Posts from — August 2012

Amanda Craig’s article about writer Maeve Binchy popped up in my Reader while I was in the middle of writing myself, and I decided not to read it until I had put a few projects to bed because the title alone filled me with disbelief: “If Maeve Binchy Had Been a Mother.”

Maeve Binchy wasn’t a mother due to infertility and she explained in the Daily Mail years ago,

Of course I wanted children. Bright, gorgeous, loving children. I could almost see them. But it was not to be and 30 years ago things were very different.  Fertility drugs were not as developed and adoption was impossible after the age of 40.  So my husband and I went through the sad, disappointed bit and then decided to count the blessings that we already had and ‘get on with it’.

She tells the story of how her friends lent her their children, sending them to London to stay with her, and how these children grew up with Binchy and her husband serving as an extra set of grandparents, a role they played well into those childrens’ adulthoods when they had children of their own.

I bless those good friends and family who lent us their children, and never minded that we played the roles of ageing enfants terribles, allowing them more freedom in some ways than parents ever would, but yet indulging our own anxieties under the cover of having bad nerves.  Our many ‘children’ and ‘grandchildren’ will never really understand what a great role they played in filling a gap that could have been sad and destructive but in the end turned out to be so joyful.

So now that we have established why Maeve Binchy had no children and how this affected her emotionally.  And from the article, it sounds that while she obviously did not have daily parenting responsibilities, she spent a considerable amount of time standing in as a guardian once the children were older and could travel for a visit.  Not exactly the life Craig envisions for childless writers (who apparently are just oozing with free time like snails leaving trails across the pavement) in her article.

So I need to start (before I touch the actual content) by saying that this article is unnecessarily cruel.  The woman was infertile.  It was a source of great sadness for her during her life.  Asking whether she could have been a better writer if she had been a mother is thoughtless at best and hateful at worst.  It was a medical condition, entirely outside her control.

Could you imagine someone writing an obit for John Lennon and saying, “yeah, sure he was a great songwriter, but since he grew up without a father from the age of five on, he couldn’t really write realistic songs about being a son.  Maybe if he had grown up with a father, he could stretch beyond writing songs about love to write songs about familial relationships as Cat Stevens so eloquently did in ‘Fathers and Sons’ or Harry Chapin did in ‘Cats in the Cradle.’  Two song writers with fathers.  It’s really too bad that Lennon was so limited in his song writing and never knew the deep love between a father and son.”

You know why you’d never read an obit like that?  Because it’s fucking cruel.

And it’s equally cruel to take Maeve Binchy’s medical condition — something entirely outside her control — and use it to muse on how much better she could have been as a writer if she didn’t have it.  But beyond doing a disservice directly to Maeve Binchy, Craig demeans all women by reducing us to the capabilities of our uteri.  Can you procreate?  Then perhaps you won’t be so limited to such boring subject matter as (yawn) relationships.  As Craig states,

Maeve Binchy’s warmth and interest in other people included their families, but I can’t help but feel that her detailed portraits of ordinary life might not have been so predicated on the relationships between men and women had she had a child.

Her insensitivity doesn’t just extend to Binchy.  Jane Austen, she muses, maybe would have gotten off that limited topic of romantic love and moved on to more important things if she had just parented a child.  After all, “No matter what your experience of adult love, there is nothing as strong as the bond between a mother and a child.”

The reality is that every writer, every piece of art can be done better.  Art is never static; there is always a word that can be tweaked, a brush stroke that can be changed.  Writers will tell you that they keep editing until their publisher pulls the manuscript out of their hands, and even then, when I read aloud from my book, I still tweak sentences here and there rather than reciting what is on the page.  So this article serves no purpose — of course a different life may have brought with it the influence of different subject matter.  I think we can all agree that our experiences (or lack of experiences) changes how we see the world, and we bring that with us into our art.

But to predicate all women’s writing on the event of childbirth is — again — reductive and insulting to women.  Parenting can change a person’s writing focus, or it might not.  And there are plenty of things including caring for an aging parent, an ill partner, or tending to one’s own poor health that affects the amount of time a person can dedicate to writing; the divide isn’t between parents and non-parents, but those who are able to make time and those who are not regardless of the why behind those time constraints.  Parenting doesn’t trump all in being the sole timesuck.

And when we read between the lines, what Craig is doing is taking a caregiving role — parenting — and making that the focus of womanhood.  And when we do that, we limit ourselves.  Women do not have to be caregivers nor should men be shunted away from the role and told it’s too “feminine.”  What Craig has done is take a truth of womanhood (we often fall into the role of caregiver both due to societal norms or biology) and make it a limit for womanhood (women should serve as caregivers because it makes them more well-rounded, far-reaching writers).  And while I expect men to build the glass ceiling over my head, I hardly think women need to step into that role of constructor of limits for other women.

Craig’s article was such a huge disappointment for women writers.  We could take the time to hold each other up; to support one another in producing books.  Or we can take Craig’s lead and muse on why someone else was just so damn limited in their writing abilities (not like Craig, mother that she is!).  On one path, we fill bookstores with quality fiction that reflects aspects of society.  On the other path, we shriek like harpies and our male counterparts notice and ask why women feel as if they need to yank on the backs of other women in order to feel as if they’re rising to the top of the pack.

Men, you have probably noticed, are not writing similar articles asking if Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, or Philip Roth (sorry to knock you off prematurely, Mr. Roth) could have been better writers if they had just experienced fatherhood.

And interestingly enough, women also aren’t writing articles asking if Franz Kafka, Jean-Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, or Philip Roth could have been better writers if they had been fathers.

We only seem to write these types of articles about ourselves.

There was an article in the New York Times this week about boys wearing dresses, exploring the world of genderqueer kids or those with gender fluidity.  As a woman who purchases her superhero t-shirts in the little boys section of stores (and pretty much only wears superhero t-shirts… like the one I have on right now… for Superman), I’m obviously interested in how gender is perceived in dress, how much we try to fit ourselves into labels and how much we twist labels in order to make them fit what we need.

Josh and I have a front row seat to watching how gender identity unfolds since we have boy-girl twins.  They have always been together, never ventured into classes outside the house until they were four years old and went to school for the first time.  All toys were placed on the floor at random, mixed together in boxes, and yet each child gravitated towards certain items and have always done so.  Two kids, two different sexes, raised in the same house with the same toys, hearing the same information and clear gender identities formed.

I wrote this post years ago, back when the twins were five years old, and never posted it.  It has sat in my draft folder until now, when I decided to hit publish.

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I recently was playing the BeeGees in the car when the ChickieNob asked if the BeeGees were particularly fancy women. “They’re men,” I answered. Which blew her five-year-old mind.

Now, she can’t stop asking me with every new disc that enters the machine: is this a boy or a girl? And it’s interesting exploring gender studies with a five year old, asking her why it matters or which sex she believes is the owner of the voice.

My great-uncle was one of the worst drivers I ever met. He would go 10 mph on the highways and 70 mph through small towns. And he never, never, never stopped for a red light. Believe it or not, he died of old age and not of a car accident. My cousin and I were staying with him outside of Tel Aviv, clutching the door handle for dear life while he drove, begging him to let us take the wheel even though I hate driving in Israel. He had this tape on continual play our entire trip, so every time we got in the car, Modern Talking was the backdrop to the taking of our life in our own hands.

At one point, my uncle said out of nowhere, “do you think this is a boy or a girl?” (imagine this asked in a very thick Israeli accent, and also imagine some of the words in English, some of the words in German, and some of the words in Hebrew because he mixed up all three languages in most sentences so it came out more like: “do you denken this yeled or yelda?”). I was positive in my answer — it hadn’t even occurred to me that the voice could be anything but: “it’s a woman.”

“It’s a man!” he crowed (okay, it more more like, “Zeh man!”)

My cousin and I, who were way too old to be this giggly, could not breathe when this particular song came on: “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore” and for years after, we would sing it to each other in this beautiful falsetto. Maybe it was the nervousness of having our gender beliefs blown out of the water or maybe it was just the fact that we had gone through another red light, the only car moving through an intersection while the traffic was stopped in all four directions, but whenever I think of my cousin, I think of that song and it still cracks me up when I listen to it.

Though I don’t know if I’m laughing over the synthesized voice, my mistake, or the discomfort of having my gender biases pointed out.

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Every year in middle school, I taught a philosophy unit using the book Sophie’s World. It’s obviously philosophy lite, where they’re reading the gist of each philosopher’s major ideas and sometimes reading a few lines from an original text. Each child had to do some additional research for their term paper, which meant sometimes handling the original text, but for the most part, we’re talking about 8th graders who had just started figuring out that they needed to wear deodorant everyday rather than only on special occasions so we need to frame this story properly.

Sometimes, though, the kids would say something truly brilliant — something that adults completely missed with the text — simply because they were processing it from a different point in life.

One day, a student had these really brilliant thoughts on Plato’s Republic, so I wrote an old friend (fine, it was an ex-boyfriend) about it, believing he would also marvel at the genius of this child in the same way that I had. I’m not sure why I believed this beyond the fact that this ex-boyfriend enjoyed Plato’s Republic because this man also literally had no heart. He was built with a shriveled up nubbin of a peach pit where his heart was supposed to be.  And he responded to my lengthy, gushing email, the one where I called this child a genius and explained how smart he was and how proud I was that he had come to this interpretation on his own with a bloated, self-important note that could only be written by someone who has a moldy, festering apple core in place of his heart that began: “Well, that is the most basic and rudimentary reading of Plato.”  Which is what you get when you share excitement with someone who has a rancid sesame seed beating in his chest.

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The point is that don’t we, simply be the fact that we don’t have the “original text” only have a rudimentary and basic understanding of what is happening around us? The Wolvog smacked his sister three times today. Which meant that we had three separate discussions in his bedroom rocking chair. Which meant that I spent almost an hour during the last discussion staring at my ceiling and waiting for him to call me back into the room because he was giving the question of why he was beating up his sister a great deal of thought.

And what I understood on the surface was that something was bothering him. It was my rudimentary and basic, albeit brilliant, understanding of the situation. And the original text, the one that only the Wolvog has access to (since we are all the owners of a single original text of our life), finally paged open in the 11th hour and revealed that he was upset that his friend had moved away that day. And thinking back, the smacking did begin the moment we returned to the house after greeting our new neighbours. This new interpretation of the events brought with it a long cry on the part of the Wolvog; that he was finally not just a brat punching his sister in the face, but he was hurting tremendously and unable to explain it to me without a lot of self-research. Guided self-research.

It always make you wonder how much you miss since you only have access to the surface. A smile could just be a reflex and all may not be fine with that person I pass at the library. That person sniffling and telling me that it’s allergies could be covering up a long cry session in a nearby bathroom. You just don’t know.  By which I mean, don’t we all have a rudimentary understanding of all we encounter? Aren’t we all 8th graders at heart, only getting the summary and not the original text? You experience your emotions in paragraphs and footnotes and I get them — even in a blog post — in the condensed form.

You’re okay.

You’re sad.

We make a lot of assumptions. A collective we. Humans, in general.

The twins were talking about what makes something for girls or for boys. What they meant, I realized early on, is that they were choosing their own interests and deeming them feminine or masculine. Noodles, mermaids, and fairies were feminine. Apples, cars, and computers were masculine. They grudgingly agreed that ballet fell on a middle ground since the Wolvog enjoys watching the ballet as well as screaming, “grand battement!” while trying to kick his sister’s head. (Are you sensing a theme?)

Pink, turquoise, gold, and orange have been commandeered by team girl.

Purple, blue, and grey have been claimed by team boy.

And all of it is so surface, what we notice. What we assume.  I think we should constantly be confronted and examine our gender biases in order to move past them and not allow social constructs to define us or limit us.  I would really like the twins to define their own girlness or boyness rather than having that dictated to them; shamed into them.

I think we start by challenging ourselves to think about how we not only define ourselves, but how we automatically define one another. As male or female. As happy or sad. As owner of a normal heart or owner of a discarded popcorn kernel — you know the one I’m talking about; the one that even the most hardcore unpopped kernel-eater discards from the salty remains at the bottom of the bowl.

You can probably guess from this post how I feel about labels.

I am definitely returning to MFA Sunday School again and already have a list of subjects lined up, but I am going to take a short vacation from writing about writing.  School will be back in session quite soon.

On the bus ride home from BlogHer, I gave up my seats to some long legged boys and felt virtuous, as if I had given away my kidney.  Perhaps I saved those lanky boys from blood clots.  That was sort of the high point of the trip.  The rest of the ride was mind-numbing.

As I stared out the window from their vacated, cramped seat, I came up with a brilliant theory on how where you like to sit in the theater is determined by the place you personally define as “home.”  Home may be where you were born or it may be where you grew up or it may be where you live now; but at some point, people connect with a space and start feeling as if this one particular space is the best fit.  Even when I live in other areas, I still think of myself as a Marylander, and I was using that as the base for this thought.

I had been thinking about Lori and how she doesn’t live close to an ocean and wondering how one gets through their day being so far from the ocean.  It’s a drive for us, but still close enough that it’s a low stakes day trip.  And I wondered where Lori sat when she went to the theater, but she was on an airplane and I couldn’t ask her.  So I started asking all of you via Twitter and Facebook, and I really think I’m on to something.  I’m just trying to figure out how close someone needs to be to a coast to say they live “close to” a coast.  I’m two hours away, and I always prefer to be close to an aisle.  Is four hours away too distant for the coast to force the person to gravitate towards aisle seats?

So, let’s see where the pull of the coast stops working:

1. Determine the place you think of as home base; the space that you either live in now or lived in during the past that still holds your heart.
2. Work out how long it would take you to drive to a coast from that home base.
3. Think about whether you prefer the aisle seat (or close to the aisle) or the center seats in a theater.

Am I correct?

It was a seriously long and boring bus ride, but I’m still totally curious if my theory is true.

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While we were at the pool this week, I noticed the ChickieNob talking to herself, twisting and leaping on the black tile lap line on the bottom of the pool.  And then I realized that she was using it as her balance beam, pretending she was part of the women’s Olympic gymnastic team, and she was giving a play by play of her routine.  I used to do that when I was her age; I used to use the weightless possibilities of the pool in order to do what my body couldn’t do on land.  And it was sweet to know exactly what was happening in her head.  And it was bittersweet to be old and not using the lap lane tiles as a balance beam anymore.

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I saw the world’s best book trailer this week:

It did exactly what a book trailer should do, which is sell me on the book.  Which rarely happens.  I mean, I buy a lot of books, but rarely because they have such a rockin’ book trailer that it makes me jump over to their site.

My agent suggested The Marrying Kind by Ken O’Neill (by sending me a link to that book trailer) because she knows I like relationship books, and I’m going to use this book to scrub my mind of 50 Shades Freed (more on that when I can wrap up my thoughts.  They are pretty cranky at the moment).  After I watched the trailer, I read a sample chapter before I Googled the author a bit and bought the book.  Has anyone else already read this book?

Thank you, Mr. O’Neill for providing me with my beach read for 2012.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week as well as the week before.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Playing Catch Up…” (Happy-Go-Lucky)
• “August” (Outlandish Notions)
• “Holy” (Mommy Odyssey)
• “Why” (Mama Said Knock You Out)
• “The Weight of Having it All” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Lori!
• “Siblings” (Are You Kidding Me?)
• “Relief” (Life Pared Down)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Not-for-Profit Dad (as in, Josh) has a post about pulling baby teeth that I fell in love with.  He writes: “Later I Googled how many baby teeth a child will lose and was surprised that it was only 20. I don’t know what number I was expecting, but I thought it was higher. I thought I had more time with her as a little girl.”  It’s about life’s milestone carousel slowing down when you still thought there were two more minutes of the ride.

So I Was Minding My Own Business has a post on the terms childfree and childless, and why she uses the one she uses.  She asks a really important question: “Am I hurting anyone by deciding what term in my situation works for me?”  It’s an interesting discussion on language choice and the meaning behind words (and how strongly we hold on to the ones we believe belong only to us).

IF Crossroads has a goodbye post that made me teary.  It was beautifully written, the perfect closing to a blog.  I love this: “What has this space meant to me? I’m not sure that words can and will ever do it justice. I’ve come to this blog for refuge in my times of great despair and great hope, great sadness and overwhelming joy.”  Wishing her good thoughts on the next leg of the journey.

There were lots of BlogHer ’12 posts, but my favourite was A Half Baked Life who juxtaposed where she felt peace at the beginning of the conference with where she felt peace at the end.  About how the conference is but a moment, and it’s up to each person to take that fuel and use it once they get home.  Loved her recap of the weekend.

Lastly, Hormonal Imbalances has a post about mourning the life she never got to have.  In the midst of loss, she reflects the fact that these small beings changed her world before they left: “It’s such a strange thing. In the middle of life reversing, I have all these memories and dreams of something that I never tangibly got to have, but ended up changing everything anyway.”  A gorgeous, heartbreaking post.

The roundup to the Roundup: Help me prove my theory about coastal living and theater seats.  The ChickieNob is mentally on the women’s Olympic gymnastic team.  I just found the book The Marrying Kind.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between August 3rd and August 10th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

I heard about Unbaby.Me, the new Chrome extension that allows you to replace pictures of babies in your Facebook news feed with photos of cats, while at BlogHer surrounded by living, breathing babies.  Surrounded is an overstatement; I felt surrounded because I was so acutely aware of all the babies around me (that happens when you’re deeply coveting them).  If I hadn’t been coveting them, my eye would have probably passed right over them.  We tend not to notice what we aren’t focused on at the moment.

My first thought was that I would never be able to mentally manage this extension.  A picture of a cat would pop up, replacing someone’s baby and I would think, “when did they get a cat?”  And then I would mentally note that I need to take allergy medication before going to their house.  And then I’d probably skip going to their house due to the cat.  And finally, the friend would confront me and ask why I haven’t been over, and when I explained it was due to the cat and she said “what cat?,” I would realize that I had missed my friend’s brunch for no reason.  Please remember that I am the woman who went on a trip and forgot to pack pants.  At least I am aware of my limitations.

Then I thought about how if I used this, I would miss out on pictures I actually really do want to see.  I don’t hide anyone in my feed; I prefer to step away from Facebook when I’m not up to seeing pictures of babies and step back when I am up to seeing pictures.  But my friend’s kids are part of my friend’s lives.  And I’m not just interested in certain parts of their life; I’m interested in everything that is important to them, including but not limited to their kids.  The reality is the day I stop caring about my friend’s kids is the day I should probably unfriend them and admit that we don’t really have enough of a relationship to keep in touch via social media.

And then I thought about how sometimes you can be full of pictures (as in, “Oh, no thanks, I’ve had enough.  I’m totally full.”) but the person keeps shoveling pictures onto your plate.  I had a friend who did this with her vacation photos and could never take a hint that I didn’t need her to describe what I was seeing in all 144 pictures in her album.  If you’ve gone someplace that I’m deeply interested in going to myself — for example, Iceland — I want to see every last photo.  I want to vicariously live your trip until I can take my own.  But if you’ve gone someplace that I’m fairly meh about (not going to give an example here because I just know that whatever I name, someone will angrily say in the comment section, “hey, bitch, I live there!”) I have to admit that I just want the highlights.  And I sort of feel that way about kids too: there are some kids that I want to know/see everything because I love them deeply and they’re far away and this is how we keep in close contact.  And there are some kids that I’d like the highlights of their life.

And then I thought about how there are people who need to be on Facebook for one reason or another, and they may not want to see any baby photos.  And this extension will allow them to be on Facebook, doing whatever they need to do on Facebook, and not be distracted and upset every time they log on.

And then I thought about how I couldn’t come up with one situation off the top of my head where you (1) had to be friends with someone on Facebook AND (2) you had to be subscribed to their news feed.  I get the fact that sometimes you need to accept a friend request you don’t want, or that a life situation changes and people start posting things that are bothering you, but why don’t people unsubscribe from the feed rather than replacing the person’s baby photos with pictures of cats?

Then I wondered if they would use pictures of actual cats or whether they were using pictures of actors from Cats! the musical.

And then I thought about how perhaps the mere existence of this extension will change people’s posting habits.  Will it make new parents feel even more self-conscious than they already do about sharing their child’s life with other people?  I get it — a lot of people hate babies.  They hate kids and they want you to know how they feel about kids.  They want kids banned from restaurants and planes.  Crying kids ruin their night out.  Kids running around anywhere acting like kids sucks all the joy out of another person’s time out in public.  I get it I get it I get it — YOU HATE MY KIDS.  Believe me, my kids have even picked up on how many adults feel about kids.  I’m sure this isn’t wrecking anyone’s self-esteem to grow up in a space where you are reviled until you hit a certain age. (Oh, and then you’re reviled again once you pass a certain age.  The western world sucks.)

I am only being partially sarcastic there.  As much as we are also a baby-obsessed culture (pick up any issue of People magazine to see that), there is simultaneously a strong message sent to parents that their baby is unwelcome in the general public.  I think there are a lot of people who are terrified to post their baby’s picture/take their child in public/talk about their child for fear of pissing off everyone around them.  This extension drives that fear home.

And then I thought about how part of the problem is that Mark Zuckerberg didn’t really get how it may not be a good idea to mix all facets of your life because he invented this tool as a college student.  And back when I was a college student, I really didn’t get how the rest of life would unfold.  But I have to tell you that it makes me fairly uncomfortable that everyone in my life is lumped into one account.  And I’m not going to spend hours customizing my Facebook feed so certain people see certain things et al.  I’m just going to use it as if it is a public space that anyone can see and censor myself.

And I think we also have a skewed vision of our Facebook feed.  Just as I felt surrounded by babies at BlogHer whereas other people went through the conference saying, “what babies?,” I’m sure that people are either hyper-aware of the baby photos or their eye glosses over them barely realizing how many there are.  Our perception probably doesn’t mirror reality.

Uh… where was I?

Posting habits.

Or will it change the amount of pictures a person uploads, making them mindful of the fact that not everyone in their feed wants to see all the pictures?  Will it make them more circumspect in what they post?  There are ways to unapologetically share your child while still being mindful of the life situations of other people in your feed.  Maybe talking about this extension will make people aware that not everyone is in an emotional space where they want to see dozens of pictures of babies.

So… where did I end up after all these thoughts?  I’m not going to use unbaby.me, nor will I use any of the spin-offs in the future because there is nothing that I really really really need to block.  But I also completely understand why other people will use this extension.  And I’m not personally offended if you replace my images with pictures of cats.

P.S. Josh does not want to incur the wrath of cat people, but he casually mentioned as he asked what I was writing that he’d love an extension that replaces all pictures of cats with pictures of dead cats.  Which probably comes closest to getting to the heart of the matter: we wouldn’t be laughing or cheering at that, we wouldn’t snicker over an extension that replaces all pictures of women with pictures of beer (you know, since women suck and who the hell wants to see pictures of women?  More beer!).  We wouldn’t be laughing if we found out that a culture who suppressed women had invented an extension blotting their image from news feeds in order to keep the eyes of men pure.  So thinking of it in those terms, why would an extension replacing all images of women be sexist, but unbaby.me okay?