this sunday i had the kind of day i struggle hard to defend. and it was worth it.

saturday was spent zooming to san fernando, first through traffic and then rain. first, i had manically put together a food bag for zi, cooking pasta and veges, packing the very necessary crix supplies, bananas, grapes etc. i say manically because these days i do everything manically and because, shockingly, a friend had agreed on the spur of the moment to accompany us in case i needed another driver so i could feed or breastfeed zi on the way. i couldn’t make the trip alone, but needed to go. i tell you, mothers need their social networks. jah bless sistren.

anyway, after all that effort, zi ate none of my food and lived off crix, grapes and banana virtually from 11 am to 5 pm. this stressed me out, no, left me feeling guilty to no end. i have a hard time with the food business. i was such a terrible eater as a kid, i have no idea how my mother stayed sane (or if), but she’s worse at the guilt stuff than me so i’m sure it made her feel terrible too.

zi has been eating badly for almost three weeks now. not so badly that she’s not perfectly fine. just not well or at all between breakfast and dinner. and the straw was the doctor reminding me that she can look fine and still be mineral deficient if all she is eating is eggs, bread and oats. hence the ital pasta and vegetables cooked with love. when she has bad meals, i feel like somehow its my fault. it’s the food or the timing. it’s cause i work so i’m not around to establish a regular schedule, looked after as she is between my mother, my helper, myself and stone on different days. it’s cause i work so i’m not around. it’s cause i’m tired and low on patience. or because we’ve been on the road at odd hours or by someone who is giving us food later than i expected or in forms zi doesn’t like. or something. it’s generalized, obviously misplaced guilt, solely based on my sense of full responsibility for her, a little human being who can’t articulate what’s going on, whose need to eat, sleep, learn and laugh is in my hands, who i chose to bring into the world.

i guess i’m still getting used to the ups and downs of motherhood, and i’ve discovered that ubiquitious, irrational, seemingly-unending thing that is so hard to understand until you experience it: mother’s guilt. that thing mothers may still carry even when they have no responsibility for your life anymore. i get it. i’m not sure i like it. i don’t think i want it. but, i’ve met it.

so saturday i felt bad that i dragged zi to San do, throwing off who knows what factors that might have made for that good lunch which has been rare in the last weeks. thankfully she slept the entire way back so there were no crazy-hungry-and-simultaneously-sleepy highway scenes but i still racked my brain to assess how i could have done things differently and still got things done. in the end, i knew there was nothing else i could do. but i still felt bad at the increased sum of mineral deficiency from the additional missed lunch.

but sunday i stayed home. i manically did all my household stuff while she slept on her daddy’s chest. i napped. i spent the whole day with her. we ate on time. it wasn’t rushed. it wasn’t on the road. it wasn’t at someone else’s place. it wasn’t before we had to get somewhere on time. it wasn’t before i left for or returned from work. and, for who knows what reason (well zi may know, but she’s not at sentences yet), it worked. i covered the pasta, veges, mushrooms, everything with a little cheese, put on youtube videos, sang and she ate. and i felt good.

the eating/ guilt thing is obviously a stand in for the tension i feel trying to make maximum time for both my work and my baby, and knowing she’s losing out on the non-scheduled or flexibly-scheduled interaction that can be attentive, responsive, timely and successful. so, on weekends, as much as i can, i try not to book anything so i’m not seeing her only in between that, not to have to go somewhere so her whole day gets organized around that ETA, not to be rushed or pre-occupied or meeting anyone else’s expectation about what i should be doing. as i give full days to work, i try to give zi her due days, her rightful hours of undivided labour and love in the domestic familiarity and stability of home. someone with a different job could do it differently. i’m not sure i have another choice i’d feel good about.

sunday reaffirmed that mothering – and for me feminist – commitment, its joys and sense of fulfillment, its ability to give you the time, space and chance to get things right. at home by ourselves that day, in the rain-fresh glow of afternoon, we walked around the yard, with her in a sling on my back, touching flowers, smelling bay leaf, making shadows and discovering birds overhead. it was magic. then, we meandered inside and sat down together to eat.

it’s so small, so silly, but i felt like the best mom in the world to her knowing that, at that moment, she knew i was just hers, she was laughing and loving the mushrooms and beans i cooked for her myself, and after a great meal, there’d be snuggling seemingly without end if only for that one day.

What a grueling year! And it’s only day 16. With tenure ahead, I’ve been working like a maltreated donkey, spending 10-6 in the office, going home to see about Ziya, and then starting to work again, after she’s gone to bed, from 9-11 or midnight. And of course, Zi’s still up close to four times in the night, Goddess alone knows why.

Each time I think I know what exhaustion is, I learn more about just how penetratingly deep it can go…and you still have to get up in the morning and go to work…and you still have to be nice to your baby, despite the fact that she doesn’t have a pause button, when you come home. And, yes, in all this, I’m still wondering about having the second one…insane huh?

I tried to find a little nursery for Ziya to begin to attend one or two days a week, to ease up her grandmother whose looking a little peaked these days, and to give me an extra half day at the office, strictly for writing. And here I encountered the vast, undiscovered world of nurseries and pre-schools.

First there was the one I visited on what seemed to be a particularly chaotic day. The very nice Auntie had about eight children, where she normally had four to six. Zi and I went to check out the joint and I admit to wanting to run when the arms, legs, noise, crying, playing, pulling and TV singing-along simultaneously hit me. We have a lot of quiet time in our house. May manna from heaven rain down on those people who spend their days with babies and children. They have more patience than Mandela and they are very, very special people. I, however, am not one of them.

Zi on the other hand, seemed perfectly fine and cruised her way over to a toy which she played with by herself while keeping one hand protectively on me while I chatted with Auntie. At one point, Auntie’s adult daughter, who is autistic, came over and yelled at Ziya, who by the way did not jump as much as I did. The daughter thought Ziya was a girl, which she is, and didn’t react well to her as a new person in her space. We then had to convince the daughter that Ziya was a boy (??) and, despite that, she actually yelled at her twice in a manner that was clearly threatening and conveyed her feelings of being threatened. This was then followed by a stern talking to by her mom, tears from the daughter and further chaos when I tried to say, ‘it’s okay, everything is fine’ to the daughter and thoughtlessly touched her arm all friendly-like, which of course autistic folks often don’t like, provoking another round of intense, up close and rather alarming (at least to me) engagement between mom and daughter.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t like Auntie. I did, but I still ran out of that place clutching my baby who, while I was there, was offered two small marshmellows by a little girl who had not washed her hands before she started to munch on the bowl of them given to her by her parents. Now you know, I’m not giving Zi marshmellows, and the wash hands thing just made me paranoid about flu, late nights, lost work time, extra doctor’s bills and overall regret that I just didn’t keep her home and take up telemarketing instead of trying to up my publications production. In the end, Auntie wouldn’t take her until she was 17 months, so I reached a dead-end there anyway.

Nursery no. 2 made me realize what goes on to make those parents you hear about want to join the right social clubs or tennis groups, so that their children could get into the schools they want them to. You need a recommendation letter from a parent with a child at the school to even get an appointment for an interview to have your child be considered. This, folks, is not a members club, it’s a day nursery. So, I said, well, I don’t know any parents with children at your school, is there any other way to be considered for an interview? Apparently, not. My mom suggested waiting outside the gate and stalking a parent, again all friendly-like, until I got a recommendation letter. Ever seen that Law and Order episode where a parent eliminates the kids who are before her child on the school’s waiting list? I can see how these places can make you crazy if you are on the edge already. Me? The secretary in my office organized a letter of recommendation from a parent whom I had never met but who had seen me on TV enough to be able to speak to “my background and character” as a parent. Oh yes, indeed. Anyway, that school was all booked and wouldn’t even let me in the door to look around.

Today, I visited two more, but neither would take her before 2 ½. I almost asked one woman today if they regularly steam clean the whole parcel of land, but I stopped myself. Then, I saw the mats for sleepy time and wondered if the same side is always put on the ground or if no one notices which side the baby puts her head on. Oh, the swimming pool with twelve at a time! As South Park said about the ph balance, is it all ‘p’ and no ‘h’? Anyway, I got numbers for two more who take babies from a few months on….so the search continues….though the more I look the more I’m secretly glad we’ve got her safe at home….regardless of what happens with my publications.

This year I am starting my second year as a working mother. It’s been both surreal and real. On the one hand, miraculous and awesome and heart-bursting. On the other, exhausting, challenging and daunting.

I took a moment to ask my sistren what their ‘resolutions’ were for this year. Maybe not resolutions, but thoughts or goals or plans or visions to mark the present, to improve their lives and stretch their reach, to articulate dreams that remain vital, and value each moment of the future. I know what I need to do, but I know such amazing women that there is always so much to learn from them, whether they are starting new degree programmes or looking for the right commune to live in or planning babies, being the shepherd to those they know need tending or just remembering to make time for themselves in the midst of their responsibilities.

One of these women said that her goal was to practice ‘fasting of the heart’, learning to live with less and be happy. Another’s was to walk with an open heart, learning an ability to look beyond what she knows and expects, to see a potential in that beyond. Both were beautiful and inpiring ideals.

My goal this year is of course to somehow get more writing done and more publications out, to be willing to be less good at other things so that I find more time. As I was saying to a friend, my new motto at work is f**k students, admin, emails, whatever…I. Am. Writing. Blessedly, she suggested instead saying ‘I’ll get back to you on that’, which is what she’s going to be saying at her academic post on the other side of the world. This is why you need friends, to remind you about tact when the going gets tough.

Aside from the writing though, what is clearly ahead of me is balance. I’ve known that balance is at the centre of my path since my ‘anew’ ritual with Elspeth and Hebe in January 2009. It replaced focus and discipline, and signalled that it was time for a new cycle to open. I’m aiming for balance in mothering Ziya, spending time with Stone, publishing, making time for my own needs and creativity, seeing my friends enough for them to know I care, and doing what little I can to continue to support feminist struggle. I am aiming to accept that maybe I can’t give 95% as I would have before, but that 70% may get me by and ensure both sustainability and sanity.

Somehow, no matter how I arrange it, things slip. The small things that slip might be appointments I completely forget about or reference letters I can only get out 5 days later than I hoped or the emails I just don’t get to. The big things are all the million things I’d be doing with my time, learning a language or doing yoga or hiking, but which have been squeezed out by that family-work nexus. Mostly, I lose time with friends, but I also lose space for real creativity and, increasingly, I’m being forced to cut back on activism. All I can do about that is sigh and tell myself that life is about phases and stages, and that this too will pass.

So this year is about words and love, balance and acceptance, single-minded focus and the instinct to know when to let go. This is the real part, always defined by the challenge to continue to see the magic in it all.

Just yesterday I finally submitted a publication that was four years overdue. As with most articles sent to ‘top’ journals in your field, you hope for a revise and resubmit (and not outright rejection), and you hope the revisions are changes you can make without deeply doubting your writing, your work and your worth.

Why I am four years overdue is beyond me. My thesis passed with no corrections and I was offered a chance to go to Max Planck, by my examiner Steven Vertovec, to continue the work. But, by that time, I was already working at Gender Studies and I don’t know if I thought I could get the writing done while here or if I figured I had lots of time for post docs or if I thought my only option would be to give up my beloved job for a fellowship or if I was just out of the hyper-competitive academic loop and naively figured I’d be fine. At some level too, I had this commitment to the region, feminist movement and Institute’s teaching that I figured was where my heart was and where my feet should be.

Hindsight is typically associated with clarity, but looking back on the decisions I made, I actually feel a lot of confusion about whether they were right or wrong. Sometimes I think that I wasted a lot of time, answering emails and being on top of the job mostly, but also participating in meetings or workshops or feminist events or doing various media things from New Voices to my ‘If I was PM’ blogs or just giving too much time to teaching. Really, I should have made decisions about locking off the admin and activism, and I should have just been badmind about getting the writing done, even if I risked my bosses or my activist sistren and bredren thinking I wasn’t invested in institution or movement-building. I take a lot of personal responsibility for being clueless about the perish part of ‘publish or perish’ and for thinking that, because I gave so much to the Institute, the university would never fire me.

My past IGDS bosses would say that they warned me and I didn’t listen. But, I think that the messages were not so simple. I think now about the new me that seems to say no to attending virtually everything (mostly because of the baby) and there is no way that would have been okay then. In the early years I didn’t have the senority, autonomy or sense to set my own boundaries on what my department demanded – and I was still paying my dues and proving my commitment.

I actually never developed that sense, it’s just that one day I got a letter saying I was up for tenure and then sense suddenly set in like a big heavy meteor hitting the earth. And, I’m still putting the pieces together after the impact. On the one hand, I’m a lot wiser now about my job. The truth is that, regardless of how unpopular it makes you, you can’t sacrifice for your place of employment. In the end, they will want to know why you didn’t focus on your own work and, in our neo-liberal context, it will all come down to the individual decisions you made well or badly, regardless of the circumstances.

Looking at our regular meeting agendas on all the work the Institute was (and was supposed to be) doing, Jane Parpart, a development feminist who did a sojourn with us, would often remark that our own publishing was completely absent, and overtly absent from being factored into our work lives. She was right and keeping note of the kind of mixed messages I’ve gotten have helped me to remember not to fully blame myself. It’s not that I haven’t received excellent mentorship, it’s just that anywhere trying to achieve a huge amount will want you to be a team player, even if the writing that actually counts is a solitary activity.

On the other hand, my friend Nicola says that if I hadn’t been as much part of the women’s movement as I was or inventing games or building feminist consciousness amongst male and female students on the campus, I’d have looked back now and wished I hadn’t lost those fulfilling, energy and passion-filled years to publishing, after already ‘losing’ so much mobilising time to graduate school, even if I ended up with the right CV. So, I’m fighting to not devalue that time and work as well, just because it doesn’t meet the demands of academia. Yet, if academia is where I’m am, I can’t pretend there aren’t rules.

Sometimes, I feel its hard to win. Yesterday, someone asked if I wanted to help with the upcoming commonsense convois being hosted by the Lloyd Best Institute. I felt selfish saying I have to put any spare time to publishing, but I said no. Last week, domestic workers asked if I’d help at a Saturday workshop. Weekends I spend with the baby so I said no. I feel bad because the women who are organising, writing and leading in some way or another all did it with careers and children, and I feel lame that I don’t have time for more than work and Ziya. If these women could build institutions, write, run NGOs, raise children, engage in advocacy and more….shouldn’t I be able to also?

I find myself thinking about the complexities of hindsight, assessing decisions, figuring out how to value my actions, and realistically appreciating what the lessons are. I have to move in the right direction from wherever it is I now am, even if its two steps back from where I am supposed to be. So, yesterday, even as I finally sent off that article and sat down mulling about why it took me so long, I also have to try to just not look back and instead focus on what’s ahead.

Women in academia can easily fall off track once they become mothers – and the majority do – in fact they do worse that both single folks and married men. This week, I am checking out daycares, to find another day that I can spend at work instead of with Ziya, despite telling myself I’d make the sacrifice to give her three days and not just the weekend two. From January, she’s losing another day with me. I’m anguished about it, but really have no choice. That family-career dilemma is very very real. I only hope I don’t look back on decisions such as this with the kind of questioning and unease that hindsight now brings me. Having a career is hard and accepting you did your best is also not easy.

In these difficult days in T and T, I’ve been mulling over the morose, morbid perspectives, from columnists, on Facebook, on the radio, that seem to be everywhere. I’ve been wondering about my own emotional place in relation to them. Like everyone else, I’m disappointed in the failures of the Partnership government to do some basic things like pass the Procurement Bill (something I had scripted an If I was PM video blog on before I had the baby). I agree that the State of Emergency has left the population with no choice but to be more cynical, critical and suspicious of the government than before.

The crime situation severely affected my family years before this, leaving wounds that have not and may never heal. I’ve never felt safe in this country since, especially not in my home. And, like everyone else, I face declining real income, almost unmanageable costs of living, the virtual impossibility of owning a house and other things that make life feel vulnerable, precarious, unsafe and anxious. In the midst of that toxic cocktail, and attending to the public comment on our nation, I’ve been wondering why I don’t feel the caustic bitterness that I hear so much around me.

It’s not from not being affected or from not caring. Maybe it’s my personality, which is at heart optimistic and somewhat annoyingly cherry. Without a doubt, I’ve benefited from my parents climb from poverty. I’m clearly cushioned by having a job, a good one and one I work immensely hard and passionately at, one I’m lucky enough to want to work hard and passionately at. But I think the greatest cushion in my life, the one that somehow keeps me intellectually and politically engaged but also emotionally centred, is my family. I’m lucky here too, that we are all healthy, happy, housed and living in working harmony, and that neither state nor criminals have violated that…perhaps, as yet.

I lie in bed at night so unbelievably thankful for Stone and for Ziya, overwhelmed with appreciation for the blessing they both are, overjoyed by just our being together and aware of every single moment in all its preciousness that I find myself unable to connect to the kind of dark anger and despairing bleakness I hear in others’ voices . It’s not that I don’t understand them, and I don’t deny their validity. I just don’t feel it, without explanation or justification.

Maybe it’s just this moment. Maybe it’s just sheer exhaustion from being up night and day for the last year, working full time all the while. This first year of this new life called motherhood. I plan so many political blogs I don’t have the time to do. I used to be a veteran writer of letters to the Editor. I used to do a lot more TV political commentary. But, I’ve found myself retreating to this little, nuclear world that I hardly have time, energy or emotion for, writing here instead of to newspapers and spending weekends close to Ziya instead of undertaking the civic involvement I used to. It’s strange for me, just as strange as not being able to connect to the tone and language I hear and read.

Peggy Antrobus, grandmother of Caribbean feminism and one of my mentors, has reminded me on more than one occasion that women have life stages that need to be heard and honoured. I’m holding onto that. For me, the absolute perfection of my life, which is not premised on things being as I want or having all I want, is so fleeting and fragile that I find myself stopping in my tracks to acknowledge and absorb it, to let it sit in my hand like a resting butterfly. I’ve achieved something in my own life that I hardly knew before, stable love, quiet connection, functional parenting, and I walk around on a cloud like someone in love, suffused with sheer happiness. It’s unreal and seems wrong and apolitical and against all kinds of people’s expectations of what I should feel in these times of blood and hunger.

The truth is that I’m genuinely happy and that’s something I hardly hear anyone say, living as I do in a place where people are often either quarreling or feteing their cares away. I find myself interested in neither end of that pendulum. I’m happy to work hard as I do. I’m happy to spend my little time left over with Stone and Ziya, doing not much at all. I’m happy to spend quality moments with my few, good friends. The rest of the maddening crowd I’ve pushed to my periphery, perhaps only delaying its inevitable impact on this oasis. But, its from this oasis that I am encountering the world, seemingly at odds with its gnashing rage and depressed disillusion.

For this kind of transcendence, I’m grateful. This moment may not last and I cherish it’s cupping hand around me. There is more activism ahead, more political organising, more engagement with the world. But, here and now, I find myself feeling protective about my own sentiments, unwilling to be taken over by the mire and maya (my friend elspeth’s words) that seem to surround, self-conscious about the need to hold tight to an innner buoyancy I feel, and which feels true and real, despite or perhaps because of the way that realities are being constructed and commented upon around me.

Today, a good friend of mine lamented over Facebook about the seemingly loveless reactions she sometimes gets from her teenage daughter. I feel such angst, the mom’s that is.

I’m terrified when I hear these stories and, I suppose, like most not-so-easy daughters, I’m desperate to do whatever it takes to make the relationship I have with Ziya different from the one I have with my own mother. It’s not that our relationship is bad. It’s actually reached a point of mutual agreement and it works as long as I maintain the boundaries that are important to me. But, I know what it took to get here and I’d like Ziya to be able to chart a different path. Like most mothers, I’d like to both appreciate my mother and do things differently as a mother myself, in an attempt to change patterns or establish greater honesty or recognise in myself the things that Ziya will both recognise and wish were different in me.

There are things I try to do with Ziya even now that I hope will begin to create a healthy foundation between us. I don’t know if they will make a difference, but they are little options I’ve chosen to attempt. I try to let her feel and express whatever she wants when I’m with her and I spend time with her without trying to overly determine our interaction. I think it’s oppressive when parents need a lot of validation from their children. I don’t try to make her perform for people. I hate when parents make their kids prove what they can say or do or spell. And I don’t invest a lot of control in her emotional reactions to me. That just feels like it leads to dramas born from hyper-sensitivity. Sometimes, I’m leaving for work and manically waving goodbye, and she’s basically concerned with other things like the oats stuck to her fingers. I let it go. I’m going to love her more than she loves me, I think that’s the case for most mothers, and letting her do her thing without taking it personally is going to be key to our sanity. I might as well practice from now.

But its early days yet and I know this all sounds theoretical – even to me. How can you love someone with all your being and not be hurt when they don’t reciprocally and unequivocally recognise you as the most wonderful person in the world too? For all its power, motherhood is rife with vulnerability and, in fact, there are few things that mothers want more than love, affirmation and acceptance from their children. That’s why for children, especially teenagers and sometimes especially daughters, withholding that reciprocity is their most inalienable weapon.

Friends and even Stone tell me to be prepared. There will be things I do that Ziya considers intolerable, and perhaps unforgiveable, even if I do my best. There may just be that period between 12 and 37 when she avoids some of my calls, shuts me out of aspects of her life, quarrels about my idiosyncracies, gets impatient about my flaws, rants about my reactions, rolls her eyes at my concerns, sighs about my stories, shrugs off my affections, and defines whole parts of herself in incomprehensible opposition to me. Even if I do my best, it won’t be perfect and I can’t control who and how she decides to be. Children revere their parents and hold them, mothers more than fathers I think, to virtually impossible standards. It’s easy for them to be disappointed, to see hypocracies, to resent failures, to think worry is a lack of trust in their judgement, and to find the demands of love too intense and overwhelming for them to balance with their own individuation and establishment of self to the world.

I’m as good a daughter as I can be. I’m extremely responsible and conscientous, but I’m also protective of my emotional self and I’m sure my mother wishes from me more openness and intimacy than I give. That’s the trade off and it’s taken me until now to figure out the balance I can sustain. Because I know the status of where we are in all its nuance, I know exactly what it will mean for Ziya to decide she is making the same choices in relation to me. I don’t want her to give what I give, but refuse what I do. I don’t want to be my mother, wondering but unwilling to ask and possibly to hear why she won’t give more. I know exactly how I’d like our relationship to be different even while I recognise that we will have our differences. I can only hope that, somehow, in the midst of career, money, family, mortgage and other craziness, I manage – with her willing cooperation – to get us there.

But, first, clearly I’m going to have to survive teenagehood. Not mine, but hers. I’m going to have to survive both her emotional sophistication and her naive callousness. I’m going to have to remember that she loves me no matter what, it’s just that there are stages and phases and lessons for us all to learn. Sometimes love sends you tumbling, caught off guard, like a Maracas wave. Sometimes, it gives you everything you need to feel full. Sometimes it teaches patience and reminds us that the heart can ache. Sometimes it makes karma seem too real to be just mystical philosophy. Sometimes, it toughens up the spirit and forces the mind to formulate an amended way. Sometimes, it leaves us unfulfilled, but that too is part of the story of loving.

My friend is someone I consider to be an amazing, inspiring, creative, caring, all too human mom. She’s raised two powerful daughters and I only hope I can emulate what she’s achieved. I understand how she’s feeling even though I’m light years away from those moments myself. I’ve been that teenage daughter. I see my own strong-willed offspring and I know it’s coming. But I also know that love heals, saving us from turning to guilt and obligation as a basis for gaining children’s understanding. Mother-daughter relationships can be intense, complex and rocky. Amidst the frustrating moments, I’m learning from my sistren to remember that love’s foremost quality is that it almost eternally endures.

Meanwhile, teenagehood eventually, sometimes thankfully for all, ultimately ends!

Out of the right window of the plane, the moon was full and radiant, and seemed to float at thirty three thousand feet, level with me. I read it as a good omen. I was on my way to my first American Anthropological Association meeting and felt a little overwhelmed by so many multiple panels, by my unfinished presentation and by the feeling of being out of the political anthropology loop. Also, this was only the second time that I left my baby for days at a time.

On the connection to Montreal, I realised I turned into one of those people in airports and other public places who smile giddily at other people’s babies as they project happy thoughts of their own missing ones onto these unsuspecting little persons. Last time I left her to go to London, I had to go through the trauma of being a breastfeeding mother away from her baby, unable to easily store her milk and in despair at the thought of dumping bags of such precious nourishment. So many people don’t understand it, they think if you can just make more why does it matter how much you throw away….I can’t explain it. I can just say what I felt and know its validity.

Here I am again. I don’t breastfeed as much so travel is less traumatic, but this time I’m hoping my milk doesn’t go dry after five days away. I don’t love breastfeeding as much as Ziya, but I’m not a neutral participant. My neighbor tells me she cried when she stopped producing milk. I get it.

Zi turned one on Tuesday, making me reflect on how much my life has changed and how much I have changed. We had a little cake and ice cream, just to say that moments of celebration are worth taking time for. The little party was low maintenance, low expectations, low effort – the kind of thing that stone and I would do. We are about the little gestures and the mundane moments that are special just because they are and because we are. It’s like getting married in the backyard. You don’t need much ado, you just need to be together, happy and willing to make each moment sacred.

I am now on my way back to Trinidad, about to fly in rain, my heart and hopes on getting home safe. Being away is such a mixed experience. Conferences are part of my job, but I feel a little guilty leaving Stone to manage for a week at a time without me, probably a few times a year. A whole network of people has to be organized for this travel to be possible. At conferences I can feel my brain working again though and remember parts of myself I hardly have energy for, the parts that get excited about theory, writing, reading, scholarship, ideas.

This time, I connected in a real way with other academic moms that I know and that was really good too. Moms who have to travel for weeks or months at a time to do fieldwork, moms who move to take up post docs, moms whose families go with them to new posts in new places. Moms who have partners to negotiate life with and children they have to raise and publications they have to write. Moms like me! All of them amazing and inspiring and encouraging in their own ways. Moms who remind me that our careers matter. Moms who got their books out somehow, pressing me to plan how I am going to get my book out, somehow, too.

I feel good. Rejuvenated intellectually. Supported academically. More focused. Stone seemed to survive. Ziya somehow slept eight hours straight last night. I was away just long enough to want to get back to them. I think that I might have stopped seriously producing milk. After a few days of expressing, suddenly there stopped being much. I’m a little sad about it, I loved those evening and morning breastfeeds, but life is about change and I know beautiful Ziya was given the best start I could give. Motherhood is clearly about just focusing on what happened, what worked and what was good, recognizing that what you can’t change, you just have to accept, reflect on and learn from.

I am excited to get back to my work again, just to prove to myself that I can meet my writing goals. Nothing inspires me like the need to focus. Forget the nation’s motto, discipline is my personal creed. So is gratefulness. So is love. I am on my way, not just back to Trinidad, but to revived ambitions and appreciation. I had a chance to connect to me. Funny how sometimes you have to go far just to find yourself. Funny how it’s in the midst of so many things to follow through on, that you can remember what makes you, you.

Today Ziya is one year old. I’m chuffed. She’s lively and happy, glowing and gorgeous. She makes jokes and can’t be easily fooled. She’s got her trademark skeptical look down cold, and she likes to do things for herself rather than having you show her or do it for her. She’s confident, communicative, generally unafraid and she’s clear on what she likes and doesn’t. She knows who is hers and loves to snuggle with us, clearly missing us even in her sleep. She’s growing in body and personality, and is suddenly all arms and legs, no longer just a baby.

My little amazing warrior of light. I smile all the time it seems and she smiles back with her whole genuine self. Sometimes, i wonder at the fact that I’ve never smiled so much in my life. She makes love spring fresh and full each day. Again and again, my heart runneth over.

I’ve become a person I never knew I could be, the kind of mother I only planned on becoming, without knowing if that was realistic or right or not. I’ve also become more confident, more clear and focused, more powerful, more grateful for life. That feeling of being a mother is both armor and vulnerability, spectacular and everyday. I had Zi basically because I wanted to know what it was like to be pregnant, to make a baby and to breastfeed, because I have a woman’s body and potentiality. Now that I know, I’m aware I had no idea at all what was in this place, beyond where I could guess. Motherhood is everything I expected and nothing I could imagine. I know I never made a better decision in my life.

For the last few days, thinking about my virtually three days of labour and hours of birth, I’ve felt like it’s all surreal, like when you win an award or finish an exam or you are about to take off in a plane or when your dream comes true. I can’t believe it’s happening, and it’s hard to be calm and excited, live in this moment and live in them all, all at the same time.

Somehow, I’ve managed to combine work and marriage and motherhood. I’ve not done it perfectly, and whether its missing spending the majority of the week with Ziya or not getting out my publications at work or being too tired for enough quality time with Stone, I’ve had to learn as I often do that I can’t do it all well instantly and simultaneously. I keenly feel these ghost wings, but I’m coming to recognise, if only by necessity and for my sanity and self-acceptance, that I’m born to put one foot in front the next, not to fly. I still wish I had four arms, but when I let things go its because I’m adjusting to the reality of not being that goddess, recognising as women and mothers have to, that we are both divine and only human.

I couldn’t have survived this year without huge amounts of investment, understanding, advice and help from my mother, my research assistant, my boss, my husband, my friends near and far. So many people have helped to carry my cares and burdens, enabling me to continue to stride purposefully ahead. It takes a village to empower a mother to raise her child.

What have I learned? In a sense, no words, just love. To be a better person and to try harder, to reflect and repair, to appreciate and be amazed, to accept and to not abandon ambition, to do my best knowing that it might only be enough to keep the basics together and to continue to evaluate what the basics really are. I’ve learned that few things really are worth stress once my husband is home and my child is healthy and I work for the feminist revolution, the rest will have to unfold as I can shape it and as it should. Above all, I need to be healthy in mind, spirit and body, and even if it’s a work in progress, it’s important work. I need to know honesty, love, aspiration and acceptance to be able to be mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend, worker, feminist, woman in all their inter-related moments and forms.

Hopefully, one day, I’ll write and perform poetry again, paint T-shirts again, edit video blogs again and all the other creative parts of life I don’t have time or energy for, I’ll exercise and fete and engage in more activism, but life is about stages and phases, and I’m rocking this one as much as I can.

She’s been her own person here on earth just one year. I’ve been that person who became a mother just one year ago. I’m full of joy for us both. I’m here and I’m loving it, learning from it and living it in full, as much as I can. I’m taking each day as it comes, as much as I can. I’m trying to balance the ups and downs, as much as I can. I’m letting Zi teach me, as much as she can. We’ve got so far to go, together. I’m open to what each of us brings, as much as we can.

Happy first birthday beautiful baby Zi.
May you continue to blossom and become the person you are meant to be.
I could not possibly love you more than I do
I wish all the goodness of the world for you
Mama.

Cunt! Yesterday my class and I collectively shouted out this word, twice. Right after we shouted the word ‘vagina!’, twice.

No, this wasn’t some flaky exercise in faux feminist power, or scandalousness or boundary-pushing for its own sake. And, yes, this is the kind of thing that my tax dollars and our oil dollars might be spent on as long as students continue to register for my class.

It was an exercise in consciousness-raising, in revealing power in language, in thinking aloud about how our silences will not protect us. Truthfully, as far as I can remember, this is the first time I got students to do this, wondering the whole time why I hadn’t done this before.

The majority of students agreed to do this by a show of hands and of course who didn’t want to say vagina or cunt didn’t have to. One young woman who said the first but not the second, said that she saw it graffitied somewhere once, asked what it meant and was told by her mom never to use that word – and she hadn’t since. Another one, who joined in the second time, said to me after class that she had never said the word ‘cunt’ in her life…and here she was saying it twice in one day, now realising that if anyone ever called her that, she would not be intimidated as she might have been, knowing the word’s original possibilities.

And, in fact, cunt historically meant the very opposite of its current patriarchal associations with insult, debasement, stupidity, failure and obscenity. What is now the worst thing to call someone (man or woman, for different reasons) was once a word denoting and synonymed with the sacred, spiritual, powerful, knowledgeable, gutsy, cunning, wise, divine (meaning God-like), life-giving, heartfelt and sustaining. Those meanings were destroyed and replaced by the ones we take to be normal, natural and timeless today. The very word that is unmentionable because it is so shameful and dirty, especially for women, is the very word that describes our sex. Surely, this can’t be right.

As any good university educator, I backed up my lecture with a great article called, ‘Cuntspeak: Words from the Heart of Darkness’ which traces the etymology of the word cunt, showing the violence that left it bruised and pariah-like at the base of its ancient pedestal. This was a violence implicated with the silences around sexual violence, with the shame invested in women’s bodies, with the hold patriarchy and pornography have on women’s erotic power despite Caribbean hype about phat pum pum, ‘waan punane bad’ and punkenani power.

I had a few minutes before the feminist advocacy organisation, ASPIRE, was to address my class about reproductive health and rights, and it seemed like we could, if only for a few seconds, collectively articulate a naming, emotion and power that would be impossible outside of my allotted two hours in the vast chamber of the LRC. Besides all that, it was the kind of thing that I teach Women’s Studies to be able to do, just cus I can, just cus it’s fun.

Fun aside and teaching aside, it felt good for me too. I’ve always loved women in the sense of having a basic admiration, respect and solidarity with them. Women somehow end up being my greatest heroes even if they are my younger sisters or my over-worked bosses or my mother or my friends who all seem extra-ordinary in some way. I’ve understood the injustice of the shaming and silencing, and the sacredness that they replaced. I don’t believe in the human-like deity called God, but if I did, it’s obvious to me that God would have breasts, womb and a vagina, which create and sustain life, and certainly make females the closest to God’s image.

Yep, any God worth her salt has a cunt through which to birth life. Anything less is, well, Man.

The experience of giving birth brings all this home. The feeling of life emerging through your womb, that process of starting something that takes you to the point where you think you can’t go on any longer, the fact of us all as Woman-born leaves me without question that female bodies, wombs and vaginas are to be given the freedom from degredation which they are due.

As long as ‘cunt’ is both a curse and part of my body, it can be used against me. And nothing that is mine shall be cursed. Nothing that has created and birthed my child shall be used against me. Nothing that makes me both woman and mother shall be used to disempower. Nothing that was once sacred shall be used to silence and shame.

And nothing can stop me, woman, mother, feminist, Women’s Studies lecturer from encouraging my students to shout ‘cunt’ in class when I know nothing else may shake their biases and their socialisation and their fears. I’ve got the degrees to teach. I’ve given birth in the drive-way. I’m mother to a little girl growing up in a patriarchal world. I’m a feminist who understands I’ve got the erotic as power to draw on. And, I’ve got a class of 100 students willing to shout.

What can I say?
All together now.

Cunt!

Imperfectly. My friend Nicola asked another friend, mother of five children, how she did it all. How did she manage children, husband, self, sanity? Imperfectly, she answered, as relayed by Nicola. I’ve been coming to terms with that word since. Thinking about its meanings for me.

One the one hand, there’s the baby, spending quality time with her and enjoying it, making sure she eats enough and feels loved and cared for. On the other hand, there is my job and that thing i don’t do enough of, publishing.

of my days, the hours during the week are spent on office life, teaching, emails and who knows what else. the hours during the weekend are all about Zi, folding clothes, tidying and who knows what else. there are no more days nor hours left for writing. I’m a slow writer and i need hours to get my brain spinning and to set a thought in serious motion. I’ve tried to do it in the nights after i put Zi to bed, but there’s a few wake ups between 11pm and 6.30am, and anyway who can write in an exhausted two hours left at the end of the day? Somewhere, some woman can of course do it, and is of course doing it, and i’m here thinking about that standard i wish i could meet.

i’m behind and short on time, over-extended and not where i want to be. i keep thinking back to my ghost wings, dreaming of myself in sci-fi with four arms, each writing the four essays due by year end. my mummy academic friends say that i should accept i’m off the fast track and on the slow train. nicola says, just accept. i’m all about the details and what i make should reflect my capacity. but maybe now i can only do my best imperfectly?

the real wake up came in a conversation with a super-amazing colleague who somehow manages to head a programme, raise two children, organise a weekly newspaper column, supervise students and engage in outreach. she said her daughter, now at adolescence, is entering one of the most demanding periods of her schooling and that its really really really hard.

really? somewhere in mind, i thought that after a few years, it would get easier. i had a weird, linear progression of getting my act together mapped out in my head. it never occurred to me that there could be steps back just as there are ones forward. i never imagined that someone so amazing would still be feeling as i do now.

here is what she wrote to me: “I am so behind with deadlines and getting resentful that people just do not recognise how impossibly hard it is to make everything on time. The thing I am realising is the priority is the family, that’s the constant, and never to compromise on that. I don’t always get it right but I have let go a lot more. second comes my public intellectual work, specially the column and also the community gigs that we organise here. then academia. i am so tired of the grind gabby, and i think and feel that women studies gets caught up in it in ways it does not imaginatively try to renegotiate. u and i are similar this way but the difference may be u do not have tenure as yet. try to put blinkers on, focus on one or two pieces u want to write, do not bite off more than u can chew, don’t develop new courses right now, and try to breathe. the work will be better for it. it is disheartening to hear – though not altogether unsurprising – just how hard it is to do this, in a world that actually does not give a damn about much else beyond the publications…keep a strong head”.

knowing that it’s not only me was heartening, this woman said to me the words i wanted to say to her and her solidarity lifted me from panic to setting my mind on a way through to a resolution. but knowing that her words could still be mine ten years from now was terrifying. what a wake up.

i’ve re-read her words several times, glad beyond belief for women, friends and colleagues who share with me the imperfectness of their reality and who give me perfect advice about how to accept my own. i’m trying to do all these things: accept, focus, prioritize, breathe, let go, keep strong. i’m also trying to make balance, being present and being grateful my foundation because i know that today life is perfect and tomorrow that perfection might just be gone.

so, i’m reaching deep for words and maturity and spirit. and i’m heartened and terrified at the same time because somehow i’m doing it all…imperfectly.