Tag Archives: girl

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vulnerable

For Impromptu Promptings Sandbox Writing Challenge 22: vulnerable.

I took this yesterday. She ran to the tree, no parent in sight. The parent was out of my sight but knew where she was.

Norah Jones : “a little girl with nothing wrong is all alone”.

Here: Seven years.

Prayers for the children who are frightened, and not safe, and lost. Alone or not alone.

 

 

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bears

Those aren’t bears! Oh, yes… this is the New Year’s Polar Bear Plunge and these intrepid swimmers are now Polar Bears. The plunge is at noon on Marrowstone Island. A cannon is fired and people jump off the dock and into the water, cold Salish Sound water, in the low fiftys. Brrrr. The ambulance crew stands by and family and friends to witness this transformation into bears for the day.

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gratitude!

I took this in the early morning at the Northwest Maritime Center.

For the Daily Prompt: gratitude.

I am full of gratitude this morning, for friends, for love, for living near the water and the boats. My daughter was home for college this summer teaching sailing at the NW Maritime Center to children who were here visiting and to children who live here. She says that some of them had hardly been in a boat before. If one child got scared in the pair out in sailboats, they might get others scared and crying. Still, she felt that they had enough staff and good training and were very safety conscious in this cold water.

One week half the kids said that their favorite thing the whole week was when one of the instructors went overboard. Honestly, he was pretty cold after that but learned to bring extra clothing.

My daughter took the Level One Sailing Instructor Course in Seattle before she started teaching. The instructors here at the Maritime Center got to know each other and work as a team.

The small land pirate ship is on the water side of the Northwest Maritime Center and is popular all summer, during the Wooden Boat Festival and for the younger Messing Around in Boats program in the summer. Small pirates ho! Gratitude for imagination and cameras and play and the sunrise and sunset.

 

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Make a difference

In medical school I made a difference.

I was with two women and two men from class. We’d had a lecture on rape that day. One of the guys piped up, “If I were a woman and I was raped, I’d never tell anyone.”

“Man, I don’t feel that way.” I said, “I would have the legal evidence done, have the police on his ass so fast his head would spin and I would nail his hide to the wall.”

He looked at me in surprise. “Um, wow. Why?”

I took a deep breath and decided to answer. “You are assuming that you would be ashamed and that as a woman, it is somehow your fault if you were raped. I was abused by a neighbor at age 7. At age 7 I thought it was my fault. I thought I might be pregnant, because I was a bit clueless about puberty. I made it stop and tried to keep my sister away from the guy. When I went to the pediatrician the next time with my mother, I decided that since he didn’t say I was pregnant, I probably wasn’t. When I started school that year, second grade, I thought sadly that I was probably the only girl on the bus who wasn’t a virgin.

In college, I heard a radio show about rape victims, how they blame themselves, often think they did something to cause it, are often treated badly by the police or the emergency room, and feel guilty. All of the feelings that I had at age 7. I realized that I was 7, for Christ’s sake, I wasn’t an adult. It was NOT my fault.

If I walk down the street naked, I’m ok with being arrested for indecency, but rape is violence against me and no one has that right no matter WHAT is happening.

And child sexual abuse is one in four women.”

The two guys looked at the three of us. After a long pause, one of the other women shook her head no, and the other nodded yes.

The guy shook his head. “I never believed it. I didn’t think women could be okay after that.”

“Oh, we can survive and we can heal and thrive.”

We had the lecture on child sexual abuse a few months later. My fellow student talked to me later. “I thought about you and — during the lecture. I thought about it completely differently than before you talked about it. I would deal with a patient in a completely different way than I would have before. Thank you.”

 

previously posted on everything2.com in 2009

for the Daily Prompt: release

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brave women

For the Daily Prompt: brave.

I took this in 2010, at a synchronized swim meet. These are very young swimmers, yet each girl is being lifted by three others, who are lifting only by swimming. They may not touch the bottom. It takes enormous amounts of practice and teamwork.

I hope that more women speaking up and saying “Me too” and refusing to tolerate the Weinsteins and all of the others will change the pattern.

Strong girls and brave women.

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relegated

you’ve relegated me to one small box

a place in your life, Sunday morning
not every Sunday, but some Sundays
to work together on the tree house
and talk a little

well, you talk. I am supposed to listen
and give another perspective. I don’t get to
pick the topic.

You don’t answer emails: not the poems,
not the essays. I am not your Facebook friend,
we don’t have dinner like civilized friends
you would not mention my birthday
nor will you take me out on your boat.
Holidays are on ignore. You even agreed
to watch my cat and left her, after one day.

you’ve relegated me to one small box

I climb out and wander the streets, howling

I am unedited, unwashed, unpredictable, unrelegated

howling about you and your treatment of me

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fortune

For the Daily Prompt: fortune, an old poem. This is the version I learned, but there are others… I think that I learned this from a nursery rhyme book, that had been my mother’s. A cautionary tale, perhaps….

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?”

“I’m going a-milking, sir,” she said

“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”

“No one will stop you, sir,” she said

“What is your fortune, my pretty maid?”

“My face is my fortune, sir,” she said

“Then I can’t marry you, my pretty maid.”

“Nobody asked you, sir,” she said.

Other versions:


https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Where_are_you_Going_My_Pretty_Maid_(A_Baby%27s_Opera)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Songs_and_Rhymes/Nursery_Songs/LIII._WHERE_ARE_YOU_GOING_MY_PRETTY_MAID%3F
http://www.bartleby.com/360/2/138.html

I took the photograph a few days ago at sunset. We are almost at the solstice. Blessings all.

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Lammily doll

Barbie has competition this Christmas.

Nickolay Lamm took measurements of the average American 19 year old female off the CDC website, made a 3D model and then dressed her like a Barbie.

The images went viral and he used crowdfunding to fund making the dolls, which will hit the stores for 24.99. Right now my QFC grocery store has a small pile of Christmas offerings, including a Barbie dressed in pink, all gussied up for breast cancer treatment fundraising. My sister, who died of breast cancer in 2012,Β  was hugely frustrated that most of the breast cancer money goes to treatment and not prevention, so I haven’t bought one. But the Barbie costs $19.99, so 24.99 is reasonable.

And second graders like her. A video of children at a private school responding to the doll shows them saying that she looks like a family member and that she looks real. Her hair is softer than Barbie’s too, judging by the video. I wondered why a private school was used, but perhaps it’s about permission. Or something.

It is interesting that Mr. Lamm talks about average being beautiful. “She is fit, strong and wears minimal makeup. She promotes a healthy lifestyle.” We could argue lots about Big Brother pushing everyone to be average, but I like the message that the average body is fine and can have fun and can be a doll. Barbie is impossible, everyone knows that. I cut out the article from the AARP magazine about Barbie turning 50. It contains a very interesting list of when the doll got to do different jobs. Teacher, nurse, doctor, multiracial, Army Barbie, astronaut….. It made me feel better about Barbie: her body is ludicrous but she has quietly moved into different careers over the years. It made me proud of her.

There have been other attempts to create a more realistic doll than Barbie… I have one of the Get Real Girls, the camper. She has a back pack, a sleeping bag, a camp stove, a GPS, socks and hiking boots, shorts and a t-shirt. I like her but she is still not the average American female. She’s more privileged. We had the basketball one too but apparently the evil introverted thinker and extroverted feeler blew up a lot of dolls with firecrackers one Fourth of July….. only the camper has survived. She was mine. Also the Barbie twin babies, now orphans, and quite a lot of pink furniture.

The male dolls, that is, action figures, got blown up too. If Lammily is successful, will we have a male average doll? I will bet that that takes longer. I have enjoyed the action figures such as the librarian action figure and the Sigmund Freud action figure. For his graduation from nursing school, I got my Ex a male nurse action figure. He thought the doll was ridiculously great.

And me? I want a Lammily doll for Christmas. No, really. When Demi Moore appeared very pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, I went to buy one. I wondered why I wanted one, until the man at the checkout spoke up: “Women shouldn’t be seen like that.”

“Like what?” I said.

“That.”

“Pregnant?”

“Yeah. They should stay inside. They shouldn’t be seen like that.”

Oh. That’s why I wanted to buy it. Images of women pregnant and a beautiful woman pregnant are evil. I still have it, that evil magazine…..

Lammily: https://lammily.com/
Mr. Lamm: http://patch.com/new-jersey/oceancity/barbie-gets-competition-bruised-and-scarred-lammily-watch
Get Real Girl: https://www.behance.net/gallery/3590013/STARTUP-GET-REAL-GIRL-ACTION-DOLL-LINE
Get Real Girl Nini: http://www.amazon.com/Get-Real-Girl-Backpacking-Adventure/sim/B0018L29NG/2

Barbie turns 50:http://assets.aarp.org/www.aarp.org_/articles/bulletin/interactive/barbie/index.html

Librarian action figure: http://mcphee.com/shop/librarian-action-figure.html

Sigmund Freud action figure: http://mcphee.com/shop/sigmund-freud-action-figure.html

male nurse action figure: http://www.amazon.com/Nurse-Action-Figure-Stethoscope-Clipboard/dp/B0006FU9ZK

first published on everything2 this morning.

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Dream: Get real, Girl

I dream that I am a prisoner and being tortured. The torturers are indistinct and shadows. They cut slices into my flesh and put me back in my cell.

I am out of my cell again and I am seen from the back, naked from the hips up. The torturer cuts slices in my back with a cutlas. The previous slices have healed and scarred. I am done. I turn, grab the cutlas and slice off the torturers hands at mid-forearm. His hands are visible as they fall away, but the rest of him is still a shadow. I will win, I know.

I have a new vase. I take the white china vase out of the base, which has brass wheels and a support like a coach. Like Cindarella’s coach. I use the vase as a template to carve the base of a pumpkin to fit. I carve it into a coach sitting on the base. I find a plastic horse and the “Get real, Girl” in her hiking boots. I photograph it and caption it: “After she smashes the glass slippers, the coachmen and horses revert to mice and rats and run away. She steals a horse from her father, puts on her hiking gear, skips the ball and heads for the hills for good.”

Then I wake up.

As you can see, I haven’t carved the pumpkin yet, nor found the horse. But I will.