A friend of a friend, who is a hairstylist, just called me to book an appointment for my children to come in.
That sounds terribly kind, efficient and proactive, but just between you, me and some frizzy hair, it is a trap. This appointment might seem like a harmless liaison to arrange some kiddie-curls, but I sense a more sinister, pressing and urgent motive. I’ve watched TLC. I know all about interventions.
Here’s what I know for sure: it all starts with Guy Kawasaki. Frickin’ Guy Kawasaki or, more accurately, an intern paid to tweet under Guy Kawasaki’s name, posted a link on Twitter last week to an interesting Salon piece.
Disclaimer: I think pretty much everything at Salon is interesting, so I clicked on it and in return for my unwavering devotion, Salon has ruined my life.
I’m not overstating this and there will be italics harmed in the making of this post. The Salon piece that ruined my life was about shampoo and how it is fucking killing you.
Guy Kawasaki, Twitter, Salon, and Bill Bunn have jointly and severally straight up conspired to ruin my life and all of them should be exceptionally thankful that I’m not litigious or that I am but I lack the funds for a lawyer or that I know that lawyers take these cases on a contigency basis but I’m just too plain lazy to pursue it.
I’m not too lazy to write about it, however, because writing is easy and doesn’t require leaving the house, and leaving the house is a problem because that requires showering, and now I can’t use shampoo, goddamn it, which means that since reading the piece at Salon about the evils of shampoo I am now housebound. And fasting. I’m housebound and fasting. This is going nowhere good, in a hurry. The refrigerator may need a lawyer, too.
I’m so distraught about the situation that I can’t even summarize the article. It is traumatizing and life-changing, so I insist you go read it yourself.
****this is you, reading the article. When you’re finished, we’ll talk****
***did you read it? omg isn’t it awful? aren’t you traumatized???*****
I KNOW! I am totally freaked out, too.
Bill Bunn makes a pretty terrifying argument that the chemicals in these shampoos are getting washed down the drain and causing male fish to grow ovaries and yes, that worries me, and I can connect the dots. This shit is at least mildy bad for you and possibly really, really bad for you. And we put it this stuff on our heads! Male fish are growing ovaries, dear readers! I don’t know about you, but I really don’t need my scalp to grow ovaries. I find the ones I’ve got to be well-sited and therefore deviations from the status quo would be unnecessary and unwelcome.
But Bill Bunn clearly is not invested in having a gleaming chestnut bob or smelling like yummy citrus sundae. He dismisses such concerns as ‘psychological’. I take issue with that. Shiny hair, and I know this for an imaginary fact, IS on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and if it isn’t, it is just because Maslow was jealous of my Cleopatra-do. I suspect Bill Bunn, who is Canadian and therefore probably my neighbour, is also envious of my shiny hair. Now that’s psychological for ya, Bill.
Still, Bill does prescribe a solution. Thank goodness, because I thought the answer was going to be no shampoo at all, ever and mass suicide would result and heterosexual men would be very, very lonely.
The answer is Sunlight. The dish detergent. That is what is safe to use to wash your hair. Sunlight. The dish detergent.
I KNOW! I am totally freaked out, too.
Look, it’s not even about me and my vanity. I’m worried about the children. My children. My beautiful, biracial children with fine, soft, ringlets. They have gorgeous hair and everyone likes to touch it and talk about it. Black, white, brown, turtles, goats, demi-gods – it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from, the interest in the texture of my children’s hair is unflagging and universal.
For women in general, hair is a big issue and I think for black women in particular, Hair Is A Great Big Giant Massive Issue of Epic Proportions.
When my former partner and I were first together, his teenage sister lived with us and gave me a crash course on Serious Hair, The Lifestyle. When she got her hair braided,it was an epic undertaking of endurance and joy, sort of like a music festival mixed with a marathon but with hair as the main event. It was a feat of endurance that took days. Three or four young women would camp out at our house for a weekend and braid each other’s hair. They’d talk to each other, cook for each other, run errands for each other (in hats and scarves), and braid each other’s hair until the wee hours of the morning, and then in the morning start all over again.
It was amazing. It took forever. It was an exercise in feminine community. It was touching. I sometimes ended up braided, too, because who could resist being touched and talked to and immersed in female bonding for three days?
Logically, then, the black women in my children’s father’s family are intensely interested in how I manage my girls’ hair. It goes like this:
“hi, how are you, a curse upon your house for leaving my brother/cousin/nephew/son you heartless hussy (usually they just say this part in their heads, but sometimes it slips out), so nice to see you, how are the girls, what are you using in their hair? Can you braid?”
Sometimes I suspect that the futures of my children are a function of my ability to make good straight plaits with fresh lines.
But after reading this Salon piece which made me fear the nuclear ingredients I was pouring over my own head, how can I, in good conscience, rub toxic, cancer-causing chemicals into the scalps of my babies?
And how can I not?
Do you know what happens when a white mama walks around with two black babies with bad hair? I do, or I think I do, and it strikes fear in my heart.
Every day, I send my children to school with freshly scraped pony-tails or braids or moussed ringlets and gleaming faces and every day when I return to fetch my children, I sigh. Their daycare is on acreage and because they play outside (hallelujah) and dig for bugs and pick blackberries and take mudbaths, my children are inevitably straight up filthy and whatever semblance of order I imposed on their hair has been challenged until it accepts the coup and seeks refuge in the domestic bermuda triangle that disappears hair-ties, barrettes, and single socks.
When I pick up my girls they are happy, exercised, energised, but filthy. And then we’ll need milk or bread or in the bad old days, shampoo, and I’ll have to stop at the grocery store, and I can see it. I can see people – black, white, brown, indeterminate – shaking their heads (even if only in their heads and in mine) at the oblivious white mama who lets her black babies run around with ashy knees and dirty faces and doesn’t know how to do hair.
In those moments, I’m pretty sure that my girls are pitied and their lack of culture and their futures as conflicted, self-hating Oreos are inscribed in wild lines of wayward curls.
And if you think I am being oversensitive and paranoid, I am.
But I worry about these things: I worry that I’m not giving my girls the tools they need to be strong black women, because how can I? And let’s be real: everyday, my little family is the subject of judgement.
Sometimes we make the cut, because oh mixed babies are just so cute. But the days when we are just being normal, and I’m tired and frazzled and snappy and they’ve got messy hair and dirty faces and are acting up in the grocery store, we’re not just being normal. We’re being judged.
With this ever constant-fear of being judged – by white people, for having black babies, by black people, for having black babies and not knowing how to do their hair or keep their skin shiny – I wondered: dare I wash their hair with Sunlight and risk the frizzies and the shame?
So I called a black girlfriend and asked her if Sunlight was okay. Her answer went like this. “What?” Pause. “Sunlight?” Pause. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????”
In the interests of diversity, I called a white girlfriend. Her answer went like this. “What?” Pause. “Sunlight?” Pause. “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?????”
Clearly the female vote was not shining on Sunlight. I decided to get really diverse, and ask a man, and a man who truly has a stake in the matter.
I called my girls’ dad. He was equally concerned about the evils being poured over our babies’ heads, until I got to the part where I proposed using dishsoap in their hair.
He shaves his head, which means he uses whatever soap is in the shower and shampoo does not occupy a prominent place in his domain of expertise. Being a good man, and an even better dad, he very helpfully offered to call one of his sisters or his mother to find out what pending aesthetic travesties Sunlight will inflict on black hair and whether he needed to seek custody.
He called one person and she called one person and she called one person and then a hairdresser called me to insist that I bring in the girls because I am a white mama run organically amok who doesn’t know about black hair and I’m pretty sure that child services will be waiting at this appointment or at least conducting discreet surveillance in an unmarked van across the street.
So when I said Salon ruined my life, I wasn’t kidding.
And you should see our hair.
I’m scared to admit it – which, by my internal code of ethics, means that I must do so, immediately – but I’m fasting.
I’m worried that my Fat Acceptance friends will frown and sigh. I promise, it has nothing to do with weight loss, promoting disordered eating, or body hatred.
No, it is way worse than that. Last week I blog-slapped Liz Jones for her sojourn into burqa tourism, but now I’m travelling that same path. Indeed, my darlings, I’m roadtripping on a little highway called called ‘cultural appropriation’ and also doing a little off-roading through the territory of the religious voyeur. I’m fasting for Ramadan.
I’m not a Muslim. I suppose, nominally, I’m a Christian although no pew has charmed my backside since a seat-warming at a gothic Catholic Church in Melbourne, Australia on Christmas Eve 1998. And that probably doesn’t count as authentic worship as I’m pretty sure I was wearing glitter makeup. For some reason I recall wearing a headband with antenna but I might be conflating memories. I sure hope so. In any case, you get the drift. I was not sober and I’m a craptastic Christian.
[Before a few Catholics flame me for being disrespectful, I was not obviously drunk, unless I was indeed wearing a headband with deely-boppers, in which case I was obviously, flagantly, publicly inebriated, for which I'm sorry, but I was out of my mind with romantic angst so I plead extenuating circumstances. Here is what happened: at the request and on the dime of my first love, with whom I had recently split, I flew to Australia so we could get back to loving each other forever and ever. When I got arrived, he had a girlfriend. Cue crying, anguishing over our imaginary unborn children, drinking, aloneness in a horrific hotel, the need to wear glitter makeup and possibly other bizarre accessories, and ending up in a Catholic church on Christmas Eve. Jesus loves lost sheep.]
[Sidenote: On Friday, a coworker outlined her criteria for new friends. It is simple stuff: 'unless you've been abandoned by a man in a foreign country at least once, we can't have drinks.' She and I can totally go out.]
Back to me and my non-Muslimah self and Ramadan. Ramadan is one of the five pillars of Islam, during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk for one month. The idea (so far as I can tell and don’t take my word for it, seriously) is that fasting strengthens your personal discipline and patience, helps you to understand the experience of people around the world who are genuinely suffering from hunger, and that the experience of fasting promotes spiritual enlightenment and clarity.
My personal self discipline and patience – well, I hesitate to even name these virtues as ‘mine’. I’m primarily fueled by passion. The two pillars of my own life are my writing and my children and I can tell you it takes zero self-discipline to do my job with either. Patience, yes. I have a bit of that, now, but it is a new and weak muscle. I blame my children for my newfound patience and I admit that I apply it to pretty much nothing in my life except my children.
I’m all about passion. I lack patience. I’m newly single. You can see why I call this year thirty-sex. It is juicy. There is some serious learning and growing and aspiring going on. This year seems to me to be all about sex, and, more recently, spirituality (but I don’t have a clever pun for the latter). A couple of months ago, someone said to me that, based on my blog, he thought I was a ’spiritual’ person. I checked to make sure he had the correct URL. Indeed he did and I was stunned. I have never thought of myself as spiritual. I don’t talk about God. I don’t talk about divinity and angels and I don’t even know more spiritual concepts to flesh out the floundering list, that’s how not spiritual I am.
And then, after this one person told me I’m spiritual, several people echoed it. Others have told me that my words have power; and most recently, someone told me I was a good shepherd. That compliment landed in my heart and then grew wings and soared. The spiritual allusions of that language of is so compelling – it was both humbling and an honour to be described in that way.
So I surrendered. I looked up “spiritual” on Wikipedia.
Spiritual matters regard humankind’s ultimate nature and purpose, not as material biological organism, but as spirits or energy with an eternal relationship beyond the bodily senses, time and the material world. The spiritual is contrasted with the physical and the temporary. A sense of connection is central of spirituality — connection to a reality beyond than the physical world and oneself, which may include an emotional experience of awe and reverence.
Oh, okay. I see. That is totally the kind of stuff I think about. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from my obsessions with Russell Simmons’ white girlfriend, fat asses (yours and mine), and dating, but yes, I am worried about the meaning of life and how best to be living it. So maybe I should start thinking about this stuff a little more explicitly and that might mean looking in to how other people, including philosophers and prophets and poets, have explored these issues. I’ve started learning about different faiths and traditions and approaches to the divine. Fasting is one of those approaches.
Once more, something is in the air (or at least on Twitter) because I’m not the only non-Muslim fasting for Ramadan. I’ve been talking to non-Muslims in Canada and the US who are fasting with their Muslim brothers and sisters for reflection, patience, and discipline.
[Have I mentioned in this blog how much I love Twitter and how it seems to be such a wiseinspiringlovespace?]
Still, because I’m all a-worried about being a religious voyeur, and because really it is a private matter between me and my God (hence the blog post hahahahaha), I’ve been too shy to tell my real-life Muslim friends (but consider this blog a shout-out). I told some of my non-Muslim friends who looked at me, aghast, and I’m fairly certain that there is a fairly profitable pool predicting which day I’ll falter. This is entirely reasonable. I get irritable if I even think that I might be hungry, soon. In my life, this is such an established and well-known fact that if I am being bitchy, people in my life have been known to address the hunger rather than the bitchiness. Me: You bastard, you’ve been cheating on me! Him: Baby, have you eaten? Would you like a cracker? Crisis averted. It is really that simple. Fasting is not my first language or even my third.
The practice of fasting for spiritual enlightenment is not unique to Islam, and I think that there is something to it. I don’t buy the current secular craze for ‘cleansing’ because I think that is based on the science of woo, which is to say it is not scientific at all my darlings, but I do believe that there are psychological and physiological effects to not eating for periods of
time. One of them is that you are hungry. Just sayin’.
But seriously. I’m two days into fasting and I’m feeling fragile and emotionally thin-skinned and I don’t have the energy to bullshit myself. This feeling reminds me of when I am sick and it turns me into a love bug: I crave hugs and kisses and closeness and connection, even more than usual, which is a lot. It suddenly occurred to me that feeling unaccustomedly tired or fragile is a gift: in these moments you don’t have the strength to ignore your truths.
So. I had a spiritual epiphany on Day 2. Does that mean I’m done and can return to carrot muffins in daylight hours? Because although that juicy bit of wisdom feels wonderful, I’m afraid that I may not have the discipline for this. Four weeks of this is a lot of hungry days. Muslims who fast are tough cookies. Please give them cookies, but only after dark, because that’s just respect, people.
Liz Jones is.
Jones is a fashion editor for the Daily Mail in the UK and that either means she is a big deal or she thinks she is a big deal. I’m not up on the taxonomy of pop doyennes in the UK so I plead ignorance. I also admit that I only discovered her a few weeks ago and was profoundly angered and saddened, all at the same time, when I read her essay about how gross it is to eat like a normal human being and how she can’t wait to return to her habit of starving herself to fashionable, morally superior emaciation and osteoporosis. (Lest you think I jest, go read it yourself.) Either way, for this stirring work of journalism, Jones was so “moved by the plight of Lubna Hussein, a Sudanese woman who faces 40 lashes for wearing trousers in public…” that she “decided to spend a week enveloped in what she [Hussein] should have been wearing.”
Jones then takes to the London Streets and her daily life in a burqa in the spirit of sympathy and openness with an open heart and mind, literally putting herself in the shoes (ok not really, she ends up risking purdah by wearing flipflops which show toe cleavage but you get my point) of women who wear burqas. It is not disengenuous at all. Not at all.
What’s our first clue that Jones is really, truly sincere and open to the experience? Oh my darlings, she writes about being “unaccountably afraid” to put on the burqa. Well, that’s not prejudicial language at all and it certainly doesn’t start the essay off with a good dose of hysteria. Nooooooo.
And come on. It is fabric – a lot of it, to be sure, but I’m not generally terrified by bits of black cotton, and as a fashion editor, I’m guessing that Jones is accustomed to dealing with – and even wearing! – textiles on a semi-regular basis, possibly even without hyperventilating.
Actually that’s not even the first overwrought bit. Let’s think about how she structures the piece. In the beginning, she’s moved by the plight of a Sudanese Muslim woman who will be whipped for not wearing a burqa. Liz is a clever chess player. In one move, she’s set herself up as a righteous liberal, liberated Western woman appropriately appalled at an evil, oppressive, southern, Muslim regime. Excellent. In the same move, she aligns herself with the poor, downtrodden, oppressed Muslim women. Most excellent. We’re not dealing in easy emotional archetypes about the West and the (scary, terrorist, Muslim) Rest, at all.
Hey. I will admit it. I’m an uber-liberal, white western feminist. I’m ideologically predisposed to worry about the burqa and what it represents. But I’m also worried that burqa-bashing is just another excuse to paint Muslims – specifically, Muslim men – as patriarchal fanatics, whom, if they can oppress their mothers and wives and daughters so tyranically, surely have no compunctions about flying planes into towers. All of them. They’re just like that.
So. The foreshadowing is there. This is not going to be a piece where she discovers anything or questions any of her assumptions. This results of this little experiment – ‘burqa tourism’ - were in far before Liz Jones got all dressed up and hit the streets.
And what exactly were her conclusions? Darling, I’m so glad you asked. Aside from dismissing the complaints of racism and poor treatment by actual Muslim women who wear burqas in London – she finds that in fact everyone is really kind and sympathetic to the clumsy and visibly oppressed except of course the token Arabic man who ’shouts abuse’ at her – will those nasty brown immigrant Muslim men ever stop? – Jones discovers that she now understands marginalisation and objectification and it is so much worse for Muslim women than non-Muslim women. Non-Muslim women (including Jones, in an earlier piece called “What’s Really Oppressing Women Isn’t the Burka, It’s Their Breasts“) think they are oppressed because they are objectified on the basis of appearance (and breasts) and sexuality, but baby, that’s not the half of it.
Never mind that actual Muslim women who choose – and some women say that they do – to wear the burqa make the same argument.
Nope. Put all that aside, because the piece ends with Jones’ final pronouncement: “I find it disgusting that we allow British schoolgirls to be treated in this way.”
I’m skeptical. Methinks that the initially righteous sympathetic identification with Lubna Hussein was a front. Arguably, the real issue was always: should Muslims living in the UK be allowed to wear the burqa because hot damn it really irritates me? and isn’t it already enough that we’re allowing them to be brown?
It has been done to death, already and yet I just can’t resist: I have to comment on Miley Cyrus on the pole (admittedly, she was more near-ish the pole than ‘on’ it).
Here is the bandwagon that I am NOT on:
oh she’s sixteen, she’s too young, oh the loss of purity, let’s wail and gnash our teeth and mourn her corrupted innocence…
Nope. That’s not my issue. In fact, I think it is incredibly problematic that we structure women’s emerging sexuality and sexual power as a ‘loss’ – a loss of innocence, of virginity, of purity. My problem is not that Miley Cyrus is (apparently) embracing or flaunting her sexuality – my problem is that I doubt that she is. Instead, I think her team of handlers – including her father – have consciously plotted out the Britney Spears path to stardom and are marketing the hell out of her apparent burgeoning womanhood.
Someone else deciding that you are a woman and then proceeding to map and market your sexuality is the polar opposite of empowerment.
So that’s the wagon I want to fix: it isn’t Miley Cyrus’ growing sense of self and sexuality we’re seeing. Her newfound womanhood has – I suspect – been scripted for her. This makes me sad. I would just seriously, seriously love for there to be some mainstream images of women – including young women – truly inhabiting themselves and their sexual power – on or off the pole.
I know, I know. I’m not supposed to say that. Feminists are supposed to be aghast at the pole. It is the spectre that haunts parents: we must keep kids off pipes and poles. That’s the mission. The pole represents sex work. Sex work equals degradation. And nobody wants that for their daughters – me included.
But I think we could take that formulation apart. Maybe if we started at the beginning, and didn’t think that having sex represents a ‘loss’ for women then maybe we wouldn’t automatically permit ourselves to consider sex workers as degraded or ‘fallen’ women. And maybe if we didn’t stigmatize sex workers then a shadowy realm where violence against women is the norm would dissipate in the light of respect accorded to all women, not just the ‘pure’ ones.
Because, I ask you, really what is the difference between sixteen year old Miley Cyrus being pimped out by her Daddy in her booty shorts on the pole in front of the world, and the sixteen year old with fake ID on the pole in a club trying to make rent because her Daddy kicked her out?
The difference is money. And social support. And there are a lot of young woman out there who need both of those a whole lot more than Ms. Miley Cyrus, and stigmatizing them for marketing and profiting from their sexuality is heartless, wrong, and hypocritical. Because let’s be honest: it isn’t permissable in our society for women not to be sexy or attractive.
Most women I know are marketing their sexuality on a daily basis – in the office, at the gym, just walking through daily life. I know I am. I smile pretty. I flirt. I flat-iron my hair. And so do you.
And that is okay. I’m comfortable soliciting attention. I own the skin I’m in and I’m safe and sexy there and I wish all women could say the same.
Regret seized me by my throat after I wrote about my mother. I immediately wanted to write my mea culpa to that piece, specifically addressing this line:
I avoid intimate conversations with my mother.
Naturally, it was the first line in the essay, so there is no avoiding it.
Imagine being my mother and reading that line.
Imagine being anyone and reading that line. Immediately, and all week since, I regretted that line, because it makes it seem like I don’t want to be close to my mother. That line writes our relationship like there is something wrong with her (there’s not) that makes me avoid her like a toxic, tentacled mother-of-origin from whom – as a wise, appropriately therapized adult and I am neither – I am supposed to disentangle myself. Please note: My mother is not an emotional octopus and looks nothing like Ursula in The Little Mermaid. Nothing.
As a result of this angst and regret, I have spent the last five days writing an addendum in my head about how it is not the case that I don’t want to NOT be on intimate terms with my mother.
Let’s go pomo for a second and observe the tortured, awkward syntax of that sentence. Revealing, yes?
I was going to write a smoothing-ruffled-feathers piece. The feathers were mostly mine, and the point of the piece was to reassure myself that I am a good daughter (mostly) and to realign my writing and my world with my core beliefs about myself: that in fact I crave attachment and am heart-centred, loving, high on interpersonal-commitment and low on requiring emotional distance.
And then I realized, holy truth batman!, maybe I don’t want to be close to my mom. Maybe I’m terrified. Maybe it is too emotional, too enmeshed, too fraught, maybe I’ll be overwhelmed, and maybe if I crack open the gates she’ll march right in and assume command of my castle again.
Maybe I am afraid of intimacy.
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That space represents the time it took for me to make an emergency penis check and realize that maybe the pop-wisdom that men are afraid of intimate relationships because of a fear of being overwhelmed by infectious femininity that will, upon contact, deprive them of their hard-won (real, and symbolic) independence from The Mother is not entirely woman-hating, commitment-avoiding, handy-excuse-making bullshit.
[I said 'not entirely'. I'm not fully convinced, yet. It might be a little true but as adults we should all get to getting over it.]
I am in shock, dearest readers. I have intimacy issues? Me? I’m the president of the let’s-get-close club. I’m convinced that kisses are the antidote to pretty much any problem and truly think that everyone in the Middle East should just hug it out. (And I’m trained in political science, so this is not just an opinion but a scholarly opinion.)
And yet. It is true. One of my friends tells me that I use sass and salacious innuendo to keep people at arms-length and as such he is unnerved when I am soft or sincere. This is not good, people.
Hence the earlier genital review. Like our cultural fable about commitment-phobic men, I think I have a fear of being engulfed by smothering, mothering femininity. Or, quite possibly, despite identifying with feminism, I may have a problem with femininity in general. Not only am I afraid of being close to my mother, I am also uncomfortable talking about periods and lactivism (bad feminist! bad! un-revolutionary!). I do and did both (bleed and breast-feed) but I don’t think either are trumpet-worthy achievements and I’m not going to march about the latter nor boycott H & M because it was just a job and a full-time, exceedingly poorly-paid one. I can assure you that golden aura did not magically appear around my head all Raphael-like as I nursed my baby who looks and behaves nothing like Christ. From this I infer that I’m probably not going to heaven for my breast-feeding sacrifice (which is a total rip-off) although according to some arguably tentative correlations, my kid will be less-stupid and marginally thinner than her friends whose mothers just mooed ‘no’ and as a result have nipples that still point north.
[Please note: my boobs are still spectacular. I have references.]
Anyways, gratuitous cleavage-shot aside, I have diagnosed myself with a motherloving intimacy issue. This is not consistent with my self-image or world-view. What to do?
I can tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to have a drinky dinner with my ex-boyfriend, Cognitive Dissonance. I’m hoping we get back together and to this end, I’ll wear something low-cut.
PS – did you notice that when I discovered a painful, earnest, uncomfortable truth I resorted to irreverance? I sure did.
PPS – let’s get philosophical and feminist-y. Maybe my intimacy-phobia (and men’s fear of The Relationship, according to Christian Carter and the good girls who write for Cosmo, which is to say, The Experts) stems, at least in part, from the way we have constructed ‘independence’ as the end of a process of disengaging from The Mother, who is the monster femininity writ large and freedom-eating. And maybe in constructing ‘independence’ as oppositional to femininity and connection and communion, we’ve made intimacy a very scary, dark and enmeshed place to visit.
PPPS – or maybe it is just me and I love you, Mom.
George Orwell hates me and my dying metaphors and that is fine by moi because I do not love Animal Farm.
I wanted it to be Charlotte’s Web, and it was not. I also did not appreciate Lord of the Flies with its pig-hunting and Piggy-haunting. For all of these reasons, I boycotted the movie Babe. Our cultural imagination is whipsawed by conflict and confusion about the essence and symbolism of pork – vulnerable, sunburnable pink proxies for humanity? Or a great breakfast side dish? – and frankly I just can’t be moved even though the goddamn wolf keeps blowing my house down.
Don’t even get me started on wolves. I may have to run with them.
I wrote this, recently, to a bloggy/twittery/virtual friend who was angsting over a debate she was having with someone utterly oblivious and impervious to her point of view and her well-chosen points.
It was an unstudied tweet, but it landed with her. And I know this, because she retweeted it, which means it really must be true!
I chose my words in the context of people holding outrageous beliefs, or pimping them in the service of a more sinister agenda, and the impossibility of arguing with faith even as it masquerades as argument. This is who I had in mind when I wrote it: Holocaust deniers. 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Creationists. Anti-sex-ed-ists (yes, now I’m making up isms to suit me. Name it, claim it). Birthers.
You’re not going to change their minds with the facts. You’re just not, and you’re going to make yourself crazy trying. So don’t. Just don’t take on that responsibility. Debate can be blood in sharky waters. So close your mouth (and therefore theirs) and starve them of oxygen instead.
[Not literally. Do not take this as an incitement to do anything strangulation-related to Rush Limbaugh and friends. Really.]
Recently, though, in an entirely different context, my own words did an impromptu ticker-tape march across my thoughts.
I received an email about one of my posts, seemingly agreeing with me but totally, completely getting it wrong and misconstruing my intent. I wrote a careful, painstaking reply, responding paragraph by paragraph to each and every point. I was interrupted, so I saved my blazing epistle of righteousness and truth to return to later.
When I returned to it, I realized: this is not my job. I am not here as a corrective action.
This is a person I love and although I would love to, I am not here to fix his thoughts and attitudes and behaviours until I deem him fit to engage with, and this careful, thoughtful, superiour, (self) righteous email will not change his mind about anything. It will just piss him off. Then there will be that to deal with and a marshalling of supporters and a furtive night march carrying the torch of resentment all through the village and thanks anyways but I like to sleep. And maybe I’m not even right (I am). And even if I am right (I am), so what? He can’t hear me because we aren’t speaking the same language. Not yet.
So I took a breath, pressed save rather than send, and decided: I am going to meet you where you are.
Because I was not put on this earth as a corrective action. The universe is not so evil and wrong and ugly and so prostrate to my wisdom that only I can fix it with my amazing super-power, the zingy missive.
This is not defeat. This is not cynicism or surrender. This is liberation.
I’m here to perceive and describe and analyse the world in its wonder and its wretchedness. I’m here to appreciate. To sing and to kiss and to word-paint. To protest, sure, but not to offer up my veiny spirit to vampiric exchanges for …nothing. No newly emblazened, emboldened souls lit by hope and love. No change. No art. Nothing.
I am not here for nothing. I am here to write. I am here to learn. I am here to love. And so are you.
You were not put on this earth as a corrective action.
I avoid intimate conversations with my mother. I know that beneath her placid surface lie roiling waters and the occasional mako shark. I’m a strong swimmer (because of her) and I know to avoid undertows: just stay out of the water.
This makes it sound like my mother is scary. She is not. She is lovely. My mother is kind, a closet sentimentalist, and much softer than her bravado implies. She is the meltiest grandma you can imagine.
My mother is usually fairly emotionally buttoned-up, but a year ago she had some sort of angry breakdown, apparently triggered by all the ways all of her daughters are unsatisfactory (in my inexpert deflective opinion, it was more likely the fallout of the loss of two parents in two years in conjuction with December-related madness) and which resulted in the heaving of a Christmas tree into the ocean. Though she lives on the beach, I can’t help but think that this dramatic gesture must have been a lot of work. I can appreciate the gesture. I hope it was worth the work. I also hope that it was a real tree and not a plastic one. The environment, you know.
So, I’m not scared of my mother. I’m scared of her family and her ghosts and the ghosts of her family and how they should haunt her and maybe they do.
It is a paradox, really. I’m a writer. I’m hungry for stories. I love the sweet-and-sour of life and adore reporting the gothic undertones of family life. My mother is practically stacked to the attic with these kinds of tales. And I can’t go near them.
My sister, on the other hand, should be the family scribe and psychologist. She tells me stories, casually, that astonish and horrify me. She has told me things that my mother has told her that make me want to mother my mother. Peeks through the windows into my mother’s life make me fierce and tender and protective of her. Because of these furtive, revealing glimpses, if you criticize my mom, I will sigh aggrievedly, take off one white glove and smartly smack you straight in the face. With my hand, not the glove. It reminds me of Valentino Deng in What is the What and how he actively forgives the people who slight him by thinking – and here I paraphrase inelegantly – you wouldn’t do that if you knew what I had already suffered.
You wouldn’t say a harsh word about my mother if you knew what she had suffered.
Yet she never describes herself in that way: as a victim, a sufferor or even a survivor. She never condemns the people who harmed her. She loves them. She accepts them. She lets them come as they are. She’s totally matter-of-fact about it.
My mother’s father – my beloved, departed grandfather – was an alcoholic. Sometimes when he was drunk, he beat her mother and my mother and her brothers and sisters. Sometimes really, really badly. Sometimes the merely bad and scary was replaced by hot, bloody terror. Yet my mother talks about her father with great tenderness and knows whole-heartedly that when he was not drinking, he was lovely. She can reconcile the poles, the dark and the light sides of people, and accept.
I don’t know if that is a gift. It might be.
These are not my words – they come from the moody, meditative and most excellent Lindsey at www.adesignsovast.com – but they made me choke on my sweet tea and then swallow hard at my simultaneously gleeful and shamed recognition of this exact state of affairs. Less the wet washcloth.
During “quiet time” I just wanted to read my excellent book. The children kept on emerging from their rooms with requests and issues, each one smaller and more ridiculous than the last. I kept getting more and more annoyed. I was reminded of a woman my parents knew when we lived in Paris. Every afternoon she took to her bed to read for a while. During that time she kept a wet washcloth in a basin by her bed. If any of her children ventured into her room, interrupting her reading, she would smack them in the face with a cold, wet washcloth. I thought this was horrifying for a long time and now think it’s somewhat genius (in much the same way “you must be mistaking this for a democracy” has gone from statement that makes me cry to rallying cry).
Go read Lindsey’s tender and melancholy blog. She’s reading good books and raising seemingly perfect (and perfectly trying) kids and taking all of it apart gorgeously.
These are lines cut-and-pasted (and artfully arranged, of course; I can never just leave well enough alone) from one side of an old IM conversation. It struck me that they are beautiful, in a slashed-hope/floundering-pride/bruising-advice kind of way.
he will tire of what is easy
[yet he lies easily and doesn’t tire of that]
you want it to be true no matter what he does or how he acts
desperately hoping you are wrong about him
but you are not
it is the truth
[the truth: you don’t just want to fuck him
you want so much more]
fooling yourself to think you control this but he does
you ride him for as long as you can
obviously he just watched
he doesn’t even respect you
he thinks you are stupid and will believe his bullshit
he isn’t as smart as you but thinks he is
you want to fuck him and you want him to love you so don’t do anything that you don’t want to do
even if it hurts you
if it is what you want then do it…
just don’t tell me that he tells you he loves you and how wonderful he is because he isn’t
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