Agreements

Not actually my son ;) (via)

My son’s been giving me a bad time lately.  He’ll say, “Mommy, it’s all your fault.”  He’ll drop his bread on the floor or make a mess or nothing at all will happen, and he’ll say, “It’s your fault, Mommy.”  He’s joking, I know he’s joking, and he knows that I know he’s joking. All in good fun, and we laugh. 

But I was thinking about the social agreements we make, the way we agree on what’s “normal” and what’s acceptable ~ which amounts to the assumptions we make. You know how a couple will have a certain way they do things.  She stays at home with the kids and does all the housework and he goes out to his job but doesn’t have to do any housework or “help” with the kids.  Or he does the cooking and she does the laundry and they share taking care of the kids.  Or he’s the primary caregiver to the kids because she can’t handle it for long. You get the picture.

We personally have these agreements between us, but then society, too, has agreements.  The idealized nuclear family is an agreement: wife keeps the home and kids while husband goes to a job outside the home.  All this is, however, is an agreement, and these things change over time.

What’s interesting about all this is that we often take those agreements we’ve been handed by our parents and never question them.  The nuclear family is how it “should” be.  Two people of the same sex having a loving relationship and getting married? Inconceivable.  It’s inconceivable because that’s the agreement we’ve inherited and we take the status quo as “normal” and “acceptable,” and anything outside that is “unnatural” or the other.

I was particularly struck yesterday by a number of articles I read that illustrated this.  One was from the Guardian ~ and I can’t seem to find it now ~ about a man who raped and killed his wife.  The point of the opinion piece was that we blame the rape victim and tell her (or him) that they should have done something different, that it was their fault.  By saying that, we’re setting normal that way, rather than saying the rapist is the one who is responsible for his own actions.  He (and it is most often a “he”) should be held accountable rather than the victim.  Another was about the practice of gaslighting, named from the iconic 1944 MGM film, where you call a person crazy and discount their feelings and thoughts so much that they question their own impulses.  A third one was about a woman who witnessed a man undermining another young woman and her writing, and how the woman took the chance and pointed out the gaslighting. A lot in the news about this type lately.

It takes a lot to change these givens.  First you’ve got to understand what’s going on and then you’ve got to call people out on it.  You’ve got to make boundaries and change normal to something that takes your reality into account.  It’s really hard to do ~ on a personal level and on a societal level.

That’s a little of what my son is doing ~ gaslighting.  We all do it to varying degrees.  It’s all in good fun, but it’s also a way to control your world, to try to get your way.  It’s a way to nudge the agreement.

The Stories Don’t Suck

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It was a great Thanksgiving.  Amid driving to Omaha, eating deep-fried turkey and Guinness cake, seeing Frozen in 3D with cousins, and talking nonstop, I edited through my story collection.  Only one more story to go and I’ll have an almost final draft!

One thing that was cool about it was I used my Asus Infinity tablet with a docking station/keyboard to do it.  It was a little slow, but so totally worth it with the portability and flexibility.  I loved being able to sit at the dining room table with everyone around and work and then have it in the car on the way there and back.  Very productive.  The Word I use (Kingsoft Office) does not have full capabilities and takes a little to get used to, but it worked great.

But the thing I loved most was the thing that inevitably happens:  the stories didn’t suck.  Most writers I know are like this.  They write something, and they may think it’s good or not. But the more time that passes, the more they are convinced that the story is absolutely no good and they’ll be mortified when they go back and read it.  But when they do finally go back ~ you know what? ~ they’re not so bad.  In fact, some of them are decent.

That was my experience this weekend editing through my stories.  Some of them needed some work, especially the oldest ones, but the newer ones weren't half bad!

'A Gardener Is an Artist'

Reading a fabulous nonfiction/popular history For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History by Sarah Rose.  Fascinating stuff.  And this passage, wow!

Butchart Gardens (via)

“Although science was very much at the core of Fortune’s work, he was at heart a gardener, and a gardener is an artist: His canvas is land; his medium, plants.  A gardenre works in a three-dimensional world, taking into account the relative heights of trees and depths of borders, the slope of a hillside, and the views to be ‘borrowed’ or enhanced.  But he works in a fourth dimension as well: time.  A gardner plans for seasons: which trees will bloom in spring (forsythia, magnolia, cherry, lilac, and apple) and which will reach their peak of color in autumn (acer, euonymus, and elder).  A gardner’s art also spans years ~ in determining which trees mature quickly and grow tall easily, such as birch, ash, and the softwood evergreens such as cedqar, fir, and pine, and which grow slowly and with some effort to leave a lasting legacy, such as oak, beech,a nd maple, which stand for generations.  Fortune was well aware that to be a great gardener demanded great patience.” ~ Sarah Rose, For All the Tea in China: How England Stole the World's Favorite Drink and Changed History

I am honored to have a piece up at Role/Reboot! Have you read the article in CNNMoney about men in traditional marriages tend not to promote women in the workplace? This is my response, "Men in Traditional Marriages Are Less Likely to Promote Women at Work. Here's What to Do About It."

An excerpt:

Men in traditional marriages are much more likely to deny promotion to women in the workplace, according to a study last year. In other words, if your boss is married to a woman who stays at home, you as a woman may not get that promotion, even if you’re qualified.

The study had several other key findings—that those same men are much more likely to view women in the workplace unfavorably, to perceive organizations with high numbers of women employees as operating less smoothly, and to view organizations with female leaders as “relatively unattractive.”

“The consistent pattern of results found across multiple studies employing multiple methods and samples demonstrates the robustness of the findings,” reports Sreedhari D. Desai (UNC Chapel Hill and Harvard), Dolly Chugh (NYU), and Arthur P. Brief (U of Utah).

Maybe we haven’t “come a long way, baby.”

Click here to read more.

To Be Famous, You Have to Document Yourself

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“History goes to those who leave stuff.” ~ me

Have you ever noticed that biographies and documentaries are most often about people who leave a paper trail or a video trail or photo trail?  Coincidence? I think not.

Al Jazeera America

I loved watching the new news station Al Jazeera America last night.  I think it’s so cool that we have this option, and I hope the channel makes it. Somewhat because we have entrenched political debate in this country, and this might stir things up, but moreso because I love the chance to get away from “The Danger of a Single Story.”

You know Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fabulous TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” don’t you?  (If not, I’ve put it below.)  She talks about how America has a narrative of what Africa is and isn’t and how her work is not only a reaction to that but a claiming of her own story.  This happens throughout history.  People yearn for a single line of meaning for the world, preferably that involved their kin in the main storyline.  Unfortunately and fortunately, that’s not the way the world works.  Everybody is the hero of their own story, but if they have the power (hegemony) they get to impose their story, their version of the truth, on the multitude of other narratives out there. 

Creating meaning for a group isn’t a bad thing.  It’s human nature, how we make our lives have worth.  But we have to acknowledge the many narratives that there are.  Like the Harper’s piece by William T. Vollman about being suspected of being the Unibomber.  In an interview on NPR, he talks explicity about his America and what it means.  (Mikhail Bakhtin has some interesting things to say about the centripetal and centrifugal forces in national dialog.)

Some of the things I love about the new Al Jazeera America channel.  The fact that most of the anchors are nonwhite (by that I mean not of European American descent).  That it has an international focus yet still covers the U.S.  That it tells positive and negative stories.  That there is dialog and disagreement and vehement discussion.  That The Nation advertises on it, and you can go online on Facebook and participate in the discussion.  Most of all, there is pushback against the dominant lines of discussion. 

Very cool.  And here’s the wonderful Adichie for your moment of zen.
 

'Motherhood Isn't Always a Choice' Up at Role/Reboot

One day I noticed on my Facebook feed a fascinating article at this website called Role/Reboot.  Then just the next day I saw another.  I kept clicking over and reading all these great articles by wonderful writers, all from this same site, and they kept popping up on my Facebook feed.  Needless to say I've had writer's envy ever since and wanted to publish something for a long time.  And now I have! Thank you, Role/Reboot! You guys rock.

A teaser:

Motherhood Isn't Always a Choice

For years, Tamara Linse wanted to have a baby, and she could get pregnant, just couldn't stay pregnant. So "choosing" to have kids isn't always that simple.

As I read the recent article “Having It All Without Children” in Time magazine, I was struck time and again with the word choice. Women choose to have children, while other women choose not to. Some variation of the word occurs throughout the article.

Choice is not a word I would have applied to motherhood in 1998. I was 29, and my husband and I had been married for five years. We wanted to wait to have children until we paid off our car payments and student loans, both of us working two jobs, and had remodeled the early 20th century Victorian we bought the year we married. We were nesting. We didn’t think of it that way, but there’s no other way to put it.

I should take a step back. Growing up, I was not a baby person. I was the youngest of seven, so there weren’t a lot of babies around for me to take care of. I didn’t gravitate toward babies, but I liked them, and I always thought I’d have a couple. Of course I would: My mom had had seven, and one of my sisters had seven, along with four step-children.

But then, at age 29, my husband and I lost our first baby at six months’ gestation. I went to that particular appointment by myself, and so I was alone when the matronly OB/GYN told me that the ultrasound showed no heartbeat. She had this look in her eye I will never forget. Compassion and empathy, certainly, but also a withdrawal, as if I had something, as if I were something that she had to protect herself against, the emotional equivalent of crossing herself.

For more, click on over to Role/Reboot.