Christine de Pisan: Widow. Writer. Anachronistic Feminist.

A few weeks ago, on a lazy Sunday, my boyfriend and I were watching the History Channel. This is not something we tend to do, and as a self-dubbed historian I can tell you that us historians have our problems with the so-called “history” of the History Channel (often fondly referred to as “the Hitler Channel”). Nevertheless—on that Sunday, it was on. Specifically, a show about ancient Rome, and its marvels and its Caesars and its rise and its fall and all that stuff.

Through historical reenactment and cheesy voiceovers, we were introduced to Emperor Claudius and his wife Agrippina, a conniving seductress if ever there was one. We’re told that one day, poor Claudius took violently ill and died. Cheesy voiceover: “Claudius was poisoned by a mushroom flower . . . and his wife’s ambition.”

“Do they have any evidence to substantiate the claim?” I asked (the History Channel doesn’t do footnotes, after all).

“Yeah,” my boyfriend replied. “She’s a woman.”

Before you virtually slap him, note that this was said tongue-in-cheek. This is how our cynical senses of humor work.

I bring this up because, while the woman-as-seductress trope remains alive and well in many contexts—particularly in political thriller and historical biography—there was a lady who, way back in 1399, was also sick and tired of such tired and misogynist characterizations, and like me, she decided to write about it. This lady was Christine de Pisan.

Christine was born in 1364 in Venice, but grew up in the French court—her father was the court astrologer to Charles V of France. (Yes, that was a thing.) She was married at 15 to a court secretary named Etienne, had three children, and then was abruptly widowed at 25. None of this was particularly remarkable. What was remarkable was what she chose to do after that.

Most medieval women of her class would have remarried, or, if they were feeling particularly pious, gotten themselves to a nunnery. Christine did neither. To ensure the financial well-being of herself and her children, she decided to work for a living by utilizing her special talent at writing.

Here I must exclaim with delight. (Yay!) As Virginia Woolf once famously noted, there were very few women writers prior to the nineteenth century; so Christine was trailblazing a path that literally did not exist. In her career, she was patronized by the rich and powerful and produced many well-received works of poetry, practically creating what it meant to be a “woman writer” in Western Europe, and was able to provide for a family without a man to help her.

What’s more, her works are considered to be some of the earliest written examples of feminism. Now, it’s a bit anachronistic to ascribe the word “feminist” to anyone living in the Middle Ages. That said, Christine’s work impressively promoted women’s value to society and combated the “misogyny” of her male writer counterparts.

For one thing, she practically invented the whole "Your Historical Woman of the Day" concept (though I will retain all rights and privileges to said concept, thankyouverymuch): In Le Livre de la cité des dames (“The Book of the City of Ladies," also the best book title ever), written in 1405, Christine recorded examples of historical women who were known for heroism and virtue, who could serve as inspiration for women in her own time.  And in Le Livre des trios vertus (“The Book of the Three Virtues”), she discussed women’s role in medieval society and provided moral instruction for women from all walks of life.

As mentioned earlier, Christine was perturbed by certain depictions of the archetypal Woman in medieval (male) writings, particularly one satirical Roman de la Rose by Jean de Meun, which portrayed all women as conniving seductresses. So she directly engaged ol’ Jean in her critique L’Epistre au Dieu d’Amours (“Letter to the God of Loves”) and defended women against such misleading attacks. Her view was that, contrary to popular belief, women were not simply temptresses designed to lead men astray; rather, they  were valuable members of society who, if allowed to receive the same education as men, had the potential to be just as accomplished and successful.

Many feminist scholars have cautioned against holding up Christine as some kind of Light of Early Feminism. Obviously, her thinking was still constrained by medieval understandings of society and the world, and she later in part recanted her more “radical” early attacks of misogyny. And, in the end, she did get herself to a nunnery, where she remained until her death around 1430. However, her accomplishments make her quite the iconoclastic figure—a woman who made her own career in writing, who earned widespread acclaim from kings and nobles (including Henry IV of England), who promoted the place of women in a society far more rigidly patriarchal than the one we know today, whose books continue to be remembered. She even wrote an account of Joan of Arc’s early victories; and it was written during Joan’s lifetime, the only such account in existence.

Not to get cheesy, but I’m pretty sure Christine and I are sisters across the ages.

Looking Forward: Girls.

“This might have been a mistake,” I said. My friend Lily, head cocked in sympathy, nodded. “Definitely a mistake.”

It was a cold night, and we’d just met friends at a favorite bar in our neighborhood. Short on cash, I’d ordered the $4 well whiskey, neat. Its smell alone made my eyes water. And I’d been given a generous pour.

“Brave girl,” someone remarked as I held the tumbler to my lips.

“Would you like me to tell you a story, to distract you while you drink that?” said Lily.

“Yes,” I replied. “Please.”

“Okay,” she said. “This is a story about unicorns.”

And she began.

---

People say that when you find true love, you know. Though I’ve experienced this with the opposite sex before, the same phenomenon has occurred---delightfully, consistently, and much more often---in many of my friendships with girls, as well.

For instance, Kimiko, one of my closest childhood friends, shared a bus seat with me on a field trip in the third grade. We debated afterschool snacks, discussed the size and cuteness of our respective pet rabbits, played MASH---and subsequently spent the next seven years together, so close that we considered ourselves one unit (our combined name was Shimiko). When I moved to LA at fifteen, we traded photo albums, and put together a dictionary of terms we’d created over the course of our friendship---code names for crushes, words only the two of us understood.

And that was just it---there was much about the two of us that only we understood. In so many ways, we spoke the same language.

I knew the same was true of Maya, a high school friend and future Brooklyn roommate, when we spent an afternoon in the parking lot at our school, seated on the roof of her car. We were navigating what I remember to be a very complicated situation involving prom dates. My angst about the situation was almost certainly disproportionate to the circumstances at hand; still, she understood.

And when Linda, my roommate all four years of college, spent countless nights in with me while all of our friends went out, I knew I’d made a special kind of friend---one you know you never have to work to impress, one who understands your history as well as they do their own. Already a sister to six, she’s filled that role for me, as well. She’s family, a touchstone. She feels like home.

I met Lily only months ago, late in the summer, in East River Park. She and another college roommate of mine, Megan, were spending an afternoon sitting in the grass, talking, getting sunburns. We’d all recently been through break-ups; we were heavy-hearted. But that gave us something to talk about. And in the weeks and months that followed, I found so much of the happiness I needed in meeting Megan to do work at coffee shops, in going on late-night adventures with Lily. (When she told me the story about unicorns at the bar, I knew she was someone whose quirkiness I understood.)

Though I’m loathe to make a Sex and the City reference here (much internal deliberation happened before I wrote this paragraph), I can’t help but think of a scene that occurs toward series’ end---it’s one that always makes me feel like weeping. In it, Carrie, set to embark on her ill-fated journey to Paris, says to her friends, “What if I never met you?”

---

Megan and I had dinner together just last weekend and reflected on the past few months over steaming bowls of soup. “My year took a turn the day I came to see you in the park,” I said. “You were lonely in the same way I was. You understood.”

You understood.

What a staggering gift, to have friends who say, “I know what you mean.” Who make you laugh. Who appreciate, and relate to, and love  your eccentricities.

This is what it means to know someone.

It’s what it means to understand.

Since You Brought It Up: Down Not Out

By Ashely Schneider I keep meaning to jot down some thoughts on my personal experience with unemployment. Let’s just say, it’s far from glamorous which is probably why I’ve avoided this for so long.

Sure, it’s nice to take a morning yoga class or grocery shop at noon. But most days, I’m braless and in sweatpants until an errand forces me to slip on jeans and spruce up with a little blush. Hey, you never know who you’ll see in the produce section.

I’ve been challenged on a daily basis, constantly questioning my skills, expertise, and self worth. That’s what a job search will do to you! I’ve also become my own worst critic.

I try to keep an upbeat, optimistic attitude. I’m constantly asked how my search is going. You never want to be that friend who mopes and complains too much so I usually respond with something like, it’s tough! Or, the process is brutal! Always with an exclamation point. Seems a bit more cheery, right?

I recognize that things could be much worse. There could be kids to feed or a mortgage to pay. Right now, I’m feeling grateful for the support of friends and family who are rooting and praying for me, as well as wishing me the very best. I mean it when I say it helps.

This month, I’ve decided to revamp my attitude and perspective. More action, less stagnancy. I’m using these next few weeks to create a little routine in my current structure-less state. I’ve set some small tangible goals like run twice a week, volunteer, send handwritten letters. I’ve also decided to strive for optimism and hope. Mind over matter, right? Fake it til you make it. I can already tell that my new mindset is helping and my overall state of being is improving. I do hope it carries over into the new year, and with it, good news.

***

Holiday cards of grinning families! Music proclaiming it’s the “most wonderful time of the year!” Nonstop cocktail chatter about how fantastically the last year treated each and every person at the party! If anything in your life feels less than perfect, the holiday season makes you want to cram it in a box, tie a lovely bow around it—and then instagram it.

We believe we can find more joy in the holidays by squashing the little voice that tells us bright spirits and good cheer are only possible when we’re perfect.  The magic of this time of year comes from connecting with loved ones near and far, reminding ourselves of all we have to be thankful for, and . . . covering everything in twinkling white lights. 

We’re embracing our present lives—foibles and all—so we can spend more time drinking egg nog and less time worrying we’re not good enough. Imperfect is the new black; wear it with pride.

Want to lighten your load? Add your story to the “Since You Brought It Up” series by submitting it here.

When the universe winks [or: Wagon Wheel]

There have been times in my work with communities affected by conflict when I have longed for a stronger belief in a supernatural deity. I have been compelled to pray, to hope that someone out there is listening. At this stage in my life, my imagination of that "supernatural something" that resides outside of ourselves does not take the form of a deity. Rather, my belief can be summarized in the following phrase: The universe is winking.

You know the moments I am describing: In the face of adversity or great irony, of what seems like undue strife, something happens to reassure you that you are not alone, that the world is not laughing in your face, that life unfolds on a continuum and the narratives of joy and heartbreak exist side-by-side. And, if recent experiences with fragility have been any indication, the universe winking at me comes with a soundtrack---Old Crow Medicine Show's "Wagon Wheel."

The song appeared in my life during a relationship that may never have happened had it not been for grief, fragility, and emotional confusion in the first place. As Joan Didion advises in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, "we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not" and, in that vein, I need to extend compassion to the self who thought she could drown grief in affection and be blind to the traits that would make the affection shallow and the grief immutable. He hated my music. That should have been a clue. Anyone who hates the company that Cat Power and Brandi Carlile and Rachael Yamagata keep, anyone who cannot reconcile himself with my army of women singer-songwriters, is dancing on a different sheet of music than the one in which I live. So he made me a CD. [Pause for nostalgic indulgence in the quaintness of making someone a CD, not a Spotify playlist.]

Of all the tracks on it, Wagon Wheel jumped out. Even after that budding relationship withered, Wagon Wheel lingered as the soundtrack to a segment of life for which I never quite found the words.

***

Second day in Cairo. I met the girls on an email list of foreigners in Egypt looking for roommates. I met the boys on a sailboat on the Nile the night before, on my first day. Coincidentally also the first day of Ramadan, the first of many firsts. We are in the boys' apartment and I am alive with the exhilaration of belonging, with the relief of how quickly one belongs when she is a foreigner among foreigners, a stranger among strangers---all of whom wish to throw out that label and slide over to best friends already. One of the boys picks up his guitar. Wagon Wheel is the first song he plays.

That song came with me to Uganda... Sudan... Colombia... Guatemala... Jerusalem. "Points South" of all that. Now Boston. So did the guitar. And so did the boy.

***

Katherine's birthday party. Budding friendship, united by parallel narratives which---defying all laws of geometry---intersect as they unravel. The kind of friendship that fills your sails with gratitude, that makes you feel like the universe can wink simply by putting someone in your path. Her friend brought his guitar. Barenaked Ladies. The Beatles. Leaving on a jet plane. Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley.

And then, inevitably, Wagon Wheel. A room full of people singing the words along. The universe winked extra pointedly that night, to make sure I knew I was home.

***

My love for the song is immaterial. This is not the kind of song that one feels was written for her. I have never been to Johnson City, Tennessee, never picked a banjo. This is not a lyrical attachment. Rather, Wagon Wheel is my clue to pay attention. It is the way that I know that, even if I am trudging through the mud right now, somewhere out there the universe is winking. It is the music that plays, almost invisibly, to make sure that I am listening.

Traveling With Parents

When I was eighteen and spending several years backpacking through South America and Europe, having a parent come to visit meant two things: hot showers and all the food I could eat.  Having left to travel abroad straight from my parent’s house, I had little to no concept of what real world costs were:  should a loaf of bread cost one dollar or five?  Was twenty bucks a reasonable price for a bunk in a hostel with bed bugs (all the better to combat the loneliness with, my dear!) and moldy showers?  Was it worth it to buy the $100 train ticket, or was it a far better value to hitch rides for free? I combatted these questions by spending next to no money at all, so that, when my dad came to visit me in Italy, I’d lost five pounds and, although I’d been through the bulk of Eastern Europe, I’d been to zero museums, palaces, or any other cultural (read = costly) attractions.  My dad fed me.  He paid for hotels that had fluffy beds and towels (towels!).  When he left, he made sure I had a train ticket to my next destination, and a clean, safe hostel booked for when I arrived.  My mother, when she came to visit me in Greece several months later, did the exact same thing.  They weren’t my fellow travelers, merely versions of the same roles they filled back home.  The environment had changed, but the relationship had not.

I recently went back to Italy, with my mother this time.  The trip started as an act of parental grace:  I was lonely and sick of the constant drizzle of England, and she offered to take a trip with me to bolster my spirits.  After we met at the airport though, the roles shifted.  Now twenty-five, with years of not only traveling but life under my belt, I found myself figuring out train routes.  I scoured the internet for the best hotels for our purposes; I directed us to the thinnest, richest pizza in Naples.  The change in roles, though, was most evident on the trains, in the hotels, at the restaurant over the pizza:  that is, in the conversations we had.  No longer adult to child, we spoke about online dating, about Israel and Palestine, about sex and cholesterol and Renaissance art.  In short, we spoke about life.

This relationship transition can, of course, happen anywhere.  Often referenced when talking about traveling with a significant other, though, being in a foreign country tends to magnify relationships, showing their boons and their flaws and mostly their shape, as a whole, crystalized and highlighted in a way that’s impossible for either party to ignore. This was the longest amount of time I’ve spent alone with my mother since I was thirteen years old.  It was the most time we had to talk, to work through decisions, to deal with things going awry, and simply, just to be.  I found out more about who I am, who my mother is, and who we are together.  My mother is a woman who has a wicked sense of humor.  She’s a woman who snores, and who shares my (lack of) interest in the multitude of religious art that papers every Italian surface (As we walked under a giant Jesus in the Pitti Palace:  “Alright, alright.  We get it already!”).  She’s skilled at bringing smiles to the faces of strangers and equally skilled at devouring an entire pizza.

In your twenties, it’s hard to redefine your relationship with your parents, the people who wiped poop from your bare bum and taught you how to read and write.  And while everyone’s relationship ends up in a different place---I have one friend who goes prowling for hot guys with her mom, and another who can’t even disclose that she drinks---traveling can help figure out where to start.  And that’s worth more than any hot shower.

Live to Eat

My mom used to say that there are two types of people, with a very important distinction to be made between them. There are those who eat to live and those who live to eat. We, as a family, have always fallen into the latter category. Growing up, dinnertime was serious business. We gathered night after night, with a properly set table, a square meal, and post-dinner coffee (for the adults, of course). Friends who joined us were always amazed that we didn’t just eat and run, but seemingly enjoyed the process. At the top of her game, my mom was a great cook. We have the photographic evidence from birthdays past to suggest she was capable of extraordinary baking feats (homemade Big Bird cakes, for instance) and family members talk about the elegant dinner parties my mom threw when my parents were first married, but really, her specialty ran closer to the classics---the dishes that don’t require a recipe. Our cousin summed this up perfectly, joking that, “A recipe calls for an egg and Janice uses a marshmallow.” Pot roast, linguini and clam sauce, a perfect spiral ham, roasted chicken, escarole and beans, Sunday sauce: this was my mom’s food. Unfussy, with no pretenses---the kind of food that invited you to stay awhile.  She went to the public market in Rochester, not because it was trendy to eat seasonal and local, but because it was cheaper. “Everything’s a dollar!” she would exclaim, arms full of tomatoes, cucumbers, and romaine lettuce in the summer. As we grew up, and inevitably thought we knew everything, my sisters and I rolled our eyes at the predictability of her cooking. If she hosted a brunch, you were guaranteed an egg strata, ham, and a make-ahead French toast casserole. For summer barbeques by the pool, you could count on potato salad, macaroni salad with tuna, and a huge bowl of melon.

My mom was the only person I knew who could pull together a meal for 15 with no advance notice. She kept a bag or two of chips in the pantry, and veggies, dips and cheese in the fridge, ready to be pulled out on a moment’s notice if friends or family swung by unannounced. One Christmas not too long ago, our group doubled hours before the beef tenderloin, double baked potatoes, and salad were to hit the table, and I can tell you definitively that we still had leftovers. To this day, if you ask a family member or friend about my mom’s cooking, they will most certainly tell you about their favorite dish, but more importantly, about the memories that the food conjures. Sara will tell you about coming over on Thanksgiving or Christmas and digging the remaining spinach dip out of the bread bowl that my mom saved just for her. She’ll tell you how even with a house full of people, my mom would stop and really talk to her. My friend Meg will tell you about the taco turkey chili my mom had waiting for us on several occasions, when we sought refuge in Rochester after a particularly long week of college. She’ll tell you how my mom always made her feel at home, even in the handful of times she was there. Nikki will most definitely tell you about my mom’s clam sauce, and how she didn’t even need to ask for it when she came to Rochester. It was waiting, along with a pot of coffee after dinner, to give us all an excuse to sit and chat even longer. For me, it’s zucchini sautéed in tomatoes (with a heaping scoop of parmesan) and sausage and potatoes; the food that reminds me of sitting at the table on a Tuesday night---in other words, the ordinary food. It's my mom's salad, generously dressed with oil, red wine vinegar and Marie's blue cheese dressing, begging to be eaten directly out of the bowl. It's the recipes that also remind me so much of my grandma: the pizzelles made at Christmas time and the Easter bread---laced with anise and lightly frosted---that my mom hand delivered to eagerly waiting friends and family each year.

As the years passed, my mom’s enthusiasm for cooking waned. On more than one occasion in recent years, my mom and dad were known to have toast for dinner. “You can’t eat toast for dinner!” my sisters and I argued, but my mom didn’t care. She told us that after forty years of marriage, she was done cooking---except for Sunday dinners and holidays, of course. My sister and brother-in-law took over Thanksgiving hosting duties in the past few years, but as we realized this year, my mom was still the heart and soul of the operation. This was the first year my mom didn’t buy the turkey and bring it over on Wednesday night, completely dressed, with explicit directions about timing and temperatures. This was the first year she didn’t make her mashed potatoes---made ahead of time and frozen (controversial until you actually taste said potatoes)---her stuffing or her butternut squash. This was the first year she didn’t save the wishbone from the turkey, to make a wish on. And so this year we did the only thing we knew how to do without her: we made her food. My sisters and cousins spent the weekend before Thanksgiving mashing forty pounds of potatoes and wrangling with a number of unyielding squash.  Weeks before Thanksgiving, we panicked, not remembering the recipe for my mom’s stuffing. Katie, in Australia, came to the rescue. My mom’s stuffing has been a mainstay in her Australian Thanksgiving for years; her friends actually refer to it as Mrs. Brady’s stuffing. We sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, surrounded by my mom’s food and the family and friends who have sustained us over the last year. A close family friend said grace and lit a candle for my mom. Danielle lost both her parents in the last decade, and told us it was my mom who allowed her to appreciate Thanksgiving again.

My mom’s legacy is everywhere, but perhaps nowhere as clearly as at the dinner table. Whether it’s on fine china at Thanksgiving or pizza on paper plates, we continue to break bread together, sharing our food and our stories as we always have. It’s not just food, after all, it’s family.

For the rest of us

So, here we are again.  The Holiday Season is upon us.  Depending upon who are you are, this either means a great deal or almost nothing at all.  Whatever your traditions or affiliations (cultural, religious or otherwise), there is no escaping the Holiday Industrial Complex in this country.  Every year I struggle with the very mixed emotions that accompany my identity as a secular, Jewish but nostalgic and kind of sappy person.  I yearn for rituals and moments in which to touch base with family, consider particular stories/lessons about humanity, make special foods.  This year, as the matriarch in a new family, I am confronted with decisions about how to integrate “Holiday” traditions into our lives, for our daughter’s sake. Although in 2012, we say “Holiday” in reference to things that might take place in December (to include Chanukah, Kwanzaa), what we really mean is Christmas.  All jokes referring to paranoid conservatives spouting off about the "War on Christmas" or the "War on Jesus" aside . . . the popularization of Chanukah and Kwanzaa have always been simply a response to Christmas (and a pretty woeful one, at that).  Let’s face facts: Christmas will never not be a really huge deal and one that takes the cake.  Christmas is so embedded in our culture, our calendar, our winter and so beloved, there is no extricating it.  Beyond the gifts, music, food and décor, Christmas is also a Holiday onto which everyone’s personal psychodrama is superimposed.  The way in which families gather or don’t, the traditions people had as children or didn’t . . . the powerful dynamics at play during this time of year call up some of the deepest feelings of joy or longing for many Americans.  Oh and also, reverent people consider it holy and significant.

I grew up in a home that was very culturally Jewish, but didn’t really give much credence to Holidays, per se.  We typically belonged to a Synagogue, but mostly only went on the High Holidays, which, incidentally do not include Chanukah.  For Jews, the major deals are Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (New Year and Memorial Day-ish).  Tragically, our High Holidays don’t involve gifts.  And let's be honest---they aren't really all that fun.  Rosh Hashanah tries hard with apples and honey and talk of renewal, but is sort of a downer what with the stern warnings about being inscribed in the Book of Life.  Even the dressed up version of Chanukah has un-sing-able songs in minor keys and potato pancakes (?!).

Chanukah was a bit of an afterthought in my house and my parents often grumbled about how it is actually is a very minor Holiday, bastardized in this country to compete with Christmas.  As far as I know, we are the only culture in which Chanukah is celebrated with gifts.  The Americanized version of Chanukah can often look like a “Jewish Christmas,” with crass commercialism at the core.  Despite my profound yearnings as a child, my parents weren’t buying it or buying it, although some years they managed to go beyond the candle lighting and chocolate coins to bestow socks, pajamas or books.

While, as an adult, I can totally respect their philosophical stand on this front, as a child, I desperately wanted what I saw most other kids having---not just an embarrassment of gifts, but a whole season devoted to them.  I would spend time at friends' houses during December and watch as the tree was trimmed and all the rooms filled up with sparkling trinkets, bright parcels and the fragrance of cinnamon sticks.  The promise of this sacred time when everything got so cozy and everyone gathered together from far and wide (particularly salient for me, as my siblings were much older and lived all over the world) felt impossible to resist.

I also knew people growing up who were Jewish, but just threw in the towel and celebrated Christmas.  This was always sort of sad to me.  It spoke to two unfortunate realities---that Jews in this country feel so overwhelmed by the power of Christmas that they feel compelled to participate in another religion's Holiday and/or they feel their children can't tolerate December without the Bacchanalia.  Meanwhile, I totally get this.  I won't mince words, Christmas wins.  It is friggin’ awesome for kids.  And let’s not even consider families in which there is only one Jewish parent and they “celebrate both.”  I SAY AGAIN, CHRISTMAS WINS.

So how to make sense of it all now?  The fact is that my parents were consistently generous throughout the year with their love, their time and many of the material things we desired.  Just because I didn't score a payload at Christmas, doesn't mean I didn't have a wealth of toys and games.  I had way more than I needed, as so many of us did.  And despite my desire to be like the other kids, I never had to watch my parents grow anxious or irritable about shopping for a bounty of gifts or spending money they didn't have.  They also made it clear that it was highly inappropriate to develop a sense of entitlement about gifts, especially as a child.  These lessons were swallowed hard, but remain valuable.

I think this is what want for Isadora, ultimately.  I hope she feels loved beyond belief and that she lives with a sense of joy throughout the year.  I hope that she relishes how our family is different and feels confident and comfortable with who we are.  I hope we celebrate important milestones with good cheer and delicious foods in each season and take great pains to be together with extended family as often as possible.  I also plan to spoil her with frivolous gift items and possibly spend more money than is reasonable on things like a long sleeve t-shirt with a bulldog silkscreen.  And certainly most important, I intend to teach her about giving to others and being of service because we have so much relative to most.

(Images: Marco Ghitti via Flickr)

Gaia & Me

Two weeks have passed. My best friend suggested me to try to put my sorrow into words. I am still not sure this is a good idea---I opened this word document and the white page was staring at me with this blank and ominous look. CLOSE ME. GO BACK TO YOUR COUCH. Some time ago I wrote Elisabeth and Miya and said I couldn’t handle a new piece for my column. I lost a family member on November 10^th, my beloved yellow Labrador Gaia. After 11 years and 4 months together in this world, she is no longer with me. I have been feeling too empty to do anything but work. I still can’t think of much more. I go to the supermarket---that’s a big thing!---I go out for walks over the weekend, and every morning I drive to Milan to edit new pages of some book and discuss publishing options with my boss. I do my best at the office---I smile, break jokes, try to concentrate. And when I cross the exit doors in the evening, tears start to stream down my face. I am going home, yes, but my home is empty now. No hugs. No kisses on that big black nose. The immensity of this loss literally broke my heart. Elisabeth sent me two pieces written by Leigh Anna Thompson on The Equals Record some time ago. I could barely read Leigh Anna’s articles, so I did not finish the story of her loss of Max and Samus. It was too painful, too real and moving. But the few words I was able to read helped me to realize a very important thing---I AM NOT ALONE. There are many other people who consider animals our best companions and cry the most burning tears when our babies leave us.

Because Gaia was my happy baby. I still remember the first drive home in the car with her. I wanted to hold her in my arms, but my two-month-old yellow lab was already too playful to stay still. She spent her first night sleeping close to my bed. She was not alone, she had a new family, who was ready to give her all the love in this world.

I fell in love with her sooner than she fell in love with me. It’s not easy to share my feelings in a language that is not my native one, but my love was pure, wholehearted. She was the first very innocent being in my life. No words were needed, only positive things were shared. Long walks, relaxation, playing, hugs, vacations, afternoons on the couch, dinners with her staring at me and craving for food. And now all the gestures and habits, those little things that have made me happy for so long, are gone.

I was on vacation with my husband (Halloween weekend) in the south of Italy when my mom texted me. I HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT TO TELL YOU, CAN I CALL? I understood right away. Yes, mothers of dogs have the sixth sense, too. Mamma told me Gaia had a severe internal bleeding, and there was an 80% chance she wasn’t going to survive the night. Dany and I ran back to the hotel, picked our luggage. My wonderful husband drove all night, 9 hours straight, while I couldn’t stop crying. I felt panic. Pure and simple panic. Time was running, and there was an entire country to cross from South to North. 600 miles. I arrived at the animal clinic Sunday morning at 7 AM. I knew my Gaia was inside there, and I wanted to see her. The vet suggested me to give her a few more hours and see if she would recover. The emotion of seeing me could be dangerous. I was confused. Just a few hours before they said she was dying, and now she seemed to feel better? I was happy and worried sick at the same time. So I waited, my heart full of mixed feelings. Could she survive? Could she come back home, perhaps? And she did. My Gaia was so strong to recover in the space of a few hours. Someone heard my prayers. OK, she was weak, had to take medicines, and have a CAT scan. But in the meantime, she could come home with me and rest. On Monday, the CAT scan broke my dreams once again---the liver was in a terminal condition. Tumor? Leukemia? Still a few days and the results of the tests would come. But at the same time, given her state, few days seemed to be all we had left.

I am a copy editor. The good thing about my job is that I can work from home, too, if I need. And how could I even think of going to the office when my Gaia apparently had such a short time left? So I sat close to her in the living room for the following days, wondering for how long the situation would last, and hoping the answer was forever. It was a long week of tears and hope, days when I couldn’t eat or sleep. Gaia did not seem to feel pain, she was weak, and very sweet. She was all hugs and kisses. She must have thought I was going nuts, breaking into tears every now and then.

On Saturday morning, November 10^th, it was Gaia who told me that she couldn’t resist anymore. I knew it. I just felt that Friday night was the last night. So in the morning I looked into her eyes, and she was asking me to let her go. I knew what I had to do. I had discussed it with my family and we did not want her to suffer, so we called the vet. I don’t want to share her last hours. They were the worst of my life. I wanted to hold her little and innocent soul---if I couldn’t keep her body with us, her soul had to remain with me forever. I could not stand or talk. I wanted to live forever in those hours. I prayed to God. And then I prayed the Sun, and the Moon, asking them to stop. Why not? Please, please, please, I need more time. And I squeezed my eyes as if this could make my prayers sound more pure. I had recently read Mitch Albom’s “The Time Keeper”. So I asked to become Father Time, to have an hourglass in my hands and be able to stop the time. But it didn’t work.

So now I am alone. Gaia lives in my heart. She is still in the house somehow---my mother still worries to keep the food out of her reach. She tells me she expects to see Gaia sleeping on her couch, or stealing an apple in the kitchen. But no, she is gone.

11 years and 4 months. In this time I graduated, I got my masters degree, I went to America and taught Italian for 3 years (oh, 3 years flying back to Italy every chance I got to make up for the time we were losing), I got married, and I started a new career in publishing. Eleven years of big changes, with my best friend/sister/daughter/companion Gaia always in our big family house, filling it with her presence. Always here close to us. Man, all those moments I gave for granted. Is it possible to have no regrets at all? I don’t think so, but I’m sure my girl was happy. She was a human, in a family of humans. And she was the most cheerful and spontaneous and loyal in the big house.

Many friends, dogs’ parents like me, told me she must be in some other place now, happy and not feeling any pain. I believe this is true, and feel her presence in the backyard when I open the windows in the morning. I believe right now she is here in my living room, in that corner where she used to sit. She is looking at me with those big sweet hazelnut eyes. She smiles. This gives me solace, for a while. And then I suddenly break, I cry like a baby because I miss her so badly. I physically miss her, I miss the fact that every day she was teaching me something new and precious.

And I find myself wondering if my sorrow will ever take another shape, the shape of the Sun, or the Moon maybe? The Sun will shine, warming me with her memory every day. And the Moon will shine, too, watching over me while I sleep and dream---I dream of her with me in the old days, and I dream of the new days that will come, in some other place, space and time.

I love you, Gaia.

Thank you all for reading this.

Looking Forward: What I Need.

I ate Thanksgiving dinner this year perched on an ottoman, the kind that’s hollow on the inside and meant to be filled with throw blankets and extra cushion covers. This one, much to my glee, contained my roommate’s collection of high school CDs – The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Strokes, and, best of all, a blink-182 cassette tape---the glory of which was revealed after I toppled off the ottoman’s lopsided lid while attempting to pass a tray of bread across the table. I wasn’t the only one who occupied improvised seating. Five-foot-tall Linda, who I met my first day of college, balanced on a disproportionately tall barstool; Lily and Megan, who dressed up as rats with me this Halloween, shared a wooden bench. My roommate Natalie’s brother, Andrew, and his friend, Dave---who I’d met for the first time that day---found seats on folding chairs borrowed from my brother; and Charlie, one of my oldest family friends, sat on a restaurant-style leather chair that Natalie had lugged home from her mother’s apartment in Bensonhurst.

To accommodate our many guests, we placed an old desk---which normally holds turntables and a hodgepodge of vinyl records---at the end of our dining table (mismatched tablecloths covered the dings and scratches). A lack of proper silverware forced us to get creative, using spatulas as serving spoons, ladles as ice cream scoops. And the food. There were two stuffings. Six pies. Enough cranberry sauce to feed a football team. This is what happens, I learned, when a group of fourteen collaborates on dinner.

It was the first Thanksgiving I’ve ever hosted (or co-hosted, as it were), and the first I’ve spent away from family. With our ever-fluctuating guest list, disorganized menu, and relative lack of space, I wondered beforehand whether the night would end up feeling like a real Thanksgiving.

But, as you probably can guess, it did.

My dad mentioned to me today that he can’t think of a past Thanksgiving or Christmas or birthday that wasn’t anything other than wonderful. Getting in the spirit of celebration---with family and friends and food---always makes those days special.

All of these things were there last week, of course.

And there was more. A candlelit apartment in a city I love. Great music. New friends, and ones I know I’ll keep for the rest of my life. I’ve realized this year, more than ever, that they’ve become family to me.

After dinner, we pushed the tables aside and arranged our chairs in the living room. “Everyone say what they’re thankful for,” someone suggested. Most everyone named family and friends, but there were more inventive contributions, too: 24-hour bodegas, neighborhood juice bars, bike rides through Brooklyn. (For the record, blog friends, one of the things I named was you.)

But Warren, another college friend in attendance, kept it simple and said it best: “I’m thankful to have what I need.”

I am, too. And I'm thankful to know that what I need isn't complicated, isn't out-of-reach. It's here.

Effortless

The sky overhead is grey and glowering, locked with low-hanging clouds that make the earth feel squeezed. The air is cool, breezy, hovering between autumn and winter. I walk with my hands in my pockets, my wool coat held closed with the only button that will still reach over my pregnant belly. I am never sure whether I like these long solitary walks or not. I love the nip of the air, the feel of the wind on my face, the wild scent of raindrops as the light drizzle hits the pavement below me. I love the time alone with my thoughts, the feeling of escape, the openness of the world around me. Still, there is something monotonous about the churning of my legs, one step after another, the same motion repeated again and again. They don’t feel tired today, my legs. After my first block, I decide to keep walking, turning away from my house and widening my path.

The wind picks up as I walk up a leaf-carpeted sidewalk; it snatches the leaves into the air and for several long seconds, I am carried along in a rush of dry leaves, swirling around my feet and legs with a sound like water. It is a magical moment, a good-to-be-alive moment, and I find myself rejoicing in the day—in the wind, in the leaves, in the strength of my own body.

When I get home and plot my meandering route into the computer, I am shocked to find that I walked two miles easily. Effortlessly, I think, remembering the way my legs kept going, the way my breathing was steady. I am overwhelmed by some emotion I cannot name. At the beginning of this year, I couldn’t walk one mile without it feeling like a monumental effort, without coming home afterward and collapsing onto the couch.

This is my year of miracles, my year to make medical history. Eight months ago I started a brand-new medication for cystic fibrosis, groundbreaking in its abilities, but still only available to handful of CF patients with a relatively rare mutation—a mutation I happen to have. In these eight months, I have watched my life slowly change in ways more dramatic than any I could have imagined. I have walked further. I have felt better. I have seen my lung function go up instead of down, and gone for two-thirds of a year without ever feeling the need for a hospital admission. After a year and a half of infertility, I find myself pregnant with a miracle baby and breezing through the pregnancy without any serious health concerns.

These are the kinds of things that you never expect, with a terminal illness. You don’t expect to get the chance to travel back in time, to reach a place of better health and more stability. You don’t expect to spend eight months watching as, one by one, so many of your longest-held dreams come true.

A few weeks ago, I sat in a hard plastic chair, beaming, as a stream of medical professionals came in and out of my room. Each one exclaimed over my lung function test results, my burgeoning belly, my newfound stamina, my health in general. In the lulls between visits I could hear the patient next to me—young; nearly all CF patients are young—talking with his nurse as she replaced his oxygen canister. They wondered aloud if he was up to the walk down to the cafeteria, or if his mother should take him in a wheelchair.

The cafeteria is almost directly below the pulmonary clinic, perhaps five hundred steps.

That afternoon lingered with me for days, and I found a familiar question returning again and again to my heart. Why me? I wondered. Only this time I was on the other side of the fence: I was not asking Why me? Why is my situation so much harder?

Instead, I was asking Why me? Why am I so blessed?

These eight months have brought with them a wealth of complicated emotions. I feel consumed with joy each day, overwhelmed by my own fortune. Every day I walk further. Every day I feel my tiny daughter move inside me, a sensation so magical it brings tears to my eyes, remembering all of the days I thought I would never feel this.

Every day, I am grateful.

But there is frustration, too, and guilt. While I have been experiencing a year of miracles, it seems like nearly all of my friends with cystic fibrosis have been locked in a year of trials. Today, when I get home from my two-mile walk, I learn that one of my very oldest and dearest friends has spent the week in critical condition, unable to breathe on her own.

Like that afternoon in the doctor’s office, it is a stark contrast.

I know that all of my friends are thrilled for me in my good fortune, and I am certainly grateful for it, incredibly so. I wouldn’t trade this year for anything; not only has it changed my day-to-day standard of living, but it has flung open so many doors to the future, exploded all of the barriers that used to exist. In a community of disease where the average life expectancy has yet to hit forty, suddenly old age doesn’t seem like such an impossible achievement. But still, I wish that I could share it, could watch all of the people I love experience similar miracles.

I cannot, of course—not yet, at least, not until science has come a little further and there are miracle medications for more common CF mutations. All I can do, for now, is to make sure that I never take this new life for granted.

And so, now, I pull back on my shoes and re-button that single button on my coat, and go outside again. I am not ready to be done walking yet, not ready to be done relishing the feel of the wind on my face and the strength in my body.

Wanting to hold on, for just a little longer, to that feeling of effortlessness.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Emily Matchar is the author of Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity (Simon & Schuster, May 2013), which explores our current mania for "new domesticity"---the knitting, the Etsy-ing, the backyard chicken-keeping, etc. etc. She writes about culture, work, food and women's issues for places like The Washington Post, Salon, Men's Journal, the BBC and others. She lives in Hong Kong and in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

How to Be a Woman by Caitlin Moran I just finished this, inhaling it in, like, 15 minutes. Moran, a British music journalist and columnist, is 1,000 times cooler and more hilarious and foul-mouthed than your most cool, hilarious and foul-mouthed friend. She gets drunk with Lady Gaga. She talks openly about her abortion. She goes to strip clubs and pronounces them bullshit. She rails against things like bikini waxing and butt-floss thongs without giving a damn about whether she sounds like a “strident feminist.” She IS a strident feminist. We should all be strident feminists. In Moran’s world, there’s a lot less guilt and uncomfortable underwear, and a lot more rock n’ roll and cake and tickle fights with your kids.

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman Shulman is a feminist activist who achieved fame/notoriety for publishing her 1969 “A Marriage Agreement,” a contract formally dividing up housework between her and her husband. She’s been mocked for it ever since by people who think it’s petty or humorless, but given that we still don’t have a fair divide of housework in this country, she clearly had a major point. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is a novel, a very 1970s novel raging with anger at possessive husbands and no-good lovers and rapey high school football players, full of lines like “Even in a separate bed I would be trapped under his ego.” It’s a bit hard going, but makes me feel really good that a lot’s changed in the past 40 years when it comes to male-female relationships. I interviewed Shulman about housework and gender for my book (Homeward Bound: The New Cult of Domesticity, out this coming spring), and she’s a real trip (to borrow piece of 1970s vocab). “We didn’t want to abolish housework!” she cried. “We just wanted men to do their fair share.”

O, The Oprah Magazine I’m not always a big fan of Oprah. I mean, she’s an amazing woman and entrepreneur, but her fondness for pseudoscience and “The Secret”-type power of positive thought crap is idiotic. Still, I love her magazine. I’ve never been able to read aspirational glossies like Vogue or Vanity Fair without feeling terrible about myself (why don’t I have a “great friend” who is a Duchess? Why don’t I have “the new wool pant” in my wardrobe? Why aren’t I at a book party in Brooklyn fending off advances from Salman Rushdie?). Oprah understands that everyone’s life is messed up in some way or another, and her magazine’s all about working with what you’ve got and having a good attitude. My punkrock 14-year-old self would kill me for admitting this, but I eat it up. My mom just sent me her back issues of O along with a bunch of Halloween candy, and I’ve been enjoying both in the bathtub. So sue me.

The Passage by Justin Cronin Ever since I picked up Steven King’s Carrie as a morbid and bookish 9-year-old, I’ve loved literary horror novels. Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic? Even better. As an adult, I’ve branched out into mystery (Tana French, Kate Atkinson and Gillian Flynn are some of my recent favorites), largely because a lot of horror novels are real shite in the prose style department. So I was super-psyched to start The Passage, as Cronin comes from the non-genre side of things and really knows how to write. I’m 23 percent of the way through the story (yes, I usually read on my Kindle), a tale a government-sponsored trial of a modern-day vampire virus that goes out of control (naturally). There’s a rogue FBI agent with a broken heart. There’s a little girl with superpowers. There’s a nun from Sierra Leone who talks to God. It’s so good I’m not getting any work done.

The American Plague by Molly Caldwell Crosby Speaking of apocalyptic horror stories involving dreadful viruses: this is about a real one. The yellow fever epidemic in Memphis in 1878 sickened 20,000, killed 5,000, and turned the city into a giant morgue. Everyone with means (ie, wealthy whites) fled to the highlands, while the poor and black stayed behind. In a lot of ways, the city never recovered. As a Southerner (I grew up in Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina), I’ve always been fascinated with the ways the region is haunted by its past.

On that cheerful note, thanks for asking me to participate! I hope everyone’s eating leftover turkey and lying on the couch with a good book (or, let’s be honest, a backlog of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” episodes).

Tradition

(If you’re a fan of old movies and/or musicals like me, I wish you luck getting the soundtrack to Fiddler on The Roof out of your head.) It’s probably no surprise that with the holiday season in full swing, my thoughts have turned to Traditions: the tried and true that I love and the possibility of making new ones.  As my sister and I have grown up our holiday family traditions have evolved.  We no longer leave cookies and milk out on Christmas Eve or receive a note from Santa with a paw print from Rudolf on Christmas morning.  But we still put presents under the tree and watch our favorite holiday movies: Holiday Inn, White Christmas, and The Muppet Christmas Carol.

This year I’ll be traveling on Christmas Day and won’t make it to my parent’s house until a day later. Surprisingly, I’m not bothered; I thought that I would be disappointed to be spending the 25^th away from home.  But it’s just not true.  Instead I’m excited for a long layover in a place I’ve never been as I know that the traditions and holiday celebrations will be waiting for me when I get back.

Perhaps this is something that others have already learned, but it’s a lesson I’m just now coming to appreciate: When it comes to traditions, it’s not really about the number on a calendar or the address on a door.  When and Where don’t matter; Who you spend your time with and How you spend it is all that makes a difference.

A Very Paleo Holiday

By Megan Flynn

A few days before Thanksgiving last year, my mother called to let me know that she had transformed her diet into one resembling that of a cave-woman. She had gone Paleo. No grains, no dairy, no sugar. And just in time for the holidays.

“So,” she said, “I’m still going to make mashed potatoes because I don’t want to push it on anyone this year, but do you really think I need to put butter and sour cream in them like I usually do?”

After trying to convince her that yes, she most certainly did need to put butter in the mashed potatoes for Thanksgiving, she tried to convince me that yes, this time next year she most certainly would be making a Paleo-friendly meal for all of us, and that we were going to like it.

I was still really looking forward to going home for Thanksgiving, because who doesn’t love Thanksgiving? The food, the football, the family; it’s all good. Throw in some cocktails and the fact that my parents live on Smith Mountain Lake, and there’s really nothing else I’d rather be doing that weekend. Even if it means eating sausage and kale for breakfast in the morning.

On the day before the holiday, my family went to a shooting range and I found myself in the kitchen with nothing to keep me company but a mound of apples and even more yams, just waiting to be peeled. I was going to attempt to make a flourless, sugarless pie for my mother and anyone else who was brave enough to try it. I first made a traditional pumpkin pie, full of flour and sugar, for those of us who weren't willing to sacrifice our traditional eats for something as silly as life-long health. When that pie was in the oven, I began my challenge. And then something amazing happened: I got excited.

My skepticism and the negativity that surrounded it began to clear as I peeled the fruit and pre-heated the oven. I smiled as I rolled out the homemade pie dough, and I caught myself singing along with the radio as I cleaned up the counters and waited for my mysterious creation to bake.

The pie was terrible.

But we had a good laugh about it and my mom, who refuses to give up, swears that it makes the most perfect brunch with a side of bacon and eggs. It’s those moments—when something doesn't work and you laugh about it with the people you love the most, when the best parts of a holiday weekend are the quiet moments spent together around a table with a glass of wine—those are the things that remind us what the holidays are about. After Thanksgiving comes Christmas, and I know that when I once again return to my parents’ home, there will be no cookies set out for Santa. There will probably be no cookies at all. But I’m discovering more and more that I don’t really care.

One thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that while traditions are important, the people with whom you share them are irreplaceable. And here I am, a whole year later; my own diet completely changed to resemble that of a cave-woman, and I eat sausage and kale for breakfast all the time, and that sugarless pie sounds like a perfect side dish for brunch, and I know that even though we may say that holidays are about the cookies, that’s not always exactly the truth.

So whether or not there is sugar in your coffee; even though you’re confused about the uses of coconut oil and the lack of flour in that crust, what really matters is that you've found your way home once again.

Knitting for Writers

No, this is not the name of a ridiculous fundraiser. And it’s not a title for one of those “How to . . . for Dummies” books either. I took up knitting during my last year of graduate school. I had received a starter knitting kit, complete with gigantic needles, two balls of very chunky yarn, and instructions for basic projects, during the previous year. After a couple of false starts, I left it propped against the wall in the corner for many months. Since I couldn’t knit my first row perfectly, I was determined to give up altogether.

But as I launched into my last year of studies, I felt smothered by the weight of so many books that needed to be read and so many papers that needed to be written. I felt like I was climbing a mountain whose summit I couldn’t see. As part of me began to hunker down and plow through the work, another part of me came up for air, grasping for something tactile to hold onto.

I was searching desperately for something that was not a four-syllable word or an idea about a theory about a concept. I wanted a real thing, with measurable weight and texture and vivid color. Hence, the knitting.

I remember the false starts, when I tossed the needles aside in frustration, but I don’t remember beginning in earnest. Before long, I had transformed a ball of thick, scratchy yarn into a very ugly, very square-shaped hat, which I gifted to my sister, who wore it with pride on both sides of the Atlantic.

After the hat, I gave up on interesting shapes and focused simply on flat rectangles—potholders, scarves, and lately, a blanket. I realized that my delight had nothing to do with the complexity or practicality of the project, but simply with the joy of transforming one thing into another.

For a while, I had a thing for fancy yarns and would scour the aisles of yarn shops for the softest possible yarns (alpaca, cashmere) and the warmest colors I could find (brick red, mustard yellow). Eventually, though, I settled on an armful of the simplest undyed yarn I could find, along with a pair of circular needles. I wasn’t sure what I would make, exactly. I only knew that it would be very big and very flat. I just wanted to knit and knit and keep on knitting without stopping for a very long time.

In the midst of all of that knitting, I wrote my papers. I wrote them without all of the hair pulling and teeth grinding I had done in my first year of the program. I wrote them without that terrible sense of sprinting and crashing I’d had before, and without the all-nighters. I chugged along steadily, picking up with each new paper just as soon as I’d tied off the ends of the one before. I knitted, I wrote, and at long last, I graduated.

Of course, this is not to say that it was only knitting that saved me, or that it wasn’t still a very hard year. It’s just to say that sometimes it helps to come at a thing indirectly, that sometimes it takes a bit of creativity to generate momentum, and that discipline grows with steady practice over time.

One Bad Mother

I have the video monitor on with the sound turned way up. I listen with one ear perked to her noisy, clogged breathing---such an adorable, pathetic, concerning sound emanating from our miniature person with a cold.  I glance periodically at the screen, whose camera looks like it is hunting for paranormal activity.  I flash on all the tasks that should consume the rest of my evening---the tasks left hanging from a never-ending work day.  It is 8:38 PM and I wonder how much steam I've got left before that heavy molasses feeling envelops my brain.  I am distracted momentarily by her flipping over, sighing a little and registering a tiny complaint.  My resolve begins to waver and now I'm considering the consequences of simply climbing into bed at this point with the monitor and a magazine.  Or better yet, scooping her up out of the crib and bringing her into bed with me.  In weeks like this one, there are days when I spend more time watching her on the monitor than I do holding her in my arms. Even a generation ago, I am not sure women allowed themselves the luxury to think about work-life balance in the way that we do now.  Today, as I was frantically rushing home to catch 20 minutes with the baby before bedtime, I thought about how lucky I am to even consider such a notion.  How fortunate that I have the education, training, and capacity to work outside the home in the first place, let alone be daunted by how to thrive in two environments.  My work is meaningful to me, it is in a chosen field, and I have a large measure of control over my schedule.  I am not limited to an exclusive childcare role nor am I forced to work a job that is dangerous, unsatisfying or menial.  When I zoom out on my scenario, I realize how refined and esoteric my dilemma might seem to some.  In fact, in an ideal world, more women would face this kind of dilemma---one in which they are choosing among many good options for childcare and have the privilege of participating an elevating career.

It would appear that whether or not women (and many men) have had the consciousness or the language to describe it, this struggle is ages old.  I try to recall how my own mother dealt with managing work and home life.  I don't ever remember noticing her being particularly tired, lacking the energy to make things happen at home or even seeming anxious about her responsibilities.  She consistently helped with homework, threw some hot meal on the table (albeit rarely cooked by her) and made it to all our games/performances.  Although she worked full-time, I always had access to her on the phone.  She arranged for school pickups and shuttling to activities with others if she was unable to coordinate her schedule.  We definitely reconvened each night as a family and this seemed to re-set the connectedness.  I do remember a general sense of wishing I could spend more time with my mother and vaguely complaining about this in moments.  But weekends were exclusively devoted to us and our needs and whatever else was happening during my parents' busy lives, it was clear we were the priority.  Of course she had help, as I do, with housework and childcare.  Oh and did I mention she had five kids?

When I ask my mother these days about what it was like for her raising a brood and working full time, she admits to feelings of guilt, mostly about not being enough or doing enough at home.  She was always highly competent and effective at work---in her mind, it was home that suffered.  Although it was not our experience that she dropped any particular ball, I have more insight now into how she must have lived with powerful ambivalence.  It is also worth noting that my parents literally never took a single vacation on their own or did any individualized, enriching, adult activities.  This is the one area where I picture doing things a little differently.  As much as I can't begin to process the demands on their time for all those years, I hope/plan to delineate more regular space for my marriage and more escape for myself.

Sometimes my mother says to me, "Oh, well, you know it was easier back then."  I have some sense that she is right about that but neither of us can put our finger on exactly why this is true.  I think for one, it required less money and less time at work to be a solidly middle class family and achieve financial flexibility.  I also think there was more neighborly and community support built in to people's lives.  Perhaps the expectations on adults and children were also more reasonable---not everybody was supposed to a "Super" anything?  The fact remains that we had soccer, art class, piano lessons et al and my parents were pulled in a zillion directions.  Still, I can't access a single episode of a legitimate melt down---the machinery always moved fairly seamlessly forward.

The guilt I feel about missing time with our baby casts long shadows and tugs at me throughout the day.  I genuinely imagine that she might develop a greater attachment to the baby sitter during weeks when their time together is more enduring.  When I come home and she instantly lurches forward from the babysitter's arms for me to hold her and proceeds to cling to me like a chimp for the remainder of the evening, it brings some secret satisfaction.  The selfish side of me is relieved when she demonstrates a touch of separation anxiety, howling when I leave the room.  I want her to be securely attached, but I also want to know she prefers me to anyone and won't forget that during the many hours I am away.

I am proud of my work and know it is critical to my identity to have a holistic sense of self.  I recognize it is good for my daughter to establish her independence and be cared for by many different loving adults.  I reaffirm that I want to be her primary and central model of a woman with a career.  This doesn't mean I don't cry at my desk mulling the fact that she might take her first steps today and I could miss it.  This is the fulsome experience of the modern woman/parent.

In my view, it is not so much about figuring out how to have it all as it is being happily immersed in what you are doing at any given moment.  I think anyone who presents as having each domain of life under control is hiding something or is teetering on the brink.  I respect and appreciate the women in my life who admit to questioning their many roles and evaluating their health and sanity with respect to each of them.

By 10:17 PM I had done nothing but write this piece and pump 5 ounces of breast milk before I packed it in for the night.  Then again, I guess that is something.

Photo of Sarah: Buck Ennis for Crain's New York Business.

Looking Forward: Free.

My dad left Glencoe, Illinois in 1960 to attend Antioch, a small liberal arts college in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was eighteen. Boyish, with hair cropped neatly above his ears. My grandparents accompanied him on his first day and helped him move in, unpacking his belongings from Nixon-stickered suitcases. Months later, he returned to Glencoe for Christmas vacation with his hair creeping to his shoulders. He wore a Peruvian cape with a gigantic winged collar, which caused him to resemble what he calls “a stoned, South American Dracula.” A neighbor who spotted him walking down the street called him a communist. (My dad remembers him as the most liberal man on the block.)

My grandmother cried. But my grandfather---whose stern countenance belied a love of race cars and a fondness for eccentricity---reacted differently. In him, my dad recalls detecting---faintly, secretly---a quiet glimmer of pride.

---

Twenty-five years later, I celebrated my thirteenth birthday. I woke up that morning feeling weighted with purpose. You’re not a child anymore, I thought to myself as I lay between sheets printed with happy-faced clouds.

“I’m going to be the best teenager in the world,” I told my parents, hardly able to imagine that I’d ever succumb to the hormonal turbulence I’d heard was in store for me.

And looking back, I made good on that promise---for the most part, anyway. While I may not have been the best teenager on the planet, I certainly must have been among the tamest. I (hardly) touched alcohol, and never laid a finger on a drug. I didn’t date til my senior year. I never uttered a swear word, and never once fought with my brother or my parents (people never believe that last one, but it’s true).

The funniest part about all of this is that my parents---who have always supported me in every decision I’ve made---did nothing to discourage me from doing the things I thought “bad” teenagers did. They told me they understood the temptation to experiment, and that there was nothing I could do that would ever make them love me less. Their only hope, they said, was that I would be safe. Everything in moderation.

Clearly, their tolerance and sensitivity were wasted on me.

But then I got older. And there came a point when trying to do everything well became impossible. Inevitably, there were job rejections. Failed relationships. Situations I wished I’d handled differently.

But I learned (slowly, the hard way) that life is infinitely more interesting---and much more fun---when it's allowed to be messy, embarrassing, complicated, noisy.  And with high school and college behind me, it's become less about doing things perfectly and more about doing things, period. Doing them, and feeling them, and thinking about them, and learning from them.

I no longer aspire to be perfect. And I think the people who know me best---my parents included---are happy for me. I’m learning to let myself live life with a full range of experiences. This process could maybe be referred to as rebellion. More accurately, though, I think it’s just openness.

The mother of one of my high school classmates published a note to her son in the senior pages of our yearbook which read, “Be free, and enjoy.”

I understand what she meant, and I’m doing that now. I think my grandfather would be proud.

Beginning to End

I left Portland thinking that I was on the verge of becoming the person I wanted to be. My big dream had become a reality: I’d been accepted to graduate school. I was about to become scholar, a creative, a put-together person who listens to their voicemail. But now, here I was, putting on mascara at three o’clock in the afternoon. My first (and only) social interaction of the day would be with the clerk at the corner market. I’ve gotten to know the houses that sit between mine and the market. I walk there almost everyday for something, maybe green beans or licorice. Mostly I just need the air. The gardens have changed gradually since I moved in, but on this day the change was emphatic. The first frost had come the night before. And everywhere everything was dying. In front of the church, the snapdragons had been pulled out by their roots. The grass was wilted over and clinging limply to the curb.

Inside the store, Paul Simon’s Slip Sliding Away was on the radio. It was a song I'd heard a thousand times, but for the first time the words really shook me. Autumn---the celebrated season of New England---was giving way to the season I’d been warned about. All of it had gradually slipped away. Not just the season, even, but parts of myself, too. I hadn’t touched my camera in months. Somewhere I'd stopped being the girl chasing her dreams and had become the girl crying in a grocery store aisle while staring at a bottle of cabernet.

I needed to see something or someone flourishing, so, I set out to visit a friend who had also started a new life here recently. Nichole is an apprentice in the flower and herb gardens at Stone Barns, a non-profit farm and education center just outside of New York City.

In the hoop-houses it was every season. Microgreens pushed up through the soil in rows. Sungold tomatoes were ripe on the vine. But outside, it was just like what I'd seen in New England. The peonies were crumpled like burned paper. Even the globe amaranth---defiant in fuchsia and Shiap pink---were being cut that day.

“How do you do it?” I asked her. I knew that Nichole helped to plant the terraces last spring. She’d put her knees on the ground and drawn her finger across the earth, placing a row of seeds in the part she made before folding the dirt back over again. With her care, the seeds had sprouted and become something beautiful. And now all of that was dying.

She replied with graceful acceptance. “It’s hard. But I like seeing something come full circle”.  I knew she was right---I’ve seen the Lion King. But, I kept thinking about the churchyard snapdragons, disappearing in a compost pile somewhere. Sure, they were returning to the earth from where the came, but they had once been exuberant. The change felt harsh and unfair.

Then Nichole took me to the drying room.  Rows of soybeans were hung up in bunches. Statice and cockscomb were pinned to the rafters and the globe amaranth was being tied for drying. There were wooden bins full of gourds and screen drawers filled with herbs. Most of them would become something else, used in teas or tinctures. Some would be saved for seeds.  Nichole picked up a clipping of rosemary and ran her fingers along the stem. With one quick pull the leaves were stripped. “Full circle.” She said.  And I finally knew what she meant.

She had followed these flowers from start to finish---and here we were at the start again. I guess circles are comforting that way. The further you are from where you began, the closer you are to the next beginning.

Neither Old Nor Young

The other afternoon on vacation we wound up at a café in downtown Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. It was the day before the hurricane was set to strike and I really wanted some fresh air. I was in the middle of a country-type meltdown and warned my husband ‘I had to get out of the house that minute’. I recognized that familiar creeping sadness feeling that day. The skies were gray, no one wanted to leave the house but me, but every noise was grating on my nerves. The temperature was all wrong, the lighting too harsh, and so, we left. Lewisburg is one of my favorite little towns in Central PA. It’s a college town and something about being surrounded by other young people revives me. It was fun to sit in the café and watch all the young freshman and sophomores come in, some upper classmen and teachers as well. They were stressing out about classes, in that way that seems really cute and trivial now. There was a lot of “OMIGOD” and “NO WAY” and cursing and flirting; it was beautiful. I love to watch the young relationships. They seem so awkward, unsure whether to hold hands over breakfast. You can tell the ones that had sex the night before (or even that morning) were a bit chummier with each other, sitting on the same side of the table, whispering inside jokes, her hand on his thigh, his behind her back, tickling her long hair.

It was so refreshing after being surrounded by my in-laws all weekend. My husband is seven years older than I am, and he’s the younger sibling, so that makes most of his family a full decade ahead of me in life. I often feel out of place, in more than just pop culture references, although those happen too. Sometimes it leaves me with the feeling of “I shouldn’t be here”. That somehow there is this magical land of cool twenty-somethings (Brooklyn maybe?) that I should be with. My people. Instead, having kids so young and being married with a mortgage lumps me in with the elderly. I don’t fit in anywhere. Not with the old, and not with the young, but I recognize that they both have their advantages. I try to listen to my mother-in-law’s stories and marvel at how different things were for her, and I try to remember that I’m not doing so poorly. And I look at the college students, and while I envy their spontaneity, I don’t envy the drama and emotion. I remember those college heartbreaks, full of deep tears and jealousy and resentment. I rarely feel those types of emotions in that type of setting anymore. Instead I feel guilt and fear more often related to being a mother. Guilt that I am doing it all wrong, and fear that it will affect him forever.

Curating the internet

Recently, I came across a brief news article offering up a study as evidence of what I’ve already known for a while: Facebook is depressing. The Utah Valley University study showed that of the 425 students who were interviewed, those who spent more time on Facebook were more likely to feel that life was unfair and that others’ lives were better than their own. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that we tend to curate the best pieces of ourselves on the internet. We tend to share the sweetest, most photogenic aspects of our lives, polishing them up before sending them out into the world. You’re more likely to share a photo of your puppy in the brief, glowing moment when she’s sleeping than when she’s simultaneously tearing up your socks and pooping on the floor.

And if you’ve ever drowned your sorrows in your Facebook news feed while you’re in a funk, you’ll know what I mean. As soon as you’ve broken up with your boyfriend, everyone in your feed seems to be blissfully in love. Circumstances or biology are preventing you from procreating as you’d like to, and suddenly it seems as if everyone else in your feed is popping out babies by the dozen.

The problem with the feed—which is not very nourishing, by the way, but often rather draining—is that it’s missing a holistic view of other people’s lives. When you bond with your real-life friends, you share in their triumphs and their sorrows. Most of our hundreds of Facebook friends are actually acquaintances or strangers, and although it may seem that they are sharing aspects of their private lives online, these glimpses have been selected from among many others for public consumption.

Of course, there are a number of ways to respond to a study like this: ignore it, cut back on Facebook usage, stop using Facebook altogether. My own experience of Facebook has been very conflicted. On the one hand, I find it to be so very useful as a directory and as a sort of social memory. I use it to look up contact information or to find a friend’s friend’s spouse’s name that I’ve forgotten. On the other hand, I arrive to look up a bit of information, and then find I’ve lost a couple of precious hours after having fallen down the rabbit hole of the news feed.

This problem certainly extends beyond Facebook to other social networking sites, Twitter, blogs, etc., and there have been many interesting responses to it across these platforms. Some have chosen to regularly prune their feeds by cutting back on people they follow. Others have taken a cue from Jess Lively’s “Things I’m afraid to tell you” post, sharing some of their own flaws and challenges as a balance to their otherwise optimistic and upbeat content.

For my own part, I’ve taken the “regular maintenance” approach to managing my feeds and overall internet experience. My Twitter bookmark is set to a list of people I actually know. I’ve trimmed my Facebook feed by taking some time to block updates from people I’ve lost touch with beyond Facebook. I’ve used Feedly to craft a reader of content that’s consistently thoughtful and inspiring. It makes sense that we curate our public personalities online, and in response, I’ve tried to curate my own window onto what I encounter when I first open up a browser. It takes time, but it feels like a method for encouraging healthy content consumption, without having to feel like I’m fasting or binging on internet “junk.”

So long, Vogue

By Rhea St. Julien After several years of an admittedly tumultuous relationship, I am breaking up with Vogue.  My subscription is up, and I am finally pulling the trigger and not renewing.  If this blog were a movie, I’d segue here into a montage of me + Vogue in better times, reading sandy articles on the beach, discovering Claire Dederer and Cheryl Strayed, ripping out amazingly curated spreads by Grace Coddington and Irving Penn to create collage art.

But our relationship has not all been Happy Days with scissors.  Like everyone else on the planet, I was appalled by Dara-Lynn Weiss’s article about shaming her child into losing weight.  I have grown increasingly tired of the pieces on Connecticut garden homes refurbished by gazillionaires, and the lack of diversity reflected on the pages.  However, I was willing to overlook all of this, because Vogue isn’t pretending to be anything else than it is.  The magazine is sold as the flight of fantasy of a particular Manhattan woman, and if I don’t like their point of view, I can just skip those articles or join the conversation surrounding them to shift the culture.  Somehow, what pushed me over the edge from giving them a pass to writing CANCEL on my invoice was a subtle message in an otherwise innocuous, seemingly empowering article.

I was drawn in by their profile of fascinating congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a woman who manages to balance motherhood, congressional leadership, and extracurriculars such as softball teams and fundraising for cancer awareness.  The tale of her own breast cancer battle was riveting, but then they slipped in this absolutely ridiculous paragraph:

“By 2011, the only lingering effect of her treatment was weight gain brought on by the drug tamoxifen.  Having ‘never gained an ounce in my life,’ she found herself 23 pounds heavier.  ‘Like every woman who goes through weight gain, you’re just not happy,’ she says.  ‘You’re not comfortable in your clothes, you’re mad when you walk in your closet, you hate going shopping.  I didn’t feel good about myself.’  After a press event in her district promoting a small business called the Fresh Diet, she decided to sign up.  Seven months later, she had lost the 23 pounds and dropped from a size 8 back to a size 2.”

First of all, I’m sorry, the only lingering effect of surviving cancer was weight gain?  What about the scars from surgery, the months lost to recovery, the strain on your family, the emotional damage from confronting mortality in such a raw way?  If you fight cancer and win, and you’re worried about your dress size, CANCER WINS.  You learned nothing from your brush with death, and I just can’t believe that a woman so intelligent and powerful really feels that way.  I suspect they took her comments about her body image struggles out of context in their attempt to trivialize and glamorize the congresswoman.

Also, what’s so terrible about being a size 8 (ahem, ahem)?  The fact that they even put the sizes in there shows that it was a nod to diet culture rather than a well-rounded portrait of a woman’s experience with cancer.  I realized I needed to stop giving money to a publication that was insulting me.

It really bothered me that this blatant body-shaming message was slipped in to a profile of a political leader, a piece that was well-written and interesting.  The subtlety of it was what shook me, left me thinking about the lasting effects of such a paragraph, like when, in the 90′s, they found all those messages about sex in Disney movies.

Recently, my review of Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From The Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture was published on the Equals Record, and in my piece, I say that I’m going to try to keep my daughter away from the princess craze as long as I can, and to expose her to different forms of what it means to be a woman than the overwhelmingly narrow cultural ideal.

Well, if I’m going to do that for my daughter, I need to stop “playing princess” myself, and reading Vogue is a way that I, monthly, escape to a world where women are saved from the effects of aging (The Wicked Witch of Wrinkles) by state-of-the-art surgeries and creams (Prince Botox), I dream of having a Fairy Godmother that will bring me a $3,450 biker jacket for the ball, and my confidence is boosted by how modern day royalty (celebs) are really down-to-earth, just like me.

It’s time to put down the princess wand.

I am searching for a new way to be feminine.  Am I a woman because I paint my lips red, wear a dress on the daily, shave my legs and flat iron my bangs?  Of course not.  These are the ways I am fashioning my body right now, and I have chosen other forms for it throughout my life---letting my prodigious body hair grow in college (my husband and I got together, actually, when my leg hair was so long I could French braid it), wearing the same pair of dusty Carhartts for months, forgoing make-up even in the face of period zits.

Right now, my look is very traditionally femme, but, my love for fashion will not die with my Vogue subscription, and I could see myself dressing like one of my icons, Patti Smith, or Georgia O’Keefe, my hair a wild mass of black and gray, my pants pegged and baggy, my white shirt crisp enough to cut a fingernail on.

There is so much power in womanhood---this is one of the major reasons I chose to have my baby as naturally as I could---I wanted to experience that feminine power running through my body in the most primal way possible, to let it change me in the process.  And it did.  But now, despite Operation Rad Bod, I feel crappy about that amazing body that brought me a baby, about two weeks out of every month (if you guessed that those are the week before and the week of my period, then ladies, you are correct).

Vogue is absolutely not going to help me with my quest for a learned experience of the deeper meaning of femininity, beyond waist size and wardrobe.  So, I’m taking this whole experiment to the next level, and trying to limit my own exposure to damaging cultural messages about women, especially since I’m going to limit my daughter’s.  I can’t be wresting the Bratz doll out of her hands while I’m filling my own with pictures of Kate Moss’s wedding.

Perhaps, I’ll spend all the time once consumed with Vogue reading things like this, an excerpt from Dear Sugar’s column entitled Tiny Revolutions:

“You don’t have to be young. You don’t have to be thin. You don’t have to be ‘hot’ in a way that some dumbfuckedly narrow mindset has construed that word. You don’t have to have taut flesh or a tight ass or an eternally upright set of tits.

You have to find a way to inhabit your body while enacting your deepest desires. You have to be brave enough to build the intimacy you deserve. You have to take off all of your clothes and say, I’m right here.

There are so many tiny revolutions in a life, a million ways we have to circle around ourselves to grow and change and be okay. And perhaps the body is our final frontier. It’s the one place we can’t leave. We’re there till it goes. Most women and some men spend their lives trying to alter it, hide it, prettify it, make it what it isn’t, or conceal it for what it is. But what if we didn’t do that?”

So long, Vogue.  It has been fun.  But it has not been real.

Republished with the author's permission from Thirty Threadbare Mercies, Photo:  Some rights reserved by JeepersMedia