nightmare the nineties must have been for those assholes. "Dear Chelsea Clinton: I said you were ugly again today on my show. Ha ha ha, you suck, kid. Love, Rush.")



Which was the whole point of destroying media ownership caps, along with every other sensible corporate regulation lately, and getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine: allowing the wealthiest right-wingers in the US to say whatever the fuck they wanted, all day, every day, without the remote possibility of a counter-argument. Because that's what the "fair" in "Fair and Balanced" means, and this is a key philosophical distinction.

When American conservatives talk about fairness in media, they're talking entirely about the supply side of a business deal, and how unfair it is to not let people with all the money steer all the public discourse. When American liberals talk about fairness in media, they're talking entirely about the audience side of mass tech that necessarily limits discourse even as it promotes, and not allowing single viewpoints to dominate public conversation.



Republicans don't hate the old American broadcast media model because it ever persecuted them or denied them a voice - they hate it because it thwarted their own desires to persecute and alienate. That's what "The Liberal Media" means, not media that displays a constant Democratic or progressive or left bias, but media that's liberal in principle and practice, in that it allows and encourages a multiplicity of voices. That’s what American conservatives hate and always hated and it shows in their choice of media, in these post-Fairness Doctrine years.

Fox News Channel and right-wing talk radio are exactly the imaginary corrupt and exclusionary liberal monoliths conservatives harped on for decades, except they’re opposite, ideologically. When Republicans these days talk about that sort of liberal media monolith as though it ever existed, they're telling you they're ill-informed. When they claim any such thing exists now, they’re telling you they’re liars. When they complain about Keith Olbermann, kick them right in the nuts.

They demanded this shit and made it happen. They birthed and embraced what they claimed as their own worst nightmare and have no one to complain to when they don’t like the long-term results. 

I can't say I hate what's happened to broadcast news since I was a kid. I find Olbermann’s shtick a little hammy, but he says some cool things on his totally biased news show. I like Rachel Maddow’s new show better, although I don’t watch it every night or every week, even. There is, as I said, a comfort in turning on the TV and watching a newscaster talk about politics in roughly the same manner I might.

I do miss one thing I didn't appreciate at the time, and often found dull, to be honest. The show would halt and the host or announcer would say "Last week, we ran a story about US involvement in Nicaragua. Here is Manuel Ortiz from the Boy, Do I Love the Contras Foundation to offer an oposing view." Everything else dropped away and for a minute or two, a single voice became the focus, a voice saying simply "I do not agree with the way you presented this issue, and here is why." Nobody could interrupt Manuel during his allotted time or call him stupid or a fascist or tell him to shut up. Nobody argued with him in absentia when he finished saying his piece, either.

It was almost religious, the respect paid this moment given to an unpretty, unfamous and otherwise unheard voice. It isn’t the moment I miss, so much as the reverence. 



I miss that a lot.

Robert N. Lee is a Pacific Northwest exile in Florida, and a designer and illustrator who occasionally writes stuff that gets published. He has two teenage children, a girlfriend and two cats and a pug named Henry, Beezus and Ramona. He also likes to say “fuck” a lot, and you can witness this fuckitude on a daily basis at http://vee-ecks.livejournal.com

You may have noticed the explosion of roller derby in the Northwest, there are new leagues popping up everywhere! 

This weekend the northwest is lucky enough to get to witness the best of the best.  You'll see women of all shapes, sizes, ages, and some amazing mamas in action. All eyes will be on Seattle's Rat City Rollergirls, the only Northwest team who will be competing at the national level this year. Last year they very narrowly took second place in the final game against Kansas City. 

I came to abortion work in a rather circuitous way. It was not expected after seven years of strict Catholic schooling and twenty-one Thanksgivings full of staunchly conservative, pro-life family debates. By the time I arrived in Seattle in 1998, a newly graduated college-educated feminist, I had left all of the conservative Catholicism behind me, but I still did not anticipate that abortion work would become my passion.

It's frightening to be poor. It's much more frightening when you have a family with five young children. My husband's mental illness had exacerbated into schizophrenia. He'd applied for Social Security Disability, which was then -- as now -- slow at being approved. We had to accept welfare from the New York City Department of Social Services.

When I was 19, I was in a car wreck. As a result I had a spinal fusion that was successful for two reasons. First of all, I can walk and second, the fusion is in excellent shape twenty years later due to an excellent surgeon and prudent care on my part.

However; this puts me in a category known as "pre-existing condition" to insurance providers. Once you have one, you must stay insured at all times or you will never be insured again.

On the news last night, following the $700 billion dollar bailout talk, it was mentioned that 25% of Americans are struggling to pay their bills every month.

Let me raise my hand and say hello, I am one of those Americans, and my actual debt is a miniscule fraction of this bailout… but it is a real, day to day, emotionally and psychologically draining financial struggle.

I think that a huge part of the frustration and anger on the part of so many Americans at the entire notion of a bailout is that we're being told that the government has to do this to "protect us", to protect the U.S. as well as the now deeply interconnected global markets from failing... they have to do this so that we can stillget credit. That is, so the banks will still loan us money, give us mortgages, give us credit cards at 8-25% interest (what a bargain!). Leaving aside the fact that the government doesn't even actually have this money and is just raising the debt ceiling on our national debt to cover these bad investments -- the kicker, the part of this bitter pill that is so goddamn hard to swallow is that we the American people are so desperate for bailout ourselves.

I'm gonna lay it out here, my friends. This is where I am at.

With all the media and political talking heads yakking about teen, unwed, or single mothers these days, I have a wake up call for everybody...

I have been a teen mother. I have lived with a man just to keep my baby. I graduated from a high school for teen mothers. I have been a single mother for eight years. I know a bit about this issue. Most of these politicos and talking heads have never lived my life, never had an inkling of what it's REALLY like to have a baby at sixteen and another at nineteen, and I cannot be silent about this subject that has, for the last few days, replaced the MISSING WHITE WOMAN headlines or CELEBRITY O.D.s on 24 hour "news." This does not happen often. Maybe in the last year, teen moms have been on the radar, in the form of US Magazine or whatever trash people are reading these days, because of what? Britney Spears, our tabloid queen, with more covers than Princess Diana, her little sister got pregnant at sixteen, sold her story to a trashy magazine for a million dollars, and suddenly teen pregnancy is a hot topic again--that and the fact that it has, for the first time in decades, increased. If the topic of teen/single moms can only be brought up because of some chick I've never heard of, in a National Enquirer-type magazine, which sadly is more widely read than newspapers.....Well, I quote Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for the fate of my country."

I am not Jamie Spears. I am not a millionaire fake celeb. I am not Bristol Palin. Do you think either of these girls will walk into their local welfare office and wait hours, just for that extra $100 a month in foodstamps? Will they ever spend week after week on the phone with operators hired by a privatized Medicaid system, trying to find a doctor who will actually see their asthmatic child? Will they spend years fighting the Attorney General's office for child support, waiting a year just to get to court? Will they ever try to pay for their generic can of beans with WIC coupons and be treated like a leper? Have someone roll their eyes as they buy food with food stamps after they just got off an eight-hour shift standing on thier feet, cutting nasty hair?