Month: March 2016

I’m looking forward to summer.

We’ve arrived at post-spring break, the part of the school year when I wake up each day thinking, ‘Oh man. Are we still doing this?’ We get out of bed a bit later every morning. I have pretty much stopped blow drying my hair. Every spring my coworkers must think I subscribe to a post-Lent back-to-basics philosophy. ‘I don’t know why but traditionally she doesn’t do hair or makeup in April and May.’ Except… it’s only March.

This is also the time of year I start buying Uncrustables by the case for school lunches because there is zero time to pull ham, cheese and mayo out of the fridge, and then all that nonsense with the knife and the bread and the sandwich bag. Who has time? I remember when I did September things like use that jigsaw puzzle sandwich cutter and cut up apples. Post-spring break is all about the fruit cup. I start saying things to my daughters like, Why don’t you guys choose what you want for your lunch sides today?, in an upbeat voice that pretends that I’m totally giving them a special treat. Choice! What fun! Mommy’s going to go put contacts in! I think they’re wise to this charade, but we all keep playing our parts.

Summer means daylight stretching into a bedtime gloaming hour and bike rides after dinner. Somehow, in summer, 24 hours in a day feels like enough. But in late March, it’s still dark when we wake and dark after dinner. Sight words, fractions, 20 minutes of reading… ooooh, hmmm, the Dinosaurs book. Here’s the truth, my darling 8-year-old, I still don’t know how to pronounce Euoplocephalus. And when you spell s-k-e-l-a-t-o-n out loud and look at me expectantly, my brain literally overloads trying to make a word out of those verbal letters. My 4th grader has learned 3 new notes on the recorder, including F#. Music is a gift, of course. And I can still play Hot Cross Buns on the recorder. These are life skills. And yet extended daylight really makes all of this more manageable. Life feels trickier when sunset is earlier.

And so, I’m looking forward to summer. I’m looking forward to reading for fun instead of AR tests, and after-dinner lounging and twilight at 9pm and laughter from the backyard when it’s technically bedtime. I’m holding on, and it’s definitely on its way. I can tell by how quickly the March snow melts off the daffodils. Roll on, summer. Roll on.

 

 

My grandmother was born in 1919. She was a WWII nurse, a working mother, a wife. She worked tirelessly for the Salvation Army. One of my favorite stories about her was when my grandfather was passed over for a government job that should have been his. She bundled up her nearly 1-year-old (my father) and her 3-year-old and went to Washington DC to give the President a piece of her mind. She ended up talking to an Assistant Post Master instead. My grandfather got his job. Clearly she knew her own mind. She was tenacious, determined and some might say stubborn. Yet she was not born with the right to vote.

American women won the right to vote in 1920 with the 19^th Amendment. It wasn’t a slam dunk. About a third of Congress voted against it, and ratification state by state was an uphill fight.

Raising girls is tricky sometimes. Probably raising boys is hard, too, but having been a girl and now raising two daughters, I can only speak to that. In one of the most modernized nations in the world, we’re only two generations out from the 19^th Amendment. We’re only one generation out from Mad Men’s 1960’s. And I’m only about a week out from being told, at work, that I looked “hot” because I had worn a skirt.

I want my daughters to embrace being female, to enjoy being female. I want them to know the history of it, the people who blazed the trails we, they, walk on. And I want them to never, ever question whether that history places limits on their limitless future. I want them to appreciate when literal doors are held open for them (that’s just polite), but also not feel like they need an invitation to break the glass ceiling. I want phrases like glass ceiling to be quaint and old-fashioned for them, like flibbertigibbet or fortnight. But I want them to be aware that there’s always a glass ceiling for someone, and to be compassionate enough to take up those causes.

When my daughter did a research project on ancient Greece, the historical fact that stuck with her was that unwanted infants, which included baby daughters, could be abandoned. They either died of the elements or were sometimes taken in by other families and then often raised as slaves. “Girls have it better now,” she said with her usual understated candor. True that. And yet.

I work at a company that’s about 90% male. There’s almost never a line for the bathroom. So, there’s that. A lot of the time, I don’t think about being the only girl in the room. But occasionally, I look around and think, “Oh, right.” For instance when a coworker, not my boss, scheduled a meeting with me –an actual calendar invite meeting so that I took a notebook and pen – for a meeting that turned out to be about my “career goals.” He was willing to help me out. Lend a hand. Be my champion, I suppose, in this tough man’s world. He was also a year younger than me, not particularly adept at his own job, and on his way out of the company, as it turned out. “Once I get settled in a new job,” he said, “I’ll send for you.”

Um, come again? I’ll send for you?

There are only so many things you can say to that. And if I say it more than once, I lose my PG-13 rating, so I’m just going to let everyone think it. Because, seriously.

When the program I work for gave out commemorative models of the aircraft that we use for our product, I was told that my husband could help me put it together. Uh huh. I’m a mother. To say nothing of going through natural childbirth, if I can put together a 500+ piece Treetop Hideaway Legos set without tears, I can handle myself in nearly any small pieces situation. I’ll see you your model airplane and raise you three dozen homemade popsicle-stick Valentines crafts.

I’m not writing to sermonize about how biased life still is for women in the 21^st century. There are lots of circumstances about life that are unfair. It’s unfair to be born into a village without running water while I leave partially full bottles of celebrity-endorsed Smart Water sitting in my car for three weeks before finally tossing them. It’s unfair to be judged according to the latitude you call home or the accent you speak with. Life is a loaded deck. It’s important to recognize that. I’m well-housed, well-educated and respected by those who matter to me, and I don’t discount that. But better than it was is not as good as it could be.

Every child wants to be something when they grow up. Right now, my oldest wants to be a teacher and my youngest wants to be an author and run an ice cream and fresh fruit food truck. Those have been pretty consistent for awhile, but if it turns out my daughter wants to be a farmer, or a ballerina or an organic chemist, I’m all in. If she wants to be a radical homemaker or the next Sheryl Sandberg, I’m delighted as long as she feels confident, empowered and happy. But I like what Sarah Silverman said, “Stop telling girls they can be anything they want when they grow up. I think it’s a mistake. Not because they can’t, but because it would’ve never occurred to them they couldn’t.”

 

Sometimes I worry that because I married someone who is a veritable Mr. FixIt, I’m setting a poor example. My grandmother was a master gardener, and so I can’t keep a houseplant alive. I didn’t need to learn. Someone else took care of that. Meanwhile, I don’t know how to stop a leaking faucet or hang cabinet doors. Someone else takes care of that. “Daddy will fix it,” my daughters say. And more than likely he will. But shouldn’t I know how? Shouldn’t I show my daughters that they don’t need Daddy to fix it, that they can fix it, because I can fix it. And then I remember that being successful doesn’t mean knowing how to do everything from organic canning to auto maintenance. It means that I am confident in my abilities to find answers. I am capable and I am intelligent. What I don’t know today, I can learn tomorrow if I need to. Or, I can go to my grave never learning to can peaches and find my answers to that in Aisle 16 of my local grocery store. Answers come in different forms. If each of my daughters reach adulthood knowing that they are capable, that they are intelligent and confident that they can find the answers, their answers, maybe their generation will have fewer patronizing meetings with would-be benefactors.

I sometimes think of that old saying, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in heels.” And frankly, I’m over it. I’m over women being congratulated or vilified for wearing the pants, and climbing the ladder and sitting at the table and all those irritating phrases that imply we’re slightly out of our league but allowed at the club. We smell good, I’ve been told. And yet we are also our harshest critics. We judge each other’s fitness and morality and fashion. We criticize each others’ parenting decisions and career paths. Sometimes justly, sometimes not.

Eight years ago, my female boss caustically called Hillary Clinton “that bitch” in casual office conversation. “Why do you say that?” I asked. She just didn’t like her. “Bitch” is an attack on our DNA. It’s personal. And it’s lazy and overused. And we don’t have to like other women just because we’re women. We shouldn’t be voting single issue with our reproductive systems. The assumption that we would is just as insulting as being told that we should. But we can respect ourselves enough to contribute to a meaningful dialogue. We’ve come farther, worked harder, than stereotypes and name calling. Whether we like the women who have been our trailblazers, we can acknowledge that they have had to dance backwards and in heels. We owe it to our grandmothers, and theirs, to be thoughtful with our criticism of anyone, but especially other women.

Our mothers have had more options than our grandmothers. Our daughters have the world at their feet, but even cleared paths need care and maintenance. What paths we take should be less about gender and more about personality, with no one dancing backwards. At our house, my husband generally mows the yard. I generally cook. This may seem like a traditional gender divide, until you consider that I get hives from the sun. And I’m allergic to something like seven types of grass. Also, I am not particularly organized. This means that if I mow, I meander around the yard until I feel like all the grass is about the same, shorter length. Apparently, this isn’t how a yard is supposed to be mowed. There’s this thing called yard striping, alternating yard striping, even. Noted. Here’s your yard back. I’ll see you inside. When I cook, I am equally unsystematic. I look up some recipes, get the gist. See what ingredients we actually have, make some substitutions, and that is how dinner gets made. It works because of who we are, not what we’re doing.

When we prioritize by what we’re most interested in, the questions that we want to answer, rather than the questions we think we ought to answer, we end up with a better slice of history. When we challenge ourselves to be thoughtful in our personal commentary, we end up with a deeper understanding of each other, our similar journeys, our different paths.

What I love most about the story of my grandmother taking on Washington is that you can feel her strength. She wanted answers and she set about finding them. I’m glad that I have her blood running through my veins. And I’m going to make sure my daughters know that they do, too.

 

It’s tempting to assume the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

On a good day, I have a beleaguered, world-weary outlook on the day’s headlines. This too shall pass. It’s always darkest before the dawn. On a bad day, it feels downright doomed. We are now officially in spring, following the warmest winter on record. The Iditarod shipped in snow. We know six million Syrian refugees are displaced outside their country because of horrific conditions inside it. But did you know that 300,000 Eritreans also fled their homeland in 2015? That’s in northeastern Africa. I couldn’t have found it on a map. The U.S. education system is slipping in worldwide rankings and we can’t seem to test our way out, all while we eliminate recess, gym, music and art. And for reasons I still can’t fathom, a quarter of our country feels favorably toward Donald Trump.

“I drink a little more than recommended. This world ain’t exactly what my heart expected.”

I took a walk today. I kept in view of the Rockies, which have 80 million years to their credit. There’s a reason people go to the mountains to sort things out. Also I found my first dandelion, hanging out in the melting snow. It’s funny how that first bright flash of yellow has nothing to do with weeds and everything to do with new wishes. The air was still cool enough to feel clean in my lungs. The Rockies didn’t whisper to me how to offer harbor to the world’s refugees or the solution to climate change. They said, Look at us; life is infinitesimally short… while the dandelion replied, No, the moments are long.

The answer is somewhere in the middle, of course. As all answers are.

The other day when I was having a crummy time of it, my youngest said, “When you get mad, Mommy, remember it’s not the whole world that’s broken. It’s your heart, but it’s not the whole world.” I swear that that kid is an emotional savant.

When I drop my children off at school, just drop them off at the corner without even going in, there are half a dozen people to greet. I drive down the street and wave at my daughter’s Girl Scout leader, who is co-leader with my daughter’s dance teacher. Wonderful women teaching my daughter things that aren’t tested on any standardized test. The world isn’t broken.

When my family’s schedule changed because my husband’s job changed, and I was sweating the idea of incorporating afterschool care five days a week into our lives and budget, one of my friends said, “Let’s figure this out.” And now my children are card carrying patrons of the school bus to her house. We’re a community and we keep each other buoyant. The world isn’t broken.

Work has been a veritable sprint lately. My husband just changed jobs within his company, and he’s an all-in type, so he needs to be able to hit the ground running in order to be comfortable. Each evening we plan the next day like generals strategizing an inter-galactic offensive. Or at least a fairly complicated synchronized swimming routine. Based on my high school gym class routine to Garth Brooks’ And the Thunder Rolls (if there was ever a song that begged for a synchronized swimming routine, that’s obviously it), complicated, choreographed routines are not necessarily my best thing. But we haven’t left a child anywhere yet and they get to see it’s not always easy, but it’s easier to work together. I’m calling that a win.

A bright flash of encouraging yellow pops up when we aren’t looking for it. It’s a community cook-off for a good cause. Blankets delivered to the homeless. It’s sending a succinct message to my best friend from college and getting the exact response I need. It’s the end of the day, when I settle in, tired and with a headache brewing, and find myself in a favorite triad text thread, where the theme bounces from bucket lists to favorite quotations to grammatical foibles to childhood memories, and I can feel some of the day roll away. Far-away friends suddenly as close as a happy hour, and the laughter is real.

As long as we have communities Venn-ing into communities, our hearts may be broken from time to time, but we’re surrounded by the antidote. Our circles connect, share burdens, divide sorrows.

We can slow down, breathe in deep. We can lean in, learn Eritrea’s location. We can synchronize our watches, pick up dinner on the way home, and remember how crazy lucky we are. Look for the helpers in a disaster, Fred Rogers said. It’s good advice and part of the reason I know we’re going to be okay, in the end. No matter how bad things are, some people always rush IN. They’re amazing. But look for the helpers in the mundane, too. They are the heroes of our day-to-day, the bright spots of yellow, and the menders of our hearts.

When it seems like too much, when it’s not quite what our hearts expected, we need to extend our community by one more circle. And then maybe one more. Sometimes we get broken. The world breaks us all (Hemingway, favorite).

But the world isn’t broken.

 

We’ve all done regrettable things in our lives. Totaling my first car (though to be fair, it wasn’t worth that much to begin with). Marrying my first husband (it turned out he wasn’t worth much either). I regret the midnight snack pancakes I had just 30 minutes ago. Just go to bed, Rebecca. You don’t need… oh, are we putting honey on the snack pancakes? Well, I do love honey… carry on.

But this fascination with Donald Trump for President? Regardless of whether he actually becomes the nominee, regardless of whether he might have a real shot at the Oval Office, we’re eventually going to wake up in the morning, not quite recognize our surroundings, feel quite a bit nauseous, and wonder what we’ve done.

In 2012, Mitt Romney said that 47% of Americans were government-dependent self-described victims who would never vote for him, regardless. The country gasped. It was a pivotal moment in his campaign and one he never recovered from. In 2016, Donald Trump accuses Mexico of sending the US their rapists and drug dealers (and a few, he assumed, who were good people), before proposing a national database of Muslim citizens, before suggesting killing the families of terrorists, before suggesting killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, before half-heartedly and belatedly disavowing David Duke and the KKK.

And while we wouldn’t stand for Mitt insinuating we were lazy… tonight, we handed Donald Trump a decisive Super Tuesday victory.

I don’t know whether Trump’s xenophobic, racist, posturing persona is what he really believes, or if he just believes it could win an election. Frankly, both scenarios are beyond horrifying. Because even if it’s the latter and he’s just a master puppeteer, he’s judged our darkness as a nation pretty well. He’s invited the Orcs out to play, and they’ve come in droves.

Democracy, even our broken, gridlocked representative democracy, is about everyone having a voice and a vote. I surely wouldn’t deny a Trump supporter that right. But I would ask anyone who currently supports this angry campaign to reconsider the consequences. And I’d ask anyone who is appalled by this campaign to speak up. Our voice can be louder, truer, than the hateful rhetoric we’ve seen take root.

Sliding backward into an era of civil injustice and fear, and doing so by our democratic vote, is more than embarrassing. It’s immoral. The damage this election cycle has done to civility, equality and compassion is a black eye on our credibility as a nation. And we’re going to one day wake up sober, and regret it.