Is anyone counting the waves?

I had an interesting conversation today on the Facebook.  A page that I follow, Evolutionary Parenting, posted an interview with Dr. Mayim Bialik (That’s Blossom, yo!).  Dr. Bialik is a strong advocate for Attachment Parenting, and she has a book out on the subject.  I read the transcript, and it was a great interview.  She talked about her parenting philosophies and why she chose to circumcise her son.  I found this part interesting:  Dr. Bialik said “I think especially in a productive and kind of feminist society it’s not valued to surrender that way to the needs of a child.”  I’ve read a little about AP, and I think it’s a sound philosophy involving co-sleeping, breastfeeding, babywearing, and basically listening to your child, learning them, and learning to respond to them in the way they need.  Not all of the tenets work for every AP family, I’m sure (I couldn’t co-sleep because I am a light and crappy sleeper and would not get ANY sleep if my baby was right next to me), but basically I think it sounds like a great way to raise a kid. 

                I wondered on the Facebook why Dr. Bialik would say feminist society doesn’t value surrendering yourself to the needs of your child.  I had thought, as a feminist, that I did value that.  I surrender to the needs of my kiddos every day of my life, happily.  The owner of the page and blog pointed me in the direction of a post she wrote last year, called “Feminism v. Mothering.”  It’s sort of a summary of what the first wave of feminism fought for, and how she feels the second wave (Betty Friedan, etc) got it wrong.  Instead of pushing to have mothering valued in a significant way to society, the second wave of feminists devalued motherhood by eschewing family for career:   

The crux of the modern-day feminist movement has been to fight for women to have the chance to make it equally in what they themselves have called the patriarchal society. By doing this, they have placed immense value on the traditional work of men, making it the pinnacle of success and fulfillment in life. Indeed, according to these feminists, the only way women can be fulfilled is to pursue one of these masculine endeavors; to not do so leads to depression and resentment.

See, I just don’t think that’s right.  I think, in this—what, third?—wave of feminism, us feminists are trying to be inclusive, not divisive.  I see us opening our circles to respect choices.  One of my favorite bloggers, The Feminist Breeder, is a perfect example.  She chose her blog name very purposefully, because she believes that choosing to be a mother is valuable and fulfilling.  I agree.  Being a feminist today does not mean you have to give up having a family.  It does not mean you have to give up having a career.  It does not mean you have to “do it all.”  It means you get to do what you want to do, and other feminists will respect your choices, regardless of whether they would make the same choices in your position.  That’s what feminism is all about to me—choice.   I want to be a great mother, a great writer, a great medical transcriptionist, and a great wife.  And I fail every day at something; but even if I chose just one of those things to be, I’d still fail every day, a little.  Because I am just one woman, one feminist, one mother, trying like hell to raise these little people to be solid grownups, and trying like hell to be a solid grownup myself. 

Posing for Picture Day in Spring

The elementary school photographer told the seven-year-old boy with the spiky hair to prop a short leg on that fake rock . . . and let it swing. Let it catch an early Spring breeze. Having a little penis and a set of promising testicles is something (indeed) to be proud of! 

Well, no one said anything about the little boy’s little penis and testies; it was, however, subtly implied.

My daughter was next in line.

That morning, she had tried so hard to make herself look pretty for Picture Day – piggy tails, hair clips with neon streaks of fake hair, her new sapphire earrings sparkling, a touch of glittery chapstick. She is a bit artsy-fartsy – a fan of Judy Moody – and she likes playing in front of the mirror and trying on quirky things as much as she likes coloring pictures and scotch-taping them all over my living room walls. That morning, she sneaked into my make-up, just before leaving, and her daddy worked himself into a tizzy trying and trying to wash off – in two minutes – what was successfully marketed as 100% waterproof mascara. He would tell me later (because I had already left for work) that she got on the school bus “lookin’ like a little Ozzy.” 

When my daughter stepped in front of that fake Spring backdrop to be photographed, she (most likely) flipped back a crooked pony tail. I can see her doing it because I’ve seen her do it, just as she has seen other girls – including her 17 year old sister – do it a thousand times. Then (she told me) she threw a leg up on that fake rock because she wanted to look “tough” like the boy before her did. She turned to the camera with her best smile.

Her legs are long – as she is one of the tallest in her class – and she’s a fast runner. Her shins and knee caps are all bruised up because she’s never afraid of falling. She was the only girl in the first grade to submit a project to the school's Science Fair. Her project was on additive and reflective colors, and it kicked ass. She mixed paints and dissolved Skittles and separated the pigments in Kool-aid and made three shades of Jell-O. And when her project didn’t win, she cried. She still cries about it sometimes. She has a fifth grade reading level. Okay, I'll stop there. I promise I am making a point (although, I must say, all this pointed bragging is the most fun I’ve had in days!).

The photographer (a tubby, bald male? a twenty-something year old girl?) likely chuckled a minute, then told my daughter to close her legs and place her hands delicately on her thigh.

And she growled. She told me she did. And I was proud.

But, of course, there was a long line of kids – kids who had been repeatedly instructed to follow the rules lest they be sent to “The Solutions Room” for interrogation; kids who find that wimpy principal in mid-life crisis quite frightening; and girls (like mine) who hold their heads high every time they are handed a golden ticket signifying that they have been a Good Citizen, abiding and assisting the flow of elementary school life rather than adding to the rowdiness. My daughter was easily – understandably – coerced her into closing her legs. She was told to hold it all in, hide it all away, as prudently as possible, that her something (indeed) need not catch a breeze, for it might make others uncomfortable. But she didn’t like it, and she saw the unfairness in it, and she didn’t understand it. It taught she and I both something.

I hope she remembers always, even as life coerces her subtlety into roles and expectations, that she has the right to growl and the right NOT to like such coercions, the right to step out of the roles because, more often than not, they are simply stifling.

Here’s what worries me: will we always see the subtleties? They are certainly sneaky. They are the subtleties that sneak up in the mornings, still, to assure me, yes, I had best keep my bag of beloved make-up. Those same subtleties are likely what piled up to coerce me into growing more quiet as the years crept up, as my legs became freakishly long, so long that I would tower over all the boys until eighth grade, ashamed; and again when my booby buds showed up, poor tender nubs as foreign as tumors; and again when one of the high school boys called me a slut for wearing short shorts then stuck his tongue out at me like some kind of lizard. Those same subtleties made me cry as the skin on my upper thighs split to show stretch marks, imperfections that labeled me damaged, not so marketable. They were what kept me from looking at myself, fully, from understanding all that I was, from exploring myself. They were what let me think both the ends and means were rooted in simply finding a lover; a Prince Charming need only be any man who would have me.

Those subtleties may be what keeps my daughter from taking giant steps in the future, and instead keeps her in some safe-box with a close eye on everyone around her. They may be what makes her heart pound as she considers raising her hand in class. They may be what makes her doubt love of self and so love of others. They may be what keeps her from running for president or what keeps her from being a revolutionary poet.

Of course, her pictures still turned out lovely. Her straight back. Her wide smile full of new teeth. Her blackened eyelids in Heavy Metal fashion. And yet, the backdrop behind her is slightly tilted like it might fall over, the whole world of Spring – the sparkling lake, the budding trees – fabulously off-kilter.

On choosing not to be an asshole

IWD

I used to be quite conservative politically in all the worst ways.  I was a misogynist.  I believed being gay was gross and that abused women should just leave already.  I told racist jokes and used racial slurs.  I’m terribly ashamed of all of that, and I’ve since become much less of an asshole.  But one thing I’ve never  been unsure about is reproductive rights.  I’ve been pro-choice at least since 7^th grade, which is when I remember having my first political argument.  My cousin Cindy said abortion was evil and wrong, and I said I didn’t think it was.  My reasoning was something about a mother resenting a child she didn’t want.  My cousin didn’t buy this and made fun.  “Oh, yeah, right, like the mom’s going to go Oh, I resent you, and slap them or whatever.”  I stood my ground though, because I knew what I was talking about.  I’ve been the resented child.

                I don’t know how my mom felt about children in general in her 20s, but I do know how she felt about girl children, and she didn’t want any.  She had a boy first.  Whew.  Then came me, and my grandmother’s warning must have loomed loud in her head, words I heard over and over through the years too:  “I can’t wait until you have a daughter just like you.”    My grandmother predicted I would be girl, and probably mom resented that implication, that she was about to get hers.  Who wouldn’t resent a barbed comment like that?  So out I came, female, and already I was a disappointment.  I know my mother loved and loves me, and that absolutely does not change the fact that she resented my femaleness. 

                So, predictably or not, my mom and I never really got along that well.  And I never forgot that she never wanted a girl.  I couldn’t, because she brought it up more than a few times during my childhood and adolescence.  By the time I began having sex, I had known for years that I didn’t want any kids.  Why take the chance that I’d have a kid like me, I figured. 

                Yes, I actually told myself and believed that I was a bad person, a bad child.  Somehow this translated to me having a fervent desire to not procreate, and I think this shaped my pro-choice views way before I ever started in with sex.  Back then, the right to abortion was about wanting pregnancy or not wanting it.  I didn’t want it, powerful bad.  And today reproductive rights is still about wanting pregnancy.  Every one of my children were wanted, even though not planned.  But before that, two abortions were what I wanted.  I didn’t know it back then, but what I wanted was to want pregnancy.  And when that happened, it surprised the crap out of me.  What my cousin could not and did not know back in seventh grade was that I knew about resentment, and I knew those ill feelings towards a child didn’t need to take the form of physical abuse.

                But just wanting my children doesn’t make me a great mother, and I’m fully aware of that.  What I want most for my children is confidence.  I want my daughters and my son to not only know they are wanted and loved, to never question that for a moment, but to instill that confidence in other young people, to be the kind of people who can buoy others in need because they have that strong sense of self.  I know some of this is up to chance and circumstance, but making sure girls and boys don’t grow up to be the kind of assholes who would restrict someone’s right to bodily autonomy seems as easy as not being that kind of an asshole yourself. 

               

The Truth?

According to eye witnesses, when I was born, my father was in two different places.

He was at the American Legion drinking when he got the call that I was on the way. By the time he arrived at the hospital, Mom had already squeezed me out. The whole ordeal was all over, and my dad missed it. BUT he says he caught a glimpse of my “monkey face” (his words) being rolled down the hallway in a cradle, as he had come racing in once he had realized his failure. Here was this adorable new baby all swaddled and wide awake, blinking up at him matter-of-factly and curious. He might’ve giggled (because Mom says he had surely been out drinking himself silly). Then he strolled his long legs into the hospital room to take the tongue-lashing my Mom was certainly entitled to give him. But, really, she was most likely already sleeping. Nonetheless, Dad insists that, in that moment, my monkey face touched him in a special way, and he will never forget it.

He was also actually IN the room AS I was being born, right there standing a few feet away from Mom’s distressed vagina but close enough to see all the blood when all Hell broke loose. And he wasn’t drunk, but he had probably smoked lots of cigarettes – right there in the hospital lounge because it was 1974 – and he (just as he had ended more than one long night at the bar) had to vomit up everything right there, right then. Mom says (with a little disdain) that a nurse left her side and rushed to assist him, and he sat and barfed his dinner into the trash can while I was thrust into existence, all soppy in goo and mucus, my blue chord hanging to a gob of placenta. Then someone surely stuck a syringe up my nose – because that’s what happens when the world first sees you – and Dad eventually pulled himself together. And because Mom laughs a little now when she tells me her side of the story, like she’s getting one over on him by telling her truth, I imagine her laughing at Dad’s green face in between her contractions. Laugh, push! Laugh, push! And when I imagine Mom laughing and pushing, I imagine some bald doctor, sitting between my mother’s spread-eagle legs, as he’s throwing Dad a raised eyebrow over a pair of itty bitty doctorly glasses. My dad = tough, ole’ beer-drinkin’ veteran or skinny, puking wimp? Why am I even asking? Being both is acceptable and quite easy.

My sister and I (born fives years apart) each get this story in reverse order. Mom says Dad puked when I was born, and it was Julie who had the little monkey face. Dad insists it was vice versa and so I was the cute little monkey face instead of a cause for vomit.

My sister and I have each claimed both stories at variant times in our lives. For a while, I’m certain, we both held on to the cute monkey face story, but it too had its dark side – in Dad’s lame absence. So what was “the truth?”  We have weighed the variables: Dad is a smart man, but he did drink a lot, still tends to. Mom WAS the one doing the actual birthing, but then wasn’t this, and potential obstetrical drugs she might have been given in the 70’s, cause for distraction? Was she really in her right mind? And we’ve often caught both parents, long since divorced, mixing up names and dates and reasons, as aging humans, who have led painful working-class lives, tend to do. Until I get them both in a room and of a proper mind to work it out, discuss details and perspective, we may never know any sort of “truth” in all of this.

And yet if life has revealed to me anything, it is that I will never get them both in a room and of a proper mind to work it out and come to a conclusion as to what really happened. After being divorced for well over three decades, neither are willing to stretch themselves toward communicating effectively. And, actually, after all of these years they’re tired and impatient with the world and hardly interested in expending any more of their energy fighting (and I must say, finally!). The solution is to, for the most part, ignore each other. Dad “functions”, a little less perhaps as he’s retired and has been recently left widowed after the death of his second wife, our beloved stepmother. And I’ve been ever more doubting Mom’s capability to remember anything, let alone make solid use of logic and reason. She’s lived alone for a long time, Alzheimer’s is in the family line, and “truth” for her as always been a bit bleary – based more so upon what her preacher of late tells her. But then she’s my mother and I’m her daughter, and I’ve believed this to be the case since I was age eight.

And even if I got them both into a room to discuss the moments surrounding their daughters’ births, they would still be sitting on different sides of a room, trapped in different lighting and cocking their heads at different angles, gripping their vast pasts. “What actually happened” or what we thought we saw with our own two eyes falls into question when we view an event from different angles and with different levels of attention. How could I ever expect Mom and Dad to come to a shared point on the horizon in such circumstances? They were never any good at agreeing upon anything anyway.

I have determined context to be important when it comes to creating truths. Oh, and brain function too. “Pure truth” will surely always disintegrate as long as there remain multiple perspectives. And who wouldn’t want multiple perspectives? And what happens after the shouting match is over, and they leave the room? Wasn’t fighting a valid reason for circling around each other every now and again? Doesn’t it make a sliver of sense to say a secret part of them loved it?

There was never a third party to tell my mother and father the “actuality” of what was what on the days when my sister and I were born. My parents never cared enough to ask a third party like the doctor, assuming he would have taken note and remembered. Mom and Dad each knew what was true, as they best recalled it. They divorced when I was two – so conversation surrounding the fact was severely stunted. Besides, that doctor might’ve coerced twenty babies into the world on either day. Who could blame him if the faces all ran together, all in a day’s work? And who’s to say Mom or Dad would want to listen to him in the first place? And maybe a confirmation could be easily passed over? Maybe that doctor had ulterior motives? It’s not hard to see how some third party witness could be shrugged off easily when it comes to expelling doubts and deep-rooted belief systems or even the slight details that barely matter for anything.

We are indeed creatures who have always manipulated “the truth,” seeing as we must come into contact with it in order to interpret it. I guess I like this idea of “truths” or “nonfiction” and “facts” because I want to believe I know something. It seems to me to be a romantic notion really and so I don’t hate it – If we arrive at what was “true” not only do my parents come to agree on something for once, but they embark some shred of actual wisdom upon me, which I am guessing would feel really nice.

Is all of this a request for just the facts, please? I would be curious to know how my (and the world’s) desire for “truth” has ebbed in and out of priority. Because I know there were times when I lived and breathed a steady stream of lies, and it felt fine. I assume it all has moved in waves and cycles brought on by an unstable setting.

I guess I have always believed art has some limitations and standards . . . but they exist because I put them there (because I have been taught I can put them there if I want to). Beauty is definitive of mere societal choices, often as they have flowed together throughout history, one individual manipulating the truth of another if even ever-so subtly. But ask my mom about art, and she will refer to her five foot tall black velvet painting of Elvis that hangs in her bedroom. Ask my dad, and he will either show you his Audubon book or play you one of his many George Jones’ LPs. And, in my opinion, they’ll both be spot on.

The truth, according to Col. Jessup?

I suppose I do come to journalism and encyclopedias and the like in search of these things called “truths” and when I don’t get them (as I feel I should), I let it surprise me, if not piss me off. But perhaps it shouldn’t. Such manipulations of shared/public information is not new. It is in fact a shouting match of perspectives and the winner takes everything. Perhaps this notion that I “deserve the truth” (when I have never had it given to me completely) is a delusion, either a delusion of privilege (as I have been sheltered) or a delusion of naiveté (as I have been duped).

Actually, I’m only being clever. Well, I’m trying. Sort of. I have accepted that I don’t come to my parents – or anyone else for that matter – when I have questions and need a bit of insight, without expecting farce, flips, or an outright stretch. For, always, all they have to offer me are their stories (their perspective, their angle, their interpretations, their past, their neurological firings).

We do like to think we know something. We don’t like to think we have been manipulated. I think John D’Agata – in The Lifespan of a Fact (big question: “How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction?”) – was trying to be clever too, and he could have perhaps gotten around the uproar he created. But he didn't. The uproar was what he was going for, just what he wanted to make people question this exaggerated notion of “truth” and “facts.” As though some divine superior creates such things and not the fantastic brains of we simple humans. As though journalists are not storytellers influenced by something as seemingly pointless as their angle in the room . . .

But I see Dinty Moore's point on Brevity’s Blog that “we have a labeling problem” and that stepping away from acknowledging the persistence of “truths” and definitive lines could bring the entire genre and even the field of writing (and all the other Humanities?) into question. Where do we stand then?

We stand beside a weird word and concept: truth. Maybe we stand beside our faulty senses. Or maybe we don't stand anywhere; maybe we kind of sit, unsteadily, in the middle of a tangled web. Social issues like class and race and gender seem to determine which stories gain the most attention, what details we make note of. We are creatures of manipulation and interpretation. ALL we have ever had to offer to each other are our stories. And all we have ever been offered are the stories of others. I’m not sure of anything. Neither are you. And that is the truth.  But none of this spawns some need to stop listening, to stop considering all the stories we have . . . oh, the possibilities . . .