February 2008

We’ve finally unpacked all the pictures. They’ve been sitting in boxes, and now most of them are hung up on the wall. While we were unpacking them, Blake was asking all kinds of questions about who everyone was. He’s always trying to piece together what our family looks like.

He knows that my parents are dead, and as a 5-year old, he has a pretty sophisticated notion of what that means. He knows that even if someone is dead, they are a presence in life. He knows how much I loved my Mom, and how much I miss her. He loves when I tell him that my Mom’s name was “Barbara Blake.” He smiles because he knows that’s where he got his name from.

We looked at the picture of me, Noel, Jenny (Blake’s birthmother) and Darilo (Blake’s birthfather). It was taken at a restaurant when Jenny was about 5 months pregnant. Blake knows this photo well. He pointed to Jenny’s belly, and said, “I’m in there.”

So many things that we have gotten uneasy about, been unsure about, in these uncharted waters of adoptive parenthood seem to work themselves out when you just let them be. For a while, Blake didn’t like “brown” people. We’ve always had people of color in our lives, but Blake is very, very light skinned for a biracial person, and I think he has wanted to be like us. But lately, he is noticing that he likes “brown” people. When I told him his sister would be “brown,” he at first was uneasy. Then, a minute later, he smiled said, “I want my stistah to be brown.” And, he’s got a crush on Madison Pettis, the little girl in “Game Plan” and “Corey in the House.” He says, “she looks like a stistah.”

These little things signal that maybe Blake is starting to embrace the half of his racial heritage that we cannot give to him. All of this seems to be happening without necessarily having to disown his other half. What a complex dance for a little child to do. How difficult in this racially conscious world. How proud I am of him.

Tonight, I was downstairs working on the laptop while Blake and Noel were upstairs looking at puppet shows on YouTube. I heard Blake’s footsteps coming down the stairs, and had that silent mother’s sigh of “When am I gonna get a moment to get something done!” But, he just came over to me and said the most amazing thing. Remember he is five.

“I just came down to give you a hug.” He hugged me I sat on the sofa. He kept hugging me and said “Your mommy is in my heart. Your daddy is in my heart. I know you love them, and I love them too. I care about you. I want you to know that I care about you.”

This is a child who is having trouble learning to read and write. He has trouble speaking, putting sentences together in the right syntax. His questions sound like statements, his R’s sound like W’s, he won’t speak at all to a new person. But this phrase, spoken from the bottom of his soul with deepest love, was uttered perfectly. I believe that Blake’s intelligence springs from where his feelings meet his mind. There is no SOL for that.

My son — the emotional genius. What a miracle he is.

I am convinced that the Gitmo prisoners are forced to listen repeatedly to the sound of the voice of that woman on the Royal Caribbean commercials extolling me to “Get OUT There!”

What is it about the search for vacation pleasure that makes me so sick to my stomach? I have gone on vacation to legitimate vacation spots twice, and both times I hated it. The first time was my honeymoon in Cosumel, Mexico. It’s not that it wasn’t a nice town. It’s just that I could not help but notice that the lifestyle of those who worked in the tourist shops and attractions was not one that would afford them a vacation to my home town. Being waited on at poolside by someone who probably lives in a shack in a marginal neighborhood doesn’t really make you have a “lust for life”. It just kind of makes you sick. Thank goodness it was a honeymoon, so there were other things that kept my attention. But, for the most part, I felt so “when can we get back to Brooklyn to sleep in our cozy home together, hug the cat, and catch a meeting.”

Then there was the trip we took to Nassau with the bonus check I got the following year. I know — I never learn. But I was trying to please my husband who wanted to go to a warm climate in the middle of winter. When I go codependent, I go expensive codependent. That vacation was even worse. We were in an all-exclusive resort thingie. Again, the demographic of those who taxi’d us, bussed our tables, and cleaned our rooms made me feel just terrible. All this so I can sit there and dip some lobster in butter, and go to bed feeling bloated. The best part of that vacation was the smart black Coach wallet I bought, now eight years old, and still in my purse. A veritable investment compared with the money frittered away on being waited on.

Some sort of consensus seems to have been reached in our culture about what constitutes a good vacation, and I never seemed to have understood it. I don’t want to waterski, or golf on the deck, or go to the 15,000 SF spa, or stay up all night in the champagne and caviar bar, or tour the Uffizzi pretending to pinch the David’s ass while coyly smiling at the camera. I saw the David in the Uffizzi, and it was a near-religious experience — not some tourist sight gag on the way to the oh-my-god awesome deals on leather bags near the Ponte Vecchio.

It’s not just about the fact that I don’t drink, and that I’m incredibly stodgy — I didn’t like this stuff when I DID drink. It all feels so forced, this paid for good time. I drank at home alone, or got tipsy before having to be “social” because drinking socially was simply too painful.

The best times I ever have, drunk or sober, are conversations, and I can have them anywhere. I find the most interesting people in the room and engage in conversation. My second choice, these days as a mom, the best vacation to me would be to have a hotel room with a really nice bathroom. I’d like to soak in the tub for about an hour without someone calling “Mommy!” or my husband calling “Honey–have you seen my (fill in the blank).” The best family vacation we ever had was in the mountains in southwest Virginia, camping just the 3 of us, hiking trails, throwing rocks in a stream, picking wild berries, watching Blake swimming naked in the lake with Trixie, and having a NAP in the middle of the day. Heaven.

The older I get, the more I want what my own Mother used to ask for whenever you asked her what she wanted for her birthday. Every year, she would say, “Peace and quiet.”

GET OUT THERE with all the bungee-jumping, rock-climbing, scuba-diving, bonfire-building, disco-dancing, spin-class-attending, sun-bathing, party-as-a-verb-using, Amex-card-slinging, indigenous-people-exploiting, tips-all-including, liver-compromising crowds? Not on a bet.

I watched an episode of Law & Order SVU this evening. It was about a mother of a teenage girl who supplied alcohol to her daughter’s friends, which led to their deaths. As with a lot of Law & Order episodes, the morality tale was not terribly subtle. But, something about this resonated with me.

The girl talked about beginning drinking at the age of 12. She drank without her mother noticing (vodka in her lemonade, of course). She drank because when she saw her mother drink, she saw it made her feel better. She saw it as an option.

The older I get, and the longer I’m sober, the more I believe that alcohol has no place in a home with children. As with other habits that many of us give up when we marry and have kids — promiscuity, drugs, cigarettes perhaps — alcohol also needs examining.

I’m not speaking on a moral level, but within the framework of psychological health and the messages our kids get when they see us drink. I learned from my parents that alcohol was not only a viable option for altering your experience of life, but a key component in becoming a grownup. My Dad used that old saw, “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink,” more than once. Our liquor cabinet was fully stocked at all times, and always within reach of the smallest of children. The joke in our house was that grocery shopping day was Thursday, and only Thursday, but if we ran out of Canadian Club on Monday, a trip to the store was warranted.

I am hoping that, as with smoking, the next great “harmless” substance that gets examined in our American culture will be alcohol. My upbringing was probably more extreme than most. Still, I would argue that when a child sees their parents indulge any unnecessary appetite, the child gains an impression about what it is to be an adult. That could be as simple as whether your Mom colors her own hair, or spends hours in a salon; whether your Dad is a couch potato or an athlete; whether you provide the family with healthy food or junk food (or, on a few of my Mom’s drunken nights at my home, no food, or inedible food). No matter the platitudes we lay on our kids, it’s what we do that they follow, and they follow really close.

My first drunk was at the age of 14 at my sister’s wedding. I passed out on the bathroom floor of the reception hall. I awoke on the blue and green penny-tile floor, and knew in that moment that I had arrived. I was one of them. I was a member of the club. I was a grownup.

After that night, I learned how to sneak alcohol from the liquor cabinet, how to make sure I took it from multiple bottles so no one bottle would look too emptied. I learned from my parents that drinking wasn’t about how it tasted, but the effect it had. So I drank anything, and I drank it quick.

Later, as a chronological adult on my own, I was glad to have alcohol in my arsenal of acceptable releases from stress. Acceptable because it was legal, because my church-going parents drank every day, because the priest who came to dinner did it.

Despite the occasional study about how good wine is for you (it’s not better than grape juice, by the way), there really is no good reason to take in alcohol. There are ways to relax that do not damage your liver or your brain. There are ways to learn to relate to other people that don’t involve taking a substance that will release your inhibitions. There are ways to have fun without it — I met my first husband in a blackout, my second husband when I was descending into alcoholism. Each of those marriages didn’t last even 3 years. I met my current husband when I was 3 years sober doing creative work that I loved. We finally started dating following a kickass sober dance at the Marriott Marquis in NY. Sober parties are amazing, and sober dancing is very, very sexy. Sober sex — even better. Oh, and we’ll be celebrating our 10th anniversary next year.

This may sound like I’m some sort of modern-day Carry Nation. I’m a killjoy, a buzzkill, uptight, name your euphemism for boring, repressive b@#ch. But, I would be willing to bet, that’s because your parents, or your favorite adult role models as a kid, openly drank.

Don’t drink as a parent, and be comfortable about it (as opposed to moralizing and superior, which is unattractive), and your kids will have to manufacture the normalcy of alcohol later in their lives. I’m hoping that to a kid whose functional parents and role models don’t drink, daily drinking, or casual drinking, will be as anathema to them as smoking has become. It will be foreign to them, not because of the Bible, or the Koran, or some well-meaning health or religious education class, but simply because their parents were happily, naturally, sober. We were all born sober, and sober is NORMAL.

If quitting casual drinking is too hard for you to do, maybe you should ask yourself why. If you can answer without rationalizing, you’re a better person than I am. If you have to reach for a sip of the rationalization cocktail, I suggest you ask these 12 questions of yourself. And hopefully, I’ll see you at a meeting

Hear me out before you condemn me as a regressive believer in biology-is-destiny.

The press coverage of the Democratic nomination process has a lot of us wondering how folks who are paid to be analytical and objective can be so swept up by Obama, and so ready to toss Hillary overboard. I just read an article about a town called Obama, Japan. A quote from a resident of that town reads: “Hillary is a bit old-fashioned and she’s the wife of Bill Clinton, so I think a new person should lead the USA.”

It is telling, the unconcscious conflation of “old-fashioned” and “wife.” It’s also curious that a woman with a history of progressive politics, who protested the Vietnam war, is being characterized as “old fashioned.” The very thing that made John Kerry a scary, commie, pinko, traitor to the US is, when embodied in a woman, deemed “old-fashioned.” This is a quote by one person, but, as with a lot of reporting, and man-on-the-street commentary, this notion of Hillary representing the past tells a story of how we view women in general, and why the political, public realm is, perhaps by its nature, the final frontier of women’s acceptance into the mainstream of power.

When I vote for a woman, like it or not, I think of my mother. The image of my mother, of each of our mothers, evokes rich positive and negative experiences and perceptions. She is viscerally in the private part of my life. Unlike my father, whom I viewed as an outsider that occasionally made visits and “gave audience,” my mother resided squarely within the home. It was her “turf.” Even if your mom was a working mom, I’ll be that your memories include intimate moments with her, not her worldly triumphs.

The late Betty Friedan wrote about this way back in 1961, and it still rings true. The oppression of women is a decentralized one. The power structure within America on a psychic level, even if not on a true demographic level, has as its base unit the nuclear family. Women in the 1950s and 1960s, and still today, act out and experience their troubles with oppression in a private way. You don’t see press coverage and rallies around therapy sessions, and the Valium of Betty Friedan’s day has morphed into the anti-depressants of today.

The significant oppression and genocide of African Americans, however, has been front and center on the national stage since the founding of the country. That is not to say that it’s been remedied by a long shot, but the point is that it is part of the national debate in a way that women’s oppression has never caught on. It’s hard to build fervor around “the problem that has no name,” as Friedan called it. Save the posed “melancholic” portraits of 19th century women by their psychiatrists*, there are few historical photos of female oppression because it mostly occurs behind closed doors, or inside the mind. Taking it into the public square has always been seen as unseemly. It’s always been seen as “airing dirty laundry” in a way that taking the ugly history of slavery and genocide has not.

Due to women’s invisible place in the public conversation, this kind of glass ceiling that women face in the political realm may be more bulletproof than I thought. We are, indeed, facing a national consensus on which group requires representation first: African-Americans or Woman. We can spin it any way we like, talk about issues, saddle each candidate with trivial assets and liabilities, but, in the end, this unconscious evaluation of the public role of women, vs. the public shame around slavery, I believe is informing this primary election more than anything.

For the record, I believe the both of them, Clinton and Obama, would each make outstanding Presidents. When we go in the booth, our unconscious takes over as each of us tries to go, in true Stephen Colbert fashion, with our “gut.” At this point, the national gut instinct would appear to be swinging Obama’s way. I am not surprised, and, given the choices of candidates that we have had in the last few elections, I’m extremely gratified that this time, the choice implies a sea change for a large segment of our population, whoever wins. As a citizen, I firmly believe that reparations are due to lots of folks in the increasingly capitalistic and Darwinian zeitgeist that characterizes America. As a woman, and a human being, I just would like it to be my turn (said with stomping my foot, crossing my arms, and furrowing my brow).

Sigh. Time to be a good sport again.

* Read an excellent book by Elaine Showalter, “The Female Malady,” for more on this topic.

I’ve been moping, no question about it. But moping (in my world meaning protracted depression) does strange things in my brain. I start to get more creative in my thinking, rather involuntarily, and things start to string together in new ways.

Maybe this is just a function of getting older and accumulating experience over experience. Unlike when I was younger, current happenings seem to trigger memories that show patterns over time and briefly reveal things about the world, about my life, about human nature.

My husband spoke with me last night about the research he is going to be doing in his neuroscience studies. Whenever he speaks about this stuff, I either start to glaze over because the terms are so unfamiliar, or I immediately jump in my head to metaphor between the way the brain lays down and conveys information and the way life seems to organize itself. It’s kind of like a mirror in a mirror in a mirror (or Stephen Colbert’s latest portrait in the Smithsonian, if you prefer). The preceding parenthetical reference is apt since there is an element of narcissism to this kind of thinking — a self-obsession with how my life maps against the ages, how my perceptions track with objective physical reality and the cumulative experiences of human consciousness (you know, the whole “Carl Jung” thing and stuff).

But I am getting off track. I’d like to reduce this down to just my own life first before connecting to the collective, if I may be so bold I wrote in my last post about this fear that I live outside the world of others who make clear choices, consciously, and move ahead. My choices always seem tortured by ambiguity. I doubt a lot. I also look back on my life and regret most the decisions I made out of fear, not the truly voluntary, but undeniably intentional, f@$%ups. The f@$%ups seem to come with the territory of learning, and demonstrate that hope springs eternal. But the fears, well they seem less innate than they are acquired. I’ve acquired quite a few.

So much so that there are times when, as Andrea Dworkin wrote about, it feels like my brain has been colonized. Indeed, 15 years ago, I wrote and performed a one woman show about how my brain as a woman has been colonized with the need to be thin and attractive — so much so that the “success” of my sexuality had been given over to the subjectivity of others, and I became my own object. In this state of mind, I would turn myself into a pretzel to create the perfect tableau moment for a lover or husband: that moment when you feel like the prettiest in the room so he doesn’t have to be embarassed by you; the moment of the faked-orgasm-as-gift The behavior is repeated and repeated until the self is no longer there — the culture and the needs of the observer colonize your brain.

This is a form of slavery, but, as Dworkin wrote, a voluntary form. She noted how brilliant it was: the system (an organic power structure that’s arisen over repeated periods of violence and conquest, not a conspiracy per se) is set up so that women spend their own precious resources of time, money, and energy to further the cause of the colonists. Without this, there would be no Victoria’s Secret. It’s nice that men go in there on the holidays, but the money being sucked up by that corporation is largely coming from the anxiety (and hard-earned paychecks) of women.

So, should women wear only plain cotton underwear, no makeup, and sensible shoes? Well, no. That’s a reaction (unless you genuinely LIKE that style :)) that can be an expression of sexuality that’s been shut down out of sheer fatigue with keeping up with it all. As such, it can be just as much a symptom of the colonization as anything. The challenge is to be able to rise about the external messages to find what is truly you about you. Maybe that’s a thong with tube socks — whatever floats your boat. But it’s your boat, the woman’s boat, that should be floating. Bad metaphor, but you get my point.

Now, to extend the boat metaphor excruciatingly further, what kind of boat is it? For me, it’s kind of been like sitting in a dinghy hanging off the cruise ship called the “SS Daddy.”

Probably the hardest thing for me to feel capable of is steering my own life. A colleague of mine long ago characterized it as “falling into the vortex” of whatever comes my way. But despite personal histories, life brings opportunities to do things differently. Perhaps the greatest change I ever experienced was quitting drinking, and I’ve managed to stay sober for over 15 years, so change is possible, and opportunities come around every day.

There is no opportunity in my personal life at the moment that seems feasible, but there is an opportunity in the public realm, and I’m so colonized that I couldn’t even see it. Until this current brick hit me in the head, I was voting for Edwards, and then Obama. My rationale: Edwards had a better health care plan and would be nicer to labor unions. Obama, well, what better role model could I ask for my biracial son than a biracial President? Also, I don’t particularly like the tactics of the Clinton campaign so far.

But, you know, all of these folks that run have flaws and are potentially “ethically challenged” to one degree or another. And in a high stakes game like the presidential elections, it seems that there are backroom deals and manipulations on all sides. Please — why do you think John Kennedy got elected?

So, what is it that makes me cling to Obama so much? Well, my dinghy would now appear to be hanging from the deck of the SS Mommy. On some level, I’ve transferred my feelings of disempowerment and invisibility to my son, to the point that I feel I owe him even what I do privately in the voting booth.

Now, I can get used to being interrupted by him in the shower, or being called when I’m in the bathroom, or being woken up at 5 in the morning with “Mommy…I’m hungry.” I don’t like it, but I can get used to it. But, is my mind SO colonized that I’ll give even my civic right to vote to the cause of my son? Is that healthy?

Robin Morgan was on NPR yesterday and was talking about the the misogynistic humor that’s out there about Hillary: nutcrackers, t-shirts, and the like. She talked about that horrible Hardball guy, Chris Matthews, and all of his woman-hating comments that went unnoticed until challenged. In the wake of “nappy-headed ho’s” and the firing of Imus, we can still make awful comments about a powerful woman (note the modifier “powerful.” I don’t want to be accused of being inconsistent with my previous post about man-bashing. Sexist humor about your everyday disempowered women, save among jerks who LISTEN to people like Imus, has largely been deemed socially unacceptable). I don’t know why, but I know this: When I saw a Hillary nutcracker in some novelty store a few weeks ago, I got an instantaneous nauseous feeling in my stomach. I felt battered by it, really demeaned. The nutcracker was her thighs, of course, and that’s a part of the body about which I’ve always been particularly vulnerable.

The thighs are the entry to the most private world of my body. They are where Blake lays his head an falls asleep. Mine are particularly generous. They are also powerful — I can do a lot of weight with my thighs that my arms just can’t lift. A woman standing on her own two, powerful legs means something. We like our women’s legs to be spindly, and I think we like the visible fragility, like she may twist an ankle and fall at any moment, needing rescue.

Hillary is like me: smart, under-appreciated, a dinghy on her husband’s off-course steamship. She’s broken free from deck, and is rowing on her own now, anchored only by the mistakes of the very person whose shared success brought her the opportunity to get to this level of prominence. Yet she rows.

I want to break free. I want my own steamship. I want my son to respect the women in his life, and learn to row beside them rather than attaching them like an appendage to a narrow, self-driven course. I want my soon-to-be daughter, an Ethiopian girl, to have a whole darned fleet to herself.

And that’s why, despite every urge heretofore to the contrary, despite the fact that I don’t really like her very much, despite the fact that I so want to swoon in the poetry of Camelot 2 and all that unbelievable Obama charisma, I’m voting for Hillary.

There’s a place where others live, but I’ve never been there. They seem to know themselves, create a destiny, assume goals, attain them, and all without doubt.

They know their values are their values. They don’t question whether they simply mimic the values they’ve been raised with. They don’t worry whether what they believe is somehow measuring up to ultimate truth.

Others never feel betrayed, or confused about what lies ahead. They have no difficulty sacrificing comfort to their vision. They are secure in themselves, and do not allow hesitant thoughts to enter their minds.

These are the people who start things and finish things, and don’t see how remarkable that is. These are the people that stick with it, whatever it is, because it’s not in their universe to do otherwise.

In the place I live, goals and intentions shift by the hour. Call it mental illness (which this no doubt is), but I don’t know who I am anymore. There are too many options in this world for what to believe and who to believe in, and I’ve lost faith in most of them. I feel constitutionally like the deck is stacked against me with a weak mind and a weaker spirit. What I lack in security and self-love I make up in personality, hubris, arrogance.

Life as a parent, wife, working person affords me constant contact with the world I do not occupy. Tomorrow, I am to meet with Blake’s school “team” to talk about whether the current interventions to help him behave and learn at school are working. We all know they are not, but the law makes it so that schools try to put up roadblocks to designating a child as special needs. It costs money, it screws up the school’s numbers. They no doubt have a bureaucrative vocabulary — neigh, a schtick — that they will lay on us to make us feel like they are doing all they can, that yet another step has to be taken before officially testing him for being officially learning disabled, and that we have to be patient.

We met this week with a doctor to examine Blake’s issues, and I was glad to finally hear a professional state what we’ve known for nearly 3 years now. We have to now pay some additional professionals to provide yet more evidence that he has special needs that need addressing or he will continue to fall behind. We already provided the school with a cognitive, speech and occupational assessment at the very beginning of the school year, but still they refuse to do the testing required to get him the resources he needs.

This is another time when I will be in my world, and they in theirs. They will start to sing their song, and I will not know if I am out of tune, or they are. I am so uncertain of my center because I access it so rarely anymore. When I do, complaints roll in, blogs close down, posts are pulled, and punches along with them. The bonsai continues of me until there will soon be nothing left. I hang onto one fundamental truth: I love my son so much that I have to keep my head above the water of sadness that now drowns me, if only to bring him safely ashore to a world where he is not on the other side, where he lives among all of those from whom I’ve been separated all my life: in short, everyone.

What is it about the ability to openly make fun of boys and men?

If I were to get the same number of “joke” emails that I get about boys and men, but the subject were African-Americans, or gays, or girls, or women, or name-your-disempowered group, I’d be considered a bigoted jerk.

In my time in the Unitarian-Universalist tradition, I remember that even among enlightened liberals, a public joke about a husband or a son, usually implying they were somehow (wink-wink) abnormal or hard to live with, was considered okay. Public chuckles about socks on the floor, or lifted toilet seats, or hilarious incidents of a lack of common sense on the part of the men we supposedly love, were considered okay.

But catch Andrew Dice Clay, or some other obvious jerk, making a joke about women’s periods, or date rape, or any other number of women-hating topics, and the result is liberal-minded derision.

I am not naive. I know that men and boys are fair game because men have traditionally been the ones in charge of the power structures we’ve created. I know that, historically, minorities and women have had to struggle to obtain parity, and still do, and will for some time. However, I do wonder about the “compassion stops here” mentality that we seem to have when it comes to expressing our resentment, indirectly, through mean-spirited humor about the men and boys in our lives.

You can argue forever about whether Susan Faludi has it right. But, the point is, if you are after a world of compassion, either through Buddhism, Christianity, Secular-Humanism, or any other ethos to which you subscribe, why do we stop the compassion with respect to those that oppress us, in reality, or in our minds?

I read an interview with the Dalai Lama years ago in the New York Times Magazine. He was asked if he was angry at the Chinese, and he said he wasn’t. He said he was sad — sad for them, sad for his people who feel their oppression.

Recently, I was told that in a post here I was attacking someone, and that was not my intention. For reasons of compassion, I took the post down, just in case ANYONE could be hurt by what I said. What I was attempting to do, but apparently did not succeed in doing, was expressing how my vitriole against a particular oppressing group — in my world, any father figure will do — was based in historical emotional experience, and not in fact. I had a visceral response to someone, and wrote about how historically this was based on my reaction to my father.

What I was attempting to do was to dig down below the fearful reaction, to view it as information rather than fact, and discover something inside myself that was keeping myself from feeling compassion for this person whom I experienced as an oppressor in this particular situation.

I am clearly not anywhere near where the Dalai Lama is in this regard. But, I will continue to try to express my struggle with giving compassion to those for which I feel, natively, the least compassion. It’s not really about loving my enemies so much as living with a clear mind and taking responsibility for my reaction to my own oppression.

My first husband, many years ago (25 — gulp!) had an interesting reaction to me once that I’ve always held onto. I complained about his never putting the toilet seat down. He said, “You never put it up for me!” I remember that to this day. Oppression cuts both ways, and mean-spirited humor is not the rightful spoils of the losers of the gender wars. It’s just more ways to keep them going, and to keep from knowing each other in a deeper, more meaningful way.