Crone

Posted on November 28, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I’m celebrating the fact that I’m now a crone. Not an old, withered, ugly woman. Crone in the sense of a elder woman of the tribe. Crone in the sense that I’ve successfully navigated “the Change”.

We don’t talk a lot about our bodies in this culture, and we certainly don’t talk a lot about our emotions. Well, sure, we talk about our bodies in the sense that we say we are too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny – we never are just right. Goldilocks would be right at home in our society, where the majority of things aren’t enough. We talk about the external parts of our bodies, but nothing about what really matters. We certainly don’t talk about menopause or menstruation.

Some cultures have such taboos about the natural rhythms of women’s bodies that they force women to behave differently when they are menstruating. Men won’t touch them, even to shake hands. This includes their husbands. If they are married, they sleep in separate beds during that time. Some societies force young girls to stop going to school the minute they hit puberty. Some are forced to marry so that they don’t become pregnant without the benefit of a man to support them. Somehow they forget that it was a “man” who would have gotten the unmarried girl pregnant in the first place. But that is a post for another day.

No, we don’t talk about menstruation at all. We call it by other names – “Aunt Flo is visiting”, “The Curse”, “my monthly visitor”… the list of euphemisms is endless. We don’t want to talk about it because we don’t want to deal with it. We’d like it to just go away.

Except we don’t know what to do when it starts going away, either. We start to think that something is wrong. Some women try to medicate it, by tricking their bodies with artificial hormones. Some women will get a hysterectomy to stop having to deal with it at all. The only thing is that the cessation of periods is natural. It isn’t a disease. It doesn’t have to be treated with medicine.

But, we are part of a culture that doesn’t like change, and it doesn’t like any sign of getting older. Women dye their hair rather than let their silver crown shine. We’ll get botox injections rather than have wrinkles. We’ll put powder on our faces to fill in lines. We hide the facts of time. In our desperate efforts to keep everything the same, we miss the valuable gifts that change can offer us.

Menopause is the complete cessation of periods. A woman is not in menopause until she has not had a period for a year. In the years before that, she is in perimenopause, where the body is adjusting to the changes.

I like to think of is as being similar to a caterpillar evolving into a butterfly.

It really is more than just a physical change. It is a transformation. The more I tried to hold on to old ways of being, the harder it was. I am grateful for drums, writing, painting and collage for being the tools I used to navigate the new terrain. I suspect learning to cook, eating better, and exercising helped a lot too.

I didn’t have a guide for this journey. My mother died when I was 25, and her response to dealing with this life event was to not deal with it. She took hormones, so she didn’t have any of the sensations that come along with this stage in life.

Note that I said “sensations”, not “symptoms”. “Symptoms” indicates disease. Do we think of puberty as a disease? Do we try to treat it with drugs? No. We get through it, transforming from one part of our lives to another. Our “growing pains” are seen as normal when we are young, but abnormal, even pathological, when we are older.

Changing into a crone is like trying to walk across a quickly moving stream. The steps are not easily visible, and they can be treacherous. Sometimes you have to stand still for a while to see what the next step is. Sometimes you have to take a different path than you intended. The terrain is constantly shifting and uncertain. The goal is to get to the other side safely. The trick is that the only way to do that is to become someone else.

I learned that certain foods I always loved were suddenly bad for me. Foods that caused me joy now turn me into a raging meanie. I learned that other foods that I never liked are now very tasty. I learned that my body and my spirit work much better the more fresh vegetables I eat, rather than processed or fried foods. I learned that I need a lot less meat than society tells me I do. I learned that a strictly vegetarian diet isn’t for me.

I learned that I need less sleep. Related to that, I learned that if I don’t make time to write, the ideas will well up inside me and force me to get up to write them down. I learned that I have to make time to be creative every day.

The creative energy is the main part here. The body is no longer able to create – to reproduce. But that need to create is still there. That force is just transforming into a different form. Consider water – it is still the same atoms whether it is ice, steam, or water. But it looks and acts different in these different states.

The trick about becoming a crone is that it is your path, and you must navigate it yourself. I celebrate it, because it was a chance to reinvent, rediscover who I am.

It reminds me of when I went to college. I initially went to college in a different state than I had grown up in. Nobody knew me there. I had the opportunity to be anybody I wanted. I chose to be myself.

The time right before menopause gives you that same opportunity. Who are you? Who are you really? What do you want to be when you grow up? Is what you are doing now leading towards or away from that goal? Are the things you are doing with your time supporting or taking away from who you are called to be? If not, why not?

Use this time as an opportunity to become the person you truly are, rather than the person you’ve always been told you were. Use this time to reexamine everything – hobbies, job, relationships… Do they build up, or tear down?

This is your path. Celebrate it.

Street Walker

Posted on November 7, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Let’s discuss something called “Street Harassment”. Perhaps you have seen the video calling attention to this. A woman walks around New York City for 10 hours, silently, wearing a crew cut t-shirt and jeans. She receives a lot of unwanted attention from men.

Consider if the roles were reversed. Men can walk anywhere they want and not be verbally harassed by women. Women do not call out to them about how attractive they are, or give them their number, or ask for dates. What we are seeking here is equality. Women want to be treated with the same respect and courtesy that men expect.

Just because a woman is walking on the street, it doesn’t mean that she is a street walker. She is a pedestrian, not a prostitute.

It doesn’t matter how attractive the woman is. She still doesn’t want to be treated like a piece of meat. A woman should be able to walk anywhere she wants without being accosted verbally. It is not okay for a man to call out to woman and say “Hey beautiful!” or “Damn, you look fine!” We don’t like it, and we don’t want it. Really.

The woman is not being rude for ignoring the man’s attentions. He’s being rude for invading her space. She is just walking to the doctor’s office or her school or work. She should not have to dress in a bulky jacket in order to avoid unwanted comments.

Women dress the way they do because that is the way they dress. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they want male attention. Just walking within male eyesight does not mean that they want them to talk to them and tell them how hot they are.

There are a lot of unwanted interactions between women and men. This is just one of them, and the least violent.

Poem – Women are not things.

Posted on October 26, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Women are people first.
We are not things.
We are not toys or tools.
We aren’t something to use.
We do not exist for your pleasure or fantasies.

Our bodies are just the vehicles our souls ride in.

We do not care if our bodies are
too tall,
too short,
too fat,
too bony
for you.

We do not care if our hair is
too dark,
too straight,
too kinky
for you.

We aren’t for you, you see.
We are for ourselves,
first and foremost.

We are our own guardians,
our own nurturers,
our own teachers.

We do not define
ourselves
in relationship
to you.

We do not need your permission
to vote,
to drive,
to work,
to feel.

We do not need your permission
to be,
period.

We are not
objects to be objectified,
possessions to be possessed,
or fantasies to be fulfilled.

We are people, pure and simple,
and if you don’t
start treating
us
like that
then you are missing out
on half
the human race.

Stop trying to
get our numbers
and
get into our pants.

Start trying to
know us
as fellow travelers
on this Earth,
at this time,
with you.

Menopause and art

Posted on October 14, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Menopause is a time of shifts and changes. It is a time where you are no longer physically able to be creative. And by creative, I mean procreative – you are no longer able to produce a baby. But the energy and desire to create is still part of being human, and still needs to be used. It just needs a different outlet.

We are the physical vessels through which God is revealed and works in this world. God gives us the energy and we provide the shape. We are created to be co-Creators with God.

When you go through menopause your ability to create changes and you have to navigate these unusual waters. I like to think about how a caterpillar knows what to do when it becomes a butterfly. Who tells it how to fly? How does it know how to move with these new legs? Everything is different and strange – yet it is normal. It isn’t like it was, but it is like it should be. Perhaps we forget that menopause isn’t a disease. We are transforming into something else. It doesn’t herald the end of life but the beginning of a whole new one.

Being creative saved me and taught me. Art is what saved me when my back hurt. Even though I had to hunch over my desk in order to make my art, somehow the slipped disc in my back no longer hurt.

I found this to be true with doing art now as well. The need isn’t as immediate, but rather it is cumulative. Now, doing art in some form every day centers and focuses me. When my mind was filled with too many ideas, writing helped me slow things down enough that I could think. Painting and making collage at least twice a week has given me a way to create and express myself that don’t use words. Drumming has restored my rhythm.

It took a while to learn how to navigate with these new wings. I didn’t have a guide. Mom died long before she thought about telling me how to “do” menopause. Even if she was alive now, I doubt she’d talk about this. Somehow the reality of being in a physical body was something that she just didn’t talk about. Perhaps being a person was too personal.

Part of my learning was done the hard way. There were a lot of nights where I didn’t get enough sleep, and days where I felt I was going to melt. Hot flashes aren’t a “Western construct” as one person (younger) told me. They are a reality. They aren’t in my mind. I didn’t expect them to happen so soon – so it certainly wasn’t something that I manifested. I’ll concede that perhaps hot flashes are a result of the Western lifestyle (eat whatever you want, don’t exercise).

Some of what I did was to get up when I couldn’t sleep. I would wake, hot in body and mind. Instead of staying in bed, I decided to use that energy. I didn’t want to disturb my husband or concern him though, so I didn’t get all the way up. I moved to another room and turned on one small light. I sat on a recliner in mostly darkness and wrote in my journal or in my Kindle. Some of what I wrote became this blog. Often I’d return to bed, having “burned off” that heat – yet I’d produced something useful with it.

I also started the practice of getting ready to go to work a little earlier. I made time every morning to do something artistic – watercolor pencil drawing, painting, collage, or my new “fortunate stamps” pieces. This took just 20 minutes in the morning, but it has been enough to help me immeasurably. I really notice when I don’t make time to do it. I’m starting to think of making art as a multi-vitamin. It strengthens and protects me.

I’m using this energy I’m finding to take new classes and discover what I want to do “when I grow up”. The coasting I was doing during my middle ages has changed. I no longer want to drift through life. I am trying to play it safe and be bold at the same time, so there is some tension there. I keep taking classes in helping people communicate with each other. There is something about peacemaking and leveling the playing field all rolled up together. My tutoring is factoring into this as well.

Menopause is a chance to discover new wings. It is a time to assess priorities. It is a shift of energy. It isn’t the end – but it is a reminder that life isn’t permanent. For me, creating has been a way to feel like I’m making a difference, that my existence matters. Deep down, that is the reason behind most human activity, according to Matthew Fox in his book “Creativity”. Properly channeled, it results in greatness.

I challenge this – On banned books and women’s roles.

Posted on September 27, 2014 by betsybeadhead | 3 Comments

I saw this book cover the other day. It is in the “young adult” section.

Sure, it is Banned Books Week – so I should celebrate that people have the right to read whatever they want. While I’m OK with choices, I’m still going to question them.

It is the same issue I have with buffets. People can choose vegetables or fried meat. They can choose to eat only one plate of food, or fourteen. But we pay for our choices. And ultimately, society pays for people’s bad choices. My health insurance rates go up every year because people refuse to take care of themselves. Their health gets worse, so the costs go up, so it has to be paid for – by me. Meanwhile, I take care to eat well and exercise. I should not have to pay for their bad decisions, but I do.

We say we are all about free choice, but in some ways we aren’t. Notice light bulbs. We can’t buy regular incandescent bulbs anymore. They aren’t “environmentally correct”. Fluorescent bulbs last five times longer than incandescents. But – they can’t be disposed of in a “green” way. You can’t throw them away legally. You have to take them to a hazardous waste center because of the mercury in them. You can’t even recycle them. So in a way they are better, but in another way they are worse. The strange thing is that we don’t have a choice about it anymore – if we want light bulbs, they are fluorescent.

I’d think that if the government was really concerned about our well-being, they’d ban cigarettes for starters. Then, they’d make sure that all food was healthy – no additives or preservatives. Nothing would have extra sugar in it. We’d have mandatory exercise time during the work day too.

I don’t see any of this happening.

But back to the book cover. I am opposed to this book for several reasons. I’m not going to “challenge” it officially. I’m not going to try to get it banned. But I will bring up questions about it, and wonder why authors and publishers provide this kind of book. I will suggest how this kind of book affects us all.

This book is geared towards teenage girls. Do they really need to be indoctrinated to the idea that they have to be sexual beings? Do they need to be taught that they have to have a boy in their lives to feel complete? Is this a healthy message we need to be promoting as a society?

The “need” to have a mate distracts women from being full people. They spend their energy and money on attracting and keeping a boyfriend to the exclusion of anything else. Perhaps this is part of why women don’t go into science or politics nearly as often as men do. They don’t have the energy for it. They’ve given it all away to the goal of becoming a girlfriend or wife or mother.

Plus, do we really need to get young girls all steamy? They can’t handle the responsibility that comes with sex. Why have books that are explicitly sexual geared to this age group?

We don’t give full driving privileges to young drivers. They have graduated driving licenses. There are certain hours they can and can’t drive, and certain limitations as to who can be with them in the car. They don’t have the maturity to be able to handle the full responsibility of driving when they get their license, so we control it for them.

Sadly, sex isn’t that way. Once you figure out how it works, you can do anything, and anything can happen. Sadly, young people are still growing up themselves, and are almost never mature enough to handle the overwhelming responsibility involved in being a parent.

Sex is like playing Russian roulette with your life.

With this kind of book we are handing young girls a gun and telling them to put it to their heads. Either way, their own life will end. They’ll either get pregnant or distracted. Their energy will go into being a mother or a girlfriend. Their energy will be in relation to someone else. They won’t be their own people – strong, independent.

We all pay for this. We pay for it in teenage girls who get pregnant, who become single mothers and can’t afford to take care of themselves. So they get government assistance – which we pay for. Our taxes go up because of other people’s bad decisions, just like with health insurance. We pay for it in women who have spent their lives taking care of a house and home rather than fulfilling their dreams of being engineers or astrophysicists or diplomats.

How much have we lost as a nation, as a world, because we keep teaching young girls that their only value is to be found in their bodies, and not in their minds? We are prostituting our girls. We are selling them as surely as if we put them on the street.

Questionable boyfriend

Posted on September 20, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

A lady came into the library recently with a guy I recognize. He’s a patron from years ago, and not a good one. She asked him if he wanted to check and see if he had a card. He shrugged her off, but came up to me later.

He said that she was his girlfriend, and he had been using her card. I was pretty sure he had an account that he couldn’t use because it wasn’t in good standing.

I was right. There was a reason he didn’t do any of this in front of her.

He had a dozen CDs out and hadn’t returned them in years. He’d been billed for them, and his account had gone to collections. He owed over $300.

He knew all of this. It wasn’t a surprise. Maybe he was hoping it would have just disappeared.

I told him his options. Find them and bring them back. Buy replacement copies of what is lost. Or pay the fine. He walked away.

They both came up later, and he’d again used her card to check out. She seems like a decent person. She doesn’t look like she would date him. I wanted to warn her – don’t marry him. Stay away.

I can see more than his fines. I can see more than his unwillingness to be responsible with his account. I know that he was caught trying to spray paint this building.

I also can tell more from what he is reading. He’d checked out “urban erotic fiction.” This is what black women in the projects read. It is rough stuff – and straight white guys certainly don’t read it. Perhaps he’s gay? Because the only other guy I’ve ever known to read “urban erotic fiction” was.

This isn’t going to go well.

The last time I warned someone away from a questionable guy I got censured very badly. There was a guy who wasn’t very reliable who was in the medieval reenactment group I was in many years ago. He’d promise the moon and not deliver. He was forever making up his own rules about things. He was shifty, and we’d early on learned to not let him be in charge of anything because he always let the group down.

He started dating this girl who was very nice but very innocent. She was trusting – too trusting. I felt like it was my duty to clue her in to his history with the group.

It all backfired on me.

At an event, months after my talk with her, my knight (I was in a household with a knight as the head) pulls me from what I was doing and says we are going to have a meeting. Next thing I know, I’m sitting at a table with the knight, the girlfriend, and the guy. I’m suddenly on trial and I’ve not had any warning. Turns out she talked to her boyfriend, and he talked to my knight. Nobody had come up to me privately.

It was uncomfortable. It was intense. And I felt betrayed by my knight.

I was asked why I said what I said. My main answer was to protect her. My brother has been married four times and the successive wives didn’t know about his lies and the previous wives. They’d gotten hurt very badly. I felt that I had a chance with this lady to let her know what she was getting in for. I didn’t have a chance with my brother’s wives. I could have saved them a lot of trouble.

I was then asked who told me what I said. Some of what I knew was from before I was in the group, so it was information that was revealed to me. I refused to answer this. It isn’t who told me that is the issue. It is the fact that I repeated it. I wasn’t told by just one person, and my personal experiences with this guy had borne out this impression that he wasn’t trustworthy. Heck – even my knight had told me stories about how shifty he was. I held my ground on this one.

Plus – I didn’t think it was fair to throw other people under the bus, just because I was getting run over.

I meant well, and I got hurt. I didn’t trust my knight after that. I didn’t talk to this guy or his girlfriend ever again either. It ruined my experience in this group that was my main social outlet. I know this group was supposed to be about honor and chivalry, but I felt like I was doing the right thing, and I feel even today that how the situation was handled was inappropriate.

So I’m a little wary of telling anybody to stay away from shady guys.

I don’t think this is the lesson I should have learned.

We read stories about women who were suckered by guys who made them think they were great people, and all the people around them knew the real story. Her friends and family saw how he was when he wasn’t with her. They said nothing, and it all went very badly. In the best case, her heart gets broken. In the worst case, she’s dead.

Is it worth it? Are we supposed to be silent? Are we supposed to pretend that the skunk will turn into a kitty cat? Are we supposed to think that if we don’t tell her our concerns that it will all work out for the best?

This seems stupid. This is how predators continue to work. We are aiding and abetting them with our silence.

How much am I allowed to say at work? Would it be considered slander? Could I get fired for expressing my opinion of this guy to his girlfriend? Library records are private, by law. Even a wife doesn’t have access to her husband’s account unless he gives her his card.

I don’t think this guy is dangerous – just untrustworthy. That can become dangerous.

Plus one

Posted on September 12, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

You know how you’ll have a friend who you’ve known for many years and then she will get a boyfriend that you don’t like? Or worse yet, it is a spouse that you don’t like. So then you don’t want to spend any time with that friend, because she feels like she has to bring her boyfriend or spouse along to every single thing that you two normally did just together. I think the same thing about people’s children as well.

These are all their “plus one” relationships. They are invited to the party, and they bring someone extra that you don’t know. You haven’t really agreed to them being there, but you have to go on trust. Except it isn’t a party, it is a relationship between friends.

I want to have a relationship with just that person, not the significant other and not their child. To me, it shouldn’t be a package deal. Sometimes I luck out and the s/o or the child is very pleasant. But more often than not the opposite is true. The s/o is self-centered or abusive, and the child is, well, a child. Children can’t help being annoying when they are young. They can’t help being loud and interrupting all the time. That is just part of the nature of young children.

Sometimes you might try to arrange the gatherings when you know that the child is with his other parent. I know a lady who will invite her friend out for seafood – knowing that her husband is allergic to shellfish. This way just the two of them can be together.

Sometimes adding a s/o or a child to the mix signals the end of a relationship. Sometimes it is because people get too busy to spend time with friends. But sometimes it is because they don’t realize that their friends didn’t sign up for the s/o or the child. They’ll try to drag them along, and then nobody is happy.

Having a relationship with someone is like a contract. We agree on how we will be together as friends. We agree that we’ll call or write or visit a certain amount of times with each other to keep the relationship going. We agree that we’ll share each other’s good times and bad. But when you add a significant other or a child, it adds a whole other person to the contract. Everything has to get renegotiated, and rarely do people even talk about this. They seem to think of it as “Love me, love my partner or child” and it isn’t always that way. Just because I like you doesn’t mean I like who you live with.

Sometimes partners are abusive. Sometimes children are unruly. Sometimes the problem isn’t just dealing with the abusive or unruly other person that is suddenly in the mix, it is dealing with your feelings about this new and unpleasant person in your friend’s life.

You love your friend, and you don’t want to see her hurt. You can tell that this guy is bad for her. You can tell she’s totally inept at parenting. Watching her with these people hurts, because you know she is in for a lot of pain.

So some of the problem is about how you feel with this “plus one” added to the party. Some of it is about how it changes or destroys the relationship you had with your friend. Some of it is about how you feel bad for her, living with such difficult people.

Why he hits. Why she stays.

Posted on September 10, 2014 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

If you wonder “why she stays” or “why he hits” it is all the same. It is all about power. They both feel powerless.

She doesn’t leave because she thinks she can’t support herself without him. He makes all the money. He knows how to repair the cars and the house. But also he feels powerless. If he doesn’t have her then how is he going to get fed? How is his laundry going to get done? They stay together out of a sense of desperation and powerlessness.

If you want to address the cause of men hitting women and women taking the abuse, you have to address the root of power. You have to teach boys how to cook and clean and take care of the household in addition to teaching him how to use tools and repair cars. If you want to teach women to be strong you have to teach them how to use tools and how to repair cars in addition to teaching them how to cook and clean and take care of the household. Only when there’s a sense of equality will there not be a sense of powerlessness.

Men also abuse others because they have not been taught any other way to deal with their emotions. “Boys don’t cry”, remember? Boys are taught to roughhouse and to fight. They are taught to be aggressive. Anything less than this is seen as weak. If a guy shows any gentle tendencies he is seen as gay. He is excluded from the pack. Thus when guys feel powerless, they will lash out with the only tool they are allowed to use and that is violence.

Part of power is also about giving people a sense of worth and value. They have to feel like they can take care of themselves. This includes being able to get and keep a job. People need to feel like they are needed.

Address these issues and you have solved the reasons why he hits, and why she stays. Teach people how to be independent.

Feminism is sexism

Posted on August 19, 2014 by betsybeadhead | 1 Comment

I am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I believe in equal rights for everybody.

I don’t believe that it is fair or just for women to focus only on the accomplishments of women and ignore half of humanity.

I believe that everybody should have access to healthcare and good jobs.

I believe that everybody should be treated fairly and honestly.

I believe that if we focus only on our victimhood we will remain victims. Men are victims too and they have been excluded as well.

For women to have a female only-God is to exclude the male side of God as well. God has no gender.

A woman is being sexist if she only reads books by women, talks only to women, and worships only a female version of God.

It is important if we are going to move forward in this world that everybody be lifted up. We are not going to get anywhere if one group raises itself above another. If women raise themselves up higher than men that they are being just like the man who they say are oppressing them.