Time Out.

I've been absent for a while...over a month, in fact.  I'm posting now not because I have a burning topic or witty anecdote, but I did want to post something. 

My Mom and her boyfriend visited me before Thanksgiving.  It was wonderful, probably the best weekend my mother and I have spent together in years, and I got to show her and Greg the city that I've made my home.

They brought my childhood dog along with them, Lily.  Lily was the dog that got me over my fear of dogs, and I always had a real connection with her.  She was so intuitive of my moods and responsive to my words and actions that at times it seemed she wasn't really a pet.  I know lots of crazies say that--maybe it's just called love.

Lily enjoyed the visit, and didn't leave my side.  The morning Mom and Greg left she came into my room for a little while and sat by me while I talked to her.

My Thanksgiving was wonderful, spent with my dad, my sister and her boyfriend.  I saw my grandma and an old friend.  It was the best thanksgiving I can remember, full of family.  I called my mom and she said Lily was back to her old habit of running to the door and looking out the window whenever they mentioned my name.

A few days after Thanksgiving, my mom called.  They had put Lily down.  They hadn't told me that for a few months, she had been on antibiotic treatments for a chronic skin condition.  It had cleared up for the visit, but started again in earnest when they got back to Pennsylvania.  The antibiotics had stopped working, and they began a steroid treatment, which ran down her system quickly.  It was an auto-immune disease of the skin, untreatable.  At the end her poor little body was too run down to recover and they made the decision to let her go.

 I am taking it pretty hard.  All pets are our friends, but Lily really was a friend to me.  I miss her. 

Not Girl Power...

...Woman Power!  Why is that almost all of the pop culture versions of feminism since the 1990s Spice Girl campaign for girl power has included girls looking all kinds of sexy, skimpy, and often more like a prostitute than someone who has read all of the classic volumes of equality.  Exhibit A:

Girl Power, even by that name which signifies one not yet grown, a child still, does not mean having the right to dress provocatively and show off your skin, while still being respected and feared to some extent.  Rather it is about the idea that women and men are equal partners in humanity and should behave as such.  I read this anonymous quote the other day "Never let the hand you hold, hold you down." Lately, (as in obsessively for the past week since having a nasty fight with my fiance) I've been mulling over what all this encompasses.  I am a child of the 90s, a Spice Girl lover from way back, who has always gone in for the notions of feminism and girl power.  I admire greatly the writers of feminist literature including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Wollencraft, Betty Friedan, Mary Piper, and beyond.  They found not only the strength, but the words, to discuss this oft ignored or unseen problem.  Even Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat Pray Love, with her newest work, Committed, delves into the feminist issues with modern day marriage and finds ways to express those slightest of slights that mean so much.  As a teenager, I remember being so angry at this injustice, the unfairness of all the weight of my own ovaries, and although I've learned to channel that anger better, I still don't know what to do with it or how to fix it.  

And what of our oppressors?  Our fathers, and brothers, and boyfriends and sons?  How do we correct them and stand up for ourselves without the sense of attack making them defensive?  How do we say this is my right to be however I want to be, and if that is silly , then I'll be silly, or angry, or melancholy, or however it is that I want to be, and I don't want to hear what you think about that because you don't get to have an opinion, because I need to hear myself above your voice, because if I can't be these things, if I can't live authentically, then I'm not really living, and it's all too easy to drip into those channels.  This is all just to say that I would rather be alone and authentically sad about a breakup than be with someone who wants to fit me into anything other than the skin I've grown up in, but why do I keep feeling like I have to choose?