Thank You Cindy Sheehan

Today, MaGreen and I read Cindy Sheehan's letter on DalyKos with great sadness. I'm not sad because she's retiring from being the face of the US peace movement, but because she has suffered so much. Her motivation truly came from losing her son to the war in Iraq, not from ego or ideology. She cut through the divisions within the peace movement. When she set up Camp Casey, MaGreen and I had already ended our intense phase of street activism because we were burnt out by those divisions. She gave us a way to lend our bodies and voices without having to debate points of unity and march routes with anyone. I didn't have to go downtown and ask for a sound permit. MaGreen didn't have to design a website getting out the word about the next protest. We just showed up in Crawford. Cindy Sheehan's authority as the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq seemed to trump all the distrust among activists. Her civility set the tone for the thousands of people who gathered with her in the Texas heat.

MaGreen was six months pregnant with BabyG when we drove to Crawford with our friends Keith and Theresa. The weekend we went may well have been the most frenzied moment in the history of Cindy Sheehan's protest outside George W. Bush's ranch, because a national group of pro-war activists had planned a counter-protest. On the way, we got caught up in the pro-Bush caravan made up almost entirely of SUVs and huge trucks. They had US flags mounted, draped, and crammed between various parts of their vehicles. Their windows were painted with “Support the Troops” type slogans. Right before Crawford, the whole caravan turned off towards what I assumed was their rallying site.

We drove into Crawford as pro-Bush people stood on the sides of the streets or sometimes in the street itself heckling us. People flipped us off or gave thumbs down signs. Many of the pro-war signs seemed factory made and they said, “I’m with W.” Others were homemade and said things like, “Cindy doesn’t speak for our marine.” Or “I support the troops and their mission.” There were several signs connecting the U.S. invasion of Iraq with 9-11. Free US flags were being handed out and the little plastic ones were strewn all over the ground. We had a big flag with a peace sign flying from our car. One man shouted that our peace sign looked like a chicken foot. “Now I know what it stands for,” he said, “chicken foot, chicken foot.”

When we got through their gauntlet of flag-waving and heckling, a peace protestor greeted us. “Ah, you’re friendlies,” he said and gave us directions. We worried that some pro-Bush person impersonating a peace activist had duped us. We had to park in a lot outside a hotel and take a shuttle to the site where the peace activists had gathered. We could see the road towards Bush’s place and there were secret service people there standing behind the “100% ID Check” road blocks. The volunteers hurried us into the huge tent where a rally was in full swing. We walked under the tent and there was Joan Baez getting on stage. Late, Cindy Sheehan spoke, mostly light-hearted quips, not her full-force polemics. “Joan proposed to me yesterday,” Cindy said, “and I accepted…just another day at Camp Casey.” A few more jokes and the rally was over. We missed most of it. Several Iraq veterans had spoken.

Once the rally broke up, some extraordinary musicians took the stage. Terri Hendrix, and Lloyd Maines played with a fantastic fiddle player. Non-Texans started shouting, “Who are you? You’re amazing!” One of Terry Hendrix’s song had the refrain, “Hey hey FCC don’t you turn your back on me.” The infrastructure of the whole camp was well done and clean. The main tent was situated behind “Arlington West” where all the crosses in honor of killed US troops were erected. To the side of the tent were about eight port-o-potties. Also tents for some groups like Military Families Speak out. There was a no drug and alcohol policy. Everyone volunteered to do something. I passed around the donations bucket and collected about $250 for the Crawford Peace House in five minutes. It was so hot, over 100 degrees in the sun, so everybody stayed underneath the tents or an umbrella. Water was available free and volunteers walked around handing them out. People had to drink massive amounts of water. The recycling bins for the “empties” filled over and over again. MaGreen had to find two chairs to sit on and placed them in front of a fan. She said, and I quote, she needed, "one for my enormous behind and another to put my feet up for the first time of my pregnancy."

A restaurant catering group served free food – celery, salad, tomatoes, cheese, dressing, cole slaw, cucumber and tomato salad, beef and corn and chicken and poblano tamales, tortillas, buffalo meat, barbecue chicken, roasted green peppers, roasted onions, two kinds of sausages, a vat of barbecue sauce, pecan pie, brownies, several other desserts, lemonade, and tea. While people were waiting in line for the food, they wrote thank you letters to the man who lent the land for Camp Casey II.



There were people there from all over the country. We met folks from California, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Colorado. There were many, many middle-aged women there. There were few teenagers and children. Also very few people of color, perhaps twenty-five out of the 2,000+ people there. We did not see Camp Casey I where we heard that there were a 1000+ people. Singer songwriters must have been ten percent people there. One young man had a sign that read, “Country singers against the war.” One t-shirt had a Gandhi quote on it, “At first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” Another said, “The revolution will not be televised…it’s online.” Several shirts said, “Yee-haw is not a foreign policy.”

After dinner, we volunteered for traffic duty and helped keep the road from getting congested. Many of the people who drove by were curious onlookers with cameras and many were pro-Bush people waving flags, giving us thumbs down signs, the three-finger W, holding up signs that said “Hippies go home,” and even people sticking their tongues out at us. We kept telling each other, “No confrontations, avoid confrontations.” Peace people also drove by. One truck had a hand-drawn devil on the back next to which it said, “Bush is my number one worker.” Every now and then a beat-up truck driven by tough-looking guys with thick moustaches, fencing materials in the back, would drive by. They just looked at it all and kept driving. The volunteers said, “Now that was a real cowboy.”

From the road, you could see the sun setting and a big storm coming in. In the tent, three sisters from Ithaca were singing a cappela, their refrain was something like “can’t be silent anymore,” and it was if their harmony drew in the wind. The tent started shaking violently. The overhead lights swung from side to side. People were packing up and securing things madly. We caught the first shuttle out. Keith and Theresa stayed back longer to help with the traffic. We reunited at the car. All the hotels in the area were booked solid so we drove home in the night through an electrical storm. Every two or three seconds the sky lit up like it was daylight. MaGreen said that the Calvinists tried to read meaning into everything they saw in nature and it was hard not to see the two thousand lightning strikes we witnessed as symbolic of all the people who had died in Iraq.

Cindy Sheehan wrote in her resignation letter:

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

That part made me want to cry. Camp Casey was an incredible moment in history, not just because it forced the human cost of the Iraq war into US news coverage but because for the people who were actually there it was a time of communion, renewal, hope, kindness, and friendship. That beautiful event happened because of Cindy Sheehan's determination. She deserves our utmost attention. We should open ourselves to the message in her "letter of resignation."

She ended her letter with bitterness and a challenge:

Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Seven Greenish Things About Magreen

Like GreenDaddy's post below, I'm responding to cake's tag: we were both supposed to write seven things about ourselves people don't know. Because I am stickler for the title of our website, mine are loosely based on ideas I associate with being (or not being) green.

1. I drank a glass of shelack, as a child, and had my stomach pumped. I don't remember the pumping, but I remember eying the shelack and thinking it looked tasty.

2. My friend Shelly and I used to clean my dad's bar every Saturday and Sunday morning, while playing barmaid. We stole a sixpack when I was six, drank it, and threw up all night long.

3. Throughout my pregnancy and even the delivery of BabyG I never actually envisioned having a baby at the end. I was thinking: I'm pregnant, or I'm in delivery, but never: I'm creating a child that will one day actually exist. I was determined to come through the 'phases' of pregnancy and delivery, but was totally shocked when suddenly there was this tiny other being, my baby, in the delivery room.

4. I learned to swim in an irrigation ditch full of leeches. Every summer I stepped on at least one rusty 'pop top'.

5. When I am depressed, I imagine myself curling up and resting in some coral cave deep in the ocean. When I'm happy, I look forward to passing lots of time swimming and canoeing in cold, cold clear rivers.

6. I once hitchiked out of Zion's park, during a Spring Break backpacking trip I took there with college classmates, because I missed my father so much and couldn't stand being so close to him without visiting(I went to school in Minnesota and he lived in Salt Lake City).

7. Whenever I am very angry at somebody I fantasize about supergluing their car's tires to their driveway.

Okay. I tag anthromama, fiddlehedz & pirate papa...none of whom I've met face to face, but whose blogs I've read awhile. I also tag top secret blogger juju, and anybody else out there yankering to yammer in meme form.

A Blessing for You and Your Newborns

For Ruben and Angela, and for Ruby Graciela and Lucia Simone who were born 19 Feb 07

May they mash you up in their gummy mouths.
May they render you into a pulsing goop,
a thing that shares only a DNA signature
with the person that you were.
Make it new, they will say in their secret languages.
May they hold back their first smiles.
You will peer into their faces at dawn.
You will try swinging around to catch them
laughing at you like torturers.
May they hold back
and yank you down with their first smiles
like undercurrents in the warm sea.

A Doozy: Ending Painful Sex Via Physical Therapy

This post was hard to write, because it's stuff I ordinarily wouldn't share. I mean, it's about sex. But I think it's important to get the information out there, so GreenDaddy and I both agreed I should post it. I tried not to be overly descriptive, while being exact. But if women’s “private” body parts make you squeamish, click on by.

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A few years ago, I was tortured by recurrent vaginal yeast infections. I’d have an infection, take mega-antibiotics so it would go away, and it would. Then, the exact same time each month, I’d get a new infection – which I often discovered the beginnings of when GreenDaddy and I were having sex. Because even the beginning of a yeast infection makes sex very, very painful.

For about three months we lived like this. Three months of me seeing a Gynecologist, who prescribed me a mega-pill that killed an infection for about two weeks. I was also ingesting acidophilus in countless forms: yogurt, little pills, etc. I read and followed many natural courses. Still, every month, on almost the same day, pow!

The fourth month, I told the doctor I was certain it was the birth control I started right before the infections, because the only thing that had been as regular in my life was my period. She’d never read about such a link, and convinced me to switch brands of pills. At month five, the same thing happened. Infection, cure, infection. We switched again. At month six, she said, “See, it’s not the birth control, it’s something else,” and she sent me to a specialist on yeast infections who prescribed sulphur vaginal suppositories.

I wasn’t into that, and gave up the pill, instead. The infections disappeared immediately. Which we assumed would save our sex life. No such luck. Sex continued to be painful in exactly the same way as it was when I had the beginnings of a yeast infection. Like the condoms were made out of the smallest grates on a vegetable grater. Very painful.

GreenDaddy certainly didn’t want to have sex, if every time we had it I felt like fainting from pain. It made him feel terrible, especially because he's rather fond of sex. And I didn't want to have sex, either, but felt terrible. And we were more or less, newly married. I felt broken. I felt like I was somehow cheating him, even though we had had a fantastic sex life -- I knew I didn't have an innate fear of sex -- until the infections started.

So I went to see doctors. “Buy lubricants,” they said. We did. It slightly dulled the pain. "GreenDaddy needs to be better at foreplay," they said.  Nope.  “Some women just always have painful sex,” they started saying then. Doctors, nurses: everybody nodded authoritatively, on occasion consolingly. That was just the truth as they saw it. I read all over the internet about vaginal pain during intercourse. Some people offered surgeries. Others concurred with the doctor: you’re unlucky, and you’re, forgive the pun, just screwed.

I did, thanks to lots of lubrication, manage to get pregnant. It was fairly painful – say a five on that list of one to ten – but I wanted a baby. Then, during most of my pregnancy we didn’t have any sex at all. A couple months after giving birth to BabyG, we had sex. We had hoped that shoving a giant baby human through my vagina might have miraculously fixed something. It didn’t.

On a post-birth visit to Lu, our midwife, GreenDaddy and I asked her for help. At this point I had talked to a dozen different doctors of different ilks about the problem. I had had so many appointments I didn’t even tell GreenDaddy about them all because it was just one disappointment after another. We were both scared. Because it looked like this was just the way it was going to be.

Lu set up an appointment for a physical. Of the many doctors I’d seen, only three others had examined me. Like them, unfortunately, Lu didn’t see any obvious problems…though I found the exam excruciatingly painful, and she could see that.

I was bearing down for her pronouncement: “Some women just have painful sex” when she actually said, “Well, it looks like you have Chronic Pelvic Pain. You’ll have to go see the physical therapists at the Women’s Hospital of Texas.”

Physical therapists for vaginas? Yes. The whole reason I am writing this post is that there is this group of women working as physical therapists, and they specialize on problems with the vagina, and nobody, not doctors, not nurses, almost nobody knows. I'm writing in case somebody thinks they either have to have painful sex forever or no sex, they really ought to go see one of these people. Because it worked for me.

I was terrified the first time I went in. Of course, the baby came with me, because it was the middle of the day. I was led to a room with a massage-like table, where relaxing music was playing. My therapist came in then, and I thought, “How’s this twenty-two year old girl going to do anything?” I lost spirit.

She examined me, which was weird and uncomfortable. After two years of pain that felt specifically like lacerations of some sort, I was pretty certain no massaging of the vagina was going to help. I thought I was incurable. But she didn’t. She said, “I think we’ll schedule eight visits. That should do it. We’ll start the first one today.”

During this and all other visits she massaged the new scar tissue I’d created giving birth, and she massaged parts of my pelvic floor that would spasm whenever something touched them. Basically, my muscles remembered the pain from having sex at the start of yeast infections, and wasn't letting go of the memories.

I won’t lie and say the treatment itself wasn’t as painful as the sex. It was. But after two visits, she said I should go home and have sex with GreenDaddy.

By this point, the thought of sex was extremely unpleasant to me, though. I couldn’t imagine it not hurting: it had been about two years without painfree sex. But I went home and did as she told me…and that pain that had been about an 8 (without lubricant) on her 1-10 scale became a 5. And over the course of the next few visits, the 5 became a three.

On various visits, my therapist talked about other things too: the use of dildos to aid in healing, and various products meant to enhance a woman’s experiences during sex, mostly liquids that stimulate the clitoris to help a woman lubricate herself.

And now, it’s been about six months since I last went, and sex is 98.5% painfree, I'm at a .5 on the pain scale and we don’t need to use the Lubrin even.

So far as I'm concerned, my therapist was a magician. I have never been so grateful to a healthcare provider.

And I think back about all those doctors, a few family practice doctors, but mostly Gynecologists and OBGYNs, who told me there was nothing to do about having pain during intercourse, who didn't hesitate to relegate GreenDaddy and I to a life in which sex was either painful or nonexistant.

And I think of all the women experiencing vaginal pain and believing there is no hope.

And I realized that the reason doctors don't tell women about these therapists is because they don't know.

So I decided to write this post, hoping women in pain, their partners, their healthcare providers...people who need it will find it. And help women experiencing the sort of hell I was to find a solution.

If you want more information: Women's Hospital of Texas or google: chronic pelvic pain physical therapy (your city).

It's worth it.

A Blackspot Birth

My wife gave me new shoes on the day our baby girl was born. It was also my twenty-eighth birthday.

"Open your presents," she said between contractions. She's a show off, my wife.

In short, my daughter was born the same day I was, the same day I opened my Blackspot shoes.



Adbusters, the organization that makes the shoes, claims that they are "one of the world's most environmentally friendly shoes." The organic hemp fabric fits the contour of my foot snugly. The recycled tire soles are firm. They don't bounce and cushion like the gel-filled shoes I wear to run or walk long distances. I wear the Blackspots to work. I pedal in them down Dunlavy. Last week, another bicyclist called to me.

"Are those Blackspots?" he said. He had some on too. "You're the only other person I've seen wear them," he said. Now we greet each other whenever we pass. Maybe we'll have lunch. Become friends.

It's fitting that my wife gave me the shoes on the day our girl was born. Like our baby, the Blackspots were made by a union. That is, a unionized factory in Portugal that operates with decent labor conditions. Neither the shoes, nor our baby, were made by a corporation that maximizes profit at the expense of human well-being. Also like our baby, the Blackspots are vegetarian. No leather. My Blackspots seem to be growing too. The loose ends of the thread running down the center seam are fraying, getting longer by the day, like our baby's astonishing hair.

As a final comparison, note that in my family's culture we put a black spot on a baby's face to keep away bad luck. The black spot, or najar as we call it, is meant as a mark of imperfection so that evil spirits do not linger around those we love.

Last Three Weird Green Things (Mystery, The Obvious Boob Thing, & The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All))

4) Mystery: I'm still thinking about number 4.

5) The Obvious Boob Thing: My breasts make milk. After living so many years with my breasts fulfilling certain functions (like attracting...bees and... bouncing around during softball games) they have suddenly become utile in a much less abstract way. I have this very, very fat babe wholly due to the boob milk.

Related, very weird question (I actually have a lot of questions, but this sort of encapsulates all of them.): If I was on a desert island with scanty food sources, with a handful of people, would I be able to feed them all if I ate all the food and breastfed them? Or at least, would they live a little longer than they would if there was no breastfeeder?

6) The Most Obvious(ly Cheesey?) Weirdly Green Thing of All:

Something Like This:
Turned Into This:

On Watching My Wife Give Birth

Miah’s water broke while we were eating at a restaurant on December 21 around 8 pm. We went home after that and timed her contractions while cleaning the house. By 11:30 though, Miah contractions were about five minutes apart and lasted a full minute. So we headed to the hospital. By about 1 am, we were settled into the labor and delivery room, but then the contractions weren’t so regular. We felt a little guilty when the midwife came in and Miah wasn’t in active labor yet. The midwife told us to try to rest. I took a nap and woke up around 4 am to Miah’s moaning.



Then the midwife stayed with us and guided Miah through the labor. It was difficult for me to watch Miah go through so much pain. Miah had made the decision early on to avoid using anesthesia. I wrote the following poem about a moment when Miah was in active labor:

Natural Labor

A white rag drops from my wife’s clenched mouth.
Good, the midwife says, face the pain,
make a straight line through the pain.
Then my wife starts to moan
a high-pitched moan
with an even higher tone ringing above the main note.
like a lone fire truck hurdling through the night
sounding its sirens not to clear traffic
but to align all the elements in the universe
to focus all the forces from above and below
calling them to the cause.
As I stand there regarding her pain,
the city marches on,
the jets howl,
the buried pipes and cables whir,
lawnmowers, compressors, and heaters
groan, whine, and growl.
The highway is one long wail.
My wife outmoans it all, the whole city.
Her moan emanates from the walls and floor,
as if her moan never wasn’t there.
Her moan is not accidental
like a leafblower’s whistle and drone.
It is not the sound of a city driven by profit
concrete spilling over steel.
She moans with singular purpose.
She moans as if she is a planet
whose tectonic plates are unbuckling
bearing forth a glowing molten core.
Can she bear this?
She is not a planet, she is a body,
a human and not a celestial rock.
She’s crying for air
because she moaned it all out of her.
All I have to offer is an assurance,
one I do not entirely believe,
that our baby will be out soon.

If Your Mama's Belly Were the Globe

Today is Miah's due date, but still no signs of real labor. We're waiting eagerly. Mehul says that Miah should eat spicy food and the baby will want to come out. Well, while we're all waiting enjoy this silly poem I wrote for our baby.

If Your Mama’s Belly Were the Globe

You would be the deep inner core
the hidden center of all the world.
You would be the force of gravity
you would be the source of magma flow.
Your kicks would be earthquakes
crushing whole city states.
You would cause a sky-high geyser
each time you kick your mama’s bladder.
You would make a great big mountain
by pushing out her belly button.
You the goddess Mahabhumi to whom we pray
with the soles of our feet each and every day.
You the yearning burning fearsome churning
six billion trembling waiting for your coming.
Om bhur bhuvah swah: come now at this twilight hour
earth air fire water may this planet turn inside out .