Five Star Friday's 217th Edition Is Brought to You By Naomi Klein

This week's Five Star Friday is brought to you by the truth about being a parent, the creative process moved to the factory floor, the importance of the journey, a brief encounter with a war veteran, the choice some women make to not have children, and Naomi Klein:


photo credit: Mariusz Kubik

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

     — Naomi Klein

Happy Friday!

"Being Mom" from A Girl and a Boy:

Something happened in the weeks after Fox was born. I started feeling like a Mom, not just some girl with a baby. I don't know what changed–that I had two kids, that I got older, that I'd had time to grow into the role, or that Wombat is almost four and is all… persony. Being a mom to an almost-four-year-old is light years away from being a mom to an infant or toddler; four means my kid has gone from being a thing that belongs to me–who is mine–to an individual who takes ownership of me back; I'm not just a mom, I'm his mom. I belong to him, too.

"A Short Lesson In Perspective" from LindsRedding.com:

What do I think?

I think you're all fucking mad. Deranged. So disengaged from reality it's not even funny. It's a fucking TV commercial. Nobody gives a shit.

This has come as quite a shock I can tell you. I think, I've come to the conclusion that the whole thing was a bit of a con. A scam. An elaborate hoax.

"Show Your Work" from Jen Lee Productions:

The journey doesn't only matter, but it in itself is instructive, even though it is still common practice to separate wisdom from the stories that landed us on its shore.

"There's a bar in the center of DC's Union Station's soaring atrium..." from The Yellow House:

He nods again, more, puts it to his mouth, and then, then, Jimmy is playing me harmonica in the middle of Union Station at rush hour. People in the center bar at Union Station turn and looks at us, Jimmy playing some beat-up rusty harp and me leaning onto my elbow. Playing, of all things, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," after I told him I like Bobby D. I have strange tears welling up behind my eyes and reach for my beer as social security blanket, only to realize it's drained.

"Motherhood Mondays: Would You Ever Decide to NOT Have Kids?" from A Cup of Jo:

I just wanted children in such a deep way that it felt separate from rational analysis.

But what if you don't feel that way? Many people don't — in fact, nearly one-in-five American women now ends her childbearing years without giving birth, up from one-in-ten in the 1970s, according to a 2010 Pew study. Of course some of those women may have wanted children and couldn't have them for whatever reason; but others simply chose not to.

Here, five wonderful readers spoke to me on the phone about why they've decided — definitively — not to have kids...

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