Ani Difranco in Town

I had just given birth when I started listening to Ani Difranco's music. A friend of mine had turned me on to one of her Cd's ~ her first ~ and it all snowballed from there. I started with her first album, recorded when she was only eighteen years old and fresh on the scene in New York City and I worked my way up to the current album. I remember thinking how wonderful it would have been to have had this music in my teens and early twenties. The degree to which it would have refreshed my perspective on self, relationships, politics, bullshit. Here I was, with a brand new baby, letting these principles sink into retrospective hindsight. Heal old wounds. Light a new fire under my ass. But I couldn't help but wonder what this woman would do, lyrically and musically, with the wonder of motherhood. Her music resonated incredibly already. I wondered, if the time ever came, how she would put this new stage of my life into words.

I had just moved to Vermont, leaving behind many of my closest girlfriends and was having this baby with a man I hardly knew. A man that didn't make the getting-to-know-process all that easy. When I started listening to Ani Difranco's music, her lyrics replaced the good advice and empowerment I may have otherwise been getting from all those girlfriends on a daily basis over good coffee. I lived, as I still do, in the back woods and spent my daily travels listening to these songs, letting the lyrics sink into my subconscious. Ella, who sat in the backseat drooling and sucking on the heels of her hands, also listened. And I think, nine years later, that those lyrics have also stayed with her.

I've seen Ani play several times already and won't be able to catch her concert tonight in Burlington, but I picked up a copy of Vermont Woman magazine to read the cover article about the show, her recent participation in the March for Women's Lives in Washington, D.C., and her pregnancy! I was thrilled. Having worked as a doula these past five years, I especially liked the following quote from the article:

"The act of reproduction, of creation, is pretty

revellating -physically, spiritually.

But these days with this combination of

technology and patriarchy and over-

medicalization of birth, women have too often

been ejected from that seat of power.

You get brought into this artificial environment,

strapped down and have it cut out of you.

That whole transformative experience

in which our greatest pain becomes

our greatest transcendence which transmutates

into our greatest power-is taken away.

.....that can be very threatening stuff for a power structure,

and therefore the controlling of it-

the assuming of the power, taking that power back

has been the quest of the darker

side of patriarchal culture. But the circumstances

of having a reproductive system

-the hormones, the emotionalism,

everything we look at as a woman's weakness-

a holistic view is to understand that it's also

a great power. The irrational perception

of women due to that biological state-is also a

great wisdom-it all makes a lot of sense

to cry when you watch the news. The supposed

rational alternative is quite insane

if you think about it."

For more on her comments on feminism, and the "cultural back-lash of the Reagan Bush era", check out that article.