Maybe the Angry Women - 5

art by Aaron Paquette,

Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022...

Owl and the Moon on Facebook in 2022

"Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth.

Anger is the demand of accountability. It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It’s a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It’s a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope.

How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun.

In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful.

The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it."

~ Soraya Chemaly, "Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women's Anger"

Angela Yarber of Tehom Center, "Protest Goddess"

https://tehomcenter.org/prints

https://maristpoll.marist.edu/polls/npr-pbs-newshour-marist-national-poll-the-overturning-of-roe-v-wade-june-2022/

-----------------

And in 2024 many women (and many men) did put efforts to elect Kamala Harris to the presidency of the US.

We are members of the 8 billion humans alive today...

But did you know this?

----------

------------------

Today's Goddess:

800 BC, Aomori prefecture Japan. Dogū

We tend to look for greatness
always in somebody else
rather than yourself.
Go inside and
get your sound.

Carlos Santana

------------

Happy 2026

 

A New Year's Blessing

May this new year unfold with light and promise.

May your body feel strong, your mind feel clear

and your heart remain open to possibility.

May you awaken with purpose in your breath

and rest at night knowing you did enough.

May opportunity meet your effort,

patience walk beside ambition,

and challenges sharpen you

without ever hardening you.

May laughter arrive often and stay awhile.

May love, old and new, grow deeper, truer.

May you give freely without losing yourself,

and receive fully, without hesitation.

And when the road bends without warning,

may you trust the strength you’ve earned

and the wisdom you carry to guide you.

May this be a year of steady growth,

honest joy, and gentle courage,

a future that feels not only hopeful,

but open and welcoming too.

~ 'A New Year's Blessing' by Spirit of a Hippie

One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, and compassion. -Simone de Beauvoir, author and philosopher (1908-1986)

Rabbit rabbit...wishing you good luck in this new beginning. (Girl on rabbit. Early 3rd century BC. Apulia Italy)

Today's goddess:

It's a new year, a birth of time, a beginning again. A wooden statue of a squatting woman giving birth supported by two attendants. 18th century CE, from south India, now housed at the National Museum in New Delhi

I was born in the year of the horse, 1942. No wonder I was crazy about them when a pre-teen...reading all the books, having a little white plastic horse who's saddle came off...but never being around live ones. I missed that! (Incidentally, no unicorns were mentioned while I was young, but I did have a story about Pegasus!)

Winter Solstice - Maybe the Angry Women - 3

Today the sun starts shining more hours each day in the northern hemisphere. It is considered the birth of new light.

"In this tradition since pre-Celtic times, and in many other cultural traditions, Winter Solstice has been celebrated as the birth of the God, and in Christian tradition as the birth of the Saviour. But there are deeper ways of understanding what is being born: that is, who or what the “saviour” is...

Birthing is not often an easy process – for the birthgiver nor for the birthed one: It is a shamanic act requiring strength of bodymind, attention and focus of the mother, and courage to be of the new young one.

Birthgiving is the original place of “heroics” … many cultures of the world have never forgotten that: Perhaps therefore better termed as “heraics”. Patriarchal adaptations of the story of this Seasonal Moment usually miss the Creative Act of birthgiving completely – pre-occupied as they often are with the “virgin” nature of the Mother being interpreted as an “intact hymen”, and the focus being the Child as “saviour”: Even the Mother gazes at the Child in Christian icons, while in more ancient images Her eyes are direct and expressive of Her integrity as Creator. In Earth-based religious practice, the ubiquitous icon of Mother and Child – Creator and Created – expresses something essential about the Universe itself … the “motherhood” we are all born within."

-Glenys Livingstone, PhD, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion

 

Tlazolteotl *

Birthing.

Any woman who has given vaginal birth (as opposed to Cesarian Sections) knows the incredible energies she had to find to push another human being into life.

When the nurse says you are 10 centimeters dilatated, that's how big your cervix must expand for you to give birth.

Every human being has experienced being born.

And every mother who gave birth has experienced the incredible forces of her womb to do this act. Us who had C-Sections (2 out of my 3 births) still had much similar feelings both emotionally and physically in the process and recovery from an abdominal surgical incision.

There are lots of photos on the internet of expectant mothers pushing, grimacing, breathing but no photos of actual birth. The babies are shown right after birth, being examined, or having the umbilical cord cut. The babies are shown with the moms holding them right after birth.

But though thousands of doctors and nurses and many fathers have seen a baby's head crown, the actual birth isn't shown. Perhaps the prudish society says we can't see a woman's vagina giving birth, or her anus, or somehow these are taboo still. OK, I don't want my privates spread all over the internet...but really, millions of births take place all over the world every day! They are invisible to the mothers, however. Just saying...

The only photo of an actual birth that I found.

---------------

We celebrate (almost everybody) birthdays each year, to mark how many years we've accomplished of life so far.

And nobody sings to the mothers!

Well, I'm just saying, it kind of is mixed up, isn't it? The mothers did all the work, risked their lives and spent many hungry hours during labor, practicing different kinds of breathing while birth was about to finally happen, after waddling around with this extra weight hanging from their very centers for so long.

----------------

Today's goddess is any mother.

----------------------

Winter Solstice, the rebirth of light, is today at 10:03 am ET.

''god is a mother

and with that

sentence

the world stops

the world always stops

when woman and

divine

commingle

as if the

feminine

dilutes the

miraculous

when in reality

it embodies it

when jesus turns water

to wine

they clap

but when women turn breasts

to milk

they cringe

a broken man’s body

is celebrated each sunday

while a broken woman’s body

is just hidden away

and it’s no wonder

that mother is a word

used by men

to demonize those

who don’t claim the name

and weaponized to shame

those who step out of line

because

their ideal

woman

plays the role of nurturer

and silencer

in pews

built and led by them

but

when god

becomes mother

she is neither quiet

or compliant

she leads confidently

she questions authority

she commands respect

which might be the problem

for mother god

did not gather us up

carelessly

but took her time with it

she fed us milk

birthed our souls

and broke her body

and the permanence

can be uncomfortable

and to disentangle god

from motherhood

is impossible

but

to disentangle god

from womanhood

is sinful

because seeing god as mother

is one step closer

to seeing god in me

and it’s in that

i am truly

born again''

~ Kaitlin Hardy Shetler @kaitlinshetlerpoetry

--------------------

My personal wishes are that the returning light, the seasonal rebirth as the earth starts to have longer daylight hours (northern hemisphere), will bring you bright healing, abundance, love, comfort and joy! And for those of you beginning the shortening days in the southern hemisphere, you are also wished the exact same things!

Bright Healing

Abundance

Love

Comfort

Joy

As the light reaches its lowest point here in the northern hemisphere we tuck ourselves into our warm homes, and even amidst the holiday gatherings it is valuable to find a bit of time to slow down enough to feel ourselves germinating, or even incubating. This is the time to nurture what wants to be born in us and in our communities—to protect and nurture our seeds until the time comes to send out our first tentative roots. When we reach deeply into the dark and embrace it, we find that what we need to know is inside of us already.

Mary Porter Kerns

-----------------

The last of 8 nights of Hanukkah

----------------

Four more days till Christmas.

--------------------

And of course a woman has to have a choice whether or not to give birth!

-------------

* This statue of Tlazolteotl is now one of the best-known sculptures in the Robert Woods Bliss pre-Columbian Collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Many scholars consider it to be a masterpiece of pre-Columbian art, highly sophisticated in design and execution (Kelemen 1943; Covarrubias 1957; Mason 1958; Coe 1993; Quilter 2002). Others question its stylistic and iconographic features, and are disturbed by its lack of provenience (Baudez 1998; Pasztory 2002). They believe it is a misattributed, more modern creation. What has been written in support of the sculpture’s authenticity since the early years of the 20th century is almost entirely subjective, interpretive and speculative, endlessly repeated, occasionally elaborated. It is axiomatic, unfortunately, that whatever is repeated often enough is eventually taken as fact.

Jenny Mendes Ceramics FB site

---------

My oldest turns 60

 Wow. Who would ever have considered I'd be sitting here 60 years later talking about my son Marty! I seem to have a post for his birthday most years.

But I like seeing these old photos from this post Younger than me Lovers...

------------

And here's the story of his birth from my perspective, as I wrote it when he turned 50.

Fifty years ago today I gave birth to my first son.

Barbara expecting, near upstairs apartment in background in Corpus Christi, Texas

It was horrible...though I'd definitely been looking forward to the experience.  Horror was being in a Naval Air Station hospital, without anyone near me who I knew.  It included being among a huge number of women also in labor, such that I was on a gurney in a dark hallway alone much of the time.  I had my first ever enema experience, and didn't know that I should have waited in the bathroom longer, so ended up wallowing out of the gurney with sides raised and not getting back to the toilet in time.  Major apologies to the young male aide who mopped for me.  Remember NAS meant everyone around me was in the Navy.

Then I was given drugs.  I had never had any drugs, even aspirin, in my whole life.  Well, maybe in my year since leaving home, I'd tried aspirin at least.  But I didn't have any idea what was happening.  At some point I was shaved down there.  My young Coast Guard husband was somewhere else, and I had relied upon him since we married, almost entirely.

Doug, Corpus Christi, Texas

Labor was intense enough that I was in that hallway around 4 pm.  I honestly didn't see or hear anything until being asked to move to the delivery table a bit past midnight.  I saw the clock on the wall.  That was what their drugs did to me.  Maybe I endured a lot of pain, or maybe I was the one shouting as I didn't endure labor.  I knew the next day I was hoarse, and people around me said I was the one screaming.  I do remember complaining to the doctors asking me to get on the delivery table "but you're making me sit on my baby's head."

I lay back, raised my feet as commanded into the stirrups, and looked for a mirroring surface so I might see the baby emerge.  Good thing I couldn't find one, because they had to use forceps.  This left a little bump on the side of my precious little one's head for the first week of his life.  They did tell me it would go away.  And it did.

I also remember I had what was called a saddle block.  (Boy the horsemen sure were with me that night, stirrups, saddle block!)  So when the doctor said now is time to push, I laughed and asked how...I could no longer feel a thing.  If I wasn't giddy with the drugs I'm sure I could have figured it out.

Little Marty

I remember having my pre-natal checkups in the same hospital.  We pregnant women would all line up and receive our little cups for urine samples, which we took turns depositing in the one bathroom.  I now wonder exactly what they were looking for in our pee.  I guess something might have been evident if it was wrong.  Then we'd undress and be draped, on a table with only curtains separating us from the next woman.  We'd be probed, measured, and baby's heart listened to.  And that was it, for months on end, then every week.

I attended the New Baby wellness class that was a few sessions showing photos and telling the stages of birth. None of that made a bit of sense when I was experiencing birth though.

So fifty years ago, I finally had my baby.  A few days in the hospital, and my parents and sister visited when we went home...they lived half a continent away.  Other cousins and Great Aunts came also to visit.  I felt like such a queen, having given birth and having a healthy child.  My dear husband was on leave for a few days, then went back on his cutter.

Grandmother giving Marty soothing lullaby

First grandchild for both sides of the families

Sure it took 2 or more adults to give that little squirming guy a bath!

And into the bliss of first time young motherhood came the disaster. 

---------

I can't find any old posting about the surgery my 4 week old son had to have. Pyloric stenosis was the diagnosis. At the time he became severely ill, unable to keep any milk down, my husband was away doing his Coast Guard work at sea.

So I went first to the NAS hospital, where the doctor said throwing up some milk was normal.

But within days he was projectile vomiting all his feeding, and then of course crying from hunger again. I nursed him all the time, then went to the yellow pages to see a pediatrician off base. She lovingly told me about his little valve having closed from his stomach, so his feeding never went down to his gut. She said I needed him to have surgery, which would be costly unless I went through NAS.

So I did. And I believe my mother was still there, and maybe my husband returned about the time Marty was checked in for the surgery. My Christian Science mother was not advising us at all, being against medical treatment. I'm glad she was praying, but she was not a warm and supportive person.

And part of this experience is fogged in my memory by 1) having breast infections from having been feeding him over and over thus producing a large amount of milk which I didn't know to expel any other way since no one seemed to bother about a mother and 2) missing this little one who, when I visited him in the hospital following surgery, was weighted down by restraining blocks to keep him from touching his scar, and he had various i.v. lines into his ankles. It was an alien sight to behold, and very upsetting. 

My husband never said how he felt, but I relied upon him for my support. I ended up in (public not NAS) ER due to my breast infections. A male doctor gave me instructions to put ice on my poor sore breasts. They didn't mention putting ice in towels, but said to use a water-bottle type thing, which we purchased. I didn't try that for long, however. They never said to use a breast pump. It was like dealing with people who I later realized were completely uneducated to my needs.

I was definitely feverish, and when my son was released from the hospital, I had to give him bottles, since that's how he'd been fed for 4 days. So I learned that whole process.

Our little family left Corpus Christi TX after my husband was finished with his Coast Guard duty, and we moved to Connecticut, where his parents lived. They doted upon little Marty! It was another experience to get to know in-laws, but that's not Marty's story, but my own.

----------------------

For today, I'm proud of his growth, his love in his family, his sense of humor, his sense of responsibility, and his incredible intelligence.  Happiest of birth anniversaries, Marty!

Fish grow, fish die

No setting on my camera would capture these little guys without blurs

I was so excited Wed. a week ago, that some baby guppies had survived the appetites of their parents...and here are some of them about double that size.  I did however lose one of the pretty mother fish this week.  I guess I should have remembered to take her back for a refund (within 14 days of purchase) at PetSmart.  But I'd already flushed by the time I thought of it.  I do always send a blessing to the little fish spirit however.

This shot does show the gap between the 2 turquoise pieces of plastic that hold the plastic barrier in place, which is how the babies escaped to the nursery side of the aquarium.

They are beginning to have some colors, which I find interesting.  I look forward to maybe being able to get the camera to focus quickly enough next week to have one out of about 25 pics in focus.  Fingers crossed.