No, it's not a compliment

I think about street harassment nearly every day, because I am harassed nearly every day. This is the reality for women who spend a decent amount of time walking around outside---even more so for women in densely populated urban centers. And I live in Manhattan, so . . . yeah. Nearly every day. Most days, the harassment is mild. A smacking of the lips as I pass, a low whistle, an obvious up-and-down with a creepy, slow nod at the end. These are the days when I think that hey, maybe it's all in my head. But then there are the times I'm followed, or told to smile, or surrounded, and I know that the milder stuff is just in a different place on the spectrum.

And before you go telling me that this is all a compliment and I should be grateful for the attention, a few things: anything that makes you feel threatened is not a compliment. Any time someone reacts to you ignoring them by calling you a bitch or a slut or a whore---all of which have happened to me---that's not a compliment. And trust me when I tell you that this happens to nearly all women, no matter what we look like. (I have lost nearly 100 pounds in the last year or so, and the only change is that instead of being called a fat bitch when I ignore men who harass me on the street, I get called a slut. So creative!)

No, it's not a compliment. It's a power play. It's a way of reminding women of what we already know: our bodies are public property, and are vulnerable to violation at any moment. (And before I hear the cries of misandry and, "Well, then, how am I supposed to approach the ladies at all?", let me cut those off at the knees with this handy, dandy guide.)

The good news is that I finally feel like this is something people are talking about. The fabulous Hollaback blogs started the conversation. You can submit your street harassment stories to them---along with photos, if you've got 'em---and trust me when I tell you that the support you get from your fellow commenters will be tremendous.

And in the if-you-don't-laugh-you-have-to-cry-because-it's-so-apt department, we have The Onion's recent post, entitled "Weird, Area Woman Wasn't Harassed Today." Let's just say they get it, proving once again that satire is this era's truest form of news. I don't want to spoil the punchline, or anything.

Chiming in from abroad is a new documentary from Belgian filmmaker Sofie Peeters. Peeters interviewed harassers for the film, which explores not only the impact of the behavior on women, but also the particular class and social issues at play. She found that confronting the men and listening to their stories led them to show her a greater deal of respect; that said, women shouldn't have to confront the men who threaten them in order to be able to walk down the street without feeling victimized. But, you know, progress is progress, however small.

It's pretty awesome knowing that all of this is out there. But it hasn't really changed my experience a whole lot. Just the other night, at about 10:30, walking from 84th to 86th Street on Broadway (a "good," if quiet, neighborhood), I was harassed three times. Once by a man who walked up behind me and whispered, "Sexy baby," once by a man telling me, "It doesn't hurt to smile," and once by a man who simply looked me up and down and licked his lips. I suppose I could have confronted them, but in the moment, it always seems safer to keep walking.

I hope my friends' daughters are never able to say the same.

Photo: Henry Tonks, Woman Walking on Sand, ca 1910

What August Means Now

By Carrie Allen Tipton For those invested in academic pursuits, August marks time like no other month. It speaks of newness and transition in a way that other folks more readily associate with January and its resolutions, or October and its changing leaves, or March and its budding limbs. August’s gift (or curse) of hyper-awareness of the passage of time blesses (or afflicts) tiny kindergartners no less than aged professors. Whether you are on the making or receiving end of a syllabus or book list in the upcoming educational year, the month delineates for all school-oriented persons the End of Something and the Beginning of Something Else.

As a student, this weird blurry month, neither fully summerish nor yet fully schoolish, meant shopping for clothes, finding color-coded folders, looking for the precise metric specifications of binders stated on the supply list, searching for a new and cooler (is there such a thing?) lunchbox. In the university years there were the added tasks of purchasing football tickets and meal plans. After many years of dutifully carrying out these sorts of instructions, I became a professor and began giving them to others. The road to this position was long and many times I have questioned whether it was, in that extremely charged yet vague term which indexes a host of existential presuppositions, “worth it.” Suffice it to say that it required many years of very long hours of single-minded focus and a willingness to live below the poverty line for the better part of a decade. Fine. It was over now, and I was professoring. In this new capacity, my old friend August meant screening books for readings lists, determining test schedules, building online class modules, anxiously checking electronic enrollment in the hopes that a course wouldn’t be canceled, dodging onerous committee work, applying for travel funding, and plotting out research goals.

For twenty-eight years, then, some version or other of me was essentially still Going To School every fall, and August meant what it always had: a physical and cognitive return to the educational premises. And then all of a sudden this year August stopped meaning anything like it once did. In late spring, I became pregnant with our first child. Let me, as I used to say to my students during lectures when an idea required further explanation, hit the pause button here. If this were an academic article, you would now be treated to a lengthy footnote about how I’d always hoped that if I ever had a child, I could stay home with it until it was school-aged. This was a simple and uncomplicated desire that could afford to remain simple and uncomplicated as long as it was theoretical. While there was no viable life-partner in the picture, such a decision was lodged (like so many of my academic ruminations) in the realm of abstract thought, and so it stayed for all of my adult life until I met my future husband two years ago, a mere year into my professorial career. And based on my longstanding desire, prior to our marriage, we agreed that I would stay home with the wee ones if wee ones ever materialized, at least in their early years. I would try freelance writing, editing, and perhaps some online teaching.

It would make a lot of sense, we figured, since I was quite unhappy as a professor and earned proportionately little money for my trouble. Pace Anne-Marie Slaughter, whose insightful article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic, but the thought of trying to have it all has always seemed to me quite exhausting. I just wanted some of it, and the part of it that I wanted changed as I walked through different seasons of life. So the decision was in place long before the baby ever was. It was still abstract and simple and uncomplicated, until the day in early April when two drugstore tests set the pre-arranged plan into motion. As I began the process of disentangling myself from a tenure-track job at my university, I felt liberated from unfulfilling employment, eager to spend the fall months prior to the baby’s arrival immersed in my beloved writing, and proud for being willing to run screaming from the ivory tower after three years of soul-searching that showed it to be an ill fit for me. I still do feel those things, and harbor no golden nostalgia for the frustrations of the career path I left. But what I do harbor is a giant question mark about who I am now, especially while my daughter is still an “inside baby,” and who I will be in the remaining months of her gestation, and who I will become as she emerges, and how we will become something together. Abstraction, simplicity, and lack of complication are rapidly eroding as I find myself in the midst of a new kind of August, and I have had to learn all over again what it means this year.

So far it has meant knowing, for the first time in my life, the months spanned by peach season, and that early August represented the final window of opportunity for capitalizing on the soft round spheres. I made a peach ricotta tart and did not make a syllabus. It has meant starting yoga classes, in the middle of the day, to help with my achy joints and to communicate with my girlie, my changing positions a sort of Morse code telegraphing her to be strong and peaceful and that I will try to be strong and peaceful for her. I sat in a roomful of people with legs crossed on rubber mats and did not sit in a roomful of people in pre-semester meetings. I measured for and ordered drapes and marched through Ikea looking for mounting hardware. I put up sheer taupe curtains in our living room and did not put books on an office bookshelf. I wrote and wrote and wrote and did not aim to produce a single article intended for a peer-reviewed journal. I am not sad, but August is feeling weird.

An entire book has been written about the difficulties and joys of either combining motherhood and academia or leaving the latter for the former, so I should have known that August wouldn’t sit right this time around. Reading Mama PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life assured me that I wasn’t crazy for feeling dazed disorientation as I walked out of the halls of academia into the blazing sunlight of other paths. Of course it made sense that I was losing my emotional footing in the bright light of August, which every other year meant that I should be walking into the university instead of away from it. I still can’t see quite where I am headed and am only accepting, day by day, what this August means. To borrow the phrase of an incomparably greater wordsmith, T.S. Eliot, “in my end is my beginning.” August has always at its heart represented new beginnings for me, and although something large and weighty has come to an end, many other things have now begun. And when I think of this, I think that perhaps, after all, this August is not so very unlike the ones that have come before.

Why You'll Never Be Good Enough: Bodies in Magazines and Media

When someone compliments me on my appearance, I don’t believe them. OK, not all the time—but sometimes. I fully realize that this is reactive and silly, and I know that my occasional lack of confidence can be especially irritating to my boyfriend, who compliments me more than anyone else—why can’t I just take it? What, do I think he’s lying? Analyzing my instinctual reaction, in conjunction with the discovery of this recent study by University of Nebraska – Lincoln professor of psychology Sarah Gervais, I realized that often, a positive impression of my overall image triggers a negative array of thoughts, each little thought corresponding to a single part of my appearance that I don’t like. That single part is measured against an abstract composite ideal of female beauty and, invariably, falls short. Loop back to brain: “How can this compliment be true in light of this [clearly imperfect body part/feature]?”

Gervais's findings are intriguing, and while the headlining statement—Men Are Seen as People, Women Are Seen as Body Parts!—is a little sensationalist, there rings some truth in this statement. The images of women and women’s bodies that inundate us in the media—be they celebrities, fashion models, or disembodied legs/lips/torsos—are perfect. More and more, they converge towards a singular, mythic body that is flawless, without fault, and unworthy of a single criticism. What this does for women who don’t have that body (read: pretty much everyone, including most celebrities and fashion models) is inconclusive, but I’m willing to bet it's pretty negative in the aggregate.

Recently, former Us Weekly editor Janice Min wrote about her struggles with the unrealistic post-baby weight loss expectations that she believes are culled from media representations of celebrities. She realized that, when she had her baby, shedding pounds at celebrity-rate was close to impossible, especially considering the coterie of assistance most celebrities have at their disposal (trainers, dieticians, stylists, money). Jezebel was correct in pointing out the irony that this was coming from an Us Weekly editor—and not just any editor, but the one almost principally responsible for making post-baby weight loss celebrity stories in-demand over the course of the 2000s.

Considering Min's complaints (and her resulting diet book “for real women”), I’m stuck on a quote from a Daily Nebraskan story on Gervais’s study. According to both Michael Goff, senior lecturer in advertising at Lincoln, and Jan Deeds, director of the Women’s Center, media is merely a reflection of our subconscious objectification of women and not its cause. “Advertising doesn’t do anything magical with that (process),” Goff says. “It just exploits it.”

This feels like incredibly wishful thinking. If advertising isn’t the cause, that implies its blamelessness. Then what is the cause? Society? The dominant culture? The male hegemony? Is not advertising a part of society, a part of culture? It is certainly one of the most visible, most visual, and most recycled elements of our culture. How can the images that it continues to reproduce be blameless in our construction of gendered images and, consequently, our own self-image? If anything, these things are cyclical, absent of a singular “root cause”. I’d like to lay at least some of the blame at the feet of ad execs and women’s magazine editors.

I’ll end on this note. On “Project Runway” this week—an exploitative reality show that provides a window into the image-obsessed fashion world and uses stick-thin, pliable models and that I nevertheless absolutely love watching—the designers were challenged to create looks for “real women” who needed a makeover. Ven, a 27-going-on-50-year-old male designer with, let’s be honest, a bit of a paunch, was dismayed that he got the “largest” woman, and complained to anyone who would listen about how it was so unfair that he, a designer of women’s fashions, should have to work with proportions like these. When Tim Gunn asks what size his client is, Ven rolls his eyes and says, “I don’t know—a 14?!” Then he describes her proportions as “off.”

When we create an impossible ideal, and when that ideal is hammered into our consciousness by the fashion world, by magazines, by celebrity photo shoots, and—very often—by post-production manipulation, we all end up being “off,” and we all feel it. If advertising and pop culture are a reflection of our values as a society, then our values as a society are also reflections of our intake of advertising and pop culture. The cycle is end-able.

Looking Forward: Rethinking the Ladder

Growing up, my vision of “going to work” was extremely narrow. I pictured myself click-clacking down office hallways in high-heeled shoes. I imagined sitting at a desk lined with silver picture frames, shuffling endless stacks of papers, a telephone receiver balanced on my shoulder. The job itself was never entirely clear but it was obvious that the woman I would become was successful, powerful, and very, very important. Cut to the present. Most days, you’ll find me perched at my dining table, typing away at my computer next to a window that overlooks my building’s disarrayed jungle of a backyard. There’s not a silver frame or leather briefcase in sight, and I don’t own a single business suit. My uniform of choice usually involves a vintage dress and bare feet---no click-clacking heels for me.

As a relative newcomer to the freelance world, I realize that while I’m extremely lucky, my career is far from what the average New Yorker would consider “successful,” “powerful,” or “important.” It’s challenging, exciting, liberating, unconventional---but lucrative? Glamorous? Cosmopolitan? Not quite.

“If you really pushed yourself,” a friend very kindly said to me recently, “you could go so far. I see you running your own business. You could be a total power player at the top of your field.”

Of course, this was a nice thing to hear. Surprising, but nice. There’s a reason I’ve chosen to sacrifice certain things, however---a steady paycheck, employer-provided healthcare, the comfort of a routine---in order to follow the path I’m on. It’s because in the past year, I’ve thought seriously about what I want to prioritize. For some people, that might be the pursuit of a high-powered career---and I think that ambition is wonderful. For myself, though---and it feels a little funny to admit this---having a successful career is just not that high on my list. I have goals, of course, and I hope to always be involved in creative projects throughout my life, but as far as being a “power player”? Putting in long hours at an office? Moving up the corporate ladder? It’s just not me.

I like to think that my life doesn’t have to conform to a traditional image of success to be successful. I'm willing to sacrifice a higher-paying job and a certain amount of security to pursue what's meaningful to me.

When I look back on my life in forty years, what do I think will make me happiest?

Having traveled.

Having had adventures.

Having loved.

Having been a good mother.

Having been a student of music, food, art, and culture around the world.

Having taken risks.

Having helped others. 

Sounds successful, powerful, and very, very important to me.

window boxes

[gallery link="file"] When it comes to bringing a bit of the country into your city life, there's not much that does it better than a window box. Perched somewhere between public space and private space, a window box offers something pretty for folks streetside as well as a welcome view for those inside looking out. I'm especially fond of the range of window boxes that you can find on a walk around the block. Sometimes they're lush and full, sometimes they're utterly abandoned, and still other times they're completely accidental, just vines and leaves and no box at all. Here, a few shots from our neighborhood.

On Being Unmarried

The assumption was that I would go with him.  The whole time that Zack was filling out his applications; that we were reading and rereading his submission essays; that we were laughing about ending up in Tempe or Boston or Pasadena-–-the assumption was that I would go with him.   Two years earlier, he had left San Francisco to help me pursue my dreams in New York City.  Now we were both ready for a new adventure, a global roll of the dice, letting fate and admissions officers decide where we would land.  On the day he would hear back from his first choice school in London early that March morning, his whole body was shaking as he clicked open the email.  “I got in,” he said, his eyes telling me and questioning me at the same time.  “I got in.”  In my mind, my bags were already packed. And then the government stepped in.  I’d assumed that, with my freelance job, I could simply pop over to Europe whenever my tourist visa for the UK expired.  A quick search online proved me wrong.  On a tourist visa, I would be allowed to stay in the UK for six months out of every twelve.  Period, or as the Brits say, full stop.  I looked at the screen despairingly, picturing seeing my boyfriend for only half of every year, of being unsettled and without a real home to call my own for the next two.  We had our relationship to consider; we had my mental health.  We had, perhaps most importantly, a very needy cat.

At this point in the story, my friends and family often ask why Zack and I didn’t just get married.  It’s a fair question-–-we’ve been dating for almost five years and still actually like each other.  We talk about the future as a statement, not a question, and split holidays between our family’s houses.  It would’ve been an easy visa to get, the only kind of romantic relationship that, for better or worse, is accepted without question around this country and the world.

Yet.

When I get married, I want it to be because there was a moment where a man-–-my man-–-looked at me and decided he couldn’t foresee a life without me.  I want to get married because my partner and I are ready not to build a family-–-kids, in my opinion, have little to do with marriage-–-but be a family, just the two of us as a unit, together.  As a fairly pragmatic person, there’ve been too many events in my life that have taken place for the sake of convenience.  Zack and I moved in together after six months because his lease ended and it was cheaper.  I spent years wondering when I would have made that choice naturally, if it were left as simply a choice to make.  I don’t want my marriage to be like that.

I’m proud to announce that Zack and I are happily unmarried partners.  Thanks to the state of New York, we now have a document that declares us in all of our unmarried glory.  It means we’ve been living together, in a serious relationship, for at least two years.  It means I can ride in an ambulance with him, and that’s about it.  I don’t have access to his healthcare (national health care in UK, here I come!).  We can’t file tax returns together, he doesn’t get access to my money or I to his, and, if we choose to, either of us can dissolve our partnership with the click of a mouse on an online form.  It’s exactly enough to get me a visa to go to London, so that my partner and I can continue to live our lives together, happily unmarried.  There’s plenty of time for the rest later.

YWRB: Truth

By Amanda Page I will always choose truth.

Even now, years past slumber party angst and antics, I prefer the subjective, nuanced, very dangerous truth.

In my youth, truth was confession. I'd offer up my flaws, my mistakes, my humiliations. My sin from simply being human---those were the only truths available. Certainly, I was full to the brim with that type of truth.  I had plenty of that type of truth to spare. I believed in offering it up, chasing it away, making it leave my body through my mouth and be judged by others. I didn't want it as my own.

As I've aged, I've witnessed maturity in my truth. My truth is no longer an open wound. It has healed, slowly, through years of claiming itself. My truth is owned. I do not borrow it. I simply believe it.

It differs in eyes that aren't mine. If I were to offer it up, then you might see a shade darker or lighter than what I insist is present. There is such a thing as a true red, but I might think it's crimson while another chooses firetruck or candy apple. If I decide my true red is the red of flames and fire, then that, my friend, is the truth I choose once again.

The truth doesn't expose us. It doesn't excuse us or even explain us.

We don't need a game to reveal it.

Although, the game might build a friendship. It might offer insight into someone unexpected. It might twist your truth until you see it take a different shape. It's still your truth.

Dare to own it.

Mimi

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still hear my grandma’s voice. I can see her standing at the stove, frying eggplant, and explaining to me how it was done. She never divulged much more than a little bit of this, a little bit of that, always followed by Capisce? It was one of the only Italian words she remembered, and I loved repeating after her. Ok, Grandma---I understand.  My grandma---Frances Camelio Panzer, known lovingly as Fritz---was born in Italy, sometime around 1915. Her birthday, or more precisely, her birth year, was always a source of confusion. She lied about her age until the end, and fittingly, my mom realized after-the-fact that we might have misstated her birth year on her tombstone. Her own mother died when she was a child, and soon after, her father set off for the US---for Rochester, specifically---where his sister lived. The rest, as they say, is history.

Even though her command of the Italian language was limited and her memory of her birthplace hazy, my grandma made me so proud of my heritage. Growing up, I thought everyone’s grandparents grew all their own fruit and vegetables in their backyard. Strawberries, peaches, tomatoes and zucchini mingled with rose bushes and bird feeders in their postage-stamp-sized yard. My grandma and her sisters canned the peaches and tomatoes, and the rest of us enjoyed the fruits of their labor all year-round. I can still taste the perfect sweetness of those peaches.

Family came first, something my sisters and I learned from a young age. Thursdays and Sundays were reserved for family dinners, and my grandparents came over each week, red sauce, dessert, and other treats from their yard or the public market in hand. Without fail, my grandma made a beeline for our basement, to get started on our laundry immediately. What she didn't finish left with her and returned soon after, stiff as a board, but smelling like sunshine and fresh air---like home. My mom used to yell at her, "Mom! Can't you sit down and relax with us?"---a phrase that my sisters and I found ourselves repeating to our mom years later, eyes rolling, as she endlessly straightened and dusted and swiffered while at each of our houses. My sisters and I were forced to take piano lessons for years, and our lessons just happened to coincide with Thursday dinners. While we painstackingly worked through our lessons, our parents and grandparents sat at the kitchen table, drinking their coffee and enjoying their own mini-recital. Luckily for them, two out of the three of us---myself never included---remembered to practice each week.

For more years than I can remember, we took a family trip to Disney World. My grandparents must have been in their 70's at the time, yet they didn't miss a moment of the action. From Disney to Epcot to Breakfast with Mickey to luaus at night, they kept pace with the rest of us. When my parents went away on a much needed kids-free vacation each year, my grandparents came to stay with us. We woke up to our grandma in the kitchen, fresh pancakes and Caro syrup on the table. Slim her entire life, her theory was "everything in moderation," paving the way for bacon, alongside those pancakes, more often than not. We spent the week enveloped in her hugs and kisses, and $20 bills appeared at our dinner plates each night, courtesy of our grandpa.

We have pictures from Christmases through the years, my sisters and I tightly clutching our new Cabbage Patch dolls. Each year, my grandparents stood in line for those prized and always understocked commodities, showering us with these spoils and more. I remember my mom telling us one year---a statement that has since been burned into the front of my brain---that Christmas didn't start for our grandparents until we got to their house. We were, quite simply, the center of their lives.

My grandma was lucky enough to hold this role for more than 25 years. Though they traveled extensively in their golden years, my grandparents never missed a soccer or field hockey game, a school play, a graduation, a holiday.  My own mom unofficially became a grandma---a Mimi to be precise---5 years ago, when Rachael was born. Though not tied by blood, this didn't seem to matter to either of them. She was Mimi, plain and simple, and it was clear from the start that she was made for the role.  Rachael and Mimi had their routines---their "things"---when they were together. In more recent years, my mom was known to pull up a dining room chair, letting Rachael climb on to "help" with the measuring and the mixing in the kitchen. My sisters and I laughed, as we recalled being banned from the kitchen growing up, our mom telling us it was easier for her to just do it herself. Rachael liked to join my mom upstairs, jumping on the beds while my mom tried to straighten around her. Before they came back downstairs, Rachael would ask for some of Mimi's special---and expensive---lotion, and my mom always obliged. Rubbing her little hands together, Rachael declared it was mmmmmmm...deeeelicious!---just like Mimi taught her.

My nephew joined our family two years ago. My sister and brother-in-law gave my parents a card the Christmas before he was born, to announce their news. It stated, simply, "Merry Christmas to my Grandparents." I'll never forget my mom's reaction upon opening that card---the initial gasp, the tears, the hugs. She was going to be a Mimi again. Even at 70, and even with a full-time job, she found the time to stop by my sister's house most nights after work. She checked in on her sweet baby---her Chunka---and without fail, tidied up while there. She told me that she'd do the same for me some day, just as soon as we moved back to Rochester. No pressure, of course. For a year and a half, she was my sister's first phone call when Hudson was sick, when they needed a babysitter, for parenting advice. Now pregnant with her second baby, I think my sister must feel the sting of my mom's absence in ways the rest of us can't quite imagine.

I never doubted that my mom would be my first phone call when I had children of my own, that we would take family trips to Disney World, that she would know how to soothe my babies when I wasn't able to. I always trusted that my children would know the sound of my mom's laugh---that laugh that filled up the room and then some. That I would get the chance to see the pure joy and love in my children's eyes someday, wrapped up safe in my mom's arms. Everyone says that our kids will know their Mimi because she lives on in us, because we'll tell them her stories. They'll learn to not sweat the small stuff, to look for the first cardinal of the season, to make a wish on the Thanksgiving turkey's wishbone. On some days, this makes me smile. But then, on other days, I want to kick and scream at the loss, both my mom's and her grandchildren's.

There's a saying about best laid plans, but boy, did we have plans for my mom.

For our Mimi.

Finding Home

My husband and I are nomads. A fun game on a quiet Friday evening involves, “If you could live anywhere, where would you live?” Answers have included large cities, various countries. The answers have surprised us, terrified us, and comforted us. Then for a bonus round, we choose which furniture we would take. I suppose this has shown that we really hate the majority of our furniture. Especially the couch we bought for $50 from a woman off Craig’s List in Seattle. Although I liked her; she had two rowdy boys, and lived in a run down little cape cod in what turned out to be a fairly expensive area of town. Being a nomad is harder when you are a parent, and own a dog. Rentals don’t want you. Everywhere seems too expensive, and then there is a whole other emotional element. The biggest differences we have had in parenting is our perception of it. Becoming a mother brings out your hidden desires and biases. Who knew I could never live in a split level (gag)? Or that he likes cities and apartments, but couldn’t live in them with two kids and a dog? Or that the random homeless guy on our street would scare me so much more once I was pushing a stroller? Giving birth opens up so many hidden vulnerabilities in you.

We are looking for home. I constantly wonder, does everyone else go through this? This constant search for the place where the best parts of their childhood and adult selves converge? Are we just over-thinking it? Ever since we moved back to Florida, we both knew that it wouldn’t be permanent. Being pregnant with a second child now, makes me remember aspects about my own childhood. We talk about our favorite things. So many of mine revolve around the seasons. There was apple picking in the fall, and pies to be made. Pumpkins, and chilly October evenings perfect for a light jacket and a fire. Snow, and sledding, ice skating, trips to Chicago. He remembers big family gatherings, being close to his cousins, and the smell of the country: “Kind of gross, but nostalgic too.” We both ache for home. And then these things need to combine with our adult biases. We like good organic food, strong coffee, interesting people to hang out with. We are looking for all the best parts of a city, without the city prices. Does such a place even exist?

We’ve started to look at houses in his home town, a small middle of nowhere town in Pennsylvania. It’s quiet, and people live there forever, including most of his family. Driving around at night, the streets are silent, the streetlights hazy. It’s the kind of place where people rarely lock their doors. I didn’t know places like it still existed. And the houses, oh my, the houses themselves are enough to overcome the small town-ness of it. Great big 1800’s houses with period details, hulking doorways, towering ceilings. Houses with a history. Houses I could write my novel in (creative people work better in places with higher ceilings).

We have discovered that we are emotional real estate buyers. To love a house is more than the sum of its parts. It’s the feeling at the front door, finding all the best hiding spots for hide and go seek. It’s all those little quirky features that make it yours. I grew up on Lake Michigan in a cold windy town in Northern Indiana, in a drafty house built in the 1930’s. It had a laundry chute that ran down to the basement, and a drop down ironing board in the kitchen, inside a narrow little cabinet. My parents sold that home years ago, but the second they found a house in Florida with an ironing board just like it, they fell in love. Sometimes it’s all the little things that you remember. It doesn’t matter that I have never seen my mother iron on it, although I did many times as a child in Indiana, it’s the memory of it all.

But tell me, what is home to you? A smell? A memory? Have you found it, or are you eternally searching?

The End is the Beginning

by Trina McNeilly Is the end really the end or is it just the beginning?  It’s arguable.  So much so, that I argue with myself on the subject on a regular basis.   The end of what, you ask?  I suppose that could make all of the difference, but, no not really.   The end of a relationship. The end of a job.  The end of a season.  The end of dream.  The end of your sanity.   Sometimes, I feel like I’m at the end of everything, although it probably appears to others that I am not at the end of anything.  You know, the end of my rope, all I can take, all out of options, no where to go from here, that kind of thing.  That kind of end.

It’s the frequent and regular kind of end that nags us all from time to time.  This kind of end tries to befriend some more than others.  And lately, I seem to be one of them.

I am at one of those ends.  And I’m standing at the edge of end squinting my eyes for the smallest bit of beginning.  I’ve always been able to see beginnings, pretty clearly even.  But this time, my tired eyes are straining---straining in the search for a speck.  If I get a glimpse, I’ll be good.  At least that is what I tell myself.

I’ll stare down that speck of a beginning, that small piece of hope and I won’t take my eyes off of it.  I’ll try my best to catch it and put it in my pocket.  But than a beginning can never be hidden for long.

All beginnings must start with an end. And I think the end that I am at is my childhood.  I know, strange words and an even stranger idea, coming from an almost 35-year-old mother of four.  But the truth is, I’ve only ever felt like me.  And the me I’ve always seen, when I walk past the mirror or hear myself in my head, is the 10 year old freckle-kissed kid, with a twinkle in her eye and plan up her sleeve.  A girl who spent her days taking on the neighborhood by way of her royal blue 10 speed and splashing away any small concerns in the backyard pool.  I had nothing to worry about except the plan I had for the next day or perhaps the rest of the summer.

I only ever wanted to grow up so I could be a school bus driver, try out for the Mickey Mouse Club, get my license, have a boyfriend, wear makeup, and grow boobs---all letdowns and disappointments concluded by age 16 . . . which led me back to the notion that being a kid is a way better deal.

But I grew up in the way that we all do.  That is, in the way that we are supposed to.  I got married, got a job, and had kids.  And yet, although the mirror, daily, shocks me into reality, somehow, on the inside I still feel like my 10 year old self.

I have been waiting and I suppose just expecting that one day, someday, I’d wake up and feel like the adult that I surely should be.  All of my Oprah watching days only led me to believe, and rightfully expect, that my 30’s would gift me with a new sense of self.  Every 30-something on the show from movie stars, regular plain people, to Oprah herself said over and again that once they hit their 30’s they suddenly felt comfortable in their own skin.  They knew who they were, what they wanted, who they were not, and what they did not want.  The self-assured weren’t afraid to speak up for themselves and almost couldn’t care less what other people thought about them anymore.  It was as if this confidence of ease magically took over their former unsure selves and no decision was a hard decision at this point because they just knew . . . knew themselves and knew what to do and certainly what not to do.

However contrived, that was my ideal of what it must really feel like to be grown up.   Yes, I am idealistic.  I am, in fact, a person with a lot of ideals.  Sometimes and maybe even often, mistaken for being naive   And wouldn’t you know, most of my ideals were configured, thought up, created and baked to perfection as a young one.

I told you I was at the end.   And here is how I’m kind of, for the most part, certain that I am likely, and almost surely, at the end of my childhood . . . because, I’ve found myself at the end of many of my ideals.  The grown up truth is that things are not always as they seem and certainly not always as you want them to be.  The end.

Today, it’s “how do you do?” to the grown up me.  It may still be a little ways off.  But it is a speck that I can at least see.  And no, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to say goodbye to the hopeful freckle-faced me.  But now, I can at least guide her and help her to be the woman she is supposed to be.  The beginning.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist living in central Pennsylvania. She is the author of four chapbooks of poetry, A Woman Traces the Shoreline (Dancing Girl Press, 2011), Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry (Finishing Line Press, 2012), Another Beginning (Kattywompus Press, forthcoming, 2013), and In This Dream of My Father (Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming, 2013). Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals like Brevity, The Rumpus, No Tell Motel, quarrtsiluni, MiPoesias, Phoebe, Cream City Review, TYPO, Quarterly West, Literary Mama, Glamour Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Penn State. I decided to ask my fabulous gal pals—astute readers and writers, all—from my MFA days at Penn State what they’ve been reading this summer. Even just seeing all of our names so close to each other here in print makes me wistful for days of gin & tonics together after workshop. (But not for workshop. Shudder. That you can keep.)

Jenn McKee is a Michigan-based entertainment/staff writer for AnnArbor.com and blogs about parenting at www.AnAdequateMom.com.

The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild by Susan J. Douglas I’m currently reading Susan J. Douglas' The Rise of Enlightened Sexism: How Pop Culture Took Us from Girl Power to Girls Gone Wild, and it's funny and infuriating and thought-provoking all at once. Since my four year old daughter is in the midst of a full-on princess phase, I'm reading the book with an eye toward the discussions we'll have as she grows older and absorbs even more coded media messages about women and femininity; but it's strange how what you're reading often jives perfectly with events happening around you in real time. The book's starting point, the Spice Girls and their take on "girl power," are suddenly hot again, thanks to their reunion performance at the Olympics; and I'd just finished the chapter that's focused on the (d)evolution of women's magazines through the years when I learned that Helen Gurley Brown died. Good, perspective-sharpening stuff.

Camille-Yvette Welsch teaches at the Pennsylvania State University and her work has appeared in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle among other venues.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See When the last living speaker of nu shu, a centuries old language spoken exclusively by women died, I was fascinated: so was Lisa See. See’s novel, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, chronicles the intense, marriage- like friendship sometimes contracted between two Chinese women called laotong, who spoke the language.  As the brutality of their lives unfolds—foot binding, marriage contracts, opium addiction, domestic abuse, death—nu shu gives the women a chance to both lament and celebrate each other and their friendship.  The novel offers an intimate, if depressing look at a language and a kind of relationship that gave voice to women who were traditionally both silenced and hobbled.

Danielle Magnuson (@DnlMag) is a writer and editor living in Hopkins, Minnesota. The Paris Wife by Paula McLain I reread Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a preface to Paula McLain's 2011 historical fiction novel The Paris Wife, written from the point-of-view of Hadley, his first wife. Hemingway’s writing is just as terrific as I remember from 15 years ago, but his characters drove me nuts. What a bunch of drama queens. The Paris Wife, as a modern-day accompaniment, is heart wrenching, with Hadley as the virginal, good woman and Ernest as the troubled young man drawn to her purity. I read The Paris Wife mostly in the bathtub in the final month of my own pregnancy. It was pretty heavy to read about the birth of their first child as I sat in anticipation of the same event in my life. The shifts in their individual indentities, the shift in their relationship, the way it all fell apart—by the end I was wiped out, emotionally.

Cindy Clem lives and (sometimes) writes in central Pennsylvania. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis I’ve been dabbling in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis since 2010 and have yet to finish it, not because I don’t like it but because it’s a Brain, and I approach it with reverence. Davis’s stories are spare, strange, cerebral.  They leave me delightfully at a loss and yet replete. The meticulous tracing of self-consciousness, the absence of emotional manipulation—this book is like Zen, but funnier. This title: “Meat, My Husband.” This passage:  “Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it […]. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.”

Sheila Squillante writes poems and essays and teaches at Penn State. Follow along at www.sheilasquillante.com. How to Train Your Dragon (series) by Cressida Cowell This summer, I am in love with Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books. I’ve been reading them with my son and they are just excellent. The ten books follow the unlikely hero, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, the thirteen-year-old someday- heir of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe of Vikings, and his tiny, petulant, but sometimes selfless dragon, Toothless. The prose is smart and lush and equally adept at delivering wry, winking humor that will appeal to parents and gross-out, bodily-function humor that will make kids howl.  But for me, the smartest thing about these books, is that Cowell has wisely chosen to frame them as the memoirs of Hiccup as an old man, looking back on a glorious, well-lived, warrior’s life. What this means is that every time the clever but bungling, underdog protagonist ends up hanging by a thread in the maw of a Seadragonus Maximus, anxious seven-year-old readers who are hanging there with him can stop, breathe, and remind themselves that we know Hiccup will prevail because we know he lives to tell the tale! We can spend less time worrying about mortality and more time focusing on how interesting (if disgusting) it is to be so very close to a dragon’s GI track.

Oh, the places you'll go

If you’d asked me ten years ago, or even two years ago, where I’d be living at age twenty-five, I might have guessed New York or Boston. Perhaps I’d even shoot a glance toward the West Coast, but I certainly never would have guessed I’d find myself in Atlanta. Atlanta’s a lovely place, but it was never on my radar. Before I showed up, I hadn’t internalized any stereotypes about the food or the people or the culture here. In fact, I had no idea what the place even looked like. (So many trees! So many strip malls!) It’s been a really wonderful aspect of settling in here, I think—arriving without assumptions and just taking it all in.

The thing about just showing up is that you get to notice exactly how a place folds in around you. When I moved to Boston for college, I had so many ideas about who I’d be there and how I’d belong. But you can spend a long time wrestling with the difference between who you think you’re supposed to be in a place and who you really are.

I moved here in June without much of a plan for what I’d do or who I’d be in this new-to-me town, and I like it much better that way. Somehow, it feels simpler this time, getting to know myself and my new context without having to make comparisons to what I’d expected. It’s a little scary approaching life in a new place without a detailed map and itinerary, but it’s pretty exciting too.

As a writer, I love trying to think ahead, imagining how the arc of a story will pan out. I love answering questions like, “How do you imagine your life five years from now?” It’s comforting trying to predict the future.

But I’ve learned that life doesn’t really work that way, plotting out a set of points and connecting them with straight lines. Instead, my imaginary future is most helpful for understanding the present.

When I was in sixth grade, I was set on becoming an astronaut one day. I loved learning about the universe, and I really wanted to leave my small town behind for fabulous adventures. Years later, that same impulse landed me not on Mars but in Divinity school. There I didn’t study how the universe looks or how it works, but rather a bit about how each of us imagines the universe from where we’re standing.

From where I’m standing today, the universe looks very beautiful and strange, and the future looks wide open. I wonder a little about where I’ll be five years from now, but I’m learning to wonder more about how I’ll shape today.

When I focus more on where I am than on where I will be, life starts to feel less like a timeline and more like a spiral. Even as we move forward, we can look back and notice how we’ve circled back around to familiar places and ways of being.

Recently in the Jewish calendar, we’ve entered the month of Elul, a time for reflection and contemplation in preparation for the High Holidays. I’ve often spent this time reflecting on past mistakes and shortcomings and planning how to do better in the year to come. This time, I’ve set myself a new challenge: to delight in what the past is teaching me about today and to allow the future, real or imagined, to illuminate possibilities for the present.

Summer Soft

A collection of photos from the beach, celebrating the softness of summer's last days. [gallery link="file" exclude="4234"]

The greatest story

My grandmother turns 90 this month.  No question she’s lived a full and interesting life.  About a year ago she started mentioning that she might like to record ‘Her Story’, as she called it.  I immediately volunteered.  I believe with every fiber of my being in learning from those that come before. I’m fascinated by history, and travel, and stories of a different time, all of which this biography promised to contain.  We’re not done yet, but already there have been fabulous stories, some I knew already, some even my father hadn’t heard.  My grandmother grew up on a farm in rural Missouri during the depression, she married a soldier during World War II, she’s visited all fifty states (plus living in Alaska when it was a mere territory), she’s canned hundreds of jars of family-famous pickles, and she remembers it all.  This is my (current) favorite story.  It’s about my grandparent’s wedding.

My grandmother and grandfather are both from a small town in rural Missouri.  My grandmother actually grew up in a farm outside of town, but once she was old enough, she and one of her sisters moved to town.  Which is where she met my grandfather.  As things go, they talked, and dated, and at some point, decided to get married.  I’ve seen the gazebo where he proposed, but my grandmother has always remained tight-lipped about what he said.  I think my grandfather would have told, but she always got there first, saying that was between the two of them.  So they were engaged.  And then my grandfather had to return to base.  This was World War II, and like most men his age, my grandfather was serving his country.  I imagine they planned a wedding just as they must have kept in touch, via letters. I do know they planned on a June wedding.  This was 1944.

At the time, my grandfather was stationed in North Carolina, he was part of a medical unit that was training for deployment.  One day, my grandfather mentioned he was engaged and the wedding date.  Later that afternoon, his commanding officer called him in to the office.  There was no one else around. The C.O. opened the safe and pulled out a folder boldly marked SECRET.  He placed a page on his desk and covered all but one line with blotters.  The line said ‘. . . will depart this station on or about the 12^th of June . . .’  The officer put the folder back in the safe, and never mentioned it again.The first time I was told this story, I was quite young, and I didn’t understand the significance.  In a time of war and fear, my grandfather’s commanding officer broke what I can only guess to be several rules, and told my grandfather a date.  The date.  The date the company would be shipping out.  A date that happened to be before my grandparent’s planned wedding date.  The officer was letting my grandfather know, they needed to move up the wedding.

And so on Easter Sunday 1944, my grandparents were married.  My grandfather wore his military uniform, my grandmother a ‘store bought blue suit with pillbox hat and new shoes’.  My grandmother had ridden the train from St. Louis to South Carolina just days before.  The girls in my grandfather’s office had planned a wedding with all the trimmings, going so far as to surreptitiously visit each mess hall on base and empty the sugar bowls into their purses so that my grandparents might have a wedding cake. Two months later, my grandfather shipped off, just as his C.O. had known he would.  My grandmother would take a train back to St. Louis, and they wouldn’t see each other for fifteen months.

And to think, that was just the start of their story.

Lessons from a Road Trip...

Dearest Clara,

This past vacation, we took what we call “The Great American Roadtrip”.  Except, we didn’t take it here in the US, we took it in Europe.  We called it that because we drove for hours and hours through countries and countries to get from the Austrian Alps to the French Coast, and that seems like the kind of thing that one would do here in the US.  If someone tells you that they just drove across ten states, I think you would hardly blink twice.  But in Europe, if you tell people you just traversed ten countries, they’re not quite sure what to make of that.  Like the gentleman who stopped us at the gas station in Switzerland, who just couldn’t believe that our license plates were from Vienna, even though we were only half way on our trip.

But despite the long hours in the car, road travel is still one of our favorite ways to really “see” a country.   The landscape, the people you meet, the dishes you have to try, the improvisation that you have do to, the strange items you can purchase at the gas station – all of that gives you an entirely different sense of place.  It’s a bit like adding salt to food – it’s still the same food you are eating, just with a flavor that becomes more alive (assuming of course, that you’re not adding too much!)

Road trips turn out the best when they’re not overly planned, but still, a few things have become good lessons for us over the kilometers and miles we have traveled, at least for Europe:

• Always have a map and water:  Always.  Whatever fancy gadget your generation will have when you become of driving age might fail you, it might get stolen, it might get forgotten or it might get lost.  In short, nothing replaces a paper map.  Have one just in case.  And have water because you should for a myriad of good reasons, the most important one being because your mother said so.
• Learn how to change your own tires: I’m no pro at this, but if you learn how to drive and you put yourself on the road, you should know how to change a tire.  Don’t think that you can call up Triple A anywhere in the world, and in many areas, the faster you get off the side of the road, the better, and the best way to do that is to know how to do it yourself.
• Make time for the scenic overlooks: There’s a reason why they call those out on signs.  You probably can’t stop for all of them but make time for some – and don’t forget to take your picture in front of them! You’ll develop a fondness for them when you come home.
• Know how to drive manual:  Often times in Europe – or nearly anywhere else in the world – there will be no other option.  You don’t have to like it, but you do have to know how to do it.  Ironically, once you learn how to do it, you’ll probably love it.
• Go with your gut: If it looks like a fun place to stop, stop.  If you had a planned stop and it looks like a bad idea, don’t.  The more you move around, the more you’ll develop a sense for these things, so trust yourself to make those calls.
• Always take advantage of the bathroom: This applies to travel of any kind but if you see a legitimate bathroom, whether porcelain or tree shrub, take advantage, you never know when the next stop will be.

Lots of love,

Mom

Colors of India.

Half the fun is getting there, they say. Certainly, visiting the roads less travelled has always fascinated me and drawn me to new adventures. This is why, for our honeymoon, Dany and I chose India, a country we had never been to before, but somehow seemed to know through our Indian friends’ stories. We travelled from Agra to Cochin, saw crowded cities and remote villages, witnessed congested bazaars and found cows hacking their path through vegetable markets. We spent time with our friends in Delhi, sharing typical spicy dishes with their families. We travelled the rocky roads of Rajasthan on our own, rode camels along the Pakistani border, got soaked under the Mumbai rain, and finally took part to our friends’ wedding in Kerala. Step by step, we realized how legendary stories are attached with every place and how strong our emotions could get.   

What struck us the most was VARANASI, a holy city located on the banks of the river Ganges, a pilgrimage site for hindus. People come here to die and be cremated at the burning ghats along the river. It’s very different from what we had known and seen before. It’s a unique place where you smell joy, hope, life and death. All at once.

Have you read Arundhati Roy's book, The God of Small Things? Some stories draw us in by making us wonder how they will end. This novel begins by telling us how it ends, and has a living, breathing rhythm to it. It’s a very melancholic novel, and it paints a picture most of the people probably wouldn't sympathize with. This is one of those books that left an indelible mark on me---the words dance and merge, and take in the sad memories of a story that is tragic, but hopeful in a way. The hope lies in the possibility of new beginnings.

Writer's Words -  Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

On joy.

“Anything's possible in Human Nature,” Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. “Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy.” Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it. Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.

On death.

It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that it purloined. Over the years, as the memory of Sophie Mol slowly faded, the Loss of Sophie Mol grew robust and alive. It was always there. Like a fruit in season. Every season. As permanent as a government job.

On Small God. 

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully. Like a rich boy in shorts. He whistled, kicked stones. The source of his brittle elation was the relative smallness of his misfortune. He climbed into people’s eyes and became an exasperating expression. 

Varanasi As I Saw It. 

 

 

 

Telling a new story

"Roxanne Krystalli is a gender-related development specialist in conflict and post-conflict areas."

What do you do when the first line in your biography no longer fits?

I am between stories at the moment, a process that involves consistently living off the top two layers of my still-packed suitcases, debating the merits of paint swatches, and confronting the reverse culture shock inherent in returning to what used to be a home with the task of sorting out the disorienting dance between the unfamiliar and the too familiar.

And the first line no longer fits. Having worked in conflict and post-conflict areas, I know not to confound conflict and war. Conflict, human pain and strife exist in Boston and Colombia and Guatemala and Jerusalem and I have called all these places home at some point along the journey. Yet, you would hardly call Boston a "conflict or post-conflict area."

You would hardly call me a specialist. I have grown wary of specialists and experts. The longer I have worked with women affected by conflict worldwide, the more I have uncovered the boundaries of my knowledge. The universe of concepts I do not understand and of life I cannot make sense of keeps expanding. It would be out of step for the titles and labels to keep narrowing. "Specialist" and "expert" do not fit. Do not even get me started on "guru."

As I fill out the paperwork for orientation at the graduate program that is anchoring my return to Boston, I notice everyone is grabbing for story. The prompts might as well read "Tell us who you are . . . in 250 words or less. In a paragraph. In 140 characters. In a text message without emoticons. With bells and whistles, without embellishment, with enough intrigue for us to want to be your friends, roommates, or mentors."

Life stories evolve, and so do their 140-character biographies. I am slowly realizing that a bio is not the story of "is", not exclusively the story of here and now. It is a journey between points, a question about the axis on which you are traveling. The story of "has lived and has worked", not of "lives and works." And, perhaps most thankfully, it is the story of beyond "lives and works." On Twitter, in her own blog, in the Admitted Students Handbook, Roxanne Krystalli is - still - a gender-related development specialist who works in conflict and post-conflict areas.

In life, Roxanne Krystalli is in transition, perpetual transition. Her heart is in gender advocacy and conflict management, in the Middle East and Latin America. This is the work that feeds her faith in humanity, a phrase she overuses, right up there with "the universe is winking." Her mind likes to wrap itself around the concepts of remembrance and forgetting, nostalgia and grief, of storytelling as a vehicle of empathy and, shyly, maybe even as a vehicle of peacebuilding. She sees the world, really sees, through the viewfinder of a camera. She loves panda bears, everything that smells like vanilla, and the art of loving in itself---as an art.

This is not the stuff of LinkedIn, of student handbooks, or maybe even not of Twitter. But it is the story of now, the biography of a journey from elsewhere and a past "then" to a future that has yet to be painted.

Liliuokalani, Hawaii's Last Monarch

I’ve been to Hawaii a few times, and growing up it always seemed like the happiest place on earth---South Pacific edition---but one chance overheard statement in 2003 stays with me and can probably be credited with changing (or at least complicating) my view of the islands forever. (I also wrote about it here, where I reviewed Sarah Vowell’s excellent Unfamiliar Fishes for my book blog. Just openly acknowledging that I’m repeating myself on the internets.)

So what was the statement? My parents and I were poking around a tiny inlet on the Big Island one evening, and nearby a Hawaiian family was having a BBQ picnic. One of the men laughingly reprimanded a few tykes who were getting too rambunctious with this: “You want to be like the white man? Killing everything you see?”

That was my first indication that Hawaii was, shall we say, acquired by the United States by means less than savory (though really, we could say that about all the states . . . but I digress!). The man wasn’t speaking with resentment, but this acquisition, it would seem, dramatically affected the worldview of his fathers and grandfathers and continued to color his own. (No pun intended.)

As far as anti-imperial icons goes, Liliuokalani is pretty tops. She’s not the only figure in the islands’ anti-imperial movement, but she fought back in the last days of Hawaiian sovereignty against an encroaching American authority, sought to prevent annexation, and was even placed under house arrest for her alleged role in inspiring a coup (echoes of Eleanor of Aquitaine!).

The first and last queen of Hawaii was born Lydia Kamakaeha to a noble family, into a culture already experiencing the drastic effects of white missionary activity and Western economic and strategic interest. She was educated by missionaries at the prestigious school for high-ranking Hawaiian children and married a white sea captain’s son named John Dominis. He’s the bearded stud seen here:

The line of Kamehameha the Great was broken after the death of Kamehameha V in 1872, and two years later Lydia’s brother, David Kalakaua, became king. Lydia was now a member of the royal contingent and heir to the Hawaiian throne. In 1887, she accompanied her brother and his wife on a great journey to Queen Victoria’s Golden jubilee (the 50^th anniversary of Vic’s reign; long enough for anyone, but she’d go ahead and add another 14 years of rule to that anyway).

This probably doesn’t need to be said, but going on a trip in 1898 was no joke. Fifty years later, you could hop on Pan-Am and be in London in less than a day. Liliuokalani and her family spent months on the road. They took a boat to San Francisco, took a train across the United States, and then took another boat to England. Along the way, they visited all the classic road trip pit stops: Sacramento, Salt Lake, Denver (which she describes as “an infant city… [with] but a few scattered houses”), the oil fields of Pennsylvania, Boston, New York, and, of course, Washington, D.C. They were received by President Grover Cleveland and dined at the White House, as they were later received by Queen Victoria in London.

Personally, I find the Hawaiian royal family’s trip fascinating. I honestly think it should be immortalized in a movie. It would be part biopic, part historical drama, part road trip buddy comedy (I’m thinking John Dominis could be the whiny guy who keeps screwing things up for everyone else; Liliuokalani describes how, in San Francisco, he had to be taken into the wharf on a stretcher because of a sudden attack of rheumatism).

On David Kalakaua’s death in 1891, Lydia took the throne as Liliuokalani. She was, notably, to be the first reigning queen of Hawaii, as well as the last Hawaiian monarch. For decades, white missionary descendants and businessmen had been playing an increasingly active role in local government. When Liliuokalani, in an effort to restore more authority to the Hawaiian monarch, abrogated an 1887 treaty that gave special privileges to the United States (including ceding them Pearl Harbor), the businessmen had had enough.

The Missionary Party deposed Liliuokalani in 1893 in a bloodless coup and announced their rule as provisional government. Sanford Dole (cousin of the pineapple guy) became president and pushed for Hawaii to be annexed by the United States. Grover Cleveland was opposed to this---he actually felt that the coup was unlawful and that the Hawaiian monarchy should be restored, so the matter temporarily remained in limbo.

In 1895, a failed coup in the name of the queen took place, and Liliuokalani was placed under house arrest. She agreed to formally abdicate, in part so that her supporters would be released from jail. However, she continued to fight tooth and nail against the annexation of the islands, which, of course, happened anyway in mid-1898 as the U.S. was in the throes of the Spanish-American War---hey, here’s some islands exactly halfway across the Pacific where we can stop our ships on the way to the Philippines! Annexed.

The rest is history. And so is the part I just told you about.

I feel a lot of sympathy for Liliuokalani, maybe more than I feel for other historical women. She was born into a changing world, a Hawaii in transition. The ending---American annexation---was not inevitable, but forces in that direction were powerful, beyond the control of a single person. This was the dawn of the American century. Liliuokalani was only queen for two short years in the 1890s before being deposed by Dole and his ilk, but her intentions for Hawaii, framed as they were in the language of her conquerors, remain clear to us today. For however brief a period, for however little she could do, she stood against the relentless tide of American imperialism and became a lasting symbol of resistance.

Oh, and she also wrote songs (see “Aloha Oe”). Another reason I like her.

My Story: Purpose

For most people, mid-life crises strike in middle age, when paunches are appearing and more hairs are grey than not. For me, the period of searching I began to jokingly refer to as my “quarter-life crisis” came calling a few years ago in early spring, a few months before I turned 21. Eight months after I got married, it was becoming clear that a bachelor’s degree was not going to be in my immediate future. My class schedule had been pared down until hardly anything remained; I spent my days going to class and doing homework for a degree that was realistically impossible at that particular moment in my life.

I felt adrift, confused, unsure of what my purpose in life was or what my next step should be. If not a college graduate, then what? My health wasn’t stable enough for even a part-time job. I desperately wanted children, but my husband and I had agreed to wait until my health was a little more manageable. Coupled with the fact that I knew that my cystic fibrosis was nearly a guarantee of a future infertility struggle, it seemed clear that motherhood was not something that would come to me easily or soon.

As the trees began to unfurl their first delicate green buds, I wrestled over and over with the feeling of being lost, purposeless, meaningless. Could there be value in a life so small, I wondered? Could there be a value in a life that was, more often than not, lived from the couch? Could there be value in a life that lacked all of the markers our society uses to define success—a degree, a job, children?

A few weeks after my soul-searching began, I reflected in a rather macabre moment that really, my “quarter-life crisis” might be considered a true “mid-life crisis,” if you consider a mid-life crisis to be the anxiety that strikes when you’ve lived half the years you can be expected to live. Currently, the average life expectancy for a cystic fibrosis patient is in the late thirties. Years later, I learned that plenty of CF patients in their early twenties experience a similar mid-life crisis.

Weeks passed. The snow in my mountain-locked home melted, leaving the earth saturated with mud and the constant sound of dripping in my ears. And still I felt empty, longing for a purpose. I had always been driven; I’d gone after the things I’d wanted with energy and zeal, and I usually got them. I had always had a purpose. I had been a daughter, a writer, a big sister and surrogate mother, a violinist, a student. I had had all number of big dreams, from publishing a book to living in Hawaii to teaching at a dance studio.

I felt, now, as though everything was being peeled away from me. I was left with only the barest of essentials, the simplest of responsibilities. The scope of my life was narrowing. I thought about these things constantly, talking them over with my husband, writing about them in my journal and on my blog, praying desperately for a purpose for my life.

And slowly, over a period of weeks, I began to find what I was looking for.

As days passed and I continued my relentless questioning, a word came into my mind again and again. Homemaker. It was not a term I had spent much time thinking about before; in the brief moments that I had, I had considered it a rather outdated phrase, one that pigeonholed a woman into a narrow frame of reference and failed to recognize her vibrant, dynamic nature.

But the word stayed. Homemaker. And as I pondered it, I had a revelation.

All my life, I had thought of "homemaker" as synonymous with "mother." After all, "homemaker" is the official term for a stay-at-home mother. When applying to college, I’d spent a lot of time checking boxes to indicate that my mom was a "homemaker." "Homemaker" was, in my opinion, the label that the corporate world had come up with to make a life of diaper changes and laundry baskets something you can put on an official document.

But as I thought about it, I realized something sensational: "homemaker" was not, in fact, the same thing as "mother." Although many mothers are homemakers, a homemaker does not have to be a mother.

I thought about the phrase: a simple compound word, really. Home-maker. One who creates a home. A woman who devotes herself to making her home a haven, a place of safety, comfort, and peace—for herself, her husband, and anyone who enters.

In that seemingly innocuous word, I found the sense of purpose I had been so desperately seeking. There were many things that I couldn’t—and still can’t—do. A year after that mid-life crisis, I officially withdrew from college. Three years since that spring of searching, I still don’t have a degree, or a job, or a child.

But I have been a homemaker. In every place that we have lived, I have worked hard to create a place of joy and love for my husband and myself. I have welcomed friends into our home for comfort, and companionship, and lots of late nights of games and laughter. I’ve discovered a passion for creating good, healthy food for my family.

I have made a home.

That moment of realization—the light-bulb instant where I realized just how much purpose could be found in such a neglected phrase—did not solve all my problems. I still had moments of guilt, and despair, and long nights where I felt worthless and obsolete. I still do.

But what that chilly spring so many years ago did do was answer one question that had haunted me for a long time before. Can there be value in a life so small?

Because what I have learned is that the answer is yes. There is always value. Even in the days where I feel most helpless—even in the days where I can hardly get off the couch—there is value. I am the maker of our home, an integral part in this family of two that my husband and I have created.

I have purpose.

In this space, Cindy Baldwin will share her evolution---the ways she has come to accept the circumstances of her life with cystic fibrosis and find great contentment within them. You can read the beginning of her story here and here. 

Growing Up

When you live in New York City, there are moments when you find yourself at odds with her. When my husband, James, and I moved here a year ago, I was fresh out of graduate school and just starting a new job. James was on the job-hunt and together we moved into a tiny apartment on a six-month lease just to see if we could hack it. I'll admit that this first year has sometimes seemed like a test of wills. The wills in question being our own, and the apparent will of the city herself. I don't mean to exaggerate our struggles. We've been triumphant, almost entirely. We've survived moments of legitimate worry like car accidents and thefts and desperately low bank accounts. Those moments serve best as a way to put into perspective our complaints about laundromats and malfunctioning subway cards. Despite all odds, this month, we even managed to get married.

There's little about this past year that's been truly unique. The particulars, of course, but not the thrust of the story. Since moving together last June, we've been regaled with stories of a once-upon-a-time nature from other once-young couples who shared bathrooms with neighbors and subsisted on ramen and ketchup packets and fiddling in the subway. The stories usually finish with a sigh and a "You're only young once." But while on one hand these stories offer a sense of community and the relief that someone else has also survived a difficult moment, there is a risk, I think, in believing that this kind of struggle exists only for young people.

I spent Sunday with my 90 year-old cousin, Mildred, who has lived in the same New York City apartment for 60 years. She is the picture of grace and good humor, and like us, she battles a willful city. I've decided that it's still more hopeful to realize that struggle exists at all stages of our lives and that young or not we have the capacity to overcome it. In difficult moments, I've found, a few stems of fresh flowers make a world of difference. And it doesn't matter one bit if you're 28 or 90. Mildred agrees.