Sixteen dancers come on stage carrying gold canes and arrayed in reds, blues, purples and pinks with jingling coin hip scarfs. They are all races, shapes and sizes, but they are not all ages: the oldest is eleven and the youngest is four. This is Happy Hips Youth Oriental Dance Troupe, veteran belly dancers who have performed at benefits, museums and festivals as well as local and regional haflas, the term for belly dance parties or shows.

Happy Hips founder, Terri Allred did not set out to become Sadiya, professional belly dancer and instructor. At Vanderbilt University, she completed a theological studies masters in feminist theology with a focus on how people who experience trauma interpret it and give it meaning. Terri ran rape crisis centers and lectured internationally on the relationship between sexual violence and belief systems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever wondered if there is a terrible truth about Santa - who he is, how he treats his elves, and what his home life has become? This holiday season reveals all, in a new play by Greg Kotis, the Tony Award winning writer of Urinetown, featuring the entire multi-talented Kotis-Halliday family! One strong warning: this is definitely not a show for children!

Will this Christmas be Santa's last? Will Mrs. Claus finally make good on her threat to submerge humanity in a lake of fire? Who are these children and where did they get their strange powers? Hip Mama caught up with matriarch Ayun to discuss the new play....

Bee: When my daughter was nine years old she performed a solo in front of two thousand screaming fans at a music festival. My son, however, doesn't even like going to crowded libraries, let alone getting up on stage.

At her twelfth birthday dinner my daughter was furious that the waitress recognized me from the photograph on my first book, because it was "her day." My son has never been fazed by anything I've done or achieved, and even leverages the stories for the odd spot of blackmail.

How do your kids react to being the offspring of two highly creative, well-known parents?

Ayun: Lucky for us, they don't have anything to compare it to... India, much as I do, seems to feel she has partial ownership of Greg's accomplishments - partly because their gestation permeates our small apartment. Another thing she's picked up on is my labors in the guerilla marketeering mines. If one of my books turns up in a blog post or something, she counts that as a personal victory. It's a little worrisome, though if she goes into the arts, this hunger for reknown might serve her well. We nabbed a family profile in Time Out Kids as part of our Truth About Santa publicity quest, and our cat, Mungo, got his mug in the photo, and India made sure he saw that. Fortunately, she has a shy side too. I'd feel awful if I inadvertently turned one of my children into a fame whore. I hope she gets that it's primarily about attracting attention to your creative efforts so that there will be butts in the seats, and sales figures large enough to convince those who might publish or produce the next project to take a chance on you.

Milo is more of a maverick, not as interested in the identity his parent's identities can confer upon him. He wants to be a chimney sweep.

I don't think either of them longs to come from a "regular" family, in a "regular" house. It helps that we live in this diverse, urban neighborhood, where there's a wide range of incomes, cultures, and household appearances. I may dress funny, but I also live right across the street from school, and arrive bearing stilts. I am constitutionally incapable of disciplining another's child using anything other than humor. Ergo, their peers tend to like me. One of them even likes the way I dress, bless her heart. If their friends thought we were weird in a bad way, that might stir up some trouble.

Bee: How has it been working with not only your spouse, but both of your children?

Ayun: It's been more gruelling than I expected, though having traveled as a family through Bosnia with one or the other of us whining, complaining, or sighing with boredom at every turn, I don't know what I WAS expecting. Commitment-wise, Greg and I are floundering up to the eyeballs on this one. He wrote the play, I somehow wound up doing costumes, all four of us are in it... the ripples just go on and on. We feel a sense of responsibility to the underpaid professional actors who've agreed to join us on this fool's errand, and if one of our kids is in a pissy mood, sabotagging rehearsal because rehearsal is, let's face it, boring and constrictive and not as much fun as running around the playground, pretending to be a sled-dog, or some brand new Pokemon character, or whatever, we're doubly-stricken. It's not the same as having your kid act up in a restaurant, or a bookstore, or some other place. There you can say, "Well, he's had a long day," or "He's overdue for a snack," and if people are shooting you the stink eye, screw them! It's a public place and kids shouldn't be automatically penalized for falling short of adult behavioral expectations. But, when everybody's there because you were like, "Hey, gang, let's put on a show! It'll be really fun! I promise!" it becomes a preoccupation.

There have also been times when we felt like Milo was getting unfairly dumped on, scapegoated due to his prior record, but it wouldn't have served the play very well if I ground rehearsal to a halt every time I felt like, "Hey, he's a little boy. Let's cut some slack. If all he hears is "no", and "don't", he's going to shut down."

That said, I did mix it up with our original Santa, whose unrelenting criticism ofI Milo's "lack of professional" smacked overtly of personal distaste. Maybe, as he claimed, he just couldn't deal with the inherent lack of control. Tensions built to the point where I went, to make a long, multi-faceted story short, all Mama Cougar on his ass. (Don't worry. the kids weren't in attendance.) He removed himself from the project and I think that was the best for all concerned for a number of reasons. He will probably feel vindicated if tales of Milo's trenchant rehearsal behavior get back to him. I feel glad I'm not in a position where, for the good of the project, I have to strong arm my child into months of conforming to the rigid expectations of someone who might not have his best interests at heart.

And then we added a dog. WC Fields is stewing in his grave. I hear him on working with children, but if I were a dog actor, I'd be pissed. The bulldog we're working with has never been onstage before, and she's been a total trooper the whole time.

Bee: Particularly given the famously small size of your apartment? I know the new place is larger than the original East Village flat, but it seems like it might be close quarters for a crew of thespians to sleep, eat, and work together in harmony!

Ayun: Yeah, the apartment isn't helping morale much, though if we pull our heads out of our heiners for half a sec, we'd think, "Hey, compared to all these people who are getting their houses taken away, we're plenty damn lucky to have an affordable rent in a great neighborhood, a fantastic and fair landlady..." it's small, but it's steady.

Bee: The EV Inky is entering a second decade - quite an achievement in the zine world! Did you think you would keep going so long, covering so many major life events - moving, babies, mermaid parades, the death of beloved pets, for Greg a Broadway play, for you the publication of several books?

Ayun: I could never have predicted whither life would lead, but when you look at my theatrical background, I did the same show, Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, nearly every weekend for a decade, so I was pretty open to the idea of the neverending project. Maybe too open. There have been times in the last few years when the self-imposed deadline has felt like a hassle, but as long as people are still reading it, I ain't complaining!

A while ago, I put together a back issue synopsis and that was really fun, going over all these little anecdotes, seeing the minutaie of my children's infancy set down like that. I'm glad I kept going. I'm not sure how it'll play when things like boyfriends and all enter the mix. Maybe I'll cleave harder to the adventures in NYC arena. Basically, I'm a frustrated tour guide.

Bee: What is next, for each or all of you?

Ayun: I just wrote the script to a YA graphic novel about a girl who fakes a peanut allergy when she starts a new school. In the New Year, I plan to bang out another one, about a star-crossed romance between a sheltered private school boy and a dumpster diver who's running this sort of one-girl, mobile soup kitchen.

Greg and his partner, Mark Hollman, are working on the script for a film version of Urinetown. Thier new musical, Yeast Nation, which I wrote about in East Village Inky #36, is opening in Chicago this spring, so Greg willl be spending a lot of time there.

India is hoping to join her friends Willa and Natalie in this kids theater program they've been participating in in The East Village.

And Milo is looking forward to running around in the playground and doing exactly whatever the hell he feels like doing.

Bee: I believe in Santa. Do you?

Ayun: Mos def, as long as he's not an a-hole to either of my kids.

For more information about Ayun, her books, the zine, the show, check out: http://www.ayunhalliday.com. Interested in a bonus feature? Lucky you, click here!

Bee Lavender is the publisher of Hipmama.com and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Lessons in Taxidermy. For more information about her work, check out Foment.net.

Let us reiterate: although this dysfunctional family comedy features children, it is NOT FOR CHILDREN!
-- adults and extremely skeptical tweens only, please.
(Kotis' children have been apprised that the red-suited man onstage is not really Santa and thus do not mind too terribly much when he "dies".)

THE TRUTH ABOUT SANTA
December 4 -20, 2008
Wednesday - Friday at 8pm, Saturday at 5pm & 8pm.
The Kraine Theater
85 East 4th Street
(between 2nd & 3rd Aves)
NYC

A Vanity Fair moment with Ayun - the Proust Questionnaire!

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A whole afternoon in a Japanese bathhouse, followed by food.

2. What is your greatest fear?
That one of my children will predecease me.

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
What, just one? An inclanation to keep badgering even after my point has registered.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Lack of compassion

5. Which living person do you most admire?
erm......

6. What is your greatest extravagance?
Living in New York City

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. 

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.

There was a space I used to feel safe. Everyone should have such a space.

Today, when fear grips me and I need a balance bar to keep from slipping out of my life, I remember those mornings when I felt safe. Ten, fifteen, twenty-five years ago…these are some of my first memories. My bed is warm and cozy, but I am not sleeping. Sometime just hours after falling asleep I am awake again and all night long I drift in and out of this semi-conscious state. It is not tiring nor is it frustrating; I relish the feeling of being snug and in bed. I don’t want to fall asleep and miss it. I want to embrace it, to realize it and hold its hand. I want to spend all night drowsy and relaxed, awake in my sleepy space.

My mom says I was born tense. Tense and intense. When she tells the story of how I was born, amidst the drama and gesticulation, I feel a little sad to know that I am this child she speaks of. When she talks about the way she could hear me screaming day and night in the nursery just a few doors down, and of her helplessness in coming to my rescue, I feel the aftermath both of her helplessness and of my own. It's a feeling I can't seem to shake.

If I had been born at home, surely it would have been into a family bed. As it was, my parents brought me home from the hospital, where I was promptly given a place aside my mother in the bed which slept us all: mom, dad, my brother and I. I nursed until I was nearly four, when the arrival of a younger sibling forced shared privileges. I was not, as a rule, thrilled with anything that wasn’t mine alone and so gave up the breast and my place between my parents for slightly more independence on the outskirts of our small country. I slept on the edge (had my parents been a bit more intuitive, they may have recognized this as foreshadowing, and thus been more fully prepared for the journey of parenting a true Sagittarian daughter).

By that time, the eldest Dotson child had moved on and now slept in a wood framed bunk bed hand crafted by our father. In a family of five, he was the only to sleep solo. This left me as the senior child in the family bed, a title that lent me a certain amount of privilege, and these are the days I remember most when I think back to the last time I slept in the same bed with someone under the age of two.

My mom says I was born tense. Tense and intense. When she tells the story of how I was born, amidst the drama and gesticulation, I feel a little sad to know that I am this child she speaks of. When she talks about the way she could hear me screaming day and night in the nursery just a few doors down, and of her helplessness in coming to my rescue, I feel the aftermath both of her helplessness and of my own. It's a feeling I can't seem to shake. When my incessant wailing finally subsided and my parents were able to hold me, as my mom goes on to tell the story, I still could not calm my nervous body; She speaks of the way I would never relax, how even in sleep she would watch me and my curled toes and clenched fists. And I have this vision of my young mother's eyes, peering in on her sleeping infant the way I imagine every parent does. The way I have watched my own daughter sleepily after midnight feedings when my eyes won't close again. And I think of the way my mother must have viewed me, that as she watched me sleep, she must have cried for so much love...

1. Cross Hairs

The proof is there in the two blue lines. A baby blue plus sign confirms I don't have the flu like I'd hoped. I don't feel joy. I feel sick and not just from what I now know to be morning sickness. To me those faint blue lines look like cross hairs. I turn off the light in my bedroom, lay face down on my bed and wish it to go away. My husband walks in and asks me what I'm doing. No words come out as I hand over the white EPT stick.

"You are?"

"Yes."

I consider my first marriage to be the friendship I have with Lori. We have been friends for over fifteen years, which is a lifetime in my transient world. We met while in college and immediately fell in love. We went out for margaritas one night and talked for hours. I came home to my boyfriend at the time and said, "Lori and I just fell in love under the full moon." This made him a bit nervous.