Feminist Parenting About Sexuality Part 4: What to tell my daughters by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir

In this blog series, we have discussed:

—The importance of admitting how painful this subject is

—Reminders that I am NOT saying all men are bad or maleness is bad, because men and maleness are truly inherently beautiful and divine

—The necessity of facing honestly just how scary and horrifying the epidemic of violence against females is in our world today

—The truly evil, vicious destruction pornography is causing to female bodies and male psyches in training many, many males to rape and abuse females, and grooming females to normalize and comply with rape and abuse by males

Continue reading “Feminist Parenting About Sexuality Part 4: What to tell my daughters by Trelawney Grenfell-Muir”

Turning Five by Sarah Frykenberg

My daughter turned five years old this week. I am now a five-year-old-mother of one. Big Five <3. I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that this is the age when children’s brains are developed enough to start creating more permanent memories of their childhood. What will my daughter’s earliest memories be when she is grown?

Four was a pretty chock-full year.

Fires—though those may seem like just another California season to her by now. Pandemic; staying home with Mommy, Daddy, and our new roommates, Auntie and Uncle for weeks on end.

Learning to ride a bike.

Pages upon pages of art, including a whole notebook almost exclusively dedicated to her “study” of “Hazel Vampire” (I blame Uncle and Auntie for this one).


Pandemic. More pandemic.

Continue reading “Turning Five by Sarah Frykenberg”

Healing Uphill

These are trying times for all sentient beings. We are all carrying the intensity and stress in our bodies and spirits. I feel it. You feel it. In fact, we are feeling it together—sharing an experience even though interpreting and understanding it in our own unique ways. 

As a person of faith, I believe we are on a collective healing journey. As a feminist, I believe that journey continues to involve extended uphill challenges because of intersecting systems of oppression.  And that is how I understand this particular moment in time—a healing journey in a difficult uphill section on the path. As a human collective we are healing uphill. 

Healing uphill can feel like too much to bear sometimes. Healing uphill is the experience of having more and more challenges heaped on your back when you are already tired and struggling to keep going. Healing uphill is like trying to take care of yourself when you lose your job in a global pandemic and one of your kids gets sick and your landlord tells you that you are late on your rent and then your spouse comes home angry and blames you for all the stress and, well… you get the picture. Healing uphill is when you can’t seem to catch a break and things seem to just keep getting worse.  

Continue reading “Healing Uphill”

To Bless One Another, by Molly Remer

May you allow yourself to
taste your longings
and to bravely honor them.
May you make wise sacrifices.
May you trust in abundance.
May you savor the many flavors
of this sweet life before your eyes,
beneath your feet,
below your skin,
within your soul,
around your heart.

I had imagined making beautiful loaves of herbed and flowered breads, but instead we hold scraps of plain white biscuits in our hands. Homemade, yes, but not as seasonally resplendent as I envisioned. It is Lammas, the festival of First Fruits, a celebration of sacrifice, gratitude, abundance, and renewal. I remind my four children of these themes as we stand in our small family circle on our back deck at sunset. There has been rain and the air is cool and beautiful, unseasonably delightful for August. The mulberry trees are broad leaved and heavy, leaning over the rails of the deck, where the last of the blackberries also hang, black and red beneath rusted red, gold, and green leaves, spotted with last month’s heat, brambles twined through the railings in a way that delights me—the wild’s insistence on creeping steadily closer and closer to enfold our home.

I have made four extra little biscuits, round and a bit lumpy, an offering for each of the four directions. I extend my hand into the center of our circle, cupping one small round biscuit at a time. My children and my husband extend their hands over and under mine and we offer our gratitude into each morsel in turn, one for each direction and each element. For North, we speak of stability and strength, the health of our bodies, the safety and security of our foundation, the earth on which we live. For East, we speak of air, our mental states, how we will be mindful of how we speak and think and focus our energy and time. For the South, we speak of fire, of tending the flames of our inspiration, nourishing our passions, and watching for burnout. In the West, we speak of water, of being emotionally stable and loving. In the last seventeen years of parenting, if there is one thing I have learned is that rituals with children need to always involve action. The kids are eager to toss the biscuits into the air, in the directions we are honoring.  In past years we have tossed pinches of cornmeal, at other times of the year grains of corn or flower seeds or dried herbs or petals, at the Winter Solstice we toss pieces of our annual golden “sun bread.” This bread, washed with egg and laden with butter is one we make together on solstice morning, shaping the smooth dough into a large sun face with a spiraled corona of rays. After it has baked, we offer scraps to the sun at noon, tossing them high into the air as we shout “Thank you! Thank you!” again and again into the crisp winter air. Last year, my garnet bracelet, a symbol of the path I walk with the goddess Persephone, flies off as I toss my sun bread and disappears into the waving stalks of wild grasses. We are never able to find it and the unexpected symbolism of Persephone becoming joined anew with the amber waves of Demeter’s grains delights me.

On the summer solstice this year, I made a cake in the shape of a honeycomb, decorating the hexagons with wild blackberries and rose petals. And, now on Lammas, there are these small white biscuits in our hands. My oldest son is almost seventeen. He is nearly as tall as his father, six feet. He has the biscuit for the south, which from where we stand on the deck is our house. He winds up his arm and lets the biscuit fly up, up and over the roof.

We offer our own small personal pieces of biscuit next, pinched as the first bite from each of our servings at dinner, as representative of a sacrifice we will make this season. And then, we cup our open hands close to our hearts and one by one we speak of what we are grateful for and what abundance we are welcoming, what we are making space to harvest in our open hands.

We join hands and sing, our six year old son requesting “We Are a Circle,” and following his lead, we sway from side to side as we sing, eventually all kicking our legs back and forth into the center of the circle and laughing. We say our closing prayer next, as we do each time we celebrate together: may goddess bless and keep us, may wisdom dwell within us, may we create peace* and then I extend my arms and gather them to me, for a large family hug. There is a sense of connection and renewal around us as we laugh and smile and I tell them thank you for participating.

This ritual was largely spontaneous, all I knew when I stepped outside was that we wanted to offer our gratitude symbolized by our four tiny loaves of biscuit-bread and that we wanted to acknowledge this next turn on the wheel of the year.

Several years ago, when I was still teaching at a local college, one of my students objected to the fact that material on working with LGBTQ clients was part of my class outline. She went through my personal Facebook page and those of my family members, where she noticed photos of the wedding ceremony I performed for my brother and his wife. A message arrived in my email: “by whose authority do you think you have the right to perform marriages?” she inquired. By my own authority, I thought, though in my reply I also cited that I am a legally ordained priestess and as such am recognized by the state of Missouri as capable of solemnizing legal marriages. Not much later, she dropped my class explaining in writing that to continue taking it would be to turn her back on Jesus Christ.

At mother blessing ceremonies, we often sing a song called “Call Down a Blessing.”** After one ceremony, I was asked, “but WHOSE doing the blessing?” and my answer was simple: We are. We are blessing one another.

These are radical acts. These are feminist acts. This is feminism and religion. To express gratitude for the earth, to name the elements as holy, to honor the cycles of the seasons and our lives, to design our own ceremonies, to hold our own circles, to be our own authorities, to bless one another and the spaces between us.

I have two teenage sons now, one seventeen and one fourteen. We have lifted our arms to the rising moon, tossed scraps of bread to the noontide solstice sun, and dabbed sweet spring water on one another’s faces in blessing since they were born. This is what they know.

And, even though they are now teenage boys, each night without fail they come to me and to their dad in turn to be kissed on the forehead in our nightly ritual, a benediction of love. Good night, sleep good, I love you, we each say. My seventeen year old usually drops his return kiss on the top of my head in my hair, speaking the familiar words back to me, good night, sleep good, I love you. Sometimes as I’m getting ready for bed, brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I look up to see him standing in the doorway, “mom,” he says, “did I forget to kiss you?” and I proffer my forehead, just in case we’ve forgotten. The boys each kiss their dad goodnight too and he them—on the forehead, a kiss, and the words, spoken and returned, good night, sleep good, I love you. Sometimes I think this is most potently feminist act of all, these two boys rapidly becoming men beneath our roof, going to bed each night with a kiss and the affirmation that they are loved.

Molly Remer’s newest book of poems, Sunlight on Cedar, was published in March. Molly has been gathering the women to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, mini goddesses, and more at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of WomanrunesEarthprayerthe Goddess DevotionalShe Lives Her Poems, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Patreon, Brigid’s Grove, Feminism and Religion, and Sage Woman Magazine.

*Thanks, Carol Christ! We’ve used this family blessing to close our ceremonies for about ten years.

**Originally by Cathy Barton and Dave Para.

Moments of Beauty by Sara Frykenberg

Last week a friend of mine started a post asking people to share something that they’ve enjoyed or appreciated since shelter-at-home orders began across the country and globe. This friend was in no way trying to minimize the very difficult situations that so many of us find ourselves facing during this pandemic. Rather, the list she elicited and generated helped to create, at least for me, a moment of hope or peace—a moment that I suspect many of us need right now.

Inspired by my friend (who has quite a talent for pointing out the potential for joy or happiness), I would like to add to her list here by sharing a couple of my “moments of beauty” in the hopes I can share this hope or peace. Continue reading “Moments of Beauty by Sara Frykenberg”

Staying Un-Frozen by Sara Frykenberg

It is February 14th, Valentines Day. So, today I want to explore my daughter’s love affair with Frozen; a story that I did not like, but that I learned to love by watching it through her eyes. A story which through her eyes, has taught me a lot about how to stay and be un-frozen.

I did not understand the phenomenon that was Disney’s Frozen in 2013. I did not like film’s premier song Let it Go, which you could hear e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. The film wasn’t even about Elsa; the queen with magical powers who sings this song while reveling in the new-found freedom of her isolation. It’s about Elsa’s sister, Anna, and her quest to find Elsa. So really, I thought, the song was misleading. I also didn’t like the ‘loveable Olaf;’ and while switching up the “true love’s kiss” narrative was a positive change for Disney (Anna saves herself and Elsa with her love, instead of that of a man), I just didn’t get the widespread appeal. Continue reading “Staying Un-Frozen by Sara Frykenberg”

The Last Time, by Molly Remer

I lie in bed with him, cementing the details in my memory. The way the morning air is heavy and green. The sound of last night’s raindrops continuing to drip from the overfull gutters on the roof. The insistent stab of a single-note bird song in the air. His head nestles in the crook of my arm the way it has done every morning for three years. Blond hair against my nose, breathing in the slightly baby smell of him. “This is the last time,” I whisper softly. “We are all done after this. This is the last time we will have nonnies.”

This is not the first last time for me, but it is the last, last time.  The first baby was born 14 years ago and gathered to my breast with all the tenderness and uncertainty and instinctiveness of a first, first. “Do you want nursies?” I whisper to that new little boy, and we begin the next steps in our bond, nursing for nearly three years, until one day, six weeks away from the birth of the next baby boy, I decide that we truly have to be done. I am a breastfeeding counselor for other nursing mothers and I feel like I should want to tandem nurse my two boys. I fondly envision their hands joining across my body, the easy love and camaraderie between them blossoming through this shared time with their mother. But, I feel an intense irritation with nursing while pregnant, nearly a sense of revulsion and the almost irresistible urge to shove away my sweet little boy as I prepare to greet the life of another. I talk to my midwife about my feelings and she explains that with her own two daughters, the agitated feeling at nursing the older one did not go away with the birth of the second, but instead became dramatically worse. After hearing this, I feel panicky and I decide we do, in fact, have to wean. He is a very verbal and precocious toddler and I am easily able to explain to him that it is time to be finished nursing. One night though, he lies in bed with me crying and begging to nurse. He says he really needs to. I tell him, “remember, we’re all done, but if you really, really need me, if you really, really still need to have nursies, you can.” He doesn’t nurse, but instead falls asleep, reassured that while our nursing relationship might be over, I’m still here.

Continue reading “The Last Time, by Molly Remer”

Parenting Lessons from the Past Week by Ivy Helman

me-hugging-treeLast week, Lech Lecha was the parshah, Isaiah 40:27-41, the haftarah.  It was also the anniversary of Kristallnacht and the fall of the Berlin Wall.  And, if you hadn’t heard, the United States elected Donald Trump.  Interestingly all four of these occurred not just on the same week, but also all on the same day.  What lessons might we pull from this coincidence?

It is already clear the reasons why electing Donald Trump was a tragedy.  Many blogs and news articles exist explaining what is wrong with him; he is sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, anti-immigration and makes fun of handicapped people.  This privileged white, heterosexual, rich capitalist man denies also global warming.  So, not only will women and minorities of all different kinds potentially and most likely suffer under his presidency, his environmental policies may have devastating long-term, perhaps permanent, effects on all beings.

Continue reading “Parenting Lessons from the Past Week by Ivy Helman”

Opting In, Opting Out: Navigating Political Divisions “for the Sake of the World” by Katey Zeh

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Over a year ago I made the decision not to watch–not to consume the vitriol of this political disaster we in the U.S. have created for ourselves. It was a conscious choice in favor of my own self-preservation which I stand by. I had no idea at the time how important that decision would be for my own mental and spiritual health in the coming months.

Since then I’ve done a lot of opting out: not watching the Presidential debates (not in full anyway), not reading much political analysis (the article titles alone cause me rage), not discussing the election before bed. Late one night my husband mentioned some egregious thing that Donald Trump had said earlier that week, and I got so riled up over it that afterward I couldn’t sleep for hours. After that we had to establish a rule that no one could bring up politics after sitting down for dinner.

My way of coping this election cycle has been similar to how another person might react to a violent image on TV: I’ve kept my eyes shut, peeking every few moments to see if the worst has passed. This avoidance behavior has begun to feel uncomfortable, even unethical. As a person of faith, is it not my responsibility to call out abuses of power for what they are? If I do not offer my voice to the cacophony of political discourse, am I complicit in the hatred being spewed? I’ve thought often of Audre Lorde’s famous line, “Your silence will not protect you.” Continue reading “Opting In, Opting Out: Navigating Political Divisions “for the Sake of the World” by Katey Zeh”

Parenting with the ‘Same Words’ by Sara Frykenberg

Teaching and talking with my daughter, I find myself revisiting the subtle and not so subtle kyriarchial language in my own upbringing in ways that I do not when speaking to other adults with my very intentional and well-trained adult language. Parenting sometimes feels like a trip back in time where I remember and more readily feel my joy of singing particular songs or reading particular stories, simultaneously feeling my inner feminist and adult self cringe at the messages in too many of these stories.

Sara FrykenbergLast month I shared a lesson a student of mine taught me about subjugated knowledge and the colonized mind. This month, I would like to continue in a similar grain and consider how we share the practice of oppression through language, and particularly, as we teach language to our children. Working to counter kyriarchy in my parenting, I often find myself asking, what I am really saying, reading, or singing to my daughter?

I walk with my daughter almost every morning, and as new parents are often encouraged to do, I try to talk to her continuously about a variety of topics. While I do talk to Hazel about meaningful things, like my hopes for her, stories about her family, the joys of reading, etc.; most days my monologues are inspired by whatever we happen to walk by at the moment.

One morning we talked about the differences between fences, gates and walls, their purposes, and the different materials from which they are constructed—I was really reaching on this day. We repeatedly talk about the flora and fauna. I have discovered that there is what feels like an inordinate number of avocado trees in the say, six square blocks surrounding our apartment. How do the people who live here eat all of these avocados? Do they eat them? Do they let them rot on the tree? This seems like a terrible waste of avocados, though there is one home with a bin in the front yard with a sign that says “free avocados,” in which the homeowners leave the fruit for neighbors and passers by like Hazel and myself.

This may seem silly and often, the discussions are silly, but taking to heart what I have learned from liberative feminists, post colonial scholars, and semiotics, I also critically observe how and what I say. One day, trying to make it fun to point out different plants and bushes, I pretended to be an announcer for kind of a nature show. Somewhere in-between introducing the “the deadly oleander,” and “a lovely variety of cacti,” it occurred to me that I was actually engaging in a kind of trope for a travel narrative. It wasn’t that I was saying anything particularly oppressive or colonial; rather, I realized my tone, my ‘how,’ came from the stories of my own youth—it was a kind of cross between stories related to  “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” and Crocodile Dundee. Continue reading “Parenting with the ‘Same Words’ by Sara Frykenberg”

No Parenting Anxieties (Yet?) About Passing Down the Faith by Grace Yia-Hei Kao

Grace Yia-Hei KaoI’ve recently read Jim Belcher’s In Search of Deep Faith: A Pilgrimage into the Beauty, Goodness, and Heart of Christianity (2013). Even though I had several issues with the book, I couldn’t put it down once I started reading and finished it in the space of one day.

What’s the book about?

Continue reading “No Parenting Anxieties (Yet?) About Passing Down the Faith by Grace Yia-Hei Kao”

A Family Conceived, Lost, and Resurrected by Gina Messina-Dysert

As I had written about in a previous post, my husband and I had a very long struggle with infertility.  After nine years, multiple failed rounds of infertility treatments, and much heartache, we decided to look at alternative options to grow our family.  Once we had made the decision to adopt, I felt new hope.  There was a light at the end of the tunnel and I knew a child would be coming home to us before long.  I had a dream that Mary, the mother of Jesus, had come to me and told me that I would be a mother.  She promised that a child was waiting that needed our love and would arrive soon.  I began praying to a shrine of Mary at a local parish near my home; she became my source of strength and solace.

Not long after we had been approved for the adoption waiting list, we took a family trip to Italy to visit my father’s hometown and meet our relatives.  It was quite an adventure and during our excursion I stopped in every church we passed to say a prayer to Mary.  Half way through the trip we received a call that a child had been matched with us.  To say we were overjoyed would be a complete understatement.  We tried to catch an earlier flight home but were unable.  A once in a lifetime trip to Italy was suddenly of no interest to us as we sat around our hotel room looking at baby items, reading parenting info, and preparing for the homecoming of our first child.   Continue reading “A Family Conceived, Lost, and Resurrected by Gina Messina-Dysert”

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