XIII. Provence

I am walking along the Mediterranean coast with the groupe des randonneurs that I joined as my required extracurricular activity from ACCP. What I had expected to be rigorous hiking turns out to be a group of mostly retired people who amble through woods every Tuesday afternoon. I convinced Leah and Bridget to join as well, and we’re laughing at how ridiculously slowly we are moving. We hadn’t fully comprehended the meaning of the verb randonner when we signed up for this. We thought it was hiking. This is ambling, maybe. Strolling.

We are the only ones wearing shorts and are obviously American, and so the other walkers are delighted to meet us. At the break halfway through the walk, we are plied with treats and spécialités personelles of every sort from our fellow randonneurs — homemade cake, figs stuffed with almonds, provençal cookies. I finally have to say no to coffee. Leah, Bridget and I tried so hard to be friendly and gracious that after the break we feel a bit nauseated.

Wild rosemary grows everywhere in this dry climate. As I walk along the cliffside road back toward the bus, the clouds rolling in over the sea, I pick some and crush it between my fingers to release the sharp, woodsy fragrance.

“Try eating it,” says one of the smiling women walking near me. “It’s good for the digestion.”

Quiet Can Be Loud

I'm thrilled to introduce you to this week's contributor, Trina McNeilly. Trina needs no introduction to many of you, as she's the blogger behind the popular (and gorgeous)  La La Lovely. She's also a mom to FOUR!, a freelance writer and a self -proclaimed style scout, who is currently making her childhood home into her grown-up home.  What struck me immediately upon "meeting" Trina over email was first, her obvious kindness, and second, that she said the fear of turning into her mother isn't much of a fear at all for her. I know exactly what she means. And with that, I give you the lovely Trina.

By Trina McNeilly 

My mom kills me with kindness and loves the way we all want to be loved: unconditionally.  She was the mom that every other kid wanted to have and I was lucky enough that she was all mine.

We were the treat house.  Growing up, ours was the house that everyone wanted to play at; for the fun, undoubtedly, but also for the snacks (it was not unusual to catch a neighbor kid knocking on our front kitchen window asking my mom for sweets).  We had a home that people just wanted to be at.  I attribute this to my dad providing a wonderful place and my mom making it a home.  Besides giving us a home, the greatest thing they gave me and my siblings was the gift of being kids.  We spent our days living out whatever it was we could imagine and playing our days away.  There was not a worry or care and if one tried to find its way in, there was no doubt that they would scare it away and make any wrongs right.

I've always held both my parents in high regard - put them on a pedestal, in fact, and looked up to them the way I thought all kids did. It’s hard not to look at my mom with a sense of adoration.  I don't know anyone as kind, loving, giving and beautiful as she is. To me she was – and still is - the perfect embodiment of beautiful elegance living in the casual comfort of the everyday.  I've always known my mom was beautiful, more beautiful than I would ever be.  To this day, when someone says I look like my mom, it’s a compliment I hold onto.  But, when someone tells me that I am like my mom, it’s the best compliment of all, because beyond her beauty is a beautiful soul.  Hers is a soul that houses a quiet inner strength, the kind that often goes unnoticed.  And worse than going unnoticed, is often mistaken for weakness.  But there is no weakness there.  My mom’s is the kind of strength that needs not be spoken, needs not be displayed, needs not show its heavy lifting to every person it encounters.  It is the kind of strength that is content to continue on, day after day, on good days and bad days alike.  It is the kind of strength that is enviable; that is, if people knew about it.

There are days I can't quite find my step.  And some days worse yet, when I can't find my footing at all.  But, before I collapse and cave to my wobbly limbs, the strength I need comes in the whisper, in the thought of a woman who has already taken the steps that I am, on that day, afraid to take.  And hope flickers in my heart.  And in that small flicker of hope, I find my strength.  My quiet inner strength is taking form.  Forming courage.  Forming tomorrows.  Forming a foundation of strength for my own daughter.  And so the story continues.

This is the story of a beautiful soul whose strength might not always be seen, but whose inner beauty always shines through.  All those years, I watched my mom putting on her makeup, always applying lipstick before she walked out the door. In teaching me those very same practices, she was actually teaching me something far greater: how to love without conditions, how to serve a family and put others first, how to love until there is nothing else, how to hope against hope itself.  A mother’s unconditional love is never wasted, it is only reproduced.

So with my lipstick in hand, I say thank you mom, for all that you might not have even known you were teaching me.  Because of you, my soul is growing strong in the quietest of ways.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is?)

Hilary Halpern's lifelong affinity with the sea took her to Santa Cruz for her college education. Here is where she learned how to sail and realized her dream of circumnavigation. Meanwhile, she is working on careers in teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow her writings of inner monologues ranging from dating to tales of her experiences on "the high seas" on her blog: hiladil.blogspot.com. Sailing and my love of the sea have quite the influence on the books I pick and the books that are gifted to me. Maiden Voyage and Dove have been my favorite stories thus far.

Maiden Voyage

by Tania Aebi

Sailing around the world became a dream of mine a little over a year ago; however, I would prefer to do it in the company of crew, unlike Tania Aebi, who at 18 years-old embarked on her quest to circumnavigate the globe alone. Upon her graduation from high school, Tania's father gave her the choice of either a college education or a sailboat. He is an adventurous man and a seasoned sailor who already had accomplished more than one ocean passage with his daughter in tow; he wanted to give her the option of pursuing her own adventure. The catch: she had to sail it around the world by herself within 2 years and break the record as the youngest woman-sailor to do so. Tania picked the boat: a 26-foot sloop Veruna. She writes of her voyage in 1989,  four years after she set sail from New York Harbor. This true story is captivating for sailors and adventure seekers alike. Aebi peppers her exciting tale of close-calls, mile-stones (literally), romance, and self-discovery with tidbits of her dysfunctional upbringing and rebellious youth. Her writing is beautifully descriptive and relatable. I found it fascinating to read her reflections on how a life-changing voyage can bring bittersweet feelings of newfound wisdom as well as a nostalgia for her innocence. After reading her accounts I craved embarking on my own adventure.

Dove

by Robin Lee Graham

This is another autobiographical solo-circumnavigating tale and is the inspiration of a cheesy 1970s flick by the same name. I recommend Robin Lee Graham's personal account. In 1965 at age 16 Robin set sail from Southern California on his 24-foot sloop Dove - hence the title of the book. His enthralling voyage took him a total of 5 years. As he sailed from one destination to the next, he would often stop for as long as several months at a time to explore the land as he repaired his boat and collected provisions. It's interesting to get a young man's perspective of the world as it was in the mid 1960s. Robin gives insight to his thoughts on society in the United States and how being away from it has an extreme effect on the way he will live his life upon his return. During his laboriously long ocean passages, particularly in the Doldrums, he writes of the downward spiral his mind takes after being with only his boat and the eerily quiet sea for so long, and how easy it can be to waver on the brink of insanity. He writes of his care-free times in tropical paradise as well, allowing us to escape in his exquisite, euphoric descriptions of island life.

I read Heinlein's suspenceful novel soon after James Cameron's Avatar debuted in theaters. This fantastic piece of science fiction, written in 1961 has many similar themes to Avatar and makes me wonder if James Cameron drew inspiration from Heinlein's story for his movie. It was gifted to me by an acquaintance who warned me that "grokking" would soon become a part of my everyday vocabulary.

Stranger in a Strange Land

by Robert A. Heinlein

To "grok" something, is to deeply understand it. In the context of the story, it is to appreciate its role in the universe and realize how it relates to one's own role which is a huge part of this story. It takes place in some unspecified time in the future, as projected from the 1960s. World War III is over and life is discovered on Mars. On one of the early expeditions to this foreign planet, Valentine Michael Smith, or "Mike" is born and unfortunately orphaned as an infant by his space-exploring Earthling parents. He is adopted and raised by the Martians and as a result, acquires their psychic powers; the ability to mind-read and to make people disappear with thoughts alone. Another expedition 25 years after his birth brings him to Earth and in captivity of the government due to legal implications and planetary politics. This brilliant science-fiction novel begins with his escape by the aide of a brave nurse and a political reporter with a passion for social-justice. As the story unfolds Mike learns the good and bad ways of his physical counterpart and also tries to impart his own Martian wisdom on the human-race. Heinlein eloquently delivers an outsider's perspective of the multi-faceted behavior of humans and our social and political constructs. He narrates the plot in a way that creates a reflection of how strange it is that we are the only species with such an unquantifiable range of emotion . . . or so we think!

I'm sure this famous novel needn't an explanation for itself. It is one of the stories I have enjoyed reading more than once.

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

I first attempted to read this classic in high school and had a hard time getting passed the language that I now love getting lost in over and over again. I am fascinated by this time period of the early 1800s and how different life was for women and their relationships with men; yet how the love and tumult between them remains the same as it is between true loves today, some 200-plus years later. Jane Austen's words never cease to fulfill the hopeless romantic within me and fuel my own love of writing.

And finally…

Charlotte's Web

by E.B. White

My Mother first read this book at age 8.  She has a vivid image of reading the final chapters late at night with a flashlight so as not to disturb her sister sleeping next to her.  All for loss as she sobbed along with Wilbur and the other farm friends in their grief of losing Charlotte.  Eighteen years later in my mother's, or rather Miss Dowd's first year of teaching, she still couldn't stop the tears from welling up as she read the ending of Charlotte's Webb aloud to her second grade class. The life and friendships between the animals on the farm Miss Dowd loved so much influenced her to create a similarly warm environment in her classroom. Every year of her teaching career she read E.B. White's story to her students. One year, after failing to control her tears at the book's ending yet again, one of her students walked up to her afterwards to comfort her and said, "It's okay Miss Dowd, it's just a story."

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.

Lessons from Cabaret...

Image Credit: Time Out London

Dear Clara,

I’m in London again for work; it seems like the opportunity is coming up more often these days.  I was able to schedule in an evening in the theater, courtesy of my best friend, for one of my most favorite shows, Cabaret.  While many musicals often aim to stay above any kind of disheartening fray, Cabaret introduces both social and political commentary, without removing any of the fun---in fact, I would argue the fun is even taken to a whole new level.  I absolutely adore the music and pace of the show, and I’ll even admit that I might have spent a Halloween or two as Sally Bowles.  The thing though, is that the Cabaret comes to an end, tragic every time.  It's getting harder and harder to watch, since you know inevitably what happens not so long after the show ends.  A few things always stick with me:

• “In here, life is beautiful…”: Everyone should have a place, cabaret or otherwise, where life is at its best.  Whether it’s wine, song, dance or nature, quiet and tea, look for spaces that are the best representation of what’s good in this life for you.   Just remember that you can’t live exclusively in those places; the outside world will always come in and you need to be prepared.
• “And it just so happens I do paint my fingernails green, and I think it’s pretty”: All of the characters have their eccentricities, personalities and even character flaws, yet for a time they all manage to be a cohesive group.  It doesn’t last of course, but focus on differences in people as something interesting, something to be learned from, and something that compliments those things that make you yourself different.  It’s a quality not many people have.
• “I thought I should know something about the politics”: When Cliff arrives in Berlin, he immediately starts to read the literature of the day, much to the confusion of Sally, who is caught up in the moment.  Different travels and places offer us adventures, but we should also take the time to know something about the location, and what’s happening in current events and what that means for all groups that live there, not just the glimpses we are given when we’re visitors.  It might just change your perspective.
• “A pineapple? I am overwhelmed”: I think one of the most touching scenes in the entire show is when Frau Schneider is gifted a pineapple by her gentleman caller.  Not only is it a tremendously sweet display of romance amongst two people who thought they would remain alone, but it also captures how something rare can really touch you.  Lately, I notice that people always laugh during this scene.  No one seems to realize that at the time, pineapples weren’t that readily available, were extremely rare, were a symbol of the exotic and were incredibly expensive.   Now you could walk into nearly any supermarket, probably one that’s open 24 hours and buy a pineapple anytime you feel like it.  It’s good to appreciate where our fruits and food come from, and how long they traveled to get there, and what a gift it is truly to have such fresh items full of flavor and vitamins for ourselves at any time.
• “What good is sitting alone in your room?” Come here the music play . . . Make time for music and for enjoyment with others.  There is so much in life that can drag you down,  don’t waste your opportunities when times are better.

All my love,

Mom

A Responsibility to Love

Last week Roxanne wrote a post titled The Responsibility to Love. I encourage you to follow the link and read it if you haven’t already, Roxanne’s writing is always timely, poignant, and thoughtful.  You should also read her post, because I’m not going to recap her words here, only the title. For a week I’ve had those four words running through my head: A Responsibility To Love.  The sheer power of that phrase has reverberated deep in my soul and subconscious.  What does it mean? What does it mean for me? A Responsibility To Love.

Love is one of those words that fits multiple parts of speech.  It can be a thing, a metaphorical place, an emotion, an adverb, and of course, a verb.  To Love. I love many people; I love my best friends, my family, my husband.  I often have very strong feelings for my first cup of coffee in the morning too, but let’s forget about loving things for now.  Love can be stagnant; I will always love my parents. But as with anything, surely it’s better with a little effort. I love my parents much more because I know them as people and individuals; I know them because I talk with them often and communicate.  So I don’t just love them as my parents, but as individuals whom I know and respect.  But perhaps that is degrees of love, and not responsibility.

What does it mean to have a Responsibility To Love?  I think first, it means letting someone know that they are loved.  If you love someone, truly deeply love them, and you don’t express that, it’s a little like the tree falling in the forest.  Love isn’t something that is meant to be hidden or silenced; it should be shouted from the rooftops. If you love someone, I think you have a responsibility to let them know: initially, often, and frequently.

I also think with Love comes the responsibility of caring for someone.  Whether it is taking care of a spouse when they are ill, helping a friend through a breakup, or offering support whenever able, if you love someone you should be, to some extent, responsible for their wellbeing.  In a similar vein, I think it is important and necessary to care for the relationship.  I have a black thumb myself, but I’ll use the analogy anyway: just as a plant requires water and sunlight to bloom, a relationship requires care and contact to thrive and survive. (Luckily I am a much better friend than I am a gardener).

Finally, on a grander scale, I think A Responsibility To Love means that I have a responsibility to act with love.  Not only towards the select group of individuals that I love, but in everything I do.  Everyone loves Someone, and in the nature of 6 degrees, if you follow the connections long enough, eventually the someone that a stranger loves will come in contact with someone that I love.  Just as I want that person to be treated with kindness, I should treat the strangers I meet with the same. There is nothing wrong and everything right with spreading a little more love in the world.  From now on, I’m looking it as my responsibility; a responsibility to love.

Dressing

Wine colored jeans. An eggplant hued henley. Chocolate brown leather ankle boots. The elements of my favorite fall outfit are best described through the language of food: wine, eggplant, and coco. In these last few weeks, with the weather turning cooler and the days darker, I had expected to find myself retreating to the warmth and comfort of the kitchen. What I didn't expect, however, was that my wardrobe would also do the same.  That cheerful looking orange pumpkin I roasted in the oven last night? It made me long for a bright soft scarf of the same color. Or what about that deep, blue-green kale? Perfect for a cozy v-neck.  I find myself wanting to eat as I dress and dress as I eat: In a spectrum of colors and flavors. In different styles, but with a similar taste. My dinner plate is my fashion muse, apparently.

It seems I'm not the only one to have noticed this appealing connection between food and clothes. In flipping through a Lands End catalogue recently I came across a slew of vegetable and fruit named garb. There was a  "spinach leaf" sweatshirt and an "aubergine plum" turtleneck. A "boysenberry" pea coat and a "brown spice" t-shirt. My favorite descriptions might have been of the boozy variety: punch, claret, merlot, mulled wine, wine berry, bordeux. So many different names for so many similar colors.

I wondered what these names are meant to convey about these products? A turtleneck that is both the color of plum and eggplant must be very purple, yes. Superficially this naming system tells us what a product looks like. But I think the food language is meant to add something. It adds truth and authenticity, maybe, by connecting the wise earth to the piece of clothing. A turtleneck is just a turtleneck. But food is different, it is memory and nourishment, it is flavor and experience. And food is also, apparently, selling us some clothes.

Michelle Obama: First Lady. Political Powerhouse.

Yes it may be a stretch to call Michelle Obama “historical” (as in, she's alive and hugely relevant), but I’m invoking my own executive privilege as YHWOTD president. Plus it’s timely. Plus no matter which way you slice it, Michelle Obama will certainly go down in history.

I was struck by this last fact as I watched Barack Obama take the stage for his election-night victory speech, accompanied by his ridiculously photogenic family: daughters Sasha and Malia, getting older every day, and wife Michelle. They waved to the audience; they turned around and waved to the back audience (you know, those randos who sit behind the stage and look awkward during speeches); they hugged and kissed; and then Michelle and the young ‘uns took off to leave the President to his important man task.

It struck me because, more than any other First Lady in recent memory, it seemed a crime that this was the only part she got to play. Just as it struck me during the debates when I would exclaim with delight over Michelle’s fabulous outfit choices, and then I would immediately feel conflicted about how this was all I had to say about Michelle.

Not that I’m denying her role as fashion icon—she certainly is one. But she’s also an incredibly accomplished woman, at least as accomplished as her husband: before Barack’s political career skyrocketed, she attended Princeton and Harvard Law School and worked several prestigious law jobs in Chicago. What’s more, she is constantly upping the ante about what it means to be a First Lady, running campaigns to promote healthier eating, making countless media appearances, and killing it at the Democratic National Convention with a pitch-perfect speech supporting her husband’s reelection.

Of course, Michelle is not the first First Lady to make that role more than a piece of set decoration in pretty dresses giving domestic tours of the White House. Notable precursors like Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton (herself a potential President—once and again?) have undoubtedly paved the way for proactive Presidential spouses like Mrs. Obama. Yet the very persistence of the office of First Lady reminds us that we’re still living politically in a man’s world (as if the countless “definitions of rape” debacle during election season weren’t reminder enough!). When will there be a First Man? (First Gentleman? First Husband? First Guy?) When will the whole idea of a “First Lady” stop seeming so patronizing? When will a family walk out onto a stage on election night, and the wife-slash-female-partner will stay?

In the meantime, kudos to Michelle Obama for being a strong, empowered, incredible role model who continues to make her husband look good. And for reminding us—every time she has to watch silently from the sidelines—that there’s still work to do.

Falling Backward

By Shani Gilchrist Late last week I became fed up. After a particularly pleasant morning out, I came home to catch up on some work in my office. As is my habit, I breezed by my personal Facebook account for a peek at what my community of friends and acquaintances were discussing. Instead of the usual banter about lunch, charitable causes, cute children, and dispatches from abroad, I was seeing words like moron, liar, fool, dirty socialist, racist, stupid, self-righteous, and enemy.

My mood went swirling to the ground. The next thing I knew, I was furiously typing a status update that was the equivalent of throwing a hissy-fit and stomping out of the room. 

My reaction was not the result of a few minutes worth of perusing social media channels. For months the vitriol and fire-breathing had been building across the internet as state and local political campaigning waged on. The feeling was that of being trapped in the center of a growing and sustaining angry mob. The seething posts were coming from waitresses, physicians, salesmen, college students, CFOs, and housewives. People from every walk of life. People whom I and my diverse little family see out and about on any given day were spewing anger in every direction in a way that I’ve never experienced. It is as if people were taking the opportunity to publicly and arbitrarily hurl the ugly, insulting thoughts that we normally hide in that little pocket behind the bitter part of our tongues in the name of politics. People are now using the guise of politics to inflict their fears on others, using social media, that great living room that is supposed to bring us together on equal footing, to turn on each other. Fear and suspicion boils over into grabbing and clawing to bring everyone to the same level in a downward trajectory. Is it really possible for all of these people to seemingly hate their peers over differing political opinions?

In most cases, the answer is no.

As an adult, I now realize that when I was in middle school and the local “mean girl” would pile on me with verbal blows it had little to do with me. It had more to do with her feeling of powerlessness around the girls with the deeper, more historic bonds of friendship than it did her actual feelings about what my hair looked like that day. What we are experiencing here is the exact same thing. We are coming out of a frightening economic time, and while many of us have jobs again, none of us know with any certainty that those jobs will still exist for us in 1, 5 or 10 years. Despite the sensational headlines from today’s more biased news outlets, this is an affliction that reaches across every socio-economic level.  Family fortunes have dried up, leaving college-age former beneficiaries faced with the possibility of dropping out of school. Parents who once had associate or managerial jobs are working in retail and unable to get full-time hours because the industry rarely allows for that anymore. Upper level managers are buried in the debt incurred during the year that they lived without income. The days of knowing that your job will be there for you until the pension is cashed in are long gone. Now people are just hoping that their departments will be intact this time next year.

Talk about a feeling of powerlessness. So now, here we are, bullying each other over the thing that is supposed to unite us… our ability to have an opinion and respect others for the same. Today’s politicians are constantly in our line of vision, so it is easy to pile hopes and beliefs into a small group of people who appear to mirror the thoughts in one’s head. Such action, however, takes away the fact that these politicians are getting up every morning to do a job. It used to be that these politicians would take aim at each other on camera and in chambers, then later that evening see each other at social events and spend at least a few minutes in truly cordial chatter. In many cases, opposing politicians were actually friends after hours. Every now and then there would be a good-humored poke at someone’s political stance, but then they’d have another drink, tell another joke, and go home to prepare for the next day’s work.  This has all changed over the past 20 years. As the old guard of politicians began to thin out, a new, cliquey breed appeared just in time for the birth of the 24-hour news cycle. Almost every newspaper columnist in the country has at some point mourned the loss of civility in Washington, and now that many of the issues being debated have caused a more palpable sting for citizens, that loss of civility has crossed the beltway into our everyday relationships.

Civility hit a new low this year in America. Something that became painfully clear to me recently when my kindergartener came to me hurting because a classmate had told him that he was “bad” for liking a presidential candidate whom the 6-year-old had declared was a “bad person.”

Can we help each other heal from the wounds we’ve inflicted on each other? The girl who piled on me about my hair is now a highly regarded adult, known for being fun and kind, and with a successful job that allows her to be an advocate for her community. Like most people who make it out of middle school, she eventually grew out of her insecurities by taking the focus off of what was wrong with the people around her and placing it on enjoying them. Last night I timidly peeked at my Facebook page and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that things seemed to have settled down. There were a few comments about the recent mean-spiritedness that tells me that people may have snapped awake to the fact that hurt was being inflicted where it need not be. The adolescent pounding has slowed, and perhaps we can start to enjoy each other again.

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.

Envy and Gratitude

For as long as I remember, I—like many girls—have loved the Anne of Green Gables series. Some of my earliest memories involve falling asleep at night to the sound of Meagan Follows reading Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea; to this day, there are whole passages of those particular books embedded in my subconscious, in Follows’ melodious voice. I have always found much to identify with in Anne Shirley; like Anne, I was an impetuous, talkative, dreamy child who used big words and was once paid money to keep quiet for ten minutes. (I succeeded, by the way.) Like Anne, as an adult I struggle with keeping my temper and tending to take life through a rather melodramatic lens. Even as a child, one of my favorite books in the series was also one of the less well-known: Anne’s House of Dreams, the fifth Anne book, which covers Anne’s first years of marriage to the swoon-worthy Gilbert Blythe. I’m not sure why, as a preteen, I found myself drawn to a book about new marriage—especially one that includes a heartbreaking subplot that still makes me cry every time I read it—but the love has persisted. Once I became a newlywed myself, and experienced, like Anne, the pangs of disappointed longing for motherhood, the book earned an even more special place in my heart.

One of the most interesting characters in Anne’s House of Dreams is Leslie Moore, the victim of a loveless marriage who is now left caring for her incapacitated husband in the wake of a traumatic brain injury. Leslie is complex and confusing, by turns sweet and sour; she becomes good friends with  Anne, but has a difficult time not being jealous of Anne’s newlywed bliss. Halfway through the book, after Anne suffers a tragedy herself, Leslie opens up about her conflicted feelings. Describing the first time she saw Anne driving into town with her new husband, Leslie says:

“I hated you in that very moment, Anne . . . it was because you looked so happy. Oh, you’ll agree with me now that I am a hateful beast—to hate another woman just because she was happy,—and when her happiness didn’t take anything from me!”

I must admit: every time I read about Leslie’s passionate jealousy, I feel something of a kinship. Envy has always been my besetting sin. I can vividly remember being fifteen years old, lying on my bed, my soul harrowed up with frustration over some now-forgotten inequality. I’ve always been prone to jealousy, coveting my friends’ lives, their children, the apparent ease that is always the illusion of a life seen from the outside. Like Leslie, I’ve been guilty of feeling anger at someone else for a happiness I couldn’t share, even when that happiness took nothing from me.

Earlier this year, I had had enough. I resolved that 2012 would be the year that I learn to overcome that natural jealousy, that I learn how to be truly content with my life exactly where it is, without feeling the need to look over my neighbor’s fence. And as I pondered, and journaled, and read, and soul-searched about the issue, I came up with a deceptively simple answer:

Live in gratitude. That was it. Could it really be that simple, I wondered? Could a life lived in gratitude have the power to overcome the vice I’d struggled with for twenty-four years?

I set about testing the principle out. I promised myself that the next time I caught myself looking with envy at somebody else’s life, I’d think instead, What they have is wonderful. But what I have is wonderful, too.

And, to my surprise, it worked. I felt myself becoming more and more aware of all of the things I loved about my life. I found that suddenly, even the things that hadn’t turned out in the way I wanted them to had become sources of blessings; I began to rejoice over all the unexpected twists and turns I’d encountered in my life and the exciting and unanticipated places they had taken me. I discovered, to my delight, that scenes and situations that had once filled me with jealousy and bitterness no longer disturbed my equanimity—unless I let them.

I was the “master of my fate,” I realized; it was up to me to decide what the condition of my heart would be on any given day. Simply the act of acknowledging my own power, and making a conscious choice to live in gratitude and let go of my envy, was bringing more change into my life than I ever could have imagined.

It hasn’t been a perfect, or a permanent, change, of course. Since that May day when I made my decision, I’ve experienced plenty of periods where I’ve let go, let frustration and ingratitude creep back into my life. Like anyone, I’ve had down days—but they have come less frequently than they did before.

As I write this, I find myself marveling over the difference that such a simple choice has made in my life. It seems silly, elementary, hardly worth discussing. But I can’t shake the idea that, this year, I have come upon the secret of happiness:

And its name is gratitude.

XII. Savoie

I take the TGV, train de grande vitesse, from Chambéry to Paris, and then another smaller train to Bernay to stay with Pauline and Roger. Clémence now lives in the neighboring city of Evreux, where she is taking classes for university. I see her a few times for the week I am there, back in that small attic room. Then I have to go back south, ostensibly to attend the language classes that I have been skipping for the past few weeks, bored with repeating lessons that I went through just a month before. On the ride back, I spend most of the three-hour trip holding back tears, hiding my face against the window as the country blurs by. In French, the way you say “homesick” is avoir le mal du pays. You could literally translate this as “to feel the pain of your country.” But it’s not quite that. I am mostly feeling the pain of being in this country.

The second I arrive back in Chambéry, I call Pauline, begging her to let me come back. She calls me nénette, her pet word I’ve heard her say to Clémence so many times before. I am on a train back to Bernay the next morning.

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.

What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?

Katherine explores grief and loss through her blog Helping Friends Grieve, which she founded in 2010 as a tool for friends and loved ones supporting someone in the grieving process.  Currently, as a graduate student, Katherine studies community healing in post-conflict environments.  Her work in international development and passion for justice and human rights has taken her to diverse regions of the globe, including the Peruvian Andes, Mexico City, Northern Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Katherine’s interest in grief, memory, and healing is reflected in her desire to explore the role of community and inter-connectedness in healing. When she's not working, you'll find her outside: rock climbing, hiking or backpacking. Grief, loss, and mourning take hold of us. They become tides that come and go throughout the day or rollercoasters that catch us off guard, plunging us into undiscovered emotional territory. Loss leaves us bruised and, yet, curiously open to the world as we re-imagine and re-create our lives. We mourn the loss of place, home, youth, loved ones, and ability; the mix of emotions and utterly human trials exist in a web connecting our individual experience to our community. Our country continues to experience and heal from the devastation of hurricane Sandy; a thread ties together survival, loss, and resilience within our individual stories and communities.  We seek safety, interconnectedness with each other, and real, literal moments of joy that anchor us to our everyday lives.

The world of grief and healing is full of stories. Stories that make our hearts ache and bring tears to our eyes. Stories that touch us deeply, resonating with our experiences, bring our losses closer to the surface, and in their own way, heal us.  A belief in the power of stories is why I share (link to Helping Friends Grieve) and encourage others to share. The stories I look to this week, offline, that is, weave together the personal and community elements of grief, mourning, and healing across cultures and experiences with loss.

this i know by Susannah Conway The moment I laid eyes on Susannah Conway’s subtitle, notes on unraveling the heart, the warm book cover beckoned me in. Yes, I thought to myself, that is what I have been trying to say, loss and grief unravel your heart. Susannah vulnerably shares her experience with layers of grief, emotions, and self-doubt, ultimately, leading to much deeper questions of identity.  Her journey becomes one of self-creation. Susannah began her journey writing about grief after the loss of the love of her life, through blogging (link here: http://www.susannahconway.com/2006/04/a-few-beans-to-spill/). This i know, her 2012 book, re-lives her beautiful, tentative steps towards healing, “When we survive a traumatic event or transition in our lives, there’s a point when the healing really starts to take hold and we feel suddenly invincible.”(pg 39) Beyond words, her camera lens captures grief and healing in a moving combination of self-portraits and the world around her, which she claims give us clues on how to re-create our own worlds after loss.  Her writing and photography show grief settling and her creative, passionate self-emerging from an unraveled heart. It is breath-taking and inspiring as we weave our own stories of grief.

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke Why do we write about grief? Why do we tell stories about loved ones?  In a 2011 New York Times piece (link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/weekinreview/27grief.html), Joyce Carol Oates and Meghan O’Rourke explore the public and private sides of grieving through personal emails that they later share publicly. In The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke jumps headfirst into her journey through the loss of her mother and openly shares its vivid, intimate details. She refers to grief as a nearly universal act with exquisitely personal transactions. (page 57) She opens up these personal moments for the reader to experience and grieve with her, thus blending their own stories of loss with hers.  In her own words;

I was not entirely surprised to find that being a mourner was lonely. But I was surprised to discover that I felt lost. In the days following my mother’s death, I did not know what I was supposed to do, nor, it seemed, did my friends and colleagues, especially those who had never suffered a similar loss. (page 12)

She bookends her story with chapters on love and healing, tying together childhood memories, anticipatory grief, the cracks in her relationships, the rollercoaster of caretaking, and the lack of rituals to shape and support her loss. She gracefully tackles the experience of saying goodbye, allowing the reader to join her and glean insight its messy mechanics.

Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen The Chicken Soup for the Soul series pulls me back to memories of weekends as a young girl, curled up on the couch of my family’s cabin in Colorado, reading stories of teenage love. This scene was nearly repeated after the loss of my father, as I dove back into other people’s stories. Only, this time I found comfort in their stories of loss and healing. I wove their stories into a safety net around my own emotions, allowing me the space to experience my own loss and journey. Wrapped in blankets, sipping cups of tea, I cried over the words I wasn’t brave enough yet to put on paper - a father’s portrayal of the loss of his son, a young woman’s loss of her mother, and a wide variety of other stories written by people who, I assumed, once had also curled up on a couch, searching desperately for meaning in the throes of loss. Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul, is a compilation of stories written by authors who have lost loved ones. It beautifully walks the line between sharing in grief and inspiring readers with stories of healing and understanding. It connects us, showing our resilience as humans.

Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder In the first few years after the loss of my father, I referred to my life, or rather the life I had known as the pieces. By pieces I meant little bits of strength, memories that let light into my life, and relationships with friends and loved ones that sewed me back together. During this time, I moved abroad and sought to re-create a sense of community spanning countries, regions, and cultures. During the months I spent a truly magical place, Mexico City, a friend gifted me Strength in What Remains. I have read and re-read this book over the past few years, scribbling in the margins and always throwing it in my blue backpack before boarding the next plane. I fell in love all over again with Deo’s story as I crossed the border from Rwanda to Burundi this summer. At 22, his devastating story of survival during genocide and his strength span his harrowing experiences in Burundi, his improbably escape to New York City, and ultimately the fulfillment of his dream – returning to Burundi to build a hospital. Through Deo’s journey, Kidder shows us the pieces of loneliness, pain, grief, and displacement from home, but ultimately the resilience of the human spirit that echoes within elements of our own narratives. The essence of Deo’s experiences are rooted in Wordsworth’s graceful words, which lend the perfect title to the book. From the poem, Strength in What Remains;

“Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass,

of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind…..”

…..

My experience with grief is no longer just a memory of my own experience, but a mix of the stories I have loved, savored, and wiped tears off my cheeks while reading. These are just a few of the stories that sustain me.

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

Lessons from a voting booth...

Dear Clara,

As we emerge from this last election, I think we’re all breathing a collective sigh of relief to the end of campaign season and campaign advertising.   But the election season, for all that could be improved, is still something I welcome as a sign of our democracy and ability to participate in the political process.   I rarely talk about politics publicly, but based on my experience, I can tell you this:

• Go VOTE:  Voting is a right but also a privilege and a duty.  We often take this for granted, but believe me when I say that lots of people don't have this luxury.  If you had been born in a slightly different time or a slightly different place, you would understand.  The right to vote for whom you want without risk that your vote would be disclosed, manipulated, distorted, or thrown away is not something everyone has.  The right to vote for whom you want without fear of retribution on your safety, employment, family, friends or your own life is not something everyone has.  We might feel like it doesn't matter, but it does.  Every vote counts, and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
• Even if the candidates aren't perfect, you still need to vote: Assuming that you always have the good fortune to vote in free elections, you still need to go and vote no matter how much you don’t care for the candidates.  It’s still a choice, and if you really disagree with both, register your protest with a write-in, but don’t expect sitting at home to register as legitimate opposition.  Don’t ever be complacent in a democracy.
• It’s okay to keep your vote to yourself: It’s also okay to be public about it. That’s up to you.  But don’t feel like you ever have to disclose your vote or justify it---you voted based on what you decided and it’s up to you how much you want to tell others.  People can be quick to judge or quick to assume any number of things based on voting, parties, or any other political indication so be cautious.  Personally, I find those immediate delineations so limiting since a person can think any number of ways on any number of issues.  In a free election with democratic parties, people are entitled to their vote and opinion.  Remember to give the same respect to the political opinions of others that you would hope to have for yourself.
• You can’t build your own success on the back of someone else’s misery:  Someone gave me this advice in the context of a relationship decision that I had to make,  but I’ve used this same advice to guide me through many big decisions, and think of this frequently when making decisions around politics.  I wouldn’t ever tell you which way to vote, but I will tell you that reflecting on this will help guide you towards the right decisions.  They won’t always be easy and they won’t always be obvious, but you’ll get to the right answer.  Remember, if you want to build prosperity and freedom and a life full of good things we aspire to, you can’t build that simply by taking those things away from someone else.
• Weigh your trade-offs: It won’t be possible for all voters to have all things.  It doesn’t work that way.  And you’ll more than likely have to make some trade-offs and some compromises---as you should.  In the end, a healthy political arena is a collaborative one.  When looking at your candidate or party, weigh the alternatives and look for the person who will make the best compromises on your behalf without losing sight of key fundamentals that are core to you.   You want someone who will represent you as you most of the time, while working towards a key set of principles all of the time.

It will be a few years still, but I look forward to seeing you at the polls.

All my love,

Mom

A Note of Thanks

If you spend any time at all on Facebook, you’ve likely seen a new trend this November.  I’m not talking about political status updates---thank goodness. Someone, somewhere in the World Wide Web decided that each day in November, they would post a status about something they were thankful for.  The crusade was adopted and has become a certifiable trend.  And I couldn’t be happier. One of my best habits is saying thank you.  I say it a lot.  I thank cashiers, waiters, and people who hold open doors just like my mother taught me.  But I also offer up non-verbal thanks.  I’ve never cared too much about figuring out who I’m silently thanking, maybe it’s a higher being, maybe it’s the universe, maybe it’s the neurons firing in my brain.  Truth is, that part just doesn’t matter so much to me.  What matters is acknowledging my gratitude.

Every night and every morning I silently reel off a list of things and people I’m grateful for: My husband, my family & friends, my life, my health, the health of all the people I already mentioned etc.  I think it helps put me in the proper frame of mind and reminds me how incredibly blessed I am to lead the life I do.

Throughout the day I’ll send out silent shout outs for the things that make me happy---a letter from a friend, a particularly great cup of coffee, a snuggly blanket.  Acknowledging the joy or peace of a moment goes hand in hand with being grateful.  When I tell my husband how content I am to be sitting next to him and reading a good book, I’m also saying thanks; thanks for a perfect moment.

I haven’t hopped on the Facebook thanks train, at least not yet, but I’ve enjoyed reading notes of gratitude from friends and acquaintances who are thankful for their family, friends, freedom, jobs, spouses, and pets among other things.  Right now, I’m thankful that I have the opportunity to write this column every week, I’m grateful to Elisabeth and Miya for welcoming my enthusiastic email and inviting me in; I am continually awed by my inclusion as a contributor alongside women whose words paint pictures, tell stories, and inspire searching thought and I am always pleased as punch that anyone besides my parents would care to read my words.

In Thanks,

Renee