Bumblebee Sweet Potato

This is the most important thing about me–I’m a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I’m a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don’t want to have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read.

Maxine Hong Kingston
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book

A few weeks ago, my mom called to ask if she could take the Bee away on vacation with her for five days in mid-July. Two of my brothers will be there (one of whom is very close to the Bee, the other one is her beloved uncle who she never sees), along with one sister-in-law & one cousin. Landisdad and I have been debating the concept for quite a while, and we’ve finally decided to let her go along.

It’s a hard decision to make, because the Bee is still only five, and five days is a long time to be away from home and parents when you’re five. In fact, while there have been plenty of times that one of us has been away from her, at this point, she’s only ever spent one night without a parent–the night her little brother was born. My mom lives far away, though, and this is a chance for her to spend a long time with her granddaughter, which she wouldn’t get otherwise.

So internet, I’m looking for advice. When was the first time you let your kids stay away from home, with a relative or otherwise? What did you do to ease the experience for both of you? What advice do you have for a mom who’s about to take this major parenting step?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited for everyone, and I’m excited, too, that we will be able to lavish some extra attention on the Potato (although I know he’ll miss his sister, too). But I am worried, and I guess I want some reassurance. So please, if you let your kid go away for the weekend with your mom, and he/she broke a leg or something, don’t tell me that. I don’t need extra stuff to worry about, I have a very active imagination. In fact, I don’t know how I’ll sleep the whole time she’s gone.

This is probably a kind of a weird reading recommendation for most people, but I’m enthusiastically promoting Don’t Sleep with Stevens by Timothy Minchin. Despite the somewhat provocative title, this is a history of the nearly 20-year campaign to organize the J.P. Stevens textile company run by the TWUA (which, through mergers, later became ACTWU, then UNITE! and now exists as UNITE HERE). The movie Norma Rae was loosely based on the struggle to organize just one of the Stevens plants. Minchin was lucky to have considerable access to the organizing staff and the organizing committees of various plants, and the union let him in to their records room, not just to see the victory leaflets, but to read the memos written by heartbroken field organizers who struggled alone for years.

I found a review copy of this book last weekend in the Strand, and have been riveted by it (finally finished it last night). (And BTW, thank goodness for the review copy, because $60 is too much to pay for 264 pages, especially considering all those endnotes.) The campaign to organize Stevens ended over 20 years ago, but some of the major themes that ran through that campaign are echoed today in the debate that’s going on inside of the American labor movement right now, and UNITE HERE is one of the unions that’s right up in there in that debate.

That debate is important, and it’s not getting enough substantive coverage in the media. Oh, it’s getting the labor movement more coverage in the press than we’ve had in probably fifteen years, don’t get me wrong. But the press has lost the ability to really understand the debate, and consequently, they’re doing a pretty bad job of actually explaining it to people.

The book tells the story of how one union decides to fight the shrinking of their membership by organizing the second largest company in their industry, which had been steadily moving plants to the south. (This of course was pre-NAFTA, when you just moved to the Southern US to avoid paying decent wages, not south of the border.) The union runs a massive campaign, which includes a very early corporate campaign (where a union or community organization tries to change a company’s business practices not just from within, but also by influencing the board, the company’s creditors, etc.) At one point, there is a comment in the book by an ACTWU official explaining how they are spending about 50% of their national budget to organize the unorganized (in the 70s). Let me assure you, that there are few union officials in the US today who are able to truthfully make such a statement. In fact, the bulk of the debate in labor right now is around a proposal from some unions (SEIU, UNITE HERE, the Laborers, Teamsters & UFCW) that the AFL-CIO should reward unions that dedicate at least 10% of their budgets to organizing. What this implies, of course, is that most of them don’t spend even that much. If the Textile Workers couldn’t organize a majority of all Stevens’ plants while spending half of their budget on that effort, how will anyone ever organize Wal-Mart, or McDonalds, or any national or global company, while only spending 10% or less on that work?

In addition, Minchin goes into some detail about the decisions that lead TWUA to merge several times with other unions in their industry–to get power, to get more resources, to get access to key staff (particularly Ray Rogers, who ran the fascinating Farah Pants boycott of the early 70s). The other major element of the debate in labor right now is a proposal to encourage more small unions to merge, for precisely those reasons.

I liked this book for the same reason that I liked Clark Johnson’s movie about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, entitled Boycott. Because it shows how really hard it is to organize a mass movement of ordinary folks who have to stick together while fighting an oppressive power structure. So often, the history of social justice movements are just told in a quick and reductionist way–”Rosa Parks was tired,” “hippies protested the war and it ended,” “women burned their bras and they got better jobs.” There’s a moment in Boycott where the organizers have to deal with a guy who’s pissed off because his car is getting mud in it from carrying so many people who aren’t riding the buses. That’s a moment from that movie that I will always remember, because it is so real. I know that guy. I’ve been that organizer, trying to make someone see the value in giving up something tangible (the cleanliness of his prized car) to achieve a higher common good (the right to ride–and drive–the buses).

I was bitching a few weeks ago about the negative effects of reality tv on investigative journalism, and so I feel compelled to give credit to a book that tells a real story, about real people, fighting to make a difference for their families.

This month’s Blogging for Books topic is to write about a pivotal moment in your life as a parent. I was sitting at my computer, contemplating what to write about, when I saw the news about the London bombings. And that led me to my post of the day.

On Monday, September 11, 2001, the Bee was about to turn 2, and I was pregnant with our second child. I went to my local coffee shop to get my daily (miniscule) caffeine fix (yes, I know I was pregnant & you’re not supposed to drink caffeine) on the way to work. It was there that I first saw the footage of the World Trade Center attacks. I stood there, stupidly, for a few minutes, watching the tv with everyone else in line. At that point, only one plane had hit one tower, and we didn’t yet know the agony & destruction that were soon to follow. I left the coffee shop & went into the office, where my shiny new intern was sitting, waiting for me to start his second week of work. I told him what I had seen on tv, and we both immediately started trying to get online to see what was going on. I called landisdad, who was watching the coverage with his co-workers, and we discussed it for a few minutes. After a frustrating few minutes of trying to get onto the CNN website, my intern and I finally just went to the basement of our building, where there was an ancient tv. We spent most of the morning down there, until we finally decided to leave work for the day a little bit after noon.

In the following days, landisdad and the Bee and I joined the country in mourning the deaths of our fellow citizens. We went to our local community’s candlelight vigil. We participated in an evening of quiet reflection at an area Quaker meeting. We went back to work.

And then, on September 18, I started to feel really unwell. I called my ob-gyn, and they brought me in to see the doctor. As soon as she came in, she sent me to their high-risk pregnancy unit around the corner, and I started to really worry. I called landisdad while I was on my way there, but he wasn’t able to get there in time. So alone, I had the ultrasound. Alone, I talked to the doctor who told me that our second child wasn’t viable. Alone, I left the doctor’s office, clutching a prescription for pain medication and with stern instructions on how to determine if I needed to go to the emergency room. I was crying the whole way home on the train. I’m not a big crier, and I hate to cry in public. But no one even seemed to notice that I was crying. It felt like the whole world was crying, then.

Have you ever read the poem “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden? That’s exactly how I felt, in reverse. Instead of the world going dully on, as my tragedy happened, my tragedy moved dully forward while the world was stopped.

It’s hard to tell your almost-two-year-old that she’s not going to be a big sister after all. At one point, during my miscarriage, I was in so much pain that I couldn’t walk, and I was literally crawling around in my bedroom, crying, not just with grief, but due to the pain. I begged landisdad to take the Bee out to play, because I didn’t want her to see me like that. I laid in my bed, and bled, and mourned. I knew that I wouldn’t die, and that the pain I was enduring wasn’t as bad as the pain that I had endured two years before as I labored with the Bee. But that pain ended in a baby. This pain was going to end in nothing—nothing but blood-stained sheets.

And now, every September, when the anniversary of 9/11 rolls around, I have my own private anniversary, too. I’m lucky, because the Bee’s birthday follows quickly after, and I can distract myself, thinking about her party, and what presents to get her, and all of that good stuff. I’m lucky, because I was able to have another child, almost two years after that. But I’ll be thinking tonight of those Londoners, and their survivors, and yes, those other people too. The ones who are having dull tragedies, while their city weeps.

“Once a man I was leaving told me I could go if I would leave my skin behind. I was so young I didn’t even know that I was wonderful…”

Ellen Gilchrist

One way that I know I’m a parent? Listening to a two-year-old say “no” all weekend is cute, not annoying.

The Sweet Potato learned how to say “no” this weekend. While I am aware that, in time, I will tire of having my child say no to me all the time, for now it’s still very cute, and I just want to eat him up every time he says it. The SP has taken longer than the Bee to become verbal. For a while there, I thought we were going to have an extremely difficult ‘terrible twos’ phase with him, because he would get so frustrated by his inability to make us understand what he wanted. But he’s starting to increase his vocabulary very dramatically, and he seems to be getting calmer, as opposed to crazier.

On Saturday, he felt very strongly that I had picked the wrong shirt for him, but instead of throwing himself on the floor (as he would have done even a week before), he said, “Mommy, onj shut” (aka, “Mommy, I’d like to wear my orange shirt.”). How cute is that? He’s even saying please when he asks for things, which is a testimony to the good manners instilled by Miss Gail at his daycare, as I am terrible at reminding him to say please.

Have I mentioned that I hate to cook? Well I do.

When landisdad is working late, or away, our kids eat much worse than when he’s here. He does most of the cooking in our house, and since he likes to cook, he’s mostly happy to do it (or if not, he can get his own blog and complain about it).

Lately, he’s been working a lot of evenings, and I decided that we can’t just have mac and cheese every night. My solution? Fruit salad for dinner!

My kids love any kind of fruit. And thanks to our local farmer’s market, we always have fresh fruit in the summer. The Potato eats so much fruit, we sometimes call him the Fruit Bat, instead of the Potato. (Hmm, maybe we should make that his summer nickname…) The Bee is also a fruit addict–I bought a watermelon last week, and she practically inhaled it, seeds and all.

Here are some pictures of them enjoying one of their favorite street fair snacks–mango on a stick, carved like a flower.

It’s pretty cool how quick the vendors can make these things–it would take me about six hours, and I’d probably lose a finger while carving it.

Last week, landisdad was away for a few days that we hadn’t planned on, and I once again broke out my trusty favorite. Pizza with fruit salad. I’m happy to report that, while a ridiculous amount of grease and fat was consumed by yours truly, the kids were much more excited about the fruit than the pie.