I have three not-so-tawdry secrets:
- I love hip-hop. Good hip hop, bad hip hop, hip hop that used to be called rap, highbrow, lowbrow, gangsta, spoken word, hip hop appropriated by suburban white boys with chips on their shoulders (shout out to Beastie Boys and Eminem, and I swear you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the BareNaked Ladies perform NWA’s Fight the Power), inspirational, political, even the stuff that is hand-wringingly misogynist (hi fiddy) – all of it. Almost. Apparently not everyone knows this. I told my gentleman caller this, recently, and he was surprised. He said “That’s something I didn’t know about you.” Really? The gratuitous Tupac references and dogged defense of Kanye‘s jackassery didn’t give it away? Don’t even get me started on Jay Z or Missy Elliot and the force and methods with which I love them (obscenely, preferably naked). And Common? Mos Def? Desdamona? The Roots? I die. D.I.E.
- I paint. My gentleman caller did not know this, either. Really? My paintings are EVERYWHERE in my house. How could you miss it? He said “I think it was because I was looking at your ass.” That makes sense. All is forgiven.
- I like money. I’m not terribly materialistic, except that I am.
I admit it. I like money. This is a bit of a surprise to me. I like to think that I don’t like money.
For example, I am a bit of a minimalist. I have four dinner plates because if I have any more, they will end up dirty, in the sink, even though I have a dishwasher. It is probably full. Don’t judge.
All I really need is four dinner plates. If more people come over for dinner, they will have to not come over for dinner. This is okay, even optimal, because I don’t do parties.
Yet somehow it has transpired that I am hosting a party in two weeks and someone has been assigned martini-making duties, and this is a problem. I own but two Martini glasses, mostly because that is as many as I can hold in my hands (I have two) at any given time. This means I do not have enough martini glasses for my martini-making, martini-drinking guests, especially if they want to use both hands. I think we will have to take turns drinking martinis. What would Leo Babauta do?
(I’m going to have a bracelet made to reference whenever I have a minimalist dilemma like this: “What would Leo Babauta do?”)
(I just posed the question to him via three-part tweet. If our guru sends word down the mountain/Guam, I will keep you informed.)
Back to my point. I don’t like to have lots of crap in my house. It makes my head explode. Sometimes I even take down all my paintings just to gaze upon uninterrupted swaths of wall. It gives me peace.
This minimalist philosophy coincides nicely with not having a lot of disposable income. I don’t want to buy a lot of stuff, which is great, because I don’t have a lot of money to buy a lot of stuff.
(I like what just happened there – it is all very theoretically and practically cohesive. No cognitive dissonance there, at all. This is rare, for me, so let’s take a moment to observe/celebrate.)
Thank you. Onward.
Yesterday I had an epiphany about money.
Two, actually.
Last night, driving home from work, I heard a song by K-Naan, who is a Canadian, sometimes hip-hop but mostly pop artist I really like. I’ve been following him FOREVA and he’s just starting to get some serious commercial traction.
(See what I did there: I just established a lil’ artistic snobbery/authenticity. I don’t like K-Naan just ‘cuz they’re playing him on The Beat. Noooooo, I liked him when he was unknown, unpopular, and starving! I can pick talent even before it is mass-sanctioned! I must know about music! But let’s be honest: I know nothing about music. I am a music mutt. Listen to it all. Like most of it. Indiscriminate. Will hump anyone’s leg. Are we still talking about music?)
The song is called Wavin’ Flag and the chorus landed with me:
When I get older
I will be stronger
They’ll call me Freedom
Just like a wavin’ flag
Those simple lyrics ear-wormed me and made me remember my hypothetical baby.
I once had a boyfriend (I know, you’re SHOCKED). We talked about getting married and having a baby. We would name our imaginary baby Justice.
Justice would probably be a girl, but she could be a boy, if she wants to be because Justice is a profound, beautiful, aspirational and gender-indeterminate name.
And then people started naming their kids Apple and Moses and Blanket and I decided that Arthur and Gertrude were the way to go.
(My children are so lucky they have a father who talked me out of that. Also, note to my father: Arthur is a beautiful, bad-ass name worn by only the chosen.)
And that boyfriend and I broke up, babyless, anyway. He is married now and has a new baby named Prince Magic My Dad is Hot but Not Very Nice To Women Zuma.
Back to my epiphany.
For the last 1-3 years, I have been trying, mightily, to make peace with a dream. I have been trying, more than mightily, to let that dream go. To breathe it into a balloon and release it into the sky. To let that dream fly away.
That dream is a baby.
Recently, a psychic friend (a real, in-person, unpaid psychic friend, not the 1-800 kind) told me that I have two unborn babies waiting for me. One is a dark-skinned, dark eyed, short little boy who is very energetic and mischievious. The other is a light-skinned, tall, skinny, quiet, shy girl.
Tears rushed my eyes and tracked my cheeks.
Here are my deets: I have two actual kids and one is only school age by minutes. If I had a third child, and, after a reasonable amount of maternity/parental leave
[We Interrupt This Sentence for a Digressive, Sarcastic Political Rant]
In Canada, maternity/parental leave is paid at 55% of your income for ONE YEAR. I love Canada, but not as much as Sweden, where it is 80% for sixteen months. In the US, I believe, maternity leave is 5 minutes and six seconds at 0% of your income – I could be wrong – and then, after you leap out of the delivery room to rush back to your job, you can get fired for expressing milk in the bathroom on an unauthorized break. But oh, don’t forget, breast is best, you bad working fired mommy you.
[We Now Return to Your Regularly Scheduled Sentence]
returned to work (because I have to AND I choose to), after paying for daycare for three kids (two real and one imaginary) and our house, I would have negative five million dollars left for food and other discretionary expenses like heat and electricity.
So – setting aside all ethical dilemmas about being a single mama, raising a kid without a father, and having kids when you don’t intend to raise them because daycare is the devil but school, which is just institutionalized, government-funded daycare, is just fine – it is just not financially possible for me to have another baby. Dream or no dream.
Heart’s desire and soul’s yearning, please shuttie.
Doesn’t that suck? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all make our dearest, secret dreams come true?
I imagine this is a decision-point faced by many. It is not only me. I imagine lots of women and families confront the finances/dream dilemma.
So I’m trying to let it go. It is pressingly urgent that I let it go, because I’m thirty-sex. I mean thirty-six. If I don’t let it go, then I have to do something about it (like, say, find someone who loves me and wants to be a family with me and lure him into impregnating me, and I think my gentleman caller just un-called) pretty quick. Like in the next five minutes to three years quick.
So I was listening to K-naan and hearing how they call him Freedom, much like my imaginary baby would be called Justice, and thinking, for the millionth time, that it is really important for my sanity and my bank account and my career plans that I let that dream go.
Because it hangs me up.
- It makes me worry about things not in my immediate control.
- It is simply not up to me, only, if I find an appropriate partner and fall in love and get married and landscape imaginary back yards and structure my life to be conducive to pregnancy and babies and so on.
- It forces me to date and be date-able.
- It distracts me from the the things I can actually work at and have a “energy/talent in = success out” formula. Like writing. Like my career. Like vacuuming.
And then I was thinking: I should write about this. I should write my way through this. I should publicly let my third-baby-dream go.
Then I talked about it with my gentleman caller. I was thinking out loud. I was working my way to letting it go. I was claiming to let it go.
And as I was doing that, epiphany!
I am not letting it go.
I am holding on to this dream. The partner and the infrastructure may not be there. The finances certainly aren’t. But it is my dream and my imaginary baby and I am going to cradle it a little longer.
I betcha Madonna didn’t have this issue. She’s got loads of cash so she can just go around adopting un-0rphans willy nilly at any old age.
And as I thought this, epipany #2!
I am a good mama. My kids are happy and well-loved. I want to have another baby and that baby would be lucky to have me, and us. I simply need to have, and make, more money.
So I will.
Which is why I hereby admit I like money and want a whole lot more of it.
Because, let’s be honest, the point of money is ecstatic, meaningful survival and dream-realizing. The point of having lots of money isn’t so you can have loads of dinner plates or martini glasses.
Leo Babauta knows that intimately, personally, deeply, which is why Zen Habits is so popular, and, in a related development, Leo Babauta has SIX MILLION kids. I mean six.
The joy of money is that it allows you to live, happily, sufficiently, and well with the family of your heart and your choosing. That’s the gift of money.
And I’m going to go get some.
Justice, I’m coming.
I was going to write a piece about the hidden benefits of the hysteria around H1N1:
- that people are freaked enough to do the right thing, which is stay home
- that people are calling their doctors or health hotlines as soon as they notice symptoms to get advice
- that people are doing research about flu shots and H1N1 shots and making educated decisions for themselves
- that people are paying attention to health alerts
- that companies – like the one I work for – are distributing health alerts, scheduling flu shot clinics, encouraging good handwashing practices and handing out antiseptic handwash and making it easily available in common areas
- that companies are telling workers to stay home if they are sick
- that companies are hiring hazmat teams disinfect the offices of people who are sick with H1N1, making them feel like they have ebola, not the flu.
Okay, maybe not the last one. But true story.
I was thinking that there is an upside to the H1N1 hysteria: that our employers are being proactive and making sure that people know it is better to stay home. That, somehow, companies were taking the health of workers seriously. That people know they have ‘permission’ to do the right thing. (I wish that non-salaried workers were getting paid to take time off because otherwise, even if they want to stay home, they often can’t because they need to pay the bills. I don’t know how to fix this problem.)
That we are taking our health seriously.
So, yay, H1N1 hysteria!
But then I was up all night, sandwiched in my bed between two snoring, hacking, wheezing, whining, feverish agents of infection.
My kids.
This is what you’re supposed to do when someone in your family has H1N1:
- Keep your child away from others to stop the spread of infection.
- At home, keep your child away from other people in the house.
- DO NOT share eating utensils, drinking glasses, washcloths, towels, beds, pillows, etc. until everyone in the household has been free of symptoms for five days
This is what I did:
Brought both of my sobbing, hysterical, coughing, infected children into bed with me and held a sweaty baby in each arm all night.
As I laid awake between my two fire/virus-breathing baby dragons, imagining every wheeze and cough spraying infection into the air and into me – I had some great imaginary symptoms by 4 am – I connected with the ancestors.
This is a parent’s dilemma throughout the ages. The plague. Measles. Various contagious fevers. Deciding how to handle viruses and infections and diseases that are highly contagious through contact and, back in the day and still in lots of parts of this world today, have a very strong chance of killing you and your entire family.
What do you do? Do you stay away, or do you hold your suffering, contagious baby?
I held my feverish, infectious babies.
And thanked the gods and goddesses of all religions and all places that it is only the flu.
Photo: I (heart) balancing rocks by James Jordan.
Work life balance: what a waste of time.
Googling “work-life balance” is like getting dropped from the sky, hard, probably by aliens, into the middle of an August cornfield: the stalks (and the stakes) are so high and plentiful that you can lift your eyes to the sky and see the heavens – the end of it all, sweet haysoos – but not much else.
(Did you know that there are “corn-maze consultants”? Neither did I until I googled directions to my local corn-maze at which point I discovered, to my surprised and delighted horror, that there is an entire corn-maze INDUSTRY. There is art, too, but only pilots and Canadian geese can appreciate the hidden wonder of it.)
I digress. I’m glad that corn-maze consultants can invent jobs around their passion for vegetables. That’s the only explanation for this phenomena, really. I’m convinced that some dude got carried away with the ‘do what you love’ philosophy and voila! a new niche.
I’m also willing to bet that corn-maze consultants are intensely, overwhelmingly busy 2-3 months of the year and just basically make peace with the fact that their lives have gone tilt-a-whirl. They don’t chase work-life balance when it is time to rock out the cornfield.
(I do believe I’m going to have to interview a corn-maze consultant to find out if it is as glam as all that. Maybe it is rock-star. Maybe there are secret drug lairs and groupie grottos and THAT is what you’re trying to find when you pay your $5 and wander around for two hours, getting your shoes dirty and thinking: I just paid $5 to wander around in some guy’s field. Effing hell. What a racket.)
The other criminal racket that perturbs me is the work-life balance syndicate. It has franchises everywhere and it is selling you (me) turn-key, uninspired solutions:
1. Outsource your life. Increases your expenses to pay for services so you can have time.
2. Simplify your life. Reduce your expenses so you don’t have to work as much and can have time.
The objectives are the same the but the approaches are vastly different. And neither approach works for me.
There’s a hidden assumption in both solutions: that you have enough disposable income that you can make sacrifices and pay to gain time; or that you have enough disposable income to spend frivolously and therefore those expenses can be pruned judiciously in the service of free time.
Either way, both formulations pivot on the assumption of enough, or more than enough. I suspect the eternal work-life crisis comes from the hidden truth that many don’t have enough (any!) disposable income to outsource anything, and, given that information, you’d be safe in assuming that there are few, if any, expenses that can be ‘simplified’.
I also suspect the quest for balance displays a truly sad truth: that we’re doing too much of what we don’t like, and isn’t rewarding, and not enough of the cosmically important stuff. So the seeking of work-life balance is really about taming the job and the bastards that wear you down. ‘Cuz when you love it, really love it, yes you need rest, but even the work doesn’t feel like work. Because it is play, mostly.
I’m not there yet. I know I’m not alone.
So, what to do when you’re workin’ 9-5 (I am all about 70s women, this week!), raising semi-humans (that’s what they feel like, this week!) and trying to break out and charge after your vision? (And let’s not bitch that we’re busy: Kelly Diels, I’m a-talking to you.)
Balance? How weak.
Let’s think about balance. Think about teeter totters. Equilibrium is hard to come by, and when it does, you just want to start bouncing up and down again. I know this for a fact. I have kids. The thrill is in the wobble.
(Did you know that teeter totters are an endangered species in North American playgrounds? No word of a lie.)
Think about tightwires. Think about raised bars. Sobriety tests and white lines. Skating and weak ankles. Weak ankles, period.
When I set up a situation where it is imperative that I don’t wobble or fall, I’m in trouble. It helps not to mull on it (bad blog post! bad!) and just keep going. Hold on. Move. Holding on is a form of movement but it is most definitely not balance. Hold. Run. Charge. Close your eyes. Leap. Leap-frog. Keep it hoppin’.
I’m lucky. I’m in love, with my life, my kids, my work, my dream and my extras. They’re all wearing me out just as fast as they fuel me. It is a bizarre high-speed stasis.
Define it all as life and you’re good. Overscheduled, overwrought and overwhelmed, yes, but at least then you’re not guilty about your lack of balance. Feeling conflicted about being conflicted and guilty about feeling guilty is a lot of work.
Guilt, in general, is a waste of time and energy. It is a smokescreen for a real emotion. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find something real, like anger. Sadness. Aspiration. Those are worthwhile. They’re fuel for something bigger and better.
In the end, the quest for balance is bogus. Love your burdens. Love them hard. And when your loves knock you down or your weak ankles trip you up, stop worrying about balancing – ‘cuz you’re not – and bounce.
the following is an entire, uncut and unmixed email from my sister. I was making some noises about taking a summer off to write. Here’s what she thought of THAT.
I think that a summer filled with day camps and writing sounds dreamy. Will you grow your hair long, wear peasant dresses, and walk through flower filled meadows barefoot? With a daisy chain in your hair of course.
(Not mocking you, I dreamed of doing that, and everything would be perfect and I would live in a beautiful house with a veranda all the way around it, with a yard that gently sloped down towards a creek surrounded by weeping willows with a hammock that I would read in. My 6 beautiful children would run around, basking in the glory that is my love, and my dogs and horses would be roaming around in the adjacent paddock while my doting husband whispered sweet nothings. I clearly read way too many L.M. Montgomery books, and I was 13).
I didn’t think you would do it tomorrow, I was just checking. I signed up for stumble yesterday.
I think she should write for me or with me instead of at me. And I love the way she writes at me. Hi J. I’m waiting for your work. I have IDEAS.
PS J only has three children. The other three are very well-behaved because they are imaginary.
To celebrate Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, announced this morning, I’m reposting one of my earliest blog pieces, originally written to mark 100 days in office. It is a call to arms, Mr. Obama.
When I look at Barack Obama, I see my children.
Like him, they’re biracial and have a black, African father and a white, North American mother. But more than that, in Barack Obama, I see excellence, achievement, perseverance and a world of possibilities for my girls. I see a “My child goes to Harvard” bumper sticker on the shopping cart that will be both my vehicle and home once I start paying for Harvard.
I also read too many self-help books and articles. It is a problem for which I blame my imaginary BFF, Oprah. So far, despite my best efforts, I have not been able to locate a twelve-step program for people who relentlessly research the ‘best practices’ for every mundane fact of life. There is no Researchers Anonymous. Trust me. I’ve researched it.
A child-rearing best practice (or so I’ve read – as evidenced by my ill-behaved children, I can claim no practical experience or expertise in this area) is to find learning moments in everyday life. When your child displays interest in something, jump on that interest, wrestle it to the ground and strangle it into a life lesson.
One day not too long ago, I was having a moment with my new BFF, Barack Obama (Oprah endorsed the relationship and is completely okay with sharing my affections. We’re all cool like that). I was watching the musical paean to him by Will.I.Am and a host of other trendy folk and getting all pumped up on “Yes We Can!”.
Attracted by the music, rather than the message (oh, Will.I.Am, you are crafty!) Miss Sophie came and sat in my lap and we you-tubed democratic p(r)opaganda together. In this moment, I heard the best practices, want-to-be-a-good-mommy voice in my head say “Yes You Can seize this learning moment! Yes You Can impart wisdom! Yes You Can inspire this child to aspire to Harvard!”
So I did. The life lesson was this: Sophie, you are just like Barack Obama. Like Barack Obama, no one can hold you back and you can be anyone or anything you want. You can be a mommy, a teacher, a doctor, a juggler, a firefighter…you just need to work hard and stay focused on your dreams. And go to Harvard.
Naturally, I couldn’t just leave it at that. I needed a little satisfaction, too, a pay-off for my good-mama efforts. I asked her: “Sophie, what do you think you might like to be when you grow up?” while visions of a masked, gowned surgical Sophie danced in my head.
My darling girl completely grasped the lesson: there are no limits to imagination. She replied, with great passion and enthusiasm:
“I want to be a mermaid with red hair and a green tail!”
My not-so-best practices, but silent, reaction was as follows:
- Yeah, should be a lot of openings in that.
- Effing Disney. Those simpering princesses are patriarchal wet dreams. Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Cinderella and Snow White are all motherless and/or mothered by an evil witch (as are my children). They flutter. They sing. They give up their voices to get their man (literally – that’s the plot of The Little Mermaid!). Little critters do their bidding, but not one of them aspire to do anything of substance beyond rodent-charming. Yet these befrocked and befluttered future fiancées capture the four year old imagination and trump visions of human excellence every time. President Obama, would you consider wearing a ruffled pink dress and sparkles in your hair? Pretty please?
- Sophie, darling, you can be any damn thing you’d like after you finish medical school.
But I have not given up. Thanks to the historic choice of millions of Americans one hundred days ago, my beloved Barack will be around to inspire life lessons and learning moments for at least another four years.
Let’s hope that during that time, President Barack Obama gives Princess Ariel a run for her money – or, even better, makes a movie with her. Now that he’s taken on the presidency, maybe he can take on Disney. Now THAT would change the world.
Update 1: now, when she grows up, the child wants to be Barack Obama’s wife. She and I are going to have a briefing on the tenets of feminism very soon.
Update 2: Disney has a new princess, Princess Tiana. She’s black and she has a mother! And that mother is Oprah Winfrey! I normally frown on the overuse of exclamation points but this occasion calls for it! Hallelujah.
Let’s assume that you and a former love must stay in contact. You have business together. A dog. Shared custody of a super famous painting.
Or, more likely, you have kids together.
This means that while THE relationship is over, A relationship continues.
This also means that all the stupid, irritating, habitual, minor but painfully-inflamed things you fought over will continue to be stupid, irritating, habitual and ONFUCKINGFIRE.
(Except the socks on the floor or best-towel-as-a-bathmat or cheating-every-time-your-back-is-turned things. Those are all someone else’s babies, now.)
I know only one thing about how to let go of an ex and it is this: you must stop fighting the same fights.
What’s Your Problem?
For me, it is time. I hate lateness. Time is fluid but clocks are not.
I used to upbraid and berate and freak and pout and sulk and cast evil eyes loudly and vexedly. And an apology and a promise not to, anymore, would be issued. And then there would be another late, next time, inevitably, always.
So it was when we were together. It was our first fight but it would never be our last fight, because we continued to fight about it even after the relationship clock had stopped ticking.
We split. Lates continued. I continued to upbraid and berate and freak and pout and sulk and cast evil eyes loudly and vexedly. Aapologies and promises not to, anymore, continued to be issued. And then there would be another late, next time, inevitably, always.
Does that paragraph look eerily repetitive?
Just Stop It
Instead of being over, our relationship was on a continuous loop, circling back on itself. Over and over again. And then lightning struck me dead.
I realized that we were just living in different houses while fighting over the same things in exactly the same ways.
To get out of a relationship, to let go of the relationship, and to truly set the other person and yourself free, you have to let go of the patterns of behaviour that defined both the togetherness and the split.
And I did.
“In her own way, Jane was trying to help me. When I was at NYU, [playwright and film director] David Mamet told me that I should be “an artist,” “speak the text,” not sell out to “commercial horseshit,” etc. “Jane” told me that in order to break into acting, I had to be likable, fuckable, have straight, blow-dried hair, and pert nipples. On a certain level she was more brilliant than Mamet, because she actually had solutions.” - Nancy Balbirer, on former friend, “Jane” aka Jennifer Aniston
“You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.” - Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker (xo to Lindsey at A Design So Vast for this quote)
I have mixed feelings about Penelope Trunk and her advice blog located at the ‘intersection of work and life.’
That’s a hot crosswalk and a great place to be. I like intersections and borders and the lines between and cracks in the sidewalk and all the interesting, passionate, generative stuff therein. In my imaginary world, daisies and/or global peace grow there.
So sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is funny. Sometimes I think she’s real. Sometimes I think she’s Doing The Right Thing like when she writes about Asperger’s and work and explains in mundane, scintillating, illustrative detail how she compensates for social deficits on a daily and minute-by-minute basis.
Sometimes I think Penelope Trunk is Liz Fucking Phair without the melody and the beat: her voice gets bare, flat, and disassociative when she writes about emotional, controversial, personal stuff. Hemingway does the same thing. It’s a neat trick.
Sometimes Penelope Trunk infuriates me. Still, she is successfully hopskotching through all the right squares, because she’s trying to assess and live in the real world. Like when she writes that being attractive is important to your career and then goes to great investigative lengths to document this shocking information with statistics and studies.
Newsflash: this is not news. It is a pretty interesting story – HOT PEOPLE always makes for an interesting read – but if this is true, which it is, what do you do about it? Penelope Trunk works out and looks hot and seems to be (maybe, one day) contemplating cosmetic surgery. That’s fine but I’m not sure that’s advice.
And what about ugly people? Should ugly people just go home and get over the whole career thing? How will they pay the rent? What will they eat? Maybe, implicitly, Penelope Trunk is a Darwinist and thinks/hopes/anticipates that ugly people will just un-profit and un-breed themselves out of existence.
Maybe Penelope Trunk doesn’t watch daytime TV, either.
So I read her blog and it stirs up wildly conflicting lovehatey kinds of emotions which is great because at least I feel something when I read it (unlike a lot of other blogs, ahem). Right now, however, I have an entirely new feeling for Penelope Trunk: respect.
Sometimes Penelope Trunk seems like the Empress Dowager High Dictator of women who benefit from feminism but sneer at their privileges. She writes that women should not report sexual harassment (and in fact leverage it), that the gender wage gap is a myth, and oh yeah if you want to succeed, get hot (we may have covered this, already).
And then, with a single tweet, she breaks my feminist heart wide and lovingly open with her off-hand, raw bravery:
I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.
And then, if I wasn’t already loveshocked into admiring her willingness to tell the truth – that every day, women are whiteknuckling it through board meetings or nursing or teaching or hamburger-flipping or taking the bus or rushing to soccer games while our fertility (or lack thereof) grows or ungrows decisions and futures – Penelope Trunk writes this:
Most miscarriages happen at work. Twenty-five percent of pregnancies end in miscarriage. Seventy-five percent of women who are of child-bearing age are working. Most miscarriages run their course over weeks. Even if you are someone who wanted the baby and are devastated by the loss, you’re not going to sit in bed for weeks. You are going to pick up your life and get back to it, which includes going back to work.
This means that there are thousands of miscarriages in progress, at work, on any given day. That we don’t acknowledge this is absurd. That it is such a common occurrence and no one thinks it’s okay to talk about is terrible for women.
Throughout history, the way women have gained control of the female experience is to talk about what is happening, and what it’s like. We see that women’s lives are more enjoyable, more full, and women are more able to summon resilience when women talk openly about their lives.
Yes.
I once went to work Monday morning after spending Sunday at the hospital presumably having a miscarriage. Then I promptly went home because I was unwell and sad and had to explain to The Powers That Be why I was leaving.
When I came back the next day, the sympathetic stares and averted eyes made me feel like a fecund, failing, un-professional woman.
So yes, we should be able to talk about it.
I have two children. One pregnancy was courted and encouraged and passionately welcomed. The other was poorly-timed and unplanned and I made sacrifices for it. I turned down a dream project that would have paid twice what I have ever made in a year, because I wouldn’t be able to see it through.
And I was depressed. Not ‘blue’, but existentially, clinically, depressed. I had to see a psychologist. Medication was prescribed. I just did not want to be what I was: pregnant.
Two things pulled me out of it.
- I already had a child, who was love embodied. So I knew with cellular certainty that while I did not want to be pregnant, when this new life arrived, I would fall in love all over again.
- I felt connected to the women who came before me. All the women, throughout all the ages, who have been pregnant when they don’t want to be. It feels like a trap, like yes, your body has betrayed you even though it is doing what it is biologically programmed to do. I suddenly understood – again, on a cellular, biological, blood-coursing-through-my veins level – why a woman’s ability to control fertility is the essence of her freedom.
I joined the sisterhood, cosmically speaking.
And so the title of Penelope Trunk’s piece gets it just about right: You can’t manage your work life [or anything really] if you can’t talk about it.
If you look at pictures of ‘career’ women in the 70s and 80s, when white middle class women were discovering the workplace (everyone else was already there) you’ll see a lot of buttoned up, mannish suits. Being in the workplace, it seems to me, meant erasing visible traces of femininity. Maybe women had to be caricatures of men to succeed.
And that is why I have new respect for Penelope Trunk. Because she thinks – and acts! and writes! – from the base assumption that women should not, at any time or in any way, have to camoflage the physical realities of their lives and their bodies in order to be acceptable in the workplace.
Sing it, sister. You’re braver than me.
P.S. I promise not to hate (much) if you get Botox.
When I was eight or nine, my mother grievously injured my fragile soul.
She may have asked me to clean my room. Possibly she made me put down my Nancy Drew to wash dishes. In all likelihood, she gave me grief for sassing her.
[Note to self: there is a lesson here. This dynamic - my unrepentant, inevitable and perennial backtalk and my mother's attempt to curb it - was the mainstay of our relationship, I believe, and a lesson in the frustration and futility of attempting to alter another's temperament and inclination.
Her efforts to de-sassify me were for naught.
This is why parenting sucks. We're supposed to shape and smooth and socialize small wild animals with pointy teeth and even more pointed wills and we're supposed to enjoy it.]
[Note to self's note: The sins you commit are the sins you will suffer. My mother endured snide comments and outright challenge from me from the time I spoke my first word to the the time I moved out. I now know her delicious pain. I'm three years into it. Her name is Lola.]
[Note to my dearerst of dear readers: If you really love me, you will babysit the little political one. The one who, when the choice to behave or not behave and the attendant consequences are outlined to her, tells me: "No, that's YOUR choice. I'M taking the power."]
Whatever happened, what ultimately happened was that I was banished to my room where I cried hot, insulted, evidently wholly unloved tears into my frilly pillow. I cried myself through the afternoon and into a sweaty sleep.
When I awoke, my questioning heart was heavy and needed answers and as every slighted child knows, the best replies are found in the heavens, or at least the ceiling, or if you’re the girliest of girls, in the ruffled canopy that arches over your bed. So I did that.
I contemplated the injustice inscribed in winding lines of flowering vines on the fabric of my bed’s canopy – the bed I had received for my birthday after earmarking years of editions of the Sears catalogue. I wanted a pink canopy bed but I received a burgandy one. Clearly That Woman hated me.
And I needed her to love me, more than ever, because she was mad at me. Because she hurt me. Because I knew then, and I know now, that the one who makes the cut should bind the wound.
If I am a nectarine – and I am – then this bit of knowledge is the pit that I carry. Hard, inedible, necessary, generative.
Je m’excuse. I am sorry. The words don’t matter but the hunger must be fed.
My children know this, too. When I have wounded them, and exiled them to their rooms to contemplate their ceilings – and they are even more oppressed than I was, as they lack canopied beds – their hearts break loudly open.
They protest. They protest me. They grieve their pain. They blame me for their wounds. And when the protesting and sobbing subsides, they need me to kiss them and their boo-boos better.
This is what I remembered, this weekend, when life was an archer and launched arrows of outraged misfortune at me and forced me to contemplate my own ceiling. Meditating on the intricacies of the fifth wall yielded these conclusions:
- The developer who built this house had the good sense not to spray texture on the ceilings of the first two levels of the house, but somehow that sense departed him on the third story. This is unfortunate. Textured ceilings are a crime against design.
- Life doesn’t have very good aim because no actual organs – including my heart – were irreparably harmed in the making of this misfortune. But pride has poor circulation and bruises vividly. It is almost satisfying to behold.
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is woefully incomplete and should be updated, preferably by me. I’ve mentioned this before.
- Aggrieved souls need apologies.
So, yes, dearest perceptive readers, someone hurt my feelings, and hurt my feelings in a way that was almost masterly: I endured – oh the agony, oh the woe, oh oh oh – a snub that was successful, effective, essential, repetitive, and, I think, remorseless.
Still, despite my suspicion that the villain in this story is not sorry and never will be, I crave a conversation, an explanation, an apology.
Apologies are magic. They are the play button when a relationship has been paused. Interrupted. Broken. An apology can bridge that distance, span that cleavage, heal that break, and start that song, again.
But only when they are real. And offered. And neither of these words captured the absence dancing across my ceiling.
So what to do with my truth, my stone fruit, that only the person who harms you can heal you?
_________________
this essay is part of The Sorry Series – How To Apologize, How NOT to Apologize, and the Power of Forgiveness:
On Harm, Healing, Ceilings and How Absent Apologies are the Pits – The Sorry Series, #1
A Child’s How-To Guide for Heart-felt Apologies and Chris Brown’s Example of How-Not-To-Apologize. OOPS. – The Sorry Series, #2
Guest Post by Josh Hanagarne: Three Lame Types Of Apologies – The Sorry Series, #3
How To Receive an Apology. How To Accept an Apology. How To Forgive. Or Maybe Not. – The Sorry Series, #4
The Forgiven, The Sorry Series #5
It is okay NOT to teach people how to treat you. Unless they were raised by wolves. Then Cold Play or a quick exit is in order. Your call. *
*not really part of the series but I do make a wildly necessary apology in it
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