Feminism vs. Greenism: Can't there just be a tie?

Are The Feminist Movement and The Personal Environmentalism Movement Compatible? That's a headline if there ever was one. And it begs a question: Can you be a green mommy, a working mommy and a feminist mommy at the same time?

Perhaps it's a bit of a simplistic idea. But let's face it. A lot of the green blogs out there (likely myself included on occasion) tirelessly journal the things grown, made, canned or cooked, all in the name of greenness. How we diaper our children in last year's sweatshirts or dressed our kids in the old drapes a la The Sound of Music. How we're talented or resourceful enough to educate our children in four languages and teach them how to be completely self-sufficient by the age of 10. How we're able to can enough to feed the neighborhood in case of the impending blizzard. And there's nothing wrong with that. The beauty of the First Amendment and the Internet is that each of us can write about whatever we please.

As someone who juggles (sometimes more successfully than others) four jobs - career woman, wife, parent and (sort of) housekeeper - I can understand how critical the juggle is. And how somehow things get off balance. And how my Catholic, green or mommy guilt - pick your choice that day - colors my perception of the world.

Does it make me less of a feminist if I choose to cook my meal versus ask my husband to take it on - or gasp, order a pizza - if I don't feel up to the task? Or if I rely on my husband instead of myself to fix the toilet that's now clogged with an entire package of toddler toilet wipes that I bought in a moment of complete frustration over my daughter's hygiene habits?

Writes Ruchi at Arduous Blog:

... The truth is, we're never going to address gender imbalance when one set of people, largely women, are consistently being told "you should enjoy cooking and
cleaning, and if you don't, you're not feminine." Or that if you don't enjoy making organic baby food from scratch you're not a good mom. Because the truth is, you can be a good woman, and you can be a good mom even if you would rather pay a service to wash your baby's organic cloth diapers. Or you would rather buy $8 jam from the farmers' market. Or you think that if the toilet only gets cleaned once a month ... well, no one will die.

There's something to remember to this. It's not all about gender balance or imbalance. Let's be realistic; how many "traditional married" households are there these days anyways?

Being green is not a cookie-cutter lifestyle. Just as generations ago, pioneer women didn't all live on vast homesteads, we all have the benefit of sprawling lots or apple orchards in our backyard. We can make general choices that help our environment or the community (such as using CFL bulbs, using less gas or frequenting a farmers market). But we can take it a step further as we may desire, with varying results. And there's nothing wrong with whatever we do. Because it was our cumulative efforts that got us into this mess in the first place, and it's our cumulative efforts that will help us get out of (or at least improve) it.

With choosing to be a woman marries her talents with her responsibilities to this world, whatever they may be, we have the ability to make choices. And those choices can be just hire someone to do your toilets, bully your teenage son to use your green cleaner himself , just suck it up and accept the messiness and the disorder that is life, or tackle the task on your own.

Cleaning up those candy canes

Candy canes. I'm not sure how they come into my home, as I don't purposely buy them. Yet every year, they enter my home, one by one, ultimately gracing my tree.

I admit they usually go into the trash. I don't eat candy canes as a rule. But this year, things are different. I was inspired by a recipe I'd found for peppermint sugar scrub for the bath and attempted to make it myself.

I ended up making a "poor man's version." No essential oils, no vitamin E. Instead I pounded a package of candy canes into tiny crumbs. (A great activity for a 3 year old with energy to burn and a metal measuring cup, by the way.) Then I mixed it with a cup of sugar.

Rather than add the oil at the time, I'm storing the base as-is until needed, then measure out about 1/3 cup of the mix and adding a small amount of olive oil to make a paste. This way, I don't have to worry about even stickier messes if the kids find it, or if the olive oil goes rancid in case I forget about the mix.

Anyway, I tried it, and it smelled and worked great.

The holidays are over. Now what?

The Christmas tree is staring me down. It's a week and a half after Christmas, and I'm feeling the guilt of not having taken down my decorations.

Each year, I'm faced with the question of now what? What can I do with the decorations I'm not in love with, the Christmas cards I'd gotten or the tons of Christmas bags my kids received?

The truth is, I can reuse or recycle most of them.

Holiday decorations
While you've likely heard of Christmas tree recycling in your neighborhood (it usually is tied with trash pickup), you can also recycle your dying Christmas lights as well. You can mail old lights to organizations such as HolidayLEDs.com or Christmas-Light-Source.com. The copper, glass and plastic can be stripped and recycled. You could also extend the usefulness of your Christmas lights by using them in your garden with a cold frame. ]

Your unwanted Christmas ornaments can be donated instead of trashed. A domestic violence organization I work with locally collects Christmas decorations in good condition to help spruce up survivors' new homes.

Have a live wreath? Toss it in your compost bin or use the needles for mulch.

Greeting cards
You can reuse your greeting cards in a number of ways:

My husband's aunt introduced me to the idea of using previous year's cards as holiday gift tags.

You can repurpose them into new cards. You can do this yourself, have your kids do it or send them to St. Jude's Ranch.

You can use them for kid art.

Gift wrap
Gift bags can find a second, third, fourth or fifth life by being reused as long as they remain in good condition. If you're feeling crafty, you can just add a little reinforcement to keep the life up.

Hang on to your leftover wrap. Whether it's bows or paper in good condition, you can reuse them for next year.

While gift boxes can be recycled, they can also be stored for next year (unless you're dying to buy more) or find a new life as a children's art project or diorama.

OK, now I know I have no excuse not to clean up...

New year, new attempts

I'll admit it. It's day 4 of 2009 and I have yet to write any New Year's Resolutions. The weight thing? It hasn't changed for a decade, despite various attempts.

The organization thing? To the outside world, I may be beyond hope.

So rather than write a bunch of useless pratter, here are a few things I do want to achieve by the end of 2009. If you have great expectations, I hate to let you down. Right now I'm about baby steps and getting through life.

Curb my passion for paper. As my coworkers can attest, I have a very difficult time letting go of the paper trail (a problem made worse by computer systems that don't track records of changes). This year, I hope to make decisions quickly and opt to reduce my paper output when I'm able to, hopefully stopping the problem before it builds. (Note that I did not say I would clean my desk or any other empty promises. I'm just cutting back printouts!)

Grow a little more. Our gardening plan for 2009 is to grow more fruits and vegetables (yes, we've decided our two mandatory bushes we have to replace will be blueberries). Ideally, we'll have the funds to put in raised beds, as we're apparently not allowed in our subdivision to have anything that gives the faintest appearance of dirt without grass. If not, we'll look into renting a community plot from the city to save on the initial costs this year.

Give greener. Ideally, this means more eco-friendly and heartfelt gifts. If I can't go greener in the traditional sense, I'll at least plan to buy presents that foster creativity, feed a passion or help someone learn something new. It certainly beats a blinking, beeping pile of plastic that will soon be forgotten. (By the way, thanks again to my family for the noisemakers...Whatever happened to the batteries-aren't-required toys?)

Plan my menus. This will help reduced any unplanned or unbudgeted splurges at the grocery store and cut back on those additional shopping trips or last-minute decisions to grab a rotisserie chicken or a take-and-bake pizza on the way home from work. When my husband and I wait until the last minute to plan the night's dinner, that's when we end up settling for the least healthy option. Also, when I plan I can better take advantage of specials, what's in season and piggy-back to make multiple meals and work lunches (for less work and money than if I did them separately).

Spend wiser. While I've been vigilant for months on watching our budget, I want to work on ways to buy smarter with the funds we do have on hand. Our resources are limited, so I want to make sure that I'm not buying duplicate things, generating a lot of trash in the process, coming home with lots of plastic bags or collecting more stuff in the process.

Happy New Year!

You, too, can grow lemons in Indiana

Sure, the gardening experts say you have to live in the deep South to truly grow lemons outdoors. Not so, I recently learned from my 3-year-old resident green thumb.

As she was squeezing juice from a lemon the other day, she calmly noted, "We can just squeeze the juice out of the lemon and take out the strings and seeds. And put it where the tree grows in the ground, and we will grow more lemons!"

And now you know.