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. 

Mothers' Day 2014

Photo by Kevin Miller

Love to the mothers. 

Love to the ones that wake in the night, night after night, then stumble through the days, keeping on. Love to the ones that care for sick children, offering juice and tea, placing cool cloths on feverish heads, fluffing pillows and tucking in blankets. Love to the ones that pack the lunches, that launder the linens and clothes, wash the dishes, scrub the toilets, that buy the food and the clothing and the toothbrushes and then, choose a small toy or treat or longed-for thing, just because. 

Love to the ones who answer questions, who give advice, who say “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out”, who say “you can do it”, who say “no”, who say “because I’m the mama, that’s why.” 

Love to the ones who soothe hurts. Who give hugs and kisses. Who refrain from giving hugs and kisses in public because it’s embarrassing. Who see you past each heartbreak. 

Love to the ones at home with their babies, going a little bit stir-crazy, lost in a whirl of milk-diapers-nap, dreaming of taking a shower or talking with a friend or doing something, anything that makes them feel knowing and capable rather than bewildered and inept. 

Love to the ones who labor all day to provide for their children. Love to the ones who rise in the early hours for work, who carry still-sleeping kids to the neighbors’ or the sitters’ houses until it’s time for school. Love to the ones who work all night so they can see their kids in the mornings and in the evenings. Love to the ones who work part-time, at low pay with no benefits, trying to find a third way that works. 

Love to the ones who discovered unknown depths of sadness and fear during their pregnancies or after, who are struggling to return to the surface. 

Love to the ones who parent alone. 

Love to the ones who did not birth their babies, but took them in and gave them the families their birth mothers could not. 

Love to the ones who cared for their babies by giving them up because they knew they were not ready or able to mother their children all day, every day, for the rest of their lives. 

Love to those for whom this day brings pain. 

To the mothers whose babies passed on before them, who live with an ache and a void every day. Love especially to those whose babies were torn from them by unexpected violence. 

To the mothers who had their babies stolen from them by coercion or by force. Love especially to Nigerian mothers in Chibok who wait every day in sorrow and despair. 

To the children whose mothers could not or would not give them all the love they deserved, whose mothers carried an inner wound that they, in turn, used to wound their children. 

To the children whose mothers have passed on, for whom this day reminds them of loss. A missing that just goes on and on. 

Love to the mothers who, in the true spirit of this day, write letters, make phone calls, march in the streets to make a healthier, more peaceful world for all of us. 

Love to the mother beneath our feet, who gives us all life and sustains it. Who feeds us, gives us water, provides our very breaths. 

Ashé.

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

  

How Long?

I’m in Canada on “vacation”—i.e., on duty with my children 24 hours a day while we visit family. I have to, once again, pause between sections of Significance: I have been transported back to 2003, where the only access to the internet is via a single cable inconveniently located in the room where the kids sleep. Online research is, as they say, not happening.

Additionally, deprived of preschool hours, finding time to write has been challenging. Most of this post I wrote after being awakened at 3 a.m., unable to get back to sleep, tapping it out with two fingers on my iPhone.

In the absence of the internet, I have fallen back on my dad’s issues of The New Yorker. So I finally read Louis Menand’s article on the Supreme Court’s decision to strip the Voting Rights Act of its teeth, something I couldn’t bring myself to do at the time because of my overwhelming feelings of frustration and despair. 

Today marks the 48th anniversary of the VRA.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, Reverend David Abernathy,
Mrs. Juanita Abernathy, and their children at the front of the Selma
to Montgomery March in 1965. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

Menand doesn’t so much analyze the Court’s decision as retrace the steps of the Civil Rights Movement that led to the VRA. His words bring it vividly back: the unbridled use of state power coupled with vigilantism to terrorize the Black population of the South. Beatings. Shootings. Firebombings. Lynchings.

(Note to pro-gun people: the era of the Civil Rights Movement saw private citizens wield guns far more effectively as instruments of terror rather than as defense against it. Imagine if the Klan couldn’t access guns.)

I am, of course, interested in how the leadership developed and adapted the strategy to realize Civil Rights, a delicate balance of economic pressure through boycotts and international pressure sparked by the horrifying footage of repression in action—exactly the opposite image the White House desired during the Cold War.

But I’m also curious about the foot soldiers of the movement, whose day-to-day logistics are rarely documented. How did each family organize their participation in the movement? Who in the family attended the meetings? Who watched the kids? Extended family? Neighbors? Or did they take them along? (Clearly they did sometimes, since we have images of children blasted by firehoses, set upon by dogs, and shocked with electric prods.)

I frankly cannot imagine an equivalent mass movement taking place today. The last gun control rally I attended, on the six-month anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, was held from 5 to 7 p.m. We stood on the corner of a busy intersection and held signs. When it was over, we all went home. In the course of those two hours, a maximum of 150 people attended.

I don’t mean this as a criticism of the organizers, who, I know, meet regularly and devote so much of their time and energy into making real change on gun control in the U.S. Nor can I fault the participants, who not only show up at the rallies, but also write letters, sign petitions, and donate money to end gun violence. 

One difficulty I see is that few of us are as single-issue as African Americans were on the topic of Civil Rights. Segregation affected every African American personally and outweighed any other injustice. Facing death at the hands of a state trooper seemed a reasonable risk to end the possibility of being dragged from your house and lynched in the dark of night. 

In contrast, my activism includes GLBT rights, immigrant rights, food policy, regulation of toxic chemicals, use of drones, Edward Snowden and the NSA surveillance policy, the targeting of Assata Shakur, reproductive rights, workers’ rights, gun control, and on and on. Not because I am somehow more aware or more enlightened, but because no one is going to kill me, or my family, or my friends over any one of these issues. (This is not to say that some aren’t life-or-death issues—many are, but few of us, proportionally, will experience it as immediate, direct terror.) The complexity of our society now can mean more freedoms, but it also multiplies the ways that these freedoms can be picked away or assaulted, often indirectly or surreptitiously. 

A second factor I see is time. For example, I am ancient enough to remember when I could call a business or a company and a living person would answer the phone. Then companies realized they could use technology to save labor costs, but that labor of “directing a call” then got passed to us, the “consumers.” Whether we saved money on products because companies cut their labor costs is debatable. That they stole our time is demonstrable. This kind of “savings” to corporations and “costs” to the rest of us continues in ways large and small. Consequently, we now spend more of our lives as consumers than as citizens. 

When we are working more than eight hours a day- 
When we spend hours in our cars commuting between our homes and our jobs- 
When our work follows us home and occupies our “leisure” time- 
When we care for our children alone, far from the support of extended family- 

How can we take the time not just to write letters, but to demonstrate in the state house, attend a march, gather for movement meetings—not just once in a while, but for days and years until the campaign is won? How long does it take to establish our rights? It takes decades of unrelenting effort: the accumulated minutes, hours, days, and years of thousands of people’s lives. We give our time, and money, and work, and sometimes blood. How long does it take to strip those rights, and erode the landscape of equality for our children? As long as it takes a decision to be read, and for the gavel to bang down.

PETITIONS TO RESTORE THE VRA:

NAACP

People for the American Way

The Nation

And, as always, contact your representatives directly via e-mail, Facebook, and/or Twitter. For the greatest impact, I kick it old school via snail mail. 

 

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.

Significance, Part 2

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1.)

About two weeks ago, I began a post I titled “Significance.” Then the jury in the Trayvon Martin trial came to their verdict, and I was unable to think of anything else for a while. 

I have been trying to pick up the thread of “Significance.” I have, in fact, almost 900 words of the original Part 2. But, for the moment, I have to scrap them all. I have been writing around what I want to say, because I wanted to keep elements of my personal history private. 

I started “Significance,” in part, to explain why I am currently a stay-at-home/sort-of-working-at-home-if-you-call-this-working mother. But I realize that none of this will make emotional sense unless I talk about the situation of my childhood. 

My parents divorced when I was 2 years old. They came up with a joint custody arrangement where I would spend four days with my mom, then four days with my dad. In the 1970s, divorce was still rare, and in addition to being one of the few brown kids at my school whose grandparents came from the here-there-be-dragons unknown lands of Armenia and Philippines, having divorced parents made me ... well, you can imagine. 

Unto itself, the divorce wasn’t that bad. I don’t remember when it happened, and I don’t remember a time when my parents lived under one roof. Living in two houses was my “normal.” I remember the aftermath, overhearing tense phone conversations between my parents. I remember being afraid when my mom cried. 

My parents married when my dad was 25 and my mom was 22. I was born the day after my mother’s 24th birthday, an age that seems incredibly young to me, considering I was a decade older when I gave birth to my own daughter. 

A therapist once told me that if I wanted to avoid a divorce, I shouldn’t marry until after the age of 30. “You need to know who you are,” she said. “You want to be fully formed as a person.” My mother was not fully formed when she married. Like many women, she essentially transitioned from her role of daughter to wife. So after her divorce, she started on the path to figure out who she was as an adult and what she wanted out of life. 

During this search, my mother didn’t mother me very much. Our closest times revolved around books and food. I can still hear my mother’s voice when I read certain favorites from my childhood to my kids now. And I remember my feelings of delight and belonging over several shared ice cream sundaes. But I also remember being alone, a lot. 

I don’t want to delve into unhappy details of my childhood. It is now in the past, and my mother and I have forged a new relationship as adults. In addition to her responsibilities as a professor, my mother is a loving and attentive grandmother to my children. 

I recently read the article that Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, wrote about growing up as the daughter of a feminist author and leader.* Not only does it sadden me to read about the ways she felt neglected and ignored as a child, but it also sickens me to see her words churned through right-wing sites like Breitbart and the National Review online as a testament to the failure of feminism. 

I want to be clear on this: my mother’s shortcomings in her duties as a parent were not because of work or feminism. I am a feminist, and my parenting is infused with feminist ideals of gender equality and radical redefinitions of masculinity and femininity. My parents’ divorce can be attributed, in part, to a lack of equality. My mother mentioned, as an example, familial and social pressures for her to regularly put on dinner parties where, of course, she would be solely responsible for cooking and serving—which is why the dish I associate most with her is instant ramen noodles. (My father, on the other hand, knuckled down with cookbooks and put a home-cooked meal on the table almost every night.)

I fully believe that a woman can work and also be an engaged and devoted parent. Indeed, for many women, the fulfillment of working makes them better parents. 

But I can’t quite escape that feeling of loss from my childhood. The wound is there, and it aches sometimes, like the scar at the bottom of my belly where my babies were pushed out of my body. 

So now, right now, when my children are small, when I am still the center of their worlds, I want to be here for them. I am not with them all the time—they go to preschool while I grocery shop, juggle the finances, do the laundry, tend the garden, take a nap if I slept badly the night before (e.g., wedged between my two thrashing offspring), read articles, talk on the phone, go to doctor/dentist/acupuncture appointments, schedule the plumber, prep for dinner, have a weensy bit of an adult social life, bang my head against my laptop while I try to write, and do all the things that are difficult or impossible to do with two strong-willed kids in tow. 

But all those hours when they are not in school, and it feels like a lot, I am here to play with them, read to them, keep them from fighting with each other, feed them, take them to dance class and swim lessons, talk with them, and, mostly, to hold them when they need to emotionally fall apart.

They will not be little forever, as every parent with older children reminds me. Later, they will have friends and activities, other interests and people to fill their time and share their thoughts with. And this is not what I want to do forever: tending to hearth and home and little ones. But for these few fleeting years, this is what I want. And I don’t see why that can’t be a feminist choice, too. 

(To be continued in Part 3.)

*Excellent feminist responses to Rebecca Walker’s article here and here.  

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.

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

I am wrestling with an unscheduled post on race, body acceptance, and clothing. My younger child also caught an unscheduled virus, which means I won't be able to write tomorrow because he will be staying home from school, and I blew through my babysitting budget last week trying to Get Things Done and fulfill my activist duties.

But I promised myself to only take last week as a hiatus, so here's a quickie.

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to not beat myself up all the time over not being a perfect parent. Yes, I've read plenty of articles on being "a good enough parent," and I am working on embracing my imperfections. I know, intellectually, that being a "perfect parent" is not possible, nor even desirable if it were possible, but perfectionism runs deep in my family.

For me, parenting is a daily struggle to rewrite old patterns of behavior and attitudes that stem not only from my own childhood, but that have been reinscribed over generations. I am learning about epigenetics, and it helps me to understand how we carry our ancestral histories with us, within our bodies. (I will write more, much more, on this topic.) It can make me feel overwhelmed, that I am trying to swim against the tide of depression, fear, and anger from two separate lineages that meet in me. But it can also help me forgive myself when I fail.

At her preschool, my daughter decorated a small journal for me for Mother's Day. It's exactly like the composition books they use at school to record their thoughts (either dictated to a teacher, or "written" themselves), except in miniature, the perfect size for me to carry around in my purse.

This is where I jot down my thoughts and ideas to explore and flesh out later. I glance at the inscription to give me courage and to inspire me to be the mother my daughter deserves. It is a gift that she gave me, and it represents what a gift she is to me. Parenting has given me focus and purpose that I was seeking before her birth. Not to say that I feel like I was born to be a mother, because mothering does not come "naturally" to me at all, but—to quote Talib Kweli—if life is a beautiful struggle, then creating and guiding the lives of my children is my beautiful struggle, in all its messiness, heartbreak, silliness, absurdity, complexity, and grace.

Guns and Anger, Coda

(I described the day my children were shut inside their school because of a man with a gun in Part 1. I discuss the gender politics of the NRA in Part 2.)
 
Of course, I recognize that not all gun owners—not even the majority—are as unhinged as James Yaeger, who epitomizes the kind of volatile personality that I’d like to keep as far away from firearms as possible. My cousins represent, to me, the opposite end of the spectrum: level-headed, generally chill guys who happen to enjoy hunting.
 

Salad. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

 My memories of Jorjorian family dinners seem to always involve my (liberal) dad and my (conservative) uncle trying to prove the strengths of their arguments mainly through the loudness of their voices while my grandmother shouted over them in her broad Long Island accent, “DOES ANYBODY WANT MORE SALAD?” Naturally, these arguments were pointless, since neither would budge in his convictions. Despite these clashes, my dad and my uncle clearly love each other, and their bonds run deep. They provided for me a powerful model—never let the little things in life like money or politics drive a wedge between family.

My cousins are older than me, so we were never close, and we inherited from our fathers our strong political convictions. But I always enjoy seeing them at family gatherings, and now that I am a mother, sharing in parenthood has given us a new connection.

I disagree with them about many things, but hunting isn’t one of them. I have eaten the venison and elk they have brought back from hunting trips, and it was delicious. I remember when I was about 12 years old, I said to them, “Deer are overpopulated. Hunting helps keep their numbers at sustainable levels.” (I was probably quoting from Sierra magazine.) I still treasure the looks of shock on their faces. “That’s right,” said my older cousin. “Wow,” said my younger cousin. “I thought you would be like, ‘Aw, the poor little deer.’” “No,” I snorted. (Because I wasn’t an “emotional” girl, but rational and scientific! Did I mention I was a tomboy?)

I recount this to establish my bona fides when I say: I am not against all guns.

But I want to stand up for my right not to have a gun. I don’t want to live in a society where everyone has to have a gun to feel safe because so many unregulated, illegal guns are in circulation due to lax gun control laws. I have lived in sketchy places in the U.S. and abroad, and I have been scared, but never—even when I heard shots and saw the flashes—to the point of wishing I had a gun. I can’t—and don’t want to—imagine how I would feel if I ever shot anyone in error, as an accident, or because I mistook a threat, or because I didn’t read a situation correctly. And if my kids ever died because they accessed a gun in my house, I could never forgive myself.

Ultimately, the “guy with a gun” turned out to be a 19-year-old student who turned himself in to the Santa Monica College psychological services department. He was unarmed.

I am not reassured that the threat turned out not to be “real.” Gun massacres now seem almost like tornadoes: random, unpredictable, terrifying, and inevitable. We know that, sooner or later, it will happen again, because we have had at least one gun massacre nearly every year since 1982.

I am tired of the irrational political calculus that makes gun law reform impossible. The unholy marriage of money and politics, the use of the filibuster to blackmail our democracy, and rampant gerrymandering stand in the way of meaningful change, and each of these is a campaign unto itself. And yet, when we look at places like Australia, it’s clear that reform could get done if politicians would stand by principles rather than by the NRA and their deep pockets.

I am also weary of action via electronic proxy. I send out e-mail messages and tweets, and I know an intern somewhere just checks a box noting my opinion and arranges for a form letter to be sent back to me. As I said in my letter, I am done with e-mails and tweeting. Remember the days when Senators’ offices would be flooded with mail from outraged citizens? We can’t all march in the streets (although we should more often), but we can send letters. On paper. Something material that has to be physically dealt with.

I’ll be participating in the Father’s Day campaign planned by Moms Demand Action. I hope you will, too.

CODA TO A CODA: Today, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw that Santa Monica College was once again barricaded. I arrived at her school to a parking lot eerily empty and quiet. 

The school was on lockdown again. This time, some of the parents had heard the shots, and one had even seen the man with the gun. We were all shut inside with our kids. My daughter kept whining that she wanted to go home, and I kept saying, "We can't go home yet, honey. What do you want to play?" 

My husband had texted that the gunman was in custody shortly after I arrived, but the lockdown remained. After about an hour, with our kids climbing the walls, most of us decided to try to leave. My son was at home, and I wanted us to be all together.

But it wasn't quite over, and the drone of helicopters constantly overhead grated at my nerves.

It's now 9:30 p.m., and the kids are in bed. It has been a harrowing day. Four people are dead. The gunman was killed on the scene. 

We can't live like this. It has to end.