Loving my Self From the Inside out

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One of the things I have been working on during the new year is loving myself more.

Not in “that” way, although that could be part of it.

What this has meant is confronting some of my blocks, patterns, and behaviors.

One thing I have been doing is getting better at expressing my needs and saying no. Sometimes this leads to arguments and there are some people that I have issues drawing boundaries with because of trauma and fear of violence. I am confronting relationships I pushed aside because of resentments and I am working on being clear in my current relationships. A work in progress but a work.

I have been paying attention to my voice – that running conversation I have with myself everytime I do something. My voice usually is telling me there is never enough time, I’m not educated enough, cute enough, worthy enough and a million and one other scripts it learned from not the easiest of childhoods/adulthoods. This voice has led me to do alot of shit half assed and not follow through. So I have been working on developing new scripts : telling myself that I do have enough time etc. and so on. And not to sound cheesy but it does help.
With some loving encouragement I submitted two fellowship applications based on a long history of media and mami worklife. Even if I don’t get the fellowships, the process of stepping back and looking at my lifework was extremely empowering and affirmative.
I’m ready to apply for another fellowship this week and even managed to draft a comprehensive outline for a dream book project that had been eluding me for years….YEARS.

I have been paying closer attention to what I put inside me. I’m not unhealthy but I have noticed that I eat out of boredom and when I am stressed. I am trying to make better food choices and also exercise more (which I have been terrible at).

I am confronting fears about my own health. The last time I got a check up of any kind was when I had poroto five years ago! Being uninsured and broke hasn’t helped but I did take the baby step of making an appointment to get a full gyn check up. Given how so many cancers run in my family, especially among women, and given a history of the state telling women in my family what they could/should do with their bodies, this simple task actually took alot of emotional/inner effort. The appointment isn’t cheap (175) but I can get financial help if I can prove my brokeassness, which is also stressful but I need to do it.

So those are most of the things I have been thinking about, working on, working with.

Notice blogging isn’t on the list. Not sure what to do with that/this part of my life.

Checking in

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I have not been doing as well as I would like when it comes to my personal goals in this new year. So far I am finding myself coming up against the same frustrations of not enough quiet time in this very crowded two bedroom apartment. My very soon to be five year old is as energetic as ever and that wonderful, curious energy is demanding. My teen has her own demands, as does my mother, especially as we balance cooking, cleaning, and caring for each other’s feelings as we deal with some tough issues in the family. My dear baby sister, whom I love, has her own demands and she doesn’t even live here.
I haven’t been writing like I should, like I promised myself I would.

I have taken some time to assess some these frustrations and how many of them are of my own making. I am not good at saying no. I am not good at drawing lines around my needs. Watching my mother in her role of information carrier regarding the state of my very sick aunt, I can easily see where I learned this behavior. We give until we are so emotionally exhausted that we shut down and shut out.

For me alot of this comes from feeling like I don’t deserve to take space/time for myself. I placed myself in this role of young single mother twice so I should deal. What the role of a big sister/older daughter is and should do is followed as if in a script, not according to my vision of how these positions should play out in a way that feels good. I even see it in my relationship with my partner. A few weeks ago it actually pained me to tell him I couldn’t do something because I was writing. I actually apologized and even as I did it it felt excessive and unnecessary.

Awareness is only one part of this. Changing patterns and rebuilding relationships around a different way of playing your roles in life is a completely different matter. I am working on it.

Welcome 2012 – Less Resolutions : More Goal Tracking

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Resolutions are easy to make and therefore easy to break. To be completely honest, I know I made some resolutions last year but I can remember one and I sort of stuck to it. That resolution was to write and phone people more often. I sent a few cards/letters out, mostly to my partner. As for phone calls, the only person I have been calling regularly is my partner because well that’s our main connection point until we are in the same city. And to be real, talking to him takes so much time and energy, that other phone calls can’t happen, especially between work and doing the single mami thing. Phone communication still gives me major anxiety too. It’s a resolution I want to make again this year but instead of seeing that, and other items on my mental to do list – I’ve decided this year to look at how the things I want to do, change, create fit into my wider life plan and break that plan up into manageable/realistic steps.

I’m not going to share my entire life plan here but I will say that part of my plan is to live with less stress. I tend to worry about everything and a lot of this is because of a scarcity of resources. Now some of these stressors and concerns are real like paying off debt, moving, taking good care of my kids. But within those spaces, I have to be gentler with myself and step back to make better decisions.

For example yesterday, I did some laundry, took a nap, took a walk, and kept on drinking champagne and watching a movie while my sister threw a tantrum over there not being any leftover mashed potatoes. I wrote in my personal journal and a small social journal I share with a small group of fellow mamas. I managed to book my younger daughter’s 5th birthday party, the first one with school friends, and negotiated splitting the cost with her father. I even went to bed early.

That’s not to say it all went well. I worried about how I didn’t blog here or on VivirLatino yesterday as I felt myself slip into sleep. My almost five year old threw a bedtime tantrum that I could have handled better. But today I was able to start again. I wrote for VivirLatino. I just wrote this post. My younger kid and I did a small lego project together and I was able to talk to my partner for a little bit.

So I guess if I had to wrap up my goals/plans into a neat resolution it would be that everyday is a chance to start again or continue and to be kinder to myself.

Are you doing the resolution thing? Why or why not?

2011 Losses and Gains

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2011 was a tough year for my family and me. I really struggled financially, culminating in painfully choosing to move out of our little Corona apartment, Casa Mala. I just couldn’t afford it anymore no matter how hard I tried to move money around. The constant battle against rising rent and utilities was taking a toll on my mental and emotional health. I found myself, over and over again making choices between gas and electricity, internet and food. At one point we even went without gas for a few months. It was easier to let it go.

Two other things that I let go of, were the the physical bodies of two of my great aunts who passed from this earth this past year. Titi Elena, or Titi Chacho as my Tio Ruben liked to call her just to annoy the hell out of her, struggled with her health this past year. My sister and mother were lucky enough to be able to see her and the part of our family in Ohio that cared for her, before she died. I carry fond memories of her from my many childhood stays in Long Island. Titi Geno was just shy of her 100th birthday when she passed away in her sleep. She was never seriously ill and retained so many vivid memories of early 20th century life in Western Puerto Rico where she grew up with my grandmother and other great aunts. She would tell us about seeing the first car on the island and offer an eyewitness account of the violent economic shift that U.S. colonialism contributed to, especially in the sugarcane fields where many of my family members labored with machetes in hand. Titi is a very special title in my family and it makes me sad that there are two less but they gave so much for me to carry forward.

I had to let go of or more accurately, loosen some of my relationships with individuals and organizations. Collaborations by nature are challenging, but I this past year I placed myself in positions where accountability remained in the conceptual realm and not the practical one. At times I lacked the selfishness I deserve and ended up feeling really used and wounded. I own that I too played my role in not effectively communicating these feelings and I admit that I needed to be more transparent or at least offer more tangible closure. This is something I hope to continue to work through in the new year but not at the expense of my personal values and goals.

But for everything that is lost : a home of one’s own, physical and emotional relationships with loved ones – there is more space opened for things to enter, to gain, to grow, to evolve. 2011 as a year of taking risks by opening my heart towards the West. Social media and mutual friends worked together to connect my path to another’s. That person has developed into an amazing friend, lover, and partner. Past relationships behind me in a sold way I never thought possible, I am working on building something complicated and beautiful. Long distance monogamy has it’s challenges and drawbacks, which deserve a few posts. But it is also unfolding into amazing experiences, lessons, and love.

While I have been blogging less (you can read more about that here)I have been developing more as a writer. I have written for local and national publications, have performed, and am much more settled in my identity as a writer.

As 2011 closes, the current trend all over twitter and other media is to look towards the coming new year with top 10 lists and and catch phrases to put onto personal brands. As a person who views her life as media, that is how I live sends messages out into the world and universe, I cannot and will not even attempt to ecapsulate my goals, visions, and plans into a neat, 140 character package. Before I can do anything for my future, I first need to embrace the mixture of failures and triumphs of the last year and understand that the true definition of success is what I take away from from that mixture.

Revolutionary Intimacy & Role Playing

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The title of this post insinuates something sexy but it’s not really. What this is really about is about learning that changes are painful and that past lives cannot be returned to if we want to grow.

The most important relationships in my life right now share one common theme : space. Not just physical space – like distances that have me moving closer to some and being farther from others, but emotional space- an opening or closing of the heart/spirit in order to heal and evolve from that hurt.

I have been going to a new church every other week or so – it’s not a church of Jesus, Allah, Buddha, the Orishas, Santos, or God but it is not a space absent of those concepts either. I teasingly call it “white people church” because well it is overwhelmingly white, especially compared to my once local predominantly Dominican/Mexican Roman Catholic Church. My relationship with church, any church, has always been complex : raised with Santos/spirits, then Catholic saints and school, practicing Zen Buddhism for a bit, drawing closer to my ancestors/muertos and now Unitarian Universalist aka White People Church. My struggle has been among my cultural need for ritual, my spiritual need for closeness with the universe and all that have been in it/are in it, and my desire to be in community/create community that reflects my morality/radical love/revolutionary desire.

Is that too much to ask for?

Continue reading →

Live Action Mala Alert: El Museo del Barrio’s SUPER SABADO: Cuéntame! Celebrating Oral History

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El Museo del Barrio in Spanish Harlem, NYC has been very generous with me y inviting me to participate in events. Tomorrow, Saturday, November 19th, I am lucky enough, thanks to Maria Morales, to be participating in their Speak Up! segment of el Museo’s Super Sabado Cuéntame! Celebrating Oral History day.

SPEAK UP!
7:00 -9:00pm, El Café
María Morales hosts an evening of fresh faces and contemporary voices in today’s spoken word movement. Def Poetry’s Anthony Morales features alongside Nancy-Arroyo Ruffin, Jennifer “Skye” Cabrera and Maegan Ortiz. (ages 18+)

The event is FREE and open to the public and I am looking forward to sharing a little bit of history – personal and political with some of you.

Reading and Writing

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My four year old is learning to read and write. A few months in Pre-K has made her interested in identifying the letters of her name, her sister’s name, my name. My journals and and notepads and filled with scribbles that look more and more like letters and words. Sometimes in between the letters are stick figures which together, in preschool hieroglyphics, tell a story.

I visited Poroto’s classroom yesterday and was impressed with ho quickly a group of 14 4 year olds adapted to new routines including sharing lunch at a communal table, borrowing books from the library, helping new classmates find their cubbies. There were of course things I didn’t like – like the counting of children by their assumed gender- it’s amazing and scary how quickly children are taught to identify themselves into two neat categories.

In this period of transition I feel like I’m learning how to read and write again as well. I am struggling with finding space and time to write. Despite the fact that my mother’s apartment is bigger than what Casa Mala was, the actual space to be creative- the quiet needed- has been hard to come by. I blame the additional distraction that cable tv offers everyone, myself included. I do have a dedicated desk space, something I didn’t have at Casa Mala. It’s been helpful as new opportunities to write for major publications open up. I’m still trying to organize myself. Many of my books are still in bins and will likely stay there until this transition shifts into another one.

There isn’t anyone to show me the new routines though. No one to hold my hand and no one to celebrate the letters of my name and what they create and will create. I have been creating alot lately – controversy, poems, performances. I’ve reclaimed writer as I try and claim space.

But I’m still learning to read and write and translate the signs the universe is whispering to my soul.

Sin Llaves

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Handing over those three metal keys, separated for the first time in five years, from a family of keys that included the keys to my mother’s apartment where I work and the key to my pareja’s house on the other side of the country, felt like a defeat. It felt like an acknowledgement of my failure as an independent adult woman. It was ad admission of my inability to keep a roof over my daughters’ heads. I walked down a street, that wasn’t particularly a beautiful street, it was crowded with garbage and people, and tears filled my eyes. I had walked down that street so many times in my life. When I was in High School, I walked down that street in the opposite direction, to the house where I lived with my father, his wife, and her daughter. Back then the Italian immigrants had (grudgingly) made room for the Dominican immigrants. Five years ago, I was 7 months pregnant, and I moved into my tiny one bedroom, with my then partner and my daughter. That street was no filled with Italians, Dominicans, and Mexican families. I knew every shop keeper and would wave and saludar a medio mundo everyday.

Three years ago, when we broke up, I was determined to keep my little apartment, with it’s leaky ceiling, loud neighbors, and occasional mice. Two days ago, I felt like I had surrendered.

My landlord and I parted ways with a chorus of apologies. They never did fix the leaks. I never seemed to be able to pay my rent on time and I bounced alot of checks.
“You’re a nice lady”, the husband of the husband and wife team told me.
And I left thinking they were a nice couple and in many ways they were. They never threatened to evict my little family, even as the rent came later and later and then in pieces.

On my ride on the 7 train to my mother’s, where I have temporarily moved my family into, I fell into deep sobbing surrounded by two big shopping bags of the last items that slept in Casa Mala : A vejigante mask, a box of chocolate cake mix, a Piri Thomas cd, among other things.

I don’t have keys to a home that is truly my own. In many ways I never did. I didn’t own the space that once was casa mala. Why do we even feel like we need to have/own space as opposed to share space? What is it about this place/country/society that makes it feel dirty to return to living with an extended version of family? Independence is praised and interdependence is looked upon as deficiency. Clearly I internalized some of these messages myself, even as I opened up casa mala to numerous friends.

There’s an overused saying about one door closing and another one opening. A donde los llaves que me quedan me llevan.

Where Mala Will Be This Weekend : After Dark at Woodlawn – Annual Halloween History Tour

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Whose afraid of a little history? A little horror?

OCTOBER 29, 30 and 31, 2011

Creep Through One of the Nation’s Oldest Cemeteries and the

Final Resting Place of Notorious New Yorkers

This year, the spookiest annual Halloween event is getting a dramatic makeover. On October 29, 30 and 31, an early evening walk through Woodlawn comes ALIVE with real-life interpretations of NYC legends and lore, surreal tales of unsolved mysteries and murders, and more. Folklorist Elena Martinez leads the tours, accompanied by bagpipers and other mysterious characters. Flashlights required.

Two tours—6PM and 7PM nightly

COST: $20 admission fee.

Reservations are required for the Halloween tours. Call 718-920-1469

Meet at the Jerome Avenue Entrance
The Jerome Avenue Entrance is located near the intersection of Jerome Avenue and Bainbridge Avenue.

#4 train to Woodlawn Station

This Shit Ain’t Radical Anymore : Tutoring for (Not) Fun & (Little) Profit

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When I started tutoring, I did it inside of my daughter’s elementary school and I did it as part of my organizing work within the school – working with immigrant and non-English dominant families to ensure access to information. I did it on a volunteer basis and worked with recent immigrant English Language Learners (ELL’s as per NYC Dept. of Ed.). While many of the immigrant parents I worked with were Latinos. The majority of the children I worked with on reading so that they could test out of the ESL program were Indian. The Indian community where I live are predominantly part of a tight knit Ismaili community. Word got around and before I knew it was tutoring out of my mom’s kitchen.

As a single mom – then raising one, now raising two daughters, this seemed perfect. I could take care of my daughters, be with them, work with my local community and make some money.

I think I tried to insert too much importance into what I should have just looked at as a job. I was especially excited by the fact that the majority of the young people I was working with were young women of color. I imagined having some sort of influence, seeing myself as a mentor I would have liked to have growing up. I imagined what would have been like to understand racism, sexism, colonialism growing up and not painfully crashing into it the way I did as 16 year old.

Of course all of this was to be done within the prescribed NYC DOE curriculum. My students would improve their grades in school, pass all their high stakes assessments, but they would also get support from bullying, family concerns, and engage in critical thinking with and about what they were learning in a way that the current high stakes standards don’t really allow for anymore.

For a while I really felt it was working. Felt like I was contributing something. My students did do well and we also went beyond the curriculum talking about politics, faith, sexuality, gender, community, art, visions and dreams. I felt this was especially important as many of my students transitioned from elementary school, into middle school, and high school. Hell my first student ever, a young man, always greets me in the streets and tells me how college is. This makes me feel happy (but also old).

But as I enter my what, 7th year of tutoring, I am growing disheartened. I am seeing/feeling especially as my students grow older, that unless I am working with the same vision as the parents/schools my work may not have the importance/impact I once imagined. My pareja says that sometimes, in this capitalist system we look for/invent more meaning when it comes to our work when in reality it is just labor/a service. Hearing this made me sad to the point of tears but it also felt/feels really true.

None of my students named helping to create a better world/helping their community among their goals but nearly all of them named being rich as one of their goals. Since I can’t quantify my students’ success beyond the grades/test scores they get in school, my assignments/suggestions are not followed up on. This means that my students still don’t read the newspaper or follow the news via any medium, so generally they have no idea what is happening in the world around them, or even in the city in which they live. They won’t make vocabulary or grammar study cards so that it takes a high school student from one of the best schools in the city/country two hours to read and understand two pages of a book because she doesn’t know what most of the words mean. The students and parents know I am a (sorta) single mother with two kids of my own I am helping guide through this world and yet I feel the disrespect from these two parent families everytime they cancel at the last minute, pick up/drop their child off late, have unreasonable expectations of me (i.e. checking homework via email at 11 pm), and don’t even bother to look at their kids’ work.

Maybe work cannot be radicalized. Maybe work is just work, a way to feed yourself and your family. Maybe I need to be real about my role in this fucked up market/education system. Maybe all I can do is give these kids and their parents what they expect – better grades. Maybe I need to let everything else go and focus on how my life – with my daughters, through my writing, with my pareja, y family and my community – be where the change happens.

As I focus my energies on shifting – moving – physically and spiritually – maybe I need to let go of certain visions if they aren’t shared.