#2: A smacking

Today, a reprieve-from-parenting poem. Though you are always parenting, whether writing poetry or missing your long estranged sons. In that sense there is no reprieve, even if they leave this world. You will be their parent until the day you die, hopefully long before they do. 

Still, you can and must lean out of the parenting world, especially if they are estranged, and lean into your own creativity and personal journey, for want of a better phrase. Tonight (Wednesday) I am leaning in to poetry...

A smacking

I love the lapping of the flames,

the crackle, a smacking of lips.

The wood so hot it burns enthusiastic

I love the cat, classic on the lap

coiled and mottled soft,

listening to the fire

I love the room, four walls plus anti-chamber                     

lead-light lanterns and Turkish rug,

two guitars, three chairs and a jug

I love the warmth, melting my muscles

soothing the cold out of its stiffness,

the silence out of its stillness

I love the man, Wordling on his phone,

stoking the fire with primal deft,

reading Sam Neil

I love the night garden beyond

lit in yellow here and there,

a leaf, a sturdy flower, a stare

I love the squabs wall to wall,

an invitation to flop,

to spread yourself out. To stop.

I love the children on the walls,

smiling...

 

#1: Sugar kills sperm

Welcome to the inaugural "'Dead' Parents Society" blog, a blog dedicated to my reflections as a long estranged mother of two sons now 30 and 24, and more recently one daughter (28) on child estrangement, the experience, the studies and some thoughts on what's to be done to lessen the pain and bring about change... I'm a parent poet and I don't know it - perhaps that's the problem...

Our parenting experience beyond our marriage (when I was 21) began with infertility. For three and a half years we tried and failed to make a baby. Many things were wrong the specialists told us. My husband's sperm had motility and quantity issues. My fertility was fine but not bursting, they said, considering I was only 23-6 yrs old. 

However they were wrong. My husband's sperm at a later test was found to be much more motile and the count average. And I was about to be retested when we had to move cities and decided not to pursue that. Instead I read up on male infertility and eventually came across the claim that 'sugar kills sperm.' As I was a crazy sugar-obsessed bulimic at the time I knew on the spot that no matter how much of my sugar binges I got rid of there must be enough sugar in my system to be killing or at least dizzying my husband's sperm. I gave up sugar and binging that was boring without it and three months later, the recommended detox period, I had conceived our first son.

Our three, circa 2001

We got lucky. Because none of the fertility experts we consulted or books read had thought to ask about my diet and I was such a compulsive bulimic still recovering from my years of obsessive ballet dieting, that if not for wanting to make a baby so bad I would never have been able to kick my sugar habit. So we got lucky when I came across that strange piece of information while researching, as it happens, for a university essay I was writing on eating disorders.

But as it turned out, that was the easiest part of parenting. The rest of it was one challenge after the next, relieved by much joy and parental pride and fun, but all culminating in the abrupt and brutal total estrangement of that son and his five-years-younger brother and partially his younger sister too. 

What went wrong? Well everything and nothing, really. That's what this blog is going to be about, reflecting on the whys and wherefores of child estrangement through my personal experience as well as some study of the estrangement phenomenon that one expert has recently described as 'the silent epidemic.' Certainly we are far from the only parents to have been thrust into this state of limbo and longing for our children, and to the point that it does feel a little like a death. As if we are only half alive while waiting to see if our children ever come back to us. 

But at the same time the four to five years since the boys' estrangement have been energised by a sense of life is short and there are things to do, by wanting to live as long as possible and keep fit to be there for them if and when they do change their minds and want to get in contact. One feels more alive too somehow. It's a strange business all up.

But that is enough on it for now. My hernia is playing up after our fish and salad dinner. I need a quick walk and a stretch to relieve the trapped gas. I'm healthy and fit but middle-aged and menopausal. That's the deal.

Hope there might be something here for other estranged parents out there to feel supported and free to share their experiences in the comments. I'll do my best to moderate and respond.

Sacha the sperm killer

#2 How to argue with a rainbow

It's not easy to argue with a rainbow, as I found out recently when I attended Posie Parker's 'Let Women Speak' rally in Auckland on the 25th of March with the hope of hearing her speak about the dangers of trans ideology for women and children and, if I could, to argue my own case for discussing, in civilised terms, how the claims of TQ+ activists, who now run the rainbow, might be fairly reconciled with the the rights claims of biological women that are being thrown under the bus by the TQ+. 

Protesters against the 'Let Women Speak' rally,
Auckland 25 March, 2023

But the rainbow did not want me or any other woman to speak that day, and ensured we didn't speak by making so much noise with blow horns, piercing whistles and mass chanting, then by breaking down the barriers separating them - more than a thousand angry and righteously energised, mostly young women and men - and us - barely one hundred brave, mostly older, not so energised, females. 

'NAZI' is one of the signs they held against us:

Marriage equality in Australia Nov 2017: Celebrated as
'The best thing that happened today' here as: 'The right to love' 

N for 'Nasty'

A for 'Angry' 

Z for 'Zealot'

I for 'Idiot'

Though they were the ones chanting hateful slogans at women just wanting to speak.

All the while they menaced and threatened us, shouting and shoving, while we waited for Posie to speak, then broke down the barriers and stormed her in their many hundreds, pushing forward to where she was in the rotunda until she and her security decided her safety was at risk and did their best, risking their lives, to get her out of the mob that were openly baying for her blood. The police stood by and did nothing. This image is of Kellie-Jay after she survived the baying mob, but only just. The police only turning up at the last minute. 

The rainbow that I heartily celebrated here in late 2017 with the above and other joyous images, after the Aussies finally granted their gay community the right to marry, is not the rainbow of today. No woman got punched in the eye by a man on that occasion, as one 70-year-old woman was punched, fracturing her eye socket, in Auckland 2023. Nor did any woman get tomato soup tipped on her head the second she arrived to speak about women's rights, or be made to feel genuine fear for her life for presuming to speak against trans extremism, as Kellie-Jay did in Auckland that day, as this image clearly shows. 

This new rainbow appropriates all the good will and gay pride of the old one to bash women, feminists in the main, and children's rights advocates, many of them lesbians, over the head with it, to weaponize the rainbow in what can only be called now, with 'trans women' (men) being the loudest, angriest leaders of the movement, a men's rights movement. It's a rainbow of rage, with a humongous pot of gold for the makers of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones at the end of it. It and they must be stopped, or all our rights will be washed away in the rain that that bow brings.  

Trans women are men

 

Sugar and Spite #1: Cake and estrangement

This is my new blog, 'Sugar and Spite'. I could change the url for this site too or start a new site, but for now I am keeping the old site and name. 

I have not run an active blog for years. But I used to be very blog active. For about seven years I regularly 'blogged', usually at some length. I guess I honed my craft that way. But I let the habit slide. 

Everything changes, however, and with all the 'gender' trans v. women politics taking off at the moment and me kind of right in the middle of it as a proud and out 'Terf', which really just means a real feminist, I just feel I must start talking about things with you again, and by 'talking' I mean of course writing, one of the old 'legacy media' forms.

I don't Twitter much but I Facebook probably too much. But I prefer the longer form of a blog if I can find the time.

The sugar is the fun, the memoir highlights, the gossip and the food, not least cake, that I will be discussing with you. Especially the food, as I have just submitted a 100,000+ words on diet and related challenges to Bloomsbury Books health imprint in the UK. Food and me go way back. I will reveal details of this project as we go along. I will probably have to self-publish. Perhaps I can do that here.

The spite of the title is all the less sweet bits of life, from the Terfery and politics more generally, to the spite that too many women have shown me over the years, to the spite my two sons (29 and 24) are currently showing me and their father by estranging from us more than four years ago now, without a word or even an image of communication from either of them since, neither of them being active on social media. 

It is also the spite I feel for them some of the time. I want to hurt them as they have hurt their father, who entirely doesn't deserve this treatment from his sons (I am a slightly different matter, which we will come to). 

Or perhaps 'spite' is not what I feel. Perhaps it is closer to resentment that I feel, mixed with anger, the most common of the emotions, for ripping our otherwise functional and even happy family apart. I have the photos to prove the happiness. 

They are much more angry than me but they got their anger from me, who got it from my father. I never expressed my anger physically, and my older son's anger against me was far louder and more spiteful. I never wanted to hurt either of them but it definitely felt that they wanted to hurt me. Of course they felt I had hurt them, and feel still. And I know I did. Just that it wasn't intentional and I was trying to help them, even if it didn't seem that way. 

I also love them of course, and I think I always will. But those other, less sweet emotions are there too and if they keep it up for many more years I think they will sour.

But for now that will have to do for my first Sugar and Spite. It's late-ish (8.15) and I need to do my after-dinner sprint walk before it gets too dark. It's part of my battle plan. 

Ciao, SJ  

 

Thick and twisted

 

thick, twisted trunks of time

compete for sweets

with timeless tweets

narrow-hipped cyclists

pedal careless confidence 

in the face of well-wheeled,

broader-hipped cars

green-red hedges clipped

thick and slick

stand solid, safe and proud

you want to take a loud bite,

leave your messy mark

on the narrow-hipped site

but you can’t afford another chip

Pink hair does not a woman make

Human females have a constitutional (disease-resistance) advantage over human males, an advantage that the Covid pandemic is appearing to prove , especially in older people but the advantage exists at all stages of life; while men have a structural strength advantage over women, an advantage that transwomen in female sports are consistently and increasingly showing up to everyone's ultimate cost. 

These differences are not political, they're poetical, if anything. We should each be playing to such strengths not denying and trying to battle them, as trans activism is increasingly doing. Mother Nature knew what she was doing in creating these strength differences that should ultimately be complimentary not combative. 

Sex 'transition' by all means, as far as you can, if you want to live the outward life of a person of the sex other than that of your birth sex (for 99.99% of humans at least), but accept that you will never be able to reproduce like a person of the other sex or to run or even walk or indeed to battle diseases, and many more things besides, like a person of the other sex. 

So don't expect to be a person of the other sex. It's never going to happen. And in reality, if it were possible, none of us would want it to be the case, as much of the charm and challenge of human interaction lies in these differences - and in the similarities - when interacting with people of the other/same birth-sex as our own. Vive la difference. 

Women and men are not meant to compete with each other in physical strength and endurance tests, only in intellectual and creative ones, the much more meaningful tests of our individual strengths and abilities anyway, tests for which we can appear however we choose to appear in body size, shape, dress and gender identity, without it affecting our chances, in fair intellectual and creative tests at least. 

Mother Nature knew what she was doing in creating our different strengths. We should listen to the Mother.  

https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/10/21/biological-male-wins-womens-cycling-world-championship/

Pink hair does not a woman make, rather a spoil sport. Man up, 'Rachel'. 

'Telling the [trans] truth is more important than being nice'

I used to think I was good at puzzles, being able to put the right pieces together in the right way at speed, but the issues arising in recent debates around trans rights and what it is to be a woman specifically that involve far more than 1,000 pieces, have tested the puzzler in me in new and disorienting ways, such that I don't know if I can claim to be 'good at' putting things together to make a coherent picture, fast or slow, anymore... 

Then a couple of mornings ago on Twitter one of my preferred commentators on the subject, Dr H Brunskell-Evans, a respected and trained social-political philosopher, posted this article from The Spectator that made me think that maybe I, who agreed entirely with its puzzling (analysis), have not lost my puzzling mojo altogether. The article challenged the BBC's reportage of 'a woman' found to have more than 80,000 images of child porn, including rape, on 'her' computer, when 'she' in fact had a man's body and had only 'identified' as a woman for a year. But the BBC saw fit not to mention these  details. 

I posted the article with this quote about truth being more important than being nice on Facebook and got only one 'like' other than my husband's. That's not particularly nice. And the truth, I suspect, is that my FB people are afraid of telling or endorsing the trans truth, namely that when we let men call themselves women and force authorities to do the same, all sorts of abuses of girls' and women's safety and freedom are likely to occur. 

The article also says that the police are yet to decide whether  thos paedophile should be sent to a female or a male prison. Really? Perhaps if he goes to a women's prison the women there can do his gender 'reassignment' surgery for him on the cheap, saving money on anaesthetic.

Then a couple of days ago, I read the article that includes the above image  raising concern about the increasing 'corporate colonisation of human sex' and the growing commercial industry around body mutilation, especially the double mastectomies performed on the perfectly healthy young breasts of women and girls who have questions about their gender and will be susceptible to persuasion by ads such as this, as all young and confused people are susceptible.  

The article claims, with good evidence, that the number of young women identifying as men has 'soared' in recent years in western cultures, with many choosing this drastic route of having elective breast amputations as well as skin grafts to create fake penises at a young age, and that the whole thing is being capitalised upon by the multi-billion dollar beauty and fashion industries and being sold to kids as trendy, while the media and Hollywood promote it as 'progressive.'

Call me old-fashion or much worse, as many have called Brunskell-Evans, but I think we have taken a wrong turn when we are celebrating people, probably men, making money off of young women cutting their boobs off, as well as letting men pass as women to better hide their paedophilic impulses and urges, and for better access to young women and girls in bathrooms and other public places, and we have done this and much more in the name of being 'nice' to gender confused people, we are the confused ones. And we are not nice.