When Dan and I do wash, we put it in the machine, close the lid, and then close the door to the laundry room, which is behind the door to our private home.
This is the appropriate way to wash dirty laundry. You won’t see me out on the front porch with the skivvies anymore than you’ll see that piece I posted yesterday again. It’s going to be, like a pair of skivvies, quietly folded and put away in a drawer. You see, I’ve had the flu since Thursday and have learned a great deal about working through illness. It’s not that this version of the virus makes you want to die; it just saps your will to live. And I notoriously deal poorly with frustration anyway.
As a mode of correction, let me reiterate that my husband is a sweet man who is trying to negotiate an equitable and happy solution to the problems of the two-career household. The transition is usually difficult when I return from the lazy, hazy days of summer to the schedules, workload and diminished housekeeping interest of the school year. This year, we are also trying to ensure that Connor’s needs are met. That’s rather like reiterating the obvious, but I’m afraid it’s as close to our personal washing as you’re going to see right now.
I have a very privileged position: Nanny, supportive husband, somewhat flexible hours (I only really need to be on campus 6-7 hours a day). All that aside, I would say that three or four different women have said that they appreciated my candor – not about the “he said, she said,” business – that’s about as interesting as watching five-year-olds fight about the last stick of gum. But about the “buck up” factor of motherhood: that sick, aching, exhausted, gotta keep-on, keeping on factor of what it’s really like to have two full-time jobs at once. Now, anyone who knows a mom knows this.
So why are all the rest of us so surprised when we either hear one of these women distressed, or we become one of them?
A student approached me in the hall the other day to say she wouldn’t be in class because her baby was sick and she had to go get her from the sitter’s. There was a time I might have internally rolled my eyes and thought: this is why it’s so much easier to get an education before you start a family. Now, knowing the reality of trying to get anything done with sick babies, I’m amazed that people (women?) do it at all. I am also perhaps galvanizing my support for those who find they must manage jobs, childcare, and the demands of a sometimes insensitive and stuck-up educational system as well. I’m going to have to tackle that one next week, I’m sure, because there are reasons for what educators choose in these circumstances, reasons why students must be in attendance and have finished their work. Yet a baby with a fever is a non-negotiable factor, not to mention a very small beloved person who feels badly. If you’re going to make a mother choose between that baby’s welfare and your assignment, the book-learning will lose every time.
I’ve never known any learning curve that was easy and each time Dan and I approach something completely new with this baby, we have to figure it out all over again. He’s teething, he’s sick for the first time, he’s needing to learn to sleep in his own bed, he’s needing to learn to be comfortable with the Nanny, he’s weaning off the Baby Einstein (yes, I read that article that says it causes ADD – mostly the Nanny didn’t like that he’d rather watch toys being played with than play with his own. I had to agree). These baby milestones, precious to us, are also challenging in ways that building businesses and writing classes, lectures, books and articles are not. We find ourselves taxed for patience when we have the least bit of it. We beg for respite from spouses who are equally exhausted, sick, and sleep deprived. Such is life.
So you pop another two Motrin, you have another cup of coffee and you pray that today will be better than yesterday.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Apologies
At 9:30 this morning, I posted my usual blog. At 10:10, I took it down. I apologize to Dan for the post. It was neither dignified nor befitting our 14 years together and was beneath the virtues of discretion and mirth with which I usually post.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
What's Cookin, Good Lookin?
Madonna once said that we live in a material world. It seems mostly, however, to be a visual world. And my world has changed considerably this week.
School officially started this week, complete with roll sheets, first-day lectures, student e-mails, course advising and the rest of my real life as a working mother. Gone are the halcyon days of editing manuscripts at the coffee table while my infant son lolls on the rug. Now it’s the nanny, a tight schedule that puts me back at the house by three, late nights and early mornings. My son has learned to crawl and I find him in improbable places about the living room. No longer content to get himself stuck under the couch, I now find him wandering off the blankets and rug to skitter on the hard wood floor and approach the threshold that divides the front room from my study.
Can you say “baby gate?”
Ours is set up at the wide doorway between the foyer and the front room and looks something like the barrier that sets off viewing spaces at the zoo. My nanny is a painter by calling and I came home to find her painting away, my young son curled in her arms, watching. Another day, he was listening to a Johnny Mercer cd and intently watching from his blankets while she etched some fine lines onto the canvas in black ink. He’s getting “watched” all right, but I suspect he’s doing a lot of watching back.
It reminds me of our first Sunday inHarrow , a northeastern suburb of London Georgia Harrow is home to Harrow school, a prestigious prep school where George Gordon, Lord Byron attended, wrote some of his earliest poems and buried his daughter Ada Harrow countryside to look at. The ladies for their part, gazed right back, stunned and fascinated by these serious little boys in their robes. Both unfamiliar creatures sized each other up from across the cobbled street, ogling and being ogled right back.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan developed an idea about seeing and being seen that he called the desire for the Gaze. In Lacanian lexicon, this is always capitalized and means that deep desire to be seen and recognized, to be claimed through vision: the desire to be desired through viewing. Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” flips this around to discuss the desire inherent in the act of looking. She does it on purpose, but the desire to see and be seen seems elemental. Even my young son wants you to look at him, to notice him and pay him attention. Even if your vision is otherwise engaged, he wants to be seen.
He also wants to see. He has a yen for lovely women and is an unconscionable flirt when his gaze is returned. He tucks his head, he bats his eyes, he smiles, he giggles. He is a mere 6 months old yet understands the pleasures of looking at and being seen. I suppose this is not so odd. it is with vision that we make our earlier associations with others of our kind, that we know our world (though to many babies, an item is just as likely to be tasted as it is to be seen). I'm definitely curious what I will see in my young son as he continues to grow from infant to baby to child. My pleasure in seeing him is never daunted, yet it will be a very different creature that I see here soon, as my return to school and work changes forever who we are together.
School officially started this week, complete with roll sheets, first-day lectures, student e-mails, course advising and the rest of my real life as a working mother. Gone are the halcyon days of editing manuscripts at the coffee table while my infant son lolls on the rug. Now it’s the nanny, a tight schedule that puts me back at the house by three, late nights and early mornings. My son has learned to crawl and I find him in improbable places about the living room. No longer content to get himself stuck under the couch, I now find him wandering off the blankets and rug to skitter on the hard wood floor and approach the threshold that divides the front room from my study.
Can you say “baby gate?”
Ours is set up at the wide doorway between the foyer and the front room and looks something like the barrier that sets off viewing spaces at the zoo. My nanny is a painter by calling and I came home to find her painting away, my young son curled in her arms, watching. Another day, he was listening to a Johnny Mercer cd and intently watching from his blankets while she etched some fine lines onto the canvas in black ink. He’s getting “watched” all right, but I suspect he’s doing a lot of watching back.
It reminds me of our first Sunday in
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan developed an idea about seeing and being seen that he called the desire for the Gaze. In Lacanian lexicon, this is always capitalized and means that deep desire to be seen and recognized, to be claimed through vision: the desire to be desired through viewing. Laura Mulvey in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” flips this around to discuss the desire inherent in the act of looking. She does it on purpose, but the desire to see and be seen seems elemental. Even my young son wants you to look at him, to notice him and pay him attention. Even if your vision is otherwise engaged, he wants to be seen.
He also wants to see. He has a yen for lovely women and is an unconscionable flirt when his gaze is returned. He tucks his head, he bats his eyes, he smiles, he giggles. He is a mere 6 months old yet understands the pleasures of looking at and being seen. I suppose this is not so odd. it is with vision that we make our earlier associations with others of our kind, that we know our world (though to many babies, an item is just as likely to be tasted as it is to be seen). I'm definitely curious what I will see in my young son as he continues to grow from infant to baby to child. My pleasure in seeing him is never daunted, yet it will be a very different creature that I see here soon, as my return to school and work changes forever who we are together.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Bridging the Gap
It's late August and school has started around the state. Next week, the college students return to my own Macon State College -- who are mostly women, it seems. The front page of Sunday’s paper contained an article entitled “Bridging the Gender Gap,” detailing admissions offices response to the rise in women attending local area colleges. Mercer University
My question is “why?” If as many women as men are heads of households and our children are reliant upon their earnings for food, clothing, housing, health insurance and education, isn’t is a good thing that more women are getting sufficient education to provide those things to their children?
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women extols reason as a necessary precedent to virtue, and education of women’s minds necessary to their ability to properly reason. Notice that she didn’t say “football” or “masculine hair” or “lesbianism” or any of those critiques of feminisms we get from the easily agitated. Wollstonecraft was a delight of a human being, revolutionary, free-thinker and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the novelist who at 17 wrote Frankenstein. The younger Mary was educated in her parent’s library and in her father’s late night philosophical discussions, became steeped in the ideas and ideals of her time, and both explores and challenges those in her novella. Shelley’s monster speaks quite a bit about these ideals, their failure, and his role in the society that has spurned him. The horror of the novel is doubled in the murderous revenge the creature takes as well as the nasty underbelly of a society that tortures him because he is ugly.
The cultural capital of this novel is clear in those green Halloween masks that we see every Fall, though we may owe as much to to Boris Karloff’s makeup for the 1931 film. These are big ideas writ large on a green man, made clear for the masses, but invoking multiple important sources and ideals. Mary Shelley is Wollstonecraft’s own vindication – proof in the pudding of the pudding-maker’s recipe: smart education makes for smart women.
For years, men outpaced women in college attendance and performance although young women traditionally did better in high schools. Now that the ladies have come to college, this is a basis for concern? Perhaps the schools are concerned that there won’t be enough men for the ladies to date and that their enrollment will drop? Perhaps the schools are worried that they’ll be perceived as a less prestigious institution if the ranks become feminized. Nationwide, women make up 57% of the total college population. At Harvard, women’s enrollment is 44% of the total, up from 11% in 1970, atPrinceton they make up 39% of this years’ class, and the Engineering and Applied Science program boasts 32%. MIT boasts 44% enrollment in it’s undergraduate class and 32% in the graduate programs. The ladies are getting educated.
Perhaps some of the difference in male and female enrollment can be traced to the perceptions that fuel ads like a Gymboree ad I saw recently. The cover depicts girls in suit jackets and the boys in sporting clothes. The interior features the same suit-jacketed little girl and a young boy wearing a shirt that says “football” and clutching the same. This is one ad in the whole back-to-school pantheon, but it might say something about the sensibilities with which we are using to prepare our young men versus our young women. Even when hula-hooping these little girls -- I repeat, little girls -- are in suit jackets and look like they’re there to study. The little boys are in sports clothes and look like they’re there to play. For years it has been a question of the girls being serious about school, but the boys going off to college to have big ideas and get good jobs. It seems the worm is turning.
But we mustn’t slide back into ignorance and complacency. I haven’t read Rousseau in years, written a treatise against the death penalty or for immigration since I left college and even now struggle to keep the TV off, the pulp novels on the bedstand, the good book list rolling and the computer screen open to that daunting blank page. Let’s just keep it up, Ladies. The stakes are high and the prizes worth it, especially when we think of what books we’d like our daughters to write.
My question is “why?” If as many women as men are heads of households and our children are reliant upon their earnings for food, clothing, housing, health insurance and education, isn’t is a good thing that more women are getting sufficient education to provide those things to their children?
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women extols reason as a necessary precedent to virtue, and education of women’s minds necessary to their ability to properly reason. Notice that she didn’t say “football” or “masculine hair” or “lesbianism” or any of those critiques of feminisms we get from the easily agitated. Wollstonecraft was a delight of a human being, revolutionary, free-thinker and mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the novelist who at 17 wrote Frankenstein. The younger Mary was educated in her parent’s library and in her father’s late night philosophical discussions, became steeped in the ideas and ideals of her time, and both explores and challenges those in her novella. Shelley’s monster speaks quite a bit about these ideals, their failure, and his role in the society that has spurned him. The horror of the novel is doubled in the murderous revenge the creature takes as well as the nasty underbelly of a society that tortures him because he is ugly.
The cultural capital of this novel is clear in those green Halloween masks that we see every Fall, though we may owe as much to to Boris Karloff’s makeup for the 1931 film. These are big ideas writ large on a green man, made clear for the masses, but invoking multiple important sources and ideals. Mary Shelley is Wollstonecraft’s own vindication – proof in the pudding of the pudding-maker’s recipe: smart education makes for smart women.
For years, men outpaced women in college attendance and performance although young women traditionally did better in high schools. Now that the ladies have come to college, this is a basis for concern? Perhaps the schools are concerned that there won’t be enough men for the ladies to date and that their enrollment will drop? Perhaps the schools are worried that they’ll be perceived as a less prestigious institution if the ranks become feminized. Nationwide, women make up 57% of the total college population. At Harvard, women’s enrollment is 44% of the total, up from 11% in 1970, at
Perhaps some of the difference in male and female enrollment can be traced to the perceptions that fuel ads like a Gymboree ad I saw recently. The cover depicts girls in suit jackets and the boys in sporting clothes. The interior features the same suit-jacketed little girl and a young boy wearing a shirt that says “football” and clutching the same. This is one ad in the whole back-to-school pantheon, but it might say something about the sensibilities with which we are using to prepare our young men versus our young women. Even when hula-hooping these little girls -- I repeat, little girls -- are in suit jackets and look like they’re there to study. The little boys are in sports clothes and look like they’re there to play. For years it has been a question of the girls being serious about school, but the boys going off to college to have big ideas and get good jobs. It seems the worm is turning.
But we mustn’t slide back into ignorance and complacency. I haven’t read Rousseau in years, written a treatise against the death penalty or for immigration since I left college and even now struggle to keep the TV off, the pulp novels on the bedstand, the good book list rolling and the computer screen open to that daunting blank page. Let’s just keep it up, Ladies. The stakes are high and the prizes worth it, especially when we think of what books we’d like our daughters to write.
Monday, August 6, 2007
On Fear
The Fear's got me again. About the time I thought I had it licked, Wham!! It hit me again like Freddie Krueger back for sequel number 13. This time, it was an article in the Telegraph about children being left in cars and slowly baking to death. It caught me off guard, like most truly horrible things do. As I unwrapped the paper, it was the front inset and I knew that it was part article and part warning by the way it was set up, letter-box style, in the middle of the other stories about Iraq
I couldn’t bear to read more than the first couple of paragraphs about the little red-headed baby whose skin blistered and sweat plastered her hair to her head as she slowly expired and cried and no-one came to help. It must be the worst fear in the world, not only that something horrible and painful will happen to your baby, your heart and the dearest love of your life, but that you will somehow -- through stupidity, forgetfulness or just brain burn -- be responsible.
I think it’s worse because the parents of young children are typically exhausted and more likely to make stupid mistakes while handling a life that is so very fragile. It may also have something to do with having recently lost our little cat to a stupid mistake, a horrible death, when she climbed in the dryer for the umpteenth time and we didn’t see her in there among the dark clothes, turned it on and lost her to a very bad death. It only takes a moment of looking away, to not see the impending tragedy, for the smallest slip of fate, to take a creature you love so dearly.
Connor, my son, is currently teething, which had me up last night every half hour between three and7:30 , when I turned to my husband and begged for relief. He took him for a walk to give me an hour of desperately needed sleep and came back with roses and a smile. How lucky am I to have this kind of support and not have had to be at work at 8 in the morning, try to function and try to pick up the baby at the sitter after a full day on fractured sleep and try not to forget anything. Yet. How lucky am I that with the bowl of oatmeal I have for brains today that I don’t have to do anything more risky than send some photos over the e-mail, begin compiling syllabi and reread a chapter I’m writing. If I screw those things up, I just have to do more work tomorrow. No-one dies. I don’t have to get on the road with this bundle of fat little legs and toothless smiles and wonder what stupid thing I’m going to do to him today. Okay, I forgot to change his diaper and he had to cry for a few minutes before I remembered that it was his naptime, but I count myself ahead of the game even so.
According to the article in the paper, it’s many times high achieving people who leave their children behind in the rush to get everything done. Perhaps its part of the new culture of parenthood that doesn’t want to recognize how messy real life is. With just a new organizational routine, the magazine articles promise, your family, too, can run smoothly. I can see it running so smoothly, with all the ducks in a row, from the6:30 wakeup to the 8am arrival, that you don’t see the baby for the deeds. For those of us who are organizationally obsessed, with a rage for order and a series of checklists and tight schedules, I can see the disasters we try to stave off by our checks and balances, ripping us open from the other end completely.
I could see this being me – is the horrible thing. I so rarely go anywhere without Connor that if he’s not in my hands or line of sight, I feel like I’m missing something. It stops me at doorways and restaurants – what have I forgotten? What happens, though, when I go back to teaching, get into the habit of not having him with me and spend my tightly organized days trying to do in five hours what I used to in eight? I’m tempted to do as Leonard in Memento did, and tattoo Connor’s name on my hand, so that I will remember always to check, to listen, to look for him, to never let him fall in the way of harm that might be waiting for him. I will lose his toothless smiles to the teeth that bite his gums, his babyhood to the world I must give him up to, his innocence to war and money and the brutality of real life. But I pray I will never lose him to my own stupidity of thinking I can fight the messiness or real life with ordered exhaustion that leads to complacency of thinking I’m every going to have it all together again.
I couldn’t bear to read more than the first couple of paragraphs about the little red-headed baby whose skin blistered and sweat plastered her hair to her head as she slowly expired and cried and no-one came to help. It must be the worst fear in the world, not only that something horrible and painful will happen to your baby, your heart and the dearest love of your life, but that you will somehow -- through stupidity, forgetfulness or just brain burn -- be responsible.
I think it’s worse because the parents of young children are typically exhausted and more likely to make stupid mistakes while handling a life that is so very fragile. It may also have something to do with having recently lost our little cat to a stupid mistake, a horrible death, when she climbed in the dryer for the umpteenth time and we didn’t see her in there among the dark clothes, turned it on and lost her to a very bad death. It only takes a moment of looking away, to not see the impending tragedy, for the smallest slip of fate, to take a creature you love so dearly.
Connor, my son, is currently teething, which had me up last night every half hour between three and
According to the article in the paper, it’s many times high achieving people who leave their children behind in the rush to get everything done. Perhaps its part of the new culture of parenthood that doesn’t want to recognize how messy real life is. With just a new organizational routine, the magazine articles promise, your family, too, can run smoothly. I can see it running so smoothly, with all the ducks in a row, from the
I could see this being me – is the horrible thing. I so rarely go anywhere without Connor that if he’s not in my hands or line of sight, I feel like I’m missing something. It stops me at doorways and restaurants – what have I forgotten? What happens, though, when I go back to teaching, get into the habit of not having him with me and spend my tightly organized days trying to do in five hours what I used to in eight? I’m tempted to do as Leonard in Memento did, and tattoo Connor’s name on my hand, so that I will remember always to check, to listen, to look for him, to never let him fall in the way of harm that might be waiting for him. I will lose his toothless smiles to the teeth that bite his gums, his babyhood to the world I must give him up to, his innocence to war and money and the brutality of real life. But I pray I will never lose him to my own stupidity of thinking I can fight the messiness or real life with ordered exhaustion that leads to complacency of thinking I’m every going to have it all together again.
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