April 2006

I don’t want to be a Unitarian Universalist. Let me try to deconstruct this a bit.

The Roman Catholic church raised me with my parents as surrogates. That is, my parents loved me very much, but their values were largely parroted values of their religion. The extent to which they lived up to these values is open to debate, but I do believe they really wanted to. I don’t think they saw the gaps between their excesses and Christ’s call to a non-materialistic lifestyle where love of others comes before love of self.

So, my parents put themselves in the difficult position that I now find myself in. By so deeply believing in something, they created an opportunity to have to put their money where their mouth is. And as I am finding now, this is something kids look at relentlessly. My son has a very high bar for consistency and honesty. As his command of language grows, I’m sure this bar will rise higher and higher. There is no question that he looks at what I do, and compares it to what I say, and makes judgments. The best part of his being his age is that he is not afraid to simply point it out. I don’t want him to lose that, so I am learning to not be defensive, but open to his observations and ready to apologize, or clarify, why I am being inconsistent at the moment. “I know I said never to yell. You’re right. I just yelled, and yelling doesn’t really solve anything. I lost my temper, and that’s not good. I’ll do my best not to do it again, and thanks for reminding me.”

So what in the world does this have to do with being a Unitarian Universalist?

My reasons for leaving the Catholic Church have little, at this point, to do with boredom or personal disbelief at how they ignore the realities of the world today. That’s a given for an institution of its age, and I would expect nothing more. My reasons are theological. I don’t believe in the resurrection. That kind of crimps the old Christianity style, and makes the idea of should you have women priests kind of secondary.

But I do not deny the power of transmitting an institutionalized, complex and deep value system, however flawed, that gave me a means to judge my parents’ behavior (other than the bromides you hear on TV about being a good person). It allowed me to try it on for a while, like a game of theological dress-up, and see if it fit. It didn’t, and, after a lot of soul-searching, I had to leave.

So, here I am, looking for a similar place for my son, but not believing in the primary myth of this, the Christian epoch.

Enter the Unitarian Universalist association. I could be a humanist, but I’m not an Atheist. I am agnostic, keeping the God option open since I repeatedly see evidence of that possibility all around me. I am willing not to know, but I have trouble knowing how to raise a son telling him not to know.

At the very least, the UU movement allows for a lifetime of ambivalence, but provides a place for belonging while in that state of mind and belief. There is no commitment, and belief can change from day to day. But, community transcends what’s in your head.

The trouble is that the UU movement is largely white, largely college-educated, and largely monied. So, even though its most transcendent value, that of community and the dignity of each life, in practice extends to white people with money. The paradigm of charity allows it to extend beyond, but the doors seem closed to those of other cultures.

Having lived in New York City for 21 years before relocating to Virginia, it’s hard for me to feel fully connected to the human race when the faces are only of one color, one language, and one socio-economic group. I had a very quirky friend in the last UU church I attended. She left because, living in a trailer park with two kids, trying to get a degree while selling appliances at Sears, she felt so little connection to the folks in the Fellowship.

Not everyone in a trailer park is a fundamentalist Christian. Deena was a pagan, as a matter of fact, getting her degree in Religious studies.

So, I am a reluctant Unitarian Universalist because my son will not see there the African half of his heritage, nor will my future daughter who will also be of African descent see herself reflected in the population. I am still looking for something better, and maybe always will.

I was driving the weekly commute from Charlottesville to Fredericksburg. Miles of farmland and two-lane roads make the mind wander (unless I’m listening to Air America Radio and getting depressed about the need to move to Canada before my son is 18).

I’ve been in a strange emotional place lately, owing largely to my period, and more largely to the way it removes the defensive bullshit from my mind and lets me feel things clearly. Feeling clearly is not a good thing for me, because I’m not one of those people known to contain feelings very well.

My mind went to Lou Costello. Why? Well, here’s the thing. I thought about how I just ordered two things from Amazon, and they are in a box on the dining room table. The box has been sitting there for two days. I haven’t told my husband what’s in it, but I know he sees the box.

Now, there’s nothing controversial about what I bought, or expensive, and it qualified for Amazon Free Shipping. Still, I was in my car thinking of how I’d be away until later this evening, and my husband will be left to wonder just what I was spending money on that I didn’t tell him about.

Getting past that bit of fear over retribution for buying something (which is in my head, by the way), I thought of the contents of the box. A book about adopting transracially (my son is bi-racial, and we are planning to adopt from Ethiopia this year) and an Abbott and Costello DVD with an episode from their TV show called “Car Trouble.”

I bought the book for myself. I bought the video for my job. I will be presenting at a Web conference in August, and the topic is developing for the mobile Web. For anyone with a white collar job, Abbott & Costello routines, particularly from their TV show, embody all the Sisyphian characteristics of modern life. And Web development, across browsers, is utterly defeating. You make it work for one browser, tweak it for another, and the tweak breaks how it was working in the first browser, and on and on. This is so for Web standards and CSS as well (web standards is oxymoronic in practice, but a very, very nice idea).

In making a presentation to illustrate the futility of the process, I wanted to use my favorite comedic prototypes to Seinfeld, and illustrate how this feels. The scene is Lou packing a car tightly with luggage for a long trip. As soon as he gets the trunk closed, the hood springs up. As soon as he slams the hood down, the trunk opens up again, and on. All with a hideously repetitive and phony laugh track.

Lou is forever in these hopeless scenes where life is just beating him senseless, with no witness to his pain. Lou is always called a “kid” even though we know he’s a grown man. Lou is scapegoated for everything that goes wrong. Lou is the butt of jokes, receiver of emotional and verbal abuse, all in the service of folks professing to care for him. Lou has no escape from his fate as being constantly monitored and policed, but never truly noticed.

So, I found myself on the road to the job where I feel perpetually invisible, crying my eyes out thinking of Lou. I hate self-pity, I really do, but there are moments when I feel like Mr. Fields is going to knock on the door and ask for the rent, and Abbott is going to blame me, Mike the cop will come to arrest me, all with me not knowing anything about what’s going on, but feeling somehow responsible and resigned to take the blame.

Costello is an Irish name. I am second generation Irish. I’ve inherited the Irish sense of inadequacy, the readiness to fight at the slightest insult. I have the problem (long arrested) with “the drink,” the tendency towards violence, the resignation to the normalcy of rage, the pain in the pit of my stomach that comes from feeling less than those that came before. I hear that, in real life, Lou was a belligerent pain in the ass. But I cry for him because I know exactly what it’s like to be trapped inside his head, alter ego or not.

I M Lou.

I complain, I complain, I complain… I’m one of those people who frequently hears the phrase:

“Why don’t you just quit?”

Is there a woman alive who HASN’T heard that from her husband? Is there a husband who hasn’t said that to his wife at least once? (strike that: in my old neighborhood from which I gratefully escaped, wives stayed at home with the kids and ignored them while decorating the house. They seemed pretty happy. Well, no, they seemed pretty able to seem happy. Sometimes, when they weren’t eating alone in their kitchens.).

My husband knows better than to use that phrase with me. I have not liked ANY job I’ve ever had, and I’ve always felt like my energy is being misspent, like it could be better directed to more productive directions. At the mid-point of a working career that, so far, has danced around the edges of the “creative” (I am a designer), my primary beef about working (minus the gender issues, which are definitely for another discussion, but substantial) is that I am an artist and I have to work or I won’t eat. And, perhaps too much, like the women in my old neighborhood, boy do I like to eat.

So, I’ve done the depression-era thing and always had something to “fall back on.” It’s my own fear that I never completely took the plunge and tried to make a living from the full flower of my creativity. Beyond my days as a student, I wasn’t willing to live in the unsafe, marginal neighborhoods as a woman alone. I traded the stress of marginal living for the stress of grown-up jobs. I was a draftsman, building code consultant (in NYC, that’s not a stress-free job, and I nearly went insane at one point, being carried to the car by my then-boyfriend-turned-second-ex-husband to leave the city, live with my sister — I remember that first sip of wine at her house in the late morning when I arrived– eventually returning to the Big Apple to get a mindless job selling bathing suits at Saks Fifth Avenue for the Christmas season — which I really enjoyed for the dumbness of it — only to have my white collar work ethic have me sell $5,000 worth of bathing suits in one day, causing them to offer me a promotion to management in just a few weeks, firmly placing me back in the potentially stressful job situation. Like the Godfather III: “Every time I want to get out, they pull me back in.”)

So there is something about me that is strongly planted in the responsible day-job culture, though I hate it so. I hate it for the way it takes my energy away from my writing, from performing, from building installations I’ve got planned, from a whole host of creative efforts that will cost money and not make me a dime. I put the best of myself into every job, and have not yet learned to conserve energies for what matters. Except for my son: I give him my all, and that is a fact. But, my creative work has really, really suffered, being stuffed into recesses of my brain like too many shoes and hats in a closet. I stuff the door closed every morning. Each day, I have to put more weight behind it.

I worry that the ideas are dying, and then when I let them sneak out, they come back as if new. That moment of access to them is painful: If I let them out, they will have to grow and become something. To do that, I’ll need to dismantle the life I’ve built that sustains myself, and now, my family. The fact that it’s a job, and not being a Mom, that is holding me back may be the spoils of the second-wave feminist generation: I have new reasons to feel the old creativitus interruptus.

I remember when I was in high school, I drew a little ink sketch of a goddess and framed it. I gave it to my Mom. I told her that I thought of her this way, and that it represented the part of her that wasn’t allowed to flourish as a mother of 8 kids. She choked back tears and put it in her drawer, never displayed it. I loved her so.

She, like I, was scared. Scared to be, for so many reasons too numerous to write in this one post, fully ourselves. I meet with people and do PowerPoint presentations. She ironed my Dad’s bleached Irish Linen handkerchiefs. Really, in the end, does it make a damn bit of difference? Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name” has come full circle. We got what we wanted, became the “men we wanted to marry,” and you know what: It sucks.

So, why don’t I just quit?

Blake had such courage today at the fair. His first ever. All the rides, “kiddie” and otherwise, that scared him and made his eyes go so wide. He went on them, and had that look of fear on his face during the whole thing, and then wanted to do it again.

My son is such an example for me of how to truly live. He doesn’t really understand what’s expected, what’s inappropriate, what’s proper. He is learning about what is wrong, but only in the most rudimentary sense of not hurting himself or another. But, teaching what is wrong, what is expected, based on social norms, has me always feeling like I’m just quietly killing his utter Blake-ness that he was born with.

I simply hate to tell him he can’t stand out on the porch naked. I hate the fact that I hurt inside when he begs for a pink bicycle with white tires and a Barbie basket on it. I hurt because I know that to buy it is to buy him the pain of ridicule. So, what to do? Do I actively kill his love of pink out of fear he will be hurt by some catty little girl, or do I let him get ridiculed by some catty little girl, or pack of girls, and go through all that pain?

He wants earrings for his birthday. His Daddy wears earrings, and he wants to be like his Daddy, so I bought him magnetic earrings that look just like his Daddy’s. I love his utter appetite for the delightful, unfettered by the way the world lays value judgments on things like 4-year old boys with earrings riding pink bicycles.

What is it about the world that we are not permitted to re-invent the arbitrariness of personal style with each life? Why does it all carry meaning beyond enjoyment. We saw parents at the indoor play area at the local shopping mall last night with their three daughters. They were repeatedly telling them “Don’t run! Walk!” It’s a play ground. All the kids were running. But they are learning for some odd reason that running is a bad thing to do when you are playing. I could not be happier than when I see Blake running a lot. It means I may actually sleep that night.

My sweet Blake teaches me that if I am to be fully alive, I have to be able to wear earrings and ride a pink bike every day. That no one can take away my right to do that, even if I’m am being held hostage to a paycheck, or a reputation, or simply their others’ discomfort. In honor of my little Blake, I am getting on the pink bike, and I’m not getting off until I want to stop riding.

The year was 1980, and I was spending the day with a friend of mine, Tony, from my summer job on Rector Street in Manhattan where we each were draftspeople for a naval contractor, labelling drawings for battleships so the plans could be sent to the appropriate shipyards across the country. Tony was black, and was the only black man I ever kissed. Once. He was a funny guy, but very conservative in many ways. So, he was fun to be around because I liked to shock him with my smart mouth and my inappropriate comments.

Tony and I met that Saturday morning at Battery Park City, and decided we would walk through Manhattan all day until we wound up that evening at Central Park, where B.B. King was holding a free concert. I remember the heat that day, the rawness of the dirt in the air in my first full-blown NYC summer away from my parent’s home. I still wore those New Jersey pastel colors: lavendar pants and a red Danskin top. I hadn’t yet adopted the ubiquitous black clothing that would become a staple of my wardrobe to this day.

So on I walked up Manhattan, with my black kind-of boyfriend and non-black clothes. I don’t remember much until we reached Washington Square Park. There, we met the usual pot-selling, pot-smoking crowd, which was a lot more open in those days. You could buy pot on the corner of Waverly and University place, and smoke it at the center of the park in the open. The cops knew in those waning days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency that busting some college kid for pot wasn’t really going to stem the dangers of the NYC streets.

So, we found ourselves smoking a joint with a group of ne-er do well artists and drug addicts, having lazy laughs, and speaking in ways we really didn’t understand. Those were days of the words coming out first, and your listening to them later. And then letting go.

There was one guy who was very small. He was older (probaby in his 30s or 40s), dressed in a cape and top hat, and talking about the acid he dropped the other night. It was all very new to me, and I tried to look like I took in it stride, but, my lavendar pants probably gave it away.

At any rate, this guy, who called himself “The Wizard” starts talking about a songwriter who was black who was one of the many that got screwed out of royalties when the record industry started to commoditize the music on the backs of the creative poor black community. Tony, who definitely was taking more of the Booker T. approach to success as an African-American male, argued with him that the writer should have known and not been so stupid. The Wizard’s response was “That’s just not African.”

The journey to the creative as commodity from its original place as a gift from the soul has been marked by countless human agonies. The impulse to give from the heart, and from the soul, must be channeled, compartmentized, vetted, marketed, and consumed in the appropriate order by the appropriate persons in the appropriate positions of power. You must have the letters after your name to have an unbridled idea expressed raw, you must rub elbows with the odious purveyors of mass entertainment to have a song heard outside of your living room walls because there is no village, no community that wants you. Only institutions that have learned to co-opt and selectively reward the creative impulse, capturing the spoils to perpetuate itself.

I am as white as white can be. But, in this regard, I think I understand this one little thing that The Wizard told me that day. This whole thing just isn’t African.

It makes me long to trace myself back to mother Lucy, and claim the heritage we all share, before someone, somewhere, decided to build our sweat, our souls, into something to serve raw power and privilege. I am truly ashamed today. To be white, to be part of all of this, to have tried to be part of all of this.

Tony and I were laid off from the naval engineer’s office shortly after that day. It seemed our labelling services were no longer needed.