books

What are you reading?

It’s not a surprise that I love to read.  I go through phases, though, where I don’t read much.  I’m not sure why.  Last summer I read mostly magazines and Mary Oliver poems.  For the last month or so I’ve read very little, probably because I’ve been so consumed with work.  I’m slowly starting to reengage, though, and am turning my attention back to my stack, which has continued growing.  I’d love to hear what you are reading and what’s on your bedside table.  This is what’s on mine:

This Life is In Your Hands – Melissa Coleman
Halfway to Each Other – Susan Pohlman
Cost – Roxana Robinson
One Thousand Gifts – Ann Voskamp
The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart – Deborah Digges
And I Shall Have Some Peace There – Margaret Roach
Schoolgirls – Peggy Orenstein
Enoughwater – Maya Stein

What are you reading?

“We are made whole
by books, as by great spaces and the stars.”
– Mary Carolyn Davies

A Double Life

I suspected I was going to enjoy A Double Life: Discovering Motherhood by Lisa Catherine Harper.  I didn’t, however, imagine that I’d devour it almost in one sitting.  I adored Harper’s book: it is full of careful, scientific details that were new to me, it is written in eloquent, beautiful prose, and more than once it made me gasp with identification.  The terrain of Harper’s memoir – pregnancy, birth, the first months of motherhood – is familiar, but the honest and funny voice in which she tells it, and the nuanced observations with which it is filled, are unique.

The first half of A Double Life is concerned with conception and pregnancy.  Ella, Harper’s daughter, is conceived on 9/11, and Harper describes how that fall there “seemed to be darkness everywhere.” There are fascinating details about the development of a baby from zygote to blastoscyst to fetus, the physiology of pregnancy, and about Harper’s own family history.

The book began to really gather power for me when Harper talks about the first time she felt her baby move inside her.  She hints at what is to come when she says,

But something infinitely more primal and more immediate had happened on the couch, and its aftermath was not unlike the seconds after a small earthquake, when everything you know about the world is cast into doubt, when your own terra firma crumbles beneath you and you are certain only of uncertainty.

A Double Life reaches the crescendo of its impact as it addresses the profound, irrevocable change that motherhood represents.  As Harper describes it – and I agree with this characterization – it is a complete and utter dissolution and then rebuilding of identity.  This begins with a harrowing description of labor, as close to the real experience as I’ve ever read.  I felt like I was back in the room where I had my daughter, during my third hour of transition, begging my midwife to put a bullet in my head and just cut my daughter out (that really happened), when I read this:

In the middle of that pain, at pain’s deep center, it was dark.  In that dark there were no others and there was no language.  It was silent and it was deafening, it was still and it was cyclonic.

Still and deafening, still and cyclonic: I’ve never read labor more viscerally evoked.  At the end of her long and arduous labor, Harper delivers her daughter, Ella.  When they return home she and Ella sink into that otherworld known as the fourth trimester, where the standard demarcations of day and night crumble and life as it has been known fades away entirely.  Harper loves these days, even while acknowledging their stultifying exhaustion.  “The intense passions that I had sought most of my young life seemed shallow in comparison to the deep tides of contentment that pulled at me now,” she writes, and for a period of time she and Ella exist in a world where all they need is each other.  It is a calm and joyful time, a “steady stream of wonder.”

After about nine months, however, Harper’s sense of herself as a mother in the world begins to feel more complicated. At one point, noticing that Ella’s eyes follow her around the room, she “began to understand ‘mother,’ its permanence fixed to me like a shadow” and we intuit that Harper is growing aware of the permanence and immutability of the role.

In the last few chapters of A Double Life Harper grapples with her most complex and ambivalent feelings about motherhood and in so doing begins to face essential questions of personhood.  The nearness – twinned-ness, in fact – of life and death, a theme that surfaces during her pregnancy, recurs in these final chapters.  For Harper, giving birth – giving life – occasioned a reckoning with death.  This awareness also shapes her experience of her young daughter’s life: “Motherhood made me familiar with this mortal creep of time.”  This is of course intensely familiar to me.  In fact it made me consider that my own preoccupation with being present and aware and my profound sadness about time’s passage likely have their roots in my being a mother.  I don’t think these are new wounds for me, but they are certainly rawer now that I watch my own children grow.

It was a sort of miracle to be able to hold these two moments – of life, of death – in mind at once; to be acutely conscious of both the present and of the presence and nearness of loss; to hold in my arms the evidence of life and death, for that is what my daughter was: an inspired, poetic fact.  She gave me an accidental genius, and if it filled me with night terrors, it also filled me with song.

At the end of A Double Life, Harper seems to move into a period of heightened sensitivity, into a porousness that I recognize intimately.  She describes a moment in church as “A pause in my life and something strange possessed me … Something had visited me.  It came, imparted, and was gone. .. I was not so changed so much as infused.”  This reminded me of a moment in my early 20s in the crypt at Assissi, a memory I return to again and again because it was a harbinger of what was to come later in my life.  I’ve had other moments – few, but indelible – like this in my life, too. They remind of the presence of something greater, a design vaster than I can understand, and, as Harper says, infuse me with the current of humanity itself.

In her memoir’s second to last chapter, Harper confronts the twisted world of the mommy wars, and suggests that the essential problem is not, essentially, whether a woman works outside of the home but the fact that the world at large has utterly devalued the work of motherhood and the experience of life inside the home.  She realizes that conversation at her baby group sometimes feels like “a storm of all that nothing,” but simultaneously finds herself deeply interested in the details of domestic life.  Ultimately Harper comes to a conclusion that I identify with strongly:

I felt I belonged in neither world: much of my energy was invested in raising Ella so I couldn’t fully claim my professional identity, but neither could I identify with what seemed to me to be the petty concerns of motherhood.  I loved my daughter and I loved my home.  I did not love the stay-at-home culture of mothering.

I guess this shouldn’t surprise me, given that Lisa and I connected when she read my essay in the Princeton Alumni Weekly called “A Foot in Two Worlds.”  Harper vows to “move between my worlds of teaching, writing, and mothering, and I tried hard to see how each inflected the other,” which reminded of Anne Tyler’s comment that “since I’ve had children I’ve grown richer and deeper.  They may have slowed down my writing for a while, but when I did write, I had more of a self to speak from.”  Perhaps instead of interpreting my life as fractured, and bemoaning the losses in that, I ought to celebrate the ways in which I am a kaleidoscope (one of those recurring tropes in my writing).  Each of the various slices of who I am, of which I inhabit in every single day, can, and should, inform – indeed, enrich – the other.

A Double Life doesn’t reach a single firm conclusion on the work/home tension.  Instead, Harper proposes that mothers ought to feel more united than opposed, and that we should drop the false bifurcation of “working” and “staying at home” identities.  Harper asserts that “what bound us together was the fact that we found our children interesting, that we were inspired by them, that we had allowed our lives to be changed by them.”  I may have initially fought this change with everything I had, but I’ve certainly allowed it now.  The new reality of who I am as a mother – not that new anymore, in fact – floods every cell of my being on a regular basis, bathing me in wonder and gratitude as much as in impatience and sharp sadness at the speed with which it all passes.

The very last scene of A Double Life takes place, tellingly, as Harper sits working at her desk.  Her daughter crawls up to her and commands her attention; there, sitting at her desk, her baby at her feet, we see the disparate strands of identification and person come together in a single compelling image.  Harper reminds us of where she begins her memoir, with researched, scientific awe at conception and pregnancy, and then touches on the various highs and lows we have experienced with her over 232 pages.  And, with the moving honesty and elegant prose that fills A Double Life, Harper concludes:

Out of nothing she had become something, and I had become something more.  If the crushing love that I felt for her made me newly and forever fearful of mortality, and if, on some days, it made me tired and irritable and beside myself with despair and fury, there was something else, too, something with wings rising now like hope, or gratitude, or grace.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

I have been a Peggy Orenstein fan for a long time.  Years ago I wrote about her now-famous New York Times article called “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?”  I also read and adored both Flux and Waiting for Daisy.  Schoolgirls is next on my list.  I have read several reviews of her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, and I read it eagerly.  Peggy is a beautiful and articulate writer tackling topics about which I care deeply.  She is also hilariously funny.  Holy Grail.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter addresses the culture in which our daughters are growing up.  It confronts the increasingly urgent sexualization of girls, and identifies that it is happening younger and younger.  The book’s central point is an exploration of how girls these days are “struggling to fulfill all the new expectations we have for them without letting go of the old ones.”

Orenstein explicates a set of new pressures that girls face today: to perform on the field and in the classroom, to demonstrate leadership, and to be involved in philanthropy, a “good person.”  At the same time, girls are still expected to be pretty and thin.  Far from replacing the old expectations, these new ones have simply piled on top, making the burden of perfection on our girls even more stifling.

Every day I am reminded that how a girl looks remains essential to how the world views her.  People seem to constantly comment on how Grace looks.  It is certainly, by a wide margin, the most common thing about her that I get comments about.  It’s true: both of my children are thin.  Bird-like, even.  But it’s totally natural: that’s the kind of kid I am.  The most infuriating comment I get, and I get it all the time, is how “well, you want a girl to be skinny.”  People said this even when Grace was a toddler of 2 or 3.  People also comment on Grace’s face, and I’m often told she is beautiful.  She can frequently overhear this commentary, which worries me, because I don’t want her to internalize that it’s the most important thing about her.  But if I am really honest, my own reaction is more complicated.  I’m simultaneously horrified and proud.  Because, just as Orenstein does, I grudgingly recognize that this is the world we live in.  I wish it were otherwise, I desperately do.  But it’s not.  And I know that being attractive will be an advantage for Grace.  I hate admitting this.

When Grace was five she took her first airplane ride by herself.  She felt incredibly proud of herself, and I did too, which helped ameliorate the shocked, even judgmental, reactions from more than a few people who heard about this.  A few days after the flight I got an email from a very dear friend, telling me that the story of Grace boarding her Delta flight alone with only a quick look over her shoulder reminded her of what I’d always said were my chief goals for Grace: that she be – and know she is – brave and smart.  This was, my friend asserted, the behavior of a brave and smart child.  My eyes filled with tears.  I remember both of those moments viscerally: Grace boarding the plane, and reading my friend’s message.

Still, no matter how brave or smart, or how accomplished girls – or women – are, their looks still matter.  This is a reality that I find both irrefutable and profoundly depressing.  It is deeply, perniciously ingrained in our culture.  Orenstein tells the story of when, while researching Schoolgirls, she followed students in middle school and realized that she was greeting them by commenting in their appearance.  Even she, who knew this wasn’t her priority, or the right thing to do.  She tried to go cold turkey and found it awkward to make conversation.  This story reminded me of when I was pregnant the first time.  I suddenly became blindingly aware that what everybody wanted to tell me was how great I looked.  I used to feel like shouting: I am growing a human being in my body!  Who the hell cares what I look like?  And I swore that I would never comment on another pregnant woman’s looks.  And you know what?  I still do.  Because in many cases my first reaction IS that they look beautiful.  But still, like Orenstein, I know better.

Orenstein also raises the important and complex topic of of body image, sharing scary data that I’ve read before about how early girls become aware of and dissatisfied by their bodies.  Like Orenstein, and many mothers I know, I make a determined effort never to disparage my own physical self in front of Grace.  But I’ve been wondering, lately, do we actually need to go further?  Should we be talking about how beautiful we are?  I don’t do that, and it would be uncomfortable for me to do so (not to mention dishonest), but I do find myself wondering if we need to model self-love.  We don’t want to raise daughters who think their appearance is all, but given the truth of the world out there, ought we demonstrate, actively, appreciation for our own physical bodies?  I suspect that our silence on this topic holds an implicit message for our daughters.

It is inescapable, this fact that our girls’ looks are essential to their sense of themselves.  “Talent?  Effort?  Intelligence?  All are wonderful, yet by middle school, how a girl feels about her appearance – particularly whether she is thin enough, pretty enough, and hot enough – has become the single most important determinant of her self-esteem.”  Even more provocatively, Orenstein challenges: “What is the alternative to thin, pretty, and hot (regardless of other qualities) as the source of feminine power and identity?”  I don’t know the answer.  And I do know that these expectations are real, and that coupled with the emphasis on achievement and success they create for our girls a tangled forest of pressure to be perfect.

Cinderella Ate My Daughter‘s chapter on the child beauty pageant circuit is riveting, and I was particularly impressed by how Orenstein identifies lesser-known, more humanizing aspects of each example of that much-vilified character, the Beauty Pageant Mom.  A chapter on the older Disney “princesses,” Britney, Lindsay, Miley, Selena, and others struck me in particular because that is the phase in which Grace is definitely.  Orenstein asserts that part of the unspoken promise of the Disney Princess brand is that it will keep our daughters safe.  The pink and plastic world of Cinderella and Snow White may be replete with contradictory messages and an overemphasis on appearance, but it is a safe place devoid of sexuality and threat.

This world gives way to that of Hannah Montana and the Wizards of Waverly Place, and the real-life “princesses” take the place of cartoons. What to do, then, when these actresses grow up and the girls who loved them have to interpret images of Miley Cyrus on the cover of Vanity Fair naked in bed with mussed hair.  The natural maturation of the teenage girls whose pre-sexual identities are fused with beloved, role-model characters renders even more complicated the already-rough terrain of adolescence.  “The virgin/whore cycle of pop princesses, like so much of the girlie-girl culture pushes in the opposite direction, encouraging girls to view self-objectification as a feminine rite of passage.”

Orenstein’s last chapter focuses on the increasing power and reach of the internet social media and the ways in which it contributes to the commoditization of girlhood.  In a world where girls think of themselves in terms of their “profile” earlier and earlier, material identifiers like what you were, what movies, songs, and celebrities you like, and what you wear become increasingly important.   Orenstein also points out the ways in which electronic media have raised the stakes enormously on the standard mistakes of adolescence.  Often there is a permanent record of those mistakes now, and one that is easily circulated well beyond a girl’s community.  The power of online networks is seen clearly in some of the recent online bullying stories, and in many of those the push-pull of girl’s sexuality played a key role.  Sexuality has become, Orenstein asserts, a “performance” like femininity itself.  Girls see that “hotness” and being sexy carries power with it, but they also observe the speed with which a girl who uses this can be taken down (as a “slut” or a “whore”).

Orenstein’s final chapter brings this set of discussions of themes of girlhood to an alarming crescendo:

It would be disingenuous to claim that Disney Princess diapers or Ty Girlz or Hannah Montana or Twilight or the latest Shakira video or a Facebook account is inherently harmful.  Each is, however, a cog in the round-the-clock, all-pervasive media machine aimed at our daughters – and at us – from womb to tomb; one that, again and again, presents femininity as performance, sexuality as performance, identity as performance, and each of those traits as available for a price.  It tells girls that how you look is more important than how you feel.  More than that, it tells them that how you look is how you feel, as well as who you are.

There are no conclusions at the end of Orenstein’s book, only a reminder that “our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so they can thrive within it.”  I closed the book and thought about it, aware of a deep unsettled feeling in my heart.  I find myself reverting back to my college women’s studies courses, becoming angry at that old edifice, The Patriarchy.  As women finally near equality in our culture (Grace simply could not believe how recently women were not allowed to vote in this country), garnering rights and achievements that were unimaginable even recently, the strictures of expectation grow more suffocating.  Is this a way to muffle our power?  A sly, subversive way to keep us secondary?

But then I ask myself: who is responsible for these expectations?  Don’t we, women, the girls of yesterday, have to take some responsibility for them?  Especially as we begin to participate in the discussions that set these kinds of agendas, don’t we start to take some ownership for them?  You can’t tell me that everybody running Disney or childhood beauty pageants or Internet companies is male.  We know that is not true.  Still, most women I know share a deep discomfort with the themes that Orenstein so provocatively explores.  How to determine where these embedded expectations and norms come from, so that we might begin to unseat them?  I don’t have answers, but I do know that awareness and thoughtful exploration such as that in Cinderella Ate My Daughter is the only place to start.

Pain engraves a deeper memory

I’ve been steering my life from my bed for three days now, with this nasty high-fever-flu-yuck.  It feels right to repost what I wrote a year ago today, when I was beginning the book that would change my life: Dani Shapiro‘s Devotion.

Incidentally, Glenda pointed out that my post last week about Rodin’s Cathedral was an echo of Albert Steiglitz’s portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands.  That portrait was the frontispiece of my college thesis, which was about Anne Sexton.  And Dani writes, in the pages of Devotion, about Anne Sexton.

Around and around we go, dancing with the same themes over and over again, welcoming new voices and bidding farewell to others … oh I am so fortunate to be a part of this dance.

Pain Engraves a Deeper Memory

I can’t put Devotion down. Run, don’t walk, to buy it. To say I’m obsessed is an understatement. I feel as though Dani Shapiro is speaking straight from my heart, albeit far more elegantly and eloquently than I ever could.  I’m about 2/3 of the way through and I have underlined at least a big chunk of most of the pages.  I love Dani’s voice, she writes about the same things that are utterly preoccupying me right now, and I just don’t even have words yet for the way this story is touching me.  I am sure this will be the first of many posts about this book.

But one passage in particular is on my mind today.  I’ve been thinking for weeks that I needed to write about how this is my blog.  Not my life.  Not my spirit.  I get a fair number of inquiries, from people in person and through email, people I know personally and people I don’t, asking if I am okay.  These people mean well, I’m sure of it.  And I am often taken aback by the question because I am more than okay.  I am well.  I realize that people are responding to what they read here, and I know this is a public forum and that of course I choose what I write and publish.

This is what I read in Devotion that brought this recent issue to mind:

“The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects: Pain engraves a deeper memory was her response.”

I love Anne Sexton, wrote my thesis in college on her, and any mention of her makes me feel instantly connected.  I’m surprised, actually, that I had never heard this sentence.  “I look for uncomplicated hymns, but love has none,” is one of my favorite quotations of both hers and all time.  This one goes on that list.  I think there is power and truth in those five words.

Yes.  I have long responded to those who, from their experience on this blog, express concern that I seem gloomy and sad that that isn’t true – it’s just that I find in the more complicated thoughts more fertile ground for exploration.  The grayer parts of my heart and head are where the interesting stuff to write about is, at least to my mind.  I am not particularly interested in reading anyone writing about how fantastic and perfect their life is, least of all me.  And, while my life is absolutely, inarguably rich and full and tremendously blessed, it’s not true that I experience every day as unmitigated sunshine.  I don’t.

I’ve written before about how I “incline towards melancholy.”  There’s no question about that.  But I also firmly believe that this tendency to feel things deeply also allows me to experience a surpassing joy that might not be available to me without the darkness.  I still don’t know if this connection is about capacity or contrast; I’m not sure it matters.  I think I lean towards capacity, though: because of the deep scars that pain has engraved into my spirit, there is a deep repository for joy, when it comes, to fill.

The introspection on this blog is definitely part of my personality, and there is nothing inauthentic here.  But the blog is also not a comprehensive representation of my life; far from it.  I understand the confusion that occurs there and know that it comes from a place of support and love.  I guess I just felt compelled to say, in the echoing voices of two of my literary idols, that my choice of topics is just because pain engraves a deeper memory.

Torn

I am delighted to be included in an upcoming anthology of essays called Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career & the Conflict of Modern Motherhood.

I’ve read a bunch of the essays, and they are smart, funny, wise, and touching.  The authors are a broad array of women who have in common that they are thoughtful, intelligent, and willing to be honest and human about what is a fundamental tension.  My dear friend Kathryn has an essay in the anthology; some of you know her hilarious and tear-jerking blog about life as an attorney and mother of two kids.  If you know her then you love her.  I do.  My other dear friend Katherine is included here, and people, she is the real deal.  The Modern Love real deal, if you know what I mean (I’m still waiting for her to kick me out of our writing group).  I’m pretty amazed, frankly, that I’m in a book with the likes of these two brilliant, beautiful Kaths.

I have written before about the struggle between family and work.  I’ve shared my deeply held belief that this is a privileged, fortunate struggle to face.  I do think, however, that the sometimes simplistically applied work and family categories can occlude what is, in my view, a deeper issue:

I sense something greater here, in the debate about work/life “balance,” a grander theme.  The topic is fraught and complicated, for sure; Lacy called it “volcanic” and I agree with her.  But the reason it’s so charged, I think, is because it probes at our innermost fears about how we are living our lives.  These fears are projected onto the scrim of professional/personal choices, but I suspect they run even deeper than that.  These fears are about the way we engage with the world and with those we love best, and about the way we spend our only true wealth: our time and our attention.

All of these themes and more are explored in Torn.  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, it’s better than Ishtar!  I promise!

Please consider pre-ordering Torn.