A Rereading of the "Most demanding 1st birthday invite ever"

This letter has been making the rounds on social media as fodder for mockery:

(Via Imgur)

I have an alternate reading:

Dear family,

We know we should be grateful that you are constantly showering our child with excessive gifts, but on the other hand, he has 25 books that he can’t even use yet when what we really need is formula. We’d think you’d agree that our child needs food more than another chewing toy in the form of a book, but so far we haven’t been able to convince you.

We’ve tried on several occasions to get you to buy us some much-needed basics, or toys that will usefully occupy my child while I try to take a fucking shower, instead of another book to add to his collection of 57 (more books than weeks he’s been alive!) or an outfit bedazzled with our child’s name on it. But since nothing so far has worked, we’re just going to tell you very specifically what to buy and try to discourage you in the strongest possible terms from getting us more useless shit.

Please let us know if you are not getting these gifts, because we actually needed them yesterday when I was pooping alone in the bathroom for like 5 minutes but my child decided he needed me RIGHT NOW and he was pounding on the door while both of us cried. We have discovered from experience that he likes other kids’ play tunnels and tents, and we will totally buy them if we have to. Then he will play with the toys that we bought that we know he likes instead of whatever inappropriate crazy thing you buy.

Do NOT get us personalized gifts, because then we can’t take them to the consignment store when our child outgrows them in 3 months and exchange them for clothes that we need. Since you are generally impervious to our rational explanations, here’s a totally scary bullshit reason to get you to stahp, just stahp.

He doesn't even *like* books yet!
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian. Yes, that is our messy pile of books.)

Have we mentioned that the costs of raising a child have made us very sensitive about wasting money? Our child is not yet reading, but we’re already stressed about how we are going to afford college. (Somehow, our suggestions to start a college fund as a gift have fallen on deaf ears.)

For this reason, we are asking for modestly priced gifts from bargain stores. Some parents ask for gifts from Pottery Barn Kids and try to milk their relatives. That’s not how we roll.

I’m so fucking tired all the time because our kid is having night terrors, and I would love to take a nap instead of running to another store to return another fucking thing that we already have.

A formal invitation to the birthday party made of paper and hand-addressed and stamped and everything is coming because we know that shit is important to you and you interpret an Evite to mean that we think you are lower than slime, when really we are just overwhelmed parents trying to plan a birthday party that will include a lot of overbearing, easily butthurt relatives.

Not signing “love” because we’re too exhausted, frustrated, and not feelin’ it right now,
_____________ & ______________

Additional thoughts: 

The family member who posted this to Teh Internetz is a total dick catheter. 

Enough with shaming parents already. Raising kids is hard. Mocking people who do it is easy. Maybe offer babysitting or a gift card to Target and STFU. Or even just STFU.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 3

Cousin Mary teaching my dad and me
her mother's secret kata recipe
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure, and Part 2, where I unpack the dynamics between cooking and gender in my own family history.

In Part 3, I want to break down the argument presented in the study, “The Joy of Cooking?”, step by step. First, the authors assert that working mothers feel duty-bound to cook because of pressure from a traditional ideal of motherhood coupled with pressure from various “food gurus” who are advocating for Americans to cook more often at home. In the course of interviewing women to support this theory, they also uncover several barriers that make cooking difficult for their interviewees: poverty, work pressures, transportation, housing, child care. Finally, they propose a number of possible “creative solutions” to feed families without forcing mothers into the kitchen. 

The authors of the study seem to contend that no working mother wants to cook, but does so due to external obligations. They write, “Mothers felt responsible for preparing healthy meals for their children and keenly experienced the gap between the romanticized version of cooking and the realities of their lives.” Women are feeling even more pressure, they argue, because “modern-day food gurus” such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Rachel Ray, as well as political figures like Michelle Obama, “advocate a return to the kitchen.” (I’m just going to note here that Pollan’s book, Cooked, includes a gender analysis that demonstrates he is aware of these issues.) 

Of course, the ideal of motherhood exists; of course, mothers constantly feel guilty for not living up to it. But to say that mothers are manipulated to this extent simply by unrealistic standards is to ignore the ways that we defy these standards on a daily basis. A search for “good enough mother” turns up the words of many mothers who are rejecting the ideal. Periodically, studies come out that “prove” that stay-at-home mothers are best for their children, or that day cares will damage children irreparably. Do working mothers feel horribly guilty when these studies come out? Yes. And then they go back to work, either by choice or by necessity, knowing that their work is helping their children by providing the financial support they need and by modeling working womanhood. (And those studies get refuted.)

So while I don’t deny that ideology is a factor in mothers feeling oppressed by cooking, I would add that to pin the blame solely on idealized motherhood and foodies is to miss the point. 

If the ideal—and the sexism contained within it—is truly at issue, then how do partnerships that are less traditionally gendered look? I asked several mothers and fathers about how they divide cooking and other domestic work, and I received a range of responses. (Because this post will be long, I’ll include direct most quotes in a coda to this series.) I heard from stay-at-home and work-at-home dads who actively enjoy and take pride in cooking. I heard from opposite-gender couples who split cooking 50/50. I heard from same-gender couples where one partner did most of the domestic tasks. I heard from single mothers who are struggling to do it all. From a small sample, I received a breadth of possible family configurations, each negotiating cooking and domestic tasks in their own way. 

In the diversity of responses, one consistency stood out for me. Many women in opposite-gender couples, who had generally egalitarian relationships, said they cook because their male partners simply lacked know-how. No one had taught their men to cook when they were young. As adults, the men had little time or motivation to learn, so if their female partners wanted to eat decently, then they cooked. 

If families abandon cooking entirely, then we lose one path to gender equity: men who cook. I am fortunate that my son loves to help me in the kitchen. I count teaching him to cook amongst my small, daily feminist acts. One day, after picking up my son from preschool, my daughter asked him, “Do you want to play ‘Frozen’?” “No,” my son replied. “I want to help Mama make dinner.” Heart cockles: warmed. 

If gender dynamics and motherhood ideals can’t fully explain the problem of working mothers and cooking, what else is at play? One clue is revealed in this quote from Elaine, a white, middle-class married mother interviewed for the study: “When we get home it’s such a rush. I just don’t know what happens to the time. I am so frustrated. That’s why I get so angry! I get frustrated ‘cause I’m like, I wanna make this good meal that’s really healthy and I like to cook ‘cause it’s kind of my way to show them that I love them, ‘This is my love for you guys!’ And then I wind up at the end just, you know, grrr! Mad at the food because it takes me so long. It’s like, how can it take an hour for me to do this when I’ve already cut up the carrots and the celery and all I’m doing is shoving it into a bowl?” (emphasis mine) 

Elaine says herself that she likes to cook, but she is frustrated that she doesn’t have the time to cook the way she wants to for her family. I hear her longing for a certain kind of connection that a home-cooked family meal can bring, but time pressures turn a leisure activity into a stressful obligation. 

The study authors themselves name many of the barriers to cooking: food costs, particularly for healthy foods; basic food insecurity; long work hours; unpredictable schedules; differing family schedules; inadequate transportation; and long commutes to work. Some mothers live in particularly dire situations: “During the month we spent with Flora, a poor black mother who was currently separated from her husband, she was living with her daughter and two grandchildren in a cockroach- and flea-infested hotel room with two double beds. They prepared all of their food in a small microwave, rinsing their utensils in the bathroom sink.” 

Is cooking really the problem here? 

Would Flora benefit more if she were released from a gendered obligation to cook? Or would she perhaps find more relief if her city had a program to house the homeless like Salt Lake City’s? 

Sign from the New York City strike
of McDonald's workers this summer.
(Photo by Annette Bernhardt,
from WikiMedia Commons)

At the same time I read this study, which features at least four parents who work in the fast food industry, I also read William Finnegan’s article in The New Yorker about the efforts of McDonald’s workers to unionize and raise the minimum wage. Most of the workers he interviews have jobs at two different locations, if not three, and yet their hours are held under forty hours a week to keep them part-time. One mother who has worked at McDonald’s for fourteen years makes $8.50/hour, a 50 cent increase over the base pay—which is minimum wage—in a city where a living wage for a single parent with a child is calculated to be $30.02/hour. Finnegan writes, “American fast-food workers receive almost seven billion dollars a year in public assistance,” which includes food stamps. 

Moreover, employees do not get regular shifts. Instead, every Saturday evening, hours are posted for the following week. Each worker receives a thin strip of paper with her or his schedule. Imagine what this unpredictability means for parents trying to arrange child care. 

As if this level of exploitation isn’t enough, some workers don’t even get paid for the hours they put in. Finnegan reports, “Two former McDonald’s managers recently went public with confessions of systematic wage theft, claiming that pressure from both franchisees and the corporation forces them to alter time sheets and compel employees to work off the clock.” 

This kind of treatment is inhumane, for parents and non-parents alike. And it isn’t just the fast food industry. American workers put in longer hours for less pay than their counterparts in other developed countries, and they also take fewer vacations. No legal limits exist to prevent American workers from answering e-mails and analyzing spreadsheets when ostensibly having family time at home. 

Rather than an accusation against cooking for causing misery amongst working women, I would like to see an indictment of a brutal work culture engendered by skyrocketing inequality. I would like to see an examination of farm subsidies that make processed foods artificially cheap while making raw foods unattainably expensive. I would like to see a report on the economic conditions that create food deserts in certain neighborhoods when food is so abundant in others. I would like to see a denunciation of a political climate that makes raising the national minimum wage to a paltry $15/hour an impossibility. I would like to see rage against weak and ineffective initiatives to end poverty while the top 0.1 percent continue to attain new heights of wealth. 

The study authors suggest in their conclusion a variety of “creative solutions” to feed families healthy meals without continuing to overburden mothers. They suggest town suppers and healthy food trucks, to-go meals that parents pick up at their children’s schools to heat up at home. 

While I am interested in collectivist solutions, the logistics bring up more questions. Where would the food come from? Who would grow it? What food traditions would be represented? How would it all get funded? If families buy the meals, how could the meals be affordable yet made with good quality, fresh ingredients? 

The main question I have is, who would prepare these foods? How much would they get paid? What hours would they work? Because I can imagine, all too easily, that these programs would rely on part-time workers juggling two jobs, some of them parents. Parents who would work long hours to prepare food for parents, who are working too much to prepare food. Alternatively, I can imagine stay-at-home moms being asked to volunteer their labor, just as they are tasked with filling in labor gaps in their children’s schools. 

This isn’t a solution. It’s a displacement of the problem. 

The answer to the question, “Why do working mothers find it so hard to cook?” is not an easy one, but cooking itself is not the problem. The way most Americans, not just working mothers, find it difficult-to-impossible to engage in one of the most fundamental human activities is but one symptom of a cancer in American culture. 

So what can we do? We can insist on connection. We are all linked: the farmers who grow our food, the migrant workers who harvest it, the drivers who transport it, the grocers who stock it, the corner-store owners who sell it, the food workers who prep and cook it, the parents who bring it home, the children who either eat it or complain about it. 

Cooking can be feminist or anti-feminist. But insisting on a more just and equal world is feminist to the core.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 2 (#365FeministSelfie 2)

#365FeministSelfie, August 26
Banana muffin for my son's birthday
celebration at school

Continued from Part 1, where I explore the connections between cooking, work, and leisure.

Second in my #365FeministSelfie series 

I grew up with three main parental figures in my life: my mother, my father, and my paternal grandmother. Their stories illustrate three very different narratives of gender and cooking. 

My grandmother cared for me nearly every day after school and many weekends. In Armenian culture in general and for my grandmother specifically, food held a central place. She turned out traditional Armenian dishes—tas kebab, kefta, dolma, yalanchi—dishes that could take all day to prepare, without even calculating in the time to grocery shop and clean up. She also made decent American fare: spaghetti, meat loaf, chicken marinated in red wine, garlic, and a little brown sugar. 

Both of my parents could count on her to feed me if they were unable to pick me up before dinnertime. She would call me to the table; when I lagged, she would inevitably chastise in her Long Island accent, “Anoosh, it’s gettin’ cold!” Obviously, my grandmother could cook like this, and care for me, because she was a housewife. For her, this represented a step up from her pre-married life, when she worked to support her parents and younger brother during the Depression and World War II. 

My mother, on the other hand, held a full-time job as a middle- and high school teacher at a K–12 private school. On the nights she fed me dinner, we ate primarily what I call insta-food: buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken, packets of ramen embellished with chopped scallions and cubed spam, frozen fish fingers. I remember my mother saying to me once with irritation that when she was married to my dad, he expected her to put on dinner parties. As with many second wave feminists, my mother embraced the life of a professional at the same time she rejected the foremost task of the domestic: cooking. 

My father, on the other hand, had a reverse experience. Naturally, he had expected to lead a professional life. He had not, however, expected to find himself the sole caretaker of his child for half of every week. Raised on my grandmother’s cooking, he felt obligated as a parent to provide home-cooked meals. At a time when men were being encouraged to “embrace their feminine side,” my dad decided to learn how to cook. On weekends and when I was with my mother, he would put on an apron and cook up giant pots of staples like spaghetti sauce, black bean soup (a dish he’d eaten while in Peace Corps in Costa Rica), tas kebab, and adobo (a Filipino tradition from my mother’s family) and store portions in the chest freezer he kept in the basement. (He learned this from my grandmother, who likewise had a second freezer built like the obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”) Dinners at my dad’s were always a complete meal: protein, starch, and a vegetable. 

When I reached high school, my dad made a new household rule: whoever cooked, the other person had to clean up. I had never felt particularly drawn to cooking, but I knew which side of that equation I wanted to be on. I pulled down cookbooks from the shelf over the telephone and started searching for easy recipes. 

And I liked it. 

Cooking took thought, but in a different way from, for example, writing an essay for an Advanced Placement course. I had the satisfaction of accomplishing something material, but without the drudgery and dirt of other types of housework. Cooking could be artistic, both in flavor and in visual appeal. It could be improvisational and experimental. And it created connection, whether it was simply a shared meal with my dad, or a batch of cookies that I gave out to friends. 

#365FeministSelfie, February 3
Making quiche, a recipe
my friend Zara gave me

The act of cooking itself created connection, too. I might spend a Saturday afternoon with my grandma as she baked a batch of churag, a kind of sweetened bread. Many recipes for churag exist, but my grandmother’s recipe was specific to her origins in Marzevan, a town near the Black Sea. Although she grew up in Istanbul, her family kept their country recipes. As we braided dough, she would tell me about her years in the orphanage after her family migrated to the United States to escape the Armenian Massacre, or her cross-country bus trip to California, or her journey to become an artist. Cooking was both the opportunity and the vector to pass down family history. 

As I’ve recounted before, my mother and I had a fractured relationship during my childhood (better now). Some of my best memories, little islands of ideal mother-daughter moments, are baking with her, the one cooking activity she seemed to enjoy. Every aspect of sifting flour—the click-click-click rhythm of the handle, the sight of flour piling up in a drift, the dusty itch in my nose, and the anticipation of cake—is suffused with feelings of love and comfort. 

I can’t help but want to pass this down to my own children. 

Cooking is a microcosm of my family’s dynamics. It promotes tolerance of difference, because my husband is vegetarian and I am not. It embodies my family history through smell and taste. It retains the identity and memory of my immigrant origins. It symbolizes our togetherness and our cohesion as a family, not only when we sit down together to a meal, but also as we assemble it together, sometimes with a lemon from our tree or tomatoes from our garden. 

It can also provide a platform for strife, which is still a part of family life. Sometimes I want my kids to help, and they don’t want to. Sometimes they want to help, and I just want to make a meal in peace, alone. Sometimes I create a dish with love and devotion, and they just don’t like it. 

On the other hand, I have those times when my son says, “Thank you, Mama, for making a yummy dinner!” 

I persist in the face of my children’s disapprobation of my cooking because I want them to know that if you live a rich and varied life, you aren’t going to like everything. 

When I lived in Senegal, I ate some things that I did not care for: a slimy okra-based dish called suppu kànja, dried sea snails called yéet. In Fiji, I downed some chicken livers that not even cumin, coriander, and turmeric could make palatable for me. These were meals I ate in people’s houses, people who were not rich by the standards of their own countries, much less ours. The women prepared food for me with kindness and generosity, and yes, it took them hours to make, and to turn up my nose at it would have been the pinnacle of ingratitude. (These dishes were the exceptions—in the main, I love Senegalese, Fijian, and Indo-Fijian cuisine.) 

The first time I tried bitter melon at my great-aunt’s house in Hawai’i, I didn’t like that, either. Everyone laughed as my mouth puckered and my eyes started to water. When I was served bitter melon in Fiji, I was prepared for it, and I started to acquire a taste for it. Eventually, I learned how to prepare it myself, and I found a recipe for it I like. (My husband is still resisting its charms, however.) 

Cooking is not just about feeding the body. Food is heritage, tradition, family lore. It holds valuable knowledge about plant variety, preparation, and use. Our farms are becoming vast corporations; our fields are becoming monocultures. Do we want the same to happen to our kitchens and our bellies and our palates? 

I feel very lucky to live in a city where I can find nearly every ingredient that I can imagine to cook with: grape leaves for dolma and yalanchis, bitter melon for ginisang ampalaya, epazote for beans, cassava for Fijian pudding and West African stews. I can’t find these in my local supermarket, but instead must go to “ethnic” groceries and farmers markets. The simple act of food shopping ties me into the specificity of my place: people, communities, traditions, and economic networks that are marginalized yet still so central to what makes Los Angeles, Los Angeles. 

And so I choose to keep cooking. But for many mothers, to cook or not to cook is not a choice they can make, but a decision bounded on many sides by traditional sex roles, economic pressures, food insecurity, and poor urban planning. In Part 3, I address the authors’ argument point by point and examine some of the structural barriers to cooking, as well as some of the ways parents are trying to reconfigure domesticity to be more gender equal.

Is Cooking Anti-Feminist? Part 1

Barefoot, pregnant, in the kitchen... and feminist
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen... the iconic image of a woman in need of feminism. Interesting to me that we say “in the kitchen.” “Barefoot” is self-evident, as is “pregnant.” “In the kitchen” is oddly coy. What is she doing in there? Well, she could be doing a lot of things, just as I do: washing dishes, paying bills, chatting with a friend. Doing a science experiment with a child. Heck, she could be sitting at the counter with The New York Times and a cup of coffee. 

But we know that’s not what she’s doing. We know she’s cooking. 

Recently, three sociologists at North Carolina State University published a study entitled “The Joy of Cooking?” pushing back against the narrative that a home-cooked meal is an essential part of familial harmony and a key step in reforming the food system. “The message that good parents—and in particular, good mothers—cook for their families dovetails with increasingly intensive and unrealistic standards of ‘good’ mothering.” This ideal, they argue, serves only to push working women back into the kitchen, where they find cooking unfulfilling. Moreover, their efforts are often met by family members with disinterest or complaints. Cooking, they assert, only continues to oppress women. 

A few writers picked this up, including Amanda Marcotte in Slate and Anna North in The New York Times. Predictably, a conservative in “The Federalist” responded: “It’s I guess what you can expect from feminists—sniping that the stress for women of at-home cooking isn’t worth the benefits.” 

So is cooking anti-feminist? 

I have certainly had my share of family meals where I have labored over the actual cooking—never mind the shopping beforehand—for at least an hour, only to have my efforts rebuffed by my kids. I have certainly experienced my share of anger and frustration over it, seasoned with the peculiar bitterness that comes from the ingratitude of children. I actively dislike cooking with my kids, because it takes twice as long, and the resulting mess is twice as big. I am a work-at-home mother, which means that my work hours end when school does, and shopping and food prep, tasks I accomplish faster and more easily without offspring, take a bite out of my precious work day. 

Yet I am not ready to concede the kitchen. 

What makes cooking oppressive? The authors detail the challenges facing the women they interviewed: unpredictable work hours, long commutes, difficulties procuring fresh foods and using them before they spoil. Cooking, they argue, is an unnecessary stressor in these women’s already-overburdened lives, so why not just taking cooking out of the equation? 

The irony is that at least two of the women, Wanda and Leanne, work in fast food, as does Wanda’s husband, while another, Greely, has her own catering company. They can’t cook at home because, between work hours and commuting, they are too busy providing food for other people—perhaps some of them overburdened parents like themselves without time to cook. 

The line between domestic work and wage work is highly charged for women, and is further tangled up in class and race. A century and more ago, upper-class women, usually white, were expected to eschew all forms of work. “Housekeeping” for these women meant managing the servants, who performed all the actual labor of domestic tasks. In contrast, middle-class women handled much or all of their own domestic work. Their exemption from wage work delineated their difference from lower-class women. For women of the lower classes, of all races, domestic work was wage work. One glaring exception, pre-Civil War, was enslaved women, who received no wages at all for the tasks they performed, either in the house or in the fields. African-American women who were freed still performed domestic tasks, but freedom made the difference in doing the work for nothing versus doing the work for pay. 

During the first and second waves of feminism, many white women agitated for the right to work; many women of color, on the other hand, wanted the right to leisure. Since then, women have gained the right to wage work—if not to pay equity with men—but the right to leisure remains elusive for many in the United States, women and men. 

Is cooking work or leisure? It can be hard to say. For a cook at McDonald’s, providing food is her job. When she comes home, the pressures that spill over from her wage work—time constraints, financial limits, physical exhaustion—make cooking stressful and anything but leisurely. 

What about a stay-at-home mother? For her, cooking might be a leisure activity and a pleasure, a domestic task she chooses to do. Alternatively, maybe she works—and cooks—at home because child care costs more than she would earn out of the house, and so economic necessity makes the choice for her. Either way, she does it and receives no compensation, even though the annual value of a stay-at-home mother’s labor is calculated to be $112,962. 

When parents work outside the home, the family often outsources those jobs and pays for them. Restaurant workers (likely immigrants of both genders) prep and cook the food. Day care workers or nannies (usually women) care for the children. Maids (women again) clean the house. When these jobs are paid, they count as part of the GDP. 

But to reduce cooking to labor is to collapse it into a singular, capitalistic dimension. Food and cooking have larger resonances than simply economics, however, as the study authors acknowledge when they discuss the ideological values placed on “the family meal.” Yet even this analysis is reductive and ignores the many other possible emotional and cultural dimensions of food, cooking, and the struggle for gender equity. 

In Part 2, I unpack the relationships between cooking and gender by recollecting my own experiences with cooking, food, and family from childhood.

In Part 3, I respond to the authors’ argument point by point. 

#365Feminist Selfie 1: Hair (specifically, body hair)

The brows are lightly waxed.
Because I'm half Armenian.

First in my #365FeministSelfie series.

I haven’t shaved for 23 years. I know, I know. Shaggy underarms are at the top of the list of Feminist Stereotypes, probably right next to “burning your bra.” You’d think I attended college in the 1970s rather than been born during that decade. 

I tried shaving, but after six years of gashing my legs and getting red, itchy rashes under my arms, I threw in the towel. 

Actually, the reason I thought that not shaving could even be possible was due to Pia, the Swedish exchange student who attended my high school during my sophomore year. Pia wore miniskirts, showing her long, white-blonde leg hair to God and everybody. Of course, within two months she had begun to shave as part of her acculturation process. But she had already made her impression on me. 

I’m going to say right here, because I know the first riposte this post will provoke, that I have had my fair share of sexy times with men even though I don’t shave. (I say only “men” because I doubt anyone is going to chime in on the comments with “No self-respecting hot lesbian would want you with that disgusting pit hair.”) Yes, Virginia, there are hetero cis-men who hit skins with women with body hair and either don’t mind or actively enjoy it. After all, ahem, I do have two children with my handsome, hetero cis-man husband. 

I am not alone in my alarm at American culture’s intolerance for body hair. Not because I think that all women should let their body hair GROOOOW FREEEEEE! I am not opposed to women (and men) who trim, shave, wax, electrolyze, or thread off some or all of their body hair. Bodily autonomy is a feminist principle. 

But I do object to a culture that excludes, shames, or punishes women (or men) who do not wish to participate in depilation. 

I never thought about how early this enculturation starts, until one day when my daughter’s friend, five years old, came up to me and whispered, “Most women shave off the hair under their arms.” She said it in the exact tone of an old lady admonishing another that her slip was showing. “I know,” I whispered back, and smiled. She shot me a look of mingled incredulity and distain and walked away. 

I am fortunate that the kind of places I have worked—queer-oriented public health, publishing, teaching abroad, graduate school—did not require a conventional [American] cis-woman presentation. I didn’t have to shave, wear high heels, or wear make-up. This is not to say I don’t groom myself (although my grooming has slipped a bit since my small children have transformed the simple ritual of showering into a major undertaking). 

I just don’t think women should be held to a higher standard of appearance—that is, one that demands more attention, time, and expensive products—than men. 

I hate that stock sitcom gag where a man rolls his eyes over how long it takes a woman to get ready to go out. On the one hand, the joke theatrically bemoans the vanity of women; on the other, it writes over the ways men have historically required women, as their property, to represent and display beauty and—by extension—wealth and class. Although most of us are no longer categorized as property, we can still be props—as adornment, as visual pleasure for the male gaze, as symbols of affluence, often in service to increasing men’s social capital. (And the methods of beautifying—the couture, the accessories, the jewelry, the shoes—simultaneously showcase yet hide the labor of those of far lesser economic and social status—mostly women, some even children.) 

My refusal to shave is one way that I opt-out of the expected time-consuming ritual of costuming for feminine performance. It’s my small, daily rebellion against this facet of sexism. By being “out” about not shaving, perhaps I can be Pia to another woman or girl. 

It is also an assertion of the importance of my pleasure, my time, and the integrity of my body. I have decided that men’s aesthetic pleasure does not rank above my bodily discomfort—pain from cuts, itching from rashes. I prefer to use my time doing something that gives me pleasure rather than removing my body hair. 

For some women, the removal gives them pleasure, and that can be a feminist act, too. 

But in a gender-equal world, every woman deserves the right to her own calculus. 

In Britain, women are going razor-free in August (i.e., Sleeveless Season) to raise money for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). So if you do shave but are poils-curious, you can experiment for a good cause.

And now, to cheer us all up, please see this Robot Hugs comic on the Body Policing Police. Enjoy! 

Two Children in Poverty, a Century Apart

At the orphanage. My grandmother is in the center row,
fourth from the left. Year and photographer unknown.

I have been very sick for a week, and no end in sight. So today, while trying to force myself to stay in bed, I finally read the New York Times’ profile of Dasani, a homeless girl living in a shelter in Brooklyn. Once I started, I had to read the entire gripping, heart-wrenching account. 

“[Dasani] belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America.” 

It made me think of another person I know who grew up in New York in poverty: my grandmother. 

My Armenian grandmother was born in Istanbul when it was still known as Constantinople. She arrived in New York at eight years old (although officially only five years old, for a lower fare in steerage), a refugee from Turkey who had escaped the Armenian Genocide. Her mother couldn’t support her, so she sent my grandmother to live in an orphanage for several years, until her mother married again and could afford to bring her home. My grandmother grew up in the city through the Great Depression. She was able to attend a public arts high school, which led to her first job copying French perfume bottles for a department store. She gave all the money she earned to her mother. 

In the course of her life in the U.S., she skyrocketed out of poverty into prosperity, a world away from where she started. She had a house in California with her own studio. Her husband owned his own business and passed it onto their sons. She died, essentially of old age, at ninety-seven and a half. 

Like many women of her generation, my grandmother safeguarded herself from deprivation, even in the midst of plenty. She bought oatmeal, canned tomato sauce, and soup in bulk. She cooked huge amounts of Armenian food—kufta, berag, lamajoon, kata, churag—and packed the leftovers into a second freezer. She hid money throughout the house; sometimes she forgot it, and we only found it after she died. 

Certain habits of caution and protection have lasted three generations, carved into my dad and me even though we have never known such want. 

When I read this story, about all the structural barriers that keep Dasani’s family trapped in a shelter for more than three years, I cried. My grandmother horrified me with stories of conditions at the orphanage, but the shelter trumps the hardships she endured. Adding insult to injury are the examples of Dasani and her family disregarded and unheard by those who are ostensibly charged with protecting children and the poor: housing inspectors, the Administration for Children’s Services, the shelter director. And above them all, the mysterious figure of Mayor Bloomberg looms, enacting laws from an abstract distance that affect their lives in concrete terms. His philosophy of ending poverty, based on ideology, instead closes down the family’s potential exits from the shelter to stable housing. 

In stark contrast, Dasani’s teachers and principal stand out as they try their best to keep her in school, to teach her the kind of impulse control she will need to succeed, and to provide structure and stability that she can find nowhere else in her life. 

America’s promise is deeply, deeply broken. That homeless children must survive in these places, just blocks away from $1.9 million condos, is profoundly immoral. We have absolutely no claim to the title “the greatest country in the world” as long as we are willing to allow children to grow up in circumstances like these. We must take steps to end such escalating inequality now. 

Charity is not enough. We need a transformation of how we conceptualize poverty. We need to take a hard look at the way inequality is built into the very bricks of our society. To provide Dasani with the same opportunities my grandmother had, we need to reconsider access to quality education, living wages, child care services, prenatal care, drug addiction and its criminalization, mental and physical health care, welfare, urban planning, and our institutional prejudices against women, against people of color, against the poor themselves. Most of all, we need to listen to the voices of people in poverty and take them seriously when they vocalize their needs. And their dreams. 

No easy task, certainly. But we have a choice. When faced with the problem of every child like Dasani, will we throw up our hands? Or will we roll up our sleeves and do the hard work?

10 Reasons Why Maria Kang Is Wrong Wrong Wrong

I don't work out. I lift my kids.
So I have biceps, but not a taut tummy.
Also, I don't know how to Photoshop out my nipples.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

... and one bonus one!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.)

1) “What’s Your Excuse?” My job isn’t fitness, and my body is not an ad for my business.

2) Some of us have priorities other than appearing fuckable to 20-year-old guys.
 
3) Not all of us have a stay-at-home-husband. Or a partner at all. Or relatives who can take the kids anytime for free. Or money for sitters. Or access to licensed, good quality day care. Gee, you know what might help with that? Universal child care.
 
4) Why don’t all moms work out while their kids are playing at the park? Maybe because they are enjoying a moment to themselves. Maybe because they are trying to have a little adult social life as a break from being around children all day. Maybe they have kids who demand a lot of attention. And maybe women who make different choices than you have completely legitimate reasons for doing so.
 
5) Being skinny isn’t the same as being fit.
 
6) Over-exercising is a thing.
 
7) Fat-shaming is bad for everybody. Including the children. Maybe especially for the children.
 
8) Different bodies are different. It makes my heart ache to think that Kang has struggled with an eating disorder in a quest to attain the societal ideal of a “perfect” body. Maybe if we didn’t define “beauty” in such a narrow band along the spectrum of our body shapes and sizes, no girl would push herself to such extremes to look a certain way.
 
9) You know another Asian-American woman who has struggled with an eating disorder? Margaret Cho. Cho has coped with this through being a bad-ass feminist and GLBT advocate. Instead of internalizing norms of feminine beauty, she has dedicated herself to challenging and dismantling them. I know which solution I’d rather choose.
 
10) My tummy is no longer taut because my abdominal wall stretched out when I grew two human beings inside of me. Maybe we, as a culture, should try to honor these bodies that have created life. Doesn’t that have its own beauty?
 
And the bonus reason Maria Kang is wrong wrong wrong:

11) Now I have to explain that not all hapa-Pinays from SacTown are like this. 

Not enough reasons? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.

Special thanks to HapaMama Grace Hwang Lynch and Cynthia Liu of K-12NN for the thought-provoking Facebook dialogues that led to this post.

The Personal Is (Still) Political

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I want to stay in bed.

It feels like too much. The government shutdown and the debt ceiling showdown. Attacks on SNAP and ACA. Funerals of victims from the Westgate Mall in Kenya. The Canadian government muzzling scientists. The ongoing deaths of honeybees. The continuing gun debate after the mass shooting at the Navy Yards. And on and on and on.

When I was a child, my mother and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad boyfriend would sometimes have screaming fights after my bedtime. I would wake to the crashing of things being broken. I huddled under the covers, terrified, paralyzed, eyes closed, wishing it would stop. On the worst nights, my mother would scoop me up, pajamas, comforter, and all, and bundle me into the back seat of her car to flee to my dad’s house. My mother and I would squeeze into my twin bed. The next morning, we returned to her house, and the clock would reset until the next time.

Decades have gone by, but it still comes: paralysis; hopelessness; the feeling that I can’t escape, I can’t make it change, I can’t make it stop. I want to stay in bed, but I’m a mother now. My family needs to be fed. My children need to be cared for. My household needs to keep going. They require money, effort, time, presence.

It comes particularly when I am sick, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or underslept. At least one of these conditions accompanies me every day of parenthood.

Parenting is hard for everyone. No less true for being oft-repeated: each child is unique, which makes advice by experts, family, and passersby of limited utility when raising your own child.

Most exhausting are the echoes of my own childhood that run in the background of my mind, the constant, constant, every-single-interaction fight I wage with my past whenever my kids are squirrelly, fussy, or just plain defiant. My goal is to be patient, to listen, to maintain firm limits while allowing my children to express their “big feelings.”

When I am tired or hungry (again, most of the time), I eventually start to lose the battle. My intellect gives way to patterns deeply etched in my psyche, patterns of yelling, of biting sarcasm, of calculated grown-up words to make a child feel small and ashamed to push against parental power. I am learning to bite my tongue and walk away, which only leads my daughter to run after me, hold my legs, cry, and otherwise completely exacerbate the situation I am trying to escape. I go to my bed and lock the door. Mama time out.

I want to be there for my children; but sometimes, I dread the emotional minefield.

It’s layers upon layers. Near the surface, stresses of adult life: finances, politics, family, sex, time pressures, obligations, balancing. Underlying these, trauma from my childhood dredged up as I relive it through my own children. I push back against ingrained habits carved into me before I knew childhood could be different. The mother-drive pressures me to make it better for my kids, I have to make it better for my kids.

I inherited a history of depression passed down generation to generation, a switch flipped in my genes for self-preservation, a legacy that means that any setback or barrier puts me in fight-or-flight. In clinical terms, I have anxiety and panic attacks. In non-clinical terms... I don’t know how to describe it. Like walls closing in. Like a personal raincloud. Like the apocalypse coming and everyone is going to be raptured except me.

I just want to stay in bed.

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I don’t write this to say poor me. I am hardly unique. I write this because none of us parent in a vacuum, because no day is a discreet moment in time. Every day is a convergence of the past—history, ancestry, echoes and reverberations. We try with every fiber to make the past clean for our children, a source of strength, not a weight holding them back. We look at them and see expanding possibilities. I want to lift my children up, not push them down.

Remember your diaper bag? Remember how light it was unwrapped at the baby shower? And then you put so many small objects in it. Diapers. A pacifier. Wipes. Changing pad. Extra clothes, each piece so tiny. A jacket. A blanket. Clothespins, to hold the blanket on the stroller. A bottle and extra formula, maybe. Or a nursing cover. Plastic bags to hold pooped-on clothing. Teething ring. Snacks. Water. Phone. And then, with the baby on one arm, the diaper bag on the other no longer felt light.

I feel this way now. Each piece by itself is not so weighty, but taken together, they burden me. What if we could lighten the load? What if I didn’t have to worry about affording enough child care? What if I knew I could get a job and still be available to pick up my kids after school, stay home with them when they are sick, go to parent-teacher conferences? What if I didn’t have to add fundraising for our schools to my to-do list? What if I could feel confident that we would have enough money to put our kids through college and retire? What if I didn’t have to worry that my husband or I might get seriously ill and drain our account on medical bills?

When I say universal child care, single-payer health care, a living wage, flexible work, paid family leave, accessible education, it all sounds so abstract. But when I live the worries, every day, it feels beyond real—it feels material.

I can’t escape my past. I can’t change how I grew up. I can’t stop the way memory and history trip me up on the path to being the kind of parent I wish to be. But with a little more support, maybe it would be easier to get up in the morning.

Resources

National Organization for Women
Moms Rising
National Partnership for Women and Families
National Center for Children in Poverty

  

Changing Schools

First day of kindergarten.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Today, I took my daughter out of our local public school and enrolled her in a charter school.

I didn’t think I would announce it, but then I realized, hey, I write about parenting and politics, and I have just committed a huge political act.

We live in an excellent school district, and our home school is one of the most desirable in our district. We were looking forward to our daughter receiving a solid education while also enjoying a truly diverse peer group.

My daughter, I should say, adored her preschool. She came home covered in paint and mud every day. The love between Silver and her teachers was plainly mutual. At school, she would pet animals, make rivers in the yard, create stories with her friends, pick and eat vegetables from the garden, and pretend to be a kitty, or a mama, or an astronaut, or an excavator. On the way, she learned to write and gained the fundamentals of reading, math, and science.

In the first few days of kindergarten, my family experienced the shock of transitioning from preschool to the regular school system. My daughter seemed oddly unenthusiastic, and one day as she settled into her car seat, she asked, “What does it look like inside your body when you cry?” My husband and I tried to take statements like these with a grain of salt, unsure of how much weight to give them during this time of flux.

The afternoon before Back to School night, I asked her what problems she had that she wanted me to talk about. In order of importance, she listed:

• Sometimes my teacher yells really loud and it hurts my ears. 
• Leila gets lunch at the cafeteria and sits with all of those kids, but I want her to sit next to me, but she never can. 
• Sometimes we have to sit on the rug, and it’s boring. 

So I sat through the Back to School night rally in the auditorium, then we parents filed away to our children’s classrooms for another presentation by their teachers. I sat down on a tiny chair and filled out several forms. The teacher talked about curriculum goals—writing aptitude, sight words, scissor skills—and also described the kinds of homework he would assign. He held up a composition notebook showing lines of upper- and lowercase L’s on one side and cut-out photos of a lion, a llama, and a child licking an ice cream cone on the other.

Silver expresses her displeasure with me.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I had my reservations about my child having to sit and write letters in long rows, when all the writing she has done so far has been on her own initiative: grocery lists, birthday messages, angry letters to me when she is mad. Nevertheless, I could see that her teacher, trained in studio art, was trying to work creatively within the limits he was given. Their first homework assignment would be to draw a picture of something fun from the summer, label all the parts, and write a sentence or two about it. (A rather long assignment for kindergarten, admittedly.)

With only 10 minutes until 8 p.m., the scheduled end of the evening and my children’s bedtime, he asked for questions. On my turn, I asked, “Can you talk about your philosophy and some of your methods of discipline?” The teacher walked over to a small rectangular table with three chairs ranged around it: green, yellow, and red.
 
The red chair was the last straw. My daughter had, in preschool, participated in a democratic classroom. As she has told me many times after I apologize for yelling at her, “The teachers at school don’t yell.” It’s true: they don’t. Of course, at preschool there are five teachers for 25 kids. In kindergarten, there are two. But my daughter is accustomed to being part of the classroom process where limits are agreed upon collectively and enforced gently, and I’m not ready for her to grapple with an authoritarian system yet.

The charter school I am moving her to practices project-based education, which to my mind, is what every school in the U.S. should practice. Diversity and social justice explicitly make up part of their mission. They emphasize experiential learning tailored to each child’s particular style. Collaboration forms the foundation of their structure.

I am, in theory, committed to public education. And yet, as every parent realizes when her or his child begins school, I want my daughter to have an excellent education right now. Public education in this country is a large, unwieldy vehicle, constructed rigidly, and difficult to turn in a different direction.

If our education system is supposed to prepare our children for life as adults, what are we teaching them? To respect authority. To tolerate repetitive, boring tasks. To understand that the system is unresponsive to their desires, needs, and emotions. And, above all, that the pleasures of education—personal attention from a teacher, play- and project-based methodologies, richness of materials, opportunities to go outside in a beautiful environment or take exciting field trips—are limited by economics. That we live in a two-tiered society, between those who find school a trial and those who find school rewarding, becomes obvious to our children from an early age.

People always scoff that we can’t buy our way to a better education system. (But maybe we can.) And yet, what would it be like if we abolished private schools and channeled all those funds to public education? What if we did only this: reduced class sizes, paid teachers wages respectable for trained professionals, and improved facilities so that schools could be open, airy, green, and pleasant places to be? What if we could make arts available to every child, every single day? You can’t convince me that education wouldn’t improve.

And what if we went further and made the goal of education to instill a love of learning in every child?

I know, it sounds like I am asking for the moon. And yet, like every parent, I want my child to be happy and smart; I want her to have ambitious goals and feel capable of reaching them. I want her to delight in learning rather than approach school with dread. It doesn’t seem like so much to ask.

Significance, Part 3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

One day, in Dakar, my family decided to prepare fried fish for dinner. The women all sat down together around a basin of whole fish about the size of small trout. My “grandmother” showed me how to slice behind the gills, pull out the guts, then cut down the belly to prepare the fish for cleaning. The first fish I tried by myself, I got the order wrong and cut into the guts. My teenaged “little sister” laughed and took the fish from me, and my “mother” gently suggested that I do something else. 

Graduating, with Denise Uyehara—both of us pre-kiddos.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

I thought, “Four years of higher education, and my Senegalese family thinks I’m an idiot.” 

Apart from when I was a small child, I have never quite felt so much like an “Insignificant creature” as when I became a mother and my work ground to a halt. School had not prepared me for Senegalese society; nor had it trained me in parenting. Becoming a mother requires no education, no certification, no proof of intellectual prowess. What could be less extraordinary than mothering, something that anybody can do if she has a working uterus? 

Knowing all the emotional contours of why I am at home with my children does not release me from feminist-mother guilt for making this “choice.” Women instigated the Second Wave of feminism specifically to be able to participate in paid work and achieve financial independence. Moreover, we live in a culture centered around our jobs, where “What do you do?” comes in around number 3 in the “getting to know you” list of questions. 

Mama-in-training.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

When I ask my daughter, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and she answers, “A mama,” I feel a sinking in my chest. “You can be a mama and be something else, too, like a teacher or a doctor,” I reply. “No,” she says. “I just want to be a mama.” 

What kind of ambition is that for a child? 

Of course, I’m taking what my 5-year-old says much too seriously. She is at the age when what she wants to be when she grows up is... me. She decided to grow out her bangs because I did. She wears my dresses. She uses an electric toothbrush because I do. (Strangely, this penchant for imitation does not extend to eating kim chee.) 

And yet, I think of my mother the English professor, and I wonder, “What kind of feminist model am I for my daughter?” Because, of course, this isn’t the Victorian era. I have a Master’s degree. I left my Northern California town and traveled to five continents. In my peer group, I am an outlier for staying at home and not working. 

Let’s set aside, for the moment, my history and emotional reasons for this “choice.” 

Of course, everyone knows—or should know by now—that these “choices” are abetted and constrained by several factors, class and gender foremost amongst them. Before I got pregnant, I was working freelance, which allowed me to weather my nausea-plagued pregnancy and, after my daughter’s birth, care for a small baby. When I gave birth to our son two years later, my husband got A Job—the one he was preparing for through nearly 10 years of graduate school, which not incidentally provides us with a steady paycheck and health care—that makes it difficult for him to take time off work to care for a sick child, take the kids to their swim lessons and dance classes, or volunteer for classroom time at our co-op preschool. I know that any salaried job I could get would likely pay less than what he is earning. But I am also privileged in that a family business helps me to uphold my financial side, which makes staying home and writing a viable option for me. 

I never imagined this for myself. I assumed I would work, like my mother. And because my mother had a job that gave her a sense of purpose, that also contributed to the greater good, I expected this for myself as well. 

My working life has been a search for meaning beyond a paycheck, whether through health education, or writing, or book publishing, or teaching. I tried to find the equilibrium between personal fulfillment and service to my progressive ideals. When pregnancy and motherhood brought my working life to a halt, I still hadn’t found it. 

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

As for so many parents, that changed when I gave birth to my daughter. I nursed her, looked into her eyes, nestled her on my chest, and thought, now this is a project I could devote my life to. 

Parenthood offers a completely different kind of significance. I don’t think I can ever leave a mark on a life the way I can with my children. I am not a “genius,” whatever that is. I don’t have the depth of agape in my soul to save humanity by spending long hours away from the people closest to my heart. 

In the funny contradiction that is life, I feel completely insignificant as a mother, yet the devotion of my small children offers significance unparalleled by any of my previous jobs. I want to inspire them most of all. And as I pursue writing now, I do it in part because I want an intellectual life of my own: I want to model for them a mother who is fulfilled, who is more than “just” a mother with frustrated dreams. 

To be continued in Part 4.

Seventeen and Stupid

Site of my high-speed chase
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Here's how I view it:

When I was about seventeen, my friend and I parked, unknowingly, in front of a vacant house. We were just sitting in the seats of my car, talking, because it wasn't yet curfew time. A guy in a pick-up truck drove by us slowly, went around the block, and drove by us again.

At that point, we thought he thought we were making out and was coming back for another look. But when we started up the car to drive around the corner to my friend's house, the guy pulled a U-turn and started to follow us. We didn't want him to follow us to my friend's house, so we continued past and went to a main street. We picked up speed. He picked up speed.

I then got into the only high-speed chase in my life, because we didn't know who this guy was or why the hell he was following us, and it scared the shit out of us. I ran red lights. I got on the freeway and pushed my grandmother's tan 1980 Honda Civic to its limit of 70 mph. The pick-up was practically on my bumper.

Eventually, a cop pulled us both over. The guy in the pick-up turned out to be someone who had babysat my friend when my friend was a preschooler. The guy said, sheepishly, "I know this kid. He's OK." He had assumed we were planning to break into the vacant house and, when we started to drive away, it only proved to him that we must be guilty of something. The cop chewed us both out. To the guy, he said, "Next time, let us handle this." He asked me, "Why did you run?" I said, "We were SCARED." The cop let us go.

If we hadn't been an Asian-looking girl and an Irish-white boy, how might this have gone down differently?

I'm writing this post after thinking about Amy Davidson's question, "What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?" And I realized, well, I know what I did do. And in other circumstances, in another body, I might have been shot to death.

Vigilantes are, frankly, terrifying: Who is this person? Why are they after me? In the vigilante's mind, you are someone suspicious. In your own mind, you are going about your own innocent business when some stranger starts to stalk you. A regular person would call the police and leave it at that. It's beyond the bounds of societal norms for a person to take the law into his own hands. It's one thing, after all, to stop a rape or a robbery in progress. It's another to target someone who isn't actually committing a crime.

Do you remember being seventeen? I remember being completely absorbed in a world of music, movies, schoolwork, peer hierarchies, and dating. When I thought about adults at all, it was the daily injustices my dad subjected me to: curfews, housework, family obligations, permissions denied. Adults occupied a realm of power that I hadn't experienced yet and that had authority over me. At seventeen, I dreamed of adult autonomy without understanding the reality. I was still living in my dad's house. I was closer to the age of being told to beware of strange adults than to being a true adult, on my own.

The way I reacted to being followed by a pick-up was stupid—I could have gotten into a car wreck, or caused a car wreck. If we had gone to my friend's house, gotten out of the car, and involved his dad, we would have cleared up the misunderstanding. And yet, if the man in the pick-up hadn't been a neighbor, but someone intent on harming us, then getting out of the car might have been the stupid decision. But until you know both sides of the story, you can't know which decision is the right one, if a right one even exists.

I'm sure Trayvon was afraid for his life when Zimmerman confronted him. How many of us, followed and then approached in the dark by a large man, would have fought for our lives in that moment?

If the racism of this case can be distilled to a single moment, it's the moment when you have a black kid and a non-black man facing each other, neither sure of what the other is up to. That the jurors and many, many other people identify solely with Zimmerman at that moment tells you everything you need to know about racism in this case. And it's the gap between those with Zimmerman's perspective and those with Trayvon's that seems unbridgeable. 

Significance, Part 1

Ben Franklin taught his younger sister Jane to read.
It's the other way around for these two.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

“The most Insignificant creature on Earth may be made some use of in the scale of Beings.” —Jane Franklin 

“The Prodigal Daughter,” Jill Lepore’s latest piece in the New Yorker*, is a meditation on mothers and their longings. Her own mother yearned for travel and adventure beyond the confines of her New England town. Jane Franklin, sister to Benjamin, wished to correspond with her brother with the fluidity and skill that he possessed. Ben assures his sister that, as a literate woman in eighteenth-century America, she is miracle enough; she continues to feel shame over her misspellings and her obvious exertions to express herself in writing. 

When I read Jane’s quote, I immediately teared up. My chest ached with what felt like an ancient injury. Why? I wondered. What was going on here? 

The lives of Benjamin and Jane Franklin tell a compact story of the politics of sexism made personal. Lepore sums it up neatly: “No two people in their family were more alike. Their lives could hardly have been more different.... He became a printer, a philosopher, and a statesman. She became a wife, a mother, and a widow. He signed the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Paris, and the Constitution. She strained to form the letters of her name.” 

The struggles of feminism, particularly second wave feminism, have been largely to change this narrative, to allow women to fulfill those frustrated longings: go out in the world, gain renown, participate visibly in history’s great events. 

As a child growing up in the late 1970s and the 1980s, I benefitted immeasurably from the second wave, but what I knew of feminism during my childhood was mostly this: my mother worked. 

My mother taught English and Spanish to middle- and high school students at the K–12 school I attended. She didn’t just work—she had found her calling. In addition to the fundamentals of English and Spanish, she also undertook to instill in them the ability to express themselves fully and accurately in writing and to think critically. She eventually became an English professor at a community college and found her niche, determined to help underprivileged students attain college degrees. Now, not only does she teach classes, but she has become one of the leaders of her college’s Puente Project, a comprehensive program to provide underserved students with mentors, writing instruction, and support to attain academic success. 

Over the years, many of her students have fallen into two camps: those who appreciated her unstinting efforts to get them to achieve above and beyond what they thought was possible, and those who found her an immense pain in the ass. 

I feel like I absorbed teaching through osmosis. My mother’s passion for her job meant that she has always shared her thoughts and struggles with me, and I sometimes watched her classes. The times in my life I have worked as a teacher—as a teaching assistant for writing during college, as an ESL instructor in Senegal, and a teaching assistant during graduate school—I felt that my joy in it, my comfort with it, and my ability to improvise in the classroom stemmed directly from her. I learned from her that my primary job was not to be my students’ friend, but to goad them to think, sometimes unwillingly, beyond their assumptions and received wisdom. 

I think I could have been a teacher, but for my chronic bouts of illness. During my years in graduate school, where we were groomed to become professors at research universities, the manifold ways that I saw how teaching was devalued, how it came at the end of a professor’s to-do list, far below research and the chase for grant money, discouraged me from pursuing a higher degree. (That we, in the United States, hold educators cheap is a discussion for another time.) 

What I have now is parenting. Instead of guiding young adults to unpack the cultural and political significance of performance, both artistic and quotidian, I am pushing my preschoolers to find alternative resolutions to their conflicts other than calling each other “Stupid.” 

So here I am, a wife and a mother, stitching together scraps of time trimmed from child care, household management, cooking, grocery shopping, finances, and my relationship with my husband to write. Looking at my life—absent my laptop, my preschool, the internet, the empty spaces where extended family and/or servants should be, the car, and my brown self—I ask: 

What is this, the Victorian era? 

(To be continued in Part 2.)

*Lepore’s piece is like a well-cut jewel: sharp, revealing, finely crafted, beautiful. Go read it.