Writing Rather Than Podcasting
A while ago a call went out for feminist guest posts on feminism and relationships. It is a heady topic that could spur a thousand essays for blogs, books, and speak outs. For me it was a great way to start writing about how my own feminism came about, and a way to work through the grief process. I’ll share a little bit here, but please check out the blog… Ashley is really great.
My father was found dead the morning of June 3, 2010. It’s a complicated loss I will try to spend a lifetime attempting to define and understand. After all, we didn’t have a lot of Hallmark moments filled with perfectly expressed love or even understanding. Most of our interactions were a tense game of seesaw; one of us angry and the other one silently judging. He was the volcano I tiptoed around as a child. I remember his loud snore, his drunken stumble, and his violence that would often erupt.
After my parents’ divorce I spent my teenage years shuffling between the poverty of a single-mother household and the opulence of a well-off and uncommitted Father. As a young woman trying to make sense of this culture’s expectations, I didn’t know how to talk to a father whose ideas of gender were rigidly binary. I remember our ‘father daughter’ talk, when I was sixteen, started with a racist tirade against Jesse Jackson – only a tad more topical in 1995 – and ended with, “I would rather die than have a woman president.”
Read the rest of the post over at the Small Strokes Fell Big Oaks Blog
I have audio enough for 2 episodes, but the computer that makes this possible, Esmeralda, is in the shop. So please be patient, and… perhaps petition the deities of computers that the memory can stay in tact so I don’t lose 3 years worth of photos.
