motherhood

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My daughter turned eleven this week. Though I agree with Allison Kimmich’s earlier post, which argued that it’s great to be a girl here in 2010, I can’t help but worry that growing up female in our culture still results in growing down.

Some examples to ponder:

When my daughter and I went to the mall to have her ears pierced last Saturday, we were deluged with anorexic size mannequins in thongs and barely-there bras.

Later, at the movies, we watched yet another film with a male protagonist (which included a male sidekick who ogled females throughout the entire movie).

For school, she worked on yet another dead white male report.

On television, she is still inundated by stories that focus on a girls looks and emphasize romance and/or beauty as the most important pursuits for a girl.

In music, there are undoubtedly many power-house female musicians, but this seems dampened by all the singing of ‘ho’s’ and ‘get-lows.’

Yet, there are positive aspects to each of these observations. At the mall, my daughter noticed the sexualization of the mannequins and complained about it, showing her awareness that our culture objectifies women in damaging ways (and revealing what I like to think is more feminist awareness in the culture generally). As for the film we watched, it did include one rockin’ strong girl character – only one, but one is better than none. As for books, we are able to find many feminist-friendly reads to fill her endless reading desires (and she subscribes to New Moon, a great feminist magazine for girls). Television may be the area most difficult to put a positive spin on, but at least there are more girl-driven shows. As for school, in general I think there is more emphasis on a diversified curriculum, one that offers more than the hetero white male view of the world.

However, I wish we had come further since I turned eleven back in 1982. The Equal Rights Amendment failed to pass that year, and has yet to be ratified. Laura Ingalls was still rocking the prairie feminism in “”Little House on the Prairie,” and my mom watched a show driven by the super-heroines “Cagney and Lacey.” Sure, Daisy wasn’t wearing much in “Dukes of Hazzard” and Suzanne Sommers was the stereotypical blonde ditz “Three’s Company,” but at least we had the strong mom and daughter trio of “One Day at a Time.” In music, female power abounded via the likes of the GoGos, Joan Jett, and Stevie Nicks. And ET, the top grossing film of the year, gave us one of my longtime favorite female actresses, Drew Barrymore. It was the year Women’s History Week was officially recognized, which has happily expanded to an entire month. (Ah, would that we could have inclusive history year round!)

In my hazy recollections of being eleven in 1982, I recall feeling I could be or do anything I set my sites on. I think here, in 2010, my daughter feels the same despite the fact popular culture still inundates her with the message she is only a sex object, only good for how she can please men, only important so long as she “plays by the rules” and shrinks to fit the mold of the “ideal female.”

As her world expands to include more ideas and experiences, her body is still expected to shrink to fit ever smaller and tighter fashions. As she grows up, the “queen be” culture at school seems to become ever meaner and more judgmental. As she is able to watch “more grown up” television and films, she is introduced incessant sexualization, dehumanization, and silencing of females. And, as her body starts to show the markers of womanhood, she will undoubtedly become more battered by the male gaze of a culture that is more pornified than ever.

Alas, growing up for girls in our culture in many ways still means growing down – but with feminist moms like ourselves guiding our daughters as they grow, I take heart in the fact that many girls are given the opportunity to expand their thinking, their horizons (and yes, even their bodies) without exhortations to “be quiet and diet.”

Last Monday, I closed on the first apartment I have ever owned. It took a year to sell. We had to move to a rental to make room for the twins before it sold. It drained my savings. It is a huge relief.

Closing was, quite frankly, exhilarating. But equally exhilarating was the odd thrill of having now four-month old twins, and especially my four-month old daughter, in that fancy mahogany boardroom with me, where the signing took place. Gave a whole new meaning to that cliched car window sticker “Baby on Board,” if you know what I mean.

Closings themselves are surreal, with multiple strangers in the room–bank representatives, lawyers, agents, plus the parties involved in the sale–and reams of papers passing back and forth. In my case, there were also two babies and one grandmother. Talk about crazy soup.

Humor me for a moment while I recap.

The transaction begins with the buyers’ lawyer asking them about their wills, and how, since they are not married, they would like to transfer the property should one of them meet with an untimely end. I sit across from them and try to render myself invisible during what seems like it should be a highly private exchange. My daughter sits perched on the dark wood table, staring into the middle distance. My mother paces the hallway with my son. My lawyer arrives, late.

The payoff woman arrives and sits with her parka still on, reading Something Borrowed, a chick lit staple. I find it amusing that the mortgage lady is reading a book with this title. I reflect, for a moment, on what’s really happening here. My life has changed drastically since the day I sat across a similar table as a first-time buyer. I have a new husband, two kids. I am 41 and at the beginning of what already feels like the very best chapter. Something old(ish) and something new. I inhale deeply. Baby Girl burps, then falls asleep.

Everything seems to be going swimmingly. Then, suddenly, mass panic over a missing lien search. Everyone’s on his and her cell phone, trying to track it down. I’m instructed to call the attorney who represented me during the purchase to see if he has it, only I can’t remember his name. At just this moment, my mother wanders in asking for help opening a formula bottle, holding Baby Boy, who looks nonplussed. Foreign words like “contin” and “endeminity” fly overhead. Someone says something about needing five thousand in escrow. All of a sudden, a fax comes in. Problem solved. And then, the furious writing of checks.

Baby Girl wakes up just as I sign the final documents. And it’s corny, maybe, but I flash forward and think about her in 40 years and wonder if she might be sitting at the head of a table like this one again one day. According to the latest report from Catalyst, women held 15.2 percent of board seats at Fortune 500 companies in 2009, the same as 2008. At this pace, it’s not looking good for Baby Girl if she decides she’d like to try her hand at corporate power, but still, a mama can dream.

And then, just like that, the closing is over. I awake. My broker pulls out a bottle of champagne, along with two Baby Gap bags with gifts for the babies. I kiss Baby Girl, I hug my broker, and my own mama and I pack up the babies and head back out into the Manhattan wind.

It’s a day of closure and a fresh start. Snuggled down in the Double Snap N Go, Baby Boy gurgles and gives me his broad, toothless grin. Baby Girl is sleeping again, and I can’t wait to tell her one day when she’s old enough to understand about the day she sat at the boardroom table, her hands in tight little fists, taking it all in.

For anyone in NYC this coming Friday, February 26: Women’s Studies Quarterly is hosting a day-long conference at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in honor of its Mother issue, featuring scholarship, poetry, and prose on mothers, mothering, and motherhood. Participants include Andrea O’Reilly, Meena Alexander, Miranda Field, Pamela Stone, Nicole Cooley, and many others. I’ll be talking with novelist Amy Sohn about “mommy lit” and her novel Prospect Park West over lunch. Hope to see you there!

This week there’s a heated thread running through the Park Slope Parents listserv about the appropriateness of reprimanding other people’s misbehaved kids in public spaces. The thread hits a nerve, because I definitely used to be that cranky person who scowled silently when other people’s children ran reckless in a crowded restaurant or played freeze tag in the checkout line. And then something changed. My twins were born. Since their arrival, that wave of annoyance that wells up when somebody else’s child whoops it up at the very moment I crave peace has not exactly subsided, but it’s transformed. Now, instead, I get curious. I project: What will my children be like when they’re that age?

Until I had my own, I was never a kid person. I hated babysitting. I was raised sibling-free. I grew into a grown up who often found kids who weren’t related to me bothersome. In my twenties, I knew (hoped?) that I’d want a kid of my own one day, but only vaguely, the same way I thought it might be nice to have a puppy. Rarely did I think concretely about what it might be like to be pregnant, or raise a child, or be someone’s mother. There were times in recent years when I actually wondered if the ubiquitous maternal instinct would kick in when my time came, or whether it would pass me over. I knew that if I had kids I’d love them. But would I love being their mother?

As part of a generation raised to view the so-called phenomenon of abandoning hard won careers for full-time motherhood with a healthy dose of skepticism, my unease about whether motherhood would suit me also meshed with fear. Coming to late motherhood in the shadow of all those dread media stories about women opting out, part of me feared motherhood for its very lure. I wouldn’t be able to quit working once I had a child, due to financial necessity, but I wondered if I would wish I could.

Now that the twins are here (4 months old next week!), and I’m engaged in compelling work with like-minded collaborators–some of whom are themselves similarly struggling to make work fit with motherhood as well as the other way around–I’m not so worried about being tempted to abandon my other life’s work. It’s not merely financial. It’s core.

And as for my proclivity to scowl at other people’s children, and my worrying whether maternal instinct would kick in? While I don’t think I’d call this instinct, my maternal lens has come into focus since my babies arrived. To wit: On a snowy day like the one we had this week, my Brooklyn neighborhood is a cornucopia of cuteness. Kids stuffed into snowsuits slide by our apartment window, pulled by their parents on toboggans on their way to the park. Must be something about the coziness of winter and all those teeny mittens. I pass a child on the icy sidewalk holding his father’s hand and flash forward to the day when my son and my daughter will be walking by my side, each of their mittened hands holding one of my own.

Just a quick take here: for those who didn’t see it, check out The New York Times article on gay marriage in Mexico City that ran yesterday, here.

When people solidly in middle age write memoirs most often they have had unusual lives.  Or — better yet — they’re about to flee from ordinariness into a major life change, or they’re writing about the aftershocks from a sudden jolt.  Melanie Gideon, in her memoir The Slippery Year, fits none of these categories. Half Armenian, half-Indian, she is the middle-class daughter of a pediatrician and a psychiatric nurse raised comfortably with three sisters in Rhode Island.  Now married with a 9-year-old child and settled in the Oakland Hills, she’s a mother in the carpool lane, a wife who resents her husband’s snoring, a reluctant member of a women-only dinner group who buckles under the pressure of what gourmet dish to bring.  And she’s floating in the middle of an existential “Is this all there is and how do you know?” fog that she can’t wipe out of her eyes.

Yet when she squints at the bleary outlines intense humor, sardonic wit, and an almost sentimental angst seeps out.  “I did not have cancer.  My parents had not abused me.  I was in a good marriage to a kind man,” writes Gideon in her introduction as an apologia for the sense of quotidian disappointment and dysphoric angst she constantly feels.  The “slip” that serves as a touchstone throughout the book is a sense of meaningfulness sliding out from under her guise as a modern-day mother entrapped with privilege and accomplishment.

This would be sobering, a kind of pre-“Richard Cory” glance to see what’s lurking inside the minivan if Gideon wasn’t so damn funny.  Blessed and cursed by the fact that she’s deeply aware, she first chronicled the burr of her husband’s impulse purchase of a camper in the New York Times’ Modern Love column and in this book she expands.  Quite literally.  She blows up details of her Bay area life to comic effect, and after letting the air out settles into an almost poetic realization of what her life really is.

In a hilarious passage she describes the tortoise-like pace of shoppers having a “lifestyle experience” at her local Trader Joe’s and how this irks her.  While walking fast in San Francisco she is stopped by someone proselytizing the “Slowmandments” as part of a goal to make San Francisco “an official Slow City.”  Gideon’s response is that the thought of San Francisco being any slower than it already was – “was terrifying.” She replies that he has clearly mistaken her for a native Californian but then feels guilty she’s rebuffed his message. At Chez Panisse in Berkeley she looks for secret messages in her menu since she is so bereft she’s not having an orgasmic food experience like everyone else.

“At forty-four, I feel the current of that river pulling at me,” Gideon writes, “I am one of six and a half billion people currently taking their turn at being alive on this planet” and then she riffs on soccer-parent politics. It’s too flip to call Gideon a postmodern Erma Bombeck – the world is too changed from that era, the jar between generations too rife. But her humor, sense of modern-day ennui, and intense wit settle into a Rothko-like layering where she stares into the lack and creates an atmosphere dark with depth and poignancy. Gideon wades around in the muck of her well-appointed life but messy psyche to create a likeable character grappling sharply with issues of purpose, how to both nurture and let go of her son, know if she’s in love enough, deal with their beloved dog’s remains, weigh risk over safety and feel guilty because she takes this measure.

One critique is that I wish Gideon could show more courage.  Also the author of two children’s books she’s obviously a talented writer who makes no mention of her ambitions.  She is willing to discount her strengths in a way that translates as honest and humble, but also unfairly self-deprecating. Striking is her willingness to indict her own misgivings and chronic worry which makes the moments of happiness, when they float by, the more startling. Her son, Ben, emerges as the book’s mini-Zen philosopher.  In response to hearing his mother explain, “The sky is falling,” he reframes this as “the sky is calling.”  Gideon’s devotion toward her son, and her sense of unbearable grief that he will one day grow up and leave (foreshadowed in a hysterical recollection of his week away at soccer camp) catch up all of the book’s themes in a Gordian Knot of incurable feeling.

“My friends and I search for our lost selves everywhere” she writes, “Where is that plucky girl, that lustful teenager, that optimistic young woman, that tenderhearted young mother?”  “Occasionally, if we are lucky,” she writes, “we catch a glimpse of the woman we are becoming… the one who has been aging gracefully inside of us. She is more than her body.  She is more than her face.” By making the book’s subtitle “a meditation on happily ever after” she outlays its thematic reach – to set thinking against fairy tale, set reality against wistfulness, and the flip of finding her younger self’s aspirations set against the woman she now is.

Here again with an announcement about a conference that looks fabulous: Mothering and Migration: (Trans)nationalisms, Globalization, and Displacement, in Puerto Rico between February 19-21. The conference is organized by the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), a research organization based at York University, Ontario. The lineup includes scholars and activists from a wide range of backgrounds and locations. Alas, a lack of funding will prevent me from attending — but I invite any conference attendees to contact me about writing a short column to share their research with the GWP community.

My daughter turned 9 this week, and she reminds me of a wave about to hit the sand, full of power and beauty at the same time. Rarely have I wanted to turn back the clock to any earlier life stage—after all, I’m learning as I go—but girlhood right now looks pretty impressive from my towel safely above the shoreline.

Number 1: Title IX Rules

Title IX became law in 1972, so I am also a beneficiary of the legislation, but I think that my daughter will reap its rewards more fully. Title IX applies to both athletics and education, but its impact on athletic particpation is especially dramatic. In 1970 only 1 in 27 females played varsity sports; the number is 1 in 2.5 today. My daughter already plays soccer, a sport that I never encountered as an elementary school student; in fact, I didn’t have any opportunities to participate in team sports in middle or high school, either.

Number 2: Girl Power Rocks

Three cheers for the Girl Scouts! My daughter joined a Brownie troop last year, and while I don’t love everything about Girl Scouting, I do love the values of leadership and social consciousness that scouting promotes. My daughter dashes out the door to Friday meetings on dark winter evenings (when a week’s worth of work and school activities leave me feeling ready to hunker down at home) and bursts into a giggly gaggle of girls who sincerlely work—and play—at building community across differences.

Number 3: It’s All About Social Justice

My son and daugther spent last week hanging environmental responsibility signs around our house: they posted reminders on bathroom doors about conserving water during showers and decorated the hamper with a sign about wearing clean clothes more than once. Today my daughter took money to donate to a Haiti relief fund at school. To be sure these efforts are small and inconsistent (we discussed contributing to earthquake relief instead of buying birthday gifts and my daughter was not quite so selfless). Yet I’m hopeful that social justice issues are woven into her home, school, and extracurricular life in ways that reflect a larger generational trend.  What do you notice about the girls in your lives, GWP readers?

It’s my pleasure to introduce a guest blogger today: Natalie Wilson.

Natalie Wilson is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is founder of the blogs Professor, What If…? and Seduced by Twilight. She is currently working on Seduced by Twilight, a book examining the Twilight cultural phenomenon from a feminist perspective.

The Mommy Myth That Will Not Die: Bella Swan and Global Motherhood

Living inside our media-saturated US bubble, one might view motherhood as a competitive sport (ala Kate and her eight), as a fashion statement (think Katie Holmes and her impeccably dressed little Suri), as a way to prove one’s enduring hotness (such as Heidi Klum’s post-partum walk down the runway), or even as a testament that one cares about the world (in Madonna or Angelina Jolie adoption-style).

If these media representations of motherhood are to be trusted, what Susan Douglas named “the mommy myth,” where women are supposed to be perfect, gorgeous, dedicated super-moms, still dominates the cultural imagination.

Twilight, via the character of Bella Swan, breathes immortal life into this myth. In Breaking Dawn, the fourth book of the series, Bella transforms from reluctant wife into exultant expectant mom all in the blink of one headboard-busting sexual encounter.

The celebration of maternal martyrdom and mothering as the be-all and end-all of female existence that the final book of Stephenie Meyer’s saga enacts is hard to stomach, even for me–a mother of two that loves being a mom.

The problem is that Bella is a modern June Cleaver–too perfect, too submissive, and too ready to defer to her Mr. Cleaver (embodied by uber-dad, Edward Cullen). Once she is a vampire mommy, college plans are set aside, vampire adventures delayed, and instead, she becomes that monster we all love to hate: perfect mom.

Bella could not be more privileged; she is white, heterosexual, has endless wealth, super-powers, and a bevy of around the clock vampire and werewolf babysitters at her beck and call. She will never have to worry about stretching her budget, not being able to afford healthcare for her daughter, not having access to clean water.

While Bella and her similarly perfect vampire mother-in-law Esmee convey that motherhood is nothing but a joy and women who don’t desire babies are cuckoo, the text silences non-white, non-first-world mothers. Why does Native American mother Sue Clearwater have no voice in the story? Why are South-American women represented as fierce, untrustworthy animals? And why is Leah, the one lone female werewolf, called a “genetic dead end” due to her infertility? (This strand of the narrative would have been an opportunity to explore the historical sterilization of indigenous women. No such luck, though. Instead, we only learn she is a complaining bitch, an annoyance to the male alpha wolves who hate having to deal with a female in their testosterone fueled midsts.)

Globally, for many women, getting pregnant is one of the most dangerous things you can do. It makes you more susceptible to procuring diseases, to enduring poverty, to dying. Around the world, one female dies from pregnancy or labor every minute. That’s 1,440 females a day. Most of these women are not located in the first world nor can they choose, like Bella, to become vampires.

Twilight, loved by many mothers around the world, fails to give voice to the realities of global motherhood. To do so may be asking too much of this lightweight vampire tale; but could not the billions in profit the series is generating be used in some way to curtail maternal mortality rates? Seeing as the series suggests all women’s lives are made better by motherhood, perhaps it should put its money where its mouth is, giving more women more access to prenatal care and reproductive justice.

Now, that’s a dream I could sink my teeth into.

I’m a day late in posting this month’s Mama w/Pen column because, well, this mama has gone back to work. With huge passion for the venture and a pang of guilt in my heart (froze my first packet of breast milk last night in preparation for spending feeding time away), I join the legions of working parents who work at paid employment and at raising kids. Canned words like “juggle,” “balance” (which, from what I’ve seen and heard, is nonexistent) and “prioritize” (clumsy, inhuman term) allegedly now take on meaning. In truth, it’s always been a juggle—far before parenthood set in.

And yet. As my brain works to adapt to new realities, the imperative to multitask feels more intense–and actually absurd. This morning, when my partner Kamy Wicoff came over for a kick-off meeting with me, I actually found myself thinking “Will you take this breast and feed Teo for a sec while I write that email?” As if the parts were interchangeable—a milk-producing breast and a keyboard being merely two comparable peripherals to accomplish what I needed to do. It’s the same impulse that’s made me want to hit control “s” when I’ve had a thought I haven’t wanted to forget, but no pen in hand. Funny, how the brain plays tricks on you. My desire to be hyper-effective is that grand.

That desire isn’t new, only newly inflected. Now that Anya and Teo are here, the thousand and one things my brain focuses on in any given day here in this hyperstimulating city of New York become a thousand and two—or rather, a thousand and three, a thousand and ninety-four (there are two babies, after all!). The beloved new additions occupy not just bandwidth, of course, but a supersized chunk of my heart. They say your heart grows extra chambers when love is this big, and I’ve definitely felt those chambers expand. The trick, now, is how to put body, mind, and heart in service of the multiple jobs that must be done. I’m going to need a word far better than “juggle” to accomplish that trade.  I’m open to suggestion. Any takers?

(PS. Today is my mom’s birthday. Happy Birthday, new Grandma Renee!)