On a personal note

What does it mean when I stalk my friends on facebook and feel depressed and left out instead of happy and nostalgic. There are some people, who I have not seen in a year, who I can read their blogs or whatever and miss them, but feel love and excitement for what they are doing in their thrilling lives. But I just read some stuff on the good-old facebook and mostly feel like crying.

I replaced some friends on my speed dial over the weekend. College friends who I still care about, but never talk to anymore. It would have been better if I'd been replacing them with new and exciting friends, but I wasn't. I don't have a lot of hope for acquiring those new and exciting friends either.

Don't get me wrong, there are some people at work who I really like and its great being closer to my family and high school friends. I've seen my mom and dad a lot lately, which has been wonderful. But I felt really connected to some of my college friends, especially last year. With a place like Iowa State, I really only had to hang out with people I liked. So the ones I stayed connected with are the ones that I have a lot in common with. Like philosophies and dreams, not just place of employment or a hobby or two.

But I'm not really friends with those people anymore. That's the truth of the matter. Glorified acquaintances with a good past, I guess. But it sucks and it hurts. I'm not usually lonely here, but I guess tonight might be a mourning night for friendships that just didn't last.

How to be inclusive

In an effort to make an already uncomfortable topic more comfortable to any LGBT students who may be in the classes I teach, I try to use gender and orientation neutral language as much as I can. Sex ed is always an awkward class, but if you are of a minority and the facilitator is speaking as though you don’t exist, it would be even worse. I always use the term “partner” and try to mention “life partner” every time I mention a husband or wife.

Today I was doing our high school presentation “Sex & It’s Consequences” for 2 classes of freshman health students. I realized that many of the little “activities” we do are strongly reinforcing heterosexism. During a discussion about pregnancy, I pick out 1 girl who, for the purposes of discussion, just found out she’s pregnant, and one boy who is her ‘boyfriend’. I ask the other girls how they feel about her and the other boys if they’d date her, demonstrating how isolated and alone teen moms become. I think it is an important illustration, but it points out the fact that the girls would be her friend and the boys her partner.

In another example, I ask the boys what kind of peer pressure they get to have sex, from friends and girls. Then I ask the girls the same question. This reinforces stereotype of boys as horn dogs, but I try to break it down and discuss it. “Boys, you have my respect. Our society expects you to be be pursuing sex constantly while we expect girls to say no for a while. If you chose not to have sex, its really hard!” BUT during this discussion there is a lot of talk about what pressure you get from the opposite sex….and the opposite sex is just implied to be the gender pursuing romance.

I did a little research on inclusive language and the only things I really found were discussing using "partner" instead of girlfriend/boyfriend. But I know that my assumptions that everyone is heterosexual go much deeper. Now I have to decide my priorities. Do I sacrifice these valuable parts of my presentation, because they aren't inclusive? Do I try to alter them, making it painfully obvious that I'm including LGBT students? Do I leave it alone? This one is sitting on the back burner for a while, I think.

I have good Self-Esteem

As a part of our 6th grade program, we spend a whole day talking about self-esteem. Today I realized that I have really good self-esteem right now. I'm happy. This may seem like an odd thing to say, but I think it bears announcing. I haven't always had good self-esteem, in fact I think that I may have had bad to mediocre self-esteem for most of my life.

But lately, I feel like things are really going well. I adore my job. My husband and I are doing really well, we are having a lot of fun and getting along beautifully. My relationship with both of my parents is in an excellent place, which has never before been true. Most importantly, I'm accomplishing a lot of goals. Very small minor goals, but its almost like my ideal self and my real self are getting much closer together. (It is generally understood that a person's self-image is made up of 3 parts: the ideal self-who i wish i was, the public self-who i think other people see me as, the real self-who i really see myself as). In the past, I was such a perfectionist that I set my ideal self up as an impossibility and perceived my real self as much worse than it truly was. But now, I'm appreciating the small victories I make, the small steps I take to becoming the person I wish I was. I am also realizing that I will never be the perfect activist, social worker, wife, simple living, carbon neutral super woman of my dreams. I realize that all the things I'm working towards are works-in-progress and always will be. That part of being a good christian/environmentalist/life-partner is the journey of it, that I will always be looking for one more way to get better at it, to do more.

People think that being happy means a constant state of feeling good. This is why none of us believe we are happy. I truly feel that I am happy and content with my life right now. I still have days where I want to strangle my husband and quit my job(violently). But when I stop and think about my life, I am filled with a warm joy through my body and I realize that my life is very very good.

LAM

I am done teaching LAM for the year! I am also exhausted and sick. I started this blog because so many things were happening that I thought were funny or important and wanted a place to record them. I hope to be able to look back after I've been doing this for 10 years and am jaded and tired, then remember what it was like to be fresh faced and naive. But I've been so incredibly busy these last few weeks, at work and at home. So I haven't recorded anything. And I don't even feel motivated to go back and record anything. Sorry self. I will say that a student from 2 weeks ago saw me at Subway and shouted "Hi Wendy!!" and waved, so I felt pretty great that she was comfortable enough to talk to me in public. I also had a girl from a class call me and ask what to do if her boyfriend pressured her for sex without a condom, as her last boyfriend did. I answered her questions, thanked her for calling, then my heart broke a little bit.

Overall, it was a wonderful 2 weeks, it just wiped me out.

Lettuce

I had 29 seedlings that I transplanted into individual containers on Sunday. I'd left them outside after transplanting and after a few days most of them looked terribly wilted and dead. I brought them inside Wednesday night, but had given up on them, believing that I'd lose most of them.

Today I went to water and in the container that hold a definitely dead seedling are 2 new sprouts! I know this isn't surprising as there were probably more seeds that just hadn't started yet, but the imagery is beautiful and made me so happy this morning. I looked around and actually have 4 new sprouts! Hooray, I will have lettuce this summer!!

A really good day

I am so proud! I PLANTED today! I spent all day outside, planting seeds of carrots, onions, tomatos, scallions, basil, oregano and onions. I also transplanted 30 lettuce seedlings into individual containers. It was such a good day, I felt really content and proud that I finally just got this done. I also got clothes on my new clothesline and just had an all around great day.

My seeds!

Lettuce Seedlings!

Darling Doggie

When I arrived home yesterday, I discovered that Dorothy, my german shepard, had vomited water chestnuts, carrot slices and q-tips all over my bedspread. Today the content was less diverse, but equally disgusting. I am tired of washing my sheets, but am pleased to say that the homemade laundry soap is meeting even this gross-tacular challenge.

Also, today was the assembling and first use of our push reel lawn mower. My darling husband assembled it for me (as well as installing a clothesline! Oh joyous day!). We had decided that mowing would be my job since I wanted the push reel mower, but, as with many new toys, he was eager to try it out and ended up mowing most of the yard(sweet!). My verdict: Pushing this machine is almost identical to using the push style gas mower of my childhood. Hills are a little tricky, but otherwise the difficulty is no different. The benefits: only using my energy, so quiet that Chris and I could talk as I mowed, no stinky fumes, better for the grass. I love it! Even the doubtful hubby said "What a good idea you had!"

6th graders: Hilarious and poignant

This week and last week I have been presenting "Learning About Me," a 5 day program for 6th graders. We discuss Self-Esteem, Decision-Making, Puberty, Sexuality, STIs, Contraceptives and Consequences of Sexual Behavior.

I have a million wonderful anecdotes from the last week, but at the minute I am too busy typing up the anonymous questions about sex from this week's groups. The students are encouraged to write any questions they may have about sex, puberty, relationships, growing up, etc. I am always shocked at what some of them know(suffice it to say that I need a glossary of porn terms to answer at least 1 question every time) and many of them crack me up ("is it good to beat ur meat.") This week I got a few personal questions, in the vein of "my boyfriend is wanting to have sex without a condom, what do i do" and "my 14 yr old cousin is having sex, what does she do if she gets pregnant?"

Spending time with these wonderful young people, I see how very young they really are, regardless of how worldly and jaded they may also be. It breaks my heart that any of them are struggling with these questions and I pray that I can help a few avoid getting into bad situations.

Weekend Update

I feel like I worked really hard this weekend and didn't get anything done. Chris had a good friend in town and they spent a lot of time in our basement making music(at one point we had a full drum set, 2 guitars, a bass and a keyboard down there). Assorted people were coming in and out of the house to participate in that, plus some of my relatives came up to see the house and visit. So I spent the weekend cleaning, buying ink cartridges, moving drums, printing lyrics, fetching drinks and somewhere in there trying to think about my own weekend projects. The laundry for the week never got started, let alone done, but it was a good weekend.

Chris became quite the handyman in the midst of all this. I wanted to build an enclosure for the extra leaves and other brown materials, but I was having some trouble. Chris came out and did some very fancy work with a rope,hammer and nails. He also repaired our screen door and dealt with the mildew we discovered on our window sill,with nothing but moral support from me. Yay Husband!

I guess there isn't much else interesting to report except that the composting is well underway. We cleaned out the fridge and sadly had A LOT of kitchen scraps to add. The trashcan was also full, although it was entertaining to watch Dorothy sit patiently, certain that I was making a feast for her, only to panic when I took it outside. Poor dog.

Breastfeeding

I don't just do Pregnancy Prevention, 20 % of my job is a home visiting program called "Pregnancy & Parenting Support Services." Most of my clients are teen moms who are pregnant for the first time and need a support person to give them information, but I've worked with women with older children also. One of my clients had a baby on Monday. She had been adamant at our pre-natal meetings that she planned to breastfeed. We even attended a La Leche League(LLL) Meeting so that she could ask questions and meet the leaders before her son was born. I had hoped that this would help her feel more comfortable calling them for help if she had trouble after the birth.

I talked with her for the first time today by phone. We talked about some other things, then I asked how breastfeeding is going. She said not well, she's already using a bottle and it hurts when he latches on unless she uses a breast shield. I asked if she'd called anyone from WIC or LLL and she said she'd had TWO lactation consultants visit while she was in the hospital and one was rude and the other did not provide any help. She said she was going to talk to her doula about it as she is also a lactation consultant.

I am frustrated about 2 things. The first is that she was visited by lactation consultants in the hospital and they did not help her. Nursing should NOT hurt if it is being done right, how could these women not have helped her latch on properly? or scheduled a follow up if they saw that it wasn't working or SOMETHING! Their job is to make sure moms are successful at breastfeeding! This girl had a doula for goodness sake, if she can't get support, who can?

My other frustration is that I see this all the time. Girls are determined to breastfeed and when I talk to them after the birth they've already given up. What is happening? Are they being discouraged in the hospital? Are they failing to understand that it is difficult and just takes time for baby and mom to learn what they're doing? Something is not adding up. I am not much help, having never breastfed anyone, so when they call me all I can do is tell them to call a professional. But they don't. Not that I blame them, they've just had a baby for goodness sake, I know making phone calls is not at the top of the priority list. But why isn't the hospital taking better care of them?

A coworker that I complained to today had some great suggestions about teaming up with LLL to try to get postnatal check-ins scheduled before the birth instead of waiting for problems and expecting the frustrated moms to call. But I'm still frustrated.

This is a continuous problem and with each new client I try to be more firm in explaining how hard it is, I try to hook them up with the resources as early as possible, and the outcomes continue to be the same.

Composting!

For the last month or so I've been trying to find used wooden pallets to build a compost bin. Yesterday I finally tracked some down at the local hardware store and on the way home Chris said "Why don't you just use the cement trashcan enclosure?" GENIUS!! So now I have a compost bin and an enclosure for extra leaves.

So today, April Fool's Day, begins my adventures in composting. I like specific instructions when I undertake projects, and most of what I've heard and read has been in the vein of " Just do it, you can't mess it up!" These people are wildly underestimating my abilities to mess things up. But we'll see. At least I'll get the Ziploc full of old salad/vegetable peelings out of my freezer.