This here post comes straight from dear friend of GWP and mine, and fellow writer, Daphne Uviller — who I’ve been writing about of late, here and here! –Deborah

I visited Debbie the other day to try to help her nest a bit, and she gave me two books, one of which was Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, which she said was a little too much for her (meaning Debbie) at this point.  I agree — it’s not a book that should be read while pregnant, but later, while struggling with what it means to be a good mother or even, as I often do, how to get back to even wanting to be a good mother.

I read the whole book in one sitting and while I disliked a few parts, I admire Waldman for her honesty — I consider myself a very honest writer, but she goes where I hadn’t dared — and her talent and her insight.

Here’s what I took away from it:

1) Men MUST be equal partners, not just pay lip service. Okay, that’s old news, but never bad to be reminded.
2) Men do not worry about being good or bad fathers, they just are what they are. We should follow their example. This is wrapped up in the whole idea of observing, of living in the moment rather than judging and worrying. More old news, but still, good to hear.
3) I’m glad I don’t live in Berkeley.
4) I kind of wished I lived in Berkeley.
5) Part-time work that you love is the answer to the work/life balance conundrum. (She doesn’t state this explicitly, but confirms what I already figured out.  We writers, money permitting, have it made.)
6) I think I’d like to try going on Celexa.

And the chapter on her abortion between her second and third child (she has four) made me weep. It is powerful, powerful stuff.

-Daphne Uviller

For Grandma Marge (may her memory be for a blessing)

Ok, it’s time for me to admit it: I’m getting scared. In less than 10 weeks (knock wood, pu pu pu – sorry can’t help it), my body will somehow, with whatever degree of medical intervention, bear forth two new beings whose well-being will henceforth depend, in very large part, on me. I confess to my husband, my closest friends, and my mother than I’m getting nervous. They offer comfort, try to allay my fears:

“Of course you’re scared. It’s scary.” –Daphne (mother of two)

“You’re focused on the first few weeks. I was too. But three months in, everything changes, and you don’t even remember that blur.” – Rebecca (mother of two)

“Too late now!” – Mom (mother of me)

Gee thanks, Mom.

Again, I must qualify. I feel blessed beyond belief at the bounty of having conceived not just one but two babies, twenty-first century techno style. I marvel at the way things have gone so far. In spite of bouts of stress (a layoff, a move, the start of a new company), these babies have grown the requisite parts. They’ve passed all their tests, independent of the fact that their maternal host has sometimes felt like a chicken without a head. They are of me, but they are not me—a lifelong lesson I’m sure, something they are already teaching me, something I am not yet wholly convinced of but want and need to believe.

My father, a psychiatrist, gets wind that I’m having a minor, belated freak out. He calls from the road 700 miles away to remind me I’m not alone. “It takes a village, Deb, and a village you will have.”

And he’s right. When the babies arrive, my mother will come for a month, and my father will join her when he can. Rebecca will come for a week or so, all the way from California. The twins I grew up with, Molly and Busy, will each come from Chicago for a few days. Courtney will be across the park. Daphne will be nearby, as will myriad others. And then, of course, there’s Marco, my sweet attentive artistic Marco (author of the “2” on my belly in the above photo), who can’t wait to hang our twins’ art on the walls and take them to see Star Wars and play them Superman’s theme. We just don’t know yet, given his new position, the extent to which he will be able to be at home, in the beginning, with me.

But come what may, I will not be alone. It’s my new mantra, and I’m trying to buy it. It’s just that my experience of pregnancy, this experience of being so embodied, has been oddly isolating. I’m a social person who stops pregnant women on the street and cries “solidarity!”, and yet there have been many times when I’ve felt alone, as in existentially, in my discomfort and angst. Locked in, with no escape. I’ve tried hard not to crawl too far into that dark hole—I have a small history of depression—and I’ve been successful at keeping healthy and busy. But every so often, that feeling of aloneless (is it just a fear?) creeps in.

A village you will have.

And I will.  The last village elder, however, is gone, and I’ve been missing her a lot of late.  My Grandma Marge passed away a year ago today. Grandma was a certified nurse—head of the department in her day—and used to bring great comfort whenever I was sick. Pregnancy is not illness, and yet its symptoms have been physically challenging, reminiscent of times I’ve felt ill. Grandma Marge made it our wedding last year, but she died before the technology worked its magic. How she would kvelled and basked in our news, enabled by money that I, her only grandchild, inherited from her. And how I would have loved to have shared the blessing of these babies with her.

If I can write it, maybe I can will it: these are our babies. They are not mine alone. I will be their mommy. But they will have a daddy, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and if I believed, departed great-grandparents watching over them from somewhere. (On top of it all, I recently joined the notorious Park Slope Parents listserv. Never again will I worry about anything child-related alone!)

I am not alone, I am not alone, and yet…I am. It’s my body that’s primarily responsible, and that seems both a miraculous blessing and a bit of a curse. In spite of my feminism, I’ve internalized wholesale the cultural mandate that the buck stops with Mom. Because let’s face it, in reality, so often it does. How desperately, already, I find myself wanting to rewrite that script. But is it feminism, or existentialism, that I’m grappling with here? I’d love your thoughts.

Linda Lowen, About.com’s Women’s Issues blogger, wrote a fabulous write-up of SHE WRITES on Friday and I just wanted to share.

SHE WRITES: The Site for Women Writers

(Thank you Linda! You are the best!)

If you liked Veronica’s excellent Science Grrl post on the gender wage gap, make sure you read Inside Higher Ed’s article , “Hiring Women as Full Professors.” Per IHE‘s Scott Jaschik, University of Texas/Austin released a self study on gender equity last fall, and, by gosh, they used the data to shape their subsequent hiring this spring, and hired more women than they ever have in the past.

The UT report showed gender gaps across the board–hiring, salary, retention, time to promotion and tenure–but the biggest gap was among full professors: After controlling for a lot of stuff, they found that among full professors, men’s starting salaries were on average $12, 229 higher than women’s. Moreover, only 19% of full profs were women. (Sounds like a case of “this food’s so bad and there’s not enough of it!”) The typical response to the wider gap at the top–seen across the country and across professions–has been, jeepers ya’ll this is a problem, but I guess we’ll just have to wait. This takes time!

But UT said, uh, why wait? As Jaschik reports:

“Randy Diehl, dean of liberal arts, said it was important for universities not to simply wait for junior professors to rise through the ranks. He said that the presence of women in the senior ranks is part of what you need to encourage younger women, and that there are issues of bias if an institution doesn’t add women as full professors. Diehl noted, for example, that the highest salaries for full professors go to those who didn’t come up through the ranks, but who were recruited from one institution to another. Universities that rely on gradual promotion from within will not see a narrowing of average faculty salaries between men and women, he said.”

Read the article. Their hires look fantastic. And the dean’s logic: Goes for minority hiring and promotion too, right? (Thanks to Paul Rutter for the heads up!)

-Virginia Rutter

It was recently pointed out to me by my dear observant friend Daphne that when talking about this pregnancy with her, I haven’t once said anything about the fact that there will soon be two new little beings around here (knock on wood) and that I will be their mother. I think the reason for my reticence lies snug inside those two parentheses: knock wood.

I am not, in general, a superstitious person. My grandmother, an orthodox Jew who would have been 100 last week had she lived just two more years, believed in the evil eye. Before getting pregnant, I neither knocked on wood nor spat three times (the Jewish equivalent) when mentioning a hope or a dream. And yet I’ve been a bundle of superstitious tentativeness when it comes to talking about the life forms I’m gestating as real people who will one day exist outside.

Why?

My mother, a therapist, says it’s obvious: “Self-protection, honey,” says she. And it’s true. I’m of advanced maternal age and I’m carrying twins, which automatically throws me into categorical high alert. But I’ve been carrying this unfathomably wondrous primordial soup in my uterus now for almost 27 weeks, and all has unfolded, so far, according to plan. When, I wonder, will I allow myself to hope, to dream, out loud?

I have never, ever wanted something this much. Well, that’s not completely true. I wanted a husband, and then, when the first one didn’t work out so well, I wanted another. I wanted a book contract, and later a second and a third. I achieved those things. I’ve been blessed (if you believe in that sort of thing), and I’ve worked hard to realize my desires. But with pregnancy, it feels different. We did everything in the book—and then some—to get to this point, but from here on in, it’s pretty much out of our hands.

The universe is encouraging, helping gently to push me along. Last week Daphne sent me an envelope in the mail with a note scrawled on the outside: “the first of many hand-me-downs from me!” Inside were two little sets of newborn-sized socks. The gear amasses. My mother-in-law sent baby shoes. A friend from childhood, herself a twin, gave me two matching onesies with images of the Dr. Seuss creatures, “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.” My aunt corralled a gently used double stroller from her physical therapist. My cousin has offered me her breast pump. Soon it will be time to get the babies’ room, currently full of boxes from our recent move, in shape for its forthcoming residents. I’ve been calling it “the second bedroom.” I can barely even say “babies’ room.”

Don’t get me wrong—I’m moved beyond language at the thought that there will be babies. When I see newborns on the street, I choke up. Just thinking about those teeny socks makes me cry. It’s just that somewhere between the concept “babies” and the reality “my babies,” or rather, “our babies,” my thoughts get lost in translation. Lost in gestation, maybe.  (Have any of you, I bet, I hope, felt this way?!)

For now, it’s easier to think of these inexplicable creatures that rumble in my belly as my own private primordial entourage. They’re in there doing their thing, and I’m out here doing mine. I wonder if I should be talking to them more. I try to get my husband to put his mouth near my belly and sing. But we both have trouble, it seems, relating to them as people who can connect to us as “Mom” and “Dad.” It will be different, I know, when we’re all out here living on the same side.

For now, they’ll remain a mystery. They’re abstract to me, but I can’t wait for them to become concrete. Yesterday my friend Kathy suggested I write them a letter. And maybe I will. This is how it might start:

Dear Baby Things (1&2),
Keep cooking. I’m here for you, waiting. You may be my entourage, but I’m your number one fan.
Love,
Your Mama-to-be

My latest Love in the Time of Layoff column is now up at Recessionwire.com. It’s titled “Back to Work”. Marco is freelancing again! Househusband, interrupted indeed. I’m happy, but I’m mixed…

Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, a sociologist at Ohio State University, set the world a buzz when word got out of her research on the wage gap over a twenty year span:

The good news for women is that during the time period studied, their average salary increased from 78 cents for every male dollar earned to 83 cents. But when Bobbitt-Zeher controlled for various factors, she found that the share of that gap attributable to selection of major had increased…When controlling for all available factors, [she] found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999, nearly twice as much of an impact as could be documented for the class that graduated 20 years earlier. (emphasis mine)

This wasn’t a shock to me as it was something that many of us who work to increase the number of women in science and engineering already suspected. So when Kate Harding from Salon Broadsheet emailed me for a response I wanted to make sure that people know that it’s not just as simple as English versus Chemistry.  “Harder,” male-dominated science and engineering fields, such as computer science, are paid more than female-dominated biological sciences, a “softer” science.

The real question that this wage gap research leads us to is whether or not the increase of women in a career leads to lower wages or not. In 2006, Paula England et al appear (I admit, I only read the abstract) to prove that there is no direct correlation between the increase in women entering a field and the lowering of that field’s wages. But a gendered wage gap is there. England showed it and now Bobbitt-Zeher shows it.

The AAUW also showed this wage gap difference based on major earned 2005 in their “Public Perceptions of the Pay Gap” report, but with a twist:

Ironically, the biggest wage gap is in science and engineering! But even with a 24% gap, women are still earning more than almost any other career field. *shaking head*

So what does this all mean?

There isn’t one reason for the wage gap. We can’t wave it away with one explanation (women’s choices) or correct it with one solution, even comparable work legislation.

For me there is an economic justice reason for women to look to science and engineering for a career. Wage gap or not, they will be earning more money. For women who have a gift for math and science and find joy in the work, go for it. But I would never say do it for the money.

Is it gender? Is it how much society respects the vocation? Is it unionization (teachers have smallest gap)?

Again, further research is needed. But whatever it is, women are getting the short end of the pay stick and all of these numbers are about the average man compared to the average woman. I can only imagine what the gap looks like for people of color!

I am so heartened by the comments on my post from last week, “Blogging Pregnancy…or Not.” Thank you, from my heart. I just responded, in comments, more individually, but I wanted to give a group shout out from here too.

You seriously have made my day. It’s been a busy few days with SheWrites.com, but I’m planning on getting back here and writing more VERY soon!

In the meantime, look what I just made — you can make one too:

Visit She Writes

This month, The Man Files brings you Jessica Pauline — a writer and feminist with experience working in some of the dicey-er Los Angeles strip clubs. Lots of ink has been spilled on the sex worker debates. Are women oppressed by sex work? Liberated? Both? How is trafficking distinct from, say, dancing one’s way through law school? In this entry, Jessica leaves those debates for another day and instead turns a keen eye to her observations of the men who make it rain. (—verb: to throw wads of cash in the air for dancers to retrieve as tips.)

Like Jane Goodall and her chimps, I spent a good deal of time during my tenure as a stripper in some of L.A.’s seediest nightclubs observing the behavior of the primates. Not the dancers, mind you — the men who came to watch them.

Based on my humble observations, I came to discover that certain behaviors are both predictable and categorical, and that most hetero men, when confronted with a pair of boobs in a semi-public setting, fall into a few choice archetypes.

Let’s start with what I imagine to be the most common breed of American strip club patron: white, middle-aged men who golf and vote Republican. They swagger in to the club with an air of ownership, their masculinity stuffed into their wallets and tucked neatly into their pressed khaki pants. Observing the dancers with the same level of detached interest that one might imagine they’d use in selecting a prime rib-eye, they pick a girl, begin to talk to her in their most sensual voice while rubbing her back and her leg, and shortly thereafter are ushered back to the VIP room with very little to-do. This is the kind of easy sell around which strip clubs were designed, and for that reason, we’ll call this breed Strip Club Men (SCM).

Now, strip clubs have been around long enough for a type of strip club rebellion to brew amongst men. So imagine, if you will, if the SCM had a son. This son desires nothing more than to be the antithesis to his stuffy, conservative father, and so he becomes sensitive, wears ironic t-shirts to demonstrate the fact that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and quite possibly sports artistic, sentimental facial hair. Let’s call this breed Feminist Men (FM).

When forced into a strip club, maybe because of a bachelor party, or maybe in search of a place to talk quietly on a Tuesday night, the FM immediately seeks to set himself apart. Rather than sexualize the dancers, he opens with a nice conversation, carefully keeping his eyes above the neck. But as the FM gets less and less guarded, a strange thing begins to happen. He becomes more willing to let his eyes wander down. His friendly conversation becomes more imbued with sexual innuendo. And finally, often after spending copious amounts of money on what he has come to believe is a “real connection,” he tries to get the dancer to go on a date with him. (This, as an aside, is both insulting and never going to happen.)

The final subcategory of men falls deeper into FM territory, and warrants mention simply because of the unique validation that they seek. They’re easy to recognize, because no sooner does some indie chick start swaying her hips to Tom Waits, the King of Melancholy himself, then the Tom Waits Man (TWM) begins nodding in recognition. Before long, he’s dug a crumpled dollar bill out of his pocket and walked up to the stage where he will deposit it, but not until he’s made sure that the dancer sees him so he can compliment her taste to her face and thereby secure his place as profound, mysterious and, of course, different.

Maybe you’ll read this and think that I oversimplify. But since the most honest interaction in sex work is based on a respectful, fun partaking of the service provided, it can’t hurt for men to examine their own behavior with at least as much gusto as I examined it (don’t worry, I took some long, hard looks at myself, too). Without that, gentlemen, you are really just entertainment.

Jessica Pauline is a freelance writer in Los Angeles. An NYU graduate with a degree in music, her writing appears regularly on LAist.com, and has appeared in $pread Magazine, The Printed Blog, the Ventura County Star, and a number of other websites and local papers. She is currently working on a book about her experiences as a feminist stripper, and lives in Silver Lake with her fiance and their dog, Molly.

I’ve been so busy during this pregnancy either a) puking or b) helping start a social networking site and company that I haven’t found time to write much–or even journal about–the bizarro incredible experience that is pregnancy itself.

Part of me has feared that “pregnant women are smug”, and pregnant women writing about pregnancy are the smuggest of them all.  In other words, to say anything in public is to risk falling in with the sanctimonious mommy crowd. Perhaps this fear has something to do with the fact that one of the only times I pregnancy blogged these past few months, over at Recessionwire, I got flamed. (Thin skin anyone?  I blame the hormones. Thankfully, the editors took the really nasty ones down.)  Of course, it probably didn’t help that I gave that post a sanctimonious title, “The Fortune Within”, though in my defense, I used that title because I had wanted to contrast the way I felt about this much-tried-for pregnancy with the major theme I’d been writing about over there–love in the time of layoff, my lack of fortune without.  But apparently some commentors felt that any woman who writes about pregnancy is, well, smug.

So here I am trying again, after recent promptings from friends, therapists, and even my business partner.  Why not write about pregnancy, these people ask me, when it’s so foremost on your mind?

Whenever I try to kick myself into writing gear, I start reading again.  I realized the only two pregnancy/motherhood-related books I’d read during this pregnancy so far had clinical titles like The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy, and Twins!: Pregnancy, Birth, and the First Year of Life.  The first had been given to me by my husband, the second by my husband’s mother.  When I gave myself permission to go one step deeper, I had reached for Amy Tiemann’s Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family and Amy Richards’ Opting In: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself. These books helped me feel it was possible to have a kid (two, in my case) and still have a professional life.  (THANK YOU, brilliant Amys!)  But they didn’t inspire me to write about what I was going through myself.

So the other week, I turned to memoir.  Thanks to the “Motherhood Books” group that Jennifer Niesslein formed over at SHE WRITES, I remembered I’d always wanted to read Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year, when the time came.  That time, apparently, is now.  Anne Lamott is so quirky, so brutally and painfully honest about the horrible things as well as the beauty, that I got inspired.  She’s the opposite of smug.  And she makes it seem ok to want to tell the truth–which for me, has not been all shiny and baby blue and powder pink.  For me, the truth of twin pregnancy at age 40 has so far been about trying to balance physical ailments of striking (yet normal, apparently) proportions with an intense struggle to slow my life down enough to make room for an impending reality for which I feel massively ill-prepared.

And so here I sit, at 5:00am with pregnancy insomnia, tiny miracles kicking around inside me, writing about writing about pregnancy.  I don’t think I’m quite writing about it yet, but hey, it’s a start.

(Does this picture make me look smug?!)