This is the thing I thought I was going to write about yesterday. I ended up going off on the fragrance-free seating tangent becasue it was in worship that I was thinking about this, and it's related to why I was willing to join with my meeting in the fragrance-free seating experiment. It's about a thing that happened a long time ago.
I used to work security at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The last year I worked, right before I got pregnant with Eric, I was an Assistant Coordinator, responsible for supervising a crew of about 8 women. There were three ACs, and two coordinators.
For years, women coming onto the land without paying had been a serious problem. One year I was told by one of the women who worked in the festival office that they estimated that maybe as many as 1 in 4 or 5 women on the land that year had come in without paying, based on things like how many dinners they were serving compared to ticket sales. But it was hard to keep women from doing it; there's hardly anything easier than strolling in through the woods.
Many women came in free by hiding in the back of friends' pickup trucks or RVs. When we arrived the week before the festival to start setting up security stations and training crew, we were told that the festival office had decided that we would now search every pickup truck and RV for hidden women as they came in the front gate. This had been decided after advance materials had been printed and after women had bought their tickets, and the five of us on the security coordinating team thought it was a terrible idea. We were sure that women who pulled up to the gate and heard for the first time there that their vehicles would be searched were going to be resistant, angry, and belligerant. We thought the festival was putting too much of a burden on us and our crews. This, we were sure, was going to be a disaster.
I don't remember whether this had already been planned, or was in response to our protests, but the organizers put together a small super-crew of women who had worked at the festival for a long time, mostly women from the office, who would be at the front gate on opening day and whose job it was to deal with all these RV and pickup truck drivers who were going to be so pissed off.
Except it never happened. With one or two exceptions (who turned out to be women with a clown-car's worth of friends stuffed into the RV's bathroom), women were happy to let the crew take a look in their vehicles. They were shocked and angry to learn that free-riding was such a problem. They were happy to do their part to keep it in check.
It's kind of a side note, but after the first couple of hours, we never found hidden women. Word had percolated back down the line of cars waiting to get in, and the free-riders cut the fence and walked in instead. But that is not germane to our story. What is germane to our story is that I was also working the front gate on opening day (I ended up having a brief, intense, and ill-fated fling with one of the women from the super-crew, in fact. Which is also not germane to the story but I like to mention it once in awhile because I like to crack the boring knit-pants-wearing suburban mom facade and remember how daring I used to be).
OK, so I was working the front gate on opening day, and in between flriting with Mocha, I noticed that my prediction about how the car-searching would go had been completely wrong. There were no protests. There were no shouting matches. There was no drama (until a few nights later when Mocha went off the deep end. "Why are you functionally monogamous these days, Su?" "Because the last woman I had a thing-on-the-side with was a psycho, thanks for asking.")
This was a life-changing thing. Not the bad fling with Mocha, but the realization that all my predictions about what was going to happen when we asked to search vehicles had been wrong. I had been really worked up about this, and I wasn't the only one. We thought it was going to be a trainwreck; instead it was the usual opening-day carnival, the blue sky, the sun beating down, the women already on the land calling, "Welcome home!" to the women arriving, the family-reunion atmosphere. There were so few problems that the woman who had been specially dispatched to deal with the trouble-makers was able to spend much of her afternoon flirting with me instead.
Anyway, this has stayed with me for going on eleven years now. Many times when a group is trying to make a decision and I think we're heading in the wrong direction, especially if I catch myself thinking of all the ways it is sure to go bad, I remind myself of that August afternoon at Michigan, and I consider the possiblity that I could, once again, be completely, absolutely, one-hundred-percent wrong.
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Red Cedar's Experiment with Fragrance-Free Seating
My Quaker meeting is working on accessibility issues related to fragrances, which some people (like me) have sensitivities to and which can also trigger or exacerbate migraines and asthma. It's been a surprisingly vexed conversation over the last six to nine months, and there are a lot of tender feelings. At our last business meeting, we talked about the issue for a long time, and I and at least two other people with sensitivities spoke. That was my first surprise: I hadn't realized I wasn't alone in this. It was so good to hear other people talk about having the same kinds of experiences I did, like being pulled out of worship to wonder if you'll have to move when a late-comer seems likely to sit near you. Or how hard it can be to address this issue in personal relationships. But how had I not known? Had I not been listening?
We clearly had other failures of communication as well. Toward the end of that conversation, one member said that this was the first time it had occurred to him that we were actually discussing a health issue. I guess he thought we'd been talking about preferences, or a more general wish to be environmental, to be as clean and toxin-free as possible. I was glad that people heard things that shifted their perspective, but I said to David later, "Where have we failed in talking about this if this is the first time people figured out it was about people's well-being?" It surprised me to learn that we had been, at least to some extent, talking past each other. No wonder feelings were hurt and progress was not made. I wonder if we have more clarity now and that will help us move forward.
Anyway, one thing we're experimenting with is designationg one-fourth of the meeting room as fragrance-free seating. This was a hard decision to make; it was actually minuted back in December and then held back from implementation because of strong concerns raised later. My concerns were pretty pragmatic: I'm not sure our meeting room is large enough for designated seating to be effective, and I was worried that people would think that FF seating solved the problem, so nothing more had to be thought about or done. I also was concerend about partial access--even if FF seating made worship accessible to me, what about the hallway, the library, the social hall, the classrooms?
Others' concerns were more spiritual; one Friend put it very well when he said he was not comfortable with having different Friends seated in different parts of the room, with setting off a separate group. Quakers have always been one body, he said, one community. He said it better; it was moving, and I thought he was not wrong. Another Friend was concerned that saying that only people who were FF could be in this seating area sent the message that some people were "pure" enough to be there and some people weren't.
We eventually decided to go ahead with FF seating, in a spirit of experimentation, and to discuss it again in about six months, after we've lived with it for awhile. This is not the only action we've taken. The Building & Grounds committee has been very pro-active, providing FF hand soap and informational signs in the bathrooms (I commended one member of the committee on the wording of the signs, and she looked at me funny and said, "Well, good. We got it from a link you sent us"). I'm attending a yearly meeting event at the meetinghouse this Saturday and was heartened to see that the organizers were asked to include a note about fragrance and accessibility at the Meetinghouse in their materials.
I sat in the FF seating for the first time on Sunday. I will say that, after one trial, it felt pretty crappy. On the one hand, it was the first time I've ever been in worship at the meetinghouse (which is 13 months old) and not had an exposure, so yay for that. On the other hand, for about the first 15 or 20 minutes (maybe not that long; maybe it just felt long), I was the only one in the FF seating. The other three-fourths of the meetinghouse was pretty well populated. I felt isolated and conspicuous; I also felt discouraged that there was not one other person in that room who had taken our conversations about fragrance so much to heart that they had stopped using scented products on Sunday mornings. It hurt my feelings. In my whole life, nobody but David and Scott, who are the two people besides my children who love me the most in all the world, has ever gone fragrance-free in support of my well-being. I don't know why. I do know that it would be like the best present I ever got times 10 if somebody did.
Eventually, two other women who are also sensitive to fragrances came in and sat in the FF seating with me, and I felt less alone and conspicuous but still set apart and visible in an uncomfortable way. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying THESE WOMEN HAVE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES! I had optimistically imagined myself camouflaged among some number of non-sensitive folks who were nonetheless fragrance-free. Alas, no. (One of the women's partners joined us at the rise of meeting; she'd been in another part of the meetinghouse during worship.)
That's just one day. I agreed to the experiment and I'll stick with it. It may get easier as I get used to it. Maybe we'll have a slow migration into FF seating as people experiment with unscented products, and it will get easier that way. It certainly seemed successful from the perspective of exposure and illness. Maybe even if I don't become emotionally comfortable sitting there I'll decide the trade-off is worth it; if I can't have both physical well-being and emotional comfort in worship, maybe physical well-being is the better part. Maybe it's good not to be too comfortable, and my discomfort will bear unexpected fruit. It remains to be seen.
This is not the blog post I sat down to write. Funny how that happens sometimes.
We clearly had other failures of communication as well. Toward the end of that conversation, one member said that this was the first time it had occurred to him that we were actually discussing a health issue. I guess he thought we'd been talking about preferences, or a more general wish to be environmental, to be as clean and toxin-free as possible. I was glad that people heard things that shifted their perspective, but I said to David later, "Where have we failed in talking about this if this is the first time people figured out it was about people's well-being?" It surprised me to learn that we had been, at least to some extent, talking past each other. No wonder feelings were hurt and progress was not made. I wonder if we have more clarity now and that will help us move forward.
Anyway, one thing we're experimenting with is designationg one-fourth of the meeting room as fragrance-free seating. This was a hard decision to make; it was actually minuted back in December and then held back from implementation because of strong concerns raised later. My concerns were pretty pragmatic: I'm not sure our meeting room is large enough for designated seating to be effective, and I was worried that people would think that FF seating solved the problem, so nothing more had to be thought about or done. I also was concerend about partial access--even if FF seating made worship accessible to me, what about the hallway, the library, the social hall, the classrooms?
Others' concerns were more spiritual; one Friend put it very well when he said he was not comfortable with having different Friends seated in different parts of the room, with setting off a separate group. Quakers have always been one body, he said, one community. He said it better; it was moving, and I thought he was not wrong. Another Friend was concerned that saying that only people who were FF could be in this seating area sent the message that some people were "pure" enough to be there and some people weren't.
We eventually decided to go ahead with FF seating, in a spirit of experimentation, and to discuss it again in about six months, after we've lived with it for awhile. This is not the only action we've taken. The Building & Grounds committee has been very pro-active, providing FF hand soap and informational signs in the bathrooms (I commended one member of the committee on the wording of the signs, and she looked at me funny and said, "Well, good. We got it from a link you sent us"). I'm attending a yearly meeting event at the meetinghouse this Saturday and was heartened to see that the organizers were asked to include a note about fragrance and accessibility at the Meetinghouse in their materials.
I sat in the FF seating for the first time on Sunday. I will say that, after one trial, it felt pretty crappy. On the one hand, it was the first time I've ever been in worship at the meetinghouse (which is 13 months old) and not had an exposure, so yay for that. On the other hand, for about the first 15 or 20 minutes (maybe not that long; maybe it just felt long), I was the only one in the FF seating. The other three-fourths of the meetinghouse was pretty well populated. I felt isolated and conspicuous; I also felt discouraged that there was not one other person in that room who had taken our conversations about fragrance so much to heart that they had stopped using scented products on Sunday mornings. It hurt my feelings. In my whole life, nobody but David and Scott, who are the two people besides my children who love me the most in all the world, has ever gone fragrance-free in support of my well-being. I don't know why. I do know that it would be like the best present I ever got times 10 if somebody did.
Eventually, two other women who are also sensitive to fragrances came in and sat in the FF seating with me, and I felt less alone and conspicuous but still set apart and visible in an uncomfortable way. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying THESE WOMEN HAVE CHEMICAL SENSITIVITIES! I had optimistically imagined myself camouflaged among some number of non-sensitive folks who were nonetheless fragrance-free. Alas, no. (One of the women's partners joined us at the rise of meeting; she'd been in another part of the meetinghouse during worship.)
That's just one day. I agreed to the experiment and I'll stick with it. It may get easier as I get used to it. Maybe we'll have a slow migration into FF seating as people experiment with unscented products, and it will get easier that way. It certainly seemed successful from the perspective of exposure and illness. Maybe even if I don't become emotionally comfortable sitting there I'll decide the trade-off is worth it; if I can't have both physical well-being and emotional comfort in worship, maybe physical well-being is the better part. Maybe it's good not to be too comfortable, and my discomfort will bear unexpected fruit. It remains to be seen.
This is not the blog post I sat down to write. Funny how that happens sometimes.