Introducing, Tallulah!

I rarely blog about this stuff, but I just HAD to kitten blog today because on Friday, the day after we learned our first attempt at IVF didn’t work, Marco and I brought home the sweetest little cat.

Our loved ones’ reactions to our news ran the gamut.  “Maybe you should have started sooner,” said a loving but disappointed mother-in-law.   Little did she know, bless her expectant heart, we did.  My mother responded with sympathetic tears.  The woman knows a thing or two about fertility woes (cue my book Only Child).  My friends responded with the requisite “oh shit,” “am so sorry,” and “there’s always next time.”  That’s what we Chicagoans used to say about the Cubs.

Marco and I mourned, each in our own way, taking a break from our 24/7 fixation on the election.  I miss those 12 cells, said my sentimental husband, who mourns a little each time he leaves a place he knows he won’t see again soon.  What happens to the embryo? he asked.  It gets reabsorbed into my tissue, goes back to the Mother Ship, I joked.  He found that reassuring.  I want a kitten, I said.

And after two days of sadness, we headed to Kitty Kind adoption center after work.  It was Halloween, and I happened to fall in love with the first black cat I saw.  Cliché, I know, but I felt uplifted by that purring ball of fur.  Its bear-shaped face and kittenish exuberance melt me, make it hard to feel self-pity.  Marco and I passed the adoption test with flying colors (thank you, Davy!) and brought the kitten home.

It’s not exactly a baby, but it’s ours.

I’m sad.  But we’ll keep trying.  I am a Chicagoan after all.  I’m grateful for the deep happiness I’ve found with Marco, for an incredibly satisfying career as a working writer, and for being born at a time in history where technology can sometimes work miracles–even if it can’t turn back the clock.

To all you other mid-to-late-30somethings-pushing-and-just-over-40-women-trying-to-have-a-child: solidarity.  Don’t doubt your choices.  There are good reasons we’ve lived non-linear lives.

Like Tallulah, to whom the world still seems new each day, I have little truck for regret.

And now, back to the election, and MSNBC.

The following is this month’s installment of Jacqueline Hudak’s column, Family Stories.  For previous installments, click here. Here’s Jacqueline! -Deborah

Amid the festive Halloween decorations I see the “McCain/Palin” signs on my neighbor’s lawn and resist the sudden intense urge to come back after dark and rip them up.

OK, I think, THAT’S not useful.  Maybe I should just knock on their door, and say, “Hello, and by the way, do you understand what their policies will do to me and my family?”

I am aware of how divisive the campaign has been; at times its hard to even imagine moving beyong the rhetoric of us/them to a real conversation in which I could share with my neighbor the impact of rendering my lesbian family unworthy and invisible. How might I convey the sense of grievance when we have been made ‘other?’  And yet, I want to hold a passionate position about the influence of McCain policy on my family without demonizing McCain himself. Or my neighbor.

What we do with these feelings was addressed for me last weekend, when  I attended a workshop on “Forgiveness” with Dr. Fred Luskin, author of Forgive for Good and Director of The Stanford University Forgiveness Project. His premise, that holding onto anger and grudges is bad for physical and emotional well being, is backed by a growing body of research.  Studies conducted at Stanford reveal that people who are more forgiving report feeling less stressed and fewer health problems, and people who blame others for their troubles have higher incidences of illess such as cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Luskin asked the participants to write something we were unable to forgive – our grievance story.  You know, the one  that can play endlessly in your head about the time you were wronged, the one you still get all charged up over. We were then asked to describe our thoughts, feelings and actions in relation to the grievance stories. This simple exercise was powerful in providing clarity about long held, repetitive patterns of thought and behavior that simply are not effective. It also opened up space for the grief and hurt beneath the wound. Using meditation and guided visualizations, Dr. Luskin pushed us to change our  “grievance stories, ” to make peace with what is, to shift attention from what’s wrong to what’s right and good. Suffering is normal, he pointed out, and life can be hurtful enough without inflicting further damage by holding onto grudges.

As a family therapist, I see what a powerful tool forgiveness can be. Family legacies can be built entirely around a grievance story, and the goal of therapy is often to rewrite the story as one of strength and resilience.  I do need to be careful about applying some of these principles without a larger contextual lens; for example, I don’t think women and men approach relationship in the same ways, and women might tend to ‘forgive’ too easily for the sake of maintaining the relationship. And if I, a white woman, can summon an interpersonal grievance with such ease, imagine the experience of women of color who, frankly, have a lot more to forgive in the face of institutional racism. The goal, it seems, would be to exist someplace between forgiveness and compassion while working to eradicate injustice.  A spiritual practice indeed.

One of my favorite lines from Luskin’s worshop was this: “How do we fill the gap between what we wanted and what we have?”

I will think about that, post-November 4th, as I fill the gap between what I hoped for this election season, and what I get. I will be profoundly disappointed if this country elects the McCain/Palin ticket.  I desire a leader who can embrace the complexities of an issue, as Obama has done relative to race.  And whatever happens, I hope we all end the divisive us/them rhetoric and fill the gaps with forgiveness.

–Jacqueline Hudak

Now this here’s one gap we’re NOT so proud of closing.  According to a NYTimes article last week by Tara Parker-Pope, “Love, Sex and the Changing Landscape of Infidelity”, a handful of new studies suggest that, yes, women–young women included–appear to be closing the adultery gap.

Apparently, younger women are now cheating on their spouses nearly as often as men.  The most consistent data on infidelity come from the General Social Survey, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and based at the University of Chicago.

The stats:

• In any given year, about 10 percent of married people – 12 percent of men and 7 percent of women – say they have had sex outside their marriage.
• While University of Washington researchers have found that the lifetime rate of infidelity for men over 60 increased to 28 percent in 2006, up from 20 percent in 1991, for women over 60, the increase is more striking: to 15 percent, up from 5 percent in 1991.
• Researchers also see big changes in relatively new marriages: About 20 percent of men and 15 percent of women under 35 say they have ever been unfaithful, up from about 15 and 12 percent respectively.

So much for the moral superiority of women, huh.  Ok boys and girls, let’s everyone just try to keep it in our pants.

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up.)

A belated but heartfelt “HUZZAH!” to my ever-savvy co-penner, Kristen. I think she won’t mind my sharing this with you all, but Kristen has now reached that age where she can legitimately have a quarter-life crisis. Happy 25th to a woman of intelligence, passion, and soul, a partner-in-crime who serendipitously found me, a woman wise beyond her years.

This here was just too good not to share. My best friend from childhood’s sister’s husband, Mike Jenkins, is a political cartoonist. This was his pumpkin this year.

I am all nail-bitey today as we enter the final stretch. As my co-penner extraordinaire Kristen said to me this morning, we have the audacity to hope.

To get your mind off–or ok, on–everything, here are a few links that came our way via the WMC. Enjoy, and Happy Hallowe’en!

Rachel Maddow has something to say about Sarah Palin

Lynn Sherr writes on why she thinks non-voters should have their toenails removed (ouch!)

Prize-winning historian Mary Hershberger asks why the media won’t examine the McCain war record

Nida Khan brings up the other campaign, the one with two women candidates: Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente of the Green Party.

Robin Morgan tackles “faux feminists.”

Lorelei Kelly tells us why women must take charge

Ellen Bravo, who advocates for paid sick leave, sympathizes with Barack Obama’s break from the trail to see his ailing grandmother

Joanne Cronrath Bamberger writes about one congresswoman who went a few steps too far.

Peg Simpson focuses on possible wins for women in Congress.

Rebekah Traistor writes on the effects of the election on Katie Couric, Campbell Brown and Rachel Maddow: “Ladies of the Nightly News”.

And the current issue of Ms. Magazine has GWP blogger Veronica Arreloa’s review of the anthology edited by amazing duo Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape and also a piece by Latoya Peterson, who edits Racialicious.com.

My inspiring powerhouse of a friend, feminist philanthropist Jacki Zehner, has a post up today over at Huffington Post that I encourage you to help me make go viral. Here’s the gist:

On Wednesday Goldman Sachs & Co. announced their new class of Partners and yesterday they announced their new Managing Directors. Twelve years ago Jacki was one of those fortunate people who got the call inviting her into the partnership of the firm. The year she made it, she was one of TWO women out of a total of THIRTY-EIGHT, bringing the grand total at that point in time up to TWELVE.  One by one, for reasons Jacki writes about from time to time on her blog, those women left.  Of the fourteen pre-IPO women partners of the firm only THREE remain.  So many of those who have left have gone on to do KICK-ASS AMAZING THINGS.  They are leaders, movers, shakers, philanthropists, and innovative social entrepreneurs.

So that makes Jacki, and these other women, Goldman Sachs alumni–and they are proud of it, as should they be. The question Jacki now asks, though, in light of a cover story in Bloomberg Markets magazine this week that features FORTY-THREE Goldman alums–FORTY-ONE of whom are WHITE MEN–is this:

Is Goldman Sachs proud of them?

Inside Higher Ed reports that women’s sports teams on college campuses are losing ground. A biennial gender equity report released yesterday (“without fanfare”) by the National Collegiate Athletic Association finds that colleges that play Division I sports directed a smaller proportion of athletics spending to women’s teams in 2005-6 than they did in 2003-4.  And we thought Title IX was, um, safe?

Here are the stats:

• In the 2003-4 academic year, when the NCAA last surveyed its members, Division I sports programs spent an average of $7,285,500 on men’s sports and $4,194,800 on women’s sports, for a 16 percentage point differential (63 to 37 percent).
• In 2005-6, the year examined in the survey released Thursday, that split had widened to 22 percentage points, 66 percent to 34 percent ($8,653,600 for men’s sports vs. $4,447,900 for women’s teams).

Football and men’s basketball are responsible for most of the diverging fortunes of men’s and women’s sports programs. The average Division I college spent $7,095,000 of the $8,653,600 it laid out on men’s teams on those two sports.

Donna A. Lopiano, former head of the Women’s Sports Foundation and now president of the consulting firm Sports Management Resources, attributes the decline in support for women’s sports to the slowdown in the growth of participation of female athletes in high school and college and–guess what–a tightening economy.

Says Lopiano, “Add in the continued arms race in men’s football and basketball, in particular the academic support building arms race and assistant coach salaries,” and it’s inevitable that athletics departments will have trouble finding enough money to go around.

Lopiano also added that the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has largely stopped enforcing Title IX, the federal statute prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in federally funded schools.

For more on what’s currently going on around Title IX, do check out this blog we recently added to the blogroll, called Title IX Blog, which is also where I found the eerie yet entirely a propos image accompanying this post.

Whatever else you think of her, Sarah Palin has been drumming up kudos in the world of communications experts for a certain, well, prowess.   And today I listened in as my fellow Woodhull Fellow Jillian Straus–a former Oprah producer now media consultant who advises corporations, individuals, and nonprofits–spoke to a group of “leaders who lunch” at another one of my fave organizations, Catalyst, about what we can all learn from Palin’s often infuriating yet ultimately effective-for-tv communication style.  Thought I’d share the, um, lessons learned:

1. Style over substance – the visceral feeling you get from watching someone on tv is WAY more important than what you say (so think hard before going on tv about how you look, sound, and how you’re going to convey your passion for your topic)

2. Stick to your msg – “I’m a Washington outsider, an average American, and just a regular mom.”  When asked about pretty much anything, Palin marginally responded, then quickly bridged to what she REALLY wanted to talk about, then sparkled (otherwise known as the classic “hit, bridge, sparkle!”)

3. Use stories and anecdotes – they humanize you, they personalize you, and they’re much more memorable that anything else you will say.  Few who’ve watched her on tv know what Palin actually did as Governor, but everyone knows that Palin is a hockey mom.  Think also of the images from last night’s Obamamercial: most memorable were the snapshots — Obama laughing with his kids, photos of his mom, etc.

4. Fake it til you make it – smile when you are talking.  It conveys “confident” even when you’re not.

Other takeaways from the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon?  Bring em on!

Well, it’s been a long election season, and in just 5 days it will be time to come together to figure out what it all means and what’s next. GWP is PSYCHED to be participating in next Wednesday’s Feminist Town Forum, organized by our friends at The Center for New Words. Here’s the dish:

At this culmination of the This Is What Women Want election project, please join those of us here at GWP, a panel of national leaders, and the feminist community nationwide to discuss what happened on Election Day, and what we should be thinking about and doing now to fight for equality and justice for all.

This is a first of its kind event convening feminists from around the country live via the blogosphere! Pretty cool, no? You’ll be able to watch live, converse with other audience members around the country, and submit your comments and questions in real time.

Please feel free to start telling us what issues and ideas YOU’D like to hear the panel address.  The organizers will get these comments to the panelists in advance, so this is your way to help influence the conversation.

(Facebook users: Click here to RSVP and invite your friends!)