Quaranteeny Theater

We finished the quarantine theater, or at least got it ready for pictures. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, and was excited try it out last weekend. Shanda is still a little afraid to use it – you worry that we aren’t allowed to be noticed using out back yard the way other people do – but I think we can get past that with some practice. I haven’t yet successfully heisted L into attendance; the initial response was a somewhat harder “no” than I had hoped for. But I’m moderately confident I can turn that around in the coming weeks. Tricking nervous middle aged women into allowing their children access to care is a thing I’ve practiced a lot. It has also provided a path into further care topics, which is valuable in service of my broader goals with L.

Dog is settling in on a lower dose of steroids, and today actually went to bed at a reasonable time. For the past week I’ve had to send them to bed explicitly at 2 AM, to keep him from barking in the kitchen, and even that often took a couple of tries. But today went really well – he was active enough to do dog things and calm enough to sit with us at home.

It’s the third week on my SSRI, and time to double my dose. To date the only changes I’ve noticed are that I’m fraking tired every day and the expected delayed orgasms. I can sleep normally all night and then all morning and into the afternoon and then feel notably tired and ready for sleep all evening until I start the cycle again. I haven’t yet noticed any differences in my mood or cognition. It doesn’t help that there’s nothing in specific to look for, since no one predicts a specific outcome. Still, I’m trying to clap my hands and believe, to give it a better chance of working. Hopefully double dose doesn’t mean double side effects.

We’ve been watching season 3 of Killing Eve. There’s a lot to recommend it. I’d still suggest Fleabag first, if you haven’t watched any Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but Killing Eve is worth the time too. The basic shape of the show is parallel storytelling between a psychopathic, narcy, emotionally undeveloped serial killer and the obsessive, anxious, emotionally underdeveloped spy that is chasing her. They both have escalating dangerous behavior and do (and want) many similar things, but their reactions are different.

The killer is explicitly coded as sexual almost all the time. It’s often an act but she’s comfortable with sex. Her watcher is anxious about sex and afraid to participate, either with the killer or her husband, and afraid to imagine herself in that context. Scenes are shot with the usual dialog exchange back and forth, but we often start the scene with music and observation and no dialog to establish a single participant’s PoV – so we can understand going in how they’re feeling. Sometimes we leave on music – loud music – where we show the PoV of two characters coming together after having started in different places.

Also the clothes. Killer is in new amazing clothes in every scene, always explicitly femme but also often full of the gay. Watcher has 6 jackets for layers and most scenes involve her taking some off and putting some back on, nervously fidgeting with her clothes all the time. She has anxious hair handling too, but we’re asked (particularly when the scene is in killer’s PoV) to understand the hair changes as seductive more than nervous, even when we know Watcher is anxious.

Mother’s Day, the holiday where people go out of their way to participate in child abuse. My life was plenty hard even when I was isolated with Mother. It was made much worse by the ubiquitous demand from others that I should like it and “respect” her. People still do it today. I’m not trapped by it like I was when I was young, but I am still pretty salty about it. Even people who know and like me often struggle to avoid the sort of judgement that society promotes.

I don’t mean “Valentine’s Day makes me feel bad for being single”. While I would appreciate not having advertisers and authoritarians bombard me with propaganda about how the title of mother demands my sacrifice, would appreciate people not bringing up the social institution of motherhood more than is relevant in my life, that’s not really my problem. The part that’s hardest for me is all the people who demand my compliance and subservience about it. The insistence that I participate in some ritual of honor with my abuser, the judgement that I must be wrong or flawed for not wanting to, the lack of concern about my actual experience (or even their own experience) when it varies from their idealized concept of the role of a mother. Holidays like this are one of the places where it’s easier to see the way society privileges the role of mother over actual mothering, the legal rights of parents over other citizens, the willful blindness toward the mistreatment of young people.

So here’s to all the unseen mothers, doing the actual work of child rearing without the support of society – sometimes even against the will of society. And a big middle finger to everyone else and their support of “parental rights” or who uses “mother” as an honorific.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.