This is actually not really news.  The UK Daily Telegraph released the details in an article in August, 2009.  A local tribal leader saw the kidnappers crossing the border from the Iran side, and noted cell phone records of the call that alerted the kidnappers to the hikers presence. The article also notes that, at that moment, the tension between the US and the Iranian government was high because of US protests of the 2009 election in Iran.

So, why didn’t this information come out in the US before? Iran covered up this information and their official story was to allege that the hikers crossed the border and were going to be tried as spies.  Anyone that knows Sarah, Josh or Shane, is aware that this is complete B.S., but maybe this is the only way for Iran to save face keep them in Evin.  I am guessing here, but my sense is that there has been a tension between using official means to try and release the hikers and using the media to build public support.

I am still speculating when I suggest that nobody really knows WHY Iran is holding the hikers and this is responsible for creating this tension.  Is it because of the protests that the Daily Telegraph mentions? If so, why do they continue to hold them, wouldn’t this only strain the relations further? Is The Iranian government waiting for an opportunity for an exchange? (This came up in the media throughout the time that the hikers have been held. Most recently, it was  reported in February  that Ahmadinejad proposed a prisoner exchange and then, earlier this month, that Iranian officals said it is not in their practice to “exchange people”.) Is Ahmadinejad just looking for a way out that he can save face?

So because nobody knows why they are actually being held, since they are clearly not spies and clearly did not cross the border, it is completely unclear what the right tactics are to pursue their release.  As has been stated by the Free the Hikers campaign many times, this is a historically safe area.  It has only been within the last month that tensions between Iran and Kurdish rebels have begun heating up.  The border crossings of Iranian troops were distinct enough to be newsworthy. Outside magazine notes that Europeans and Americans regularly travel in this area and that at peak times, this trail does have significant use.  The article also notes that Iranian-US relations are at an all-time low due to “Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denials and anti-Israel diatribes, the surging power of Iran’s anti-Western Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the regime’s suppression of the country’s pro-democracy movement”.

It seems that the few hateful American’s that post comments saying that they deserve their fate for being so stupid may be the only ones that have ever thought that their jailing makes any kind of sense.  And now, with the public release of this border information, not only can I send a big FU to those self-righteous people, but it is the final piece of a puzzle that points to the fact that is was not a stupid mistake that the hikers are paying for, but is instead an international hostage situation, and one that has been downplayed for too long.

But here’s the rub, and how the situation is turned upside-down version of  a simpler hostage situation.  The hikers “are the opposite of ugly Americans” (as Outside puts it). They can’t be held up as models of imperialism. Instead, they are warm and generous people wanting to bridge gaps between cultures and advocate freedom, information and education for everyone.  They are pro-Palestinian.  While it would certainly be a stretch (and an incorrect one at that) to say that they are supporters of Ahmadinejad’s, they are not even close to his worst enemies and  are even farther from being enemies of the Iranian people.

Because of these personal qualities and the consequential journalism, teaching and activism that they have done here in the Bay Area and internationally, I have hope that international allies in Europe and the Middle East will step up and ultimately mount enough public pressure to lead to their release.

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I did come home frothing after seeing an offending slogan and posted on facebook. Some of the ideas from this post are from my funny peeps there, and are duly attributed with their first initial.

Bumper Stickers that I hate:

Electoral

I am an anarchist. I do not believe that voting actually works. Publicizing that you vote for someone that I fundamentally do not trust fails to impress me.  It is kind of rubbing my nose in how bad the system is.  Additionally, as N- so eloquently said, “Girl I am with you… Mainly that people don’t take the political ones off after the election…Go Dukakis! :)”   You know those crusty looking worn away ones that are either half chipped off or so faded you can barely read them…

My Dog is Smarter than Your Honor Student

Why dis people that are all proud of their kids? Okay, you like your dog, a lot.  It isn’t really funny and it certainly isn’t true.  I see that the parent of the honor student is making themselves vulnerable for some sort of a class attack. They are almost inevitably middle class white people driving a Subaru Outback less than 2 years old.  You, on the other hand, with your beat up red pickup expose yourself as a young, unattached guy (well, you are attached to your co-pilot dog) from Connecticut who will probably be driving your kid around in an Outback in less than 10 years.

Do No Harm

Just explain this. It is on a car, which is basically a harm machine.  You can just add any sort of environmental message to this part of my list.

The Mystery Spot

I went to the Mystery Spot, when I was 8. Isn’t that when we all went? My favorite part was the painting that had eyes that followed you while I walked in the room. Second favorite was water that ran up hill. I stopped being charmed by this little gimmick shack when I was 9.  But I must not be all cool and retro.

A fish of any kind

If you have a desire to compete with Christianity, more power to you…but it isn’t funny anymore.

Bumper Stickers that get a pass:

Cheney-Voldemort ‘08

Even though I usually don’t like Electoral stickers, this one is funny AND true.

My Other Car is a…

You’ve got a schtick and you are excited about it, there is nothing there to offend anyone.  That is cool, dude. I would love nothing more than to see you hanging 10 down Shattuck Avenue someday.

Hang up and Drive

We’re all thinking it, anyways.

Found cache, Lost car

A little self-deprecation is always appreciated.  Considering this has happened to me more than once when I have wandered away from my car, with my nose in  my GPS…and the fact that this seems pretty hilarious, this one gives me a chuckle.

As long as you are riding my ass, at least you can pull my hair

Okay, so not only does this get a pass, but it may go down as the best bumper sticker I’ve ever heard of. Thanks S-…hahahaha.  If kids weren’t required to sit in the backseat, it sure would be a good intro to the birds and the bees.

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Unfortunately, any signs that give hope of their possible release are rare, indeed.  The hope that the supporters have is vitally necessary and mostly self-generated.  Because they are being held in a culture so foreign to our own and because the families and supporters of Sarah, Shane and Josh are not government people, it is hard to know what to make of anything that happens here or there or in between.   Is our government giving the families the whole story about negotiations?  Will the mom’s emotional and spiritual appeals for reunification help?  What do Iranian holidays mean to them and could that help their release?  How does their release relate to the political situation of Ahmadinejad both domestically and internationally?

I think that the possible answers to these questions have all changed over time and continue to change, sometimes daily.  The campaign has had to take every opportunity to appeal on a heartfelt and personal level for the hikers release.  And this is the kind of people that they are, the families and Sarah, Josh and Shane….heartfelt and personal.

I bring this up because Iran has alleged that the hikes have some sort of ties with the US intelligence.  This is absolutely ludicrous and I want to tell you a bit more about how I know them.  I should back up and say that I only really know Sarah and Shane and Sarah’s mom, Nora. I know that the only ties they may have to US Intelligence are to be in their watch list files.

Although I am not aware that Sarah and Shane have ever broken the law, they are an important part of my community, which is an anti-governmental anarchist community in one of the most left-leaning areas of the US.  And most of us are probably in those files because we actively organize for a world with social justice and anti-imperialism,which we believe is antithetical to most of the US governments actions.  To any patriot out there saying, “The US government is the greatest system in the world”, I respond that I realize the US government stands for a lot of great ideals, but they are long transformed into a mere symbol that no longer relates to the system.  Okay, but back to the subject, to put it simply, US intelligence doesn’t actually like us because if most of us had our ways, there would be an overthrow of their damn system.

When I met her a number of years ago, I had been hearing about Sarah “Bean” for a while, maybe a year. She lived with friends of mine at a house that is associated with The Midnight Special Law Collective. Take a look at the logo featuring a dead justice system, a monkey wrench.  If you read the text of the website, they are working to legally support civil disobedience.

I ended up meeting Sarah’s mom, Nora, first.  I was involved with an adult anarchist education project. We sponsored a community-based earthquake preparedness workshop and organizing meeting that Nora and I both participated in.  We talked about having central houses for communication and a central store of supplies in every neighborhood.  We envisioned setting up short-wave radios so that those houses could communicate with each other. We looked at mapping those neighborhoods so that we could check up on each other and offer mutual aid.

So, you see, I am not trying to say that we are a community of hooligans or even simple rabble-rousers (although we are certainly to some degree rabble rousers).  We are a community that is serious, thoughtful and organized.  We run some long standing institutions like a dojo, non-profits and worker collectives. We are sometimes parents, union members, teachers, musicians, artists and writers.  We come from many traditions, including an intellectual anarchist tradition.

I suppose that the one remaining possibility is that Sarah (or Shane) is a mole, a government informant or something.  Well, she is not. I know this because I know her family and I know her life. When she wasn’t doing political work, she was learning massage and teaching English and spending intimate time with her friends.  She wasn’t someone that lived in isolation and could trade her business suit for a black hoodie to show up and infiltrate a meeting. She had long standing accountability in her life. Her life was intermeshed with other lives, the lives of her family and friends.  Because of this, to varying degrees, pieces our lives are on hold until Sarah is back and for some, their lives have been transformed into a project of getting Sarah back.

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The magic tripod that allows me to maintain a highly productive lifestyle collapsed. Some Exercise, Decent Diet and Stress Management (are the three legs) stopped happening. I KNEW it was a mistake, but I scheduled two big events on the same weekend. I cooked for the anarchist cafe AND organized and held a big meeting for a new project that I am launching. And of course, the former exposed me to a whole lot of germs in black hoodies.

So, it is sort of a case of hard-to-prevent bad timing, but even before that, there were too many commitments with not enough fun. Even some of the things that used to be fun turned into areas of stress and obligation for me.  I did start dropping some things before I got sick, but there are some things that I just couldn’t budge without a crisis. Meanwhile, Zombie mom posted about her own work-a-holic nature, which made me raise my eyebrow, but it is easy for me to deny this since I don’t have just one “job” and most of my projects don’t pay money.

This all fits in with a parenting article that I read recently about the importance of unstructured family time. In particular, parenting in the last decade faces critiques for not providing enough outlets for children to entertain themselves and, in turn, has limited their initiative in  creative play.  What is best for kids developmentally (and maybe for people in general?) is having more unstructured family time, where you are just chilling out and someone says, “Hey, let’s play Monopoly” or “I am gonna build a cabin out of these Lincoln Logs” or “Wow, mom, the fridge is really dirty! Can I clean it?”  Of course, this is about not having your self and your kids in too many commitments.  I really don’t wan to be a mom that ignores her family because she has to work all the time or a soccer mom that lives and breathes to drive her kid to the next activity. Not to mention, that I want to MODEL myself as an adult that takes care of herself, making time for my own dental appointments and taking time to sit in the sun with a book and a cup of tea every once in a while.

A while back, my therapist gave me a great tool to frame this all in.  It is sort of a zen approach, where I think of all the activities that I participate in without obligation and as something that I am choosing to do right now, not necessarily forever.  Both setting my commitments up that way (with actual or potential end dates), but also giving myself the opportunity to change my mind about things as I go feels ridiculously revolutionary.

Being sick for a month also gave me a clean start. When I had to put everything on hold to vomit and lie shivering in bed, it was a reality check that I COULD do that.  My clients love me and they waited for me, I am not so poor that I can’t miss some work time every once in a while.  It was sort of like hitting a reset button. My diet cleaned up, my routines disappeared, and gee golly, the world didn’t freakin stop and my life actually didn’t change that much. Oh, I did lose 5 pounds.

So the upshot is cool new projects that will hopefully move my career in a good direction and a break (and exodus?) from the projects that aren’t serving me.  A renewed intention to focus on my career, both serving my clients and also moving my work in a direction that will be sustainable for me on a longer term.

More importantly, was the not-so-gentle reminder to take care of myself. Oh, and hang out with my dogs more, who seem to be magical converters of stress and obligation into joyful, frolicky runs, furry-soft cuddles and long lazy nights of sleep.

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1.  The opposite of a fair-weather friend, a foul-weather friend only seeks you out if they have a problem, need a shoulder to cry on, a ride to town or someone to watch their dog, but otherwise they act as if they don’t even know you. They’re only your chum when they’re glum.
2. A foul-weather friend is someone who likes to be around you when you are unemployed, depressed and in the dumps. He/she feels sorry for you, and gets some pleasure out of feeling superior, handing out advice, berating you for having a bad attitude. As soon as you get out of the slump, get a job, get in shape, get a decent place to live, etc., the fair weather friend is jealous, and stops speaking to you.

J-  and I thought that we had made this term, but after Topeka’ing it (lol), it appears to not be our original idea.  We invented it for a friend who I would go for years to months without hearing from until she was released from the institution, losing her apartment or getting broken up with and then she would appear.  Well, I have become a sort of opposite version of a foul weather friend in the fact that my friends and acquaintances seem to be engulfed in crisis and I am wanting and feeling compelled to show up for them.

So, I have been thinking about this fact. I have many friends that live poor (by choice or not), many friends that are queer/single or not in traditional relationships and also among folks that do participate in more risky lifestyle choices.  Also, activists and radicals are less likely to devote adequate resources to their health (myself included), whether that means things like exercising and eating well or having health insurance.  We are also just plain and simple getting older, which increases our risk for disease and complications.  Most of the time, these things do not effect anyones life too much (and especially mine), but the moment seems to be a convergence of folks in need.

A friend to all is a friend to none. – Aristotle

Okay, but the last part. Why so much going on and going wrong and why do I sometimes feel like I want to take it all on?  Is it that I have lots of friends (423 by Facebook’s count) and am grounded in a community where I have known most of those people for 5-20 years?  Is it because I spent time working on mutual aid projects and am in a caregiving profession?  I sometimes wonder if it has become a dysfunctional part of my identity. Of course it feels good to help and be available and it is also sometimes a relief to focus on someone else’s problems.  Some of it is wanting to give back for those many bits of help that I received when I was poor and when we had the kids and any little bit of help made so much of a difference.

I suppose what feels most notable about this moment is that I cannot keep up  with the demand that I perceive.  There is more need that I can provide and this makes me feel a bit sad and hopeless. It makes me wonder if this marks a downturn that will continue for the future.  It is forcing me to pace myself and recognize my own self-care requirements (and the importance of them).  It is also forcing me to make choices that I would rather not make.

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When I got out of school, I remained broke.  When it was time to start paying off my student loans, I was still broke.

By that time, I had figured out that I was much less likely to spend by not using a bank account and by not using a credit card.  It was the first time that I chose paper over plastic.  Rather than depositing my money and removing it slowly with a debit card, I cashed my check every month and budgeted that way. I found (and still find) that I am much less likely to spend if I am handing over bills than if I use a debit or credit card AND that I was much less likely to stay on a budget if I had a physical stash that I was using to monitor myself.

This is not really a groundbreaking discovery, but instead something that has been understood for quite some time.  A 2008 NPR story reports that this is psychologically rooted in that there is a difference in feeling between actually spending the money versus agreeing to pay the money at a future time.  It notes that the average spending at McDonald’s goes up from $4.50 with cash to $7.00 with credit.

Using cash only also supports my aesthetic and political sensibilities. I appreciate the added benefits of keeping my money local and under the radar.

More recently, I had some experience with bartering. It was a great way to practice massage without simply giving bodywork away. Barter served to build up my reputation, client and referral base. But the more skilled and busy that I have become, I have been less willing to barter. Sometimes, it ended up feeling like an unequal trade andother times it has created scheduling or tracking difficulties and stress.  I also ended up consuming many more services than I would normally, getting my hair done frequently and receiving private pilates instruction (although I do miss these things, they are just more extravagant than my budget actually allows.  I am at the point, where it is worth it to pay people for their work and for me to get paid for mine.  I have my schedule clear for paying clients and I can schedule with any provider that I want without dealing with feelings of obligation or micro-managing the relationship. It was as if I rediscovered the idea of money. It was invented for sensible reasons, but I know all about where good intentions lead…

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I went to a zine reading the other night by my friend artnoose.  Ker-bloom! #81 was actually sub-titled Artnoose and the Terrible, Horrible, No-good, Very Bad Year.  She writes

My Inner Nietzsche berates me and says that those with power are the ones with the will to power. It ridicules my resentment because it says I can’t be angry at wolves for eating sheep. I hate the Inner Nietzsche; I think it’s a jerk.

Okay, well it is true that you can’t be angry at wolves for eating sheep, but that doesn’t make it suck any less for the sheep, right?  I think we are in just such a predicament, with the terms of our liveliehoods being so far from our choosing.  It is hard to not lose integrity, compromise or get screwed sometimes.

Of course on the most immediate level, my year was defined by 0ur adoption disruption, which J- and I agree is the hardest thing we’ve ever done.  The first months of the year, we spent attaching to T-4 and getting further distanced and discouraged by T-7. The end of the year was spent in recovery. One of the contributing factors to our decision was my mom getting diagnosed with breast cancer.

She has spent the year fighting it through western medical treatment, chemo, radiation etc.  It is not that simple of a story, of course.  She actually had breast cancer  many years ago, which she successfully fought and this new case emerged in the scar tissue of her masectomy. She noticed it some time ago and her doctors reassured her it was nothing. Time passed and eventually, she found a doctor to biopsy. Unfortunately, it had reached stage 2. Additionally, our go0d friend N-’s mom has been near death several times from leukemia. She and my friend  Anandi , who also has breast cancer are both uninsured.

Tristan Anderson got shot in the head by a teargas canister in March and fighting, literally on the edge of life for the rest of the year.  Tristan is not  close friend of mine, but he is a close friend of friends and is a long-time acquaintance. The good news is that it sounds like the setbacks to his healing are behind him and although he has sustain serious cosmetic and cerebral damage, his is finally accomplishing some recovery.

My friends, the hikers were detained in Iran at the end of July.  And still detained. I think of them daily and hope that their spirits are strong. I have so many feelings about this, but there are just too many words to open them here.

I have had many friends experiencing nasty and tragic breakups, the most public of which is zombie mom.

I kinda hate to even mention it in the same context as these other things, but Obama sure has turned out to be a big disappointment to the far left on many counts. (I never really believed it to begin with, but I am sad for the folks that had such high hopes.)  While in 2008, people were getting pregnant with Obama babies all over the place, this year has been.

Good Riddance!

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I am not a huge traveler, but a combination of factors has made the call of a few places that I have always wanted to go too loud to ignore.  The fact that J- and I will likely be parents again sometime during the next year and will not be able to travel for while after that, cheap air prices and an accumulation of flyer miles has me doing my small-town-girl version of jetsetting for the next few months.

I also have a theory that some places are going down.  The economy, the environment…they may be irreversibly changed and I want to see them now:

Glacier National Park

Well, okay, in this case, it isn’t actually MY theory that Glacier National Park is going down, it is pretty well supported scientifically that the glaciers are melting.  And even the most conservative folks are now pretty much on board with this.

Actually, it looks like I missed the heyday of seeing the glaciers of Montana.  Even my parents did.  Still, I have had several reports from friends over the years that this is one of the best places that they have seen and it has long been on my list of places to see.

Enter my caching friend Binky del Mar, who moved to northern Idaho not too long ago.  Binky is one of my few female caching partners and I love that about her.  It takes a special kind of lady to cache. One that is comfortable on her hands and knees, looking under dumpsters. One that is more interested in 1) finding the cache and 2) the story she will be able to tell later than 1) how difficult it is or 2) how dirty and gross it is.

Visiting Binky is the perfect opportunity to head up to this great area and visit 2 states that are new for me.  Binky and I are going on a caching extravaganza between Spokane, WA, Sandpoint, ID and Glacier National Park, MT for 4 days.

Las Vegas, The Strip

It is a bit ridiculous

that I from California and have never been to Las Vegas.  I can’t even tell you how many times that I have been to Reno.  Because I don’t know, I’m not sure that I would be able to count.  Being from Sacramento, that is what we did…we went to Reno.

The draw of Las Vegas has grown in the last 10 years as it has become more upscale and I have become well, uh…more upscale.  Hearing about the art, architecture and shows, seeing Anthony Bourdain’s pleasure while eating at Buchon were all part of the draw. The lights and fireworks and the fake Venice and Paris. I know, it’s kitschy, but it’s fun!  Not to mention that they have caches, like every other place on the map. And it is yet a whole other state that I can add to my “states cached” map.

I began looking at air/hotel packages and seeing deals because I just needed a getaway and didn’t want to deal with a long flight or drive.  Then, I heard about the decline in business there and realized that I have no faith that the economy will get better any time soon, and places like swanky Vegas hotels are going to be some of the first to go down, bigtime.  After a few months of looking, I decided to take the plunge and prices had dropped. I couldn’t imagine them going lower.

Vegas is so overdeveloped, with no solid basis for the economy of decadence, other than some weekend traffic from LA.  I know that Vegas will always be there, but in what condition?  Already many of the more “family-friendly” attractions have disappeared, what will go next?  When will it sink below the level of seediness that it was when I was a child? I am imagining a ghost town of these posh hotels, turned vacant, hauntingly empty, guarded and almost post-apocalyptic.

So, this is how my few months of somewhat opulent splurging has come about. I want to get it while the getting is good.

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I recently watched Milk and The Times of Harvey Milk.  I was a bit humbled that I didn’t really know the whole Milk story when I saw it. I knew they Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone had been killed and that Milk was the first out gay man to be elected to public office in California.  I think that I knew at some point that Supervisor Dan White had shot them.  But, I don’t think I could have said this before I saw the movie, I had forgotten this part of the story at some point.

I was almost 7 years old when the murder took place, but I don’t remember it.  We had recently relocated to Sacramento from Santa Cruz when it happened and I wonder how my parents reacted.  Did I know about it and just not remember or did I not see the news that night?

My first memory of the story was sometime around 3rd grade (around 1980) when we went on a field trip to the Crocker Art Museum.  I think it was a sculpture that had a twinkie that was referencing the “Twinkie Defense“.  I can almost picture it. Bright colors and chaotic lines and a piece of a Twinkie sticking right out of it.  My mom explained the Twinkie Defense to me, but like many things at that age, I was just beginning to make sense of things and be able to understand the difference between imagination and reality.  Dan White and the Twinkie defense was filed in my brain next to the Greek mythological gods that I had learned about. It seemed partly true, clearly important, but it also had an aura of remoteness, something that was before my time.  I learned about the defense, but I didn’t know who was killed or who did the killing.  I was 30 years from understanding how this could be relevant to my own life.

The Milk documentary was filmed in 1985.  Memorable scenes were an interview with a union man that said he was homophobic before he began working with Milk.  He agreed with everything that Milk said, and this is what made him change his feelings about gay people.  But, he straightforwardly assured the audience, most people still feel how he used to, shamefully.  Also, I believe it was Milk’s colleague Jeannine Yeomans, who describes the fear of people at that time.  They saw that things were changing and did not understand what that would mean for San Francisco and their lives in it. They were used to power being one way and power was changing.

Interestingly, when I finished watching The Times of Harvey Milk, I saw this article that the day before, Speaker Nancy Pelosi compared the extremist and violent rhetoric being used today in the debates on health care to late 1978 in San Francisco, the time when Milk and Moscone were shot.  The comparison is striking for the obvious reason that the US now has its first black elected official.  I was struck by this statement because I related to the times portrayed in the movie.  I was really moved by the scenes in the documentary that showed the candlelight vigil, with thousands out mourning the deaths of Milk and Moscone and the scenes of angry riots following the weak sentencing of Dan White.  Although I am not usually very interested in politics, it was impossible to not feel inspired and have some hope the night that Obama was elected.  I walked out to my back porch and in all directions, I heard whooping, music, horns and celebration.

Rachel Maddow discusses Pelosi’s speech on her show.  She shows the clip of Pelosi then follows with Dianne Feinstein’s 1978 announcement of the murders.  The emotional turbulence of both are remarkable.  A bit later, she plays a clip of Republican John Boehner reacting to Pelosi’s comment, in which he describes the exact fear that Yeomans had described in 1985, cinching the similarities of three decades earlier.

I wonder how much of the Bay Area’s queer culture that I love has to do with politics and specifically, the politics of Harvey Milk.  My bias is to think very little.  It is hard to believe that if politics does make a difference, that 30 years later, Proposition 8 still failed in California. Demographics, geography and economics are what have provided the conditions for queer community to flourish here.  On the other hand, iconography, political figures and historical markers are all building blocks for shifts from a subculture to a culture.

So the fact that our tapestry of our dominant culture continues to be rewoven with queer, black and “other” as thread with a new political context does change things. It ultimately forces the change of  the relationship of the “isms” – sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. – to the dominant culture.  The question that I suppose I am consciously leaving unanswered surrounds the compromise that these historically discriminated against groups inevitably concede to in order to play the game at all.  And of course, whether this is really “the game” that any of us should want to be playing.  And sadly, the celebratory hoots of victory from Obama supporters have become few and far between since long before the health care debate began.

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That being said, I do protect the information that others give me about themselves that they want private. Because I have this aforementioned trust with the people in my life, I don’t feel that I am often put into hard places around this. Still, J- and I have come to conflict around this issue with regards to the question of gossip. I have always felt that gossip, in some sense plays an important and valuable role in community for me. But, I have never take the time to justify this idea.

First, I thought I should get the definition of gossip. Most definitions focused on the potential idleness and maliciousness of gossip. This wasn’t really what I was looking for, if anything it supported AGAINST the case that I was trying to make. For my purposes, the most interesting thing that I found was that the origins of the word are in godsibb, which means godparent. So historically, gossip does come from a place of intimacy and trust, it is the negative aspects of the word that have stuck over time.

I continued on in my research by using, of course, google to query “Is gossip good”. In fact, this uncovered a number of articles that defend gossip in the sense that I do. That it serves to build relationships and trust between people to discuss the relationships that they see around them. That it can force accountability in ways that it may not be enforceable otherwise. Maybe most importantly, it helps shape our understanding of the rules and norms of our culture. It is through discussing issues of moral substance and importance within context that we get feedback on our ideas and are able to grow and deepen our perception of right and wrong.

I assume that my readers know that I am in no way wanting to justify malicious gossip. I also do not take lightly that it is very tricky ground to navigate this issue. And it is from this very trickiness that some of us have the most lessons (oh and they can be agonizingly painful lessons, indeed!) to learn. What I suppose I am trying to justify is that I feel this is ground worth treading into, as challenging as it may be. I am trying to tell myself, above anything else, that I do not need to punish myself when I choose to open my mouth rather than shut it. It is something to watch and work on in myself, and it may be a flaw…but for me, it may also be necessary.

As I become a mother, I am being challenged with this issue on a new and more impactful level than I have had to before. My girls are creating a story about their lives and their histories. It is my responsibility to help them form it, but also to protect it. What I choose to say and not say to my community is naturally going to influence people’s opinions and treatment of them and in, turn affect the girls’ opinions of themselves.

As I processed our decisions around the matching process, it was really helpful for me to talk details with some of my closest friends. But I also started to lose the carefulness with which I needed to be doing this sharing. Before we had full information, my head was swimming and I needed feeback from my friends to get it off my chest and to begin processing the information that I was being handed. But in the end, actually getting the full information made much of my processing irrelevent, except for the intrinsic value of the processing itself, which I do argue is significant.

Now that we have matched, a number of questions come up for our friends and family: Why aren’t they with their parents?, Why does she walk funny?, How long have they been in foster care? I know I will run into other questions from complete strangers: Are they adopted?, Are they sisters? Many people have reasons for justifying their questions. Maybe they are feeling protective of us and they hate to think of us having difficult or “damaged” kids. Or maybe it is simply curiosity and they are certain that they will not judge or use the information against the kids.

J- called to my attention that I can’t fully trust people’s intentions, even my own, because the human psyche is just not that simple. How we process and use information is complex and, as we all know…many roads have been paved with good intentions. So, as committed as I am to community and living with the input of my dear friends, I am also committed to my girls being free to shape and reshape themselves, to their privacy, and to nurturing them to be able to talk about themselves in the way that feels best for them, not the way that feels the best to me.

And this isn’t even to mention that my kids will ask me questions about their pasts, as well.  As their identity shifts and grows and as they develop more intimate relationships with others, they will be exploring these questions. As their perception of their biological parents change, they may want to know more than we are prepared to tell them.

What is most important to all of us from this time onward is telling the “story of us” and telling it together. And what the story of us is will be filled with careful new choices every day.

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