The INTJ Birth Class

Or, The Social Aspects of an INTJ in Late Pregnancy

The (very awesome) friend who is going to be my “birth partner” at the hospital when I go to deliver and I decided that we ought to learn about the stages of labor and practical measures for coping with them. You know, like a responsible pair of birth partners. Rather than buying books we wouldn’t make time to read, we paid to take a class with a birth educator since money up front = something we’ll show up for. We opted for the weekend class because, seriously, who the hell has time to do a class a week for 12 weeks?! We walked into the meeting room laughing about how we were going to look like the cutest pregnant lesbian couple ever…only to get into the room and find the actual cutest pregnant lesbian couple already there! The room ended up being an interesting mix of people between the 7 couples attending – a lot of the women expressed that their goal was an unmedicated birth, but some of them seemed like they just wanted to have more information on birth either from ignorance of the process or fear of it – and ran the gamut from hippies to yuppies to suburbanites to trailer park libertarians. (I leave it to you to decide where I fit. 🙂 )

We enjoyed the class and got out of it what we hoped for – what the different processes of labor entail and some great suggestions for getting through it. One of the  most interesting aspects of it to me was an exercise we did with different coping mechanisms to try and figure out what works for us, which amounted to a “how well do you know yourself?” quiz. I, as I expected, know myself quite well. The instructor had us hold ice for the length of contractions and do various things – walking, partner massage, humming, visualization, breathing, etc., to try and make our perception of the time seem shorter. The things that worked for me were exactly what I expected to work for me based on what worked for me back in high school when I was a long-distance runner (focusing on the discomfort until it becomes unrecognizable as discomfort, the same way a curve becomes a straight line if you zoom in close enough to it; music (the humming was insufferable until I made it a melody and then it worked pretty well); distraction via a stronger physical sensation than the discomfort…I don’t expect that one will actually work against a labor contraction, though!). The variance of reactions to each type of coping strategy was fascinating. No two people had the same set of likes/dislikes, and different people seemed to like and dislike (or at least be indifferent to) each exercise. I was the only woman in the room who liked the focusing one, but several of the men did. INTJ in action (because we “think like men”), or an introvert/extrovert thing? (Or just a coincidence?)

Also, Baby Shower

The same friend threw me a baby shower. It was fun, in part because I insisted it have booze and non-standard games (because typical baby shower games are L-A-M-E), but probably mostly because the group of various friends from various parts of my life actually clicked really well. I was honestly surprised at how many people I found to invite, who live nearby and I am genuinely fond of (not to mention extended-area friends and family!). My impending motherhood being the focus of the occasion did bring out this weird dynamic in my personality, though, which is that I hate being fussed over and made the center of attention unless I am actively engaged in exhibitionist behavior. Like…Stage Lily loves having everyone paying attention to her; real Lily finds it awkward and uncomfortable, even when the attention is an honest outpouring of good will and love. I was truly touched by the time and effort the gals put into gifts for me and my little one (seriously, I teared up afterward going back through the stuff to put it up), and I think I accepted all of it gracefully in the moment, but inside I was squirming. One of the lessons I had to learn as a younger woman was that ceremonies are often not about the person being honored but rather about everyone in attendance. Or, as the Captain likes to say, “It ain’t about you. It’s about them, and what they need.”

If I had not done a shower on my own, one would have been done for me, at least at work, so the better solution seemed to me to be having one on my own terms. And the best part of all of it? I got a ton of adorable stuff for my kid without having to shop for any of it!

Otherwise, things have been quieter than I expected, socially speaking. I definitely made the right choice to be vague about my due date, because while I get a lot of remarks, no one is hassling me about what if I go “overdue” or anything. Only two people at work have tried to touch my belly without permission, and only one stranger has. The work people were easier to deal with, because it was just a matter of saying “Nope, you don’t know me like that, ask before you touch!” while the stranger at the grocery store was this sweet little old lady who just kept praising Jesus for the gift of life. Very hard for me to be rude to someone like that so I just smiled and thanked her for the blessing and that was that. Now pray Jesus it doesn’t happen again….

That’s the news from Lake Lilybegone.

Or, And Now We Wait

Courtesans in Romance

Editor’s note: Fair readers, I do not want to be here at this particular moment. It is 8:30 p.m. after a grueling week at my day job that culminated in a workday that started before 7 this morning. If it had not, I would have written this before work when I am fresh as a winter night and equally clear-headed. I mention my state of mind not to discourage you from reading but to explain that I am writing this now because this conversation matters to me. 

One of my favorite blogs is The Honest Courtesan, whose byline explains it all: “frank commentary from a retired call girl.” I love Maggie’s perspective for many reasons – because I am a libertarian and criminalized prostitution is a violation of the Constitution and the moral standard I believe in, because she articulates issues I have with feminism and the language of PC liberals often better than I can, because her stories never fail to deliver a narrative that I have experienced nowhere else. I don’t consider myself naive, but in many ways I have a theoretical knowledge that has never had to be applied to the real world, and her posts often either force me to do so or force me to take a logical progression to an end I might otherwise have avoided.

This post is not about her, or her blog, however, except as an introductory point about why I am writing about this topic today. Maggie asks every Friday the 13th that people who support decriminalization of sex work to publicly acknowledge that position, so that, for at least this one day, people who don’t work in the field but other people, mainstream people, vanilla people, can be seen to support the cause, as well. So that is why I’m tackling this topic tonight, when I’m tired and grumpy and would truthfully rather be heading to bed – to raise my voice and say it’s wrong to make a crime out of consensual sexual relations, no matter how morally repellent other people might find those relations. It deprives women of the right to make an honest living, it makes their work more dangerous, and it empowers the police and the judicial system to humiliate and discriminate against individuals at will. That is not justice; that is a perversion of justice.

That said, I present tonight’s topic:

The Courtesan in Romance Novels

Is it just me, or have courtesans slowly been disappearing from historical romance? I remember a time when every rakish hero had a mistress on the side, and she was always a paid bit of fluff who didn’t raise a fuss when he ended the relationship – as long as he gave her a generous severance gift, at least. For the past couple of years, or maybe even longer, though, I feel like the mistresses have been women of the hero’s class. Adulterous wives or merry widows who know the man socially and possibly know the heroine socially and can therefore create drama when he ends the relationship.

I am trying to decide if this shift has to do with the influx of chick lit readers who need the kind of petty drama that only a “woman scorned” can provide, or the publisher-driven move away from big sweeping adventure romances into teacup tempests that clock in at 70K instead of 130K, or if the actress-courtesan mistress is merely the latest victim in the whitewashing of romance for the bourgeois sensibility that has been happening over this same span of 2-5 years.

One of my favorite older romances is An Unwilling Bride by Jo Beverley, in part because of the friendship that the heroine strikes up with her new husband’s ex-mistress, who was a consummate example of the intelligent, educated, and discreet courtesan. Even among romance whores, however, she was a rarity – most of those characters were merely a bellwether to show the reader where the hero’s heart was.

I haven’t seen a Blanche Hardcastle in years. Maybe I am just reading the wrong romances…but I doubt it. I find this sea change to be a shame. Romance is not, perhaps, a genre that is known for challenging reader expectations or worldviews, but a sympathetic character can sneak under anyone’s guard.

For me, Blanche did. I was shocked that a man of good society wanted to marry her when he knew she had been a whore, and a celebrated one, at that. When I read the book and the subsequent ones in the series for the first time (at 18? 19?), the idea of a man marrying a whore seemed really outlandish. Even though, even then, I didn’t think prostitution should be illegal (just because I wouldn’t doesn’t mean no one should be allowed to), I did believe in the “fallen woman” myth – basically, that a woman’s worth is defined by her sexual history, and that once a woman becomes a whore she’s ruined for any other life. Blanche’s story was the start of cracking that myth in my head. Inara Sera from Firefly was another character who helped break it. I am sure that the setting helped, where her profession is revered and respected, but most of it was simply her. The amount of training she has in all the gracious arts is evident in every word she speaks and every smile she offers, and as a result Inara is more of a lady than even the “ladies by birth” we meet during the series. What drove the myth into oblivion, though, was the movie Once Upon a Time in the West, where the character of Jill is so utterly, brilliantly, capable…able to survive, able to live through and move past anything, able to laugh at the men who try to use her body to demonstrate power over her. “Go ahead. Call your men and let them have a turn, too. No woman ever died from that. Afterward I’ll be just the same as I was before.”  Nothing encapsulates more clearly the stupidity of reducing a woman to her “virtue” or lack thereof.

So I find the collective choice to stop offering even slightly positive depictions of courtesans and prostitutes in romance a little sad. I am not sure whether I find it troubling, because I can’t decide if it’s an intentional part of taking the grit out of historical fiction or if it’s a side effect of newer writers wanting to have woman scorned drama in their stories. I do find the sudden lack of discussion about whores inside the books kind of weird, though. They and their work was certainly part of every historical time period, and most of the heroes would have trafficked with at least the upper echelon of them. I have at least one whore story I intend to write, and maybe two. If nothing else, if there is a publishing conspiracy to lock romance into the ivory tower of upper-middle-class sensibilities, self-publishing continues to give every other voice an equal opportunity to be heard. Viva la revolution!

Two by Two, Hands of Blue

Or, I Am Making Slow Progress and Using Violence in My Visualizations

September 14 is the one year point for this project. I am determined to be done with it by then. I would like to be done with not just the rough draft but also the rewriting, revisions based on beta feedback, and ruthless copyediting diet (where the manuscript struggles to lose every unnecessary word). I don’t know if that would be possible even if I finish the rough draft this weekend; it would cut it close. But at the very least I will not be writing anymore by then. I will be editing. Or finished.

So I have finally come to the last river I have to build a bridge across before I hit the climax.  The end of the book should be fun and easy to write. It is a very specific sequence of scenes and events, and it has been in place long enough in my outline for me to feel confident that I will not need additional scenes. The gray area has always been how to get from the last Event I knew about early on to the events of the end.  As with all fog banks, cloud does not seem so impenetrable from the inside of it, and that has proven true for me. I have three and a half more scenes that will be hard to write because they were not visualized in advance, but finally, finally, finally, I am sure that these are the last links through the nebulous “what happens between the sister’s debut and the end?” field.

I don’t know how long it will take me to get through this section in words, or how long the end will take to write. Or how long the beginning will take to re-write. Words have been hard to come by the last…month. I’ve gotten in the habit of forcing at least 100 a day. Not much, but something. With enough days it adds up. I am hoping this weekend will be more productive. No husband to spend time with as he will be on call and/or at work, no movies I need to watch for festival screening purposes, no projects of any stripe that would require my attention now as opposed to next week.

Time to get in my imaginary Hummer and just drive over the rubble of my writer’s roadblock.  Maybe I’ll back up over it again just for fun.

Time to drink all my ADD’s milkshake. I’ll drink it up! All gone.

Time to pull on my blue gloves.  Two by two, I will murder the words until the job is done.

Two by two.