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. 

Feminist Quickies: My Own #365FeministSelfie Series

Tired Mama Working
Each word is its own feminist topic!
Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian

This winter has sucked. In spite—or perhaps because—of our record-breaking warm winter in L.A.,* my kids have been sick a lot, particularly with nasty coughs that linger and linger, sometimes disappearing briefly only to return with a vengeance.

During the month of December, it seemed that we all had one cold that we were simply passing back and forth between each other like some kind of high school basketball drill. Then in January, my grandmother (my last surviving grandparent) contracted a lung infection and spent about a month in the hospital, a forced confinement that made her lonely and depressed. Shortly after she was released, my son got sick again—this time with croup!—got better and attended school for a week, then caught another cold with nonstop coughing and was diagnosed with asthma.

I remember last week as one marathon viewing of the anodyne Canadian cartoon Caillou barely heard over the droning motor of the nebulizer. I didn’t see any of the episodes, mind you, because my eyes were fixed on my son’s upper lip, where I trained the hose spewing vaporized Albuterol.

So, I haven’t been writing.

I have been Facebooking, however. Ah, Facebook! The refuge of the exhausted, isolated mother, trapped with a sick child, yet able to participate in a quasi-social life stolen in five-minute snatches.

A few of my friends began the year pledging themselves to the #365FeministSelfie project, the brainstorm of Veronica Arreola. Arreola began the project as a rebuttal to a Jezebel piece describing selfies as a “cry for help.”  “Selfies aren’t empowering,” the writer scoffed, “they’re a high tech reflection of the fucked up way society teaches women that their most important quality is their physical attractiveness.”

“But what about positive selfies?” Arreola countered. “Yesterday I saw a mom and her maybe-5yo-daughter taking a selfie.They were making silly faces and snapping pics. Those were memories being made, moments of love that both will likely remember forever.” She went on to describe other ways selfies could be feminist: “WOC [Women Of Color] rarely see themselves reflected in media, people over a size 4 are told to hide themselves, transgender persons want to be seen...”
 
I wanted to take part. Because periodically, someone has to write a clickbaiting column declaring feminism dead, again (too many links to embed, I’m afraid). The #365FeministSelfie project seemed like a way for women (and other-gendered people!) to simply and effectively preempt a 2014 Feminism Is Dead article while bringing up feminist issues in a new way. I wanted to be a visible mixed-race woman of color in the 365FeministSelfie roll call. But-

“A selfie every day?” I thought. “Ha ha ha ha.”

In February, my friend Jaclyn Friedman interviewed Arreola for her podcast. Together they were so convincing, I made for myself the more modest goal of a selfie a week.

Now it’s mid-March. I miss writing. I am having that kind of tired, sad, well-worn Cult of Domesticity feminist mom crisis that we all know. (Members of a parenting group I belong to—again, on Facebook—have titled our version Household Drudge, PhD... or MA, in my case.)

Since sustained writing, research, or even thought is quite beyond me these days, my goal now is to turn out a series of weekly quickie posts, based on my own #365FeministSelfie series. Tomorrow’s post will cover feminine performance, social capital, and body hair.

* Yes, I am sorry to rub it in your face, everyone suffering from the Polar Vortex. The downside, of course, is that we are going to run out of water this summer. Oh, and the earthquake this morning.

Are you participating in the #365FeministSelfie Project? What made you decide to join? Share in the comments below! And please subscribe to be sure to catch every post in the series. 

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

  

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.