An insider’s look at the way that American pop culture has turned children against their mothers — and how Europe has managed to keep mothers at the center of their children’s universe.
A nicely dressed German family enjoys their day outside instead of in a shopping mall.
The children of women who fought for equality during a time of discrimination are now mothers themselves. And while these feminist activists struggled to get more opportunities and freedoms, it seems to me that their fight has brought more complications for us. According to Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, 70 percent of mothers surveyed in 2000 said they found motherhood “incredibly stressful.”
It’s no wonder why, when women struggle to balance family and a career and in order to keep up with their grueling schedules, today’s career moms end up placing their children in the hands of the electronic nanny.
While the feminist movement offered women visions of prosperity and independence it also took moms out of their homes and away from their kids. As a child, I walked into an empty house every day after school and was expected to take care of my sibling, do my homework, and wash the dishes before my mother came home. I lived in a household run by parental rules, without the parent present.
My generation grew up during the boom of commercialism. However, the media still had a sugarcoated veneer: MTV played decent videos; cartoons included Mighty Mouse and Speed Racer — characters who displayed schoolboy visions of aggression unlike today’s cartoons and Hollywood blockbusters full of Triple-X heroism. We were influenced by something still essentially wholesome.
As a result of today’s hyper-sexualized images of feminine perfection, Madonna’s stuffed torpedo bra was replaced by silicone, plastic surgery, Botox injections, and Schwarzenegger strength. Commercialism spread. Inflated and superficial heroes like the sports stars and superstars of today, who flaunt money, fame, and power, send messages to children that “this” is the way to gain happiness. But in reality, happiness is a state of mind cultured through positive reinforcement rooted in the family unit.
The times they are a changin’
At age four, my daughter was very capable of giving the “f— me” look. I say this because it should frighten you as it did me. Her heroes were Britney Spears, Shakira, and Christina Aguilera. She copied their sexual dances and suggestive lyrics, yet she had no clue what these dances meant. They represented what my daughter wanted to be: a singer and dancer. But when did singing and dancing require pelvic thrusts in skimpy clothing?
At 30, I left America in search of a better life for my daughter after my divorce. Though she was innocent, she unknowingly displayed a sexual resonance and teen-like attitude, unlike her German classmates. I broke her of this by eliminating all American teen idols, music, and programming. As a result, her sexual looks have receded.
American culture has lost its innocence to teenage girls trying to look 20-something and pre-teens piercing their belly buttons to show off their bellies. To young boys, this only signifies sexuality, something they don’t understand. And young girls try to look grown up with Mary Kate and Ashley cosmetic lines and cool, yet grown up clothing. Violence, the other dominant theme, appears in cartoons like the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter’s Laboratory and over-hyped Disney movies that allow characters to say words like “stupid head” and “shut up.”
Children in Germany seem different to me. Their culture demands intergenerational respect and people still believe that intimacy is fundamental to community, unlike America where most people don’t even talk to their neighbors. Three generations often live together in one house. Because of this, there is active involvement and interaction between family members, which helps build respect and character in children. And unlike my childhood, most children are surrounded by at least one family member for the majority of their day.
In Europe the ideas of family and simple living overpower consumption. Restaurants do not concentrate on table turnovers but allow guests to linger with each other as stimuli rather than television. Christmas markets celebrate the season with community instead of commercialism. People congregate in countless town squares and drink Gluwein (a spiced wine), while talking and enjoying each other’s company. Shopping is secondary.
A mother is the backbone of the family and yet I have witnessed American culture steal this respectable image away from them. As an American mother, I felt I overextended myself and never found quality personal time to recharge so I could be the best for my daughter. I was an unbalanced woman and mother and therefore was unable to guide her, so the media got to her first.
Two German children enjoy the wonders of nature from behind their cameras.
Recovering the age of innocence
Germany encourages children to enjoy childhood and preserve this time for discovery, play, and innocence. These things disappear as we age and succumb to society’s conventions. America is hypocritical because it preaches morality and wholesomeness yet it delivers the opposite. Instead American media endorse anything that sells, neglecting the negative effects of the images they market. As a result, the country is dealing with heightened violence and sexual activity among children and a complete loss of respect for elder generations.
I lived the American dream yet all I felt was stress and unhappiness. Like many mothers, my feminist role models came from women in fashion magazines and television sitcoms who were powerful women with babies who maintained a perfect marriage and sexy body. I became depressed because I could not achieve this image. But while a doctor in the United States would offer me a nice choice of antidepressants, a German doctor would suggest a walk with a friend or a passionate night with my husband. If the mother in the home is not balanced, the entire family falls apart.
Germany endorses the family institution. Women get two years maternity leave with guaranteed work upon return. Families receive kinder gelt (kid money), usually $2,000 per child every year. Stores close on Sundays; most shops close at lunchtime for family meals and close for the day by 6 pm. And an average employee receives five to six weeks vacation time per year.
Feminism and the American dream fuel mass media’s profit by offering fairy tale visions of life. However, these visions need to include accepting the responsibility of motherhood despite personal sacrifice. Part of this sacrifice is understanding that wrinkles will come, breasts will sag, and age equals wisdom.
Recently the White House enlisted several organizations to conduct a survey to find out why youth crime has dramatically increased this year. The answer is simple: Our children are confused and angry because moms can’t provide the family structure necessary for a society to prosper. Financially stable mothers are not home by choice and poor mothers are not home because of need. The American Dream no longer entails a strong family unit with a mother at the head of the table, but rather a nice house, a white picket fence, and a plasma screen television to baby-sit the kids.
Women of past generations paved the way for our freedom but through the initial excitement of freedom, we have lost the most important meaning of life: the ability to make personal, self-defined choices, that make us feel content and so we can positively influence our family. Spending time with a child is not about giving them all they desire. It is about offering children the best of a mother’s self. Until the United States redefines laws and attitudes that re-shape the way a mother and a family are viewed, it has little to offer those who walk on greener pastures. The oasis does exist but if society loses respect for the mother, it will slowly crumble.
Best of In The Fray 2005. More than 40 years after a horrific — and racist — triple murder, the “other Philadelphia” is finally showing some signs of brotherly love.
Mississippians are fond of quoting their state’s native son, William Faulkner, who said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
I’ve quoted Faulkner myself, and I’m not a Mississippian. Recent events there have got me reconsidering Faulkner’s quote. In June, Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen, the main conspirator in one of the most notorious killings of the Civil Rights era, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter in the deaths of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. The verdict came 41 years to the day after the men’s disappearance in 1964. Two days after the conviction, Killen was sentenced to 60 years in prison — a life sentence for the 80-year-old man.
Killen’s fate proves the limits of Faulkner’s observation: The past is dying in Philadelphia.
I speak as a black woman raised in Tennessee. I came of age during the Civil Rights struggle. I was only nine when Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner disappeared, but I remember it vividly. The case stunned the nation. The men disappeared in June, and their bodies were found 44 days later, in August. Even then, it took a tip from an informant to lead the FBI to their graves. The agents brought in bulldozers; the men had been buried under tons of earth.
The trio wasn’t killed in Philadelphia, but they had been charged with speeding and were detained in the county jail while their murderers plotted their deaths. Thus, this southern city of brotherly love wore a scar that thickened over four decades. The town’s very name invoked black people’s worst fears about the racist South.
In 1989, working for a Mississippi newspaper that had sent me to Philadelphia, I heard that fear in my relatives’ voices. I spent two months living in the black community there, and wrote about race relations 25 years after the murder. The past was alive and well in that little town. There, the complexities of racial segregation lingered in ways that seemed unfathomable to an outsider. The high school had private baccalaureate ceremonies: one for the black students and another for the white ones. Blacks didn’t shop much at the drugstore in the center of the city, and they certainly didn’t sit down to have a cup of coffee or a cold drink. The drugstore had been off limits to blacks during the Jim Crow era, and that prohibition, though illegal, remained in force. The one theater in town still reserved the downstairs seats for whites and the upstairs for blacks.
That was the Philadelphia the world saw this summer; it was a vision that framed the stories I read about Killen’s trial. It was a view of a hopeless place that would never change.
There was, however, another Philadelphia — one of small-town pleasantries and relationships. Even though I was an outsider (and worse, a reporter), the suspicions and hostilities eased somewhat. People began to talk. Over and over, I heard black and white Philadelphians insist that their home was more than the place where the infamous murder was hatched. They were tired, and they were ready to lay their burden down.
But how?
Burying the past is a long journey that begins with a single step. Philadelphia took that step in June of 1989, when a committee held a commemoration of the Civil Rights workers deaths. The ceremony included a speech from Richard Molpus, a Neshoba County native and Mississippi’s Secretary of State, admitting that the city and state bore responsibility for the killings. Just last year, at the 40th anniversary of the murders, Molpus pleaded for informants to come forward. “I’m speaking primarily to the white community now,” he said, noting that as many as 20 co-conspirators were believed to have participated in the murder. He continued: “Someone told me the other day, they have already had their judgment day. Others, however, have told wives, children and buddies of their involvement. There are witnesses among us who can share information with prosecutors. Other murderers are aged and infirm and may want to be at peace with themselves and with God before their own death. They need to be encouraged to come forward. They need to know that now is the time to liberate those dark secrets.”
Now, with Killen’s conviction and sentence, the city has taken a giant step. Is its journey over? I don’t think so, and neither does Molpus. “The end of this saga should not be about only cowardly racists finally brought to justice,” he said last year. “The final chapter should be about redemption and yes, those famous words we hear about moving on … moving on to a better life.”
Even though he was addressing Philadelphians, his words speak to the nation. The racial divide is embedded in our society. Philadelphia belongs to all of us, even though the town has symbolized an aspect of American life that many of us would rather ignore. I’m convinced that they are showing us the way through the pain, anger and shame that accompanies race relations in our country.
Faulkner warns us that we can’t leave the past behind. Philadelphia proves that we can put it to rest.
Hiding inside her apartment leaves the author little room to make faux pas on the streets of Paris.
When the chance to apartment-sit in Paris came up, I finally made the big move. After years of fantasizing about life abroad, I was about take the first leap into my destiny as an international adventuress. That was the title I introduced myself by, for lack of more concrete plans.
I was seduced by the idea of making a fresh start. Being able to say, “I live in Paris,” would render even the act of waking up a little more blessed. (Read: “I’m waking up poor and unemployed in my dingy flat, IN PARIS.”) I harbored the secret thrill of knowing that the fascination most people had for the city would, by extension, leave them in awe of me.
“Living abroad will teach you so much! You’ll turn into a real woman — refined and sophisticated.” My friends and family were swept up in the possibilities of my upcoming journey.
But by departure time, I found myself all knotted up and personal growth the last thing on my mind. My mood dipped from excited to gloomy. I was sure that my first trip to France last summer had sapped the newness of the experience. The clichés had been exhausted. I had visited the monuments touted on the tourist postcards. Already scampered across cobblestones with Gene Kelley enthusiasm.
This time, I would have no friends, no job visa, no plans, just a scary blank slate. With my anticipation dampened by pessimism, all I had left was the dreaded realization: I’m moving to a foreign land, and I have to make it work. My Parisian fantasy went pouf.
Les Halles station, with its hordes of veteran Parisians, can be intimidating for the uninitiated.
Paranoid to patron
After pooling my savings from a series of meaningless jobs and waving a falsely cheerful goodbye to friends and family, I had nothing to do but leave. During the first few weeks of my arrival, I spent days shuffling around the apartment in my pajamas, taking fearful peeks out the window between spoonfuls of Nutella. I didn’t have a problem with Paris or French people, but the risk of being a walking ball of foreign faux pas was daunting. Having taken a year of French in college meant that I should have been able to manage without resorting to “parlez-vous anglais” but fear of conversing in raw, unadulterated French froze me entirely. My only line of defense was shrugging my shoulders and flashing “I don’t understand, please go away” eyes.
Improving my language skills was an emotional process. I would spin around in a mental dance of self-congratulation whenever I got through a conversation without bursting into bright red as I stuttered through the exchange. Unfortunately, I wasn’t masochistic enough to willingly humiliate myself on a routine basis. The amusement as well as flashes of impatience in response to my mangled pronunciation held fast in my memory and deepened my diffidence.
I poured over guidebooks on French culture but made a general effort to avoid social situations. Food markets were picturesque in books but made my anxieties flare. How should I ask for unlabeled items? How could I explain to the fruit lady that I hadn’t understood her well-meaning advice on figs? I avoided the fromagerie and bucherie for similar reasons and resorted to impersonal packaged food from the supermarkets. Instead of practicing my French, I practiced making myself invisible to ward off looks of pity.
Meanwhile, the ordeal of keeping in touch with friends and family back home had taught me that evasion is the best policy. In principle, email updates from abroad should include a generous dose of “What I’m up to,” with a subtext of, “Don’t you wish you could be here?” or more subtly, “don’t you wish you could be me?” Contrary to what people back home expected, I refrained from gushing. I hoped they would interpret the lack of news with a little misguided imagination and enthusiasm. If they would only try a little, they could imagine me coiffed and chic, romanced by a dozen chain-smoking young Europeans over an assortment of croissants and paté.
I was tempted at times to pack up and leave but failure was more frightening to me than staying in Paris. The little voice in my head whispered “and what would folks back home think if you were to give up?” So I parted with some of my precious savings for daily French lessons. After two mundane hours in morning class, I got to hang out in the school cafeteria with an international cast of women who also had complexes about being in France. Our lunchtime conversations covered everything from the confusions of life abroad to job search tips.
But more than language lessons, what really turned things around was the don’t-have-a-clue state of some anxious tourists. Two months into my stay, I was in a grocery store on the Champs-Elysées, strolling up and down the biscuits aisle when my reverie was interrupted by the raised voices of confused Americans. A couple was struggling to get assistance from overworked cashiers in no mood to straddle languages. I shook my head, knowing from my French culture guidebooks that substandard service was a cultural norm and that speaking in English only made things worse. In an act of compassion, I swept the tourists under my protective expatriate wings.
The source of their confusion was in the range of electrical outlets. “We don’t know which one to pick. We don’t want to risk exploding our second cell phone as well.”
“You won’t find what you need here,” I told them authoritatively. “You have to go to the 12th district, full of computer shops. [But] no one will understand what you are talking about and will send you away. You’ll need to head to the one just a bit off, by the river.”
“Ah merci, merci! Do you have a name?” they asked, tearful with gratitude.
“No. And if you find the right plug, it will cost you a lot of money.” I walked away with the glow of one who had done good. My assortment of embarrassing mishaps had allowed me to accumulate what could be interpreted as Important Information. For the first time since arrival, I was able to demonstrate competence, at least in relation to those more clueless than I — the people who felt even more stranded and scared in this country. Suspecting that this could hold the key to a greater truth, I decided to make it my duty to sniff out tourists in their moment of desperation and come to their rescue.
Another day, another tourist in need of assistance.
My most memorable damsel/victim was a little balding man stranded in the Metro’s maze of underground tunnel. Shoved by the rush of afterwork passengers, he looked ready to cry. “Vous avez besoin d’aide?” I asked him, then tried “Um, do you need help?”
“Thank goodness, someone who speaks English!” said the tourist, who turned out to be from Kentucky. He explained that he had been following his tour group through the station for a metro change, had paused to give some money to musicians, and when he looked up, the group had disappeared. “The tour guide was taking us to a pizza place. Somewhere south, I think.” He didn’t have the name of the restaurant or the metro destination. “Maybe a taxi driver would know of a pizza place south of here.” I stared at him, amazed and I must admit, exhilarated at his naïveté and childlike carelessness.
He thought it might be easier if he just returned to his hotel, but he had forgotten the name: Hotel Est, maybe, or Est Hotel. He sifted through his pockets, but found no address or phone number among the wads of American dollars and euros.
We spent a quarter of an hour at the information booth where the attendant with the Yellow Pages fruitlessly read out the names of 20 hotels containing the word “Est.” Mr. Kentucky then went through his pockets again, this time yielding, to the disbelief of me and the attendant, two business cards from the hotel.
I didn’t get irritated. Because as much as this guy was a nuisance, I found that I needed him and all the other helpless tourists just as they needed me. I hoped that he, and the others who in their moment of confusion mistook me for a local, returned home with a memory of me as some kind of French guardian angel. A Good Samaritan who had helped them at their most vulnerable moment without disdain or ridicule.
I had spent months trying to shrink away from life abroad, but my newfound ability to save other sufferers injected optimism into my Parisian travails. I allowed myself to see that after incessantly analyzing French culture as an outsider, I had somehow accepted and internalized some of its more foreign elements. As I grew to see my new culture for what it could be, I was finally able to take off my cloak of invisibility. I felt like I had grown just a little more competent at fitting in; well on my way to international adventuress status.
The island filth is clingy and stubborn. It’s an all-out war between me and the layers of Hawaiian dirt that have accumulated on termite-eaten walls. My mop lunges violently at the house that my grandfather built 50 years ago. The aging paint crackles and chips, as bubbling cleaning agents do their grimy work.
Droplets of sweat accumulate on my forehead as I toil away, but I mistake my perspiration for Hilo’s perpetual ocean spray. The air is so moist that some mornings I return home soaked from a run, not realizing that my clothes have been saturated by a gentle morning drizzle.
I take a break under the lines of fruit trees that Grandpa planted in front of the house’s entrance. Mom says that wherever Grandpa walks, vegetation pops up behind him — a green thumb I failed to inherit. For years he nurtured the earth daily so that he could leave us the gifts of his land. Lemons the size of oranges, oranges the size of grapefruits, star fruits, crunchy green mini-apples, and chubby berries wait to be plucked. I sink into the earth’s moistness, my toes slipping out of my slippahs and into papaya mush.
I start clearing rotting branches, fallen leaves and decomposing fruit from the black gravel ground and feel a wave of distress — Grandpa can no longer look out his living room window and watch us as we enjoy the fruits of his years of labor.
The disturbing images of the nursing home video I watched a month ago flood back as I remove mildew that has crept across the walls. “Don’t feel guilty about condemning your elderly loved ones to a cold, windowless home for the dying, where we are understaffed and unhappy,” was the message I took away. Viewing this video at home in the D.C. suburbs, 10,000 miles away from my grandfather’s nursing home room that he shares with a new person (his last roommate passed away), I shudder imagining his life.
He is lying on his back, developing skin sores behind his knees, elbows, and calves because of the constant contact with unfriendly plastic sheets designed to protect the bed from his incontinence.
There is no soul-warming miso soup, with little pieces of tofu and green onions floating on top. No soft, steamy white rice that can dissolve under his toothless gums. Instead, the hospital staff leaves huge chunks of “all-American” white toast that neither his shaky hands can cut nor his gums can manage.
Grandpa’s second-stage dementia triggers a series of daytime naps — the Wonder Bread, left beside his bed, goes stiff and is cleared away before he wakes. On their clipboards, the hospital staff note that he has no interest in eating. He slips in and out of reality, not knowing how or when to ask for food. His remedy? Singing his empty stomach to sleep.
The songs he and his 442nd Purple Heart buddies used as their sustenance during WWII, serve as his now.
“Oh, but Grandpa Kohashi is doing just fine! He watches the birds every day!” the nursing home’s public relations employee tells my mom during a long-distance phone call.
“The birds, the birds — all they can talk about is the birds!” my mom mutters to herself as she hangs up, feeling helpless from the East Coast. “Can’t they comment on his health? His eating habits? His adjustment?” I see guilt emerge in tight wrinkles on my mother’s face. Scrawled on our kitchen calendar are X’s marking the number of days left before we fly to visit him.
And now here I am, in Grandpa’s hometown of Hilo, trying to protect and cleanse his house and the only piece of land I have known throughout my nomadic childhood. It is the plot that has sustained my struggling immigrant family for four generations. Its cement structure has proved impenetrable — withstanding tropical storms and the 1960 tsunami that claimed the life of my mom’s elementary school classmate only a few homes away.
Grandpa’s name tag says, “My name is Hiroshi ‘Coffee’ Kohashi, and my favorite hobby is building my own house.”
I imagine Grandpa pouring wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of cement into a foundation that would keep for future generations — it was a symbol of the unlimited possibilities for success.
“Are you Susan’s son?” my Grandpa asks my brother. His capacity to recognize our hapa haole faces has disappeared, and so has our opportunity to make him proud. I want to tell him that the reason my younger brother is studying biomedical engineering is that Grandpa inspired us to work everyday, to chip away at our goals until they no longer appear frightening to achieve.
I squeeze his withered hand and peer into his glazed-over eyes, realizing that they never read the postcards I have been sending him for over two years during my travels, tiny acts of gratitude for every achievement I owed to his silent support.
“Hey, take it is easy!” my mom yells out, as she hears paint splintering and ripping off the wall’s surface. I try to refocus and resort to my old childhood game of pretending to be the Karate Kid diligently painting fences white and waxing cars smooth for my Sensei. If the main character, Daniel-san, could follow a path inward and heal himself through the repetitive cleaning motions, I can do the same.
I whisper thanks to Grandpa’s cement walls knowing they will hold his history, our history. The now gentle, circular strokes remove stains, cobwebs, and the coating of neglect. I finally step back.
Stripped clean, the raw white surface now shines like a fresh coat of paint.
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Hilo, Hawaii
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilo,_Hawaii
I set out in late May on a leisurely journey to the American West by car. Among other things, I wanted to witness first-hand the political reality of Red America — a reality I don’t often confront in the blue isthmus of Austin, Texas. My journey started in Austin and ended up in San Francisco, two cities known for their liberal inclinations, though neither is far from Republican strongholds. Austin and San Francisco are both high rent, hip towns populated by a lot of people that fit my demographic — young, white, college-educated liberal Democrats — who, truth be told, have little interest in penetrating the mentalité of the conservative heartland.
As New York Times columnist David Brooks might say, they’d rather vacation in Tuscany than Tucson.
Red America shouldn’t have been such a mystery to me. After all, I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a place John Gunther called “the most conservative city in America,” in Inside USA. Tulsa is the kind of place where the first question people ask outsiders is “What church do you go to?” Voting Republican is not something you decide to do out of free will; it’s a civic obligation, like getting a library card or picking up litter.
Still, the shock of the November election remains with me. Even though I grew up with them, and count of them as family members and friends, I still wonder: Who the hell are these people who reelected George W. Bush?! If, as Thomas Frank claims in What’s the Matter with Kansas, Americans are suffering from a “species of derangement” that allows them to vote against their own best interests, what does this derangement look like on the ground?
This is my travelogue of the people and places of the Red Sea:
Somewhere around Mason, Texas, the inevitable happens. I have been listening to the Austin-based NPR affiliate, KUT, when the crackle and hiss of the weak signal becomes unbearable. I push the dial further to the left, hoping to hear more about the scandal of the day, the “Downing Street Memo,” which supposedly proves that the Bush Administration was attempting to “fix” intelligence to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
After weeks of ignoring the memo, journalists were starting to pay attention. The memo was the “smoking gun” that proved the Administration had deceived the American public in the run up to the war.
I listen for more, but no luck. Monopolizing the left side of the dial is what sounds like a college rock band, with a low-fi sound and a jangling guitar riff. When I listen closely, though, I hear earnest lyrics about Jesus and the young rocker’s personal relationship with the Lord. It is “alternative Christian,” a bizarre palimpsest of the Pixies or Nirvana, but with saccharine lyrics about being reborn in Christ.
I push the dial rightward, hoping to get another slice of the airwaves — maybe more on the Memo. Here I encounter Toby Keith, a fellow Oklahoman who has his own take on international affairs. In a song called “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue,” Keith warns “the terrorists” (whoever they are in west Texas) that he will personally “put a boot up your ass / it’s the American way.”
AM radio isn’t much better: Rush offers predictable rants about Hillary, Hannity vents about liberal judges, and a particularly vile shout show host named Michael Savage offers his $1.02 about “politically correct” professors. Nothing about Downing Street.
In the afternoon, hunger overtakes me. I am in the vicinity of Llano, Texas — pronounced “Laan-ah” by locals — and the world famous Cooper’s BBQ, so I make a detour. I once read a book by Larry McMurtry in which the Texan said that he would drive 100 miles for a good steak, so I figure a half-hour’s detour for the thickest pork chops ever carved from a pig is worth the trip.
Cooper’s has approximately seven 20-foot-long rows of BBQ pits that smoke every conceivable kind of meat: sausage, brisket, chicken, turkey legs. I think you can even get ostrich. You point to the meat you like, and a huge man in Wranglers pokes it with a sword-like instrument, dips it in some sauce, and then throws it on a plastic tray. If you get your food to go, the good people at Cooper’s put it in an over-sized cardboard box — the kind that liquor stores often use. They encourage you to take an entire loaf of white bread, a 20-ounce Styrofoam cup of beans and a roll of paper towels — for free! It is all excess and dressed-down decadence: what Texans like to call “Texas-sized.”
It is also wasteful and inefficient, of course, but to call attention to the vast amounts of waste generated would come off as un-Texan, and by extension, un-American. A pickup truck in the parking lot has a bumper sticker that reads: “Piss off a liberal: Be happy!” Some eating establishments might be wary of offending patrons by announcing their politics, but Cooper’s has a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker affixed to the front door.
Two pounds of pork chops later, I am back on the road. Long stretches of nothing. Dusty, low-slung towns. Few people visible outdoors, apart from Mexican construction and lawn workers. Even as I write this, I sense something’s wrong with my observation. Texas is now a “majority-minority” state and Hispanics are the largest minority, so of course I would see a lot of brown-skinned folks. It’s just that I don’t see any white people. That’s not a problem, of course, but as I approach the border, I see bright blue “Viva Bush” yard signs. My stomach churns pork.
Contrary to popular belief, a handful of counties outside of Travis (where Austin is located) voted for Kerry last year. Most are along the Mexican border. About seven hours west of Austin, I am in one of these counties: Presidio.
The county seat is Marfa, home to just over 2,000 people, but disproportionately famous for at least three reasons. One is a bizarre phenomenon known as the Marfa Lights, mysterious lights that flash on and off near a distant mountain range. Another Marfa attraction is the Paisano Hotel, where James Dean stayed while on the set of Giant, his last movie. Still another is the work of minimalist artist Donald Judd, who took over an abandoned Air Force base and converted it into a permanent art installation. The installation also houses an artists’ colony that attracts artists from around the world. At the Marfa Book Company, a sleek, cool downtown coffee bar/bookstore, I hear German and Australian accents.
The influx of artists has an odd effect on the locals. Down a side street, I spot an old white church that has been redecorated to look a cross between a Las Vegas-style wedding chapel and an artist’s studio. Pure kitsch. As I get out of the car to snap a photo, an old cowboy in dusty jeans, cowboy hat, and western shirt, nods to me. I am sure I have committed some faux pas.
“Hey, why don’t you take a picture of this?” he says, pointing to his scrappy house and rusted-out pick-up truck next door.
We talk and I find out he is the ex-sheriff of Presidio County, and — surprise — a Democrat. Now he works part-time as a cop in Marfa. Contrary to the stereotype of a redneck, he embraces the artists.
“As long as they pay taxes, let them do what they want. It’s good for a little town like this,” he informs me.
Outside of Marfa, and all along the New Mexico/Arizona border, I see more green U.S. Border Patrol SUV’s than civilian cars. I take two-lanes as close to the Mexican border as I can get. Twice — once in Texas and once in New Mexico — I see billboards spray-painted “The Minutemen.” The border feels militarized and eerie. It is blazing hot, and there are no signs of life except for the occasional torn piece of clothing on a barbed wire fence, probably left by an immigrant suffering from heat exhaustion. I begin to worry about breaking down: there are no towns for 50 miles and no cell phone signals.
On the way to California, I see sprawling towns all along the border that lack any visible water supply: El Paso, Las Cruces, Yuma, El Centro. Theses are booming places that feel part Mad Max, part Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Cruel, lifeless places that look like upscale versions of Falluja.
But the biggest surprise is that, in the middle of this blighted Red Sea, there are signs of life. Flagstaff and Tucson in Arizona. Santa Fe, New Mexico. Here I see people actually walking. Flagstaff, I read in the local paper, is resisting the invasion of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Santa Fe, for all its hokey New Age vibe, has a unique character. I see more Subarus (the most popular car for Democrats) in Santa Fe than anywhere else in the country.
Days later I arrive in Las Vegas, a place I hope to never see again. This where the American species of derangement becomes a virus, making people look and behave like they’re on a Fox reality show for the living dead.
After four days of traveling I finally feel the cool breeze of the Pacific. I have come up from California’s Central Valley, a flat place of urban sprawl, smelly farms and unbearable heat. Another Red space.
On the horizon, I spy the red Golden Gate Bridge and thank God that the sky is still blue.
I think I’ll fly next time.
STORY INDEX
The writer Russell Cobb, InTheFray Assistant Managing Editor
Brian Michael Weaver and his son enjoy some time together.
“Go home tonight and ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework,” I said to a second grader in my class. He belongs to one of those “conventional” nuclear families with a mother, a father, and a sister — all biological. His parents are high school sweethearts who still hold hands and make each other laugh.
Two children in my primary class differ from this mold. One is an adopted child. Family conflicts prevent the second, Brianna, from living with her biological parents. She, instead, lives with her aunt — and her aunt’s female partner.
Brianna had overheard me when I told her classmate to “ask Mom or Dad to help you find your homework.” It wasn’t the first time I had made this faulty hetero-presumption, the “mom and dad” slip. An administrator had once pointed out a similar mistake. That time, in a letter to my pupils’ parents, I suggested that children raid “dad’s closet” for white-collar shirts to use as scientific smocks the following week.
How many other children with same-sex parents or caregivers have teachers who take for granted the momanddad childhood experience? Did it register on Brianna’s radar? How would the women raising Brianna react?
I should know better. After all, I am the adoptive, gay father of a kindergarten son at the same school.
And yet it took a Mother’s Day art project to jar me into recognizing my own insensitivity to adoptive parents and children within the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. I was teaching students how to make “coupon books” for their moms, when, a quarter of the way through, I remembered Brianna.
For whom would she be making Mother’s Day gifts? Would it be her mom, her aunt, her aunt’s partner — or all three? My mind raced through the rest of my students’ family situations, and I was relieved that she was the only student for whom I needed to adjust the lesson.
I knew that one of my other students was making a coupon book for her adoptive mother. Still, I called her adoptive parents to warn that Mother’s Day may “strike nerves” among adopted children. At that moment I realized that my own son also would be making a Mother’s Day gift in his kindergarten class for the first time. I had neglected to prepare my own motherless child for this holiday.
Not to worry.
My son’s teachers, brilliant as they are, had asked their students to make their Mother’s Day gift for a “VIW” (“Very Important Woman”). At first my child claimed to remember his mother, whom he hadn’t seen since birth. He recalled, or so he said, a mother who “made cake before breakfast” for him. Logan strongly notices and feels the turmoil of not having traditional parents. Consequently, it is no surprise when he invents and imagines facts about his birth mother, perhaps to give his family life some semblance of normalcy.
But that day in class, when he had to make a Mother’s Day gift, he settled on making his gift for a VIW whom he sees on a regular basis — his “Baba” — my mom.
No room for “my two dads”
I had taken pains in some cases to “train” my school community to understand that the fact my son has a gay dad does not mean he has “two dads.”
I’m reminded of how teachers used to treat Jewish and Christian holidays as a bit of a balancing act: “Can I use Christmas stickers on anything in class during December? If I do, should I use equal amounts of Hanukkah stickers? What about Kwanzaa?”
In 10 years as an educator and three years as a gay dad, I’ve seen political correctness toward LGBT families grow from a quiet seed to a more paramount issue monitored and negotiated in our classrooms and communities. As my own son’s teachers taught me, there’s finally room for parents, students, and teachers to negotiate the definition and parameters of family.
One thing, however, is not negotiable between my son and me, when it comes to our family structure: There will never be “two dads,” even if I were to find a male partner.
After all, I am the dad — the one now making cake before breakfast!
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OutProud The National Coalition for Gay, Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Youth advocates and provides queer teens with resources and support. URL: http://www.outproud.org
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ProudParenting.com An online portal for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender parents and their families worldwide URL: http://www.proudparenting.com/
Although I have crossed the 40-year mark of adulthood, the territory that accompanies being black, female, and lesbian poses a continuous struggle 37 years after “Stonewall.” Still, as the gay marriage debate escalates, I’m not convinced the civil rights claims at the forefront of the gay and lesbian political platform echo those of the African American civil rights movement, as so many claim.
Historically, the gulf between the heterosexual and homosexual populations have been wide; however, members of both groups will likely agree that sexual preference outside the norm can be a liability. Since the loss of a major media market career and intentional exclusion from gay and lesbian social circles have peppered my perspective, I might inflame the men and women to whom I am connected by sexual preference. In fact, my take on the matter may land a little too close to the majority’s opinion for their comfort.
Earlier this year when the California Supreme Court announced that withholding same-sex marriage licenses was unconstitutional, throngs of gays, lesbians, and their supporters in every corner of America basked in the momentary victory. Countering this positive development, the gay community in Houston (where I live) sustained a slight slowdown in political momentum when the “good ‘ol boys” in the Texas House sent a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to the State Senate for consideration. Subsequently, the Senate has decided that passage of the same sex marriage ban will be a voter-driven issue.
Additionally, the reaction from civil rights organizations has divided many African Americans. In a shift from the bastion of homophobia long associated with the black community, the California chapter of the NAACP made public its support for a bill that will legalize same-sex marriage statewide following this significant ruling. Undeniably, the wheels of justice are in motion but in reality’s bigger picture, securing full-fledged marital equality for gays and lesbians remains an uphill battle.
The marriage ban is a glaring inequity but more opponents might soften their stance if given clear-cut evidence of the severe threat it poses to the gay and lesbian concept of family. Consider today’s locked doors of legality for gays and lesbians who lose partners to death. In some instances, surviving partners lack legal protection to ensure equitable distribution of property and financial assets. Even then, next-of-kin who are void of compassion may retaliate with judgmental weapons blazing in an all-out lifestyle objection slugfest.
Under similar circumstances where children extend the gay or lesbian family, it is not uncommon for partners to suffer the humiliation of having to relinquish parental privileges. Though the legally binding partnership has its inherent advantages and disadvantages, most gay and lesbian couples in marriage-ready relationships are still eager to sip the bitter with the sweet. Unfortunately, a large segment of heterosexual America sees us as mere sexual beings, nothing more.
Still, since one’s choice of battle must be weighed carefully, my glass is not raised in celebration of victory without sizeable reservations.
It troubles me that the gay marriage movement is flimsily packaged by white gays and lesbians in the civil rights rhetoric written by African Americans. Banning same-sex marriage is not equivalent to Jim Crow laws, which made blacks second-class citizens.
Admittedly, I was remarkably naïve when I started unraveling the fabric of gay and lesbian culture. If racism was absent anywhere in America, I was certain it did not exist in the gay and lesbian community. After all, I had firmly latched onto the “We are Family’’ bandwagon as an unofficial gay and lesbian anthem during the heyday of disco.
Then, reality set in. On numerous occasions, I was asked to present multiple pieces of identification to enter predominantly white gay establishments. Then, I overheard the friend of a white associate whisper “you didn’t tell me she was a nigger” immediately after a chilly introduction in a local lesbian bar.
While gender and color are tangible, sexual orientation is not always so easily classifiable. The African American gay and lesbian community is extremely diverse; many don’t fit the stereotypical mold of “limp-wristed queens and diesel dykes.” In fact, some have gone to great lengths to remain in the closet for fear of career collapse and/or social retribution. Having experienced the former, I now never give my professional colleagues confirmation of my lesbian membership.
Some years ago, my career at an NBC affiliate was destroyed from the fallout of an unfounded and disparaging accusation directly related to my sexual orientation. I made what I considered to be a harmless remark that women in sports are often mistaken for lesbians to a female subordinate. Several weeks passed and I had no idea that news executives were conveniently churning my comment to seal a sexual harassment charge behind the scenes. Their action was even more suspicious since my termination came on the heels of a threat to legally resolve a clear case of gender discrimination with respect to compensation.
Perhaps some will conclude that I guided the career-slicing dagger when I insisted on more insightful media coverage as opposed to the endless footage of frolicking gays and lesbians to commemorate a celebration of Gay Pride. In the conservative minds of my peers, I assume the assignment editor directive I issued flung the closet door wide open.
I tried to revive my career several times but bad news travels fast in network-affiliate TV circles. Matters worsened when a highly regarded African American media coalition I had hoped to enlist dismissed my case as a “domestic issue.” Rising above the “trumped up” charges that ousted me from my newsroom perch was a slow and painful process.
Unlike some white gays and lesbians who push others to come out, I do not feel compelled, as a black lesbian, to follow an agenda that may feed microscopic inspection or voracious speculation in and out of the workplace. As the societal and political tones indicate, the waters of racial and sexual discrimination are still deep.
In fact, subtle or overt racism is never far from my daily experience. More often than not, race and gender prevail as magnets of discrimination long before sexual orientation. The burden of having to prove one’s worth when outfitted in black skin remains unchanged. Unfortunately, this burden is not alleviated in the gay community.
A paved road for white gays and lesbians does not necessarily smooth the bumpy road gays and lesbians of color are forced to travel. Systematic separation by class and color within the diverse gay and lesbian community is a well-kept secret that thwarts unity for all under the rainbow umbrella.
Some white gay and lesbian powerbrokers who head prominent organizations designed to protect our collective interests rarely deem it important to reference or rectify the social and political division that has long been in play. One would think that an examination of the weeds within our own yard would merit a discussion agenda entry at least.
My friend took one look at the blurry digital picture I sent her of my new engagement ring, and wrote back, “It sorta screams ‘I sold my sex life for this sparkly rock!’”
A couple of years ago, I would have agreed with her — there are precious few things in the world less queer, less transgressive, than an ordinary diamond engagement ring. I had always seen the engagement ring less as a symbol of undying love than a visible token of male ownership of female sexuality, and a material manifestation of the matrimonial monogamy.
I was never the traditional kinda girl — I never imagined the ring, dreamed of a wedding, or named my bridesmaids, not even in my head. My thoughts on commitment everlasting were always less “happily ever after” than “what a fucking disaster.” Commitment to me was not just settling down, but settling, period. It was the first step on a journey that would end, inevitably, with me as a harried housewife in the suburbs growing bored and bitter, reduced to chasing children and swapping recipes, voting Republican and worrying about Capital Gains taxes. A diamond ring symbolized the beginning of that descent.
But I have recently discovered that everything is not as it appears to be, and that wearing a diamond engagement ring is a little different when you’re a dyke. For one thing, there is no question of male ownership in a girl-on-girl relationship, and for another, monogamy is easy to take when your toy drawer rivals your sock drawer in variety of colors and styles. And after three years with my partner, the whole commitment thing didn’t seem to be so bad after all. I had begun to see the appeal of getting all of our friends and family together to celebrate what we had found.
But beyond all those arguably schmaltzy justifications, there was a compelling political reason to want to announce our relationship to the world. For the last few years, gay relationships were coming under increasingly hostile attacks under the slash-and-burn morality of the Bush Administration. By proclaiming our commitment, by getting engaged to be married, we were not only celebrating our relationship, we were making a radical statement about our definition of marriage. And while gay marriage was once firmly in the territory of Human Rights Campaign assimilationists, it had moved into the province of radical queers at the very moment the Right denounced it as moral depravity worse than sodomy (which had just been officially sanctioned by the Supreme Court.)
In that light, marriage started looking pretty hot. I’ve always been a sucker for subversion. I discovered the potent aphrodisiac power in defying social norms when I first came out as a lesbian. When attraction meets activism, the act of locking lips is more than simple titillation; it becomes a portal to self-liberation. I spent a few very liberating years shoring up my lesbian-activist credentials.
There was the poet from Smith with a penchant for cheap Thai food and sleazy sex. There was the Swedish kickboxer getting her PhD in French Studies at New York University. There was the Hungarian girl whose red Doc Martens were always flawlessly shined. There was the one I called “Rock Star Girl,” who claimed any of six different professions depending on the day, and was never without her Gucci shades, a flask of rum, and a fat spliff. There was the surly butch with a Long Island accent living off unemployment in a slummy loft with her three dogs and six cats. The Army lawyer, who cried into her beer on our first date. The Singaporean stewardess whose tiny back was a sea of ocean-themed tattoos. The gym teacher whose mastiff puppy snored louder than she did. The masseuse, the vet, the ad exec.
Canadian hers-and-hers engagement rings: all the sparkle without the blood.
Given the rate at which I was going through girls, it was statistically inevitable that I would eventually meet someone I liked more than the others, someone who I would keep around for longer than it took to dig cab fare up out of the couch cushions. This one defied the reductive epithets I was given to using for the women who passed through my life, and after trying one or two, I allowed her to have a name, her name: Alex. After her name, I gave her space in my apartment. Room in my coffee cupboard for a box of tea. A carton of milk in my dairy-free fridge. Space in my underwear drawer for her boxers.
It was all downhill from there. Soon after the merging of the underwear was the merging of the apartments, the acquisition of pets, the purchasing of joint property. So after three years, four apartments, two dogs, and two cats together, we got engaged. But then there was the problem of diamonds. If I am vehemently nontraditional, Alex is the exemplar of all things tried and true. For her, there is no such thing as a diamond-less engagement.
And this is why we are meant to be together — because compromise is the highest expression of love. And even though I had come to view marriage as a revolutionary act, I had told Alex I could still not get down with the diamond: They have long been a primary source of income for both insurgent groups and brutal dictatorships, funding genocide and civil war in diamond-rich countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo, and Angola — and more recently, of course, they were linked to terrorism through al-Qaeda. Knowing all that, instead of presenting me with a ring as she was down on one knee, Alex handed me a plane ticket — we were going to Canada, she explained, so we could pick out some rocks that could broadcast our engagement with a PC pedigree to match their dazzle.
Canada is one of the only places in the world that offers a laser-inscribed proof-of-origin on its rocks to show that they have not come via a war-torn country where they contributed to human rights atrocities. Canadian diamonds were not dug up by the hands of children. They did not come at the cost of miles of agriculture in a famine-struck land. They do not come at the cost of human life or dignity. But they look just like every other diamond in the world.
That’s the funny thing about this brand of activism I have come to embrace. On the surface, it looks a lot like the very institutions it seeks to reform. Fiancée sounds a lot like fiancé, Alex sounds a lot like a man’s name, and a conflict-free Canadian diamond looks just like any other rock. The defiance is in the details.
An aerial view of Fuerte Olimpo, Alto Paraguay, looking south down the Rio Paraguay. On the left is Matto Grosso do Sur (Brazil). The hills are called the “Tres Marias.”
Ohi heta secretos Rio Paraguay kupepe che aguera hatava che yvyguype.
There are many secrets along the Paraguay River I will take to my grave. And not because I don’t want to tell them. I used to think it was only Guarani that kept me outside looking in, but it’s more than the language. People here are born knowing everything about this place; history speaks to them though the water and the stones and the dust.
I lived here three years but I’m as clueless now about how this country works as when I first arrived in 1999: a Peace Corps volunteer with two words of Spanish and a dim idea that Paraguay was somewhere hot and south and vaguely venomous. And where they sent me, to the wild northeast Chaco that is the watershed of the great swamp called the Pantanal, the secrets bubbled up from the riverbed and swirled around me. I’d reach out and each time they would float away.
It’s nine a.m. in Fuerte Olimpo when Lalo and I tiptoe up the skinny gangplank of the cargo launch Ña Manu. It’s now doing double duty as a passenger ferry since, during the years I have been away, the other boats working the northern Rio Paraguay have sunk, cracked in half, or been confiscated for unspecified, unsavory crimes.
Which makes the owner Doña Manuela very happy. This morning she is practically bursting out of her pink leotard with joy. For a three-hundred-pound woman she is surprisingly nimble and as strong as any man; she helps her rather dimwitted young stevedores stow sack after sack of rice and hard biscuits in the hold. We’re told the Ña Manu will leave Fuerte Olimpo punctually but this is Paraguay. And, though I don’t know it yet, Ña Manu has special guests.
When I lived here, I never took the Ña Manu. She is tiny by river standards, about seventy feet long, and the only places to sit are deadly caranda’y palm benches running the length of each side. There’s a bathroom — a box with a hole and a hose — and… oh, I don’t know, I always thought she was too dirty and spooky and creaky, though certainly Carmen Leticia (“the jewel of the Río Paraguay”) and the Cacique were no motor yachts. But at least they looked like they could carry more than two extra people and they weren’t wrapped in brown tarpaulin.
Ña Manu is basically a floating shanty. You don’t burn from the sun, you just braise in the brown oven bag. She has no set schedule, and she’d stiffed us on the way up to Fuerte Olimpo, leaving a day early from Isla Margarita where the distance across the river between Paraguay and Mortinho, Brazil is no more than two hundred meters. No other lanchas were due for days. But Lalo’s friend Eladio was taking his empty cattle chata past Olimpo to Bahia Negra so we hitched a ride and made it upriver that way. All this, I suppose, should be enchanting. But coming back to visit this country that still troubles me and that I still consider my true home, it only seems sad and exhausting.
When we pass through the tarp flap in the stern onto the main deck, I see far too many passengers. Five men sit lined up on one of the long benches on the starboard side. A sixth, younger than the rest and like Lalo, tall for a Paraguayan, sits on a perpendicular bench with his back to the wheelhouse. Lalo walks over and shakes hands with each of them. I’ve seen this before; I’ve learned to shake hands at parties and funerals, but doing it on a boat seems like only a guy thing.
Seems. What do I know? I decide to be a Paraguayan woman about it and give it a pass.
I sit down on the opposite bench next to a Chamococo woman with a baby that can’t be more than a week old. The six men have a look about them: they belong together somehow. The oldest is maybe fifty; the youngest twenty-five. They have small travel bags and most are dressed fairly formally: button-down shirts, belts, a gold chain here and there, boots. All are quite dark though they don’t look Guaraní or Chamococo, meaning they probably work in the sun, maybe cattle hands on estancias.
Other passengers arrive. All the men who just got on go to the bench and shake hands. Mba’e la porte? Upepi nde ha? How’s it going? Where’re you headed? They all know these guys. There’s a little jostling, a little baring of teeth for position — two old women with cigars commandeer the only two comfortable chairs. The doe-eyed crew scampers around trying to avoid Doña Manuela’s wrath. Husband and pilot Ramón has been found, dragged out of his girlfriend’s bed near the port and unceremoniously thrown into the wheelhouse, so we’re good to go.
It’s a six-hour trip downriver from Olimpo to Isla Margarita, which isn’t so bad compared to the thirteen it takes to get upriver. From Asunción the capital to Olimpo, and then up to Bahia Negra, it’s five days. Sometimes there are buses that go halfway up the river. But this time I don’t have five days to get to Olimpo. I don’t have, like I’d always had before, all the time in the world. This time I’m just a tourist, and Paraguay has responded with washouts and road closures and river transport dropping like flies. So Lalo met me in Asuncion and figured out a way for us to loop through Brazil and come out at Mortinho and only have the thirteen hours up to Olimpo by boat. And now we have to get back downTo get me home. He does this for me because he still loves me. He treated me like shit when we lived together in Olimpo. He is atoning.
Lalo waits for me to visit every year. Who knows what he does in the meantime. He’s a good guy, big and sunny and friendly; everyone likes him. When we’re in Asuncion people think I’m the Paraguayan and he’s the European, so fair-skinned and healthy and well-spoken. But a little lost, like me; a few too many vices. So he is destined to live on cattle ranches and on the river, looking and calculating and waiting for the next opportunity. One of the reasons I come back to Paraguay is that Lalo no longer considers me an opportunity. I’m just a woman he knows, who loves this part of the country as much as he does, who needs help getting to its farthest corners, because she doesn’t, after all, really belong here.
Cargo vehicles wait for the arrival of the cargo boats at Fuerte Olimpo, the main port. The rocky and steep terrain of the town above the main road makes it impossible for any vehicle other than a donkey cart to pass. (In the water are camelotes.)
An awful lot of Policia Nacional seem to be making this trip. Lalo is staring ahead, grinning, knowing I’ve figured out that something’s up. One of the policemen I know; the other two are new to me. So much time has passed. This was my home, this inhospitable web of marsh and palm forest where nothing grows except what is meant to grow. Yet people live here and their life is hard. My life was hard. And I still miss it. Whatever it was.
I’m staring at the six men. There’s another one; he could be a crew member but I’m not sure. If he’s not, he has a future in crime with his slits for eyes and too big jaw. Even his teeth look criminal. And almost immediately after we shove off, I have to pee and must squeeze past this character to get to the bathroom, such as it is. He politely locks me in, because the door will not stay shut from the inside and I think, surely there are worse ways to die than in a shit-filled toilet on a cargo boat in the middle of the world’s largest continuous swamp. But he lets me out and shows me his teeth and I go back to my bench where there are seven other passengers now, not including the cops.
We’re all facing the five men on the opposite side, except the young one facing the stern. A cop comes over and rather roughly pushes him to one side so the cop can sit down.
Finally Lalo can’t stand it anymore. “Do you know who they are?” he asks me.
I want to punch him. Do I know who they are. Christ.
They are the cattle thieves, Lalo tells me, cuatreros who have finally been caught after two years of robbing their neighbor, Lalo’s employer, Don Miguel Arevalos, whose estancia is about thirteen kilometers outside of Olimpo’s centro. The chase and capture has been covered widely in the national press.
With the thieves, in a relatively clean, yellow oxford shirt, is the would-be buyer of the stolen cattle. The oldest man — the one with the gold chains — is the leader, but it is the youngest who looks the most worried.
He’s “lo más famoso,” says Lalo. “Because he hasn’t fallen yet. The others have all been caught before.”
But they are all, I think, a little too jolly. No one’s guffawing, but they’re joking and drinking tereré and chatting with the cops. Everyone seems to be friends here.
“You don’t get it,” says Lalo. “Everyone robs. Everyone. These guys just rob more.”
The police, while they have a boat, don’t have a budget for gas, so they use public transportation to take prisoners to Concepción, where they will be arraigned and stand trial. It seems that Big Jaw’s going down for attempted murder with a knife. He is presently roaming the decks, gabbing with the crew. None of the passengers looks particularly alarmed. “He’s sorry he didn’t kill the guy,” Lalo adds, and from the way he says it I know he’s not speculating. He knows this for a fact. And there it is again, that thread of connection that Lalo’s attached to, that all Paraguayans are attached to — a word on the street, a nod, a glance — it all moves past me and beneath me unnoticed, like the piranha and dorado passing under the boat’s hull in the brown water.
The police have brought along evidence: one saddle and two white grain bags that hold dried skins and ears, to show the brands and ear cuts. Eight cows were recovered; Lalo says Don Miguel knows of at least thirty missing. Two hours downriver, we arrive at Puerto Sastre where the buyer lives. He is let off to go home and get lunch and some clothes. The rest are from Olimpo and have all their stuff with them. Other passengers board the boat. Motocerristas — men who cut fence posts for estancias along the river —are let on with their chainsaws and post-hole diggers, which at a shriek from Doña Manuela the hapless crew stuff into the hold. More hand-shaking. A few Chamococo come on as well, with big suruvi in grain bags. It’s illegal to fish in the river this month but no one turns in a Chamococo. They are barely alive and barely remembered.
Before, when Paraguay was all quebracho forest and swamp, they were nomads; now they’re exiled to the river’s edge with no home to get back to so they stay on the river and starve, and ride the lanchas, and are quiet. They speak a language that they know no one understands, so they simply gesture gently and smile. They smile at the cattle thieves; they could care less who took what from who. And of this whole story — of the big estancia and the thieving and the knowing and shaking hands and getting on and getting off — only I am out of place, only I am something not right.
I was living in Fuerte Olimpo when Don Miguel’s son Caludio hired a witch doctor to put spells on the corners of their land so the thieves could not enter. Neither Don Miguel nor Lalo could talk sense into him. “You have to ride out and count your herd — two, three times a week. You have to fix fences and patrol borders. Caludio wants to stay blind. He knew who was doing it; he just didn’t want to see,” Lalo tells me now. I once brought Caludio amulets from Asunción to help him with his spells. This was when I didn’t know that he already knew who the thieves were. It seems even the blind know more than me.
As we head out into the river again all the thieves open their lunches, prepared by wives or girlfriends. The cops have returned to the boat with empanadas. One of the thieves produces a cake, cut into six pieces. From the way the cake has been prepared, I can tell there was a party last night to send off the thieves and this cake is part of the leftovers. I have bananas and bread; Lalo has cheese and honey and buys a milanesa from a kid in Sastre. We drink tereré afterwards and I pray that dehydration has set in so that I don’t have to use the bathroom again.
By the time we’re well beyond Sastre, Manuela is done shrieking at the police for leaving the thieves unguarded on the boat while they bought empanadas up the road. As far as I can tell everybody finds this pretty amusing, even her.
It is about a hundred and ten degrees on the river and the lancha is galloping along at about eleven knots. My back is killing me. Camelotes crawl by, not yet in flower but trailing yards and yards of rubbery root and leaf as the upper Chaco has received about eight inches of rain this week and the river is high and fast. Twice we stop to let the crew disengage a particularly big clump from the propeller. The hum of an old diesel engine, even this one, is quiet and soothing. Above it I can hear the big green and blue parrots calling to each other in the trees. Occasionally a canoa, a small handmade fishing boat, slips out of a clump of hu negro horsetail in a small riacho, the boatmen tending some plastic bottles with hooks streaming down, baiting paku.
I can make fun of Ña Manu, I can talk about filth and discomfort, but with Paraguay on one side dark and scrubby, and Matto Grosso del Sur on the other all endless palm forest, I can’t say it’s ever been too much to bear. I have stared at this river five days at a time, over and over. I have never been bored here.
The thieves get off with the police at the second-to-last stop, Carmelo Peralta, and I have to tell Doña Manuela that they forgot the evidence. More shrieking. Much appreciative nodding by the cop who knows me. A dirty glance from the thief with the cake. I have entered the story now.
A typical cargo boat. This one is the Cacique, one of the better models. (Ña Manu is smaller.) Cacique’s route runs from Asuncion to Bahia Negra.
Ña Manu heaves herself around to Isla Margarita and anchors for the night, and Lalo and I pay a ninety-year-old man to row us across the river to Mortinho in his yellow-and-green canoa. This is the only way across. Mortinho is a bigger town and we need to catch the bus here to do the twenty-hour loop through Brazil and back down to Asunción. Brazil has roads; Paraguay has, at this moment, mud.
In Mortinho, we round a corner and sitting in front of a hotel having tereré are four men I know from Olimpo: José Belén Gonzales, a council member I worked with; his cousin Martin Suarez the veterinarian; two other guys I know but not by name. Just hanging around. In Brazil.
Lalo starts to grin. Asks a couple of polite questions that are not all that polite.
“How’d you get here?”
“Deslizadora.” Motor boat.
“Whatcha doing in town?”
“Oh … you know, heh-heh, a little business.”
“Staying long?”
“Er, no, we’re going back to Olimpo tomorrow.”
“Ya, Ya,” says Lalo, which is sort of an ‘Of course, I see,’ non-threatening, low-key, but these fellas are spooked.
José Belén looks ready to die. He can’t look at me. He never was a big help as a consejal but as far as I know he didn’t hate me. In Olimpo, I spent weeks trying to teach him and the other consejales how to read the town’s budget so they could know where the money went. On this visit trip back, Lalo informed me with a smirk that I’d done a good job and now all the consejales know how to track the money… right out of the budget.
Lalo does not do what he does best — plop down for a good long mindless chat. I have already braced myself for an hour of Guaraní. Instead he asks them in Spanish where we can find Brazilian reales since we need to pay for the bus and the banks are closed. Martin says “Oh, Vincente’s got them,” and gestures towards the corner where I see a locked door. José Belén starts to say, “But Vincente’s closed —” but Martin shoots him a look and says with clenched teeth, “No, I’m sure he’s open,” and José Belén shuts up. Lalo grabs my arm and we scram.
Lost. I am lost.
Lalo says, quietly, “Aha,” and this is what he tells me he has figured out:
José Belén owns the estancia next to Don Miguel. Each has about twelve thousand acres. The thieves are José Belén’s hired men. José Belén knows they’ve been stealing cattle from Don Miguel; there are still about twenty-five on José Belén’s property. Martin is José Belén’s cousin and knows Vincente who is a buyer. The other two are involved but who knows how. They are in Mortinho because two small chatas are berthed here and they need to ask around and hire one to take up the river, load the cows, and sell them to Vincente to make enough money to pay the thieves’ lawyer in Concepción who is on Martin’s payroll. That’s why the thieves looked unconcerned. They knew José Belén was already here, working things out for them.
“But how will a chata sneak up the Río Paraguay and load the cows?” I ask.
Lalo gives me a look that says, you know the river. You know how you can get lost in it, with its miles of riachos and twists and thickets and hidey holes. A chata can easily slip in below Olimpo without anyone noticing…unless Don Miguel and Caludio have been tipped off and know it’s coming. “Then,” says Lalo grinning, “things could get interesting.”
So we find a phone and call Miguel who is somber, then gleeful, then somber again, because Caludio will be absolutely no help, clinging to his yuyos and amuletos till he’s kicked in the teeth by a ladrón himself and left to die. But we are thanked, and defense plans are put in motion, and I will extract some small piece of satisfaction from all this. And it is that even though I knew nothing, nothing at all — I would have sat through a boat ride with felons thinking they were off to a business meeting and never been the wiser — José Belén and Martin thought I knew everything. In that one moment, all the secrets were handed to me. They thought I knew; they thought I deserved to know. And that, ultimately, is what keeps me coming back here — a nod, a recognition, a tiny opening through marsh and water, that I can slip through.
Related links:
Waterland Research Institute.Essays from a collection entitled The Pantanal: Understanding and Preserving the World’s Largest Wetland. Juan Maria Carrón provides a wonderful overview of the Paraguayan Pantanal, its people, and the dangers facing it. Also see the essay by John F. Gotlgens for a frightening look at what multinational corporations and monetary institutions are trying to do to the entire South American watershed.
International Rivers Network. For more information about Hidrovía and what the IRN and local NGO Rios Vivos are trying to do to stop this project.
With all their progressive tendencies, punk-rockers can seem pretty cool — even sexy — to the queer eye. But their love for The Clash hardly guarantees them a homophobia-free persona.
The band engages in homoerotic male bonding for homophobes while they play at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.
Kevin’s house is small, drafty, and dirty. It sits in a poor neighborhood in upstate New York that straddles the line between rural and suburban. It’s early spring and it’s still freezing and grey: the fields, the roads, the faces. Down in Kevin’s basement, however, it’s hot as summer and warm with flesh tones.
His basement smells like body odor. The room is packed with boxes and there’s a sharp scent of mildew and kitty litter, but it’s body odor that dominates: the scent of sweaty boys working hard.
I’m sitting on an ancient brown couch, just a few feet from the amps, and close to where Greg stands at the microphone. I feel guilty taking pleasure in their smell; I fear them noticing how happy it makes me, and then never speaking to me again. It’s a big deal to me that they’ve let me sit in on their band practice. It’s my third time here, and Kevin’s basement might be my new favorite place. It’s warm, safe, and full of handsome boys sweating and spouting off radical rhetoric and contempt for the cool kids.
“What did you say there, Greg?” says Kevin between songs. “In the next to last line of that verse? ‘Something something chicken, something something living?’”
“What the fuck is wrong with you man?” says Kevin to Greg. “Chicken?”
“So the song’s not about eating meat? I can’t understand a word you’re saying. I don’t know how you’re going to convince all these kids to become vegans when they have no idea what the fuck you’re saying,” he says as he stomps off and pretends to look through a cardboard box full of family photos.
“Oh my fucking God! The song has nothing to do with eating meat! God! The line is, ‘I don’t want no part of the world you’re building.’” Kevin turns to me and asks, “Does anyone else in this room have any idea what the fuck Greg is saying when he sings?”
The only people in the room who aren’t in the band are Amber, Greg’s girlfriend, and me. Neither of us are objective observers. She’s in love with one of them and I’m in love with all of them. So we both say ‘yes.’ Gary, the bassist, wants no part in the conversation. His contribution to the scene involves scowling and occasionally grumbling rude remarks as he sits on the amp.
Some fans get in on the homophobic fun while watching the band at CBGB’s in New York in 2002.
Amber sits next to me on the couch and quietly flips through magazines. If she enjoys band practice as much as me, she hides it well. I say: “So what’s the word, Amber?” When she says, “Not a whole lot,” Greg yells, “Quiet in the peanut gallery.” He then winks slyly at her to cover up his chauvinistic impulses with humor.
As much as the closet Stalinists — Greg, Kevin, and Gary — mouth feminist rhetoric, they have a bad habit of telling Amber to shut up when she talks. But it’s different for me. I’m a boy; I’m allowed to have an opinion.
“Oh man, Simon, you should have seen it,” Kevin says to me between songs. His tone reveals that he cares more about retelling the story than informing me. “That kid Bolevice, the guy we always talk about? You should have seen it — he came to school the other day wearing a Metallica t-shirt! Can you believe it? I asked him what was up with that. Then I figured, hell, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he was being clever about it, and you know what he said? He said, ‘Metallica’s punk, right?’ Can you imagine?”
Actually, I can imagine because at my own school that’s me. I’m Bolevice, the corny poser loser the other boys make fun of.
“So … he likes a band you guys don’t like and that’s a big problem?” I reply. “Why?”
“Hell yeah, man!” says Greg, who can articulate better than Kevin why mainstream culture and its followers lack independent thought. “He wants to come to shows, talk about how punk rock he is, and how he agrees with all the stuff the Dead Kennedys talk about, yet then he turns around and supports bad corporate mainstream music that kills individual creativity and independent labels.”
“Oh,” and I shut up. Of course I agree with Greg; that’s why I love Kevin’s basement so much. We see eye-to-eye: We hate big money, big business, big music. Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart , meat. Capitol Records, and Green Day. We hate sports and the jock thug misogynists on the football team. We despise the way people exert power over the weak: in sweatshops, in armies, in government, on the bus. Yet lately they have started to freak me out, not because they’re a clique — that much was obvious from the start — but because they can act just as mean as the jocks that beat me up in the locker room. They boast about fighting prejudice, but somehow faggots don’t fit into their list of oppressed peoples.
Walking my high school halls, ducking projectiles, and headlocks, and boys yelling “faggot,” I always wanted to find people who thought like me. I used to lie alone on my bed in the dark, listening to The Sex Pistols or The Clash, and think that I’d eventually find a group of people who would accept me even if I was gay or liked commercial music. I felt happy and relieved when I finally met these three guys, even though they went to another school, but now I’m starting to feel less welcome and less valued by them.
Practice is winding down: They’ve gone through every song they know and now they’re playing around with a new riff. I’m thinking of the long drive home: the empty wasteland of dead depressed Columbia County. After we all leave, Greg and Amber will go off somewhere to fool around — although not to fuck because Greg’s practically a monk now with his new Hare Krishna/vegan/hard-line communist beliefs. He has negative views about non-reproductive sex. I’m avoiding this topic of conversation with him because I have a feeling he will say some pretty ugly things about gay sex.
I’ll begrudgingly drive 20 minutes out of my way to give Gary a ride home so as to not give him any reason to like me less. Then I’ll drive home alone, past the gray cold winter fields and the dilapidated houses. Afterwards I’ll go to my room and jerk off to memories of Kevin’s basement — the smell of boys and the guitars ringing in my ears. Kevin will stay in his basement and play Nintendo and watch television, or watch pornography — straight pornography.
Sitting on Kevin’s filthy couch, not wanting the afternoon to end, I focus on the sight of Kevin drumming. His shirt’s off and his face shines from sweat and intensity. He bites his lower lip with the same sort of joy, concentration, and pleasure your face shows when you get a blowjob. I focus on the ecstatic look on his face and I imagine my own face buried between his legs.
STORY INDEX
TOPICS > FEMINIST THEORY >
Information about feminist theory. Published by Kristin Switala. URL: http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/enin.html
TOPICS > CORPORATIONS >
“Is Wal-Mart Good for America?” By Frontline. Published by WGBH Educational Foundation. November 16, 2004. URL: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/walmart/etc/synopsis.html
Citizens Monitoring Coca-Cola website designed to monitor the actions of The Coca-Cola Corporation. Published by Campaign for Justice at Coca-Cola. URL: http://www.cokewatch.org
When I was little, I loved that people called me a tomboy. Even the name “tomboy” made me feel strong — all the privileges associated with being a boy without having to be one.
My best friend hated to be called a tomboy. In all honesty I didn’t think she qualified. She poufed her bangs and cared about having a bump-free ponytail. Sometimes she wore cute jean shorts to our softball practice. She also took dance lessons and liked it. So it angered me that people thought we were both tomboys. It brought my tomboyishness down a notch or two.
Beth Ann moved away from Kansas in sixth grade. By then she was getting too old to be caught doing pliés in right field. As first base-tomboy, it was my job not to let anything get to her. But sometimes I had to miss games for soccer, and she’d be left solo to pick up grounders or circle underneath pop flies.
She and I ran into each other ten years later in an H&M department store in Manhattan. I was on a weekend trip to New York from Boston, where I had just finished my fourth and final season as a soccer player. She was auditioning for a Broadway chorus line. We were 22.
Beth Ann had moved away right at that hazy time when girls who are tomboys become girls who are probably going to be lesbians. Around that same time boys who play sports become Gods. Quarterbacks. Point guards. Short stops. They are all revered. It doesn’t matter if they can’t spell the name of the position they play. Boys become men on the playing field.
At this transitional time when I was 12, my soccer career took off. I played on two club teams that traveled around the country and on a state team whose players had the opportunity to advance to the national team. I basically lived in my uniform until I won a scholarship to play in college. Then I really lived in my practice shorts, my team sweats, and all the other gear they gave us.
I don’t look like a lesbian. That’s what all my friends and family told me when I came out to them. My dad actually said to my brother, “But she doesn’t look like a gay.” Which is to say that I did not fit the stereotype of a lesbian the same way I did the stereotype of a tomboy. I had long blond hair when I came out. I pierced my ears after my last soccer game, and I wore dangly earrings. I wore dresses, sometimes, and heels. And I liked that.
People noticed these things, but nobody seemed to notice that I had never, except half-heartedly under extreme peer pressure, expressed any interest in boys or men. It somehow slipped by that, at college parties when girls teased about kissing other girls, I was perfectly serious. I didn’t look like a lesbian, and so I could not actually be one.
During the summer before I went away to college in 2000, I coached at a local soccer camp. On registration day I sat at the table for the youngest age group and welcomed nervous moms, dads, and their oblivious toddlers.
One woman approached, pushing her son in front of her. She had read about my college plans and soccer scholarship in the coaches’ bios in the brochure.
She stood over me as I handed her four-year-old a size three ball and tiny t-shirt.
“Congratulations,” she beamed. And then she leaned in closer to whisper. “But aren’t you afraid that, you know, there will be a lot of lesbians on the team?”
If I had met the woman four years later, I would have told her that there weren’t any lesbians on the team, except for me, and because of her question — and the stereotyping and attitude it reflected — I spent four extra years in the closet.
I waited until after I finished soccer to come out because I was terrified of being “the lesbian soccer player.” I let my best friends think that I was asexual and uninterested because I didn’t want them to think I was looking at them in the shower. All my life I had avoided stereotypes and stereotyping successfully. Although I was a tomboy, I wore skirts. Although I was smart, I sat at the “cool” lunch table. Nobody could quite nail me down.
I loved the competition, the pressure, the excitement, the commitment, and the skill that soccer demanded of me. But here’s a confession: I also needed soccer because people aren’t suspicious of the mysterious way a team of girls loves each other. A team of girls can touch, giggle, cry, sleep on each other’s shoulders, and kiss each other’s cheeks without arousing cries of lesbian. They can be angry and scream and shout at each other without drawing whispers of why does she care so much? Americans love the intensity of sports — even women’s sports — and so, insignificant details like falling in love are not always noticed. I made it through undetected.
The woman at my registration table and her honestly fearful question represented my first personal experience with homophobia. In my back-and-forth struggle trying to decide when I should come out, it never occurred to me that my teammates might be afraid of me.
When my brother found out I was gay, he asked me if I was going to cut off all my hair. He thought I was going to suddenly morph into his default image of a lesbian.
I wish I had allowed myself to be “the lesbian soccer player,” if only to prove that not all lesbian soccer players are the same. But I waited until I could avoid that very stereotype before coming out.
And when I did come out, those who knew me — including all of my former teammates — found a louder, freer, more intimate version of me.
A lesbian former soccer player, yes. And many other things as well.
In the 5 a.m. darkness, I slip out of bed, turn off my alarm clock quickly and slide on whatever clothes I can find on the floor, careful not to lose my balance and fall. I cannot afford to make a sound. I tiptoe out of the room, relishing the sounds of open-mouthed breathing coming from the bedrooms. In my head I am already writing. The half-written story, started the previous morning, is sharp and clear, and I am eager to enter into it. But halfway down the stairs I am interrupted by a terrific wail. And there is the dilemma: Do I let the baby bawl herself to sleep — and run the risk of waking up the four year-old? If so, I would have two people awake and no writing done. Or do I wake up the sleeping husband, hand him the baby and attempt to write while listening to unhappy baby yelling at unhappy daddy and, eventually, unhappy big sister?
Three people awake. No writing done.
I sigh and pick up my child. Her skin, soft and pliant as bread dough, smells of sugar and milk. Instantly, she buries her face in my neck. We lie down next to her sleeping father, curl up and relax. The story I was writing in my head slowly ebbs away until I no longer remember what I was doing out of bed so early. I rub my baby’s back, her legs, her tummy, breathe in the scent of her sparse hair, love her with my guts.
In the disappearing moments before I drift asleep, the black-and-white image of that English woman reappears in my memory. Her hair is falling out of the knot at the nape of her neck, her wool jacket and loose silk scarf at her throat fade at the sharp pallor of her face. Her eyes look past the photographer, out of the doorway, into the other room.
Her own room.
God damn you, Virginia Woolf. You were right, you are right, you always will be right.
Happy?
I now detect a gleam in the motionless gray eye, a slight curl of the lip that was not there before. It says, I told you so.
The life I envisioned at 20, with a copy of A Room of One’s Own stuck in my backpack, is a far cry from the life of interruptions and revolting tasks that I now lead and love.
For me, it begins with a tumor.
Let me explain.
I am sitting in the lobby of the student clinic writing in very small letters. I can barely fit my name in its designated spot. Under the heading “Reason For Visit” I write this inside a 3 cm by 1 cm box: “cessation of menstrual cycles but don’t even bother giving me a pregnancy test because i’ve taken four already all negative and i think i have some sort of tumor.”
Date of last period: October 20. Today’s date: January 8.
The nurse smiles. I don’t think she even read the words that I painstakingly jammed into that tiny box. She takes a pregnancy test off the shelf and sends me into the bathroom to pee. This is fine, I tell myself. I now see why our health care costs so much — a bunch of nervous-Nellies and their insatiable desire to order more tests. I perform the usual routine. Wipe with alcohol pad. (Ouch.) Spread legs apart. Hunch over. Lean in to get a better view. Pee on hand anyway.
I place the sample in the metal cupboard and slide the door shut.
On the other side, a door slides open, and the lab assistant takes the sample out.
I wash my hands confidently. Perhaps now we can get down to business.
My mother had a uterine cyst several years before, so it would make sense that this is what I have. This is the reason why I am so bloated all the time. This is the reason for my insane cravings for milkshakes after two years of veganism. This is the reason why I have been falling asleep at the computer, on the bus, in the student lounge, at the library. This is the reason why I nearly threw up on two heavily-perfumed girls, as they walked into the Creative Writing class I was student-teaching. I am ready for surgery or drugs.
I just want to feel better.
The nurse walks me to the exam room. She is chipper and bubbly and says it will take a few minutes. She is not looking down at the test. I am. I am walking down the hall behind a nurse holding a small white plastic square with a gigantic red “plus” sign.
I sit in the exam room and cry. I see every plan my boyfriend and I have made over the last two years disintegrate. Thailand, Guatemala, New Zealand, Tibet. These were places I could teach, and he would tag along. I could finish my novel, he could write travel essays. We would come back and work for the Park Service again. He would study architecture. I would teach for five years in the roughest schools I could find and then go to school myself for that MFA. I would write essays. Publish a volume of poetry. We figured we would have children in our thirties, if at all, but now …
Were you trying to get pregnant?
The nurse is kind, concerned about my puffy eyes, my gray skin.
No.
Are you married?
No.
Did your boyfriend have any idea that you might be pregnant?
No.
How do you think he is going to react?
I don’t know.
Do you want to keep the baby?
I don’t know.
Have you ever even thought about motherhood?
Maybe. I can’t remember.
Would you like information on …
Wait, I say. I don’t want her to continue.
I’m sorry?
Yes, I say. My eyes begin to burn. My hands tremble, grip my jeans, tremble again.
Yes what?
Yes. Yes. I do want the baby. I do want to be a mom.
I imagine that I have grown taller. That my hands are claws, and my eyes, flame.
The nurse looks at me. Her eyes are blank.
Yes, I tell you!
I am crying freely now. It is a relief, and my face relaxes. The nurse looks at me as though I’ve gone crazy, horrified that I have just shouted.
Yes, I whisper. I put my hand instinctively on my stomach. Haven’t yet learned that the womb is actually much lower, but never mind. The nurse purses her lips and gives me a stack of brochures. Crisis counselors. Midwives. Abortion clinics. Anti-abortion clinics. A social worker. Discount maternity clothes. Adoption information.
I shove it all into my school bag and head for my car.
Seven months later I am pushing so hard that my eyes bug out and my skin rips open. My sisters are there and my mother and all are gasping with joy and revulsion and pain and astonishment. After three colossal pushes she emerges, knees and elbows moving chaotically through the birth canal, spit out like a watermelon seed and almost slipping out of the tired and cranky doctor’s hands. My baby is laid upon my belly, and she is red and gooey and bellowing. Prettier than prose. Sweeter than any poem I will ever write. Her heart-shaped face and rosebud mouth are wrinkled with rage and confusion as I vainly attempt to shade her eyes from the overly bright room.
“Can we turn down the lights?” I ask.
“No,” says the cranky doctor with a look that keeps my mouth shut. Apparently I have already been enough of a bother.
I imagine that we have already returned to our apartment in South Minneapolis, with its lilac walls and pale green sheets on the bed. I have already prepared a little spot for her between her father and me. As she screeches and squirms, sucks and falls asleep, I plan out our days lounging and writing together — baby at the breast, pencil in the hand, notebook on the knee. She would play quietly, amuse herself while I explored the vast terrain of linguistic possibility.
Ha.
Two months later and only one paragraph into the master’s thesis (the computer is currently covered in diapers, receiving blankets, and toys), I discover that the daily poetry journal’s last entry was two days before my daughter was born. A simple, four-sentence note to my landlord takes six days to compose. I discover that I need to re-evaluate my relationship with writing and re-learn.
My first attempts went like this:
Day one. Find notebook. Place notebook on table. Find pen. Place pen next to notebook. Sit down. Baby starts to cry. Decide to let baby cry, and maybe she will calm herself down. Wait six very long seconds. Pick up baby. Sing to baby. Read story to baby. Take baby on walk. Forget about notebook.
Day two. Put baby down for nap. Discover notebook on table. (What luck!) Sit down to write. Consider writing ode to dirty diapers. Consider writing sonnet about spit-up. Decide to free-associate, writing down words and allowing the poem to form. Inexplicably, the word “whereas” is written 16 times down a neat little column.
Day three. Head out with baby in backpack, blankie around waist, spare diaper shoved in jeans pocket, notebook and pen in hand. Lay baby on blanket in the grass. Lie down next to her. Smell the warm soil, the fading grass, the falling leaves of early autumn. Write. Time, space disappear. Three poems and the first eight pages of a story later, I am satisfied. Roll around in the grass with baby. Show baby colored leaves, flowers, grass, sky. Kiss baby. Bring baby home. Forget notebook at the park. It is gone forever.
At night, I dream of Virginia Woolf. Words first encountered in college have lain dusty and ignored in the recesses of my brain, but now, like the dry bones in that barren and wasted field, suddenly spring to life, animation, and power. My new life as mother, teacher, wife, and frustrated writer has opened a window between our lives, and I can’t get Woolf out of my head. A life superimposed on sadness and despair, her writing life transcends gender, class, illness, and expectation. Every limitation falls away on the page, every prison disintegrates in the freedom of her own room.
And now, five years into the new millennium, I discover that I am the woman that she wrote about. I am the woman who lays art aside to play the mother to my kids, my adult siblings, my neighbors, my friends. I am the woman whose soul-crushing love for her children creates disorganization of thought, disordered creativity, and desperation. I am the woman who feels guilty for any minute spent in the pursuit of art. I am the woman in desperate need of a room, not just in my house, but a room in my head. Like the millions of other women who haven’t picked up a paint brush in years, who can’t find a sitter when her band practices, whose desk has been co-opted by fingerpaints and crayons, I have allowed motherhood to trump artistry.
The sun glares on my computer as I write this one-handed. My squirming baby tackles my shoulders, tugs on my hair, struggles against my arm crooked firmly around her waist. My nose wrinkles at the acrid smell of her diaper, but I decide to let it slide for a minute.
“Nuss, nuss,” says the baby, peering under my shirt to make sure they were still there.
“In a minute,” I say, “Mommy is finishing her sentence.”
My room, unfortunately, has an open door and often invites wrestling children, half-done art projects, a rancid diaper pail, and the constant cries of rage and protest. But at 5 a.m. it is just me, the stories forming from my fingers and the click-click of my computer, if the baby doesn’t cry.
STORY INDEX
PEOPLE > WOOLF, VIRGINIA >
Biography British author, feminist URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
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