Getting to know you weirdos meme

[attackfish]

Ganked without attribution from people on other people's f-lists

I know very little about some of the people on my friends list. Some people I know relatively well. But here's a thought: why not take this opportunity to tell me a little something about yourself. Any old thing at all. Just so the next time I see your name I can say: "Ah, there's Parker ...she likes money and cereal." I'd love it if everyone who's friended me did this. (Yes, even you people who I know really well.) Then post this in your own journal [only if you feel inclined]. In return, ask me anything you'd like to know about me and I'll give you an answer*.

*Providing it's answerable/suitable for public posting.

Comments

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

I'm back again! Next time I decide to do something stupid like pinch hit, smack me and set me right.

I can't really point to any one work that I can look at and say this is what gives me the impression that society still treats marriage and motherhood as the end of a girl's story. Some of it has to do with our still very powerful "wedding as the most important day ever for a woman" we have especially in the states, with all the wedding based reality shows, and the way it is portrayed so clearly as the bride's day, etc. combined with the lack of representation of married women in action roles. In a cop drama, if there's a married character with a family, it's almost never a woman, for example, that gives me the impression. It's a pattern rather than any one work that declares it.

I don't think it's really a YA thing, (though I have seen some veeeeeery odd incarnations of this in YA, such as one series where the character has a daughter, and suddenly, the next book takes place fifteen years in the future and is all about her and her romantic prospects, and I'm like wait, didn't we leave mommy behind in a zombie apocalypse?) Marriage isn't all that common a theme in YA, and when it does show up, it's mostly a signifier for adulthood, which by its nature puts an end to a coming of age story. Motherhood would have to entail teen motherhood, and that brings its own storytelling problems. Though, there is an absence of mothers in general in YA. Along with a whole lot of orphans, most of the characters with only one parent killed off are missing their mothers, and if the mother is alive, she's usually absent.

It's not that I don't appreciate that being a mother is time consuming, and that doing heroic things takes you away from your kids. That's a given, and needs to be addressed when a mother does heroic things. However, I've noticed that there seem to be quite a few more fathers in fiction doing heroic things (the number of father/son teams in action movies, fathers acting on vengeance for dead wives and children, fathers rescuing their children in peril, or in older fantasy novels, fathers going off journeying) than there are mothers. I think that this has to do with two things, the construction of girlhood verses womanhood (girlhood, you can have adventures, womanhood you can't, marriage and motherhood breaks girlhood from womanhood) and also that society is way less comfortable with the concept of an absent mother as a hero than an absent father. A father can go off and do things without being seen as a bad parent in the same way a mother would, and thus lose audience sympathy.

Belle Prater's Boy is now definitely on my list.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Ooh, pinch-hitting, that's never a good gig. Congrats for successfully finishing it, though!

Some of it has to do with our still very powerful "wedding as the most important day ever for a woman" we have especially in the states

It's the same in Korea. I really had to tune up my bullshit tolerance for my own wedding. I wasn't comfortable with the way I was on center stage, either, because hello, I'm not going to be a different person tomorrow, everyone!

That reminds me of a Mormon joke vmuzic told me. A bride upon her marriage told her mother, "I've reached the end of all my troubles." Said her mother, "You're right. You just don't know which end." Marriage is the beginning of a whole new story, not the end of the woman's story, and you're right that too many people disregard that in seeing it as an end point, a goal. I think this view of marriage is actively unhealthy, because too many women think like the bride in the joke, that once they're married that's it and everything will work itself out, no more work required. UGH NO. Is it any wonder so many people grow disenchanted so quickly once they're actually married? Unrealistic expectations are a bitch.

most of the characters with only one parent killed off are missing their mothers, and if the mother is alive, she's usually absent.

This is actually a big thing with fantasy, including the Abhorsen Trilogy. Both Sabriel's and Lirael's mothers are dead, though they play some small supporting roles. In the case of Lirael's mother, her role for the story seems to begin and end with the decision to follow her vision and conceive Lirael, thus carrying on the paternal Abhorsen heritage. (Not saying the office of the Abhorsen is only passed on through the father's line, since everyone assumed Sabriel's son was the next Abhorsen, but that's how it happens within the events of the trilogy.) It's interesting how Sabriel won't be passing on that part of her inheritance to either of her children. Instead the next Abhorsen is Lirael, who got it directly from their father and won't be taking on any of her maternal lineage as a Clayr. Sabriel and Lirael's mom were both effectively vessels to carry on the bloodlines of elite men, when you think about it.

In fact the whole Abhorsen series is an intriguing example of power conferred by bloodline, a major theme in fantasy, which brings up larger issues of what heroism means in terms of privilege. Thanks to this discussion an essay is percolating in my brain examining the meaning of heroism.

doing heroic things takes you away from your kids. That's a given, and needs to be addressed when a mother does heroic things.

the construction of girlhood verses womanhood (girlhood, you can have adventures, womanhood you can't, marriage and motherhood breaks girlhood from womanhood)

I wonder if that's a function of the stories we choose to tell rather than the relationship between motherhood and heroism. Is it better to have adventures than to raise kids? In fact in real life most people would rather spend time with their kids and spouses than go to war or otherwise risk their lives. A spouse's unwillingness to spend time with family, whether that spouse is male or female, often breaks up marriages. Aren't we falling for a very specific view of heroism, or what's "better" or worth a story, when we're putting an arbitrary division between peaceful life and heroism?

A father can go off and do things without being seen as a bad parent in the same way a mother would, and thus lose audience sympathy.

That's very true, we have a double standard for mothers and fathers. To me this seems a case of sexism hurting men as well as women, though. A man who is absent from family life may have freedom, but freedom at what cost? What happens after the accolades fade if he's alone without emotional support, especially since realistically he's likely to be traumatized from the brutal action he's seen? If heroism for violent action really were enough to prop up a life, the United States alone wouldn't have more than 300K veterans sleeping on the streets on any given night.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Comment cut in half due to length. Second half is below.

Not my brightest move, but oh well. It's all done now.

And there's the tremendous pressure to have your wedding be perfect, which you just don't have if you aren't expecting the wedding to be The Most Important Day Of Your Life. My mom and dad, who were both on their second marriage, had a lovely wedding because they didn't really worry about everything being just so. Mom bought a pretty white sun dress, Dad wore a nice suit, and they were married by my maternal grandmother, who was a notary, and in Florida at the time, notaries could officiate at weddings. They held the ceremony in Grammy's backyard, and then my uncles threw my dad into the pool. We have the greatest picture of my soaking wet dad and my mom trying to cut the cake, with my brother and cousins all stealing fingerfuls of icing. They've been married almost thirty years now.

And of course, you expect that everything will be different after The Most Important Day Of Your Life, but after you're married, you still gotta go on with the business of living. You're right. The end of troubles ideal is deeply toxic.

Sabriel and Lirael's mom were both effectively vessels to carry on the bloodlines of elite men, when you think about it.

Yeah, and it's all the more jarring because it's shown as unusual for the Clayr. Usually it doesn't matter at all who a Clayr's father is.

Aaaaand because I'm me, I went back and read the TV Tropes Never A Self-Made Woman page and got myself caught there for about a half an hour (could be worse). This is part of what the whole princess mystique feeds into, I think. A princess is the ultimate expression (usually) of someone who has power through her connection to a man, father or husband. And it's something I've been extremely aware of in the writing of my current novel. The main character is a princess, but she's a princess because her mother's a princess. Her father's a swordsmith. He made her sword, but her mother taught her how to use it. Her mother is also a main character.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

In fact the whole Abhorsen series is an intriguing example of power conferred by bloodline, a major theme in fantasy, which brings up larger issues of what heroism means in terms of privilege. Thanks to this discussion an essay is percolating in my brain examining the meaning of heroism.

This is something else I'm playing with in the same story. At the end of the first book, My main character wins back the country that she is the Rightful Ruler of. Things get interesting from there.

I wonder if that's a function of the stories we choose to tell rather than the relationship between motherhood and heroism. Is it better to have adventures than to raise kids?

This is part of it, but to an extent, it's a natural divide. Domesticity rarely has a beginning and an end the way stories usually do. "A woman's work is never done," as it were. Also, heroism is often pretty reluctant in a story. Yes, I'm going to fight you, but only because you attacked my family or kidnapped my child. That seems like a perfectly legitimate reason for a mother to go charging off to fight the enemy, yet the heroes in those stories are usually the fathers. The hero or heroine in such a story could easily be the kind of person who usually spends their time with the kids changing diapers and helping with homework.

My mother got a lot of crap for working when she had to disabled kids, even though she was working so she could get us health insurance. It also, and she does not deny this, gave her a break from us, and since we really put her through the ringer... Dad, who spent a lot of time with us, since he worked days and Mom worked nights, was treated as an unacceptable substitute by a lot of people. "Yeah, their dad's home, but he's not a mom. For some reason, he was seen as some kind of adjunct to the family instead of part of it, because he was a man.

What happens after the accolades fade if he's alone without emotional support, especially since realistically he's likely to be traumatized from the brutal action he's seen?

Along with not wanting to deal with domesticity, we don't like to look much at the after affects of war, which extends to real life, at least in The States. Those 300 thousand vets aren't real heroes, you see. If they were, they wouldn't need help. They're just malingerers. It's definitely a case of patriarchy hurting men too. Real men don't get traumatized.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Pssht, half an hour on TV Tropes is nothing. I've spent whole days there at a time. (Must... not... return...)

I agree with some of your points and disagree with others, and expanded my thought-bubbles from this discussion into an essay-length musing on my LJ.

I recently read this excellent piece on Mother Jones http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/ptsd-epidemic-military-vets-families that included a brief history of PTSD, including an episode where Patton slapped a soldier who was recovering from "nerves" and called him a coward. At least people don't tend to be so out-and-out assholish these days, but a lot of people are still afraid to face and accept the reality of it. Though that's true of most mental illness, depressingly enough. (u c whut i did thar?)

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Lol. I realized when I somehow ended up reading about the slenderman mythos that TV Tropes had gotten me again.

I know. For some reason, LJ decided to send me multiple notifications that you had linked to me. I would delete them, and a whole bunch more would show up in my inbox. *shakes head* Anyway, I've been thinking, we do need to tell more feminine narratives (because the patriarchy doesn't just disdain the female, but the feminine) but what we need isn't just more traditionally feminine narratives of heroism with women at the center to balance out the traditionally masculine ones with men at the center, but instead people of all genders in all narratives.

Making this more complicated is the way that genre works in it's current form. There are narratives of domestic heroism, but they're usually not fantasy or sci fi. Part of the appeal for a lot of people in fantasy is the same as the appeal of cop shows. Good and evil are often clearly laid out. It's very clean in a way that real world war and crime isn't, and domesticity can't be. Also, domestic heroism with supernatural elements is often labelled horror, not fantasy.

Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone deciding that they are ill suited to a type of heroism. For example, I would make a godawful diplomat, and there are wonderful, tremendously loyal, heroic people in my family that we are all grateful they never became parents. In other words, when it's time to lay down the sword, it's time to look not only for difference ways to sacrifice, but different ways you personally can sacrifice. Or, it would not have made Eowyn any less heroic to me if after the war, she had said "I hate this, I'm miserable taking care of children, and I'm not serving them well, and if I keep doing it, I'll burn out. I need to find another way to serve. Not that those would have made her moreheroic either.

As for the article: I'm not at all surprised that secondary trauma occurs. Not in the least.

"Somebody at the VA told me,'Kids in Congo and Uganda don't have PTSD,'" Caleb tells me angrily one day.

What the fuck! Of course they do, holy shit! That's the psychiatric equivalent of "They're stronger than us. They don't need clean water and good food."

I've written before about our reluctance to deal with the aftereffects of war and violence in an essay I wrote about disability and fantasy, and the way we still treat people with PTSD or disabled vets is a symptom of this. The dead are dead. We can pin any stories we want on them, or forget them. It's the living, the families of the dead, the walking wounded and the permanently disabled that force us to remember there are consequences to war and violence. They rub our noses in it just by being there.

I have PTSD from being stalked twice. I've also managed to give PTSD to my mother, along with my brother, due to the terror that having her children have chronic episodic potentially deadly illnesses gave her. There are so few resources and so little acknowledgement of the toll caretaking takes, and how much trauma it can cause. That might have a whole lot to do with secondary trauma, especially for spouses.

Speaking of horror, The Exorcist and other stories of supernaturally afflicted children really do capture a lot of the real terror of caring for a sick kid when you don't know what's wrong, far better than any popular so-called realistic portrayal I've seen.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Ugh, LJ fail. I wondered as I wrote the essay whether the whole thing is about me checking myself out of the genre more than anything else. I love the potential of fantasy and a lot of fantasy works, but I also feel like I've matured out of most of it. That makes it harder and harder to find good stuff to read in a genre that seems to cater to younger and less critical readers, especially with the huge popularity of YA.

There are absolutely many different kinds of heroism, and it's a great injustice when groups of people are locked out of aspects of it, e.g. women being seen to be bad mothers--including, too often, by themselves--when they're working to provide for the family, or men like your dad being seen as inadequate nurturers. (The Doofus Dad stereotype needs to die in a fire.) It's the work of both fiction and activism, I think, to recognize and celebrate the huge variety of heroism out there and the huge variety of people being awesome.

Ugh yeah, the stupid in that comment you quoted made me haz a sad. PTSD in situations of deprivation or conflict might possibly be less problematic than in first-world countries, since a deprived or dangerous environments may call for heightened alertness and aggressiveness. In that case PTSD could actually be beneficial to survival, if no less painful. I hope that's what the VA person was clumsily trying to say, because otherwise the level of ignorance is just staggering.

Victim-blaming is supposed to be a defense mechanism to the fear that bad things can happen to you for reasons outside your control. PTSD sufferers seem to up there with rape victims on the long list of "people to scapegoat in order to deny it could ever happen to me." If only she weren't so promiscuous and didn't wear such short skirts (because I'm not That Kind of Girl), if only he were tough enough to snap out of it (because I'm not a wimp), and so on and so on.

You know, outside of being in personally dangerous situations like war and crime, it seems the most likely way to get PTSD is by helping people. Caregiving, as in your mother's case and as with military spouses, is surprisingly hazardous, and reporters and humanitarian workers also suffer trauma from the things they've witnessed. It's another aspect of the service and sacrifice involved in heroism (of all kinds) that you put not only your life, body, time, and future but also your mind on the line when you care enough to extend yourself for other people.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

The thing about Fantasy was that there was a time when most of the really emotionally mature Fantasy was being written with the YA label, and the Adult Fantasy publishers were giving us things like Robert Jordan, all adolescent male fantasy (small f). Now that YA is becoming popular, it's mostly adolescent female fantasy, and I'm left picking through, desperately seeking the good stuff.

God, the Doofus Dad. My dad's an absentminded professor type, and can't cook, and there was a lot of "what do you expect from a man?" jokes. What?

I hope to God you're right about what the VA person meant, because otherwise, I can't deal with the stupid. And it is true that while I was being stalked, I didn't recognize my symptoms as PTSD because I was too busy using them. Hypervigilance was necessary, not maladaptive, and while I was in survival mode, I was too terrified to realize how traumatized I was. So in a place like the Congo, PTSD would be serving its original evolutionary purpose. Which is, um, horrifying on an entirely different level, I suppose.

It gets even more ridiculous when people start victim-blaming for inherited illnesses. Obviously my genetic disease wasn't real and I was just sick because my parents were bad, or because I was a bad kid or something. Yeah, I don't even know. The Just World fallacy is really pernicious.

There's a reason why therapists who treat depression have staggeringly high rates of suicide, and I don't think there really is anything much more traumatic than watching somebody close to you hurt and almost die over and over again and being unable to do anything about it. And I say that as the person who was almost dying on a regular basis. *shakes head* Caregiving is also tremendously devalued in many societies, so how dare we allege that it is grueling and potentially as traumatizing as war? And then there's more victim blaming. "If you really loved your parent/spouse/child/whatever it wouldn't be a burden" bullshit.

[lalunatique.livejournal.com]

Obviously my genetic disease wasn't real and I was just sick because my parents were bad, or because I was a bad kid or something.

That reminds me of John 9 ( http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+9&version=NIV ), where Jesus's disciples asked him whether a man blind from birth was blind because of his sins or his parents'. Jesus replied it was so the works of God could be shown through him, then promptly cured his blindness 'cause that's how the Jeez rolls, yo.

Though I'm not a Christian anymore, this chapter still resonates with me not because of the whole magical healing aspect (which I've never taken literally, not even back when I went to church) but because of the message that a person's inborn harships are not a punishment but a potential for greatness and meaning.

That's what the spiritual agnostic, or more accurately lover of story, in me says anyway. The rational and scientific part of me says it's just random chance and could just as well be anyone or their loved one so shut the fuck up you science-ignoring ignorant ignoramuses.

Evidently the rational part of me has a bit of a temper. And a low tolerance for stupidity.

"If you really loved your parent/spouse/child/whatever it wouldn't be a burden" bullshit.

I hope for the sake of their souls that those horribly hurtful words were a misguided and ignorant attempt to get her spirits up. Which makes it no less wrong, just helps me feel less stabby.

It's all the more wrong because the barest glimmer of common sense should tell anyone that love makes it harder, not easier, to watch loved ones suffer and fear constantly for their safety. In my planned essay about Eowyn facing down the Nazgul as a metaphor for caregiving (your sharing your mother's story gave me the impetus to write it--you're making me all kinds of productive here), the title is in fact "Love as a Battle" and the argument is that love is the risk Eowyn is taking in that scene. The Witch-King's threat is specifically that he will not kill Eowyn, just Theoden. Surviving a loved one after pouring one's time, energy, and spirit into their care really is the kind of spiritual flaying and eternal torment that the Nazgul promises her, one that Eowyn can walk away from by not committing to protect and care for for her uncle.

She refuses to do so because she knows her spirit is stronger than any torments Mordor can threaten: Yes, the loss is hard and it will never really end, and yes, maybe she can cut her losses by refusing to commit herself completely to this difficult and terrifying process. She knows that it will be a compromise of herself to give anything less than her entire self, though, and though others will be completely understanding of her choice she could never forgive herself.

It's also significant that the prophecy set things up so that the Witch-King would be afraid of a woman but not a man. (I also read a humorous fanfic that pointed out that hobbits, Dwarves, Elves, Ents, Gandalf, etc. etc. are also not Men. I really should hunt down the link for the essay.) Caregiving has been primarily, though far from exclusively, a woman's domain, and it makes sense that the Nazgul as a sickness that inflicts the mind should fear a woman. He had even better reason to fear this particular woman who had been caring for her ailing uncle for years, something that may have given her the courage to look unblinking into the eyes of fear itself.

I'd like to dedicate the essay to your mother when I write it, would that be okay? If you'd like I could send the draft to you first to make sure I didn't misrepresent anything or accidentally share details you wouldn't want me to, though I don't think I know anything more than what you shared on LJ.

[attackfish.livejournal.com]

Livejournal doesn't like biblegateway. This got caught in my spam filter. Thanks for the quote. I bet I can use this when people get all obnoxiously Calvinist in their whole "God rewards the righteous, and if you were a better person, you wouldn't suffer so." Course, they're usually so freaked out by a Jew quoting their scripture at them that they don't pay attention to the scripture I quote.

I personally think to be rational in this world is to be pissed off.

I hope for the sake of their souls that those horribly hurtful words were a misguided and ignorant attempt to get her spirits up.

Mom usually heard it from people who were trying to guilt her into not asking for help, because in the insane troll logic universe they claimed we lived in, if she really loved her kids, she wouldn't need any help. It was just one more justification they used to abdicate any responsibility.

The thing is, I've never been the caretaker for another human being, and I have only second hand experience with my mother's difficulties caring for myself and my brother, but I have nursed quite a few animals through long term and terminal illnesses (it comes with having seven birds and eleven dogs) I have lost birds that for more than a year before they died, I had to hand feed every day. I've lost dogs that I've had since I was a little girl, and who when the medication was no longer able to deal with the pain, I had to decide to put to sleep.I've taken care of a dog who had to be held up while he peed, had to have his bowl held up to him when he ate, who had to relearn how to walk, and who was terrified of me, because he had been abused. If I didn't love them, it wouldn't hurt. I wouldn't spend every waking (and a lot of unwaking, I tend to dream about my charges dying, and I know Mom did too) moment worrying, and running over and over every possible thing I could do to make it a little better. How would love possibly make it easier? It makes you do it, but it makes it so much harder.

Oddly enough, one of my White Lotus fics (I figure this is far down enough in the thread that no one is going to casually run across this) has as one of its themes that trust isn't about truth and belief but about giving somebody the power to hurt you, and the difference between love and trust. So this has been, from a completely different angle, on my mind lately. I'm really interested in reading your essay, and I'm really flattered you would want to dedicate it to my mother. She's actually a huge LotR fan, and Eowyn is one of her favorite characters. The idea of "love as a battle" in caregiving is really fitting. When you're caring for someone, and everything is going wrong, and you're terrified they're not going to make it, you face down the world, fate, death, darkness and pain, even God to say no, you will not win. And sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes, not often, it does.