Read an interview with J.L. Powers at Through the Tollbooth!
Q: What about this novel makes you most proud?
There is absolutely nothing on the market like it! It is young adult magical realism, set in a poverty-stricken township of South Africa. It is a love story but it also deals with the clash between science and traditional medicine in Africa, and it highlights and focuses on the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the part of the world with the highest rate of HIV infections—the heart of the epidemic.
Candice Baxter’s piece of flash fiction, “In Public,” has just been published on The Fertile Source. Here, I talk with her about that piece, writing, and her own personal journey.
In “In Public,” your piece of flash fiction, I love the way you characterize women’s ambivalent feelings about breasts-how they are a source of life but also a source of sexual pleasure and objectification. Was there an incident that sparked this piece for you?
I watched a documentary on Joe Francis, the creator of the Girls Gone Wild video series, and it affected me so much that I decided to dress up like a girl gone wild for Halloween. I wore jeans, a nude body-suit (drawn on belly button and butterfly tattoo), a child’s football jersey pulled above my boobs, and a printed black and white sign pinned across my chest. CENSORED. The reactions I got prompted me to think about men’s attitude toward breasts, especially college girls’ [breasts], before motherhood takes its toll. And it’s not just men. From a young age, girls learn from peer reactions that big breasts equal sexy. Fashion promotes a nice rack.
But women’s bodies change so much during and after pregnancy. The wonderful process of a mother’s body producing milk to nurture her young is amazing, a personal mixture of nutrients for her baby, but sometimes the “sexy” goes away. Breasts are for feeding. After the nursing period is over, women want to reclaim their sexuality. Add in media promotion of cleavage in commercials selling everything from website domain names to gel deodorant. Thousands of us buy growth pills, chicken cutlet bra inserts, push-ups, under-wires and posture shaping straps. We try to make them like they were before, but for most women, perky breasts are the first in a long list of motherhood sacrifices. This piece draws a definite line, focusing more on function and less on appeal.
What process did you use in writing this piece?
Before I sat down to write, I transcribed pages of Gertrude Stein’s “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them.” In her style of repetition, after all, she is the one who said, “A rose is a rose is a rose.” But is it? Each time a word or image is repeated, especially in a short work, it resonates meaning. In my piece, the first mention of milk refers to an engorged pain inside the mother’s body, an internal image of suffering. The next occurrence shows an external image of milk, not one of nurturing a child, but of wasted milk that never reaches the lips of the baby. It represents the many involuntary sacrifices mother’s make for children, however indirect or unnoticed. The third “milk” refers to the actual liquid, which is now a metaphoric image with more meaning than if I had only presented breast milk once in the whole piece.
Another word repeated in the piece is “creation” or some variation thereof. This technique of repetition does not so much depend on a metaphor as it is applied to the sounds of language, like a stanza. I make a word sandwich: (bread) I mention “plump,” “perky,” and “round.” (meat, tofu, cheese, whatever your pleasure) I use “creation” thrice in two lines for poetic impact. I liked the long vowel sounds packed together in the word-the turn of your voice in the middle when you say it out loud. (bread) I immediately follow up with another “plump, perky, or round.”
Only once in the next paragraph, after all the milk repetitions and images and metaphors, does the word “creation” appear again. It refers to the mother’s belly button, a sign that she herself was once a baby.
It sounds as though, in this short piece, you pay as much attention to the sounds of language as any poet. Can you talk about the similarities (as well as perhaps the differences) between poetry and flash fiction?
Flash fiction develops a sympathetic character and some sort of narrative. Working to do both of these things in such a tight space, each word has to count. Utilizing an element of poetry adds another layer, another connection to reach the reader through sound. But you still have to tell a story and set a scene. With access to the vast amount of words in the English language, if a specific word gets repeated in a short piece, there better be a good reason.
I’m wondering if you’d tell us what it was like to have a teen pregnancy in the deep South in the heart of the Bible belt. How did that shape you as a person and as an artist? Do you now focus on writing issues related to the female body in part because of your early experiences?
Truth is, teenage pregnancy was truly hard and filled with struggles I would never wish on my child, but with modern society’s programs, it wasn’t so terrible. I attended high school in the general population, went to prom, and graduated with honors. Because every decision I made was based on what was best for my daughter, life was not woe-is-me horrible. I worked three jobs, was on food stamps and welfare, got a Pell grant for college, earned a degree, and built a corporate career. Young single motherhood was just a part of everyday life. The hardest times came when my daughter turned ten and asked to live with her father in the small town where it all began. I was afraid, not for her, but for myself. She was born on my 18th birthday. I had never been an adult without being a full-time mother. And I let her go.
I had two reviews published on Feminist Review this week.
Falling Apart in One Piece: One Optimist’s Journey Through the Hell of Divorce by Stacy Morrison
Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soliders in the Twentieth Century by Susan Zeiger
Check ‘em out and make your comments. Scintillating topics, all. 
In college, my best friend once described her hips as “child-bearing hips.” She knew back then that she wanted children and, indeed, now has six beautiful and healthy daughters.
Me? I didn’t even know what hips were. Literally. If somebody had provided me pictures of two headless bodies-one male, one female-I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the outline of hips on the female body.
A boyfriend once pointed out a transvestite, then said, knowingly, “You can always tell the difference between a woman and a transvestite. A transvestite lacks hips.”
My response? “Huh?” The transvestite looked like a perfectly beautiful woman to me!
***
I was never one of those women whose overwhelming desire in life was to have children, what some childless men and women have sneeringly referred to as a breeder.
Motherhood was simply never one of my goals.
One of the reasons I left organized religion, in fact, was the emphasis it all too often places on motherhood. I always felt devalued as a woman in the Christian church, and it never comforted me to have my feminist concerns pooh-poohed with a well-meaning, but completely off the mark, comment like this: “But women are completely valued in the church. There’s nothing more important than motherhood. That’s the most important role in life, male or female.”
I heard a preacher one time say that he was sick and tired of hearing people say that God doesn’t value women. “God chose a woman to carry his only begotten son,” he said. “That should prove how valuable women are! They’re more valuable than men!” (I didn’t have the guts to raise my hand and ask if he actually thought God would have chosen a man to give birth to his only begotten son, which would have truly been a miracle….but I definitely thought about it.)
Whenever I heard the emphasis on motherhood in sermons, I wanted to ask: If women are valuable because they are mothers, what happens to a woman’s value if she’s infertile? Or if she can conceive, but her body is incapable of carrying a baby to term? If women are valued precisely because they are mothers, does a woman cease to be valuable if she is unable or unwilling to contribute to the ongoing human gene pool? And are women to be valued for nothing else? Can’t they be valued as scientists, artists, educators, and healers? What about being valued because we’re funny, smart, thoughtful, or we make a good friend?
I never got around to asking those questions. I just stopped going to church. I was tired of crying all the time, tired of fighting people with stupid ideas about what constitutes a person’s value.
I’d go as far as to argue that this strong correlation between motherhood and saintliness, and the conflation of our value as women with our fertility, can be labeled as spiritual abuse.
A person is valuable because of who they are, not because of the fertility-related identity role(s) they assume in life, roles such as wife, mother, grandmother. A woman should never be valued simply because of her ability to conceive and bear a child, just like a man should never be valued simply because he produces viable sperm.
So why do so many women’s self-images founder on their ability to conceive and bear a child, to successfully raise functioning members of society-at-large?
***
I never thought of myself as a slow learner, but when it comes to parenthood, I’m definitely a late-bloomer.
Throughout my twenties, I was grateful that I didn’t have children. The life of an artist is hard enough without adding babies to the mix, I thought.
When I first got married in my mid-twenties, my husband (now ex) and I planned to remain blissfully childfree. I hadn’t anticipated, then, that my biological clock would kick in with a vengeance as I approached thirty. Suddenly, to my surprise, I wanted kids. Oh, not the goobery, snotty-faced, diaper-rashed babies that grow up into delightful, creative, intelligent young people; no, as I approached thirty, I suddenly realized that I’d be thrilled if my children could emerge from my womb, already 10 or 11 or 12 years old. Talking in complete sentences. Potty-trained. Relatively independent already. You know, little adults.
This was an impossible dream, of course, unless I was willing to adopt an older child and deal with the potentially debilitating emotional problems they might have-always a crapshoot.
In lieu of heading down that path just yet, my husband and I have recently been trying for the flesh-and-blood variety, a normal baby conceived in the normal way pushed out of a normal vagina at the normal age of 0 months’ old. I guess I’m willing to subject myself to sleepless nights, poopy diapers, and sore breasts so I can get that pre-teen, teenager, college-student, and adult child I long for down the road.
But even as I embrace my identity as a woman “TTC” (a popular internet acronym that stands for “trying to conceive”), I still vacillate in my desire for children and it has to do with that fragile thing called identity.
There is always one solid reason for me to give up on the idea of motherhood: my identity as an artist. I’ve worked hard to get to the place where I am. I write five or six hours every day, and then teach college writing classes and run my small literary press on top of that. Recently, I’ve started working as a writing coach, and offering private writing classes in my home for children, teenagers, and adults. I easily put in twelve hours a day. It’s hard to imagine how I’ll balance all of that with motherhood.
It’s when I contemplate the vast gulf between what I desire to do with my life and the reality of raising children that I begin to wonder if I really want them.
Yet just when I think I might be “okay” with foregoing the pleasures of parenting, I realize I’m still captive to the idea that being a woman means being a mother. Intellectually, I know that this is a false belief. Emotionally, somewhere deep inside of me, I still believe that to live a full life, experiencing the full range of human emotions, requires adopting the role of parenthood, however your children come into your life.
Why the hell do I continue to associate my value as a woman with my fertility?
And so, I’m on the verge of giving up, of saying, “No more. I don’t want to try to get pregnant any more. That doesn’t mean I’ll try to prevent pregnancy, but I don’t want my life to be dominated by cervical fluid, basal body temperature, and that period that comes late but inevitably comes.”
It’s true that I’ve only been trying for eight months but I’m already tired of the emotional roller-coaster. Twice, my period has been a week late. In those days when I think I might be pregnant, my mind jumps to sugary fantasies of what it’ll be like, and I’m overwhelmed by the I can’t wait-ness of it all.
And then the disappointment sets in when my basal body temperature drops, menstrual blood arrives, and I discover that I’m not, after all, pregnant.
I wonder how women do this over and over and over? You know, those women that try to conceive for years and years and years? Those women that go to heroic efforts, spend all sorts of time and money, all in their quest to have a child?
I don’t think I can keep it up.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’m willing to give up on the so-called “fullness of life experience” b.s. I was just blathering on about if it means some emotional sanity.
I’m fortunate. A few days ago, as we were having yet another discussion about my on-again off-again desire to get pregnant, my husband looked at me and said, “You are my world. I don’t need anything else.” And we once again talked about what we will do if we don’t get pregnant-move to South Africa or Mozambique, to the Caribbean, to Ecuador or Argentina or Brazil, or maybe to all of those places for a few years apiece. Or we could take in foreign-born foster children, generally teenagers by the time they make it here after spending years in refugee camps.
Without children, the world is our oyster.
But still, it all comes down to this crux issue: What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean for me to feel valuable as a person?
We all, we all, need to learn to value ourselves apart from these roles we assume in life. For me, that includes the role of artist. If I replace motherhood with artist, am I really any better off? I’m still valuing myself by something that is transitory, fleeting. We don’t achieve immortality through our art. Nor do we achieve it by bearing offspring.
As I move forward TTC, or not TTC, I hope I can learn to value myself as Jessica with no titles attached to my name.
***
Last November, I had a dream about motherhood and identity. In the dream, I was in a house, surrounded by women I know who have young children. I wandered from person to person, but I couldn’t relate to any of them. In fact, I felt inferior as I talked with them-there was a sense in which all of them had experienced a part of womanhood that I lacked, and so we couldn’t connect. I felt, well, robbed. And even as I tried to interest them in non-motherhood-related topics, I realized what I was doing: they seemed to think I was inferior because I wasn’t a mother and so, subconsciously and nastily, I was trying to turn the tables by demonstrating that I’d had an interesting career and had traveled to so many exotic locales and done so many interesting things that they would never do, encumbered as they were with snot-faced babies and dirty diapers.
Eventually, not liking that dynamic one tiny little bit, I separated myself from the mothers with babies and went to another part of the house. There, I was joined by my many African friends, and we discussed Africa, and politics, and health, and religion, and we ignored the issue of motherhood. Though many of my African friends are also parents, I felt none of the distance I’d felt from my mother-friends, who were treating me as though I was less of a woman because I wasn’t a mother.
I woke up and felt a moment of grief, like the dream was telling me I’d lost my chance at motherhood, that I’d traded it in for Africa and my writing.
On reflection later, I realized that of course, I have never given up my dream of motherhood-until the last few years, I didn’t have a spouse with whom I could have children. Instead, the dream was speaking to me about my hidden desire to be a mother as well as the obvious calling on my life to Africa and as a writer. My desire to have it all.
It was also reminding me of this unassailable truth: While all the other women in the room had chosen motherhood first-and let me add, they are all young women I admire, who have made the choices they wanted to make by choosing children over career, at least for the time being-I had chosen it second. And ultimately, I found myself in a room with the people I had chosen: Africans.
It was a revelation.
As I embark on this next stage of my life, trying to get pregnant, I’m constantly filled with doubts. Sometimes I wonder if motherhood is what God intends for me, or even if motherhood is something I want to add to my mixture of things I’ve already chosen (or that has chosen me)-Africa and writing. Sometimes I feel desperate to be pregnant, now, and sometimes, I secretly hope I’m not pregnant, so that nothing needs to change. In fact, I worry about how motherhood will prevent me from doing the things I feel I’m supposed to do, in Africa, as a writer-those vague, hazy outline of things that make up my future. I’m still waiting for the clarion call from God, the angel of the Lord appearing to me in a dream, the way he did with Mary and Joseph, and telling me, “This is what you’re supposed to do. I’ve arranged everything for you. It won’t be easy but at least there’s no doubt about it.”
But that’s too easy and, in all likelihood, false. The path that God marked out for Mary and Joseph must have seemed hazy and uncertain to them. It is only clear in retrospect, when written about as a narrative, a narrative that brooks no other possible paths.
I wonder how fearful and frustrated Mary and Joseph must have felt as they walked down that road, wondering all the time if they could veer in a different direction, or if they even wanted to, or if this was really the path they were supposed to be on and if they weren’t just fooling themselves.
I wonder how much of this path I’m following I charted myself, and how much has been charted for me.
I suppose I’ll never know.
And, at least some of the time, I’m okay with that.
My interview with Ariel Gore on women, happiness, and self-determination appears today on The Feminist Review. Gore’s new book BLUEBIRD: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness hits the stands today. Please check it out!
Gore, Ariel. Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, January 2010. $24.00.
The final scene of the 2008 indie flick Happy-Go-Lucky encapsulates one of the core problems presented in Ariel Gore’s new book, Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness.
Poppy and her roommate Zoe are rowing a boat in the middle of a pond. Poppy has just spent a harrowing afternoon with her psycho driving instructor, who blames Poppy for the complete and utter ruination of his potential love life, quite possibly his career.
“I think I should give up smoking,” Zoe says.
“That’s a good idea,” Poppy says, with her trademark giggle. “What can I give up?”
“You can give up being too nice,” Zoe says, slightly exasperated.
Poppy laughs.
“Seriously!” Zoe insists. “You can’t make everyone happy!”
“There’s no harm in trying, though, is there?” Poppy asks.
Poppy clearly hasn’t learned her lesson. Throughout the course of the movie, this happy-go-lucky woman meets miserable person after miserable person, who try to convince her that there’s something wrong with her life because she’s, well, happy. And her best efforts to cheer them up, to help them see that life ain’t all that bad, are wasted. But thankfully, though she’s brought low for a few hours each time, she’s always able to bounce back up.
Poppy is one of the truly fortunate: she’s happy with the life she’s got. As she explains to her sister, “I love my life. Yeah, it can be tough at times, but that’s part of it, isn’t it? I’ve got a great job, brilliant kids [referring to the children she teaches], lovely flat, I’ve got her to look at [pointing at her pretty roommate], I’ve got amazing friends. I love my freedom. I’m a very lucky lady, I know that.”
There are two themes presented in this scene. One theme is Poppy’s eternal good-will, her own happiness, undeterred by the suffering around her. Though she is touched by it, and even experiences sorrow at times, she is able to move through the moments of misery and back into her status quo of blessed satisfaction with life. Most of us only wish we could achieve Poppy’s sense of equilibrium. The second theme is Poppy’s profound need to help others achieve happiness, and her utter inability to help.
Both themes have a great deal to say about this idea of “happiness” in western culture, particularly as experienced by women, according to Ariel Gore, whose new book, Bluebird: women and the psychology of happiness, explores the question, “Can women be smart, empowered, and happy?” In the U.S., the pursuit of happiness has become enshrined as a political right. And in the 20th century, happiness has become big business-a business, as Gore discovered, dominated by men and symbolized by the father of happiness, Martin Seligman himself. Women writers and psychologists, by contrast, have responded negatively to the new happiness movement. Why? Gore wanted to know. Don’t women want to be happy?
As Gore set out on her search to explore the source of happiness for women, she discovered, to her chagrin, that the things she thought would make her happy were not, in fact, her happiest moments. What’s going on? she wondered. Shouldn’t her many accomplishments-editor, writer, mother-make her happier? When the research Gore did suggested that the “happiest women” were wives and homemakers, she wondered if that truly equated happiness and, more importantly, whether it was possible to make other choices, to go against the social grain, and still be happy?
“We are told what will make us happy as if we were all the same woman, as if we all share a single heart, as if we can’t all be right when we realize our disparate desires: another child, an intellectual life, more than contentment, a giant squid” (23).
Part of the problem, she noted, is that “women’s notions about personal happiness are all tangled up with our ideas about privilege, selfishness, and social responsibility” (27).
Why do so many women believe that they are responsible for helping others to find happiness, even if it means neglecting or erasing their own happiness?
Although Americans have enshrined the pursuit of happiness as a right that should be protected by the constitution, they’ve done so for men only, suggests Gore. Society still emphasizes the feminine role as one of helping others pursue happiness. “There’s a hierarchy of happiness,” one woman told Gore. “First comes the kids, then my husband, and then me. I’m stronger than they are. I don’t need to be happy” (33.) Gore argues that women have historically become the cheerleaders because we’ve been dependent on men economically and one way of justifying that dependence was to do “extra emotional work” (41).
Gore suggests that many women are stuck at one level of emotional wholeness. If the first level is letting go of selfishness, of putting me first, the second level is acting only out of a sense of responsibility towards others. This is where most women get stuck, forgetting that they, too, have needs. There’s a third level of morality, one where we don’t slight others but we also take care of ourselves. “Connection and relationship involve more than one of us, after all,” Gore writes, “and if anyone is slighted-ourselves included-the relationship is harmed and something immoral has taken place” (29).
So the first step is recognizing that we can seek our own personal welfare without being selfish. If that’s the case, what does it mean to be happy? The key to happiness, Gore suggests, is the freedom to recognize what we want in life and to move towards those goals.
But what do we do when our desires can’t mesh with reality? For example, if our desire is to have a child, and we struggle with infertility? Or if we’ve invested our identities in a job or a marriage, and we experience unemployment or divorce? Is happiness incompatible with heartbreak, with sadness?
The answer, according to Gore, is “no.” Happiness is also the choice to respond productively and proactively to the negative stimuli in our lives, to “rejoice in the midst of suffering” (p. 14). Psychologists who study happiness have noted that only about 60% of our happiness is attributable to life circumstances and/or our basic personalities. Another 40% is “under our control and depends on ‘intentional activities’” (80). In other words, despite the circumstances we find ourselves in, we can practice happiness. This doesn’t mean faking it or putting on a cheerful face despite sadness. Rather, it means doing certain things that can move us away from discontent and heartbreak and towards happiness.
Gore researched the various suggestions for achieving happiness and put some of them to the test. Among the activities she tried, and which worked, were practicing gratitude; allowing herself to be get absorbed in the tasks at hand, that is, experiencing flow in her work; recognizing that the challenge of juggling her work and her relationships (with her children, her partner, and others) was part of the joy in her life-that work didn’t have to get in the way of relationships and vice versa, but that they worked together in tandem; working with a life coach to better define her wants and desires in life, and then setting goals to help achieve them; and, finally, recognizing that she can find happiness in even the most menial of tasks when she doesn’t feel trapped by them, that is, doesn’t feel obligated or controlled by them.
“In nature, with our friends or children, working or reading, we are happy when we are dynamically engaged with our lives. We are happy when we’re following threads of thought and activity we’re curious about-unconcerned where those threads will lead….I am consistently happy when I experience a particular synthesis of the intellectual and the domestic. I like geeky academic texts and I like berry pie” (171-172).
Women find happiness, Gore says, when they reject the prescriptions for happiness that have been written for them-by church, society, spouses and partners-and have the courage to find their own path (173-174). In short, she’s arguing that women feel happiest when they have choices.
But making some choices limits other choices. And what do we do if we lack choices-if our choices are limited by circumstances we can’t change? There’s no easy answer to that one.
As I read Bluebird, I thought about my mother and the career sacrifices she made to put her family first-sacrifices she’s still making today, by taking care of her 100-year-old mother-in-law. Growing up, despite the sure knowledge that my mother loved me unconditionally and would always do what was in my best interests, I sensed that she yearned for some imagined future that she’d given up in order to put her husband and children first. It wasn’t that I believed my mother to be unhappy. It’s just that she didn’t seem exactly happy, either.
If I were to press Mom on whether she wished she had “achieved” more, I suspect she would say she’s achieved the most important thing-raising children who are functioning members of society. I once told her that the book she’s been writing for the past 25 years is her “grand opus.” She hesitated, then said, “Actually, I consider you and your brothers my ‘grand opus.’”
But even though my mother is pleased with her grown-up children, is glad she’s married to my dad, and loves her grandchildren, is she happy? Did she sacrifice joy in order to do what she was “supposed” to do? Even if she doesn’t regret the decisions she made, does she still secretly long for that other Future That Might Have Been?
I don’t know. You’d have to ask her. But what about me? Am I happy?
Although the American pursuit of happiness is legendary, my religious family didn’t consider personal happiness to be the main goal in life-or even a goal at all. It may be closer to the truth to say that personal happiness, or the pursuit of it, was rendered completely irrelevant to the grand pursuit of the truths of God and discovering his will for our lives.
My parents never stated it directly, but I picked up on and adopted the underlying belief that happiness was all well and good, but it was also a little selfish. The point of life wasn’t happiness. The point of life was salvation-finding God and then helping others find God. The point of life was doing what God called you to do. That was where true joy resided. If you resisted his calling, you’d be miserable. Presumably, if God had called me to do something, it would also be my heart’s desire. But if my heart’s desire was not what God intended for me, there would always be a tension between what I wanted to do and what God wanted me to do-and I’d never be happy until I gave in and was obedient. Happiness was obedience to God’s will, in other words.
I left religion behind when I left home, but I realized when I read this book that I haven’t left most of those ideas behind. There’s a secular version of this same belief. Happiness is a luxury, goes this version. Rather than pursuing personal happiness, we should be pursuing social justice, the elimination of hunger and poverty, the eradication of racism, sexism, homophobia, and all those other bad “isms.” Happiness has no place in this vision of the world. That’s not to say happiness is wrong-only that it has no purpose. Happiness, according to this view, doesn’t help you change the injustice in the world. Instead, passion and righteous anger are the tools you need.
Is it possible to pursue peace and justice-and be happy? It certainly should be! Part of the problem, I realize, is that there is something wrong with my definition of happiness.
I’ve fallen into the American trap of believing that the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of material and financial success. But I know myself well enough that I wouldn’t be happy if I was constantly in pursuit of the purse. Worse than being pointless, the pursuit of “wealth as happiness” contributes to the economic injustices in the world.
To be honest, the inner me still feels guilty at the thought of pursuing happiness at all. I still sort of believe that personal happiness is a lucky byproduct of these other things-pursuing your calling, helping others, making the world a more just and humane place. If you only pursue happiness, this inner me says, you risk never achieving it. Instead, pursue your calling, peace and justice, and loving relationships-then you’ll find your happiness. And if you don’t, this inner me insists, maybe it’s not your fault. And maybe it’s okay.
Perhaps Gore would agree with me. Happiness, she argues, isn’t a static condition. It isn’t a state we find ourselves in-it’s something we experience as we reach towards those things we really want in life (172-174). It’s almost like we experience it without knowing it. We only notice unhappiness.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be questioning whether my mother was or is happy-or whether I should or should not pursue happiness. That there are circumstances we can’t control-it isn’t easy for my mother to take care of my grandmother, for example, and I sure as hell would like to be a more famous and better paid writer-doesn’t change the basic fact that we are both living lives of our own choosing, reaching towards our highest values and our largest dreams.
In the end, we can’t ask much else of ourselves.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
qtd. in Gore, p. 181
Like many girls my age, I had a crush on the Bionic Woman while I was growing up. My bicycle was slathered with stickers that I had gotten somewhere, and I remember impassioned arguments with my older brother about who was better: the Bionic Woman or Wonder Woman. But as it turned out, the Bionic Woman was not my childhood hero. My childhood hero was tall, skinny, blonde, and about 9 years old. His name was Michael.
Michael and I were on a soccer team together in El Paso called “The Thunderbirds.” I was the only girl on the soccer team, something that had never been a problem until the day my old all-guys soccer team, The Braves, showed up to play us one Saturday.
I had played with The Braves the previous year and, though I never felt particularly welcomed as a girl on the team, it had been mostly okay.
Except for one day.
That was the day Abel, who went to my school, told my teammates about what he and other boys at my school liked to do to me on the playground.
How they would chase me, surround me as a group, and take turns humping me through my clothes. From behind, forcing me to bend over. As I was lying on the ground. Mounting me if I tried to remain standing.
In other words, they mock-gang-raped me, on a daily basis, for months.
And after hearing that, I was fair game for The Braves, too. Soccer practice became a Russian roulette of possible torture, of boys pressing themselves up to me from behind and pumping their groins against my bottom whenever we stood in line for some soccer drill.
I was eight years old.
I never told anyone.
On the day the Braves came to play The Thunderbirds, I arrived later than usual. Both teams were gathered together under a tree in Crestmont Park, the home field for The Thunderbirds. They all turned to watch as I approached, this line of boys, one team dressed in blue, the other in orange. Then, with one accord, they turned their backs on me.
I sat down and the teammate I sat down next to scooted away hastily as the other boys giggled, “Oooooohhhhh, gross.” My teammates and the players on The Braves stood up, moved quite a few feet away, and sat down again—leaving me very much alone under the tree.
I had no idea what the problem was, but it was clearly sexual in nature, something waaaaaaay beyond “cooties,” something that suggested they would be contaminated by my presence. The leering looks they threw my way from a distance made me feel dirty beyond belief.
I wondered if the boys on The Braves had told the boys on The Thunderbirds that they had “done it” with me. I wondered what they had said. I knew it was bad, whatever it was.
I held it in, because that’s all I could do. You don’t break down in the middle of a situation like this. No, you break down later. Privately. And you never, ever, ever mention it to your parents.
We only had half an hour before our game, though the way the boys were treating me made it seem like hours and hours and hours were going by. The coach tried to put us into lines to kick balls into the goal. Nobody would get into my line. If I stepped into a line, everybody moved to the other line.
I stood in my line all alone, bravely kicking ball after ball towards the goal. The two lines were supposed to take turns. So I took turn after turn after turn, returning to my invisible line, only to find a ball waiting for me.
The coaches tried to change the routine, suggesting we pass the ball to each other before we kicked it towards the goalie. But nobody would kick the ball to me and I was the only person in my line, so they decided we could keep doing what we were already doing.
Like the teachers on my playground who could have stopped the mock gang rapes I experienced on a daily basis, my coaches did nothing.
They heard the sexual taunting and they did nothing.
This went on, like I said, for what felt like hours. I was wondering how I was going to make it through the game. I was wondering about future soccer practices. For some reason, it never occurred to me that soccer, unlike school, was voluntary. If I had to endure the boys and what they did to me at school, I figured I had to endure it at soccer practice, too.
And then Michael, my shining angel of strength, deliberately moved from the other line to stand behind me.
My teammates were vocal and loud as they shouted at him, as they told him how disgusting he was to come even within inches of my flesh.
But he stood behind me in that line and jeered back. “You’re being stupid,” he said. And I have never ever ever felt so grateful for another person’s bravery as I did at that moment.
I don’t know what kind of person Michael became. But in that moment, at least, he bucked the crowd and became my hero.
Yesterday as I walked to my doctor’s appointment, some random dude leaned out of his car and screeched something at me that I couldn’t understand.
But I definitely understood his final epithet: “BITCH!!!”
His scream startled me so badly, I jumped and tensed, the pain from a day of hunching over my computer shooting through my shoulder blades and one sudden, hot tear smarting my right eye.
It’s a small thing, really, that some stranger would get their rocks off calling you a bitch as they fly by in their small white car, insulated from any real retaliation, probably horsing it up with their buddies, not really meaning it in a personal way. For that guy, I’m a bitch for reasons that have no real bearing on who I am. Maybe, to him, I’m a bitch because I’m a woman, or because I was walking down Portola Avenue at 4:15 in the afternoon, or because I was wearing jeans and a sweater, or because I have long brown hair that reminds him of his ex-girlfriend.
And while I know that, like gays with the word “queer,” some feminists have reclaimed the word “BITCH” as part of their self-description, I also know that when someone hurls it at you as an invective, it’s a violation. A small one, but a violation nonetheless. You can reclaim terms for personal use, but you can’t dictate how others use those terms.
It got me thinking about other times I’ve experienced small, but important, violations with complete strangers. One of those moments came to mind right away and it’s amazing how much it smarted to remember it several years later. Unlike the stranger calling me “bitch,” this one seemed more personal, even though I had never met the woman who violated me.
I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I had recently come to the conclusion that I no longer wanted to use the Mirena IUD as my form of birth control. The conclusion had come pretty quickly after it was inserted, for a variety of reasons. 1) The way my uterus cramped and bled for two days after it was inserted convinced me that it’s not a good idea to have a foreign object camping out and having a party in your uterus. 2) I suddenly started having skin problems that hadn’t bothered me for years, skin problems that started occurring within two days of the insertion. 3) While I’m pro-keeping-abortion-legal due to some complicated reasons that don’t belong in this post, I am not pro-abortion, and the realization that the IUD is, essentially, an abortifacient was keeping me awake at nights. 4) My sister-in-law, who had never had a miscarriage in her life and had already had two healthy children, suffered 3 miscarriages after using the Mirena IUD for only a few months. Coincidence? Perhaps. Worth the risk to my personal health? Absolutely not.
Anyway, the point was, I wanted the IUD out. And I wanted it out now.
So I went to my friendly Student Health Center on the Stanford campus, Vaden Health Clinic, where I know many of the staff by name (and they recognize me by sight as well) because I spent so much time going there after that truck hit me while I was crossing a street in downtown El Paso. They were all very good to me and I love them very much.
My nurse practitioner at Vaden, Carolyn, is a wonderful, kindly, caring woman, in her fifties I think, who teaches yoga on the side. She reminds me of one of my sisters-in-law who is a medical doctor. She takes her time with her patients and always listened to what I had to say and, the next visit, would remember it. I felt well cared for her in her hands.
I dressed in that little flimsy cotton gown that opens in the back (or the front, if you put it on wrong, as I have on occasion) and she did my pap smear and we chatted about this and that, joking about how I was getting wrinkles and acne at the same time, which somehow seemed really wrong and unfair to me. She needed help to remove the Mirena IUD, so she left the room to fetch another nurse.
The other nurse came marching in to the room, Carolyn on her heels. “Now, exactly why do you want to remove the Mirena?” she asked, her voice busy and important.
“Well, I’ve been having some skin problems ever since it was inserted and I’m not convinced it’s entirely healthy for the body,” I said vaguely.
She peered at my face, one of her hands on her hip. “Your skin problems don’t look bad to me,” she announced.
“Well, they’re bad for me,” I said. “For what I’m used to.”
“Well,” she said, “a lot of women in their thirties start having skin problems.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You might regret having the Mirena taken out,” she said.
Carolyn interrupted. “Jessica and her husband are talking about starting a family,” she said.
“But you’re going to Africa next week,” the nurse said. Everything she said came out forceful, almost like an accusation.
“Yes,” I said, wondering what her point was. I was, in fact, leaving for South Africa a few days later.
“You don’t want to get pregnant when there’s a chance you could get malaria,” she said.
“There isn’t any malaria in South Africa,” I said, beginning to feel frustrated and defensive about wanting to remove the Mirena IUD, “at least, not the areas I’m going to. And my husband won’t even be with me while I’m gone.”
“Still, that’s a risk you don’t want to take,” she said, the little wagging finger in her voice. “It would be very very bad for your baby if you got malaria.” She stared at me, strongly concerned, and waited for me to agree with her.
“I’m not in danger of contracting malaria,” I repeated. “And, anyway, I’m not in danger of getting pregnant while I’m there either because my husband won’t be with me.”
Did she think I was a floozy and would be getting it on with a bunch of strangers while I was overseas?
“It’s not a good idea to remove it right now,” she said.
I don’t even remember what else she said, I just remember that I was holding my tears back as she talked me out of removing an IUD that I no longer wanted inside me just in case it was fucking up my reproductive system.
And Carolyn pressed forward and said to me, looking me directly in the eyes, “If you want the IUD taken out, we will take it out, right now.”
She was trying to repair the damage that the other nurse was creating. She was, subtly and kindly, reminding me that this was my body and my choice.
This was precisely why I always chose Carolyn as my primary health provider. And I was glad in that instant—and ever since then—that I had never before or since encountered that other nurse in my many trips to the health clinic.
Nevertheless, as I write this, my throat aches with unshed tears. Why? Because despite Carolyn’s reminder that this was my body, the pressure from the other nurse—a perfect stranger, but one who had some power over me—was so great that I backed down and decided against removing the Mirena that day.
Later, it made me angry. Later, I wished I’d made a scene and told that nurse to shove off. Later, I wish I’d asked her, “Why do you have such a personal investment in preventing me from getting pregnant right now? What fucking business is it of yours?”
Later. Later. Later.
But at the time, I let myself be violated.
A small violation? Sure, small, though it won’t seem so small in ten years when a group of women come together in a class-action suit against the makers of IUDs because of some health problem that’s occurred—like they’re doing with Yaz and Yasmine right now.
A small violation? Sure, small. I went to another doctor a few months later and, two seconds later, it was out. “Do you want to see it?” he asked, and I said, “Yes,” and the reason I said yes was borne out of that encounter with that nurse, with the sudden fearful stabbing thought that a doctor could say he’d removed something like an IUD from your uterus but, in fact, leave it in. That’s a paranoid thought, I know, but not so paranoid after my encounter with that nurse who really really really wanted me to leave mine in, wanted it so badly that she applied considerable pressure and used manipulation, even to go so far as to suggest that I’d be putting my as-yet-unconceived-child in danger if I didn’t leave the IUD in. And not so paranoid when you consider all the violations of human rights that have occurred in the medical profession since the profession was created.
I love doctors and nurses, I do, and this is not an invective against them, though it does point out the ways they have power over their patients in ways both large and small, and the very fact of that power makes violations so easy to occur. The jerk that yelled “bitch” at me as he passed didn’t have any power over me because there was no relationship but he managed to violate me anyway.
The only thing that connects these small violations is the fact that both of the people who initiated them were perfect strangers. I’ll never see either one of them again. And I suspect that the other thing that connects them is that I’m a woman. I’m not saying that perfect strangers don’t try to do these kinds of things to men, but I suspect they occur less frequently, and that most men respond differently (both at the time and after the fact) because they’ve been socialized differently. I could be wrong. I’m curious to hear from men about it.
Why do perfect strangers have such an investment in us that they would behave in these ways? And how should we deal with these kinds of small violations, when they happen so often?
I don’t really know how to end this blog post except to invite you to give your thoughts.
My mother used to read books that had titles like People Pleaser: Learn How to Say No. She used to say this was a real problem for women—we struggle to say no, we want to please others. I don’t know if that’s really true for the majority of women, but my people pleasing mother certainly raised a people pleasing daughter. I feel tremendous guilt when I tell somebody, “No.”
I was the 16-year-old teenager who didn’t really want to have sex with my boyfriend…but couldn’t say no. And once you’ve said yes to having sex with your boyfriend, how do you go back and say no? I tried but it was impossible. There’s a line in one of my all-time favorite short stories, “Lust” by Susan Minot, that describes it perfectly: “Then they get mad after when you say enough is enough. After, when it’s easier to explain that you don’t want to. You wouldn’t dream of saying that maybe you weren’t really ready to in the first place.”
Why was I more afraid of saying “no” to my boyfriend’s insistent demands for sex than dealing with the emotional consequences of saying yes? Read More
From Midwest Book Review: “Maternity is more than putting on a little weight and having a baby show up nine months later. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a collection of anecdotes covering the adventure and misadventure that is oncoming motherhood – as well as oncoming fatherhood. Maternity is a nine month span of joy and worry; joy because of the arrival of a new soul to the world, and worry that every little thing you do during this time could screw them up for life. “Labor Pains and Birth Stories” is a fine choice for future mothers, and should not be ignored by future fathers either. ”
From Ralph Magazine: Kind of an odd review, and thoroughly disagree that the best writing is at the front of the book, but here’s one quote: “We are reminded in a couple of these stories that — in a single twenty-four hour period — there are 300,000 children being born into the world. If there are two words to describe the truth of becoming a mother, one is pain; the other is waiting.”
Check out Bookslut’s provocative discussion of childbirth after reading Labor Pains and Birth Stories. A thoughtful review, not necessarily positive, and I’m certainly appreciative of the time and effort put into this one, though I disagree with the assumption that I had a political agenda and was pushing midwifery/home birth/ natural births and am opposed to cesarean sections, since well ovver half of the contributors (almost 2/3) had hospital births. But it’s true, I didn’t include a cesarean section story–nobody contributed a cesarean section story, so I had none to offer.
And here’s one from MetroActive, one of the Bay Area’s many small newspapers. (Thank you, Tania, for securing this one!) “My hope is that our child’s birth will be simple and smooth. Labor Pains and Birth Stories assures me that this is a delusional fantasy. Labor Pains and Birth Stories reminds me about pelvic exams and pitocin and epidurals and slowed heart rates and complications and death and arrrggghhh. Elisabeth Aron turns in a tear-jerking story of a stillbirth; Ann Angel writes about her teenage daughter giving a child up for adoption; and Sebastopol author Tania Pryputniewicz shows that no matter how carefully one plans for a natural, simple birth, there’s always the possibility of the dreadfully unexpected. Can’t it just be easy? Please?”
