The miracle of holistic motherty

Oh FUCK ME, am I sick of pre-natal yoga. First of all, I fucking hate yoga. HATE IT. It is a bullshit industry, a naive person's Pilates, monetized cultural appropriation and appropriated from one of the most viciously colonial, racist, misogynistic cultures in human history at that, and what's more FUCK DO I HATE YOGA.

It was tedious enough when I was pregnant with Godzilla but at least then I had the time and emotional energy to burn, not already having a kid running around to take care of and to not accidentally throttle when my upitty hormones got the better of me and he was messing up some sheets, or something. But now it just feels like this fucking stupid, terrible drain on my time at a time when I have no time, and energy when I have no energy. And the fucking stupid music! Oh FUCK ME do I hate it.

But if I don't do it, my back spasms to the degree that I can't do anything. The general physical and joint discomfort becomes unbearable. Because the first trimester of pregnancy is basically cancer.

FUCK.

FUCK.

Well. Time to do some yoga.

Guess which is which.

Well, now, everybody has turned tricolour on Facebook and gives all sorts of fucks about dead people because they're in Paris, and not Lebanon, or Iraq, or Myanmar, or under a fuckton of mud in Brazil. But it's not just about racism (though it is about racism) and not just about identifying more with the French because they have a developed economy that's familiar to us and so we understand a little better this could happen to us elsewhere in the developed world too (though it is about that) and not because we only recognize terror when it's wearing a balaclava and explosives and not a suit or uniform (though it's also about that).

 Paris has a special meaning to a lot of North Americans and Europeans. I'm guessing about half the people I know have been there, and most of the other half would like to go there. Personally, I was there for three years, and they were, you know, fucking formative sorts of years, that have left me with a love hate relationship with that place that has only really swung back toward love since I entered the middle class, because that is a shitty town to be poor in.

But even when I wasn't middle class I went to shows at the Bataclan and got falling down drunk around the Bastille and had an apartment I shared with a bunch of fucking mice a few blocks from where those restaurants got shot up and sometimes I had a really fucking good time, and I know I feel this attack differently than I feel others around the world because it happened in places I know and love, in my fashion.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of arguments for open borders and travelling as much as you can, to as many places as you can, meeting as many people as you can, and one of them - far from the most important thing but still so important - is that more places have more emotional meaning to you, more people are REAL to you, and your heart is a little more open to understanding that tragedy always deserves a response.

 So I bet you ten bucks that if you watch your conversations in the coming days, there will be a split in people's thinking about refugees coming into Europe or North America from the Middle East. The split will be between people who have never moved out of their socio-economic/cultural comfort zone, and people who have. One will react to the atrocity in Paris by calling for a shutdown in refugee intake, and the other will react by understanding that the fear and sadness they feel over what happened in Paris is the same fear and sadness that are driving millions of people to leave their homes against their will and look for a safe haven elsewhere, and that those people should be welcomed, because there is not all that much separating us.