letter to Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

I commend your editorial team for advocating the repeal of Wisconsin’s constitutional amendment prohibition on the recognition of gay marriage. I would like to point out, however, that gay marriages exist whether or not the state acknowledges them. The marriages of gay and lesbian couples across the Wisconsin and the US are sanctified by virtue of their mutual commitment and the ceremonies in which their religious institutions, families, and friends bless their unions. It is time for the state of Wisconsin to step up and provide legal protections to gay and lesbian married couples on the same basis they are provided to heterosexuals.

In which I agree (somewhat) with Jonah Goldberg

It’s not every day that I even bother to read Jonah Goldberg’s column, much less agree with the basic sentiments in it. But today is a different day.

Goldberg recounts the story of Lena Reppert, a wheelchair-bound, dying nonagenarian being escorted by her daughter to a nursing home out of state. The staff of the Transportation Security Administration searched Ms. Reppert in a way that made her daughter conclude that she had to remove her mother’s adult diaper, humiliating enough in itself, and then rush to catch her plane, lacking a second diaper with which to protect her mother’s dignity. Goldberg calls for a rebellion against this suspicion of passengers by TSA.

I don’t follow Goldberg’s railing all the way back to ethnic profiling, which he would clearly prefer to the current approach taken by the TSA—that everyone is a suspect. A mother who brings water or juice boxes for her children through security (yes, this happened to me). A baby, inspected out of the sightline of his mother. Lena Reppert. But I do agree with Goldberg’s basic sense that TSA staff often act like machines, at the expense of their discretionary, human judgment.

Although I have traveled by plane only infrequently in the years since 9/11, when I have flown, I have often wondered about what working for TSA must do to a person’s soul. What does it mean to a person to be trained by his employer—the federal government, no less—that all other human beings must be regarded as possible terrorists and treated accordingly, with no milk of human kindness to ameliorate what most rational Americans recognize is a sadly necessary level of screening? If you work for TSA, do you carry your work attitude home with you? Do you fear the children in the playground and treat them with the same distance and disdain you do at work? How many people quit their jobs at TSA because of what it does to them, inside?

I am fortunate enough to have work that I love to do. I realize that this is a privilege that I should not take lightly, a product of my class, educational, and generational contexts. Most humans in the present, as well as in the past, have had to labor under bad conditions for goals that they may not value personally. I wish that everyone had the opportunity to do the kind of work that I have. Not that everyone should be a professor, but that everyone should enjoy the chance to do work that they believe makes a substantive contribution to bettering the human condition and receive adequate compensation for their labors. This is the dignity of work, to my mind. I wish for everyone the chance to do work that elevates them personally, rather than degrades them.

Declaration of Mutual Dependence

The baby has to learn to sleep independently, to sleep through the night by herself.. It’s developmental.

Yup, that’s what most parenting advice would have you believe. The baby has to learn to sleep by herself in order to develop her independence as a human being.

Some advice even tells you to let the baby cry and cry by herself for long stretches of time until she learns that you won’t come to her in the night. At night, she has to be independent.

Of all the parenting advice I’ve read in the past few years, that’s the biggest bunch of crap I encountered. The baby doesn’t need to learn to be independent. The baby needs to learn that she is secure, that her parents (i.e. mothers with milk and breasts) will come to her during the night to bring her food and comfort if that’s what she needs.

And this is the parenting advice that taught me just how ideologically loaded most formal parenting advice is. There isn’t just an agenda in most parenting books, there is an ideology. Back when I was up with my babies multiple times during the night (last week?) I often wondered what the parenting advice in the Soviet Union or Red China said about a baby’s sleep and independence. Perhaps that they need to sleep through the night for the good of the collective?

But it also strikes me this morning that urging a person to grow up to be independent is dysfunctional in another way. When I became a mother, I lost so much of the independence that being an American has conditioned me to treasure. I can’t set my schedule, do the work my soul burns for at the moment I need to do it, take a shower, get dressed, or even sleep unless all my other ducks are in a row. Is my husband available to watch the children? How many minutes are left on that DVD? Is the school open? Will they please, please, please settle down and go to sleep so I too can get the rest I desperately need?

And I also desperately need those children, the ones who are carrying around my heart.

Raising children to be independent does not prepare them to be parents themselves. It trains them to resent the ways in which parenting (or at least mothering?) curtails their independence.

Maybe this week we should celebrate our mutual dependence, rather than our individual and national independence.

How’s Your Water?

I’ve never been much of a fan of the balance metaphor as a way of describing our lives and our work as being in competition with each other. When I picture “work-life balance,” I imagine a woman holding up heavy burdens, maybe bowling balls, up in the air while she walks around trying not to fall over. The only time I felt that the metaphor really worked was in the introduction to Mama, PhD, where the editors remind us that when a dancer’s body is in balance, every muscle is working. That, at least, felt validating and true.

Perusing Samantha Parent Walravens’ Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood, I was struck by the observation of my college classmate Alexander Bradner. Bradner writes, “Children need their mothers—not nannies or daycare workers—to narrate the mundane, introduce so many joys, and assist with so many pains…But women need a public voice, external affirmation, internal feelings of triumph, money of their own, and a mental life beyond worry and logistics. Only those free to fulfill their early promise have a chance of living through their fifties and sixties without debilitating regret. So we should be able to work as well.” (“Muthering Heights,” p. 110).

For me, Bradner’s observation triggered something. We need our families, or, writ more broadly, our lives. We need our work—something satisfying that makes a contribution somewhere beyond our selfish inner pleasures. We need life, and we need work. They are not burdens; they nourish us. Granted, they nourish us in different ways, and it usually is hard to cultivate them simultaneously.

I have not fully worked this out, but it also seems to me that work and life usually interpenetrate. Show me a mother who does not think about her children when she is working. Show me a worker who never does any “work” while off the job. I acknowledge that you can’t drive your bus while you’re at home. But I have loaded the dishwasher mentally while trying to go to sleep often enough to suspect that downtime nourishes our ability to do our jobs in important ways.

So now I am in search of a different metaphor, a metaphor that acknowledges that work and life are not just burdens, but needs. And that projects the notion that work and life are mutually reinforcing, not undermining.

Today I am trying out the metaphor of water instead of work-life balance. Water consists of hydrogen and oxygen. We need them both individually, and we need them together. We need them to be connected correctly, in the right proportions, at the correct angles. Let’s try it out. Instead of asking your friend, “How is your work-life balance?” ask them “How is your water today?” and see what you learn.

I Should Have Made the Tag "Mothering," Not "Parenting"

My favorite magazine, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers runs a debate in each issue. Usually I am intrigued by the topic but frustrated by the actual “debate,” because the authors tend to construe the question so differently that they talk past each other rather than with each other. But the debate in the current issue comes out of a long-standing colloquy between the co-editors and for once offers a true binary: should they change the subtitle to include “parents” more broadly, or should they stick with “mothers”?

            I am a longstanding equality feminist, rather than a difference feminist, so I was surprised to find myself coming down on the side of keeping mothers in the title.

            As I thought it through, however, I realized that in recent years I have often told myself that it is motherhood, rather than my experience as a woman in American society, that is the source of my mid-life radicalism. Before I had children, I could function socially as a man. I was the ideal worker (granted, in a profession I love and feel privileged to participate in). With a few notable exceptions that ended up mostly harmless (and which I was privileged to be able to see as exceptions), I have been able to dodge sexual harassment and sexual violence. I benefited from the changes in laws and social norms in the last quarter of the twentieth century that enabled me to be taken seriously for what my hard work and talents produced.

            Motherhood, however, reminded me of my deep animal nature. I put my body on the line—twice—with pregnancy and childbirth (and in another era would not have survived the effort to bear a baby who weighed almost 11 pounds). My thinking brain went on a short hiatus as I coped with the demands of a sleepless child. My schedule revolves around the needs of my children. The topics I think about—personally and professionally—are deeply different from what they used to be. People who don’t know me—and some who do—call me “mom,” though they never would have called me “babe” (not that I was ever a babe). I struggle to remain even a good worker while I aspire to be a good mother, hitting neither target most days. My husband, who is involved with the children, has not appeared to have his fundamental relationships in the world changed, as I have. I am unconvinced that American fathers do experience the sorts of transformations that American mothers do. My experience of gender, in short, has broken over the lines of motherhood. Biology did not make me a woman, but motherhood has.

            One of science fiction writer Sheri Tepper’s novels, The Gate to Women’s Country, is set in a post-apocalyptic United States (spoiler alert!). Women and young children live in gated forts, cultivating art and science. Men live in warrior groups outside the forts, doing what they do best (in Tepper’s jaded view)—fighting with other groups of men. Men and women “hook up” (to use a horrible term that actually fits this situation too well) at regular intervals to allow for reproduction. Boys live with their mothers for a while after birth, then they go live with the men. As they hit puberty, they choose: run the gauntlet back to their mothers’ homes in Women’s Country, or stay with the men? Most stay with the men. But increasing numbers return to Women’s Country, scorned by most men but enjoying the company of a heterosocial society that the women are cultivating. The kicker? The spoiler—it turns out that the men who live outside Women’s Country are not actually the fathers of the boys they welcome to Men’s Country, nor of the girls who stay with their mothers. The women have preserved reproductive science and technology, and while they allow the warriors to believe that they continue to father children, only those men who have returned to Women’s Country are enabled to become fathers—either through trickery on the women who foolishly fall for the warrior men, or the old fashioned way with women in on the secret. In a bit of nastiness that is classic Tepper, the women in fact periodically provoke wars with other forts of women, in order to cull the numbers of aggressive men. The leaders of Women’s Country are carefully breeding violence out of humans, cultivating a society in which womanhood is the norm, and cherishing the men who are willing to prioritize art, science, and community life over patriarchal manhood.

            This turns out to be how I feel about changing Brain, Child’s subtitle. They are doing some really important work at that magazine, excavating with care, honesty, and wicked funny humor what motherhood implies in the twenty-first century US. Some men are brave enough to cross through the gauntlet, read the magazine, and even write for it. Even though the title seems to set it aside as Women’s Country. We want those men, and we need to hear from them. But let them preserve the space where motherhood—which remains a different experience from fatherhood—sets the norm.