Annals of Failure: Bystander Alert

I’m feeling bad, Readers. Just the other day, I had so much wisdom to dispense to you, but then something happened and I realized - I got nothing.

What happened was this. I was at the gym on a recent Saturday. The Y gym. On a Saturday. A January Saturday. New Year’s resolutions. People with regrets and resolutions. Crowded. You get the picture. I was on the weight machines, maintaining muscle mass, so I can, I hope, live well and independently into my 90s, like my dad, and also, maybe, look hot for a nonagenarian. Looking hot being a gender nonspecific aesthetic goal and therefore not a reflection of being crushed by the patriarchy….. 

I was minding my own business when a large, muscular, young man strode past the chest press machine. He was muscular muscular. Like the kind of gym-made muscular that prevents any of his limbs from touching one another. He was wearing a loose muscle shirt and one of those weight lifting belts made of leather so thick it could be a saddle, and long, droopy shorts. He had dark hair hanging out of a red knit cap. He was noticeable. I noticed him. 

He strode by me and over to the triceps machine and spoke to the person on that machine. I couldn’t hear what he said, since it was several machines away from me, but I thought it started out as, “I was on that” or something. My ears prickled. That was bullshit. I had been in the area for twenty minutes and I hadn’t seen him on any machines, although I had noticed him dead lifting huge barbells, or whatever you call those things, in the free weight area. But that person on the machine was a little, skinny, blonde, teenaged girl, and she hopped up like a jack-in-box, and walked away, an expression of embarrassment on her face. 

An older man on a different machine a few away from mine said something to her. I figured it was her father, or maybe her grandfather. I figured he would say something to the guy. But, no, the red hat guy did his reps, then strode back out of the machine area. Like he had to do some other weight thing in another area of the gym, probably with free weights. I shot him an evil look, but he didn’t notice. The guy never came back. He had only needed that one machine, apparently, and he needed it that very second. He couldn’t wait for her to finish. In fact, he didn’t think he had to wait for her to finish. He felt he could just tell her to let him use the machine. He felt he had more right to it than she did. 

The girl went on hopping nimbly from machine to machine, but she never went back to the one she'd been booted off. I wanted to say something. I wanted to say something to her like, "You had every right to be on that machine, and I’ve been bullied by these weight lifters before," which is true. They like to drop their giant weights with a lot of fuss and then pace around and so forth, so everybody knows how muscular they are. If you’re not aware of their habits, you might think a machine is empty, because in fact, the guy has crossed the room to parade his gigantic muscles around, and it is empty, but he thinks he owns the machine and is just resting between sets. That happened to me, once, and let me just say, the episode did not end prettily, nor did the guy think he had done anything wrong. 

I am filled with rage as I write this. I'm mad because I wanted to say something, but I didn’t. I’m mad at myself. I’m mad at the older guy who spoke to the girl, her father or not her father, who didn’t say anything to red hat guy, either. And of course, I am mad at that guy with the red hat. Why would he wear a red wool hat in the gym? His head muscle was the only one he didn't want us to see, apparently. 

Basically, it’s about guys—men—who just don’t see young girls. Or older women. Or women at all. Who just look past them, or think they can intimidate them to get them out of the way. And it works. They take what they want. They believe what they want is more important that what some young girl wants. Goddammit. That’s the worst thing about it. That dude scared that girl, and no one stepped in. I’m assuming the older guy who spoke to her said something somewhat reassuring to her, but he didn’t confront the bully. I didn’t confront the bully. Oh, I had fantasies about confronting the bully. They started with me saying, ‘You know, that girl was in the middle of her reps. Couldn’t you have waited a minute or two, instead of kicking her off the machine?” And they ended with me punched in the head by Mr. Beefy. 

But I was going to say something until that other man spoke to her. Then I felt it wasn’t my place. If he was her father, then I would be stepping on his role, and it would embarrass her. I would be implicitly criticizing her father for not stepping in, and that would not be good. She already looked humiliated. She wouldn’t want extra attention at that time. 

Or maybe that was just an excuse. 

So we were both bystanders. It feels terrible. And Mr. Beefy went on with his day, and he’ll go on with his bullying. Maybe he’ll be President of the United States one day. That girl will probably vote for him. 

********

Hoo, boy, was that negative. Well, it’s hard to get around it. I don’t want to leave you thinking I’m defeated. I am not. I didn’t step up at that moment, but I have defended myself in the past, and I will again. There were mitigating features in this situation. Meaning, my respect for the putative father mitigated my impulse to say something to the bully. I’m not sure he deserved my respect, but that’s another issue. 

It seems like a good time to pivot to a very empowered woman, Caroline Adams Miller. My interview with her continues with a discussion about feminism and how women’s backs are to the wall, but we are fighters. Click here to read Part 2 of my Q & A with her on Psychology Today. 

Success and the Ooze of Life

Time is out of joint

Scene: Kitchen. Three women, two on the passenger side of a kitchen island. One on the cockpit side, deveining shrimp. All three are mothers. One is a professor, one is a painter of the visual artist variety, not the interior/exterior house variety, and the third is a writer. The professor is cooking. The other two are her guests. What I left out of those job descriptions is that two of the three have “and stay-at-home-mom” appended to them. Can you guess which two? That’s correct, the painter and the writer. The professor, although also a mother, doesn’t have any explanatory appendage to her job description.

What does this mean? Does it mean that being a mother isn’t part of her job? Her only job is the academic post? 

Does it mean that the painting and the writing don’t equal “real” jobs? Or that they are part-time? Maybe that, huh? 

The painter says, “I still hold myself to that Nineteen-fifties ideal.” 

I think about this. Donna Reed’s famous New Look dress and coiffed hair comes up in the brain register automatically. But is that what the painter means? She’s younger than I, and I am too young, actually, to have watched Donna Reed. Yet I know her as shorthand for 1950s housewife, cook, ever-pleasant, perfect-house, homemade-everything Mom.

The point here is that after a second, I thought maybe I needed to clarify that we were all talking about the perfect housewife, cook, cleaner, child-minder. Because this painter doesn’t look at all like Donna Reed. I'm pretty sure she's not secretly longing to change her jeans for a pouffy circle skirt and set hair, but I want to make sure she’s talking Ideal Mother. The mother who is put together herself, and keeps the whole house together and never raises her voice. Now, in the 21st Century.

Yes, the painter says, that is what she meant. And by holding herself up to that standard, she is failing: because she likes to be with her children, to take them to the park and the playground. That means she gets tired with them, and when she gets home, there is all the rest of that Ideal Mother crap to deal with. With which to deal. However, she doesn’t “really” do it. The house is messy and the meals are thrown together. So the housework is not a priority; and cooking square meals isn’t either. But still the idea that it should be hovers. She feels guilty that she’s not doing more. As if minding the children isn’t enough - well, to be exact, as if minding the children and painting isn’t enough. 

And like the writer, the painter finds it really hard to make time for painting, since the nature of childcare is that it oozes to fill all spaces. Like spray insulation. Or Silly Foam. So there is guilt about not painting enough, and guilt about not houseworking and cooking enough. And general frustration, too. Very familiar to me. 

Meanwhile, the professor. When we turn to her I say, Well at least you know if everything goes south - if your husband dies  or loses his job - you can provide for your family. I am totally dependent on mine, financially. 

Yes, says the painter. That’s another way we feel like 1950s housewives. There is tremendous guilt and inadequacy around not earning money. As good feminists, we object to this dependent status. As artists we need it, especially since were we to take on jobs, most likely teaching or something else not particularly lucrative, we would spend our non-kid hours doing work that was secondary to what we wanted to do, spend our tired hours with our kids, and turn over most of our paychecks to childcare. 

The professor says she does feel that her work is very creative and fulfilling; but it is overwhelming and nonstop, even when she comes home. So she feels stretched thin as a parent and as if she is barely getting that done. Guilt, guilt, and more guilt.

Seems to me that because her job is paid and she is accountable to others, her students and her department, that work starts to ooze around the family life that she also wants to have. So she feels overwhelmed by the demands of her work. Whereas the painter and I feel overwhelmed by the demands of the parenting work and our desire to do our personal, creative work. Because we are accountable to ourselves to do that personal work, it’s very hard to enforce the boundaries; therefore, that creative work often gets short changed. There are questions of legitimacy relating to money and to self-confidence in valuing what we do when we do it for nothing and no one for a lot of the time. That applies to the creative “work” we do as well as to the other creative stuff we do called raising children. We can’t call it work, except amongst ourselves, because it’s not considered legitimate “work” unless we earn something tangible from it like money. Or prestige. Prestige counts sometimes, too, intangible though it is. As Anne-Marie Slaughter points out in her new book, (haven’t read) and in this interview (have read), one of the major issues we face societally is that we devalue childcare, or care of any kind. So those of us who spend much of our days doing that kind of work feel crappy about ourselves. Therefore, we insist we have to also fit in a full-throttle creative kind of work, like writing or painting. Then we feel crappy about ourselves because really, caring for young children is full time work and there is just not a lot left over to do the so-called “work.” 

Bottom line: We are all stretched thin, “working” and “not-working.”  We each need to be able to institute boundaries around our time, so we can do that thing we’re supposed to do - have it all. We all need it, but life as currently structured makes it too hard to do that satisfactorily. It’s not sufficient to say we can have it all, just not at the same time; because the teeter-totter nature of balance is, well, kind of stressful.

The state of women. Is this how we want life to be? 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2015/10/21/nurses-fathers-teachers-mothers-why-do-we-devalue-someone-the-minute-they-care-for-others/

A French View of Success

You know, until I got well into this success thing, I thought there was something wrong with me. I seemed genetically incapable of holding down a full time office job without plunging into depression. I assumed my need for blocks of free time and my tendency to grab a few moments to sit in a chair and stair out the window indicated lower energy than a “normal” person, or perhaps congenital laziness. This idea of laziness sharpened against my conflict over earning money versus time to write. Or, in plainer English, what I mean is that I felt like a hypocrite because while I wanted plenty of money, I didn’t want to do the jobs that would earn me it. So what did that make me? A big baby or a hypocrite, both terrible things for an adult to be. Especially a feminist adult. 

Then, when I got married and had babies and ended up staying home with them, well, the things wrong with me multiplied. I was a sell-out for staying home, and a bad feminist for the same reason. I was clearly lacking in some element that would allow me to have energy for parenting, being a spouse, AND writing. Did I mention the part about being supported by the husband? I was dependent on someone else for my financial security. That was a big no-no, for sure. 

Let’s see, what did that make me? 

• genetically incapable
• depressive
• lazy
• abnormal
• low-energy
• hypocritical
• greedy
• a baby
• bad feminist
• sell-out
• dependent

Oh, yeah, and 

• writer

Yikes. What a loser. 

However, I no longer feel that way, usually. Usually. I have my moments, but right now, I feel okay. Perhaps it’s the night time affirmations I do sometimes. Perhaps it’s all the reading I’ve done on creativity and flow and success and happiness and motivation and self-control and on and on. It’s all drip-drip-dripped against my brain and worn it down a bit. 

Or perhaps it’s some smaller successes along the way, like having more than 7 readers (Thank YOU), and a couple of publications in the NYTimes and so on. Nothing like external validation to prop up a lazy hypocrite. 

Into this little trickle of brain drips flowed this little piece in the NYTimes by Francophile Pamela Druckerman, American ex-pat (PDAXP) living in Paris. It is a cute little piece about giving a commencement address to an American school in Paris with French and American students. A commencement address is, according to PDAXP, a quintessentially American thing that boils “down to: Yes you can. Here’s how.”  That would not fly with a largely French audience. “A French commencement address,” she says, “would probably boil down to: No you can’t. It’s not possible. Don’t even try.”  

Well, Readers, you know how taken I am with French style. In fact, just today I tried this French dry shampoo, which is what it sounds like, and makes your hair look clean without having to wash it. If this sounds strange and unnecessary to you, then you must never have had a great blow-out at the salon and then got sweaty exercising. That’s all I have to say. Except - doesn’t my hair look great?  It’s Klorane Shampooing sec. I got it at Sephora, FYI.

But I digress. I was talking about the article by PDAXP. And so I read on with interest how she resolved her dilemma of delivering a very unFrench address in a French style. She chose, she said, a common French saying, something “optimistic, but not grandiose.” 

So practical, those French. Here it is:

Vouz allez trouver votre place. 

You will find your place. 

PDAXP goes on to talk about some rules for being a creative person and finding your place in life. And they are so, um, validating. What a nauseous word. You can look it up. Her list, I mean. I’m not writing about creativity rules today. Except the part about sticking to it, and about creating blank space for yourself. And about paying attention to what you do on the side of what you do to earn money, because that gives you big clues as to where your place may be. Yes, validating is the word. 

If you’re wondering what I’m on about, this is it. Finding your place. That is success. Some people do it without much fuss, some people have more trouble. I have, no doubt, been one of the latter. I have had so much trouble. Partly because of who I was raised to be, and partly, again without doubt, because I am a creative person. A “creative”, as I’ve seen it nominalized. Like a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher - a creative. The word sounds a little weird like that, with an article, turned into a noun. I used to hate it, but I’ve just this second convinced myself I kind of like the term. Making a description into a thing in this case is helpful, because a description is abstract, but a thing - well, a thing can find its place. 

Tips from Baba Wawa

A quick note before I retrieve the 15 year old from her summer dance intensive. We’re getting ever closer to 11^th grade over here, and I’m experiencing trepidation. You’re shocked, aren’t you, Readers? After all, I usually face challenges with total equanimity. A veritable Dalai Lama of calma. That’s me.

For the journey, I’ve fortified myself with Barbara Walters’ first book, How to Talk to Practically Anyone About Practically Anything. I’ve decided I need a better approach to small talk – better than turning myself into a dog-and-pony show of self-deprecating neurosis. I’m thinking there might be more to conversation than that. Perhaps enquiring about the other person ostensibly listening to me? I’m not sure. I’ll have to see what Barbara says. Or said. She wrote this in 1970. Her intention was to help women – men, too, but women – because women had just recently begun moving out into more visible roles in the world. Interesting, at least to me.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Baba Wawa’s book, attributed to “Mrs. Eugene McCarthy, during a television interview I conducted with her at the time her husband was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.”

I am the way I am; I look the way I look; I am my age.  

Why Am I Not Danish?

It’s not that I long to talk about TV shows, but this one has been so interesting that I can’t resist. I’m

Maybe on a good day.....

speaking of a Danish drama called “Borgen,” which is about the Prime Minister (PM) of Denmark, who happens to be a woman. We watched the last episode of the second season of Borgen yesterday and I dreamed about the PM, Birgitte Nyborg, off and on all night.

Spoiler alert! But, as my Shakespeare professor once said, if you’re upset to discover that Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play, you’ve lost the point of literature. Okay, maybe I’ve lost the point of it, by now, eons later, Professor Finkelpearl long retired; but his message was that knowing the ending of the story doesn’t lessen its impact, it makes the story richer. So, I am performing due diligence in warning you of spoilers; but I’m telling you, Readers, a spoiler doesn’t matter in this case.

This season found Birgitte pinioned by the demands of her job and her desire to be available to her children. One of her children had an acute mental health crisis, and following the shrink’s injunction that her recovery would require big changes in the family, the PM decided she had to take a leave from work. Naturally, this made big news. Other (male) politicians, of course, took advantage of her absence to build themselves up while running her down. Predictably, they turned her gender into an issue. Questions about her mothering, and whether a mother could handle the job of PM dominated the press. She was a bad mother, because her daughter was struggling; and she was a bad politician, because she was distracted by her child. Eventually, even though she wasn’t quite ready to return to work, she did return, because her advisors suggested the situation was getting out of hand, and policy implementation was foundering in a perceived power vacuum.

The PM’s instinct was to ignore the press. She refused to respond to the insinuations that her gender affected her ability to lead. She told her aides that responding was beneath her. She was happy to talk politics, she said, not gender. It would have been easy to get on the TV and angrily ask if journalists would be asking these questions of a man. And of course it would have been easy to say that a man would probably not take a leave to be there for a child - because men assume the women will do it. Women have to shoulder more roles. That doesn’t mean they do inferior work, by any means. But Birgitte didn’t go that route.

The PM had been struggling all season as a single mom, by the way. After her first year in office, her husband Philip left, feeling frustrated, neglected, and probably emasculated when she took on the demanding job of PM.

Jerk.

Finally, in the last episode, she told him off – thank goodness – and said he’d given up too fast and hadn’t been understanding enough of the demands of her new job and how long it would take to adjust to them. When a former male PM got on the news and talked about how hard it had been on his wife, how neglected she had felt, and how inevitable that neglect had been when he was PM, it seemed to strike a new chord with Philip. While he didn’t say so, one can hope the realization had begun to penetrate that he’d been an ass. I believe that’s the technical term. He’d applied a double standard to Birgitte. I thought it was a nice touch to show Philip getting driven around by his new girlfriend, a busy pediatrician, another strong woman; the suggestion being that he was entirely too passive about his life choices and didn’t know how to fight. Also, that he both enjoyed and was immobilized by the powerful women in his life.

When the PM returned, she gave a short speech to the legislature. It was marvelous. She pointed out that the first four women in Danish politics were elected in 1918, therefore, the debate about gender was about a hundred years too late. That ship has sailed, she said, in different words. Danish words. Her point was, here I am, I am PM, and I am doing what I have to do, so shut up about my gender and get back to work. It was great.

This was all entirely diverting and engrossing, and there was added pleasure, too, that the husband said the actress who plays the PM looks like me. But it was an uncomfortable feeling, too, when I consider how mired and stuck I sometimes feel in my own life, and how unfledged I am professionally, and when I see how much she does in her life. In fact all the women in the show are professionals, and it makes me feel like I haven’t done enough.

There’s been a whispered, provocative question circulating among feminists and sociologists that it’s awfully interesting that our society discovered, just at the time when women were getting into the professions seriously and moving out of the home, that mothering is a fulltime job requiring 100% attendance at home to provide a solid base for the children. Mom can go back to work, the suggestion is, but her kids may turn out sociopaths. So go ahead and take away some deserving man’s job, but watch what you reap.

The implication, I suppose, is that my generation grew up to be a bunch of miserable degenerates (slackers, anyone?), because a lot of us had parents who worked - and who, by the way, practiced a more hands-off style of parenting. Therefore, we try to give our children what we think we missed.

Yet now there’s a move away from “helicopter parenting” and a yearning for the freedom kids experienced in the latchkey kid days. Or was it the fifties and sixties when kids were outside all day long, roaming freely, while their moms were home suffering from the problem with no name? It’s all so confusing. What’s a feminist mother to do?

I can’t help wondering if I’ve been hooked by some line cast by the feminist backlash. Because I surely felt my attendance at home was preferred. I felt that my kids needed me home, at least when they were little. However, now that they are older, and feminism has moved back into the mainstream, I want to earn money and show them a “productive” role model. Unfortunately, now it’s much harder to build a meaningful career because I’m, well, older. So I flop around on the deck, regretting my choice.

After all, I am not a degenerate, even though my parents worked. My stepmother stayed home with my sister for a while, but the honest truth is that I was happier when she wasn’t there. We had a housekeeper, so I was not a latchkey kid, though several of my friends were – and it was fun to go to their houses after school. But I did manage to grow up and attend college and graduate school and get married, have children, and become the neurotic, anxiety-riven overthinker that I am today, without winning a lot of ribbons for participation in soccer, without Mom being There for me. On the other hand, the minute my first child was born, I was all in. I wanted to be there for all of it. I don’t regret that.

Ah, the pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth. We are all getting sleepy. I relate to Birgitte Nyborg in this: the push-pull conflict over women’s roles needs to end. Cease the discussion about qualifications. We need to move to a new understanding of women’s needs, of children’s needs, and of men’s needs, too. The line between working at paid work and caring for family needs porosity. It’s still too rigid. A mom who needs or wants paying work, needs places to go. Let’s talk about that.

Borgen and Me: The Political Gets Personal

Do you know what Borgen is? Until a few weeks ago, neither did I. Among the husband’s side of the family we’ve become obsessed with Scandinavian television and literature. Well, "literature" may be overstating the quality of the reading material. I'm talking about the genre known as Nordic Noir*, specializing in barely functioning yet mesmerizing detectives trying to solve grisly murders without themselves becoming victims of either their own weaknesses (how Shakespearean) or of the killers they’re trailing. Some of these novels have been adapted for TV, but now we’ve discovered – and by "we" I mean my mother-in-law (MIL) – original television series on DVD. The latest one she passed along to us is a Danish show called “Borgen.” She passed it along to us, and with it, she passed along a request that I blog about it.

Borgen, for those who, like me, know zero about Denmark besides that it was the land of Hans Christian Anderson, is the locus of Denmark’s parliament. “Borgen” the TV series is about its fictional first female Prime Minister, Birgitte Nyborg, a forty-something brunette with a husband and two children. Turns out that the real Denmark also has its first female Prime Minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a forty-something blonde. There, now you know as much as I do about actual Danish politics. 

So let’s begin with this: what I think I know about Denmark. What I think I know about Denmark is  it’s one of those Scandinavian countries with a strong socialist system that fosters equality between the sexes and classes and where everyone is attractive, white, and wears burly sweaters. This is also what I think of when I think of Sweden, Finland, and Norway, but to prove that the MIL is right to expect something intelligent from me, let me also say that I do differentiate among those Northern European countries. For example, while my idea of Denmark is that it’s one of those socialist countries that fosters equality between the sexes and where everyone is attractive, white, and wears burly sweaters, I don’t stereotype everyone there as tall and blonde. That’s Sweden. Denmark has brunettes, and possibly redheads. Norway has brunettes, too. This I learned on my junior year at Oxford. And Finland? Cell phones and excellent schools.

This is the sum total of my knowledge of these countries. Wait, no, that’s incomplete. I know from Nordic Noir that there is a fine heroin trade with Asia, a sex slave situation from Eastern Europe, and racial tension with the few immigrants there. Despite the existence of poverty and junkies there, Denmark has come a long way since the Little Match Girl died of cold and starvation back in H. C. Anderson’s day.

Why am I writing about “Borgen”? Because the MIL was right. There is a lot to say about it. I’ll admit I’m feeling a smidge pressured, though. She expects I will have something interesting to say. And for the MIL, interesting is more than witty. There has to be pith there, too. Evidence of intellect. That kind of thing. This is a problem, because most of what I think about when I think about “Borgen” is that Birgitte Nyborg, the Prime Minister in the series, is not a super-skinny woman, but has some curves, and even half-heartedly despairs of them. So I think about how fat or not she thinks she is, and how fat or not I am in comparison to her – TV adds fifteen pounds, so really she is not at all fat, the actress, I mean, and how I’m not on TV so does the mirror add fifteen pounds or is that just life? - and what percent of her life she spends thinking about it – the fictional character, I mean - considering that she is the Prime Minister.

But despair not, MIL, because my point – and Readers, you know I have one - is that this show has a realistic, complex view of its characters. Furthermore, the main character and one of the key supporting characters are women, and the show explores the many roles they fulfill as educated career women with considerable nuance and realism that you don’t see on American television.

For example, in the third episode, a character has an abortion. Can you imagine that happening on American TV? Not only does she have an abortion, but her decision is dramatized. The viewer watches her learn she’s pregnant, get an ultrasound to confirm it, and hide it from her employer - because she's conflicted about being pregnant, not because she's worried she will be fired. Katrine is twenty-eight, and a rising TV political analyst with a public profile and obvious ambition. She had been having an affair with a married man, who died suddenly, after which she discovered she was pregnant. Both people she tells about the pregnancy expect she will terminate it. One is her ex-boyfriend, who assumes she will terminate. The second is her mother, who tells her to. Can you imagine that? And not only that, but also, her mother tells her to have an abortion despite being a practicing Christian. She tells Katrine she is hanging onto this pregnancy for the wrong reason – grief that the father of the baby has just died, and she wants to have some part of him. “You’re the one who believes in God,” says Katrine, who expected a different response from her mother. Her mother says, “God has nothing to do with this. You must look out for yourself.” 

God has nothing to do with this. From a Christian woman.

Not only that, but Katrine has this abortion (which is presumably covered by her health insurance, which is presumably covered by the taxes she pays to her government who then invest that money into a social safety net) without incident – though not without a few tears – and returns to work immediately. She is not maimed by the experience physically nor psychologically, and apparently her religious mother isn’t worried for her soul, either.

Can you imagine any of this on American TV? Or in American discourse in any way?

That Katrine Fønsmark in Denmark can get an abortion safely, legally, and with excellent anesthesia, apparently, in a clean and well-run health facility, on national television, shows that Denmark is way ahead of us. This very common plot point in the average professional woman’s actual life in America is kept hidden from view on US TV and in the movies. For wouldn’t I have done the same as Katrine if I were a young, single, rising professional who got knocked up by a married man? Yes, I would have, and most of the women I know would have – or did – too. The majority of abortions performed in the US are on women in their twenties. Over 90% of the abortions are performed at thirteen weeks’ gestation or less, and about 70% at under eight weeks’. There are about a million abortions performed a year. (http://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/data_stats/) Only we aren’t allowed to talk about it. And while we are busy not talking about this very common solution to a very common problem, unwanted pregnancy, we are forgetting to fight for our right to it, and we are in danger of losing it.

There has been much talk lately about the dearth of female leaders in corporate and political affairs, and a renewed look at feminism and work-life balance, and at the challenges women face maintaining careers and families and returning to careers after focusing on raising children, and this is terrific. I am all for this kind of talk. But, as Deborah Spar, President of Barnard, said recently on NPR (she has a new book about feminism), the feminist agenda needs to focus on a few other things as well. It needs to return to the activist, civil-rights bent it had back before my generation thought we’d reaped the benefits of the women’s movement and were all set. Deborah Spar, like Madeleine Kunin, says we need to focus on equal pay; paid family leave; and quality childcare.

However, this agenda presupposes that women have control over their reproductive systems. This agenda steps around the edges of this right, because there is still that infuriating minority of legislators and deluded constituents who are working as hard as they possibly can to undermine it. If women can’t control their reproductive systems, then they can’t really control anything in their lives. Which is exactly how a few wildly flapping fundamentalist sexists want it, but is not how most people want it to be.

But also – and here’s where I start sounding like one of those liberal conspiracy theorists – while we are fighting to retain the right to abortion and birth control – yes, even to birth control - we are not advocating for those other three agenda items: paid family leave, equal pay, and quality childcare. These agenda items might cost a lot more government dollars overall than legal abortion. Perhaps it suits certain powerful minority voices to keep us plugging the reproductive rights dyke, because while we have our fingers over there, we aren’t lobbying over here for these other measures that would potentially fundamentally change the structure of our working lives and therefore of our society.

So I have to ask myself, who benefits from the way things are now? Who benefits if things don’t change? And what might things look like if this so-called feminist – but really just humanist – agenda came into being? Furthermore, if we don’t let ourselves get distracted by the assault on abortion, at least not entirely, and if we do return to the more civil-rights focused aspects of the women’s movement and get these family-friendly policies installed, then I imagine reproductive rights will be strengthened along with them.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. As Walt Whitman said, “I contain multitudes.” We all do.

* For a great overview of Nordic Noir, try this.

Opting Out or Shut Out?

Hello, Readers. I should've done this before, but better late than never. I had another piece on the Huffington Post. It's about women "opting out" of the workforce and then "opting in" - or trying to.

It's my response to Judith Warner's recent New York Times Magazine article, "The Opt Out Generation Wants Back In."

Ten years ago, Lisa Belkin wrote an article for the New York Times about a group of well-connected women educated at elite colleges and universities who had decided to step away from full-time corporate careers to focus on raising their children. These women were "opting-out" of the high-powered working world, despite their feminist upbringings, because their careers were incompatible with raising children and "having a life" outside of work. In my sweat pants and with my small children hanging on my ankles, I related to this article. Some may ask why, since I had never held any kind of high-paying, high-profile corporate job.

Read it here!

Sheesh, my self-promoting skills kind of suck, don't they?

How to Be a Successful Woman: Be Human

Do you want to know the weirdest thing about Sheryl Sandberg's book, Lean In, Readers? I relate to it.
That is weird. Why would I relate to a book about climbing the corporate ladder? Excuse me, climbing the corporate jungle gym, as Sandberg prefers to describe it. I’ve done everything I could to arrange my life so that I would have blocks of free time in the afternoon. This plan has led me as far away from corporate life as anything could have. I worked in an office right after college, and I discovered that it depressed the hell out of me. After ruining a perfectly swell linen skirt with grass stains on my lunch hour, I had to face it: I am not your corporate type. Whatever that is.

On the other hand, why wouldn’t I relate to a book about how a seemingly competent woman struggles with self-doubt and has to double think and analyze every step she makes? If I’d known I could do that on a stupendously large salary, I might have stayed on the professional path.

I’ve been kind of appalled by the responses to  Lean In. It’s too one-percenty. It’s about “clawing your way to the top.” It doesn’t consider the real problems of most working women, or of most women, or of other particular groups of women.  She was “lucky “ to have Important Male Mentors.

So what? Does every woman have to speak for every other woman to speak truth? To make a difference? Isn’t Sheryl Sandberg’s experience as valid as mine? Or yours? Or your cleaning lady’s? And frankly, it’s the one percent who can make some immediate policy changes just by being who they are at the top. Is this bad?

I have to admit that I was one of the people who read Sandberg’s Barnard commencement address a couple of years ago, and her profile in the New Yorker last year, with skepticism. I wanted to hate her. I wanted to find the flaw. If she’s a great business woman, then she must be a sucky mom, right? Or be divorced.  Or hate other women. When I really paid attention to her, however, I had to admire her words and recognize my own thwarted ambition.

A lot of people complain that she’s blaming the victim, telling women they have to fix themselves internally before structural change will occur. To them I say, have you actually read the book? She’s talking about the need for internal and external changes. Leaning in means not prematurely cutting yourself off from seeking promotions or taking on extra leadership roles just because you might want flexibility to have a personal life and children. She says it’s better to lean in to your goals and keep going towards them, and work out the details later; don’t cut off possibilities for yourself because you’re afraid you’ll have too much work or responsibility. When women do that – and they definitely do – then they often find themselves in lesser work that’s unfulfilling, and ultimately they may drop out of the workforce.

Sound familiar, anyone?

Her section on mentors is a little harsh. In short, she says there’s been too much emphasis on women finding mentors, as if a mentor is the secret key to success. She says, “We need to stop telling them [women], ‘Get a mentor and you will excel. Instead, we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.’”

Speaking as one of many women who has lamented her lack of mentors and looked at finding one as the deus ex machina necessary to success, let me say, “Ouch!” However, after rubbing that bruise, let me also say that her words echo the phrase, attributed to Buddha and familiar to habitués of yoga studios and meditation retreats everywhere, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” Honestly, she’s just saying you’ve got to work hard. No one is going to get you there until you’ve proven yourself.

So, here’s what I like about this book:

1.     She’s honest about her self-doubts. Lean in also means learning to work with the negative, doubting voice in the brain and acting confident, even if you don’t feel it; it means, to quote a friend’s favorite phrase, “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

2.     She’s honest about her intellect, her luck, and all the help she’s received from men, from women, from bosses, and from assistants.

3.     She’s honest about her mistakes, like the time she failed to see the raised hand of one of the few women in the room and called on man after man. At a talk on gender equality.

4.     She says she’s a feminist. If you think this is minor, just check with any female under forty and find out if she wants to identify herself as feminist, and then look at the other prominent women in business and notice how they distance themselves from the term, and from the “issues” that are “women’s.” Why do you think we haven’t had that final burst of change that would institute meaningful family leave policies, equal pay, paid sick leave, and flexible scheduling across all industries, businesses, jobs? Because women have had to distance themselves from these issues to get ahead. And once they do, like Melissa Mayer, Chief Yahoo at Yahoo, they pretend being a woman makes no difference in the world.

The feminism I grew up with taught that once women made it to the top, they were going to change things for everyone. Well, the movement stalled, didn’t it? As Sandberg says, women who made it found themselves adhering to a stereotype about what men are like, and men often have to do that, too. The point was supposed to be that when women gained equality, then men would have more options, too. Only it didn’t work out that way, because women at the top forgot that last step: speaking out to make change. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t. She says, “I believe that this will create a better world, one where half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men.”

5.     She gives practical advice. She talks about how to negotiate salary. She talks about how to navigate the mentor-mentee relationship. She talks about how to handle negative criticism. In every instance she talks about challenges she overcame.

Yes, Sheryl Sandberg is different from most of us. She’s a corporate superstar, very bright, extremely ambitious, and powerful. She’s not a professional automaton, however; she’s a very human professional. By showing her humanness, she’s also in the vanguard of a changing working paradigm. This is what we were aiming for, back in the 1980s. She made it up there and now she wants to encourage more women and men to join her, and to be human about it. Maybe you don’t want to be part of her working world. Maybe your ambitions are totally different from hers. But I honestly believe that it’s people like Sheryl Sandberg who will help shape work life policy in a more equitable, family-friendly direction, and that will in turn make life better for all of us. She’s speaking her truth, and encouraging others to speak theirs. I say, applaud her for bringing the focus back to what a lot of us would like to think is old news: We’d like to think those feminist battles have been won, because they were exhausting. The battles were not won, however, and the movement, until very recently, had been beaten back into the tributaries of academia and radicalism. With Sheryl Sandberg, the women's movement, feminism, whatever you want to call the effort to achieve equality between women and men has moved back into the mainstream. Let’s lean in on that!

Success Went to My Head (Ask My Niece)

Sorry I've taken so long to post a new post. My head--see, my head--it got all swolled up and I had trouble fitting it in the overhead bin, so my return to Normal, Suburbia, got delayed. I'm better now (steroids), and I'm here to tell you that Success with a capital-S, hasn't changed me a bit.

Portrait of Me by my niece--note large head

Okay, there is a bit of truth up in that paragraph. For one, I did have an actual success, as I mentioned, my guest post in the New York Times (online). It was a thrill. Indeed, it was. At least from the moment I learned my writing would appear before the public until the moment that it did, I was thrilled. After that, the mix of emotions was, well, a mix. Try as I might to avoid reading the comments, I failed. Even though I was prepared ahead of time for a range of reactions, some of them got to me.  Some were supportive, some were abusive. Some were plain silly--like the accusation that I was denigrating an entire metropolis (Boston), by accusing women there of not wearing make-up.

Parse that one, my scores of readers, and your heads might pop off and roll under the seats in front of you. I mean, really, is it an insult to "accuse" someone of not wearing make-up? I mean, is there something wrong with not wearing make-up? And if a whole city (Boston) chooses not to wear make-up, is there something wrong with that?

I rest my case.

Anyway, the other bit of truth in that first paragraph is that I was out of town at my high school reunion and that something in my possession did not fit in the overhead bin  (my carry-on suitcase) on my return.

In the event that any of my readers are under the age of 30 and might, therefore, be alarmed by the knowledge, I will refrain from stating which year reunion it was. But it was a biggie.

I must also point out the fortuitous timing of the publication of my Motherlode piece in the week before my big high school reunion. Not that I'd have had any trouble going without that publication credit in my pocket--I'd already booked the dinner and the flight, I swear--but it was a nice little feather to have along with me. And a few people did mention reading it, and several others also mentioned it, and it was fun to be recognized and have people relate to my written words and find they'd been meaningful to people. Sure, they were mostly other women of exactly my age and background, which is what happens when you go to a girls' prep school in Washington, DC; but we're important. Yes we are.

So my head swelled a little (apparently--ask my niece), even though I'm not exactly on the short list for Secretary of State or anything, like one of my classmates. It was just a little piece in the paper. Nevertheless, I signed a contract with the New York Times Company, and I'm getting paid for it, which means I'm a bona fide published writer.

Now that the excitement has died down, and I've re-established myself to myself as a decent mother and person and human being following all those nutso comments in the NYTimes, I find myself back exactly where I started, writing a new blog post for my scores of readers. I do, however, have a small lesson or two about success to impart.

1. Achievement does feel good. However, the feeling is fleeting.
2. What's most important about this achievement is it makes me feel that since I did it once, I can do it again, and it helps me feel justified in pursuing the thing I love to do.

So that's success. And it did change me a little bit. Just a little bit, though. A slightly larger head suits my frame better, anyway. Just ask my niece.

Byline Success

Hi there!  Check this out:

Today I am in Motherlode. 

That's right, that's the New York Times online.

I'm feeling pretty successful right now, my scores of readers!

Sisterhood

"I thought you were a feminist," the husband joked after reading my last post. I am a feminist. Really. Truly. Germaine Greer, Nancy Friday, The Boston Women's Health Book Collective collectively, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet, Sisterhood Is Powerful,  Adrienne Rich, I read you all. Yes, sisters, I am a feminist, I swear. I was primed. 

So why the weird stuff about ambition? And how to explain my existence as a stay-at-home mom?

I was never going to be a stay-at-home mom. I was going to have a profession. A sanctioned, capital- P profession. Sanctioned by the parents, I mean. I've dipped into that a bit already, but to recap: That ship ran aground in my mid-twenties, when I realized - surprise- that what I really wanted to be was a writer, and immediately began doubting myself. Stepped off the sanctioned path, got lost in the woods.

Bad mixed metaphor, and beside the point. The point is, I was going to work "outside the home." Yes, I wanted children; but I was in one hundred percent agreement with Adrienne Rich that just because women are biologically compelled/created to have children doesn't mean that having children is the ultimate fulfillment of a woman's destiny. Motherhood wasn't going to complete me. It wasn't my destiny, it was my choice. I agreed then. I agree now. Really.

So even though no childbirth was going to be my ultimate experience, even though having a child wasn't going to fill some hole in my womanhood that would forever go empty, no baby was going to plug a gaping hole in my psyche, well, maybe - definitely - because I didn't have a mother, it did.

Probably because my mother died when I was a baby I discovered a hunger for that mother-child bond that awakened with the birth of my first child. I took a leave of absence from my teaching job, and suddenly, I didn't want to go back. I didn't want to leave my child. Ever. Possibly to a pathological degree.

Who would want to miss a moment when every moment with a baby is full of change and growth?

At the same time, who wants to be "just a mom," a full time job with zero status (unless it is the status gained by proving that you're able to stay home when almost everyone else has to work at least part time, but that's really just reflected status from the breadwinner, not true status?) Who wants to give up autonomy, financial independence, future financial gain, lunches out,  and fun shoes to stay home with this magnetic source of drudgery, filth, frustration, and fatigue?

Choose motherhood? You spend years on the floor or the bathroom--which, by the way, you can never enter by yourself (and closing the door while small hands beat upon it and little eyes peer underneath it or pass desperate notes through the slit does not count as privacy.) "They suck everything out of you," I've heard more than one parent say about their children. The best comment I ever heard, though, from a friend whose three children were under five at the time, was that she "felt like an elevator." Choose motherhood? I did.

If you'll permit an extended metaphor, I would say that being a mother is like a being a nail. You start out all shiny and pointed, and end up dented and flush against the surface of some structure whose shape you can't discern, and which is permanently under construction. Oh, sure, it's only you, doing your part to create a dependable, sturdy, solid corner of the scaffolding of society, but it's awfully hard to remember you're doing something important when your head's been pushed down so far, and not too many others notice, either.

And as wrong as it feels to agree that motherhood has such low status, I actually spend time distancing myself from this choice by making sure that everyone knows that I'm a writer, too. I'm a mom, but also a writer. I mean, it is true. I am a writer. And one of the benefits of being a writer is that I can arrange my schedule so my children are the priority when they're around. For many years they were the only priority, because the labor side of motherhood was so intensely physical and non-stop there was no time or energy for anything else. Even so, I clung to the writer-identity to give myself a modicum of self-respect. Oh no, I'm not "just a mom." I'm a writer.

And another thing. The raising of children is one job, the management of a home, another. I am a parent, yes, but not a maid or a domestic goddess. Who wants to be that? Only very famous people who get paid to do that work.

As usual, I am a welter of conflict about this topic. I feel the job is vital; but does that mean that mothers who work outside the home are doing a lesser job? I know that many who do feel they're failing at both, the paying job and the mom job. It's damn hard to do one thing really, really well. So doing two?

The bottom line is that I feel angry that I feel ashamed  about this choice. I feel I have to apologize to the "real" feminists, because to choose mothering as a career places you in dependency on someone else, and that is a big, feminist no-no. Furthermore, I worry I'm being a bad role model for my children. Mine are both girls, but if I had a boy, I would also worry that he would think that being "just a mom" is what women should be. And there's reality, too, which is that my children have to plan to take care of themselves financially, and while I'm providing them a role model of a mother, I'm not providing them with a role model of a financially independent working woman.

That part I'm trying to change.