Bowl o’ Cherriesbowl o’ cherries

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.

Every Sunday, I can’t wait to read The Boston Globe Magazine’s column “Dinner with Cupid.” Globe staff set up blind dates from a pool of folks who apply to eat supper with a stranger.  The participants get asked a set of questions: if you were stranded on a desert island, what would you want? what was your best date ever? why are you a catch? when are you happiest?  The answers to these questions are up top.  The blow-by-blow of the actual date follows underneath and ends with a post-mortem.  The daters grade their experience.

The grades aren’t usually very high — usually in the B range.  Participants don’t usually want to go out again — or, if they do, just as friends. It’s obvious up top why staffers make the matches.  You know — the guy markets wine, the woman is a chef…the man’s a grad student, the gal’s a teacher.  Even with the similar interests, the participants almost always say the chemistry just isn’t there.  One date, and it’s over.

My refrain most weeks is that these people need to go on a few more dates before they give their final answer.  I met my husband on a blind date — the only one either of us had ever been on.  He knew right away.  For me, it took a while.  (Maybe it’s still taking a while….) I’ve thought as I’ve read these weekly date reports that the reason things never work out is that this generation expects things to move fast or not at all. I changed my mind, though, this past Sunday.  The participants finally clicked. The guy (internet ad exec) and gal (asst food and beverage mgr) both gave the date an A+. But why?  Was it just instant “chemistry” — or something more?

Just read the participants’ answers to those up-top questions, and it’s clear why things worked.  If stranded on a desert island, the gal would want: “Peach Snapple, sunglasses, and a bathing suit.”  The guy is happiest when “Riding his bike up a hill or surfing.”  If all it takes to make ya happy is a Peach Snapple and pair of sunglasses…it’s a hell of a lot easier to find a mate.  The guy reported seeing the gal and concluding that she was “stunning and confident.”  I looked at her photo — in the magazine, online — and though she’s nice enough looking, I wouldn’t call her a stunner.  But if you’re the kind of person who can be made happy by a bike ride uphill…why not?

So, it’s not just sticking with it, not just giving it time. The key to happiness is low expectations, so say the wise.  The key to happiness is wanting what you have. The key to happiness is Peach Snapple.

I was predisposed to like Judith Warner’s new book, We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). I read it and had a visceral, negative reaction. I couldn’t put my finger on what bugged me. Two weeks passed, and I still couldn’t sort out my thoughts. I sat down with the book again yesterday, and now I can explain.

Like the more than 60 families Warner interviewed in We’ve Got Issues, my family has children who have needed medication.  I, like so many of these parents, have struggled to come to terms with the implications of medicating kids for diagnoses that 30 years ago would have gone unseen, let alone untreated. In fact, they did go unseen and undiagnosed in my extended family, and the attendant wreckage and dysfunction have been profound. My mantra concerning medicating children for mental illness has evolved to this: it is far scarier to contemplate what things will be like if the meds don’t work than if they do. Hence my predisposition to read Warner’s book with a favorable eye.

We’ve Got Issues is a combination conversion narrative, memoir, and reportorial expose.  I wasn’t sure how I felt about Warner situating herself at the center of the book, but I thought I understood the strategy.  She was outing herself as a card-carrying member of the opposition, one of the judgmental parents certain that kids these days are helpless pawns. Warner started her project, originally called UNTITLED on Affluent Parents and Neurotic Kids, ready to lambaste “the whole archipelago of therapy and tutoring and labeling and medication” (7). She was prepared to delve into the “social construction of disease,” assuming that overly anxious, ambitious parents were incapable of accepting their children’s imperfections and therefore labelling less-than-perfect behaviors as pathologies.  She was set to dine out on stories about the way Big Pharma fed these anxieties, making gazillions shoveling anti-depressants and untested anti-psychotics into the mouths of babes.  Warner stepped out of her comfort zone to attend a meeting billed as “Should I Worry?” The stories she heard at this meeting in a church basement made it difficult and eventually impossible for her to continue with her stated project. Here were parents describing interactions with out-of-control children who were destined for disaster. Diagnosis, treatment, and medication were saving lives.

Warner’s conversion moment came when she encountered a sentence the left-leaning French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had penned: “Mental illness is the revolt that the free organism in its total entity invents in order to live in an unbearable situation.” She confessed that she’d been inhaling these kinds of ideas for decades:  ”‘Theory’ was like a religion to me” (25). It was time, she decided, to grow up. How could she swallow theory whole when the concrete experience of suffering precluded the validity of the musings of Lacanians and deconstructionists and Marxists? The theorists were engaging in “foolish, inhuman, cruel” thinking, leading her to “deconsruct kids’ diagnoses by analyzing them symbolically” (27). She stopped bashing psychiatrists and started listening to families in the trenches, and she hoped that others sympathetic to left-leaning cultural criticism would join her in her new religious affiliation.  She also hoped that families living through what she was describing would find solace, validation, even community in her book.

Other reviewers have taken Warner to task for her approach. Did she, in fact, have this come-to-Jesus moment, or was the conversion merely a brilliant marketing strategy?  If Warner cared so much about evidence, why did she focus narrowly on family stories instead of digesting scientific research?  You can click here, here, here, and here for generally favorable summaries and reviews.

So, why my hesitation in giving Warner kudos? What’s holding me back, given the fierce struggles my husband and I have fought to help our families? As she set out her research methods, Warner explained that she had interviewed “psychiatrists, psychologists, parents of kids with autism, Asperger’s, ADHD, anxiety disorders, OCD, bipolar disorder, dyspraxia, dyslexia, and sensory integration issues — in short, the range of disorders that I had once dismissed as ‘fashionable maladies.’ (And that I will, from here on, refer to as ‘mental disorders,’ ‘mental health disorders,’ ‘mental health issues,’ or ‘mental illnesses’” (27-28). She makes this elision again on pages 35-37.  Since when has “dyslexia” — an umbrella term covering difficulties with decoding, fluency, and spelling written language — been considered a mental illness? And though ADD and AD/HD were, in the dark ages, referred to as “minimal brain damage,” scientists these days think of this condition as a brain difference and a learning disorder.  Dyspraxia — a neuromuscular problem — a mental illness? Come on!

It’s true that cutting edge researchers are exploring whether many of these conditions are “spectrum disorders.” That is to say, scientists wonder whether there is a genetic relationship between, for instance, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.  Families with members who have any of these syndromes are more likely to have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren who inherit variations of these syndromes. Scientists want to know if similar neurotransmitters or genetic mutations are involved. By conflating these conditions, Warner does a terrible disservice to the field of neurology and to the people — children, in particular — who are living (and living well) with “issues.”

When I returned to Warner’s book, I was struck by her description of the process by which she initially got her book contract for UNTITLED.  Her editor and publisher were so taken by her as a personality and writer that they green-lighted her idea. I am curious to know if they took a similar approach to the manuscript.  Who reviewed it?  Did no one along the way object to Warner’s approach to “mental illness?” It’s hard for me to believe that anyone working in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neurobiology, or education wouldn’t have challenged this manuscript.

Last: by putting herself at the center of her book, Warner blurred the lines between insider and outsider.  She wanted to maintain distance and objectivity so that she could report stories that might be unfamiliar to many readers.  But she committed the cardinal sin of the outsider who wants to pass, by way of empathy, as an insider.  She made a careless, even harmful mistake that no insider, no one who actually lives with “these kids” and “these issues” would ever make. And while there is much to praise in Warner’s new book, I can’t forgive her. I hope, when the book goes to paperback, she will revisit the construction of her definition and make a few critically important changes.

I was feeling exceptionally sorry for myself this morning.  Sad and dreary.  Low and teary.   I cancelled our Passover seder because Max has been sick.

Max came home Monday afternoon saying he “felt like shit.”  Pale face.  Glassy eyes.  Wickedly sore throat, he reported.  A quick date with the thermometer revealed a fever of 101.6.   Sixteen year olds don’t generally run those kinds of fevers.  And Max hasn’t had more than an occasional cold all year.  He tucked himself into bed and slept, on and off, until morning.  

When I woke Max yesterday, he still had the high fever and sore throat.  He’d had his tonsils out when he was 7, but I knew he could still have strep throat.  And given that we were preparing to host a modestly sized seder at which we’d have two guests at opposite ends of the life spectrum, I figured I ought to have him tested.  The receptionist at our pediatrician’s office took pity on me and squeezed in Max so that I could still get to work, albeit a little late.  The pediatrician confirmed the fever, ogled the scarlet throat, and did a quick strep test. It was negative, so she sent out for a long test.  For now, the verdict is that the bug is viral.

With a heavy heart, I called all of my seder guests and warned them off.  Could not in good faith expose a 3 1/2-week-old baby or an 88-year-old woman to a high fever.  I knew other guests would be visiting elderly relatives over the weekend, and so I alerted them, as well.  

I look forward to seder with absolutely no ambivalence.  The message of Passover, of freedom, always resonates.  We celebrate spring.  The haggadah offers a chance to retell one of the great stories of the Western world.   We eat the soul of soul food.  And we gather with friends whom I adore.   Since Mark isn’t Jewish, it’s mattered to me to celebrate with others of the tribe who have deep connections to the rituals that make up the chord of my own life.    

So, to cancel seder brought me a sense of loneliness and loss that I can’t quantify.  I woke early this morning and felt disconnected, dejected.  Mark had tried cheering me last night.  ”We’ll have seder just the five of us.  It’s still a seder.”  I couldn’t get there.  The work of getting ready seemed unsatisfying, even insurmountable.

I sat down to work for a few hours this morning but couldn’t settle. My  mind wandered to mundane tasks.  I sent a text message to Max’s cell phone to remind him to register for orchestra auditions.  At about 10 my cell phone buzzed.  Max had texted back: “ok.  are you at home.”  

I replied: “Yes.  Are you awake?”  

“no im asleep but still texting you.”  

“That’s what I thought.”

“do you want to go to zaftigs.  i dont have a fever.”

“Come down and make eye contact, please.”

Down he came, still pale, but not looking like death.  If he wanted to go out to eat,  would he agree to change over the kitchen for pesach?  Nope.  We sparred for a bit.  Max said he’d help bag all the forbidden foods if I’d do it with him.  We agreed that we would work in tandem after our meal, but that Max would have to come along on a few errands, as well.

Max has mostly been snarling at me of late.  He and I, we haven’t been able to make it to our regularly scheduled Tuesday morning breakfasts at Zaftig’s, a favorite local deli, for almost a month.  So we started our late breakfast in the restaurant this morning not sure what to say to each other.  Where was the thread of our conversation?  After a few false steps, we settled in. Sports, video games, my teaching, stories of one of the guys in a documentary I worked on last fall, politics and military actions in Africa, and so on.  What a gift to exchange information without emotional charge.  Just to be sitting at the same table, breathing the same air, and not fighting….

Max came with me as I returned library books.  He strode along, he more than half a foot taller than I, as we stopped by the liquor store for a bottle of Manischewitz.  And when we came home, he pulled out plastic bags and the vacuum cleaner so that we could make quick work of the cupboards.  Without complaint, he walked garbage bags filled with pasta and flour into the basement and brought up grocery bags filled with matzoh, potato chips, toasty coconut marshmallows, and fruit slices.  We finished the job together with nary a cross word.

I hate to type this, but the glands in my neck are tender, and I’m trying to decide if I have a scratchy throat.  This virus — a plague not on the list afflicting the Egyptians — may be a blessing in disguise.  I can’t say what it will feel like tonight as we sit down with haggadahs.  I’m grateful to have had a few hours with Max today, who, had he been healthy, would have spent his day at school.  

And I have an idea for the Afikomen tonight.  I’m going to make the kids hide it this year for Mark and me to find.  And everybody — all five of us — will get a prize.

Bowl O’ Cherries

The other morning I watched five game shows in a row on television. I wanted to turn them off, but I was too mesmerized by the contestants. The first one was a frail woman who said, “I am a simple, average housewife,” then proceeded to win a toaster by humming the fight song of Bangladesh High. The second one said she was a mother of seven, then spewed out the fuel formula for the Russian Soyuz XI space flight last year. The third was also a “typical, suburban homemaker,” who won a year’s supply of tulip bulbs by answering that the Sixth Crusade in Europe was led by Frederick II in 1228. (I thought it was Billy Graham in 1965.) After I flipped off the TV set, I sat there stunned for a minute. Not only could I not remember what I had for breakfast three hours before, but I realized that mentally I had let myself go to pot.

Erma Bombeck, “Gametime”

If Life is a Bowl of Cherries - What Am I Doing in the Pits?

(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1978)

Much has changed in the 30+ years since Erma Bombeck published If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, when women were starting to think about what it meant for their “personal” choices to be “political.” But one thing remains the same, for sure. Then, as now, there was no such thing as a “typical, suburban homemaker.”

I started reading Bombeck’s column in The Dallas Morning News when I was 12 in 1974. I loved the way she deployed her wit and self-deprecating humor to chronicle the life of the mythic stay-at-home mom. I laughed with my own frustrated homemaker mom at the ways a “simple, average housewife” could be counted on to know about anthropology, engineering, and Medieval European history. I was inspired to know that she could publish a newspaper column to describe the phenomenon. And it hit me in the gut that she felt deeply insecure all the while.

Like Bombeck, I sometimes feel that I’m letting myself go to pot. I’m a former assistant professor of history who quit “to spend more time with my family.” Really.

This was my big morning today:

~ waking up my teenage triplets at 6:40

~ getting them to eat breakfast (choc. chip banana muffins and orange juice - hey, at least nowadays, the OJ has calcium - wonder what Erma would’ve made of that?)

~ dropping everybody at the train at 7:15

~ convincing the elderly Russian lady at the pool that it was OK for her to share her lane with me, even though she has a bad heart

~ writing several thank-you notes

~ questioning the foreman at the construction site a football-field distance away from my home office about what his crew is presently doing that is causing the dishes in my dish drain to dance

~ starting in on my to-do list.

Here’s what’s left on the “to-do” for today:

~ call the plumber (again) to get him to figure out why hot water is coming out of the “cold” faucets on the second floor

~ call the electrician to figure out why the electrical sockets on one wall in the kitchen have stopped working (teething mice?)

~ take laundry to the dry cleaners

~ re-schedule an appointment to meet with a neuropsychologist for one of the kids

~ fill out medication forms for the school nurse so my daughter can use her asthma inhaler before gym

~ get to the library to read microfilm of The New Orleans Times-Picayune from 1947

~ set up interviews with Sudanese refugees for a documentary

~ finish War and Peace (I’m loving it, but it’s too heavy to take to the gym).

Instead of tackling the to-do, I’m starting this blog. If you, too, are running away from your to-do list, come join me.

My blog, “Bowl O’ Cherries,” continues Bombeck’s practice of examining and poking fun at women’s choices. I have parked my behind on a chair at a kitchen table where family and the wider world intersect. Many others have taken a seat at this table:

Judith Warner

Lisa Belkin

Anna Quindlen

Katha Pollitt

Anne Lamott

Marge Simpson

…to name some of my favorites. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these women are all white and middle-class. We seem to be productively self-conscious about our privilege and our decisions.

I can answer questions about the implications of the transcontinental railroad on national expansion and labor unrest, can describe what it was like for the first Americans to read books, can explain how to record and transmit digital sound, and enjoy talking about the factors leading to the French and Indian War or the War in Iraq. Mother of Three with LD, I can also share my thoughts about the best ways to organize a mud room or swap stories about advocating in classrooms where kids’ needs might go unmet.

I am, in short, as typical and atypical as all American housewives.

And for the record, I know what the Bush Doctrine is. I cannot, meanwhile, field dress an Alaskan moose.