I have been sewing up a bloody storm today and have successfully completed two beautiful projects. Once I make a few more of, well, each thing that I would like to sell, I'm going to get that Etsy storefront up and pray my bum off for success. I want so much to support myself, at least in part, with a skill that I have. I have spent the vast majority of my life feeling skill-less, and would feel just dandy if my shop was a hit.
I've had this thing on my mind all week and I want to throw it out here. I work very closely with a woman and her son (at our summer camps), and they're both strongly Christian. Her son is young, only 19, and headstrong as any of us at that age. He's a wonderful guy - a fun mixture of sensitive and "macho," if you can call him that. At any rate, we got into a discussion about menstruation. Usually I'm much better at keeping my mouth shut about the religious divide here, but I was tired, cranky, and hot, and I lost control. He truly believes that menstruation is a curse given to women for eating the forbidden fruit - or moreover, for getting that sissy pushover Adam to partake. (I feel that God wouldn't create such a wimp and then give him a strong sexy woman.. let's just set the human race up for failure.) I countered with my own logic - how can anything natural be a curse? Why wasn't Adam cursed for taking the fruit? He could have said no. It's our JOB to say no when we're tempted to do something we know isn't right. So basically women get fucked for introducing wisdom to the hearts of men, who would otherwise just march along without questioning anything. Sounds a lot like a curse on pagans and an easy way to oppress those of us with ta-tas.
But then I started thinking. Why DO we have these horrible periods? For many of us, myself included, it's a week of pain, moodiness, and general discomfort. Was this the best evolutionary path for mammals to take? I suppose if it didn't kill us, it didn't have to get tossed into the wastebasket of the universe. But why is it so awful? I'm not saying I think it's a curse, I'm just realizing I can see how easy it would be to believe that. Is it wretched to make us appreciate the life that comes forth from the process? Or have we, as some faiths suggest, actually made periods this painful and awful simply by being trained to believe that they will be; that the "curse" mentality has actually created a whole race of women who truly suffer and have been trained not to find any joy or appreciation for the fact that we (and, consequently, not men) are born with the ability to create life? I daresay that creating life is awfully God-like.
I suppose men didn't want us figuring that out and getting too uppity.
Any ideas on this front would be appreciated and pondered.
I'm starting to really loosen up I think with all the kids every week. Some things I still bump heads with my coworkers about, but for the most part I've managed to let go of the maniacal need to have every moment planned out. My main partner in crime is getting her MD in free-choice education - basically allowing kids to figure things out for themselves while you stand back and only really jump in when they want you to. No sitting down at a desk for 8 hours and expecting a tiny developing brain to really benefit from the experience. I myself have always thrived on order, the day-to-day routines even if they ebb and flow. College was a blast for me; I even enjoyed writing my thesis (64 pages). People who are free to the wind and seem to have no sense of responsibility have always made me a little uncomfortable, because I've wanted to experience that. I suppose in a small way I've been working on it through camp - not stressing out if I don't have a thousand things planned, just knowing that wherever we go, the kids can find something fantastically interesting *on their own*. That's really magical, and I can see why my coworker thrives on it. Plus, the whole MO of our camp is making the attempt to give kids what their parents and grandparents had generations ago: wandering around in backyard woods and ponds, getting dirty, getting scrapes, getting hungry, and connecting with nature - which, really, they are still so very close to, having left the womb so recently.
There is a forward that has been passed around and it goes something like this: a little boy's mother had just had a baby, and she has placed her in her crib and left the young boy to visit with her. Once the mother has left them alone, he checks to make sure he truly has privacy, then leans over the crib and whispers to his freshly born sister. He says, "Can you tell me about God? I'm beginning to forget."
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