Archive for November, 2007
November 29th, 2007
I swear I am not writing this just to urge everybody who has ever dieted to go read this Shapely Prose blog entry on the magical thinking that goes into thinking about the life you’re going to have when you just hit that magical number, even though I think it was one of my favorite blog posts I’ve read in a while.
No, I’m writing because I am still trying to sort out what it means to have goals, about the difference between “I am accomplishing” and “I have accomplished” and why the first one feels so much better to me than the second. The end of NaNoWriMo is about 56 hours away as I am writing this (and why I am writing this now?) and I am close, and that does freak me out a little bit, because as long as I only have to focus on a daily goal, I don’t have to worry about what to do with the thing or whether I let anyone read it or whether it is even worth the energy that editing and re-writing it will take. But doing it each day has made me really happy, like the kind of happy I always think I am going to be when that beautiful brown truck brings me my next box from Amazon or the kind of happy I once thought wearing a particular size of jeans would make me.
But I am attached to my goals. One, it has worked for me, at least as an initial motivator — I did start exercising wanting to reach a weight, be all thin and beautiful, started doing morning pages, wanting to turn my impulse to write towards a great American novel. But, the truth is, I exercise because it feels good, keeps me sane, is time to myself each day. And I write morning pages because it is how I sort out what I am thinking and make sense of my life. And these turn out to be as big a part of happiness as being a thin, gorgeous, best-selling novelist might be. I have a list of goals for the house that range from the terribly mundane and short-term, like taking out the trash – to the medium-term, like raking up more leaves and trimming back the vines growing on the house – to the long-term and maybe-never, like getting the basement finished. And I am convinced that if I let go of the to-do list even a little we will all be wallowing in our own filth, like immediately. I recognize that this impulse that makes it hard for us to enjoy a weekend hanging out together as a family — I worry about stuff getting DONE (pity Raven, y’all). And it would be easy for me to draw some zen-y ‘Be Here Now’ conclusion, but it’s more than that, more than thinking goals are important, but habits work better, because they don’t lend themselves to the let-down of having accomplished something I wanted to and finding I am still me, untransformed, living my same life. It’s more than having some happiness to look forward to that is somehow not accessible to me now.
Because all of the parts of my life seem to flow together I have to think about goal-orientation in terms of my kids’ music lessons too. Our violin teacher is motivating our five-year-old with stickers, which goes against all my intrinsic reward stuff, but the stickers are a concrete thing to look forward to when we are practicing each night, I can coax one more attempt out of the child when he hits his “I can’t do it stage” with “Brian believes you will be able to do it if we just keep practicing it every night, and you’re going to get a sticker for doing it.” We don’t do this with my eight-year-old, because the intrinsic rewards are there for him. And I know that he focuses on the weekly goals, the one thing Brian has set out as the skill to acquire this week, but that is not the whole reason for practicing, that each of the boys has expressed something about finding the practicing, in itself, enjoyable. As their parent, I don’t want to let some goofy, Carnegie Hall fantasy goal of my own hide that enjoyment they get to experience each day. There’s something about making music, that you put it out and you don’t get to edit it, re-examine it in morning light — no, you experience it and then that experience is gone, that makes music presentness, puts goals in perspective.
November 26th, 2007
The good news is my small house can hold nine people for three days and really not feel crowded. And the bad news, it feels sort of empty when everyone goes. What made it worse was Raven having to fly to Boston for a conference Sunday night, so today we were really thrown back into the non-holiday world abruptly. My oldest son has a cello lesson with a teacher who is across town, and because traffic can be pretty gnarly the hours right after school gets out, we’ve settled on evening lessons. When Raven is in town, the whole family goes together for sandwiches and then Raven sits in the van with the younger brothers while I go in and take notes on the lesson, good Suzuki mother that I am, but tonight, we had dinner at home, and I suspected that the younger two would fall asleep in the van, so I bathed them and put them in pajamas, and they’re snoring away while the eight year old reads and I take advantage of having the laptop with me to catch up on the blog. Actually, as I figured out how much time I had to get dinner made, homework done, practicing with the violinist and violist, taking out the trash in the rain, and the bath in the time between getting home from school pick-up and leaving for the lesson, it occurred to me that I could never leave instructions for a babysitter for all the things that have to be done, and they’re dumb little things, but there are dim rainy days in November when your sinuses hurt and getting the smallest thing done seems impossible.
So I eat leftovers and dwell on the holiday. Thanksgiving morning we got up and drove in two cars to Multnomah Falls to show my sister the falls, which are lovely, and the Columbia gorge, which is scaled in a way nothing is in New Mexico. I drove up with my mother and sister, while Raven drove the minivan with the kids and my father and once we were there we decided that my father, my eight year old son and I would stay and hike to the overlook at the top of the falls while everyone else drove back to the house to start cooking. Coming back down the hill, my son picked up on the fact that my father was greeting everyone with a “Have a happy Thanksgiving” and he decided that was something he could get into, and he greeted people with such enthusiasm as he bounced down the trail ahead of me that the smiles on their faces as they came up towards me seemed like reflections of the smile I couldn’t see on his face. And it was such a lovely thing to be sharing this with my son when sharing hikes with my father was an important part of my childhood and adolescence, the two of us in the Sandias, talking or not, but sharing it. And among the other things I was grateful for was how being a family means being in different combinations all the time as well as being all together, that I was sure that Raven and my mom cooking together would have a fine time, that each of my sons was working on his own special relationship with his aunt, that there was time for each of us. So it was one of the more thankful Thanksgivings I have had.
I had an interesting phone conversation with a writer, Julie Tilsner, (who has a blog of her own) working on a magazine article about mommy guilt. She asked why mothers feel guilt and I didn’t have a great answer, but it feels like one of those questions that will be recurring in my journal for a while. I don’t know how universal it is — it seems like it could be one of those Puritan inheritances, like a work ethic, or something vaguely religious where we’re always being reminded of our deep unworthiness, one of those inabilities to reconcile injustice in the world — having the things we do and still not being happy, or on the happy days, having the things we do, and reflexively having this emotional equivalent of the sign against the evil eye in hopes of forestalling loss, or perhaps it is not being capable of doing all the things we think we are expected to do. I resist on my feminist grounds the guilt about eating what I want, and also, I think the guilt about being an at-home parent who takes time to pursue her own interests and maintain her own well-being, but those are works in progress. Still, I think there are other lurking guilts that sound like defensive reactions when I justify owning and driving a minivan, not being green in absolutely every way possible, not providing identical childhood experiences for all four of my children, neglecting to provide them with any form of athletics whatsoever, failing to provide the older two with a second language, for enjoying the fruits of a school with an active, involved set of parents while feeling an absolute dread of the PTA… A lot of these come from looking at other people who seem to manage the things I would like to do so gracefully and forgetting temporarily that they, too, have had to compromise somewhere. That in my best world we would all be free to make the decisions that are best for our own families and in line with our values and be respected for them, that each individual decision would seem like a referendum on other people’s decisions. So, still no snappy conclusions. Guilt would be a useful thing if it were a just a symptom for something we are able to do better at, but I am at a balancing point right now, my needs and my kids needs have produced the life we have right now. The one where I am sitting in the car writing a blog entry while my son finishes his ‘cello lesson.
November 19th, 2007
So eleven year old son has figured out how to use Garage Band with the Mac and play pieces and record himself and accompany himself, and yes, he added a track where he says goofy things over it, and I just die over this, so in compensation for how embarrassingly verbose I’ve been this weekend (and with his permission):
Etude rap.mp3
This is a Suzuki ‘cello Book 1 piece called simply Etude.
November 16th, 2007
The thoughtful and wonderful feminist mother blogging at Blue Milk interviews her blog readers with a bunch of interesting questions, and it has taken me weeks to get to it, but I found the questions provided a good starting point for crystallizing some of my own thoughts and enunciating some of my own views:
1 How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?
Ack – one sentence? Feminism is cultivating a society and a personal life which allows and values the expression of our diverse and different selves. No, that doesn’t quite get it. I grew up Bahá’í with the precept that the realization of the equality of women and men was essential to the progress of the human race, and know my parents worked hard at having an “equal” marriage, at least in terms of respect even if sometimes the division of responsibilities fell along more traditional lines — but my 1970’s childhood was rife with messages about being able to do anything a boy could do. I had a Free to Be You and Me record, and it wasn’t until I was listening to it with my own children that I realized that it was so strongly messaged, because that message was so ubiquitous in my childhood. I think there was a distinct moment of feminist awakening in early adolescence when the sci-fi I had always really liked suddenly seemed to be missing the point when it ignored and neglected women as interesting characters. Then in college I took a course titled “The Philosophy of Feminism” and came away finally able to articulate my own feminism as believing that every individual ought to be accepted as the person they really are, not just who they are supposed to be according to norms and expectations.
2 What has surprised you most about motherhood? Having a son! I spent the last two months of my first pregnancy reading The Second Sex and I was so ready to raise this kick-ass, take nothing from anyone girl, and now that boy has three younger brothers. And I still find it worth fighting the good fight for messages about gender — I get as frustrated at the ways the world is unfriendly to boys, classrooms that ask them to sit still painfully long times, the violin teacher who told me my sons would learn so much faster if they were girls, the dumb things people said about them as babies, how girls are faster to potty train and learn to talk, like having a boy was being a runner-up somehow, and I’ve come to believe every harmful stereotype of femaleness has a corresponding harmful stereotype of maleness.
3 How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?
My feminism has moved a little with motherhood — become more concrete and more urgent. I think that it as a feminist that I am frustrated by the economics of doing work that isn’t valued by society and how that becomes a division between groups of mothers that should be fighting for each other and not with each other, angry about the constant messages about our bodies, about attractiveness being the measure of our value as women, even angry about the messages given to my sons about what being a boy means. My feelings as a feminist and my feelings as a mother and my feelings inhabiting a body that has borne four children are hard to separate out from being sad about women who don’t like themselves very much, angry about the working conditions of women throughout the world, wanting to protect my own children and feeling guilty about how much cushier their life is than so many, wanting to cultivate their consciences and awareness, their media literacy. I don’t know that it isn’t this seeing myself as a feminist that also shapes my feelings about the environment, the valuing of profit over people and it all sounds knee-jerk-y doesn’t it? I get frustrated that something as simple as believing that men and women are equal does spiral out into all of these other issues. It’s hard to remember that post-birth “I’ve joined a sisterhood of women throughout history who’ve done this amazing thing” when I see the woman at the supermarket smacking her kid for not listening, and I feel compassion for her as well as the child, and I don’t know how to avoid feeling judgemental when I do believe that some things have a right way and a wrong way to be done.
4 What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?
I think more than anything, I am critical of the really essentialist statements, people telling me what boys are like and what girls are like. For all of the differences that seemed to appear despite consciousness about the messages our kids got in their first years (e.g. my sons’ fascination with weapon-play in the face of all of my pacifist preaching, friends daughters who strongly prefer dresses and princess play), I think that the feminist parents I know still hold back from generalizing to much because it is so easy to slip from characterizing those differences to making inferences about capacities, imprisoning kids in roles that may not be right for them. I also think that my partnership with sons’ father, my husband, is a striving for a feminist balance, because our children are watching. We’ve recognized that with our different interests and abilities we are going to have different roles in the household and in our children’s lives, and still work we have to make sure that there is some justice, that both of our needs’ are being met, that we both have room to grow, that there is respect going both ways.
5 Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?
Yes and yes. I do the housework — and on the good days, it seems to balance his having to produce work for an employer to get a paycheck, and on the bad days I wonder why he gets to change jobs when he’s unhappy or complain about work and have weekends and vacations. But it’s been interesting as he has been working from home more in the last year, he is more aware, I think of what needs to be done all day and more likely to unload the dishwasher during a break between phonecalls. He is also very encouraging and supportive of the non-parenting, non-household things I do. He is much more involved in the lives of our children and aware of what is happening in their lives. Other small compromises and feelings of failure — the first time you balance wanting your son to be whoever he wants to be and wanting to protect him from teasing if he decides he wants to wear pink to kindergarten. The presence of video games in the house that my husband and sons love and I have no interest in. The catching myself disliking my belly in the mirror. The moment when my three year old son told my woman dermatologist she didn’t look like a doctor, and I realized the two family practitioners we’ve seen since he was born were both men, as is his dentist.
6 Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
I suppose, in some ways I am defensive about it because from the outside it looks like we’ve taken on such traditional roles in our family, and I want to say, take me seriously, I really am a feminist. I am married to someone who is comfortable speaking to rooms full of two and three hundred people and I find the prospect excruciating, so just talking about how different our interests and capacities are and how I struggle to get outside my comfort zone, take small risks (like blogging!) seems like a gendered thing, and I sometimes will feel in a social sitation like I am hanging off him, which doesn’t feel feminist to me. The fact that the word feminsim is such a splintered and confusing thing, meaning something different to everyone who uses it means I cannot just encapsulate my views with one convenient label, and my not use it to identify myself to others at all times.
7 Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?
I loved the book At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst by Carol Lee Flinders for her attempt to reconcile the sacrifice and humility of a spiritual practice with the need to be assertive and find her voice as a feminist. I think that this is a similar reconciliation — and so I remind myself of the ways that I have chosen these sacrifices, the ways I’ve been enriched by motherhood, of the sacrifices my husband makes, of the sacrifices my own parents made and 95% of the time I wouldn’t go back to that other existence for anything.
8 If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your feminist motherhood? What is the impact of your feminism on your partner?
I suppose reading answers above, our domestic bubble is where I play out a lot of my striving to feel equal — and yet he consistently has treated me as capable of doing anything I wish to do, as having contributed significantly to our lives, as deserving things I sometimes don’t feel entitled to, and yet as I have this imaginary conversation with him in my head, he would call it justice rather than feminism, which is ok with me. He thought it reasonable I keep my last name, and give that last name to our sons, has been supportive of our sons pursuing the interests they have that are different from his own. I suppose that my feminsim and his being married to me, has made him have to consider a female viewpoint on some situations, but who he is is so justice-minded, it’s not that it was a big compromise.
9 If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?
I am a do-what-works-for-you-and-your-family mother, mostly, but yes, in my son’s infancy I did a lot of the parenting work and a lot of the time enjoyed it, and because it did feel like a valued contribution to the family and household it didn’t feel like too much of a contradiction to my own rendering of feminism.
10 Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?
I don’t know if I can talk about feminism as a monolithic thing that has failed or given me as a mother — the ideas out there in the world, the increasingly critical evaluation of messages and media, the voices of other women who proclaim themselves feminist, even when they interpret things differently than I do, are empowering, and I am grateful for all of the political movements of the last two hundred years that have moved for increased rights for women. I do agonize at the way movements splinter and divide and forget the essential things that they were formed around, and think that issues protecting women and their children need to be seen as feminist as much as workplace issues and political issues.
November 15th, 2007
I’ve been tagged by Marjorie with the cool blog 280 Main Street, and felt all honored she reads my blog because hers is interesting and well-written and her blogroll has been so fun to explore, and there are times when you start seeing this all as an interesting conversation that is spinning off in all of the potential directions that conversations could spin off in at the same time if they weren’t so generally linear, and at this pace that allows for thoughtful response and yet is constantly moving, and I feel like I’ve been sitting on the periphery, but it is such a relief to realize how many interesting and thoughtful and funny and literate people are out there after feeling just slightly out of place at PTA meetings and going to preschool mothers’ groups where no one reads for fun, and would never, ever write for fun. But it’s funny: the rules include tagging seven other people at the end, and I get all squeamish about that, thinking that I am the only person who would be delighted to be tagged, worrying the people I want to tag are too busy, wouldn’t appreciate it, whatever. Can that count as one of my weird things? That I think I am the only person feeling shy or uncomfortable or awkward and am always surprised (and grateful!) to realize it isn’t so?
Anyway, I’ve been slow blogging this month — now that we’re almost halfway through November maybe I can say this is the year I thought I could manage to write 50,000 words by November 30th, NaNoWriMo style, without jinxing myself. My current count is 23,883, and it’s awful, but I can handle know I don’t ever have to write the whole thing, I only just have to get through the next 1,667 words. Anyway, that’s why I’m being worse than usual at answering emails, calling, being responsible for anything more than a bare minimum of laundry and easy meal preparation. So, I am grateful to have a good reason to post. And I will try and come up with seven facts about myself that aren’t on my list of 50 factoids and aren’t that I think I am the only person as insecure as I am, nor that I was surprised to learn I talk with my hands.
RULES:
•Link to your tagger and post rules.
•Share 7 facts about yourself, some random and some weird.
•Tag 7 people at the end of post and list their names.
•Let them know they were tagged by a comment on their blog.
1. Right before we met, my husband consulted a fortune teller in Santa Fe — like one out of two times in his whole life he did this — who told him he was about to meet the woman he was going to marry.
2. I kept my name when we got married, which isn’t that unusual, but we decided the kids should just have my last name because I’d more often be the one dealing with schools, doctors, etc. This confuses some people.
3. I have a life-long self-image as a non-jock, but my well-being seems to depend on daily time on the elliptical we own. I am all ritualistic about listening to my favorite podcasts in a particular order in alternation with some upbeat songs while exercising.
4. I also am 95% consistent about writing three pages a morning longhand in a journal, and have been doing this almost five years, since my third son was a tiny baby and I was having a rough time coping. So I have a big stack of journals I don’t want anyone to ever read.
5. I tripped during intermission during a youth symphony tour to Great Britain my junior year of high school and didn’t smash my violin but jammed the little finger on left hand and had to go to a doctor in Bath, England. My experience of the NHS wasn’t really Michael Moore-worthy, with the doctor more or less telling me off as a whiner for wasting resources when there were people far worse off than I, but that finger still isn’t as strong as my others.
6. I got fired from a job managing a video store in college and I honestly cannot remember the reason now, but was devastated, and yet not working for those people turned out to be much, much better for me.
7. Both the video store I worked at and the bakery I worked at afterwards burnt to the ground. It wasn’t me…
Ok, tagging: how about I contact the people I would want to tag and ask them if they mind being tagged, that’s not against the rules, is it? And I can get back to you on this?
November 7th, 2007
Self-knowledge is not a fun thing. You carry around a picture of who you are and that makes you vulnerable to all sorts of deflations. It was a relatively minor one that when Raven sent me a picture of me talking to someone at Ignite Portland it looks, as Raven said, like I’m doing some “This big” thing with my hands. And as unsettling as it is to have this picture up when I was completely unaware of it being taken, I couldn’t remember that gesture at all. Which killed Raven, “But you always talk with your hands! It is one of your things!”
“No, I don’t!”
“Totally do.”
“Talking to you right here, right now, not using my hands.”
“Well, you do it when you’re in a new situation, talking to someone you don’t know well, it’s like how you keep your thoughts moving.”
I find this completely mortifying.
So much so that I’ve waited some two weeks after the fact to post about it. And while I suspect I am going to be even a tad more self-conscious the next attempt I make to push my introvert comfort zone about what I am doing with my hands while talking, I am apparently not so completely dorky that he refuses to be associated with me, I mean, he still introduces me to the cool people he knows (I think!)
I do sometimes miss the stage in my life when a cigarette gave me something to do with my hands, or (in the post-cigarette stage) a baby strapped to my chest that I could pat and rock. Not that that’s a good reason to go back to either of those two stages. Maybe I’ll have to take up knitting.
November 2nd, 2007
A friend sent me a link to this NY Times story about a self-described ‘über-mom’ Shannon Hayes who wrote a lovely blog entry about being held up as this new ideal, the organic, sustainable farming, eating locally, back to the land mother who homebirths and homeschools and has somehow become the new ’supermom’ figure of intimidation, the one I see replacing the so-’90’s nanny-employing lawyer in a power suit who sends her child to the most exclusive private schools and remains deeply involved in her child’s life despite the power career. And there was something really reassuring in this revelation that it’s just another way of doing things — that her laundry doesn’t get folded and her lawn doesn’t get mowed, she feels like she compromises too! I am embarrassed at how relieving I found that revelation, that I don’t always discern the fine line between being inspired and aspiring by and to the models of motherhood held out in front of me.
And it’s frightening how much easier it is to see a person as a type than a person, perhaps especially when something about them touches on some area where you don’t see yourself measuring up.
Then it occurred to me how much this is always a mommy thing and not a daddy thing. I’ve never been aware of my husband looking at other fathers with evny at the ease with which they apparently do some things, or thinking he’d like to be more like that guy. I don’t think that he’s any less committed than I am to providing the best life we can to our kids, but he doesn’t agonize about the decisions and compromises the way I do. And that’s probably to the kids’ benefit, having one parent who researches the issues pretty earnestly and one parent who can be the source of endless, spontaneous fun (though it benefits our marriage, and indirectly, them, if we don’t let those become totally polarizing roles).
But in fact the degree to which my beloved looks around does seem to be really popular, by informal poll, among my friends’ husbands — “Honey, relax, I’m doing more than 90% of the dads out there” by which I think they mea “Look, I’m not Homer Simpson!” And somebody with more patience for media studies than I have might figure out what media portrayals of family life we are responding to so differently.
The thing is, I don’t know how our experiences of the messages in mass media about parenthood mean anything since I think we’re pretty selective in our media consumption, skipping glossy magazines, preferring television in box DVD sets a year or more after a series is completed, or at least, tivoed so we remain oblivious to commercials, completely eschewing reality tv, getting news by scanning CNN headlines and never clicking through on the celebrity stories, or from NPR, but mostly by podcast, so we spend time on the stories that are interesting to us.
How did the über-mom imprint so powerfully on me? Is it because I am only a degree or two away? I stay home, homebirthed one of the four, and, on the good days fantasize about homeschooling? But I am aware of the compromises to my own feminism (a whole other post!) and environmentalism that are involved involved in our daily life. I believe that the main parenting advice anybody needs is “Trust yourself and find what works for you” and everything else is tips and tricks for when you’re having a hard time figuring out what works for you, a chance to take a deep breath and reflect when you’re sleep deprived and stressed and don’t see things getting better any time soon.
I suppose it does come back to the AA thing about not judging insides against outsides, and acknowledging that things are hard, and if they appear easy for someone else, you probably don’t have the whole story or know what compromises they’re making. It may even be a case for learning to deal with each other as individuals rather than types and, on the enlightened days, understanding what part of your reaction is coming out of feeling a little intimidated, a little inadequate.
