On Not Wishing Away Time

It has taken more than half my time on earth for me to learn the lesson that I must embrace life when and where it happens and not wish it away.  I learned the lesson the hard way, mostly after I conceived my son nearly 25 years ago.  By then, I’d spent a lifetime believing that there were things I couldn’t do or have because of who I was: a fat lesbian and a smart woman who scared the shit out of patriarchy.   Limits were set by society and for many years I accepted some of them. Becoming a mama was something I feared would be unavailable to me.  Against that particular perceived limit, I fought back.  When I became pregnant, I vowed that I would raise a child who always knew his value and worth and needn’t wait to love, or be loved, or live the life of his choosing.  In the subsequent years, I learned to take on other limits and not feel that I had to wait to enjoy the full measure of life.  I came to embrace wearing a swimsuit despite my imperfect thighs.  I came to love doing things on my own: movies, dining out, going to the gym, going to parks and museums on my own, even vacationing by myself.  If I wanted to do it, I could and I did.  It was empowering.

Then came the wonky hip.  Since last August, when the pain became suddenly unbearable, I have faced a world of limits brought on by doctors who denied me care because I’m fat.  I’ve rarely been a fan of modern medicine and this circumstance has turned my lack of enthusiasm into palatable dislike and distrust.  I am a woman who does not hate but if I made an exception to that rule, it would be for the medical field, which has almost never been my ally.  As I restricted food to lose weight and qualify for the hip replacement surgery everyone agreed would cure me, my dislike of doctors grew as their withholding of treatment shrank my world.  I resisted as much as I could but pain and sleeplessness are a toxic combination.  The last 6 months have mostly been miserable.  No longer able to walk very far, I have been confined to a life of home and work, my independence limited outside of my home (and even within it….going downstairs to do laundry is very hard for me; everything takes longer when you are disabled and in near-constant pain).  I have found myself wishing away my current existence in exchange for a future when things will be better, the exact approach to life I rejected so many years ago.  

With just under two weeks until surgery, I finally see light at the end of the tunnel.  With a hip replacement, I believe I will regain my independence.  I will once again be able to live my life on my terms.  Whether I will be able to let go of my anger at the 6 months of my life lost because of the denial of medical treatment remains to be seen. I’m only 56 years old.  I have many years left on earth, though not so many that I welcome my time being wasted by doctors who don’t seem to understand what an oath like “do no harm” actually requires of them.

Monthly Book Report: Emma, by Jane Austen

There is a new book group among some of the women in my family and our first read was Emma.  I’ve read Emma before - on many occasions actually - and I am always down with the classics, so I happily picked up Emma and, as expected, it proved a lovely read for the month. 

Emma is not my favorite Austen novel but I enjoyed this reading a great deal.  For starters, the characters - like all Austen books - are well-drawn and amusing.  The narrator is an honest broker with a keen observation skills and a sarcastic sense of humor, also a durable feature of many an Austen novel.  In the case of Emma, the narrator is nearly a character of her own and is a big part of the pleasure I get from reading the novel.

Emma herself is not the most sympathetic of Austen heroines but I even like that about her.  She’s well-off and snobbish and Austen - and Emma herself - makes no apologies for that.  Emma is happy in her world, circumspect though it is, and I admire that about her.  Austen’s writings are deeply invested in the lives of the women.  They live in the early 19th century and I am always struck by the ways in which meaning for women is relational - not about who they are for themselves but about whom they are for others.  I’d like to think that in the 21st century, we are past this view of women.  Experience tells me that we are not  and that makes this 200 year old novel a rather timely read.

New School Year, New Bulletin Board

Every year, I organize a new bulletin board for my office.  

Two parts inspiration and one part the story of my last year, each year’s board is organized to bring me daily happiness. The usual suspects are all there: UCLA; anthropomorphized British animals; books; flowers; people I love; a nod to my home state; my first celebrity crush, Smokey the Bear...and more that makes me smile).  

This year’s theme is female empowerment.  I have grown weary of being taken for granted and underestimated because of my gender.  I see being a woman as my greatest superpower and I’d advise the universe to take note and get the fuck out of my way.

Representation Matters

This week, with the death of Cokie Roberts, as I teach a diverse group of 7th graders about colonial society, I am reminded again how very much representation matters.  Roberts, a long-standing political reporter and commentator, was an enduring part of my world.  I listened to her on NPR and watched her on ABC news.  She always brought attention to women, especially women leaders, and gave me an abiding sense that women could matter in the political world.  

If that belief was ever tentative (and I don’t think it was), these days it’s foremost in my mind.  I raised a son who learned to value and enjoy women’s sports and I am proud that at the age of 19 he considers himself a feminist and an advocate for women.  I teach in diverse classes with 12 and 13 year old girls and boys; the girls coming of age in a society that regulates their bodies and is prone to underestimating their brains.  These years are formative and in my class I emphasize the empowerment of women.  I do this for the benefit of all of the students and I search for the examples of representation that show the truth of my words.

But for all of these efforts, it’s examples and representation that matters.  When we open our textbook and look at the picture of delegates to the Continental Congress as they contemplate declaring their independence, we mark who is missing.  We read Abbigail Adams’ letters to her husband, present at that meeting and prepared to ignore his wife’s request that he and his peers remember the ladies.  We don't forget the ladies.

I remind them all that someone must go first for the rest of us to follow.  I show them the Americans who made room for others and I emphasize the power of that small change.  And over and over again I remind them that representation matters.  Cokie Robert's passing is a loss for all of us.  I will always remember her with gratitude for the way she always showed me the enormous power of representation.

October Book Report: The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

Several friends had recommended The Winthrop Woman to me before I finally picked it up.  It had all the signs of being my sort of story: a story about a woman, plenty of history, set in England and colonial America…..it’s rather a wonder that I hadn’t found the book sooner.  The novel is story of Elizabeth Winthrop, an early Puritan settler in Massachusetts Bay.  Expertly organized as fictionalized history, Seton has carefully researched all the details of Bess Winthrop’s life and then brought her to life.

And that’s a good place to start, because most women from the 1600s don’t have lives whose history is known and marked, let alone shared.  We know who these women were, but we rarely know how they felt; how they experienced their lives.  A woman’s life in the 1600s was shaped by the men who ruled the society, both at home and in public life.  Women weren’t often in control of their fate and those who pushed against this restriction were often punished for such defiance.  That is certainly the case with Bess, who had three husbands and would give birth to eight children over the course of her life.

I read this novel as I was teaching 7th graders about colonial history.  We spend a great deal of time on the social history of the colonial world both because that’s what the students find compelling and also because it’s the best way for me to introduce all the people whose experiences will form America.  Everyone knows Ben Franklin, of course, but it’s the lives of regular settlers, slaves, and indentured servants who make up the the backbone and story of our nation.

To read the story of a woman whose hallmark is her challenge to patriarchy in the midst of the re-surfacing of allegations against Harvey Weinstein (and others) is to be reminded of the fact that women’s lives have been constricted for years.  It’s also a reminder that our collective strength comes from a willingness to rebel against those constrictions and to stick with one another as we do so.  It’s not often that I can claim that a story set in the 1600s is timely, but this one certainly is.  

April Book Review: The Invention of Wings

I picked up this Sue Monk Kidd novel because the back-of-the-book description was so compelling.  The novel is the story of Sarah Grimke, a 19th century abolitionist and feminist.  I have long admired Sarah Grimke, who, with her younger sister Angelina, became famous for their public presence amongst the most active social reformers of the 1830s.  Contemporaries of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Weld, Lucretia Mott, and others, the Grimke sisters were important leaders in both abolition and feminism.  Moreover, they were intellectual forces to be reckoned with at a time when women were largely seen as ornaments, not intellects.  Thanks to her careful command of the real history of abolition and feminism, Kidd tells their story exceptionally well.

Sarah Grimke was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1792 and she grew up in a prosperous slave-owning household.   As a child, Sarah began to question the injustice of slavery.  An obviously bright child, her father permitted her to read the same books as her brothers.  However, as she approached adolescence, her parents made clear that her world must be the circumspect existence of a privileged Southern woman of the 1800s.  She could not receive the same education as her brothers; her aspirations to a career in law were laughed at dismissed.  

Kidd weaves the known story of Sarah Grimke with imagined conversations and an internal dialogue that adds layers to Sarah’s story and makes splendid work of it.  The story is powerful on its own; Kidd’s prose makes it exceptional.  The novel is structured as a story about Sarah and a Grimke family slave named Hetty, who lived alongside Sarah and whose experiences form the core of Sarah’s abolitionist beliefs.  

The novel is told in first person in alternate chapters by Hetty and Sarah.  Kidd’s prose is lovely and in the opening page of the novel, when Hetty says of her mother, Charlotte, “Everything she knew came from living on the scarce side of mercy,”  I knew that this book was special.  Not two paragraphs in to the story and I was hooked.  The rest of the book measured up to that first page and it was a terrific read.  Beyond that, it had me thinking about the lives of women in the 1800s.

As I read The Invention of Wings I also watched the Masterpiece Theater story about the Bronte sisters, “To Walk Invisible.” Charlotte, Emily, and Anne lived around the same historical time as Sarah and Angelina Grimke and though the women lived an ocean apart, their worlds were similarly circumspect.  All of them were brilliant and capable and all lived at a time when such women were largely excluded from the public eye.  They may not have been rare, but because opportunities for women were so limited, they seem rare.  That these amazing women wrote anyway (and Sarah also spoke out at public events), says much about the power of the ideas swirling in their minds.  As I read about all three of the Grimke women and watched the Bronte sisters, I felt again how much is lost when women’s contributions are undervalued or downright excluded.  Though they lived more than 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the Trump election, the Grimke women and the Bronte sisters seem more important than ever.  These women were warned and yet they persisted.  In 2017, we should embrace the lesson of that experience.

Charmed

I’m a perpetual re-reader of books, seizing up one of my favorites whenever the mood strikes me.  This month, I picked up Charms for the Easy Life by Kaye Gibbons.  The book was first published in 1993 and I read it for the first time in 1994. It’s the story of the Birch family and its three generations of determined Southern women.  On my first read, I most identified with the youngest member of the family, Margaret.  She’s the narrator and a smart young woman who is finding her way in the world of 1930s Raleigh, North Carolina.  In 1994, I was 25 years old and living in Nashville, Tennessee, sorting out my next move in life.  I felt like Margaret and I had a great deal in common.

The novel is sentimental but not cloying, thanks to the humor that runs throughout the story.  Re-reading the book this summer, at the age of 48, I found myself identifying less with Margaret and more with her mother and grandmother, two independent women in an age when independent women were something of a rarity.  Like Margaret’s mother, Sophia, I’m the mother of an indulged only child.  Like Sophia, my life is shifting as my child prepares to head out into the world on his own.  Reading the novel found me thinking about the changes I’ve experienced in the last twenty-plus years.  I’m as fiercely independent as Charlie Kate, Sophia, and Margaret.  In some respects, it’s easier for me to be that way.  But though we are more common in the 21st century than the 20th century, we independent women know that there are still plenty of unspoken rules about what we can say and what we can do.  There are expectations about how we are supposed to think about our place in society; our accomplishments can still be grudgingly honored or ignored all-together.  We're supposed to ignore that.  In this way, I expect that the Birch women would find themselves right at home in 2016.

The South is practically a fourth character in the novel.  When I first read it, I was living in the South myself and I very much desired to stay there.  A job would ultimately take me to the Midwest in 1994.  I’ve lived in the Northeast since 2002, but I’ve never lost my affection for the South.  The only time in my life I’ve ever been homesick was in 1997, when I spent my last summer in Nashville and reconciled myself to a life lived outside of Dixie, at least for a while.  I’ve not yet returned to the South but this reading of Charms for the Easy Life found me homesick for the South and all of its quirky charms.  

A familiar book is a companion throughout life, offering comfort and lessons in equal measure.  Fittingly, this Kaye Gibbons novel is a charm, if not for an easy life, then at least for a thoughtfully-considered one.  I’ll take it.

Back in My Day

Last night JT and I went to the school gym to watch the girls' basketball team play for the state championship in their division. It was a close game in the first half and a good game throughout. Our team won. But most impressive to me was the number of boys who came to cheer on the girls. When I was in high school, the boys just didn't come to the girls' games. The girls played at crummy times and in the least desirable locations. And their fan base wasn't huge.

I went to high school in California in the mid-80s, so we're not talking about the feminist dark ages. But things were different. Last night, the boys basketball team, whose season is already over, sat in the front row and cheered loudly, along with many of their classmates. And I realize that things have truly changed. There's a lot of complaining about Title IX, but if last night was any indication, it has successfully delivered opportunities to girls. And, just as importantly, it's created a generation of boys (my son included), who think that girls sports is just as important as boys sports.