The Homesteady

How to support someone who's getting an abortion

Originally posted on Instagram

How to support someone who’s getting an abortion:

1. Don’t assume anything. Don’t assume they’ve told their partner or family members or friends. Don’t assume you understand their birth control choices. Don't assume this was an easy decision for them to make.
2. Find out what they can expect from the clinic, the appointment, the day (Planned Parenthood has good general resources on this) and gently prepare them. Suggest that they call the clinic for a breakdown of the appointment beforehand too if they feel that would be helpful.
3. Support them in making a list of questions for the provider. Prepare to ask them yourself if they want you to advocate on their behalf. Every patient deserves an answer to every question.
4. Ask how they’d prefer you deal with any protesters who might be outside the clinic. (Do they want you to answer if someone yells? Do they want you to help them avoid conflict?)
5. Offer a ride to the clinic and a ride home afterwards. Ask what they want to listen to in the car (what kind of music/the news/nothing).
6. Ask if they'd like you to hold their hand while you walk in together.
7. Offer to go into the exam room with them and be present for the procedure in whatever way they need (hand-holding? playing funny videos on YouTube? distracting them with conversation about "Game of Thrones"?).
8. Make sure they are as comfortable as possible when you bring them home. Settle them in bed or on the couch with blankets and a heating pad, and then go out and get their favorite foods for when they feel ready to eat. Make sure there are menstrual pads in the bathroom. Put things like water and Advil and the TV remote nearby.
9. If they want you to stay and you are able, stay. If they want you to leave, leave and tell them they can text you if they need anything or just to talk. When they text, text back.
10. Check in a few days later via text, and simply listen. Drop off a bag of little self-care things like chocolate, a candle, or a single-use face mask – things that will help them focus on themselves with acts of care, comfort, and love.
11. If you need to tell someone else what you’re doing, don't tell anyone who it is you're helping. Even if if they don’t tell you explicitly not to tell anyone, don’t tell anyone.

Do any or all of these things. Most importantly, keep checking in and asking what they need. (And remember it’s okay if that changes from one minute to the next.) Offer them love and support and acceptance and try your best to create peace.

The allure of the "soft apocalypse"

There's this Tumblr post, written in 2016, that's been reblogged almost 200,000 times. It's about a new genre concept called "soft apocalypse" and it sounds...really nice, actually.

(I won't do a good job of re-explaining it here so I won't try; it's perfect the way it's written. Please go read it.)

Why is this so lovely?

I sent the link to my friend Katy, and we texted back and forth about it for a little bit. Here's what I wrote to her, piecemeal, while at the gym.

The soft apocalypse. A world where everyone values the things that we value.

It feels like holding a bird in your hands. I'm loving right now thinking about why this is so attractive, hypnotizing.

1) Base equity. Everyone is facing the same challenges, working within the same constraints. No one is better off than anyone else.

2) Creativity, hard work, and passed-down knowledge are valued.

3) Handiwork is critical for survival = more time/effort spent in pursuit of these crafts, which are especially satisfying since they produce a useful physical product = more happiness and satisfaction in work.

4) Reliance on community becomes paramount. That which we can't do, our neighbor can. We survive because of each other. Acknowledgement and value of this symbiosis feeds community building, respect, and kindness.

5) Increased pride in one's own abilities, since we are able to witness directly how they fuel our community's survival/success.

6) More unity with nature. Interruptions in electricity/water delivery/automobiles force community-based, nature-informed responses to basic needs. Adverse nature events require collaboration, and therefore reinforce equity balance and community reliance.

Something's missing though...maybe it's 2 and 4 combined. Community reliance and value of passed-down knowledge engender the valuation and care of those who are not able to contribute directly.

That's 7.

And 8) Bounty. Forced to creatively reassess the utility of the things we have or can produce ourselves (since nothing can be ordered from a faraway factory anymore), we find that we as a people have or can make anything we need.

Back to 7, love matters because community matters. Then one day, love just matters.

9) Time/energy spent on creating the physical. We believe that love survives after our deaths; but we KNOW that at least some of the physical things we create do. Our lives, our work reassure us that someTHING will be left — and that we will value the women left whose only purpose is to add our names and our work to their poems.

= we never die.

(I can be a prolific texter.)

Katy pointed out rightly, beautifully, "It's really the pieces that are missing/devalued with capitalism."

I'm left with self-assigned homework: Keep this idea warm. Help it grow by rereading The Feminist Utopia Project. Try to amplify the whispers of these values in my daily life. Imagine honestly the other side of the coin: what would be lost in this hypothetical version of society (vaccines? accessibility?). Watch warily as news of our planet grows bleaker (NYT). Remember to compost. 

If this subgenre resonates, you might like reading Station Eleven [affiliate link].

Do you like to be surprised?

Four years ago, my brother and sister and I sneakily planned a surprise anniversary party for our parents to celebrate their 30th year of marriage. We roped my aunt into taking them out for dinner, and while they were gone we got the party ready. We set up a popcorn bar and decorated their backyard, and my parents' friends and extended family arrived – some even drove six hours to be there!

Long story short, we partied the night away and everyone had a really good time. It was so worth the secret-keeping. My parents loved it too – even though afterward my mom made me promise never to throw them a surprise party again! And I don't blame her. Surprises aren't my favorite either – I much prefer being in the know about what's going on.

I can't wait to figure out if Miles is a pro-surprise person or not – whether we could spring one of those Disney surprises on him when he's older, where we tell him where we're going in the car on the way to the airport, or he'd prefer to plan the whole trip with us. (Either way, I'm happy.)

I'm curious: Do you like to be surprised?

Here & there

A few weeks ago we had a spring solstice egg hunt in the backyard with our dear friends Katy and Allan and their two little girls. Miles took his cues from the ladies, watching them rush around our rainy backyard, reaching for the bright plastic eggs. He wandered cautiously away from the porch, selected two eggs to put into his pink basket, and considered himself done. 

The next day Katy asked me how I was liking being a mother, 17 months in. We were sitting in the backyard while Miles napped inside, having moved our chairs into the sun and stretched the invisible connection between baby monitor and camera as far as it would go. "It's good," I said, describing how it had taken this many months to recognize myself in this role; the relief of seeing my "old" self again. Of finally feeling natural calling myself a mom. "There are some days I still feel like a babysitter," I said. "Like, when are the real grownups getting home?" I thought more about my answer later, and felt like I'd left some things out. Like the heart-aching bliss that pierces through our most difficult days (and nights). The ever-shifting struggles of toddler-hood are very real, and my life is very, very good. There are more challenges now, and there is more gratitude now. 

(In keeping with everyone's food restrictions, the gluten-free, dairy-free, no-bake recipe for these chocolate nest cookies. The M&M eggs do contain dairy, though, so we filled a few with jelly beans.)

 

Links for your Friday

There's a new menstruation emoji

Why it took us so long to believe Lorena Bobbitt

On decriminalizing black hair

There is probably a drag queen to thank for your favorite makeup tips

8 things you might not know your library card can do

Starting a feminist club at an all-boys Catholic school

I'm adding Like A Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science & Culture of Pregnancy to my reading list [affiliate link]

Praise Satan, there are new episodes of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix!

How to raise a child without imposing gender (NYT)

Archaeologists found a trove of Maya artifacts dating back 1,000 years (and did a six-hour purification ritual with a Maya priest prior to entering the cave system)

New Mexico has become the newest state to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day

More news about the "Downton Abbey" movie thank god

5 reasons all children should learn how to sew

A woman found a braid of Charlotte Brontë's hair inside a ring

What do we do now that will be considered unthinkable in 50 years?

A salt dough bunny garland

"Where is our Easter box?" I called to Kristie from the basement, facing the shelves where our holiday decorations rest divided into separate cardboard boxes.

"We don't have one," she answered from the kitchen (leaning, I imagine, a little more closely to the open basement door).

We don't have one? I wondered. 

It was true. No springtime decorations were waiting for us at the foot of the basement stairs. We had a wreath, once, but it didn't fare well in our terrible storage system.

So: A garland. A cookie cutter. Dough made from the pantry.

I followed a salt dough recipe I found on Pinterest, and used a rabbit-shaped cookie cutter from a different cardboard box in the basement. I pierced each cut-out twice (a meat thermometer worked well – sorry, buns) and left them out overnight to dry before baking them at a low temp for awhile the next day.

I dipped the end of string into candle wax to help strengthen its point before threading the bunnies on one by one.

I love them. These seven, plus a few vintage finds, are making it a little springier around here.

Currently

Reading: Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver [affiliate link]. I quite like it. Not so much the trick she's doing with the last sentence of a chapter also being the title of the next chapter, but rather because I love her writing. It's so rich. I re-read The Poisonwood Bible [affiliate link] every few years. 

Listening to: My regular favorite podcasts have felt, suddenly, far too violent and upsetting to listen to. My therapist said it's because my mind is preoccupied with Miles, who is in such a vulnerable stage of his life, and that my aversion to topics I once couldn't get enough of is probably only temporary. So true crime is off the table, at least for the next little while. Instead I'm listening to This American Life and Radiolab in the car, and '80s pop on Pandora at work.

Making: The entirety of my creative energy is being taken up now by one big, challenging, lovely knitting project. I'm one-third finished, and I'll share it here soon but I can't now because it's a gift for a dear friend and I want it to remain a surprise.

Watching: All the "Schitt's Creek" we can get our hands on. The original "Charmed." Godzilla (1998), which you are probably not surprised to learn really does not hold up well. The new season of "Queer Eye," of course, but only one episode every few days to make it last longer. 

Planning: To sit on some couches at Ikea this weekend. I'm fancying this one and this one (although I'm feeling a bit skeptical about only one armrest!). Other than that, to be outside as much as we can bear! Happily, the picture above is a few weeks old, and the backyard is no longer covered in snow. We've made it a habit to turn Miles out for a quick postprandial frolic in the yard before bedtime each night, giving him space to craft his own uninterrupted outdoors play. I try to stay out of it while he selects a stick to clutch while marching around, to see how far he can get up the steps of his slide without my help (which, obviously, he gets in spades when wanted). "He's figuring it out," Kristie whispers to me and we watch our child negotiate his way through wildhood. We fold our arms and speculate on which new little behaviors are borrowed from his peers at daycare, and he calls to the neighbor's dog, leashed in the next yard. The fresh air is doing us all good. 

Solange's new album

Solange released a new album today called When I Get Home. Everyone in my office today is streaming it on Spotify, and I'm listening too and thinking back to the night Miles was born. My sister played A Seat at the Table for me in the delivery room on a little speaker, and it made me feel safe and strong and calm while I pushed our son into the world. (And I'm glad a creative, powerful black female artist was the first music he heard.) Listening to that album and now her new music smoothes some of the sharper edges of my memories of childbirth. It's an emotional balm.

Now that she has a new album out, I said to Kristie, "Looks like we need to have another baby!"

"Hmm," she replied, "let's wait for the next album."

If you're a parent, did you have a birthing playlist? What's on it, or what do you imagine you'd listen to?

Gender-free toddler clothes v.1

The clothing Miles wears comes from thrift stores, hand-me-downs from neighbors across the street (whose son is a few months older than ours), or the sales racks at fast fashion stores whose doorways we guiltily, greedily darken. Sometimes I am emboldened to make something for him to wear. Regardless of the source, when I have the opportunity to choose I do nag myself to try and select clothes for him that might be difficult to interpret as belonging to one gender or another. Lately he's been mistaken for a girl when we're out, which I suppose could be counted as a credit toward this effort ("Maya?" another mother mishears when I tell her his name. "She's beautiful!"), or perhaps to my furious unwillingness to yet consider cutting his hair. It's not perfect or maybe even great, but it is an effort; I think often about how we/Americans praise and empower parents for dressing their daughters in "boys'" clothing, but we don't do the same when our sons wear dresses or skirts. (Were Miles a girl, I know I'd bedeck her in dresses and skirts. And I don't, since – as far as we know – he's not. Am I not part of the complication here?)

Well. My experience was that it was much easier to find a wider range of gender-free choices when he could fit into smaller clothes. (Do you think that's for parents who decide to wait until birth to learn their baby's sex?) Now that he's larger, it's like a schism has opened between the pink/sparkly/ruched and the blue/construction-themed/sturdy clothing that is made in his size. I've started quietly pinning options that couldn't really be shoehorned into either camp, and I'd like to share them with you in a new series. I'd like it also if you could please tip a cap in my direction when you find something that might belong on a future iteration of this list!

Striped tee, Nordstrom Rack / Knit bauble sweater, H&M
Bunny booties, Hanna Andersson / So Much Fun tee, Nordstrom Rack
Knit set, H&M / Heart leggings, Old Navy

Oh, and be aware – all of these are affiliate links.

The distance between home and home

Thank you Lexington Law Firm for sponsoring this post. A high service partner and consumer advocate that will help you fight for the credit you deserve!

It's time!

Kristie and I have resolved that 2019 will bring us closer to a new home – to a house that we own, walls that we don't share, a quiet street where Miles can grow and play. 

Our "whys" are many. Most of all, recently, I've wanted more physical space outdoors. Just a little more distance between our front door and the road. Room for planting flowers and a vegetable garden. Maybe for adding a chicken or three. More room to be loud, to park our cars safely, to leave our windows open in summer without inviting in the neighbors' experimental music. 

(Really, it's not our thing.)

I daydream about walls we can paint (or knock down) without needing permission. A quieter neighborhood with nice sidewalks and trees out front. Room for the record player to come out again. Built-in bookshelves. A fireplace, if we're lucky. At a minimum: Privacy and safety and peace. I love our future home so much already. 

I've written before about our path out of debt, which Kristie and I are still on. We each carry student loans, compounded by the cost of starting our family (which, for the record, I would spend a thousand more times to get our son. But gosh, it was a lot of money.) There's lots of work to be done on our finances before we're ready to buy a house. 

So this is where it starts.

After Miles goes to bed, Kristie and I take seats across from each other at the kitchen table and plot our family's future.

Our financial wellness checklist includes saving a down payment, getting out of debt, and improving our credit so that we can hopefully qualify for a home mortgage. 

Along with working extra hard on side hustles and cutting down our spending, tools like Lexington Law Firm are critical to address the third in that list. I don't want to be one of the millions of Americans who are denied home loans because of credit report errors (that usually take months to fix).

It's everyone's right to know and understand their credit report, and it's so important to be educated so you can advocate effectively for those errors getting repaired. Lexington Law Firm is one of the most respected names in credit repair and relies on new technology to have your back through the repair process (including an app that puts crucial information literally into their clients' hands).

The best thing we've done so far in this process is to talk openly about where we are, and to ask for help when we need it. I'm married to a person who likes to do her homework and research before we work with anyone, so I love that Lexington Law Firm is a Consumer Credit Protection Act compliant organization, which means they're regulated extensively. Along with finding a certified public accountant (CPA) to help guide our family, reliable professionals like Lexington Law Firm are going to be really helpful over the next several months while we get our ducks in a row, and then into our own pond.

How to knit elbow patches

I can't remember the day I bought this sweater. It was probably something I added to an armful of clothes on my way to the register at H&M, thinking it would be a good staple.

I do remember where and when I've worn it: absentmindedly pulling it on during late nights at the office, squinting more closely at my screen. On a plane to Paris, where I washed it in our apartment's machine (which, in my memory, took about six hours to complete a cycle). Over baggy t-shirts, as my newborn and I navigated nursing while the sun rose. 

I was sad when the elbows finally started to wear thin (particularly the left one; I like to lean it on my desk at work). Really, it couldn't have cost more than $25 originally, and probably about that to buy a newer version, but I feel sentimental about this sweater! I am attempting to knit one that could replace it, but...we'll see. I was inspired by this book [affiliate link] and this Instagram post to knit elbow patches in the meantime. I wrote out what I did, so you can use it as a pattern too if you'd like.

The yarn was from my stash; I believe it's a light worsted. I did the following on size US 6 straight needles:

Cast on 9 stitches.

1. P across
2. K across, knitting twice into the first and last stitches
3. Purl all

Repeat rows 2 and 3 until you have 17 stitches, ending with right side facing.

1. K across, slipping the 1st stitch
2. Purl across, slipping the 1st stitch
3. K across, knitting twice into the first and last stitches
4. Purl across, slipping the 1st stitch
5. K across, slipping the 1st stitch
6. Rep. rows 4 and 5 until work measures 4.5" from cast-on edge, ending with wrong side facing
7. Ssk, K until 2 sts remain, K2tog
8. Purl across
9. Knit across
10. Purl across
11. Ssk, K until 2 sts remain, K2tog
12. Purl across
13. Rep. rows 11 and 12 until 9 sts remain
14. Bind off in pattern

Repeat for second elbow patch.

I used contrasting embroidery thread and a darning needle to stitch each patch on, after having Kristie model the sweater so I could safety-pin the patches in place. I'm glad this sweater can keep joining me on more adventures. My elbows feel warmer already.