Summer-Cation Blog Hop: Sharing My Sunshine!

I love the idea of Sheila's Summer-Cation Blog Hop--

"Everywhere I look in Minnesota there is SNOW SNOW SNOW. We are having wind chill warnings weekly, snow storms, and more school closings this year then I remember in my entire life. :shock: Then I go on-line and read other book reviewers in the same boat – unusual cold temperatures, winds, snow in states that normally do not get snow…

"I am calling an emergency Summer-Cation. We need to talk sunshine people!!!! I am looking for people to write posts of a great summer experience (sun is not optional… I repeat sun is not optional! )"

--but I feel like a bit of a fraud participating in it. While so many of you have been bearing up under a winter for the record books, here in Southern California, it's been mostly sunny, dry--we're actually setting records for that, as opposed to snowfall--and pleasantly warm. These photos were taken earlier this winter in Ventura, California, about 35 miles west of where I live. The surf wasn't up very far, but it was up to something...

The beaches out here are more crowded when the calendar actually says it's summer, but other than that, they won't look much different in July than they did in January. And the forecast won't look all that much different, either:

Don't shoot me, I'm just the weather messenger.

It's not so much that this is the land of the Endless Summer--it's that we basically have one season that feels endless because it doesn't vary all that much. It can get very hot--well above 90 degrees--for days at a time from May through October, but it's the proverbial "dry heat"--and having spent nearly 80% of my life in the humidity belt between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, I'm here to tell you that the dry heat really is easier to handle. And because our summers really are the dry season--not that our winters are all that wet--we get used to making outdoor plans without even considering a rainy-day backup.

So, my contribution to the Summer-Cation is sharing some of our warm California sun...and a little touristy giveaway. Leave a comment on this post, and after this Blog Hop Weekend ends, I'll choose one commenter at random and send you two refrigerator magnets depicting scenes from Sunny SoCal--hopefully they'll brighten your kitchen, at least, if not your winter!

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#stopitnow: Bullet Points--or, Me and a Gun, revisited

I originally wrote this after the Tucson shootings in early 2011, and revised it a bit after the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut last week. Members of the #GenFab bloggers' group have been sharing their responses to the Sandy Hook School shootings with the hashtag #stopitnow. What follows are my personal opinions on the generalities of a very complex issue, with links to facts on the matter where appropriate. I've linked to others' posts in a Readlist.

Whenever there’s a newsworthy shooting somewhere in this country, the debate about guns and their “control” gets revived. America is a nation born from war; it wouldn’t have come into existence without firearms. Our Constitution’s Second Amendment was meant to ensure our right to bear arms in defense of ourselves, our families, and our country. However, all too often, they’re used for purposes pretty much unrelated to that right, and activities that, being against the law, are technically unprotected by the Constitution.

My parents were both victims of gun violence associated with criminal activity. When I was twelve years old, they were both shot in an attempted robbery at the liquor store they owned at the time; my father’s knee was shattered when he came out from behind the counter, and my mother sustained a flesh wound when she chased the robber out of the store. (By the way, he didn’t get any money--but he did get arrested a few days later.) My sister and I were in the store at the time--a Saturday evening, the night before Easter 1976--and witnessed it all. It’s no overstatement to say it changed our lives; by the end of that year, my parents had sold the store, our house, and most of what we owned, and we moved from Connecticut to Florida to start over. (This happened roughly 30 miles--and 36 years--from the town where Sandy Hook Elementary School is located.)

When I had a child of my own, I was one of those parents who didn’t want him to play with toy firearms, although I did make exceptions for the occasional water pistol. However, I observed what many parents of little boys do; if they want to play “shooting” games, they can pretend anything is a gun. (I don’t mean that as a sexist statement; girls may do it too, but I only know from raising a boy.) My son wasn’t all that interested, fortunately, but he did engage in that pretend play every now and then. And he spent most of his growing-up years in the South, where gun culture is pretty well entrenched, although we really didn’t know anyone who used them.

I have joked occasionally about the irony that I would leave Tennessee and move to California before I lived with a guy who owned a firearm. Early in our acquaintance, and well before we were officially “in a relationship,” the man who would become my second husband told me that one of his favorite hobbies was target shooting and that he had an interest in collecting firearms. He hadn’t wanted to mention it until I’d gotten to know him a bit--and had a good sense of how non-aggressive he was--but he did feel I should know fairly early on, as it was the kind of thing that might affect my feelings about him. He was well aware that people can have some prejudices against gun owners--but since I hadn’t yet told him about the robbery, he didn’t realize that I might be someone with those prejudices. I surprised myself by how calmly I took this revelation; I told him that it was his thing, and as long as he didn’t expect me to participate in it, I wouldn’t bother him about it.

And I really haven’t, although I am the last person I ever thought would live with firearms in the house. But I also live with someone who is is exceedingly responsible about firearm ownership and usage, serious about safety, and fundamentally nonviolent. Because he’s the only firearms owner I’ve had a close relationship with, I can’t say whether my husband is “typical” or not, but I suspect he probably is; we just don’t hear much about the gun owners who don’t fit the “NRA gun nut” image. My husband’s firearms are stored, unloaded, in a locked safe. They’re removed only for his trips to the shooting range (and occasionally for cleaning); he has no interest in hunting or any other uses for them, and no one touches them without his supervision. Not surprisingly, he’s not as averse to toy firearms as I was when my son was little--my stepson owns a few Nerf dart guns, which he’s not permitted to point at any living creature--but he’s never allowed violent video games, particularly those of the “first-person-shooter” variety, and he’s never pushed shooting with his daughter and son; they’ve used air rifles and accompanied him to the target range a few times, but they’re not overly interested.

I have mixed feelings about the worth of “prohibition” laws in general. Outlawing the production and sale of alcoholic beverages in the 1920s not only didn’t stop people from drinking, it was a major factor in the growth of organized crime. The illegality of abortion prior to 1972 didn’t stop it from happening then, and efforts to curtail its legal availability now won’t stop it either. But as you might imagine from my experience in that liquor-store robbery when I was twelve, I’ve been quite strongly in favor of gun control most of my life. On the one hand, I (kind of) get the NRA’s “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” position; on the other hand--yeah, people kill people, but in this country far too many of them have much too easy access to guns to do it. Even where there are restrictions and prohibitions against gun purchases, I suspect that a determined criminal mind--or an unstable one--will find a way around them, but the fact remains that stricter gun laws correlate with less gun-related violence.

In the years since, I’ve thought we were relatively fortunate that my family’s experience with such violence happened when it did, the mid-1970s; now it seems like criminals are more interested in not leaving witnesses, regardless of whether they get what they came for, and my parents might not have made it out with just bullet wounds and broken bones. I don’t blame “the media” for what seems to be a more widespread appetite for carnage, but I do believe that as violence in entertainment--and as entertainment--has become more prevalent and more graphic, it’s come to feel less real, to the extent that some seem to disassociate violent acts from their effects on living human beings. That may point to an issue that needs at least as much attention as gun control, and maybe even more: mental-health care and treatment, starting with a hard look at the attitudes and stigmas surrounding it. There are even bigger questions of ethics and morality connected with all this--Is a criminal act less of a crime if it's committed by someone mentally unstable who may not really understand what they're doing? Is it more of a crime if the person who commits it understands it but is incapable of caring about it?--but since we're already struggling as a society with the more concrete questions, I'm not sure when we'll be prepared to tackle the philosophical ones.

I'm pretty sure of this, though: the “right to bear arms” is a significant American one, but the right to health and safety is a fundamental human one--and personally, that’s the right I’m more interested in defending.

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It's Election Day in the USA!

I never get one of those "I voted" stickers, so I had to find a photo of someone else's to post here.

I have voted "permanent absentee" for at least the last half-dozen years. In California, that means I vote by mail, even though I'm almost never out of state, let alone out of town, on Election Day (although I truly was an absentee voter for this year's June primary).

The vote-from-home, mail-it-in ballot makes dealing with California's runaway ballot-initiative system almost manageable. When you have to read and vote on more than a dozen propositions--which may include some that contradict others on the same ballot, and which are all written in some variation of legalese--it helps if you can sit comfortably and spend time with them. But after spending time with this year's propositions, I was willing to vote for just one more--a ballot initiative to get rid of ballot initiatives and actually force our elected representatives to do the jobs they were elected to do.

I mailed in my ballot for today's elections two weeks ago, which has given me blissful freedom to ignore the last-minute political-advertising blitz (from all sides, for the record). I've played my small part in this--I'm glad to have done it, and glad that it's done. I do wish they'd mail me a little sticker with my ballot, though.

Are you registered and eligible to vote? Have you done it already? If not, why are you hanging around here? Voting is your right and your privilege--go exercise it!

By the way...

While you're in a voting mood, why not submit your votes in the opening round of the 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards? Choose your favorites from 15 nominees in 20 categories--or write in your picks, if they're eligible! (I did.) First-round voting closes on November 10, and you can vote from anywhere--the only thing you need is to be a Goodreads member!

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"Are You Mom Enough?" Yes. No, Maybe. (Graded on a curve?)

(I rescheduled a book review from today to Thursday because I wanted to put on my mom-blogger hat before last week's news literally becomes "last week's news.")

I really wasn’t sure if I’d make a response to last week’s sensational TIME magazine cover for its feature on attachment parenting, but the more I read other people’s responses to it, the more I realized I did have some thoughts of my own to add to the many thousands of words already spilled over it.

For those who might somehow have missed this, here’s the cover:

The people on the cover are LA mom blogger Jamie Lynne Grumet and her almost-4-year-old son...who does, in fact, still breastfeed. I haven’t met Jamie Lynne in person, but she is one of my fellow contributors at Moms LA and has done some very thoughtful, articulate writing on attachment parenting (including extended breastfeeding) and adoption on her blog I Am Not the Babysitter.

I’ve been a mother for almost my entire adult life (and now approaching 60% of my entire life, period)--my son is a year or so older than Jamie Lynne. I’ve seen a lot of child-raising practices come and go, and I’ve heard some of the same debates go on for decades, believe it or not. There were “lactivists” back in the ‘80s. There were “family bed” advocates and baby-wearers. There probably weren’t as many of them, but I’ve come across them throughout my years as a parent. And the further I get from raising young children, the more of them there seem to be.

One of the things that’s impressed me about Jamie Lynne is that she firmly believes in what she’s doing as a mother, but she also consistently expresses support and lack of judgment for those who don’t do the same. She hasn't struck me as the combative know-it-all "mommier-than-thou" sort who would pose a question like the one TIME uses on its cover

I understand that TIME chose that particular photo and designed that cover for provocation (and Jamie Lynne had to be aware that there was a chance they’d use that photo as they did when she and her son posed for it). I think they knew what buttons it would push, and I’m sure they knew that mothers ask themselves that question over and over...no matter how old their kids are.

I didn’t nurse my son. His father and I almost never let him into bed with us, although we took him plenty of other places. He was frequently with his grandparents while his father and I finished our college degrees, and I’ve worked full-time outside the home since he was three years old. I let him cry. By attachment-parenting standards, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t even close to being “mom enough.” Having said that, if I started all over again tomorrow, I probably still wouldn’t be “mom enough,” because I’d do--and not do--a lot of the same things. My focus wasn’t really on my son’s experience of childhood...or on my own experience of parenthood. I was always aware that he wouldn’t stay a child, and considered my job to be raising him to be a functional, contributing member of adult society.

By most objective standards, he’s there--a college graduate with a solid career, a thriving side job, and a variety of interests who lives independently. By more subjective standards, I think he’s there too--he’s smart and funny and caring and principled, and I genuinely like the person he’s become. (And most of the time, I’m pretty sure he likes me.)

I think the ultimate verdict on whether a parent is “enough” isn’t rendered until years down the road, but I think I may have been. In any case, I was mom "enough" to refill my empty nest and take some of the nitty-gritty of motherhood on again when my son was 21...and I became stepmother to my new husband's daughter and son, then 12 and 7. There's a whole different calibration of "enough" that goes with that job.

There’s more to this story than a provocative question on a magazine cover (a question which, for the record, is fairly loosely related to the content within), so I wanted to highlight a few of the responses from within Jamie Lynne’s Moms LA community; they’ve ranged from deeply personal reactions and impassioned defenses to considered questioning of blogger motivations and concerns about the photo’s future effects on her young son.

At MomsLA:
Dear TIME Magazine: Working Moms Can Attachment Parent Too
Attachment Parenting: How I Made It Work For Me

Ciaran @ Momfluential: Are Mommy Bloggers a Bunch of Boobs?

“...If lactivist wasn’t her brand yesterday, I sure as hell hope it will be her brand tomorrow. Because she has been made the face of this controversy, along with her 3 yr old son. The world will move along to the next willing 'model' without her if she doesn’t use her words well. They probably will even if she does. Models are ultimately interchangeable...

"This is just my opinion, but Brand and Media 'ops' like this and so many more are starting to feel like bad boyfriends. More and more bloggers are being motivated by the scraps of addictive fame that these pimps are peddling. This addiction to attention is dangerous. It runs the risk of undermining all the wonderful other things they do. And for what? 40 dubious comments about how pretty we are?

"Five minutes of fame and fluffing is not enough!”

Shannon @ The Woman Formerly Known As Beautiful: In Defense of My Friend Jamie Lynne Grumet: TIME Magazine's Breastfeeding Cover Girl

I think TIME did Jamie a disservice by photographing her in an unnatural position in a calculatedly provocative pose in order to sell magazines. The woman on the cover – while as stunningly beautiful as the real Jamie – doesn’t reflect the inclusive, intelligent, wise-beyond-her-years, loving, nurturing, non-judgmental woman I know who would never have authored the headline 'Are You Mom Enough?'"

Kristen @ Rage Against the Minivan: where is the mommy-war for the motherless child?

"I don’t much care if you breastfed your kid until they started kindergarten, or if you fed them formula from day one. I don’t really care if you turned your infant car-seat forward-facing prior to age 2, or if you homeschool, or if you send your kids to daycare while you go to work. Do you cosleep? Did you circumcise your son? I DON’T CARE.  Do you babywear? Push your kid around in a stroller? Use a leash for your kid at Disneyland?  Whatever.  Good for you. 

"When it comes to issues of motherhood, there is one issue I care about: some kids don’t have one. All of these petty wars about the choices of capable, loving mothers is just a lot of white noise to me, Quite honestly, I’m often astonished at the non-essential parenting issues I see moms getting their panties in a wad about. Particularly when there are so many kids in this world not being parented at all."

Deborah @ BetweenParents.org: TIME and time again...

"A school administrator who’s a friend of mine talks regularly about appreciating diversity in our culture and on the school yard. She’s referring to parents who have gossiped relentlessly about the way other people raise their children. The gossip and name-calling damaged our small community. People were put in the position of picking sides on issue after issue. A lot of bad feelings went back and forth. We see this over and over with the media-manufactured 'Mommy Wars.' I know a lot of us who write and blog are trying not to enter the mudslinging fray."

Morgan @ The818.com: “Mommy Wars”: An argument around us, about us, but not between us

"I read a LOT about parenting and motherhood. I read books, and articles, and research papers, and blog posts. I read the views of mothers and children and MD’s and Ph.D.’s, and the only common thread I see is the one where this argument, this battle…these MOMMY WARS? Nobody is fighting them. When it comes to Mothers, WE ARE ALL ON THE SAME SIDE."

Jessica Gottlieb: Jamie Lynne Grumet Breastfeeds on the Cover of TIME Magazine (vlog)

Cheryl @ Mommypants: Are we mom enough?

Sunshine Wonderland: I am mom enough, Time.

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Denim Day: Protesting violence on Wednesday, April 25

By virtue of my position with my employer (management level) and my age (several decades old), I tend to dress fairly traditionally for work--usually in dresses or skirts. But tomorrow, April 25, I'm going to wear jeans to the office to participate in Denim Day in LA & USA.

Denim Day is a nationwide event launched in Los Angeles in 1999 by the pioneering anti-violence organization Peace Over Violence to promote education about and prevention of sexual violence. Individuals, elected officials, businesses and students are encouraged to "make a social statement with their fashion statement" by wearing jeans as a visible means of protest against the misconceptions and excuses that surround sexual assault--including the suggestion that certain clothing women wear "invites" it.

The organization's website offers the facts about why we need to make this statement:

• Every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted.
• One in six American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape.
• 82.8% of rapes committed by an intimate are not reported to the police.
• 35% of college men who voluntarily participated in psychological research conducted at several universities indicated they might commit a rape if they knew they could get away with it.
• Two million children around the world are forced into prostitution every year.
• Law enforcement arrests for internet sex crimes against minors are on the rise.
• 15,000 to 19,000 people with developmental disabilities are raped each year in North America.
• Survivors deserve support and assistance, not shame and blame.
• We want to build healthy relationships, families and communities free from sexual, domestic and interpersonal violence.

Denim Day emerged as a response to the verdict in an Italian rape case in the late 1990s, according to Peace Over Violence and the Valley Star:

Denim Day began nearly 15 years ago after an Italian Supreme Court chief judge overturned and dismissed the 1998 case of an 18-year-old driving student against her 45-year-old instructor when he appealed the original verdict convicting him of rape.

According to Peace Over Violence—the organization sponsoring “Denim Day in LA and USA”— the chief judge ruling on the case said, “Because the victim wore very, very tight jeans, she had to help him remove them, and by removing the jeans, it was no longer rape but consensual sex.”

The new verdict upset much of Italy, and according to POV, female Italian Parliament members were so outraged by the overturn that they wore jeans to work in protest. Following suit, the California Senate and Assembly, as well as POV’s Executive Director Patricia Giggans, sparked the protest in Los Angeles.

Many organizations will be altering their normal dress codes for the day, including LA Unified School District schools that normally require uniforms, in order to give attention to this issue...and in a time when there seems to be a lot of interest in turning back the clock on matters that are particularly significant for women, it's especially important to pay attention. Eva Smith's post about Denim Day on MomsLA places it into context with some recent news items.

Even if jeans are your normal daily "uniform," please take some time tomorrow to educate yourself--and others--about the myths and facts of sexual violence, and make a statement about stopping it.

Disclosure: My employer is participating in Denim Day 2012, and I am sharing this information as a personal show of support. No compensation is involved.

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No #Readathon for Me--I'm at #LATFoB!

Greetings, Readathoners! I'm sorry not to be among you this weekend, but I have a good bookish excuse. I'm at the University of Southern California today (and possibly part of tomorrow) for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books!




I picked up my media badge on Thursday afternoon, which will admit me to the press room and serve as my ticket to any and all panels. I have three I'd like to go to today--and lucky me, they're all in the same room!

10:30 am John Green in Conversation with Lev Grossman (Panel 1091)

John Green 

Interviewer: Lev Grossman

12:30 pm Susan Orlean in Conversation with Michael Silverblatt (Panel 1092)

Susan Orlean 

Interviewer: Michael Silverblatt

2:30 pm Judy Blume in Conversation with Mary McNamara (Panel 1093)

Judy Blume 

Interviewer: Mary McNamara

I may be even more excited about seeing blogging friends than I am about the authors, to be honest. I'm hoping to meet up with Amy, Danielle, and Anastasia, and possibly several of my MomsLA co-contributors as well (I wouldn't have that media badge if not for them!). If you're not Readathon-ing, please @ me on Twitter if you'll be at USC today too!

Despite the very warm forecast today, I also intend to make the rounds of the exhibitors and, hopefully, do a little book shopping! Most of SoCal's best indie bookstores will have booths on-site, and some will be hosting signings as well, with signed books available for purchase.

I'll probably try to get everything done today, because I'm not sure if I'll go back to the Festival tomorrow. But if I do, I want to see this panel (which may be the closest thing to Comic-Con I do this year):

3:00 pm The Nerds Shall Inherit the Earth. (Panel 2093)

Maureen Johnson

Pamela Ribon

John Scalzi

Interviewer: Amber Benson

If you're on Twitter, watch the hashtags #books, #bookfest, and #LATFoB for Festival of Books updates all weekend long, and I expect to have a recap post or two (with photos, of course!) some time next week.

Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC

Exposition Blvd and S Figueroa St.

Los Angeles, CA 90089

April 21-22, 2012

Saturday 10:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Sunday 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM

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It's International Women's Day, and She's Out of Control!

Today is International Women's Day, and I'm going back to a post I published on this date in 2011 as a jumping-off point. I'm sorry to say there hasn't been a lot of positive progress since then.

Source: wildgypsies.tumblr.com via Malina on Pinterest

March is Women’s History Month - a time to reflect on where we’ve been and consider where we go next. As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it...and those who haven't forgotten may be forced by circumstances to re-fight battles they’d hoped were already resolved.

If a “war on women” led by conservative forces was declared early in 2011, it only seems to have escalated in this Presidential election year. As Mona Gable said on BlogHer.com last week, "As far as women's rights are concerned, you'd think it was 1912 all over again! Where is Margaret Sanger when you need her?"

Margaret Sanger's first-hand experience--as a nurse on New York City's Lower East Side, and as one of eleven children--with the effects of unplanned pregnancies on women's physical and economic health led to her work as an advocate for birth control, which eventually led to the formation of Planned Parenthood.

Considering that just 3% of the total services it offered in 2010 were related to abortion, the amount of attention Planned Parenthood gets for those services is rather disproportionate, to put it mildly. And for the record, terminating a pregnancy through abortion is, more often than not, a response to the prospect of unplanned parenthood.

My own parenthood, which commenced when I was barely 20 years old, was unplanned. The fact that my unplanned pregnancy was also my only one is a direct result of planning, and the use of contraception, for the remaining 17 years of my first marriage (beginning six weeks after my son was born). My chosen method was the Pill, and for most of those years, my health insurance didn't pay for it. For several years early in that marriage, when my insurance was old-fashioned "major medical" that didn't address prescriptions at all, my source for contraception and general health care was the Planned Parenthood office in Ithaca, NY.

These days, my body is providing its own birth control--hormone tests have decreed that is has officially entered menopause. However, it's not out of the realm of possibility that those hormones might need some outside help at some point in the coming years, and I could find myself taking the Pill again one day--and hoping that my health insurance will cover it for non-contraceptive usage.

For most of the four decades that access to safe and legal abortions has been legal, loss of that access has been a near-constant threat, and never something to be taken for granted. But despite the fact that I belonged to a church that denounced it, I never really worried about being able to obtain and practice effective birth control--and I've never equated it with abortion, as some of the scarier rhetoric does these days. My thinking is that effective birth control is the best way (OK, not counting abstinence) to prevent abortion.

One definition of “conservative” is “keeping things as they are” - that is, preservation of the status quo. By that definition, actions such as those that would restrict access to contraception by equating it with abortion look like the polar opposite of “conservative" to me; they’re about radical change that would dismantle existing systems and reverse decades of social momentum--progress which, for the record, has often benefited both sexes.

As the saying goes, "Well-behaved women rarely make history." The "bad behavior" of history-making women isn't "girls gone wild," frat-boy stuff--history and infamy are not the same thing. History-making women have made their mark by taking control, not by being controlled; not by keeping quiet and "knowing their place," but by speaking up and questioning it. We've fought long and hard for control over our own bodies and our own lives, and if we want to hold on to that control, it looks like we won't be getting a break from that fight any time soon.

EDITED TO ADD a link to a related Huffington Post article by Suzanne Braun Levine:

"The contraceptive furor of recent weeks highlights the forces that are trying to impose another narrative -- theirs -- on us.

In the century since Margaret Sanger crusaded for birth control, women got the vote, entered the halls of higher education, broke into male-dominated professions (including the clergy), and made great and celebrated strides in sports. No one is trying to roll back those achievements. So how is it possible that anyone could argue that contraception is a matter of anyone's business other than the woman's own "moral conviction"?...Why has it been so hard to establish the narrative of a woman's right to control her reproductive health?

This is a uniquely American state of affairs. Other western countries have left reproductive politics behind decades ago. But this is the home of The Scarlet Letter,and to this day women's sexuality makes some people lose all reason.

Most of us -- even those who grew up during the so-called "sexual revolution" -- have encountered one mixed message after another...(but) with the help of our daughters and such brave young women as Sandra Fluke, and the outrage registered by millions of women to the all-male debate about whether to "let" women have birth control covered by their health insurance (as Viagra is), this may be the moment that we take control of that narrative once and for all."

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