All Hallows Eve

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It is Sweetpea's first real Halloween. She has been celebrating this holiday sense soon after being born but this is the first time she has become aware of candy, costumes and getting into trick or treating. As a parent I am conflicted by Halloween. I love the holiday, the DIY qualities of meeting your neighbors, the art installations on front lawns, the costumes and yes, even the gathering of candy. I love that this pagan holiday addressing death in this season still is celebrated in a mainstream way with the lighting of candles and carving of jack o lanterns. 

My main issue with Halloween, besides all the corn syrup, is the idea of witches. Medicine women, healers, herbalists, are the people we call witches. These women were put on trial and often burned at the stake during the dark ages. The villainizing of these medicine women lives on today in our green skinned, crooked nosed, caricatures of women people call witches. She rides around on her broom scooping up children and eating them. It’s a terrible and scary image. Girls dress up like witches today reenacting these “evil” women. Yes there have been some exceptions to this, good witches, Samantha on the show "Bewitched" and more recently Hermione Granger, but most of the time the old, ugly, hag is what I see being the most played out. There has been a lot of reclaiming of the word witch in the pagan community. Now folks wear the pointed hat with pride. What I see in the main stream culture though is a complete lack of understanding of who witches really are. They are different from the other made up ghouls of Halloween.  

 I try to be relaxed about what is enacted on Halloween, every society has a shadow side and this is the place young and old alike get to try things out.  At the same time, the thought in the back of my head is, “really, we are still dragging this old concept of women healers as villains out of the closet again?” I remember being so scared of witches as a young person, It would have been nice to have a broader perspective of these misunderstood women healers. It looks a little like the way folks wear other cultures dress during Halloween and think its ok to pretend to be that person for the night. I think most folks are coming from a place of play with this but I have seen how hurtful it can be to my friends from the cultures that get the most Halloween attention, like Arab and Indian people.

 My family celebrates Samhain, the pagan holiday that honors our ancestors and this season of dying. This morning we watched the sunrise and lit our jack o lanterns welcoming our ancestors into our home for the day. Sweetpea and I decorated our family alter with pictures and memorabilia of family members and pets that have passed from our lives; she decorated with candy and some marigolds. We will make a pumpkin pie to feast on this afternoon and think about all our beloved dead and all the folks that recently lost their lives from the intense hurricane Sandy. After pie and candles we will get dressed in costumes and join the hordes of children and care givers on the street tonight playing in the community game that is Halloween. I hope to give Sweetpea this balance growing up, understanding who witches really are, taking a moment to notice all the amazing people and animals that pass into and out of our lives and the sweetness of family, community fun.  

The Politics of Domesticity

 
Being a stay at home parent is political. We do all the work that keeps a family unit functioning and don't see a dime for all the effort that takes. We hold the emotional and physical stability of a house and a child. The role of a stay at home mom specifically is wrought with sexism and feelings of inadequacy. I recently heard another stay at home mom talk about how she said to her husband, "I want to feel like I am contributing to society. I don't get paid to do housework and take care of our kids." He replied, "honey you get paid in makeovers and pedicures." This is one extreme example of sexism but there are plenty of micro aggressions that happen in the political nature of the stay at home mom.

My child is freshly 2. The "plan" was to have the baby and have me go back to work when she was 6 months old and our money ran out. When I graduated from college and had Sweetpea we were and still are in the middle of a huge economic downturn. The amount of jobs and the amount of people wanting them is way out of whack. When Sweetpea turned 6 months we moved to Austin. We thought Austin would be an easier place to get jobs, turns out being an artist in a very creative and young town makes the competition fierce for anything art related. Daddy was able to get employed quickly with the city in his field, health, education, and advocacy. I on the other hand have been struggling to find good work for a year and half, experiencing multiple interviews and letdowns. This is not just the economy, I am not willing to settle for whatever job and pay the high fees of childcare to be able to do it. It has put stress on our family and depleted any idea that we had about not going into debt. It has also been a great success in making do and being there to experience what really matters.  

Then there is classism. Stay at home moms are looking for community with other parents who are choosing to be full time with their young people. What is one of many things that gets in our way of being connected? The big C of classism. I came into the role of being a stay at home parent because of necessity. Some moms plan it all out and choose that they will be the stay at home parent. The folks that choose this I notice seem to have a good financial cushion. These mostly middle and upper class moms who have personal trainers after giving birth to get there body back. They have their own car to take the little one places, they always have money for museum admissions, date nights with their partners, hired babysitters and infant music classes. I am sure these stay at home moms also battle with the same inner demons of inadequacy, isolation and the stress of holding together the family unit.  It seems that our society at this point largely holds this kind of mom to be what is expected if you are a stay at home mom. I know this is not always the case, just my experience as a nanny and now working class mom.


I see all stay at home parents struggling with this. The stay at home dads I hang out with don't have the added bonus of sexism to deal with but definitely get hurt around their manhood for choosing to be domestic and be with their kids full time. The pressure of keeping the working people in the house happy and getting some time to yourself once in a blue moon is something all stay at home parents have to deal with.

I like that I am getting the chance to be with Sweetpea this much, I like that she sees me prioritize her and gets to learn from my wisdom. I like watching her grow and being there for the big happenings in her development. I wish that it were easier. I wish I had more of a support network, that I didn't feel obligated to do a huge share of the housework because I am home the most. That doing house work didn't feel so degrading because there are centuries of women behind me scrubbing the kitchen floor, attending to their young people and worrying about how to make ends meet.

I start a substitute-teaching job next week. I will be teaching art in after school programs with a really awesome organization called “Creative Action.” I do not know how we will be able to get the childcare we need yet but I am rolling with it and believing the right answers will show up.  This job is a crack in the door of arts education, a field I want to break into. I am excited to see what opportunities come up after I start. I hope to hit a balance with my stay at home mom status by bringing in some much needed extra cash and giving myself a break. I am still figuring out what is fair and how I want house work to go in my home. I will keep you posted. What have you figured out?

Heaven on Earth

I am reading a fabulous new parenting book called "Heaven on Earth." Its focus is on the Waldorf school of thought and I am soaking it in. The book really lays out in easy steps the ways you can incorporate wild, sensual, nature play with your kids and living in a harmonious rhythm. Sweetpea is growing up in a city for now, I always imagined when I had kids I would be living on a farm. It makes me sad she is not getting that sensual earth connection of living close to the land. I think in her lifetime we will live this way but for now I am making it happen in a city way. I grew up in a small city and found lots of ways to live in the wild. In my neighborhood growing up there was secret dappled light hiding spots, flower gardens and a woodsy park. The windows open all summer long breathing in the moist hot air of summer.

I bring Millie to the park almost every day, when there we look and play with the trees but spend most of our time digging pebbles and climbing the play structures. The same in our back yard, she immediately gravitates towards the plastic toys in our yard instead of seeing the whole yard as a place to play. In the book the author talks about awakening your child's imagination to the sensory play of her environment. Today in the back yard I had us look for families of sticks. We chose two large ones for the parents and two smaller ones for the kids, and then there were the babies. We had the sticks sing to the babies, and then tied the small baby sticks to the bigger kids with springs of grass. She loved it and I loved finding toys in nature.

Side note, Millie just awoke from her nap and came in and lied on my belly, somewhere between sleep and awake she lies nestled on me, I smell her sweet baby sweat from the nap, this is very nice.

"Blessings on the Blossom
Blessings on the fruit
Blessings on the Leaves and Stem
Blessings on the Root"

I am now incorporating this earth prayer to each meal we have. It makes Millie laugh with glee whenever I say it. I see the words delighting her and reminding us both that food is sacred and its good to acknowledge that. The book even outlined a simple meal plan to follow that helps when you are super busy and hungry. The plan is to eat in categories Mexican Mondays, Pasta Thursdays, then just choose what meal you want to have from that category. We are trying it out this week, I am excited to have a framework to think about dinners, firstly so they happen and secondly so we will have more family dinner together some days of the week. I am working on Daddy and the housemates around making this happen.

This week we head to the beach for our first real family vacation in Texas. I am excited to see the gulf and be inspired by the waves. Being a coastal child I have always loved seeing the edge of the land and the expansiveness of water for miles. Sharing the ocean with Millie as a toddler will be a sentimental and pleasure filled experience.

Artist Mama

This spring has been crazy busy. In March we moved in with our new housemates. In April and May I got to work making the trailer for my documentary film “Czechxan.” I was story boarding, finding crew, shooting, editing, getting regular childcare and writing a grant. Talk about super mom! It was all made possible by the burning fire I have for my work, the blessing of another mom who could do weekly 5 hour trades, my awesome husband who took over the second he got home from work and occasional sitting from my housemate and a teen I hired for the month of May. Also the amazing support I got from having a weekly goal check in with my mother in law called our “artist hour.”

I have not had time to write this blog and I have missed it. I have been facing the question a lot of artist moms face, "who does she think she is?" BTW, This is also the name of a great documentary made recently about artist mothers. According to our capitalist society, I am choosing to live in poverty, neglecting my child, selfish, can't have it all and need to grow up. If you are not being a successful artist aka making money, there seems to be no reason to continue on other than at a hobbyist level. I am here today to share with you the reality of being an artist mother.

1. I actually have more attention for my art and my child by being both an artist and mother at the same time. I know it sounds wild, but there is a very small window of time in my day I get to work so I use it! The second she goes down I am at my computer or notebook working till she wakes up. In the evening the second she goes down I go to work at my desk for a 3-4 hour chunk and know I have to stop at 10:30pm otherwise I won't be able to face the next morning with her. I get work done, am able to be with my daughter and get mostly enough sleep, shocking!

Because of these intensive spurts of creativity I am able to put it away when she wakes up and get my mind going in a different direction, food, diaper change, play dough or park usually do the trick. I think my artist mind needs the break of being able to be on toddler time, engaged in her growth and development and not thinking to hard about my work. I would even say my work is enriched by the play/out doors time I have with her.

When I was solely focused on my art I spent a lot of wasted time in guilt spirals for not doing enough, lack of accountability and getting lost in silly activity’s. I think parenting is a great focusing tool, helping me to decide what is doable and what is the most important. I still spend a lot of time on facebook and having tv/movie time with daddy, but it feels balanced and a welcome break from always having to be on.

2. Because I am deciding to make my art and parent my young one full time I can have my passionate adult time so I don't feel like my whole life is my daughter. This also gives Sweetpea a chance to have relationships with other loving adults and socialize with other kids. She gets a lot of close time with her dad and she still gets to have a lot of me, in some ways, it is a win win situation.

3. It is f*&^ing hard to really pull off and a constant negotiation. As a co-parent I am not the only one being affected by my life choices. My amazing husband would love it if we were not strapped for cash every month. We also have different ideas about day care and me getting a "real" job. For me, I see having this time with sweetpea when she is young as invaluable and also great that she gets to have a lot of one on one time and not have to join the pack of kids and rules that come with day care. She socializes every week with her friends and her housemates. She is rarely sick and she knows her caregivers have attention for big feelings so her sense of security is strong.

I was not a day care kid, my husband was and he says it was a good experience for him. We have often tried to negotiate ways for her to go to half time care and me to work at least half time for pay. After trying to get lots of different jobs our first year here I realized, the job market is hard and overloaded right now and it was time to start listening to myself and what I really wanted to be doing here in Austin

It is not easy but I have never felt so alive and though we are broke, our quality of life is really good. We have a great time in our city doing free or cheap activities. We live simply and get to have a lot of time together. We miss out on regular big, fancy dinners, far away vacations, gym memberships and new goods and clothes, but it seems like a good trade off, for now.

I am running an online funding campaign to make my film “Czechxan.” It will run till July 18^th. Please check out the trailer and share the link.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1210194179/czechxan-the-film

Imagineria

I remember the sacred domain that is the imaginative play when one is young. I remember the coming together of minds and the fights that happen when two people are trying to decide on the objective of the play. I also remember the sweet, fun spontaneity of engaging fully with a dear friend and having a grand time. I seek this collaborative energy out as an artist. I feel the fiery passion of making an idea happen when I am playing and working with another person.

One of the main games I remember from my childhood was playing radio station on the phone with my friend Harriet. She lived in a town a half hour away. Her mother was my Godmother so we had known each other sense we were very young. We could not have regular play dates so our time was spent connecting via the phone. Radio show was all about Harriet being the disk jockey and me being her sidekick. She ran the radio show and I got to be all the different callers in and various characters that also helped run the station. I remember asking her once on why I couldn't run things and she said she did a better job. When we tried doing it the other way once it was true, she was much more bossy and managerial then I was at that time. Though I was in the sub role in this play I still got a lot of freedom to build up my characters and decide what they would do on the show. We had zoologists on talking about animals, various insider dramas within the folks running the station, romance and adventure. My mom would let us play for hours at a time in the creative soup of our minds.

I am watching the imagination play unfold in Sweetpea. She is now starting to act out things we do with her doll. She feeds the baby her bottle and gives it little toys to play with. She also tries to play with our cat Oli in this manner. She passes him toys and attempts to rough house with him. He is not pleased by this but puts up with a lot of fur grabbing and chasing despite his want for space. I wonder if she will have an imaginary friend like I had. My imaginary friend lived in the laundry basket and came out when I had to go to the bathroom. She kept me company during the many times a day a young person spends on the potty. Having a little made up friend helped me through the potty training process and kept me staying put for a little while.

My favorite imagination play was with my friend Jillian. We would build intricate houses of shawls and tissues for our Barbie’s to live in. The stories we came up with were tackling the hard things we heard about and saw in our diverse city. We had pregnant teenagers and formally homeless women living together. We had kids being raised by grandparents while their moms were in rehab. We also had plenty of fashion shows and classic nuclear families too. But we were always pulled to look at the hard parts of our society and act them out in our games. There was fighting and battles, sometimes fairylands and even a game where one of the characters was a Barbie turned into a horse. Jillian and I worked well as a team, coming up with the games together and enjoying our magical world. We also wrote plays together and put them on for my parents on the front porch of my house. We made big cakes from box mixes and would line them with candles full of wishes to be kissed and to have our first boyfriends. We loved each other fiercely and our collaborations set me up for a lifetime of working best in healthy, artistic collaboration.

My friend Neala and I would play a game called "Adventures in New York." The game was based off an experience we actually had where my family and each of the kids took a friend to NYC to go see the air and space museum. We drove and had a tire pop right before getting to the museum in Queens and had to find a tow truck and good shop to fix it in. This was all fun adventure for Neala and I. At one point we were picked up in a big, black, town car and driven to the garage. I had to sit on my brothers friends lap to make us all fit. This made me blush. Neala and I had each brought a doll and had them act out each part of our city adventure. In the end we had to take the train home and my dad had to come back for the car. The game was played outside her house or in the basement with variations on what happened while we were in New York. We even had a theme song we would sing and a dance we would do down her drive way when we played.

These time capsules are some of my favorite memories. Imaginative play had shaped me as an artist. At the time, it helped me process the heavy stuff that happened around me that I did not understand. It also gave me allies in the process of growing up. I am excited to watch Sweetpea's imagination blossom and play the games with her that she makes up. I can already tell we will be playing the role of dogs for a good long while.

The End Of The Beginning

2012 is here. I have been waiting for this year. It used to be a dooms day prediction kind of waiting. I sunk into the hype of the end of time, a new culture forming, judgement day. A few weeks ago my best friend informed me the Mayan calendar actually ends at the end of 2012, the historians speculate. This made me somewhat relived that we had a whole year before dooms day happened.

I don't really believe the end of the world is happening but it does frighten and excite me to think this is such a momentous time in history. We as people have the power now to completely destroy our earth or completely radically change our rate of consumption and live in connection with and fostering our planet. We get to decide how much we care. We get to read the signs of global climate change that are affecting all of us. I see this in the 107 degree months of this Texas summer, also the snow blizzards and earthquake in the Northeast. I see the devastating affects of climate change that have happened and continue to happen in Southeast Asia and Japan.

Now is the time that we get to re-learn how to care for our plant families, how to be inspired by nature and love of the place we live. The other day I caught Sweetpea hugging a tree in the park. She was in complete awe of this amazing, living, trunk that stretched up to the sky, towering above her. I wonder if this sense of wonder about nature is inspired by the way I respond to trees? Is she mimicking my behavior? Perhaps, but I also see this action as innately human. Given the chance we will love and care for all living things. We will look beyond the veil of our bothersome emotions, grudges, and over stimulated systems, to really see how lucky we are to be alive and breathing in oxygen these trees give us.

I fear that most children's connection to place will look like a strip mall. That seems to be the paradigm set up for us born in the 80's. In a country where if one is to succeed one is supposed to move anywhere one can find a job and keep moving for work. In this way of life strip malls do look like the closest thing to familiar territory.

In 2012 I want to make a difference. I want to live more by my values and teach them to my child and to other peoples kids. I want to join the Sustainable Food Center of Austin and volunteer to teach organic gardening to children. I want to figure out how to save rain water at my house and use the extra water from my shower to flush the toilet. I want to teach people to see water as a precious resource. I want to build clothes drying racks for people to use instead of dryers. I have always had these values but I see this year as a call to action. I am becoming a part of the adult community of my generation, it is time to live life with the intention I want to see the human race heading in.

This is what I want for 2012, what about you?

On Co-Habitating

Seeking Family Style Home Share

We are a family of three with a wonderful 15 month old looking for awesome people to share a house with. We would like to rent a house in central Austin or join your home. We would ideally like a house with a big backyard, close to a park and has two bedrooms for us. Here is a little description of our family. We are fun, optimistic, and easy going people who mostly do not drink and no smoking. We are super kid friendly, like animals (we have 1 cat) and like creating a cozy home. We enjoy a party but mostly like staying in and watching movies. We are eco conscience and are interested in making a sustainable green house that includes growing some of our food, compost, keeping chickens, buying organic food when possible and eco cleaning products. We like adventures, biking, exploring new neighborhoods and ethnic markets. We are upfront, direct people who thrive on open dialogue and sharing feelings. We are not interested in passive aggressive communication. We have both lived in communal living situations and know how to share chores and work out problems collectively. We like things tidy but are not neat freaks and we eat meat as well as vegetables. Queer friendly. If you are a small family, couple, single parent or kid friendly person and this sounds good to you please contact us. We are looking to move around March 1st.

Daddy and I are thinking about joining in the labor of love that is co-habitation. I just wrote this ad for Craigslist and will send it off this week. I am both excited and nostalgic for all the communal living I have done in my life. The thought of co-habitating meshes with my moral principals as well. It is definitely more environmentally sustainable for folks to live together instead of in individual houses. It is a direct stab at isolation to live with other people especially as a parent, I would love to have housemates to talk to on my long, home word bound, days with my daughter. It is also way more affordable for us to share the bills and rent of a home with other people.

My experience with communal living has been vast and long. I figured out how to happily live with others as a young single woman, I wonder what will be different trying it with my child and partner? I see the difference in being pickier about the folks I live with. I will be looking for people that I actually want my daughter to be connected to as well as me. I want people my partner will get along with and be able to confront in hard situations. I know these folks exist in Austin, I hope they read our ad. We set up collective style situations wherever we have lived. With our neighbor’s in Olympia we shared baking ingredients and their BBQ. We traded our chicken’s eggs for watching the chix and our cat when we went away on trips. In our new duplex we share Internet and occasional childcare with our duplex mate. Daddy and I are communal people; we are actively spreading that value to Sweetpea by making this lifestyle shift.

A Life Story Told Through Co-Habitation

In my young adult life I have lived collectively in 8 different situations. It all started with my parent’s house that I moved out of at age 18. Most of my childhood I remember professing I wanted to live alone in an apartment in New York City and get all my house ware from Pier One Imports store.

This dream bubble helped when I had to share a small house with my brothers and all their friends and mostly wanted a place where I got to actually take up space. Through a series of events including a sense of adventure and falling in love, I headed for the Northwest to check it out for a little while.

My first collective house where I paid rent was with a sassy & sweet older, working class, lesbian and a younger, Minnesotan, hippie lesbian, in the Central district of Seattle. Our house was lavender and on the side of a hill. My older housemate watched kids upstairs during the week and I had a basement apartment. I heard the trampling of little feet over my head as I crafted my next artistic project. I started work at a pre-school while living there and would come home exhausted and fall asleep on the couch amongst the squealing 2 year olds waiting to be picked up from their parents. I lived in that house for 2 1/2 years, sublet my room to friends when I went on vacation, and lived through 2 housemates beside the Minnesotan. One was a thieving performance artist who only lasted two months and the other was a sweet, Irish, rock climber from upstate New York with the middle name Clover.

I decided to move out when I wanted to go travel and be gone for an unknown amount of time. I boarded a plane in June to Greece via Italy and did not see the gray shores of the Long Island sound again until that September of 2001 a few weeks after the world trade towers fell. After a brief stint back East with my family during that scary time I decided to head out West again to continue my life in Seattle.

I moved back right when my best friend was about to leave for a trip to India and Thailand and would not be back for several months. We shared a room at a collective punk house called "Spokanarchy" for one month before she left. The house was technically a 5-bedroom house that we made into a 12 person living situation complete with folks living in closets and cubbyholes in the attic. You were lucky if you found one clean dish a day in the house. There were often bags of half rotten vegetables on the floor from dumpster diving the night before and huge political discussions happening daily on the large, moldy, couches in the living room. It was a perfect place to start out communal living again. It was temporary, alive and politically passionate, the way I felt at the time.

I was still interested in being an artist and was really looking for a space to make my work. This could not happen at “Spokanarchy,” a house named for the majority of anarchists from Spokane that founded the house. One evening at the arts walk in downtown Seattle I happened upon a rag tag bunch of artists, with brightly dyed hair, sharing their work on the brick streets of Pioneer Square. One of them was a lady with bright blue hair, I thought was awful cute, who knew my best friend at the time. She took us back to her loft, an old rubber stamp factory with a whole wall of old windows overlooking downtown Seattle's International District. After talking with Blue Hair for several hours, staring out at the skyline of our pretty city, I was hooked in more ways then one. Blue Hair and I started dating and I soon moved in down the hall in my own loft with her best friend and one of my good friends.

The romance of living in a loft was cut short by the intensity of being their day-to-day, sharing one large room with 2 other people. There was no running water in the place; we did our dishes in the hallway, a drying rack full of paintbrushes and sweet potato encrusted pans. We ate a lot of Ramen and whatever we could find for cheap at the giant, Asian, markets in our neighborhood. I created wood and photo collages and sold them on the street. I was a part of performance pieces and had spontaneous singing sessions down the halls of that crazy place. I slept in a tent in the middle of the room and tried to be quiet with my new sweetheart (Blue Hair) as we stayed up into the wee hours of the night getting to know each other s bodies.

It was a wild time that came to a crashing end as my roommates and I realized this was not working for us. I moved in down the hall temporarily with my sweetheart and ended up living with her for the next 3 years. In the new loft we tried to make a happy living situation. We called our place the overpriced squat; we would pay insanely high bills trying to heat the place with little electric heaters. We had a huge loft built inside the bigger space for sleeping. It was really glorified bunk beds. We moved in my best friend, her partner and we were always looking for the 5th roommate to make it all affordable.

Who would want to live with two couples in glorified bunk beds in a freezing cold loft trying to make art in-between dealing with day to day living rituals? Well, you should have seen the view. The romance of the place just made people think they could handle it. My best friend and I had a garden in a pea patch, community garden, up on a hill a few blocks from the loft. This was our tiny green oasis in the downtown concrete jungle. Did I mention the crazy coke parties my landlord held who lived next door to us? Or the downstairs neighbor who blared her television, would get high on meth and start banging a broom on the ceiling telling us to quiet the f*&%k down or she would come up there and shoot us?

At some point we had enough and my sweet heart and I decided to get a two-bedroom apartment in the heart of the Central District. The place looked perfect, affordable, clean, and quiet, less drama. That is before we realized after moving in we lived next door to a crack house. The nightly commotion out one of our bedroom windows was a real nightmare. People screaming, strung out, prostitution, drugs and violence held that place together. We liked our apartment but got tired of the drama and feeling of being unsafe in our home. We started scheming for a trip together. We wanted to go to Ecuador and knew we needed to live cheaper in order to make that happen.

We moved a bit south of the drug, apartment, complex to a neighborhood with kids, and into a collective queer house called the "Sweet Potato Shack." There was a huge sycamore in the yard and a big garden started by our new sweet housemates. The feeling was warm and inviting, we shared a room off the kitchen, it all seemed to work out nicely. We were saving money, had a nice, mostly clean house with folks that cared about politics and art. I started photography school again, which was an easy bus or bike ride from the house. We started to make the preparations for our big trip.

"The Sweet Potato Shack" was a really eclectic house. My one housemate that played the viola gave lessons out of her bedroom, she also would make crepes and scones for everyone in the early mornings. There was a huge tangle of houseplants that blanketed the front windows of our living room. Unfortunately we never could arrange to garden together, so the two that started the garden ended up doing the most work. I only remember weeding once but often helped with watering. I left my cat with these housemates when we left for Ecuador planning to return back in a few months.

After we got back from Ecuador, my sweat heart and I started to break up and life fell into chaos. We tried living on the East coast for a little while before our break up but soon realized all the resources we had built in our young adult lives were back in Seattle. We boarded a plan and headed for the wild Northwest again. The break up was gradual, and we decided to not live together anymore once we returned. My good friend had a room in a big old, bright, blue, house on top of a hill and there was an opening for one of their tiny rooms.

The room had a buckled floor, was only a little bit bigger then a closet and had a floor to ceiling window facing a parking lot. It was $425 a month for everything, all bills, including phone. I took it. My friend lived in the best room in the house that was almost the size of an apartment. She often slept in my little closet room saying, “it was more comfortable then her place.” She was quirky like that. She would make a huge mess in that big, beautiful room and then stay in my room for days on end instead of cleaning it.

I was living with men and straight folks again which actually felt like a welcome break from all the queer, women centered houses I had lived in thus far. I wanted a different feel from the circles I was used to running in.

“The Big Blue House” was not communal. It worked out because, folks were clean, mostly quiet and I had a good friend down the hall to snuggle up with and grieve over my failed relationship. She had also had recent heart break. We were each other’s rocks. I ended up living in that house for 2 years, working down the street, saving money and studying to get into college. The house did get more communal as the years progressed. New folks moved in, one awesome guy from Minnesota who wanted to have potlucks every Thursday and the tradition still lives on in the house to the present. My good friend moved out and I moved down the hall to a room with floor to ceiling windows facing a giant apple tree in blossom. The blooms were amazing and I would sit on a pillow by the window for hours in reverence. We also planted a huge Garden of Eden next to the parking lot and had bushels of abundance one season.

My final cooperative living was in Olympia WA, where I moved to go to college. My best friend, the one that got me to move to the NW in the first place, decided to go to college with me so we both moved to Olympia and into “Terra Down.” This house was an old, green rickety home on the down of a hill. We moved in with a new housemate and three cats. “Terra Down” had one of those gorgeous claw foot bathtubs in the upstairs, the perfect remedy for student stress. The kitchen was huge and painted a fantastical crayon box mix of colors by ancient housemates past. The house was a queer women’s space, which I was ready to be around after two years without. We had our dramas and our strife, fighting to make it work and stay close. We all were involved in peer counseling and this made our friendships adhere longer. Unfortunately we were all busy students and sometimes the house was a second thought to mountains of homework and school activities.

After three years in Olympia I found the love of my life and after a year and a half of togetherness we decided to move in together. At first we wanted a housemate too but we couldn’t get my best friend to move in. We couldn’t think of anyone we both deemed the right person, so we just moved in together. We started a beautiful home, all painted walls, chickens in the back and a studio attic space for me to create in. The rent was just right for us and we were in a new neighborhood to give our small, college, town a fresh perspective. I was on top of a hill again and living with my love.

Through a series of simple twists of fate we decided to commit to each other and soon after had Sweetpea come along. With all this transition and a whole new little person to join us, two becoming three, we decided we were ready for a life style change. I had some karmic, unfinished, business and some historical, place based, artwork to do in Texas. We had a brother here, multiple cousins, aunts and uncles, and loving grand parents just a state a way. Grand parents that agreed that if we moved, they would visit every month we were here. This and a new job for my dear daddy sent us packing for Austin TX where we have landed today.

Our first place has been a sweet, small, community of duplexes in central Austin. We like the people and the location but the rent and bills are to high and we miss having a yard to grow things in. We are ready to start anew and make collective living a part of my family’s life together. Wish us luck.