Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

For my 49th birthday last year, Mark rented me a cello. He also gave me a music stand and a beginner’s book. I drew the bow inexpertly across the strings and made a commitment to this hour-glass shaped beauty. Sound waves rumbled up my arms.

The summer passed before I managed to find a teacher and schedule lessons. Everything I’d been doing to coax sound out of my instrument was wrong. I’d been sitting wrong, holding the bow wrong. Even the size of the instrument was wrong. I rented a different-sized cello. And I practiced. Twenty minutes a day.

The more correctly I placed my fingers on the cello’s neck and the more expertly I employed my pencil grip on the bow, the more my elbows and wrists ached. The fingers in my left hand went numb. Joints in my right hand stiffened and swelled in protest.

Though I was in pain, I continued to practice. I learned ecumenical plucking: “Jingle Bells” and “The Dreidel Song.” Kids home on a visit in October asked for a concert, and I obliged. “Let’s hear that again,” they teased.

My sense of loss around the absence of Sam’s power drumming diminished. I was no longer lingering in the hall, recalling Max’s increasingly indifferent, irregular sessions on trumpet. My cello and I, we were making new music memories to fill the Big Empty.

A friend asked me how things were going with the cello. I filled her in, including details of numb fingers and joint ache. Why, she wanted to know, was I doing something that gave me pain?

“I just need to practice harder,” I told her.

“Will you listen to yourself?” she asked.

I knocked off for a few weeks. Sensation returned to the fingers in my left hand. My wrists ached less. The bow lay where I’d left it, its strings slack but still coated in powdery rosin. And I thought.

Or maybe I felt.

I wanted to fill my heart and head with vibrant sound. I wanted to try something completely new. I didn’t want any more pain than I was already experiencing.

So, this past January, I joined a choir. Every Wednesday, I retrace steps I took with my children to our neighborhood public elementary school. I climb the steps to the third-floor music room and slide into a stiff, plastic chair, squeezing in among the altos. The only pain I experience comes from climbing the stairs. That and the times I occasionally pinch my fingers in the metal clasps of the three-ring binder that holds my sheet music. Our brilliant, tart-tongued director warms us up. I take a deep breath and open my mouth. Sound waves rumble through my chest and out of my head. Our improbably named, almost 90-year-old accompaniest — Flossie — plays the first few bars of Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” and we’re off.

I’m not good, but I’m getting better. I have trouble tracking the line, so I’ve highlighted the music staff in yellow. My counting is often off, so I’ve written in the beats, noticing time signatures, rests, and odd rhythms. I don’t practice, I won’t be in town for the year-end concert, so there’s no public payoff. But I am fully present each week. I join my voice with the rest of the choir and experience the joy of making music.

I need to return the cello to the rental company, since the year-long contract is almost up. In a month, I will no longer punch “49″ into the touch screen on the exercise machine I use at the gym. Fifty. And what have I learned in the first year of empty nesting, the last year of my forties?

To age gracefully has little to do with skin care, hair color, sagging neck, or even productivity. The trick, I think, is to hold onto the dreams that matter most and to be creative and flexible in making them come true.

Last night, I listened to “Glory (Feat. Blue Ivy Carter),” rapper Jay-Z’s tribute to the birth January 7 of his daughter.  And then I listened again.  I couldn’t get the refrain out of my head: “My greatest creation was you.”

Many musical papas have written love songs to their newborns, with ABC News’s Bill Weir noting that fatherhood is “the ultimate softening agent.”   Dads who’ve publicly crooned to their kids include John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Lou Reed, George Strait, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, Alan Sparhawk, Loudon Wainwright, and David Byrne (in no particular order).

All of these songwriters — with the exception of Jay-Z — focus on the baby as they marvel at the newly arrived.  But not “HOV” — Jehovah, God’s gift to rap — as he refers to himself.  Who is this new, sweetly wailing creature? “A younger, smarter, faster me,” Jay-Z exults.  Not even a younger, smarter, faster…Beyoncé?  The rapper acknowledges his daughter’s mother, diva Beyoncé Knowles, who burst onto the pop music scene as lead singer for the girl group Destiny’s Child: “You’re a child of destiny / You’re the child of my destiny / You’re my child with the child from Destiny’s Child / That’s a hell of a recipe.”

“Glory” shines a light on two classic parenting mistakes. Never assume that your child will be a better version of you.  Don’t think that there’s a special recipe to produce a great “creation.” Little Blue Ivy might just turn out to be tone deaf, hate music, and have two left feet.

When I think about the (initially) female progeny of power performing duos — Carrie Fischer, Jane Fonda, or Chaz Bono, say — I don’t think happy.  Narcissistic parents have trouble grasping that the “glory” of giving birth to a child comes from the “giving” part.  Maybe Beyoncé will have enough good sense and girl power to tell her husband, a man who publicly crowed that he “got the hottest chick in the game wearin’ my chain,” a man who declared himself, “not a businessman, I’m a business, man,” that in twenty years’ time, the “feat” in the “glory” of having children is in giving them some of the same freedoms we’ve given ourselves.

Or maybe he’ll listen to himself. ”This is the life that I chose,” Jay-Z rapped in “december 4th,” a hit song about his own birthday from The Black Album, ”rather than the life that chose me.”

“Cuba-to-Florida Quest Defeats Swimmer at 61,” the headline reads in today’s New York Times. Diana Nyad, famed marathon swimmer, tried to make her way from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage in one go.  Her shoulder cramped.  She kept swimming. She had an unexpected bout of asthma.  She kept swimming. She began vomiting uncontrollably.  She stopped swimming. Her handlers pulled her from the water, and that was that.

I want to be supportive of pretty much anything anyone does to challenge themselves, but this venture struck me as kinda dumb. But, then, I don’t get mountain climbing, either. So what if you can swim from Cuba to Florida? Or climb K2? Seems like a huge waste of money, plus it’s really dangerous. And you could leave people who love you feeling awful forever if something bad were to happen. Like if you were to die.

In addition to my usual “hunh,” I didn’t respect Nyad’s motives.  She told reporters she was feeling bad about getting old. Or older. Whatever. She announced that “60 is the new 40″ and that she wanted to do something that would prove she was in great shape physically and in better shape mentally than ever. “People my age must try to live vital, energetic lives,” she said. “We’re still young. We’re not our mothers’ generation at 60.” And this: “I’m standing here at the prime of my life; I think this is the prime, when one reaches this age.” I rather lost patience when Nyad counseled to “[b]e your best self.” Didn’t Oprah retire, already?

In yesterday’s newspaper I read about 70+ year olds clamoring for elective plastic surgery. I don’t want anyone discriminating against my saggy old self. But, really, when do I get to let go a little? When can my “best self” admit that it’s not in its prime any more, that it can’t do what it did at 20? When can my “best self” have a bad knee and crow’s feet?

Making my bed, Wellfleet, Mother’s Day 2011, I tucked hospital corners into white cotton sheets — just as my mother taught me.  I folded an ancient Hudson’s Bay four-point blanket in half, smoothing it to rest between sheets and duvet, to keep me warm on my side of the bed.  I first slept under that blanket in 1986 in a bed my mother-in-law made in Taos, New Mexico.  It came to me, here in Massachusetts, when my father-in-law sold the house that held that bed.  I fluffed the duvet in its clean cover this morning, grabbing two corners, following my sister-in-law Katherine’s instructions.  I arranged pillows in their soap-smelling cases, wondering who next would rest here — my husband? I? guests?

To all the mothers who have taught me to make beds, meals, homes for myself and my family: a wish that wherever you are, you can feel my gratitude.

To all the young mothers who make beds: a wish that there will be a time — it’s not here, not yet — when you get to make your own bed and sleep in it, without interruption.

Rebecca from the visa service called with an update. She wanted to let me know that by listing myself as a “writer” on my application form, I was putting myself in a category that would require five to seven weeks of scrutiny. “The consulate will read everything you’ve ever published. They’ll want to know what you might be writing about the country.” I protested that I also put down that I’m unemployed. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “They’ll consider you part of the news media.”

I let out a deep sigh. I’d need the visa in five — not seven — weeks to make the flight. I didn’t want to risk a delay. I didn’t want to lie, either. But the truth of my professional identity is layered and multiple. Any number of labels fit. The squirrels in my brain did a few backflips.

“What if I were to put down ‘housewife?’” I asked.

“Perrrfect,” Rebecca purred.

I filled out the forms again, FedExing them to New York. Five days later, my passport returned to me in the mail, visa affixed.

“Housewife.” The term traditionally refers to a woman whose sole role it is to tend a home while her husband earns a living in public. Feminists have objected to “housewife,” preferring, instead, the term “home maker,” because the latter doesn’t presuppose dependence on a man. Either way, the assumption — as the consulate concluded — is that housewives and homemakers are harmless. Whom would you rather let into your country: a writer or a housewife? A writer might be dangerous, cause public trouble. But a housewife? Can she bake a cherry pie?

An obscure British definition of “housewife” refers to a sewing kit, complete with needles. I like this one. A lot. Self-contained. Portable. Able to provide valuable assistance with the most ordinary of objects. Handled unwisely, capable of wreaking havoc and causing pain.

Two pieces in yesterday’s New York Times caught my attention  One, by The Times’ ombudsman Arthur S. Brisbane, addressed the paucity of obituaries celebrating women’s lives. The other, by “Motherlode” blogger Lisa Belkin, analyzed the decision of a group of academic psychologists to declare parenthood the pinnacle of human experience. Both Brisbane and Belkin were well-intentioned, but both missed the implications or their arguments on the connection between parenthood and women’s lives.

Brisbane was addressing reader Mike Sponder’s complaint that The New York Times seems to publish women’s and men’s obituaries at a 1:8 ratio. “Women rarely die, it seems,” Sponder quipped. Brisbane turned over Sponder’s observation to Times obituary editor Bill McDonald. McDonald wrote that the Times has to “narrow the field to those who made the largest imprint and possibly found fame or notoriety in the process.” Given where women were seventy or eighty years ago, when most of these dead people were born, there’s not much chance that they’d make the cut. Brisbane urged McDonald to look harder, contacting organizations such as NOW to cast a wider net.

Belkin wrote this week’s Times Magazine’s “The Way We Live Now” column about a new configuration of  the hierarchy of needs Abraham Maslow posited in his 1943 paper, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Maslow theorized that people have to meet low-level needs first (food, shelter, safety) before they can contemplate reaching their full potential, or “self-actualizing.” The tippy top of human experience these days? Parenting. That word used to be thought of as a noun, Belkin noted, but these days it’s a verb whose infinitive form is “to parent.” Belkin was appalled by the new hierarchy.  ”Most of all,” she wrote, “it raises the question of whether to sanctify parenting has gone a bit too far.”  The psychologists who put parenting at the top of human experience, just above finding and retaining a mate, she wrote, have lost their sense of perspective. Parents, she proclaimed, are supposed to be making themselves unnecessary, since the goal of parenting is to raise self-sufficient adults.

Maslow wrote his essay when many of those appearing in current Times obits were born. In other words, his organizing principle of human behavior informed the worldview of those now in their seventies and eighties — as well as obit editor Bill McDonald. By telling McDonald to look harder for notable women, Times ombudsman Arthur Brisbane didn’t challenge the fundamental assumption that greatness and notability appear primarily in the public sphere.

For her part, Lisa Belkin missed a critical bit of demographic data. Academic fields, especially psychology, have largely been feminized in the last seventy years. When Maslow was busy focusing on self-actualization in 1943, he was writing as a man for a mostly-male audience of academics and practitioners. The group that reconfigured Maslow’s hierarchy doesn’t resemble Maslow and his peers. Belkin didn’t mention in her condemnation the possibility that women, who continue to perform the bulk of parenting responsibilities, likely made up a large part of the academic psychologists who declared mating and procreating the pinnacle of human experience. She didn’t consider that for the first time women have had a chance to value their own roles, to publicly declare that what they do (we do) privately matters as much as or more than anything else transpiring on the planet.

While I, too, am grossed out by the self-indulgence of my generation (and myself) at times, I want to make sure to celebrate this new hierarchy of experience. This ranking values something that has historically been private and unworthy of note. If we follow the reasoning of McDonald, Brisbane, and Belkin, humans who spent and continue to spend much of their lives raising the next generation to be healthy, independent adults aren’t worthy of obituaries in the Times.  If we follow Maslow.2, perhaps we have to rethink what it means to make an impact publicly, since, for the first time, an academic discipline has privileged what has traditionally been women’s private sphere.

Maybe it’s time for editors and reporters to acknowledge more fully that creating families and caring for others (parenting, nursing, teaching…) at times may well be the way we humans make “the largest imprint,” whether we find “fame or notoriety in the process.”

While Lily was hanging out Sunday at Smith College, getting a sense of what it means to attend an all-women’s institution in the 21st century, I was reading Hilary Mantel’s autobiography, Giving Up the Ghost (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2003). Mantel recently won the Mann Booker Prize for her brilliant, challenging novel about Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall. The book so intrigued me that I pulled everything of Mantel’s from my branch library’s shelves. The autobiography was among the haul and proved to be a fortuitous read on this particular trip.

Mantel was studying law in her late teens and early twenties, first at the London School of Economics, then, following her geologist husband, at Sheffield University. She described her disappointment with Sheffield: “one of my tutors was a bored local solicitor who made it plain that he didn’t think women had any place in his classroom.” (153) Mantel’s comment on her tutor’s approach to women’s education is worth sharing:

Some people have forgotten, or never known, why we needed the feminist movement so badly. This was why: so that some talentless prat in a nylon shirt couldn’t patronize you, while around you the spotty boys smirked and giggled, trying to worm into his favor. The birth control revolution of the late sixties had passed our elders by — educators and employers both.  It was assumed that marriage was the beginning of a woman’s affective life, and the end of her mental life.  It was assumed that she neither could nor would exercise choice over whether to breed; poor silly creature, no sooner would her degree certificate be in her hand before she’d cast all that book learning to the winds, and start swelling and simpering and knitting bootees. When you went for a job interview, you would be asked, if you were not wearing a wedding ring, whether you were engaged; if you were engaged or married, you would be asked when you intended to ‘start your family.’ Whether you were celibate, or gay, or just a sensible preplanner, you had to smile and jump through the flaming hoops held up for you by some grizzled ringmaster, shifty and semi-embarrassed as he asked a girl half his age to tell him about her sex life and account for her next ovulation. (153-154)

I wish Mantel had kept her verb tense in the present: why we need the feminist movement so badly. The fight’s not over. Here’s a not-so-subtle statistic I learned during the information session at Smith: at women’s colleges, women hold 100% of all leadership positions. At peer institutions, men hold 90% of all leadership positions. Lily will decide what she’ll decide when it comes to college. Meanwhile, if I had it to do all over again, I’d be inclined to explore women’s colleges with an open mind.

Mantel titled her memoir “Giving Up the Ghost” as a way to refer to the process she went through as she coped with surgical menopause and subsequent infertility. She was diagnosed with endometriosis in her late 20s. Her illness would end her law career, opening the way for her fiction writing but closing her path to parenthood.  ’Twould have been excellent if she’d added in one sentence about the importance of not giving up the ghost when it comes to feminism.

Dear Tiger,

I owe ya one.  You have given me the best holiday gift a mother of teenage boys could ask for. I take no pleasure from your suffering.  At the same time, I am grateful to you for screwing (up) so publicly.

You went to Stanford because you could play a great round of golf.  Your link-ability got you famous.  That fame got you a thin Swedish supermodel wife and two perfect children. You got really really rich, earning a billion dollars between 1996 and November 27, 2009, when you had your car accident.  By then, we could get a Tiger Woods golfing watch (it’s really light and can withstand a big “G” spot, I mean force), and Gatorade Tiger (if you drink it, you, too, can really swing).  In short, you, dubbed “the world’s most marketable athlete,” schooled us all in the fine art of getting.

I fear that the ones you schooled best are teenage boys.  Mine have grown up thinking that to be successful, their faces should grace ads for sporty cars, credit cards, and breakfast cereals. They’ve known that making it means not just getting a bunch of stuff but having the stuff named for them. And all for whacking a ball around country club green grass.

Meanwhile, their dad has been commuting to his government job on a bicycle.  He comes home for dinner, makes bad jokes, and, when possible, attends their soccer games, tennis matches, and music concerts.  It has been clear for a very long time that they will not live to see a sports drink named for their pa.

I never buy The New York Post, but I brought home a copy yesterday and left it on the kitchen table.  ”Tiger’s Sex Texts” the headline trumpeted. “Another day, another bombshell!” The boys were standing over the tabloid cackling before I could ask them to empty the dishwasher.

“Can you believe this?” one said.

“Wait, is this real?” said the other.  ”Or did someone just make this stuff up?”

Essential questions about most everything having to do with you, Tiger.  So I offer my sincere thanks for creating this golden opportunity to talk to my boys about who, as high school juniors, they think they’re supposed to be and what it means, at the close of 2009, to be a successful American man.

I went on a job interview.

OK, so not a paying job.  An internship.  Two days a week.  And I couldn’t have been more delighted when I learned I’d gotten the spot.  

After five and a half years of — now, how shall I say this? — Unemployment?  Staying at home with the kids? — I stick my toe into a formal work environment again.

I notice three things about my hesitation as I waffle over how to describe the last five and a half years.  One starts with a negative.  (UN.  As in UNhappy.  UNfulfilled.  UNpaid.)  The other sounds like a positive decision but comes off as if it were a really fun fakey vacation to a theme park.  (You know.  You’ve just gotten off the Whizzmatron and are standing by a large metal trash can, holding your hair back — and also the hair of several small children who have just drunk blue Slurpees — as everyone retches from the effects of Zero G, and someone asks to ride again,  and you think, “Why not?”) The last is a simple declarative sentence. (I stick.  Manly, no?)  The truth is in there.  Somewhere.

Even as I walked into the interview, I had these grammatical and internal complexities on my mind.  I’ve been mulling them over since second grade (I’ll save that one for another posting).  I got more serious in graduate school, when, pregnant with triplets, I prepared for an oral exam on the history of American women and work.  I found it difficult to maintain a stance of scholarly disinterest as I checked articles and books off my long list.  I’d be wrapping my head around the cultural and political factors that had shaped American women’s lives over the centuries when one fetus or another would deliver a swift kick.  The most important lessons I took away from this reading were: 1) When America goes to war and most men join in the fight, women work and get paid to do anything and everything that theretofore had been considered unladylike and off-limits,  2) When the economy shrinks, men — traditionally white men — get the pickins’, and 3) drink gallons of water when carrying higher order multiples — it reduces the blood concentration of the hormone that causes contractions. 

I gave birth and began raising children in a period of extraordinary economic expansion. Though I watched CNN reporters live from Iraq as I gestated, for me, my family, and those I knew, we were not “at war.”  Jobs were plentiful.  Money was plentiful.  And in my life, children were plentiful.  I left gainful employ for what I believed – and still believe — good reasons.  I had absolutely no idea when or how I would make my way back to a place where I would be going on a job interview.

Some of what I’ve needed to do in the last five and a half years has been downright head-bangingly impossible.  Much has been plain old fun.  Never have I needed reminding that it’s been a privilege or that it is because I am privileged that I’ve been “at home.”  

When I read Lisa Belkin’s farewell column in an October Style section of The New York Times and found her declaring ownership of the phrase “opting out” and the “revolution” it inspired, I had a grammatical hiccup akin to the one I experienced writing the beginning of this post. I remembered the article  Belkin wrote for the Times Magazine called “The Opt Out Revolution.” In it, she described women very much like me: married mothers with advanced degrees and promising careers who “opted out” of the job market to “stay at home with the kids.”  Her descriptions weren’t always flattering. Women used to running organizations and managing large staffs were putting their PDAs and Filofaxes to work overscheduling and micromanaging their children.  They channeled their ambitions into their offspring, morphing from accomplished fast-trackers into aggressive stage mothers.  Belkin’s use of “opting out” bugged me.  To “opt out” put a premium on the work place.  It cast women’s decisions in terms of a negative — what we/they weren’t doing, rather than what we/they were.

The verb “opt” comes from “option.”  An option is a choice.  Choices often come only to those who have possibilities.  I wish there were a word, a grammatical phrase, that could simultaneously honor and complicate “opting in.”   I don’t imagine anyone putting a lot of energy into this phrase-mongering any time soon.  I come back to those oral exams.  We’re in a time of economic contraction. Options are evaporating.  I worry that even with advances in discrimination law, we will fall back into sexist habits.  Will women have fewer choices as employers hire young male college grads to fill empty positions?   Will women be “staying home with the kids” because they have to — there won’t be jobs, and they won’t have day care?

In January, as I zip myself into business casual two days a week, I’ll still be thinking about what it means “to opt.”  And I’ll be hoping that you will help coin a new phrase, something better than “opting out.”  Send me ideas via “comments,” please.