Pahlka Dot

I’ve raved to friends about The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi’s brilliant explanation of our culture’s bizarre reactions to the attacks of 9/11, but I had not actually finished the book until today, having been forced to consume some off-line media on a 10-hour flight to Germany.  I was mostly done with it and didn’t want to make room for this two-pound hardback in my tiny suitcase (carry-ons only!) for half an hour worth of reading, but I’m glad I did.  It was worth forgoing a second pair of shoes.

Faludi’s book is the kind that I hope they are teaching in American Studies courses these days.  Reading it I got angrier at our dysfunctional national psyche, but my primary reaction was the delight of relevation.  “So THAT’S why!”   Our maddeningly reactionary cultural responses are not senseless; in fact they make a lot of sense.  They are, unfortunately, insane.  Like clinically insane.  Having studied my own personal insanity a lot, I can assure you that insanity has a logic all its own.

The basic premise of the book is this: Our cultural response to 9/11 was to manufacture a narrative of male heroism and female weakness/rescue that was so blatantly disconnected from the actual events that some “serious ‘splaining” is required.  Part One of the book catalogs the ways in which narratives were rewritten, female voices were silenced, and fantasies were constructed in response to 9/11. Part Two embarks on the explanation, which lies in our “original shame” at not being able to protect ourselves from terror from the time the colonists arrived in the New World.  She writes:

September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because it was an “unthinkable” occurrence for a nation that once could think of little else.  It was not, in fact, an inconceivable event; it was the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak, the shard of memory stuck in our throats. Our ancestors had already fought a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since.

What I love about the book is not only that makes some sort of sense of what seems to be irrational or ludicrous behavior, but that it points towards alternate realities, how things could have been, and how they could maybe still be.  Surprisingly, it’s the earliest Puritan response to the terror of the wilderness and Indian captivity that she sees as the road, unfortunately, not taken.  I’ve always thought the Puritans were kind of crazy; they were an intensely patriarchal and religious society, and the whole submission to a higher power thing never really floated my boat.   Victimhood is not an attractive stance, and Faludi’s description of the Puritan response to attack comes dangerously close:

To place human intervention before divine was a sin for imperiled women and men alike.  Thus, when the “Utmost Frontier Town” of Deerfield, Massachusetts, faced imminent Indian attack, Rev John Williams…delivered back-to-back sermons on Jacob’s wrestled submission to the angel…The people of Deerfield understood that they should not pray to conquer their enemies but to be conquered themselves by God.”

Helpless maybe, but I’m starting to get the appeal (of the higher power, not the patriarchy).   However wacky it may seem that Puritan Mary Rowlandson, who wrote her narrative of captivity in 1682, turned out to be really quite glad to have been abducted so that she could make up for the sin of independence from God, her story is introspective and ends relatively happily.  And it beats the hell out of how Americans soon evolved to deal with this sort of trauma: by constructing a set of myths designed to compensate for male powerlessness and invite disaster and further terror.  [There’s a lot there on how this happens; if you’re curious, READ THE BOOK.  It reads fast and it’s worth it.]  Later, speaking of American culture’s preference for Westerns (which chronicle the time during which we finally exterminated our homeland enemies) over narratives of settling the Eastern frontier, Faludi writes:

…Cold War America turned its back on the earlier chapters of our history and the insights they might yield.  One potential insight, which would seem all the more essential in a post-atomic age, involves learning to live with insecurity, finding accommodation with – even drawing strength from – an awareness of vulnerability.  It entails struggling, as the earliest Puritans once struggled, to perceive the message in Jacob’s story of strength and dependency, to fathom the difference between wrestling with angels and slaying them.

There it is again: wrestling with the angel Jacob.  This is where I got really glad I’d brought the book on the plane.  I’ve heard that phrase several times recently, in the voice of Tim O’Reilly, quoting a favorite poem of his by Rilke.  Tim employs this poem, exceedingly effectively (if I can say that with any objectivity), to exhort the audience to tackle important, hard problems.  On the surface, you could argue that Tim’s instruction would sound like pure hubris to a Puritan; on the other hand, listen to the words he chooses to say it (Rilke’s words):

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.

I doubt this what Rilke had in mind, but certainly any of the ways our current political leaders have claimed to win in the “war on terror” have been exceedingly small things, and have made us small.  Many of the ways we’ve responded – security theater, the constriction of civil liberties, our tolerance for torture — have diminished us as a culture and a people.  To me, one of the most heart-wrenching parts of the book is the description of rescue workers’ profound sense of helplessness, and their subsequent betrayal by the media, whose desperate need to cast them as heroes deprived them of their ability to express their anguish.  Faludi writes: “In the mind of the New England Calvinist, helplessness and heroism were one.” But in the post 9/11 media, helplessness was seen as an intolerable condition that required heroism, however problematic, to neutralize it.  We’ve lost much of our ability to tolerate, or even embrace, powerlessness, but there are small ways, perhaps, that we are rediscovering how powerful it can be.

It’s not hard to see that learning to live with insecurity and vulnerability are going to be a core competency of the coming years; how could you argue otherwise in this political and economic climate?  But this dawning recognition predates the current crisis.  I heard Tom Malone speak about the “paradox of power” four years ago: the way to gain power is to give it up.  Most Web 2.0 and open source business models depend on giving away what has traditionally been your advantage: control, assets, intellectual property.  In fact, there is something extraordinarily modern about the notion that weakness is a form of power.  Or maybe our definitions of power are just hopelessly broken.

Tim’s rally cry is for hackers and entrepreneurs to tackle the enormous challenges of our economy, and environment.  But what more profound problem could we face than the inability to see past the contours of our own nightmares?  Functioning radios for the New York City Fire Department are certainly not the kind of hard problem Tim is envisioning when he asks the inventors of the world to wrestle with the angel, and yet still can’t provide them for a group of men and women we insist are our nation’s greatest heroes.  That’s just one of many absurdities that we participate in every day as American citizens: when we go to the airport, when our libraries buy metal detectors instead of books, when our neighbors kids are shipped off to fight a pointless war. For now, simply admitting vulnerability and rejecting the myths that cripple us may be the hardest work we have.  And Faludi’s book, as futile as her agenda may seem, is hard, important work.

The Rilke poem ends with defeat, but the regenerative power of defeat and the beauty of the struggle:

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

There is another point I have not made here, because it requires a bit more thought. I have been in the audience for most of the times Tim has delivered this speech (or variants of it) and the audience is largely male.  It would be a bit silly to draw parallels between these two works and not acknowledge that Faludi’s book is at its core a feminist work, and Tim’s audience (and my audience, since I produce these events) has a noticeable gender imbalance.  I have more to say on this topic, I think, but I will save it for another day.

I got the biggest compliment from my friend Corey this morning.  We, along with our families and a few hundred other families of K through 6-ers, were gathered in front of Park Day School waiting for The First Day of School to officially start.  She told me she actually checked my blog last night to see if I had posted any words of wisdom regarding The First Day of School.  I always feel bad when people tell me they’ve checked the blog, but I was terribly flattered, and now of course, with exactly one First Day of School under my belt, I DO feel qualified to dispense advice.  Shocker!

So here it is.  Parents in general seem far too concerned about what their children will wear on the First Day of School.  It is really not that big a deal what your kid wears, and if you make a big deal about it, you are likely to stress the kid out.  Incidentally, Clem ALMOST wore a dress for The First Day of School, a cute little homemade number I bought her on Etsy in attempt to wean us off The Crap.  (When I showed her the dress last weekend, she said, and this is verbatim: “Mommy, I really like it!  Wow!  I always never like what you buy me!”)  But she changed her mind, and wore her Small Paul shirt instead, which of course resulted in her wearing the EXACT SAME SHIRT as some blond third grader.  I believe a better mom would have asked the third grader to change so Clem could feel unique.  I am not that mom.

Anyhoo…my point is that many parents, and here I mean me, carefully consider their kids’ attire and totally neglect THEIR OWN OUTFITS.  I should have had my own little Back To School spree and chosen something casual and flattering DAYS in advance. I should have laid it out on the dresser the night before.  I should have had a ribbon, or at least one of those trendy fabric-covered hairbands, for my hair.  Instead, I realized 15 minutes before departure time that my favorite jeans were still in the dryer, along with my new capris.  At this point, I made a difficult decision: with no margin for tardiness, several morning tasks still to be performed, and a fashion crisis, something was going to have to give.  And while I spent the day praying I could conceal this fact, I will now, in that bloggy, stupid sort of way, reveal that I consiously decided not to brush my teeth.

In retrospect, I should have brushed my teeth and just gone in my sweatpants, because what I ended up wearing was new and untested and made me look horribly frumpy anyway.  And my breath was probably unbearable.  Not the impression you want to make on your new fellow Kindergarten moms and dads, who are checking you out much more than they are the kids.  Or I’m paranoid and they’re not checking the other parents out at all, but it really doesn’t matter because you think they are and you feel all self-conscious.  The point is that what they say is true: the kids are fine, it’s the parents who are a mess.  It’s just in my case, I wasn’t a mess about Clem, who was clearly completely comfortable, I was just an ACTUAL unbrushed-teeth MESS.

When Clementine woke up yesterday morning, I suggested we walk down to the Safeway and get some milk, since, having just returned from vacation, the fridge was near empty.  She reminded me that it was Saturday, and we could go to the Farmer’s Market.  This was astonishing to me, as it seems like only days ago she had absolutely no sense of time (wait, I think I just…never mind).  Our trip to the market ended up including a visit to LakeFest, the annual street party on Lakeshore, and an overly long turn in the largest bouncy house I have ever seen.  By the time we set off for home, we were both hot, tired and grumpy.  The only way I got her home was reminding her that we had a birthday party to go to that afternoon.  I also told her that she needed to wash her wild tangled hair if she wanted to go to the party.

We finally made it home and I let her watch TV while I did some prep for tonight’s dinner: we were having three other couples and five children over, so there was a lot to be done.  As the party time approached, I checked in with her.

“Do you want to go to the party?”

“What kind of party is it?”

“I don’t know.  It’s at the lake.  I guess it’s a lake party.”

“It’s not one of those princess parties, is it?”

“No, I don’t think so.  I think it’s just a party.”

She decided to go, at which point negotiations regarding the hair washing began in earnest.  Actually, one very simple negotiation:
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I must have had my head in the sand again this week because I didn’t know that Hans Reiser had finally taken the cops to his ex-wife’s body until I saw an actual newspaper yesterday.  I always believed he was guilty, but was surprised to notice myself finally let go of that possibility that she was still alive, that she might be reunited with her children again.  I had no idea part of me still hoped for that, but it was  deeply sad letting it go.

I also did not realize how many people actually thought he was innocent.  The people I know close to the case were on what I think is now fair to call Nina’s side.  The Reiser kids went to Clementine’s preschool; some of her teachers had also been the Reiser kids’ teachers, and the parents and teachers at Grand Lake Montessori were, to my knowledge, unanimous in their belief that Hans had killed Nina.

I never knew Nina or her kids.  Her younger child overlapped with Clem’s tenure at GLM by a few months (the daughter had left GLM for elementary school right before Nina disappeared), and my only knowledge of them being there was Chris remarking on seeing Hans in the parking lot during one of our first weeks at the school.  He knew of Hans through the software community, and after told our friend Jon (who knew Hans at UC Berkeley) that Clem was in school with Hans Reiser’s kid. When Nina first went missing, I remember seeing an article online about a missing Oakland mom, and clicked through not knowing anything about her.  The next day, there were flyers in our parent boxes and emails from the school urging us to look for Nina or to come forward with any information that might help locate her.  As the days went on, the school really mobilized.  They organized several searches for her in the hills, raised money for billboards asking for information, and when Hans was indicted, continued to raise money for her kids, before they left for Russia.

To be part of the GLM community during this time was to witness surreptitious hallway conversations among parents who knew the Reisers, whispered in a sort of code language that developed to keep our children from knowing what we were talking about.  The school director reminded parents on more than one occasion how traumatic the idea of losing one’s mother is to a child, and that the kids should be shielded from any knowledge of the case.  But it was impossible not to talk about it; parents, teachers, and administrators were being interviewed by the police, and later testified at the trial.  I recall showing up to volunteer at the Book Fair one time and the adjoining rooms were being used to counsel some of the teachers who’d testified at the trial.  It had been very stressful for them, and the school had brought in a therapist to help them decompress from the whole experience.

The consistent message from the GLM parents and teachers was that Nina would not have run off and left her children (Hans’s explanation for her disappearance was that she had gone back to Russia or Europe).  I think this spoke to both the parents’ impressions of Nina as an individual, but also to a sense of our identity as a community: such an act by “one of us” was unthinkable.  Obviously some in the open source community similarly did not want to believe one of their own had committed murder, and held out a belief that Hans was innocent despite what our friend Ocean pointed out was an almost comical litany of condemning evidence, right down to the books on murder investigation Hans purchased after she disappeared (which should have silenced the argument that Hans was too smart to have committed murder right there).

Now that the competing narratives have been resolved, I surfed around for blog and twitter entries about the case yesterday, and found some humorous:

some bitter:

As to the many geeks who vehemently defended him, my theory was that they, also being socially inept, saw themselves looking guilty if ever accused, and my advice to them was (and is) not to kill their wives and they’d be fine. I will be looking for contrition from those guys on the Wired boards, and do not expect to find any.
- deathbychichi commenting on Valleywag article

and some righteous:

The impulse to see a lesson in the Reiser case should be resisted.  The only thing this case “goes to show” is that the Oakland Police don’t always make a hopeless mess of everything (though the cynical corollary is that they’re capable of solving high-profile cases involving middle class white people when the evidence is overwhelming.)  But Hans’ murder of his wife is part of no pattern, and the attempts to connect it to other trends or headlines have been misguided, opportunistic and wrong.  The so-called Geek Defense in particular, in which the defense attorney asserted that Hans’s suspicious behavior was the natural result of geekitude, rather than guilt, does a severe disserve to geeks and those with Asperger’s.  Thank God Hans was either too broke or too crazy (or both) to hire an attorney who was not clearly somewhat nuts in his own right; if some genius lawyer had managed to get Hans acquitted by virtue of his social ineptitude, the Geek Defense would have a cultural life it has no business having.  As one Valleywag commenter says to another:

Indeed, Hans is just an ordinary sociopath and narcissist.  His crime says nothing about geeks, Asperger’s Syndrome, or the open source movement; nor does it say anything about the virtue of Oakland Montessori mothers.  I don’t think the murder even qualifies as a tragedy in the Greek sense; Hans was certainly no noble hero with a fatal flaw, and while Nina may well have been a noble person, I think she was pretty clearly, no matter how unfashionable the term, a victim.  With no sociological trend at stake and no “lesson learned,” I am left where I started: deeply sad.  By all accounts but Hans’, those kids had a loving and nurturing mother, whom they last saw when they were only 4 and 6.  Unfortunately they also had a father whose final words to the jury that convicted him were “I’ve been the best father that I know how.”  If that’s true, that’s even sadder.

I’ve been reading Groundswell (along with 3 or 4 other books simultaneously, which probably isn’t healthy) and while it definitely lends itself to skimming in parts, it’s a solid, useful book and I’ve been thinking of buying it in bulk to leave around the office. I was shocked, and then not, to hear that the author, Charlene Li, who has also been a speaker at Web 2.0 Expo, is leaving her employer.

Forrester has bent over backwards to be accommodating and flexible, but in the end, I have decided that I need to have greater control over how I allocate my time between work and family. As any working parent knows, there’s no such thing as balance – only a series of compromises on both the work and home front.

After my crisis about the Europe trip (which went well, by the way, despite it’s brevity) I’ve been domestically inclined. I’ve gone from blogging quite a bit on the work blog in the spring, to a short flurry of posts here, to nothing in the past weeks. Not that work has shrunk its footprint in my life; there’s been plenty going on with putting the finishing touches on our New York event, planning for Europe in October, and thinking ahead to 09…yes, the planning starts now, or at least planning for the planning. But with Chris pulling back-to-back all-nighters for weeks now, it’s just me on the homestead, so some focus is required.  The “balance” shifts.

Anyway, good for you, Charlene.  You have options.  You’re using them.  I bet whatever you do next will be just as significant and useful as your recent achievements, and now you’ll be in the drivers seat.  I’ll take inspiration not only from your insights into the business potential of social technologies but also from your frank assessment that the search for balance is futile.

When I first moved to San Francisco, my roommate Wey Wey, who has the most beautiful voice ever, would play guitar and sing in our Mission apartment.  Her singing was enchanting and I always felt totally blessed to be near her, but it was also unintentionally hysterical when she would mangle the words, especially to REM songs.  (I mangle the words to songs all the time too, but it’s funnier when someone else does it).  Now there’s a word for those crazy mishearings: a mondegreen.  It’s a brand new word, or at least officially. The Merriam-Webster folks included it for the first time in their 2008 edition.

As John Murrell over at GMSV says, we all need to do our part for this newbie noun.  I’m thinking it’s going to be a bit of a challenge to work it into casual conversation, so I vote instead for submitting your favorite mondegreen to the Merriam-Webster folks for their collection.  I’d put Wey Wey’s in for her, except I can’t remember any of them.  I realized recently (when I put my finger on a rotary dial phone) that I still remember my 4th grade best friend’s phone number (thanks, that’s really helpful), but I can’t recall the words that split my sides in the early nineties.

I sound old before my time, and let me make that impression worse by being even more nostalgic.  As a word, mondegreen has arrived a bit late.  The days when you learned the words to your favorite songs completely wrong are probably largely gone.  Now we just look them up on the web.  Yes, I realize people can still mishear lyrics and other spoken words, but the giant trove of absurd misquotes are the result of not being able to understand what the singer was saying, and just deciding to fill in the blanks, whether you knew it or not.  I think the instant availability of the correct data has trained us not to bother coming up with alternatives; if it’s vague, just check it.  Mondegreens: get ‘em while you can.

In honor of hitting 10K miles on the Prius (which is nothing to crow about; I swore to reduce my driving to 6K a year when I bought the car), I would like to say a few things about my car. First, Prius, I love you. You are ugly, with a butt that looks like it was lopped off in an unfortunate factory accident, and a hunched over Quasimodo stance, and you’re blue when I wanted black, but I love you terribly. I love your 40 miles a gallon (I don’t where they got that 60 number), I love the way you cheerfully beep and unlock the door when I walk up to you, and I love your sunglasses holder, big enough to fit my big funky tacky frames. I love the way you came with several very annoying habits, and all I had to do to change them was to look up the magic spells on the Interweb and perform them with accuracy and conviction. If this mechanism could possibly be extended to the other important people in my life…

Second, you are different, and not everyone understands you and accepts you. You are quiet, and that is different from most cars. Seems the people who created you didn’t think through the implications of this to blind people, who have an actual logistical problem with quiet cars.* But the non-blind people who feel it necessary to say “wow, it’s so quiet, I can’t get over it” for the fifth time…well, they are starting to bug me.

Also, you have a back up camera in your very ugly butt. This is necessary because of the limited visibility out of your oddly designed rear. It has been a godsend in the chaotic parking lot of Clementine’s school, since the rear view mirror totally misses people under four feet tall. However, other people don’t know that you have a back up camera, and that I am looking THERE, on the console, and NOT in the rear view mirror, when I am backing up. The driver of the car behind me doesn’t know that even though I am not looking up, I can see what’s behind us quite clearly, and when I start to move backwards, he or she begins honking desperately, as if to save his or her life, which is quite disconcerting. As of yet there is no universally recognized hand signal for “it’s okay, I have a back up camera!” so typically I do something retarded like a thumbs up into the rearview mirror, which has occasionally been taken to mean “it’s okay, I WANT to back up into your car! Wouldn’t an accident be really fun right now?” and sent the other driver into absolute seizures of honking and hand waving. These are just the little wrinkles of personal interaction we as a society need to work out when new technology comes along, like when cell phone headsets came out, and the luddites thought the hipsters had started taking acid and talking to themselves in public, and were afraid.

Lastly, you are different, but you are also extremely popular. Clementine and I have progressed from shouting “Blue Pruis!” when we see one of your kin, to doing it only when we see two at one time, and now pretty much only when we see three in a row at a stoplight. I frequently have to pick you out from a half dozen other identical blue Priuses in a parking lot. This is why I put the large white gash on your passenger side door, and have still not removed the temporary registration papers the dealership taped to the inside front window. Yes, mean people have said things like “you should really fix that,” but I am here to tell you those things make you SPECIAL. Not that you weren’t already special to me.

You are popular because you are the car of the future. You were one of the first, and you are the best. Fuck the Tesla. Yes, I know, you are still a bit self-conscious about your poky acceleration on an uphill, and the Tesla can go from zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds, but you are smart and cheap, like your owner. The Telsa is Paris Hilton. You are Terry Gross: you are very good at what you do, and you are there for me every day.

* I’m not sure whether this is an unintentionally funny embarrassment or a piece of pure PR genius, but I found this in last month’s Harpers. These are the lyrics to to “The Hybrid Car Song” by Mary Ellen Gabias, originally published in March in Braille Monitor, the newsletter of the National Federation of the Blind. The song is sung to the tune of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.”

Kids and dogs won’t know when to scurry.
Silent death arrives in a hurry.
All who walk have reason to worry
‘Bout the hybrid car.
We all want to stop the polluting,
Save a lot of gas while commuting.
If they made sound there’d be no disputing
With the hybrid car.
Saving the planet we all hold dear,
Nobody wants to destroy it.
Please make cars pedestrians can hear
‘Cause we want to be ’round to enjoy it.
We don’t need a noisy vrum-vrumming,
Just a simple audible humming,
So that we can know when you’re coming
In a hybrid car.
Then we all can walk with safety on the street
Without fear that we will accidentally meet
A hybrid car.

Will someone please build this product for me? When you have an only child, you can endlessly set up play dates, but you will still inevitably find yourself on a Saturday afternoon, having exhausted your tolerance for playing Vampire Bunnies for the 35th time, and wishing your kid had someone to play with while you prepped dinner. I would like to be able to go to a browser and/or mobile device and set my status to “looking for play date now” and look at a list of other parents in my network who are in the same boat. The service should sort by proximity, age of kid, and/or other factors I choose. I would of course approve everyone in my network so we’re talking about people we already know here; it could just be a Facebook app even, but it needs a mobile interface. It could also ask for proposed length of play date, and match you up the way you find which cars are available on Zipcar. The service should offer the option that of receiving text messages or other alerts when a family in your network sets their status to “looking.” The “invite for play date now” function should be like a poke on Facebook, or even a meeting request in Outlook, in that it should save you the social overhead of having to call and politely ask how the other parent is doing, etc. You can always pick up the phone and chat if you want to, but sometimes you just need to make the date and execute.

Obviously, this doesn’t need to be limited to only children. Kids with siblings sometimes need impromptu dates with kids their own age. Also, I’m sure there are other applications of this same basic mechanic, though I can’t actually think of any.

Oh, but it should also have “going to Ikea” and “going to Target” as two of the status options, and allow you to text your friends the couple of things they could pick up for you while they’re there. And you earn some kind of points for saving your friends trips to the store.

Okay, here’s the headspace I’m in. Just got back from a week of pretty grueling travel (something like 20 meetings in 4 days) in India. Home this week when I should be at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston. Feeling guilty and left out about not being at E2, but elated to be home with the munchkin, who is totally my crack (but healthier for sure). Leaving next week for Europe for venue tours, advisory board meeting, Ignite Paris, etc. Husband begging me desperately not to go; he’s on final crunch for Spore and under “normal” circumstances would revert to his normal 28 hours on/12 hours sleep work cycles. But guess what: we have a kid, and we both have jobs. How’s this gonna play out?

So this is the headspace I’m in, and here are four articles I read today.

Are There Too Many Women Doctors?
How my mother’s fanatical views tore us apart, By Rebecca Walker
The mother-daughter wars
$5 gas? To some, it’s not impossible

Get it? No I guess not. Alright then, here’s a glimpse into my stressed and messed mind. We’ll start with the Walkers: mother Alice (yes, the famous writer) and daughter Rebecca, also a writer (and a college classmate of mine, though I didn’t know her personally). Rebecca has published a very bitter account of her relationship with her mother, one in which she blames her mother’s ambition and feminist ideology for a neglected and painful childhood.

…While she has taken care of daughters all over the world and is hugely revered for her public work and service, my childhood tells a very different story. I came very low down in her priorities - after work, political integrity, self-fulfillment, friendships, spiritual life, fame and travel.

Well, I wasn’t planning on becoming Alice Walker anytime soon, but I sure as hell could have used a more encouraging message today. That long list, minus the fame, is mostly stuff I thought I could have and also have a child who felt loved and nurtured. I realize this is all relative, but Rebecca implies that you actually can’t balance those priorities without your kid getting the shaft. It would be histrionic of me to suggest that Clementine would consider herself at the bottom of my priority list, or feel as unloved as Rebecca clearly feels (and it seems with justification), but it would be nice not to have the mother’s needs and the child’s needs positioned in such direct opposition. After all, I’m about to leave again next week. And I’ll be spending Wednesday night with my book club, Thursday night with Josh and Helen (visiting from Oz) and Friday night with my women’s circle. And I’m up late writing an unnecessary blog post, which will make me tired and probably grumpy with her tomorrow morning. Do I need to look at my priorities?

When I have thought about my priorities lately, I’ve actually been trying to pay more attention to self-fulfillment outside of motherhood. Yes, I guess I’m lucky that I am so fulfilled by being a mom to an adventurous, sweet, loving, and willful five year old. But I notice something when I spend time doing two things I don’t do nearly enough of: writing and exercising. I notice a sense of taking care of myself, and I think I should do more of it.

Rebecca concludes that she has “discovered what really matters - a happy family,” and decides to model her own motherhood on her stepmother’s traditional approach.

My father’s second wife, Judy, was a loving, maternal homemaker with five children she doted on. There was always food in the fridge and she did all the things my mother didn’t.

To which Phyllis Chelser, writing on Salon, has this to say:

Yes, and Alice did all the things that women like Judy don’t want to do and can’t do: Write great poems and novels, devote oneself to world work, crusade for human and women’s rights. Rebecca: Trust me, a woman really cannot do both. The myth that we can is a dangerous one.

Chelser is just warning against pretending you can do everything and be everything, and hey, that’s something many women, including me, probably need to hear daily. But ouch. Again, I’m not as ambitious as all that. And I think I have a pretty decent role model, which clearly Rebecca lacked. My mother struggled with the demands of school and then her midwifery practice, with its long shifts and odd hours, while raising two daughters. My sister and I were often what they called “latch key kids” back then (maybe they still call them that) and there were times I wished for a mom who was big into the PTA. Her divorce from my dad wasn’t exactly fun. But I never felt unloved, and I don’t think I ever doubted that I was high on her priority list. My mom needed her career to be fulfilled, and I think it was good for her daughters that she pursued it. Only now do I realize how hard it must have been.

I’m with Rebecca on one thing: I think motherhood is Da Bomb. But I’m not with Rebecca on throwing the baby of feminism out with the bathwater of her personal pain. While I feel the weight of daily, even hourly choices in a zero-sum game, pulled in multiple directions and constantly disappointed not to have lived up to my potential, I try (sometime unsuccessfully) not to blame anyone but myself. Mostly because I am personally too privileged to get away with it; my job is flexible, my boss is understanding, and my husband has always been willing to play Mr Mom whenever I need to leave town for work(current circumstances excepted). But things still aint right in our culture, not by a long shot. Pick up The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi and read a page, any page. Or check out this truly bizarre exercise in sexist illogic, a Business Week article that takes the following data:

• Women doctors tend to work 20% to 25% fewer hours than their male counterparts,
• Women are willing to take on lower-paying specialties that male doctors are moving away from, such as primary care, pediatrics, and obstetrics,
• Doctors who work fewer hours have less burnout; there is a strong association between long hours and medical errors

and concludes that perhaps there are too many women doctors. Apparently we are projecting “a shortfall of anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 physicians in the U.S. relative to demand by 2020,” and I guess there must be someone to blame. Somehow the fact that more women than ever are becoming doctors (up from 10% of the physician workforce in the 1970s to one third now) is a bad thing, because we don’t have enough doctors overall. Huh? Wait, let me explain. Turns out motherhood is to blame.

“It’s pretty much an even bet that within a year or two of entering practice they will go on maternity leave,” says Phillip Miller, a vice-president of the medical recruiting firm Merritt, Hawkins & Associates. “Then they are going to want more flexible hours.”
Such demands tend to irritate older doctors. “The young women in our practice are always looking to get out of being on-call,” says a male internist at a large New York-area medical group who asked not to be named. “The rest of us have to pick up the slack. That really stirs up a lot of resentment.”

Well fuck you very much, Dr Asked Not To Be Named. No chance that making the profession tolerable to human beings who may also be parents might actually help recruitment? And fuck you, Dr. Brian McKinstry, of Scotland’s University of Edinburgh, who concludes that “in the absence of a profound change in our society in terms of responsibility for childcare, we need to take a balanced approach to recruitment.” In other words, let’s not let so many women into medical school. Unless we can effect a profound change in responsibility for childcare, in which case, what? Then we let in fewer men?

(I should clarify that the author of the article isn’t entirely to blame here. I think she chose a rather unfortunate title and I think she implies some really stupid things, but she is really just reporting on an article in The British Medical Journal by Dr. McKinstry titled “Are There Too Many Female Medical Graduates? Yes.” The Yes is IN THE TITLE. I didn’t add it. Just to be clear here.)

All of this, of course, brings me to the price of gas. Basically, my thought is that it’s going to kill the airline industry and do serious harm to the events business, assuming that a lot of people fly to the conferences and tradeshows we produce. Maybe I should just get ahead of this curve, can our overseas business, and spend less time on the road. If only it were my decision alone, and if only I were confident and quick to act. I would not only decrease the stress on me and my family, I would dramatically reduce my carbon footprint, which is more like an asteroid crater than a footprint at this point.

The truth is that I kind of hold on to the travel. Remember that profound change in our society in terms of responsibility for childcare? Yeah, well that’s one part Dr. Fuckwad got right. It’s not really here yet. Chris is an amazing dad and husband, but when I am at home, things have a tendency to just kind of drift. Responsibilities designed to be shared slip slowly and quietly downhill… towards the mom. I let them. I’m supposed to go to my boot camp class in the morning, but if Clementine wakes up before I leave, I spare Chris the early rise and stay with her. Chris is supposed to clean up the kitchen but when I’m up I might as well load and unload the dishwasher. Taxes, bills, camp applications, school forms, doctors appointments, travel plans; those don’t slip, they’re just mine. When I go away for a week, which I do a lot, Chris deals with everything, and it feels like our roles even out. He likes it (except, understandably, during his crunch time). He gets quality time with Clementine, he gets to be in charge of the house, he gets to feel super-competent and independent. And Clem gets to see Domestic Daddy.

I don’t know what the right thing is. I know that I want to accuse my employer and the entire capitalist system of always wanting more – more events, more revenue, bigger brands – but that wanting it all feels familiar. The list of things I have not done is so much longer than the list of what I have done, or at least it seems that way. Small thing: in the course of writing this, I decided to shorten my trip to Europe next week. London only, instead of the three cities planned. I will do the advisory board meeting, but skip venue tours, Ignite Paris, and the salon in Amsterdam. It’s too small a decision to be a tragedy, a victory or even a true embarrassment (though I am a bit embarrassed). I think it just is my life: little things here and there. Hoping each little decision heads me in the right direction.