June 2006

Trying to kick myself out of a depression, I read a few of my favorite feminist blogs today (Bitch | Lab, Bitch PhD). Favorite because they are in-your-face, claiming the ability to be obnoxious and stand their ground. Here here! I’m entertained by the attitude. Some of the content I take issue with. And I think anger is too easy. It’s only part of the story. But, as I said, entertaining.

It brought me back to why I left NOW-NYC, besides the burnout. The notion of revolution was being turned on its head. Robin Morgan wrote a book back then (1991 I think) called “The Demon Lover” in which she talked about activist women that got caught up in male-run violent activism of the 1960s and 70s. Women like Angela Davis (whom I admire greatly) and Kathy Boudin (whom I met once in a group at a visit to Bedford Hills prison, and she is a fascinating, brilliant woman). In Ms. Morgan’s discussion of how women essentially signed up with organizations that had male-traditional “revolution” in mind, they were facilitating the potential not for revolution but for what she called “revolving”; that is, the same paradigm takes over with different people in control. But there is no structural revolution per se because the notion of “power” is still defined in a male framework: power as a zero-sum game, with some having a lot, some a little, and everyone vying for more. The problem, as I understood it, was that once such “revolutions” actually take place (witness Cuba — heck, witness the USA), the notion of the partnership society, where all work for the good of the other, can’t grow from the roots that were planted in traditional violent terrorist tactics. The ends not only do not justify the means, they actually are informed, shaped, and spawned by them. Violence is in the DNA from the very start.

I believe that it is our willingness to want to play the men’s game that has put us in such a bind. We didn’t have the patience to make our own game, or the network (due to Betty Friedan’s notion of the “problem that has no name” and its inherent isolation of women that precludes networking). So, small groups of wealthy stay-at-home moms marched in mink coats to the Oak Room at the Plaza (Betty herself sporting sunglasses to hide the black eye from a battering husband) in the naive notion that access there actually meant something to all women. Elitist, for sure, and indicative of the second-wave in general: We want a piece of the men’s elitist action, not to question the nature and ethics of the game to begin with. But these women didn’t think of mobilizing the working class woman behind them. Again, that networking thing: You didn’t meet working class women at the Junior League luncheons…oh…maybe they were serving…never mind).

So, what does this have to do with the feminist blogs I’ve been reading? Well, we have indeed become the men we wanted to marry. We seem to be as obsessed with laying down rules and heirarchy over the existing ones. So we debate whether it’s “better” to have kids when you are younger and older, whether motherhood is indeed a “choice,” whether religious women are wacko, and other woman-determined, top-down concepts that are loaded with rules about how we “should” carry on our lives, a patriarchal notion to begin with. It’s no different to me than those who say “you’re either with the President or you’re with the terrorists.” Creating polarity out of nothing.

The truth is, we can rant all we want, and I love a good rant. But, a life guided by pure compassion is necessarily the most revolutionary, outside the system way to live, and the ultimate in subversiveness. The trouble with a lot of female American history is that the expression of human compassion has been proscribed within patriarchally laid-down boundaries: The “noblesse-oblige” of Eleanor Roosevelt, the codependent battered “long-suffering” wife, the ultimate self-sacrifice of a Mother Teresa (well, I guess she wasn’t American, but, you get my point ). We have become giving machines, and each of these female-giving roles are characterized by actions expressed as what I’d call “cookie-cutter compassion.” The reality is, this type of giving is infused with fear and ego. They, by their nature, involve staking out our territory within male-created institutions, and lamely trying to compensate for their shortcomings: poverty/wealth, the institution of traditional marriage, organized religion, and many more.

I’m not Christian by a long shot, but I think the life of Christ (even if it’s a damn good fiction) has so many lessons. There are many others, but, having been brought up Catholic, I know more about Jesus than the Buddha What Jesus did, and when he did it, utterly subverted the power system, and he died as a result. It is possible that the world as we know it is simply not ready for pure compassion, and the necessary resistance from patriarchal traps of money and power that keep us keep it going. You have to jump from the train, not fight to be the engineer.

So how to be compassionate, and not contribute to the powerlessness of women? Well, first of all, I think I gotta accept that if I want a world of love and compassion, I may indeed remain powerless in the patriarchal sense (a seat at the kiddie table ). But, what the heck? I need food, clothing, shelter, love, community. I really don’t intrinsically need to be the perfect mother, or admired by my colleagues, well-known, considered well-read. I don’t need the perfect house, my kid doesn’t need the perfect school district, I don’t have, or need, the perfect body. I chase my tail looking for these things, and someone’s making money every time I aspire to them (like with the plastic surgeon who sucked the lard out of my thighs and, with it. $8000 from my bank account ).

Who cares about any of this stuff if I live with love in my heart. Letting go of that need to have power and visibility in the male world, and its female counterpart world, is very, very hard for me. I crave it like booze, which was also not very good for me. I think I’ve read that many folks crave foods to which they are allergic. I’m allergic to patriarchy, I think. Immersed as I am in academia, another patriarchal institution, my allergy has been acting up and, as a result, I’ve got a bad case of the spiritual hives.

I’m amazed at how many times Jesus was given the opportunity for power or notoriety, or even just to save his own skin, and he turned them all down. That’s not humility, really, for humility seems to necessarily contain a self-observation and outside judgment that I believe pure compassion does not need. It’s just deep happiness, happiness from having experienced the oneness of pure love as far as humans can experience it. And his insistence on that state of deep connected happiness, expressed as compassion, was and continues to be transforming for millions of people — more transforming than a the lives of the Roman soldiers who were decorated, privileged, and reaped the fruits of the patriarchal game. They had a “seat at the table,” as second wave feminists liked to say.

There have been others like Jesus, I’m sure, and may be some now, and we may never know. I knew a guy in AA from Brooklyn. His name was George. He was an older man who had MS. George was a little nuts, but in the best of ways. Most people couldn’t stand him but I just loved him. He was a blowhard, but he was so kind. When he told his story, it was of a highly successful telecom executive who basically drank it all away. He said, before he got sober, he always dreamed of power and money. Then, after getting sober, he told of his aspirations metaphorically: He dreamed of directing the show, then starring in the show, then playing a supporting role, then being a stage hand. Now he dreamed of sweeping up afterwards. I get it, George, I get it.

For now, in times of making war and hating war, we are smug or we are panicky. Pure love and compassion is pretty off-the-grid. And I wish I had the courage to make the leap.

As with many of us who love to write for its own sake, I was moved to re-read all my blog entries to date. I would do the same with songs when I used to write music. I’d play them over and over again. It’s soothing to me, as though I am verifying that I indeed do exist.

Blake wanted to watch his “tiny baby” video tonight. That’s a tape of the sonogram taken when he was in his birth mother’s belly. He turned to me today and said, “I was in your belly.” I had to give the stock answer that adoptive parents are trained to give, “I wish you had been in my belly, because I love you so much. But, you were in my heart. You came from Jenny’s belly.” We watch the tape together, and he points to his eyes, his head, his spine. I tell him how he was floating in water when they took it. He wants to see it again. I rewind the tape for him and his Daddy, and I have to leave the room. My tears overwhelm me.

Re-reading my blogs, re-viewing the pre-birth images of my son, immerses me in enormous pain. I am at a turning point as a person, for I can read in what I write that I am growing bitter. I see resentment overcoming compassion, I read the overwhelming, lifelong sense of being less than those that surround me. So much less, so not belonging.

No wonder I don’t like Second Life. It feels alienating. I feel like Second Life all the time. In a space that has nothing to do with me, that will go on fine with or without me, with no one in particular waiting for me, with potential creeps out to do me harm. I think I would need a very strong sense of my own significance in the world to transport myself joyfully into a parallel universe of mathematical and spatial indifference. I find it, not inscrutable, but painful. I don’t think that virtual space can be tackled by someone who has not commanded real space yet. It holds nothing for a person that is screaming from all the back corners of her soul, “Someone please tell me that I’m worth something, that I matter, that I’m good at something, that you want to hear a song I wrote, that I made a difference in your life, that I’m indispensible.”

I’ve done every kind of therapy imaginable. Been to retreats where I pretend someone is my father and yell at him. Done psychotherapy, 12-steps, cognitive therapy, Jungian therapy, psychoanalysis, and what one person called relational therapy. I’ve gotten insight, for sure, but I look and re-read the pain over and over. Hanging on to it gives me something to hang on to. The virtual and real worlds do not.

I’m just so sad.

I sit here with the laptop after an hour and a half of trying to understand what my colleagues see in Second Life. After an evening of rain, and trying to keep Blake occupied, I sit at the laptop, login, and give it an earnest whirl.

I am given opportunities to change my appearance. I try my best to make myself look as I really do, but the hairdo is far too hip to be me. And the lips are very full. I am embarassed. I have no desire to present myself to the world, even the virtual world, in a way that more aligns me with popular culture. Not unless I can lose the weight for real. But, I make myself as plump and curvy as I really am. I can’t make the pants high enough or the shirt low enough to conceal my bellybutton, which has me rather uncomfortable. I am walking around an arid area with a few strangers, mostly men that look as airbrushed as Sears underwear ads. Tight jeans, white T-shirts, and 6-pack abs abound. I feel like I’m back on Christopher Street.

Blake wants an ice cream, and first life calls. He sits with me at the computer. He wants me to find a beach ball in all this nothingness. I haven’t a clue, but I’m sure I could learn to use this thing better. He’s got a beach ball in his room, but I try to find one on the screen in vain. He has finished his first ice cream (actually, a Scooby-Doo push bar, in green) and now wants another one in blue. The choice is clear: Keep life peaceful by getting him a blue one, enabling me to continue with this experiment online tantrum-free. He gets his blue push bar and runs into his bedroom where Daddy is.

I go back to the screen. I dive underwater, and strangely do not drown. I fly out, and wind up next to some guy in a skimpy toga. He is disturbing.

Then some IM thing shows up on my screen from some person saying he’ll listen to all my whispers. Ew. Kind of gross. Disturbed again.

I fly around the space. It feels like a subway station, a big one like Grand Central, only no one is there. There are billboards and all the surfaces seem easily washable. It must be 3 am. I have a feeling it always feels like 3 am in this place.

I begin to wonder why I am in this space that gives me the creeps but makes me feel slightly intrigued. Not for any reason other than I’m trying to understand what my colleagues see in this. For people like my husband and me, people with “checkered pasts,” re-creating scenarios where you have altered consciousness in alienating spaces, spaces that feel dangerous, spaces where you could be caught unawares by someone, spaces where you are projecting dishonest images of yourself to unknown affect, this is an unsettling experience akin to a “flashback.”

But, I want to understand and get beyond my being disturbed. Blake comes in again. He wants a third ice cream. This time a pink one. He gets it. I continue. I then link from one of the subway billboard things to someone’s blog about using Second Life in a PhD study about online communities. I feel snakes eat their tales all around me, we study the studying of online study and wonder if we can use it for study.

I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to pry open my closed mind on this topic. But, the first half of my first life has been full of amazing, inscrutable, some hard to remember and and most hard to forget encounters with near death, dangerous strangers, waking up in weird locations, really bad mistakes, and the like.

My husband and I were at the playground today with Blake. We ran into a neighbor whose two kids like to play with Blake. We shot baskets with him while the kids played. We had a long conversation together. I found out that he, his name is David, is incredibly like me. We both talked about our experiences with what I call intellectual ADHD, how each of us is attracted to multiple disciplines of reading and study, how each of us sees how one idea hooks into another, how each of us have both strongly considered the ministry as a way to use this lack of discipline, and interest in connections between the idea and the humanity, to good use.

I am not sure the quality of my conversation with this person would have been the same without my husband there, without throwing the ball among the 3 of us, without the kids acting up in the background and needing some “stop doing that” discipline from a short distance. That kind of complexity, so very simple, seems to me to be nearly impossible on a screen. But, as I said, I’ll keep my mind open, and visit again.

Oh, Blake now wants a root beer float.

We all saw it re-broadcasted from FOX News. The trogladyte that told the white educated American women to start doing their jobs and reproducing more white babies, or whites will be in the American minority. After scraping my jaw off the floor, I remembered the days when Jimmy the Greek was fired on the spot for making an insensitive, and unnecessary, comment about African-American male anatomy, and wondered where our sense of decency has gone since then. If Jimmy were around when FOX was on the air, he’d still be employed today.

But, FOX is “but a symptom” of our society’s hate-based sense of entitlement and superiority, it allows for some truth about the dark side of humanity to slip into the public conversation. Unfortunately, it landed on arrid ground. No real discussion among women followed. Us too-busy-to-reproduce educated white women (as Linda Hirschman would posit) are “too busy to blog” about such things.

But, this is all a digression from my main source of outrage today, albeit, all fruit from the same male-centric tree. My husband posted a link on his neuroscience blog about some pseudo-research into women’s brain activity during orgasm AND during faking orgasm. Don’t ask about the methodology, because, it’s just so unbelievably dumb. The findings, however, are quite interesting from a poetic perspective, if totally unreliable.

Take into account that the whole thing is bunk — what kind of statistically significant group of women is going to climb into a PET scan to get off, or fake it (shades of Sleeper’s “Orgasmatron”)? Probably Swedish women, I’m thinking :)) They measured brain activity during orgasm vs. during faking orgasm, vs. resting state. As it turns out, in having an orgasm, a woman’s brain activity in the “logical thinking parts” literally shuts down, and the woman becomes temporarily very, very stupid. The opposite is true for faking it, that is, the brain is working overtime not to shut down. Been there? Of course not (you’d never admit it anyway.)

Of course, the dubious findings from the dubious methodology is followed up with one of those dubious “I had this idea before I performed the research” kind of academic approaches: In turning off the brain activity, the woman makes an evolutionary choice, choosing survival of the species over her own personal survival.

I’m not qualified to critique this one. I am, however, curious as to whether there is a gradual shutting down of brain activity, as I’ve always suspected, surrounding the entire mating, nesting, reproducing ritual. Is buying Maybelline just foreplay for the final brain shut-down? If you took away the trappings of femininity as peddled by the marketplace, would women have a whole host of brainpower that remains now channelled towards reproduction? I’d like to find that one out. I think some feminists in the 70s tried, too, and that’s what gave us Earth shoes, fanny packs: the world’s most effective birth control. So, the FOX news guy had a point ?!? But, my Lesbian friends have not reported problems with orgasm. And they are not choosing reproduction, so, wait, I’m having trouble with this. I can’t keep up.

Maybe I’m just having an orgasm.

If I were the director of Pennsylvania tourism, I’d make the motto: “Come to Pennsylvania, and feel good about yourself!”

We were at a water park in Lancaster with our 4-year old son. I wore a bikini and felt like the hottest babe there. That’s no small feat, considering I’m 46, white as a ghost, and about 15 pounds heavier than I was a couple of years ago. But, context is everything. The state of Pennsylvania appears to be the fat capital of the country (at least it was at Dutch Wonderland, one of our main vacation destinations).

I know I’m poking fun, but I honestly worry about these people and their kids. Thomas Merton, in the Seven Storey Mountain, talked about his first re-visit into New York City after living in the cloister for a few years. He looked at the faces of the people on the subways, and felt love and compassion for them. I felt that way about these folks (although, admittedly, made a few sarcastic comments privately with my husband. It was just too easy.).

There is something so pure about obesity as an expression of human misery. The psychologist could go to town about anxiety and depression, the philosopher about existential guilt, the nutritionist on bad dietary options — everyone has a stake in an opinion about the causes and ramifications of America’s ballooning out of control. Only women, as a sub-group of humanity, have more societal projections, humor, and anxiety pointed at their bodies. Fat people hold a special place among the derided, disowned, and ignored.

Obesity reminds me of a phrase in the Big Book (the “bible” of Alcoholics Anonymous): “…our liquor is but a symptom.” Drug addiction, gambling addiction, alcoholism, food addiction, codependency — you name it — they all have a ramp-up time to showing their effects, and the manifestation of the disease affects the size and nature of the group that is affected by them. So, I could be in a crowd of gambling addicts and not know, but, if I’m in a room of folks with eating issues, chances are, they will be easy to spot. They scream out “I’m in pain!” Really loud.

We don’t like the sound of that scream, so we make jokes. It all seems so innocuous. My second husband had a very big food addiction, at one point wearing a size 50 short (and contemporary photos indicate he is now even larger). When I wanted to really be nasty (through my own diseased, contemptuous, alcoholic haze), I’d make a comment about his weight and his impotence. Fat people can be made fun of because they show us our worst selves, and we don’t like it. They cannot hide the weakness that we all share, the weakness that leads us to our various substances and obsessions. Some that the world rewards (like overwork), and some that the world punishes (like, being hopelessly fat).

I have attended all kinds of 12-step programs over the years. The saddest ones I attended were for overeaters. They were the least friendly meetings. These folks ate at home in isolation (which I have a tendency to do, hence my attendance). They were lonely and sad, and their loneliness and desperation hung in the flesh that ballooned so far beyond their bones. It was like all that adipose tissue held in negative emotions. The anger and sadness was palpable. There were not many available to sponsor others, and there was not a lot of recovery. It’s one thing to put down a drink, or a drug, or a habit. It’s another to have to regulate food, which you can’t put down altogether. These folks could break your heart.

The folks at Dutch Wonderland and Hershey’s Chocolate world and the Howard Johnson’s hotel pool had not yet made it to “the rooms” of recovery. They were there in all their diseased glory, as was I, and we all promised not to call each other on our bodily imperfections. I can point to my motherhood and the stress of work as springboards to eating too much. We can each point to our personal reasons. But, collectively, the story is more complex, and it makes me worry about the human race.

These folks will die younger than they should and will live a less well life. This will directly affect their children in a profound way. They will pass on the cost of their disease to society in the form of disabilities, sickness, and early death. I saw a man playing with his son on the water slide, and he clearly loved his son and wanted to be doing this. But you could tell all the work it was taking to get himself up out of the slide, run after his son, breathing, breathing, breathing visibly and heavily, his belly hanging out over the top of his bathing trunks, and swinging from side to side as he tried to keep up, wanting to have all the fun he could with his son, in this moment. I hoped that he would be there to do this for his grandchildren one day, but I sadly doubted it.

The bean counters are just waking up to this, and we are seeing more and more about treatments for the morbidly obese as we as a society (read the health insurance industry) are starting to pay the bill for everyone’s overindulgence.

But, if the eating “…is but a symptom,” I worry less about good nutritional training than about why we are driven to eat as we do. Is it overwork, or underchallenge? Is it too much processed food being available, or too little self-love being taught as we strive to get ahead, or keep afloat? Is it a deficit of imagination? Is it a lack of compassion for those among us who are visibly weaker? Are we inviting death indirectly as we paint ourselves into corners that allow no other misbehaviors due to our increasingly Fundamentalist-Christian-centric morality?

I have no answers. But I do have worries. Not for these people’s bodies, so much as for their inner hearts, and those of the ones who love them. These people, and their children who are learning their behaviors, are in so much agony. Our answers for their symptoms are shallow, expensive, compassion-free, and statistically ineffective. Allowing a real dialogue to take place about why we eat this way is taboo. We see it as “too much food.” But it screams to me to be too LITTLE of something else, something deeper, something fundamentally tender and human. I would posit it as a deficit of love, given and received, which to me is a primary disease these days in “I got mine” America. And none of us is immune, including me.

The elephant is indeed in the living room. In Pennsylvania, it would appear to be in most living rooms. And it’s really sad.

I may be a born philosopher given my desire to constantly re-frame arguments from what I consider to be a more universal angle. The world has its head largely up its own ass. I try not to do that, but there is so much to see up there

In the car the other day, my husband and I had a brief tiff about my arrogantly stating my belief in my ability to see things in a fresh way from the way others see them. He told me, “Oh! You’re terminally unique!” To which I responded, “Damn right. There are two things I’m sure of about myself: I can sing like no one else, and I can view situations through a unique perspective that others don’t see, and synthesize various points of view into a new argument.” I won’t apologize for it, dammit!

But I do live in the real world, and with others gifted as I am, and with the guts and tenacity to share that gift on the world stage. To them, I say bravo (or brava) or huzzah. One such person is Linda Hirschman, author of “Homeward Bound,” an article in the December 2005 issue of the American Prospect. I found out about her in a Washington Post article which talked about how she has become the demon of the stay-at-home-moms crowd (See “Everybody Hates Linda“). They hate her, basically, in the name of Christian values (by the way, I wouldn’t doubt that there is just a tinge, albeit unconscious, of the anti-semitic in their vitriole, but you didn’t hear that from me).

Whence my arrogantly touted “unique perspective” on all of this? It’s my perspective as a veteran of nearly two decades in the corporate/business environment of NYC, followed by my lowering into the administrative side of academia just 6 years ago. I call my position now “the basement of the ivory tower.” Begun with an awe of higher education, my foray into WORKING for the non-academia side of higher education, not as a fresh-out-of-school wide-eyed waif, but as, in “Tammy Tell Me True,” a “woman fully growed,” I am stunned by the infantile nature of the academe’s world view.

Which gets me to Linda Hirschman. A retired philosopher and women’s studies professor, which are very, very cool things to be. I envy it her in a big a way. But, her point of departure for bemoaning the educated woman’s retreat back into the home is based on one of those classic, naive uniquely-academic, never-held-a-straight-job points of departure: her universe is women who announced their nuptials in the New York Times Styles Section !!!!!!!! Now, THAT’S a slice of the big American melting-pot pie if I’ve ever “et” one. And how did she choose it? She saw an episode of “Sex and the City” and thought that the women in this show represented the educated feminist demographic she sees as significant !!!!!!

I have one thing to say:

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!

Someone PLEASE buy this woman lunch with Barbara Ehrenreich!!

So, you’re now saying, “Okay! You’re hopping on the “Linda Hirschman is a hopeless elitist” bandwagon!” But, no. I’m not saying her argument is elitist at all. Her argument is one with which I agree: The female brain, spirit, and passion is at best self-deceptively shoe-horned into domestic life. But, the way she chose her universe of data undermines the seriousness of her argument. I wish she had thought this through, and planned a more diverse population of input, before making her arguments public.

I was the Public Information Vice President and Program Director for NOW-NYC in the early 90s. Women and the workplace were kind of a given to the folks in NOW at that time, and we were concentrating on stopping the rollbacks to reproductive rights that were occurring at the time in the form of precedents created by the Hyde amendment, and the Webster case.

Those were days of late nights emptying bottles of wine, talking about women’s issues, and feeling so alive at moments that you sensed the rush of blood to your brain when you heard someone spoke. It was a dysfunctional and eclectic group, for sure. Lots of women — gay women, straight women realizing they were gay, straight women forging friendships with gay women, primarily white women, some veterans from the Betty Friedan days of the Purple Purge, which caused a disruption in the feminist movement that, I believe, stalled it indefinitely. Lots of damaged folks, like the woman who would stand on the street corner with an old and rather upsetting cover of Hustler magazine, urging folks to sign a petition making pornography illegal (she’s apparently gone onto other causes with the same delivery mechanism). There was the sociopathic chapter secretary who told us that “If you don’t like the way that men are running the world, get out of bed with them!” in true Lysistrata style.

I did this work as a volunteer while working full-time in the architectural design profession (I never got an architect’s license because I didn’t want to take the boards. They looked really hard.) I had an undergraduate degree from what is purportedly one of the most elite design schools in the country, if not the world. But, I learned a big lesson there: graduating from an elite school does not make you elite. When you get out into the world of “straight-jobbia,” the exceedingly class-centric NYC world of design and architecture hits you in the face. Here’s how: The ludicrously un-talented son of a major design house CEO gets a job with a major design house! The granddaughter of an El Salvador aristocrat gets to work for a leading architect! The rest of us journeymen pounded the pavement and got drafting jobs, or low-level jobs. I wound up doing code consulting work for an architect who was the grandson of JP Morgan. There were those, also, who had less of a fear of exams than I did, and plugged away at it, doing well for themselves. But, these folks did not social climb as a result.

So, although from my education, in design and arts academia it was a “Wow!” in the real world it was a “can you use a rapidograph pen?” The less-talented, and less passionate, elite classmates of mine were the ones whose nuptials were announed in the NY Times Styles Section. And, I hate to tell Linda Hirschman, but, having been a very sexually active woman in NYC in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, I know first hand that you can’t really afford those clothes with the jobs those women have. “Sex and the City” is insulting to any thoughtful woman who really had to work in NY and survive jobs, the threat of STDs, and regular social consumption of alcohol.

Which is to say that, as an academic, it would appear that Linda Hirschman is just a bit detached from the reality of the range of women facing the daily choice between work at home and work for hire. It is another discussion for another day whether that choice is an artificial one, but, one thing is for sure: it’s not clear cut, and it’s not something that many women in my invisible middle-class position even have a choice about. Anymore than our single-mom, working class compatriots slogging through as non-union, minimum-wagers (although I cannot even dream of how desperate and lonely some of those women must feel, I’m sure that “staying home with the kids” is a luxury that’s hard to even momentarily entertain when you and your kids are forced to live a marginal existence).

My colleagues in the workplace, like me, have degrees, some advanced degrees, and still cannot afford to stay at home with the kids, even if they were philosophically likely to do so. Most of us married the kind of men we purported to want to marry: those who also wanted an inner life, to be involved with child-rearing, and thus eschewed the type of careers that would make them big breadwinners. We married our collaborators in happiness, not our sugar daddies. We chose the “middle way,” and, as a result, are not picked up on the society pages.

But I don’t believe that Linda Hirschman’s point of view is necessarily “elitist.” That word to me evokes that she is part of the social system in the marketplace and society where your family’s socioeconomic position clouds your judgment. I don’t know what socioeconomic class Dr. Hirschman occupies, but I would posit that her position within academia has made her not elitist, but rather, kind of ignorant about how the world works, and the varieties of experience facing the educated woman once she leaves the walls of the ivory tower, diploma in hand, facing the ugly world.

It doesn’t piss me off so much as make me laugh that a sheltered academic is making arguments about my life, and the choices I’m faced with every day when I drop my son at day care, when she’s never even walked a foot in my pavement-pounding shoes, and when she thinks that the STYLES section actually represents me and my bill-paying colleagues. The world is not linear, and the “choice” between work and home is artificial when reality steps in and messes it all up with economic inequities and personality quirks.

The world has gotten much bigger since Socrates, and I’m wary of the academic’s ability to grock to its complexities without ever actually joining up.

My mom was 43 when I was born. I never saw her face without lines. The ones I remember most vividly were the lines in her forehead. They were so perfect. About 1/2″ apart, almost precisely parallel. I used to scrunch my forehead together to try to get those neat looking lines. They were so cool.

On my 24th birthday, I bought my first Clinique skin-care product. It was quite an event. As a teenager, I generally eschewed beauty products. That was easier in the 1970s when the natural look and androgenous dress empowered my generation to propel itself into the 1980s, designer jeans fitting our curves, powersuits, and the eventual body-obsessed fitness lifestyle. It was like the promise of androgeny and equality was snatched away before it had a chance to mature into full-blown matronly dowdiness — and I was so looking forward to wearing Wallabees to work.

Along with the fitness craze came a whole new world of grooming for women. “Product” for hair, and skin care boutique lines, replaced the tried and true Breck, Noxzema and Witch Hazel. So, there I was in 1983, marching into Macy’s on Herald Square and buying my first 3-step Clinique kit. I learned the three verbs: “Exfoliate, Emoliate, Clarify.” Translation: $15 jar of Daily Exfoliator, $12 jar of Oil-Free Moisturizer, and $12 bottle of Type 3 Clarifying Lotion. Of course, weekly exfoliation necessitated another $15 jar of Beauty Emergency Masque (the “que” being much more expensive and effective than the “k”). So, with this $54 stash of stuff, plus 8.25% NYC Sales Tax, I got free samples of mascara and lipstick, and a light green makeup bag, the Clinique company got an annuity, and PT Barnum got one more validation. I was hooked.

I brought it all home to my husband at the time and we joked about my “Beauty Consultant.” He had known me since the tender age of 15, and knew that this was all new territory for me — actually investing real money in how I looked. I think he was probably secretly happy, but, I know that to the two of us, it was quite odd. I was in a man’s only profession as an architectural draftsperson and construction administrator. The only women I met in my work were the secretaries, who regarded me as being from another man-stealing planet. I went to lunch with them a few times — it was tacitly and inexplicably expected that the ladies would lunch together, in spite of the quite apparent and deep cultural rifts between us. There was rarely anything I could talk about. But, when I got this Clinique stuff, there was suddenly an entree to their world.

We talked moisturizers. Apparently, the Clinique Oil-Free Moisturizer was not good for around the eyes, and I needed to buy another product (of course, from the Clinique line) that was more appropriate for that skin. Another $9, and I began to descend into the dumbed-down world of cosmetic lines, no longer encumbered by concerns like the meaning of life, reproductive rights, the environment, or should I go to graduate school. Soothed by the promise of immortality, I went to existential sleep along with the rest of my younger-boomer generation*.

“Working Girl”: The triumph of Melanie Griffith over bad hair and makeup, was the story for my times. Taste and grooming, and a yummy boss that wanted to marry you, was all it took. Shades of “Sweater Girl” with Shirley MacLaine.

Whence my desire for Mommy’s lines? I loved the stories in them, the Mommy-ness of them, the time they betrayed, the way they expressed every historical thought she had, every child she lost, every disappointment she weathered, every resentment, every night my Dad didn’t come home or call, every night she spent in worry, in drink, in a pack of Parliaments. The whole story, un-exfoliated, un-emoliatted, un-clarified, in-your-face real-woman history. I had once wanted to carry my own history on my face, like her. I had once habitually squinted to get lines on the edges of my eyes. Living sculpture, tragedy and joy, that could not be undone.

But somewhere I began to try to undo it. Liposuction was first thing I spent my Mom’s inheritance on. And the Clinique habit moved into makeup, perms, mousse, waxing, L’Oreal Preference, Esoterica, Retinol and Glycolic Acid.

I am turning 47 in two months. I have a perfect set of 1/2″ parallel lines on my forehead. My story etches itself in and on me no matter what I do. Every moment I’ve hated my life, loved my husband, worried about my fertility, taken joy in being an adoptive Mom, worried about my son, money, career, the planet, the environment, reproductive rights, should I go to graduate school. It can not be Cliniqued away. The stuff doesn’t work. Mommy’s lines are the only promise that doesn’t break.

* Refers to those of us born in 1959 and later who are called “boomers” but who were doing 5th grade reading exercises while Woodstock was happening — we remain demographically invisible, too early for Generation X, too late for Vietnam, but folded into the boomer umbrella because there was no compelling pop music icon between Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain except David Bowie, Elton John, or Queen, and we were too embarassed to anchor our generation’s identity to flamboyant, unapolagetic, bisexual and gay cross-dressers.

So, they asked me for the followup interview, which is always good news, if you want the job. My feelings of ambivalence about it had begun to make more noise inside of me between my leaving the first interview and receiving the invitation for the second. I am rather a bit too in-tune with the noises inside, or so I’ve been told.

My world would certainly be more navigable, if not more painless, if I paid greater attention to the power of outside cues: the ego stroke, the possibility of more money, prestige, the child that is genetically “mine.” The road to these things, while at times costly, is clear. And we all get the map for it. The roadmap inside, however, is rather filled with ruts, detours, blind alleys, and that whole Robert Frost thing. You know the thing.

I sat across the desk from her sensible colored linens and business-gal-helmet-hair, wearing my out of control print Isaac from Target and humid weather wild long frizz. I knew it wasn’t going to be good. And, to give her credit, she hung in there. She hung in there with those smiles that contract at the corners ever-so-slightly, as though she had sucked on a few dozen lemons before we met. My “ideas” fell with a thud as I learned that they’ve always done it this way or that, that they “tried that once,” that they’ve “already spoken with the director about that,” and that the actual work here was for production, not strategy…for work, not thought.

“Do you think you’d be bored in this job?”

“Yea…I think so.” I said.

As we both danced around my obvious unsuitedness for the position, I sensed it again. That feeling that I was erupting all over the well-tended, peaceful landscape, that I was too much power, making the room shake, taking it down with my hair, my loud prints, my off-the-wall inspirations, my utter energy. Perhaps my hand motions alone started it all moving. Like I was at the age of 12 when I first sang in public, “Such a little girl, such a big voice!” I still sing on the stage of every job interview, and the thunderous applause ushers me out of the room, followed by hefty “phews” on both sides of the door.

She suggested I explore the private sector. I concurred.

I spend a lot of time not listening to my heart. So, when a situation comes around where that becomes an essential skill, I am rather rusty. Life for me seems like an endless quest to push down that which I most deeply desire in order to keep going in a world that, to me, gets harder to negotiate emotionally each day.

I went to a job interview yesterday. Nothing is more demoralizing than a job interview. It’s a one-up all the way. I don’t like being on either side of one. It feels like a blind date. I come to the table with expectations, and get hit with something different. Only it’s not that the guy has bad skin, or bad teeth, but that the folks seem a little on the stodgy side. My hyper-non-stodginess makes me feel like I’m sitting in an executive board room wearing a chicken suit. But, the stodgy ones are so well-bred that they know reflexively “not to mention the chicken suit” and treat me politely.

But as with most encounters in my adopted home of Virginia, there is an air of indirectness, a body language that is so controlled as to betray what it is designed to conceal: the forced smile, the diverted eye contact, the defensive self-agrandizing words that scream “You’re threatening me!”

I was the smartest one in the room. But, the danger in an interview is communicating that without letting people know you know that. There was one woman who clearly, clearly hated my guts. I can just tell. She was impeccably groomed, with a kicky hairstyle and nice pastels. I was in my trademark New York black and gray, with my long hair in the same style I wore it in 1977. I’ve got kind of an Albert Einstein attitude (if not coif) about grooming: if it works, why spend all the psychic energy it takes to change it? So, I feel like I dealt with the hair thing a long time ago. Check.

This woman made a point of talking about HER credentials and HER experience. I was thinking: just exactly HOW miserable will she make me if I take this job.

My mom always talked about the “devil you know” being better than the “devil you don’t know.” Typical depression mentality of a bird in the hand — risk-averse. The trouble with the “devil I know” is that he is a sweetheart that just can’t pay me enough money. If he could, I’d stay here indefinitely in spite of the political nonsense of this place. But, he can’t. So, my family has to come first, and I have to, as a result, pound pavement, press flesh, and sell, sell, sell!

I keep telling myself “This is the last straight job I’ll ever have!.” But, in 4- or 5-year cycles, circumstances change making me have to look for the next thing. Leading me into the board room, in the chicken suit, into the hands of the devil I don’t (yet) know.