I listened to the end of Obama’s book today driving home from Providence. He talks eloquently about his wife, Michelle, and about his growing awareness of and sensitivity to the challenges she faced as they had children and she struggled to reconcile what he called two sides of herself. He describes a woman who wanted to provide the traditional home her mother had provided for her, and also a woman who had big dreams about making a professional mark on the world, and how they cohabited in a single body.
I had the same reaction that I do when I read books like Mommy Wars, or articles about this topic: I welled up instantly with tears, the words having touched some reserve of emotion in me as inarticulate as it is endlessly deep. I can’t even explain what the feelings are, I just know that they are raw and powerful. Conflict isn’t the way I’d describe it – Obama says Michelle’s two selves are fighting with each other, and I wouldn’t say that of myself. I am clear on the choices I’ve made and quite convinced that they are the right ones for me and for my children, at least right now. And yet, somehow, there is a profound vein of feeling that is still there, pulsing beneath the surface, but still foreign enough that I can’t put its contents into words.

Which brings me to another topic. I often feel like my emotional sensitivity, the ease with which things both wound and delight me, is a liability in this world. I am often made to feel like these are traits I ought to learn to harness and quiet down. And I do agree that there is value in my being able to control these emotional reactions; it would be a relief to be able to halt the crazy spirals that I sometimes feel powerless against. But during a run this week I was listening to Ben Harper’s Fight Outta You (“don’t let them take the fight out of you”) and it occured to me, in a single swoop of realization, that maybe I ought to start thinking of this part of who I am as a strength. Damn it, I thought, I need to stop letting the world drain my emotional awareness of value; by doing this I’m letting them take away something that is integral to who I am and to how I approach life. When did emotional stoicism become the ideal?

That fighting sense dissipated rapidly, of course, and today once again I feel like I should just grow up already, but it was an interesting reversal to view something I’ve long thought of as a weakness as a potential strength. Now if only I could recapture that!