In which pretty blonde women have babies (gasp)

Have you read Kate Chopin's The Awakening? If not, you should.

Seriously. Go do it now.

****

Have you read it? Great. Let's talk about Marissa Mayer.

Actually, let's not talk about Marissa Mayer. She'll be much more interesting to talk about in a year or so, when we can see if she's managed to jolt Yahoo! into the 21st century. Let's talk about the fact that people are talking about Marissa Mayer's fetus as though it's the biggest piece of news related to her hiring.

Marissa Mayer is, by all accounts, an intelligent technologist, an extremely capable executive, and generally a Web 3.0 star. The biggest news here is that she wanted to work for Yahoo!

But no - we have to talk about how she's pregnant, and how she doesn't seem to think that giving birth will totally destroy her ability to lead an enormous (and enormously struggling) company. What madness!

****

Edna Pontellier, the woman who awakens in The Awakening, is a decade younger than Marissa Mayer, and much less intelligent. Oh, come on - you've read the book by now, and you know it's true. She's good at betting on horses, but she's no towering intellect.

In fact, Edna Pontellier doesn't have much in common with Marissa at all. She's got absolutely no experience with the internet, most of her money comes from her husband, she's not very self-possessed or self-confident, and she's terrible at remembering to wear sunscreen. But she resembles Marissa in a few ways, some of them important: she's blonde(ish) and attractive, she is wealthy, and she would like to do more in life than be a beloved and loving mother.

Edna puts it like this:

"I would give up my life for my children, but I wouldn't give myself."

Her friend Adele, a splendid wife and mother, a beauty bent over the sewing of tiny bibs, doesn't understand this in the slightest; but of course, we can hardly blame Adele, since Edna doesn't quite get understand herself either. But we might observe, from a comfortable readerly distance, that Edna would really like to be the kind of parent that her husband is: unquestionably loving towards their children, very considerate of their material welfare, often absent, and beloved in absence as in presence.

Edna wants many things, of course. She wants to be in love, and to be loved, and to remain married to her husband while having sex with rather more exciting men, and to make art - make good art, even - and to run her own household, and to learn how to swim, and to hear great music, and to walk unencumbered down the streets of New Orleans, and to have happy children, and to eat crackers and Gruyere at midnight if she feels like it.

Edna might be greedy and selfish; that's a pretty fair response to her characterization. She makes sometimes astonishing demands on her husband, who is conveniently absent for much of  the story. But it's very important to note that she does not want everything. There are many apparently desirable things that Edna simply does not want.

She doesn't want to be a powerful society woman (although she probably could be). She doesn't want to summer in Paris (although she certainly could). She doesn't want a big, beautiful house (she has one, and leaves it quite willingly behind). She doesn't want a career in banking (which is fortunate, because she certainly couldn't have one) or a massive amount of wealth (which she has no interest in helping her husband acquire). She wants a certain unexpected combination of things, but she's willing to sacrifice a great deal of advantages; she wants a lot, but she doesn't want it all.

She wants, in many ways, less than her husband wants; but it seems she wants too much.



*********

This is, to my mind, one of the most absurd elements of this whole cultural argument over how women spend their time and when they have their children - from that Atlantic cover story to the reports on Marissa Mayer back all the way through these so-called "Mommy Wars." The desire of certain middle-class or wealthy women to have both children and a successful career has somehow been successfully branded Wanting To Have It All.

Madness! As though a career and children were all the world had to offer. Listen, I have neither a career nor children, and I can promise there are many other things in the world; there are mountains to climb, craft beers to drink, great works of fiction to read; there's art to be made, and chores to be done, and bills to be paid, and I just learned how to make sopes the other day (they were delicious); there are parties to go to and cocktails to learn how to make and crossword puzzles to solve and I am BUSY, okay? I don't know how anybody has time for a career OR a family when there's like five whole seasons of Star Trek to watch.

There are so many different things you can ask from the world: you could want to see every Phish concert live and intoxicated, you could want to get your picture on the cover of Forbes Magazine, you could want to get the most epic neck tattoo of anybody you know, or you could want a quiet, peaceful life on a mountaintop in Nepal. Probably there's nobody on earth who wants all of those things simultaneously; if there is, I kind of admire that person's inner life, even as I regret their constant disappointment with the limitations of the space-time continuum.

But mysterious Nepal-dwelling, neck-tattooed, Phish-loving young executive aside, most of us are really quite okay with the idea that our lives cannot contain all possibilities. Saying that women "want to have it all" suggests a childish inability to comprehend that every decision demands the sacrifice of alternate possibilities. And here's the thing: we all get it.

Yes, of course no one can have it all. But who wants to have it all?

I submit that full-time Phish enthusiasts understand that, in order to smoke as much pot and hear as much Phish as they intend to, they will not be placing themselves on track to be VP at a multinational by the age of 30. And most ambitious young executives appreciate the tragic number of Phish concerts they will have to miss in the pursuit of a higher profit margin,.

We don't want it all. We understand you give up one thing to have another; you do it every minute of your life. But we all fully expect to have more than one thing at a time. This is hardly a revolutionary idea. Both a job as a CEO and an frequently-exercised golf habit; both the responsibilities of president and a loving family; both a rewarding job at a nonprofit and a modest boat, both an income and a career as a poet. To have more things, you simply give up more things; you don't buy a new car, or keep up with five TV shows, or sleep eight hours a night, or eat organic, or take weekends off. You sacrifice the excitement of a city for the cheap price of land in the country, or you live in a 300 square foot apartment for the job opportunities in a city, and either way you can still give up your sushi habit in exchange for a more detailed hobby railroad. There are lots of ways to arrange a life.

The questions are: What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

*****

What exactly is so excessive about Edna Pontellier's demands on life, anyway? Her artistic ambitions are limited to improvement; she doesn't plan on being the next Rembrandt. Her means match her expenses. She has time enough for all the walks she wants to take and all the men she wants to love, and doesn't ask for any great measure of respect from society. So why is it too much to demand?

It's not that she couldn't possibly demand to the point of excess. To cry out for respect as well as sexual freedom would be to expect too much from her society. To want great artistic success as well as great wealth would be a pretty high bar. Some kinds of lives are harder than others, some are luckier, some demand more fortitude (only a strong-winged bird can fly against the wind, to borrow Mademoiselle Reitz's ominous metaphor). Some simply cost more than they are worth.

But other ways of living might seem workable, yet be unacceptable to the world. And this is the point that drives Edna wild. It seems to her perfectly reasonable that she might have a modest income from her art and her inheritance, a small house, a constrained social life, an appreciation for art and music, and healthy, happy children; how she will manage the lover and the husband never quite coalesces in her mind, but she suspects it can be done.

She's right about almost all of this - except the children. At the end, while it might seem like the note from Robert is the final straw, read closer. It's no accident that a birth scene immediately precedes the romantic disappointment. In the final scene, just like Adele demanded, Edna is thinking of the children.

What she thinks is that she cannot possibly be their mother and be also herself. Mothers can have affairs or hobbies or interests or appreciations, but they cannot be individuals; they cannot be let alone.

She cannot live her longed-for life because her children possess her too completely.

And yet her children are living with their grandmother; she has visited them once, brought bon-bons, kissed them and loved them exorbitantly, and left. They seem to be perfectly happy with this situation. She has nannies and maids to care for their needs and keep them safe, relatives to help shower them with love, she has an abundance of affection for them; there is no practical reason why she should feel that her children are preventing her from living the life she wants. And still she is wholly convinced that they are, devastatingly certain that they have destroyed her independence through their very existence.

*****

There is something patently absurd about suggesting it is unworkable for a woman to both raise a child and do difficult, time-consuming work. That "something" is the entirety of human history - including the present - in which the vast majority of women struggled and labored just to keep their children alive.

It is as absurd as Edna's internal claim that her children, who love her fondly and miss her hardly at all, are a concrete obstacle to her attaining an independent life of happiness.

And both these absurdities are, of course, not the real argument at all.  Rather, the critics of the new Yahoo CEO and Chopin's dour heroine have reached the same underlying conclusion: that a woman cannot properly love her children while acting on any unmaternal desires - any longing for fame, respect, sex, or power. Regardless of how the mother and child in question feel about the situation, regardless of the family finances, regardless of how controlled or confident or strong the woman in question is, regardless of the father's aid or absence, regardless...


What do you want? How do you plan to get it? What are you willing to give up in exchange?

Pontellier and Mayer can make any answer they want to the second and third question. It doesn't matter. The problem is with their answer to the first.

It would be fine for their critics - though perhaps not for them - if they were, in some way, fighting fundamentally for the needs of their family. "I want to feed my children, so I need to work" is never part of the "Women Can't Have It All" discussion.

It would be acceptable if they wanted no children at all; if Edna, like the prickly pianist Mlle. Reitz, were willing to forgo the rewards of a family, she too could be unliked and independent. Mayer's uterus would never have made the news at all.

But they want a family and. And and and. A family and an art career, a family and professional success, a family and love, a family and freedom, a family and some revolutions in the way the internet is used on a daily basis.

While they might see a thousand ways to build a life of "ands," the world cries out that the very idea is unacceptable. Chase both money and religious satisfaction, pursue moral certainty and gustatory excess and artistic excellence, seek both quiet contentment and constant excitement from the world - you can ask for anything else, but add "and family" and suddenly you Want It All.

Don't bother explaining all the things you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of your "and" - didn't anyone ever tell you you Can't Have Everything?

***

It is a strange world that views children as cages. It was strange to Chopin, a mother and an author, 115 years ago. It ought to be deeply strange to us now.

Have you heard of Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret? Movie about a teenage girl whose casual flirtation causes a serious accident? Explores the world of adolescence?  Theatrical release held up for 5 years because of fighting between the director and the producers over what cut of the film to use?

Well, regardless, I'm going to assume that you haven't seen it, since it seems to have been shown in all of 2 theaters in America for a period of 12 hours, just long enough for every film critic in the country to see it and declare it the greatest movie ever made. The reviews read like this:

"God, this is such a good movie. It's just extraordinary. Everything about it was mind-blowing and Kenneth Lonergan, writer-director, is a genius. It's too bad you, dear readers, will never see it... oh man, are you missing out." Gee, thanks.

Anyway, I should preface this by saying that I also have not seen Margaret. What can I say; I was busy for those twelve crucial hours. Now it's out on DVD and maybe I'll get around to watching it... sometime in the next six years.

But I read the reviews, and I just listened to an interview with Lonergan on Fresh Air, and he said something I thought was very interesting. Namely:



GROSS: Since you went to a school similar to the upper-middle-class private school in Manhattan that part of the movie is set in, it made me wonder about how you felt about the teenage girls in your school who were beautiful and, you know, flirtatious and often inappropriate in how they used their sexual power. Do you know?

LONERGAN: Frustrated.

(LAUGHTER)

LONERGAN: I was very frustrated. I was very shy. I didn't have a girlfriend in high school. I felt sort of - I actually felt, I felt envious of them in a way because people were very attracted to them, and they did have this power, and I felt sort of powerless in that arena.

I went to a school exactly like the school in the film, which was an upper-middle-class school, not a super-wealthy school, but there was one kid whose father was extremely wealthy who had bought him a Porsche at 17. And I remember driving around with him in this - we would all pack into his Porsche.

And when the car would go by, all these guys, everyone's head would turn to look at the car because it was so beautiful. And I thought oh, gee, this must be what it's like to be a pretty girl.



Terry Gross goes on to ask Lonergan whether these "teenage feelings" affected the screenplay, and Lonergan, rather unsurprisingly, said yes - but then changed the subject away from his feelings towards teenage girls and towards a more general experience of adolescence.


So here is this piece of art - here is this movie - that explores, in great and intimate detail, the life of a teenage girl. Again, I haven't seen it, but my understanding is that it was broadly praised for its psychological precision and for the way it illustrates the worldview of Anna Paquin's character even as it rips that world apart. And she's very specifically an attractive young woman, exploring her sexuality for the first time.

It was sort of stunning to me to imagine a writer writing that kind of a piece inspired not by sympathy, or personal experience, or an unforgettable observation, but by jealousy.


Part of me wants to take this information, add it to the fact that Lisa, the main character, is essentially punished for an innocent flirtation, and dismiss this whole apparently-brilliant-movie-I-haven't-seen as a middle-aged man finally exacting reveng on the high school girls who wouldn't sleep with him.

Most of me, however, feels like that is unfair. And then I turn to another question: how hard must it be to imagine another person's inner life with any believability if you are envious of that person? Envy twists everything; reshapes every action into one of power and intention, every expression into an indication of some emotion inaccessible to you, attributes power and happiness where the object of envy actually experiences helplessness and feigned contentment. Do you overcompensate, imagine that they must be actually miserable (or do you just make them actually miserable, as a way to correct for your idealization?) When you imagine what it would be like to be a beautiful young girl, can you somehow get over the fact that you desperately want to be one?

At first it seemed like it would be incredibly detrimental for an artist to be jealous of his subject. Even hatred, I think, has more space for nuance than jealousy does; and hatred is at least directed to the subject, moving the attention outward, where as envy always comes back to "I." They have and I don't, they are and I'm not... You can imagine a painter who doesn't truly see the model, a writer whose depictions of others are really explorations of everything he or she lacks. How terribly dull.

But then at the same time, jealousy carries with it an obsessiveness that might be productive. Envy can drive us to watch for every tiny motion, every indication of the source of beauty or success, every crack in a facade, every minor tic of fleeting action. And that might be very fruitful raw material from which to craft a narrative; if you get the exterior perfectly right, maybe that's all that matters.

And now I've talked myself out of any stable position, and I just don't know.


If jealousy is a fruitful source for art, however, I'm going to start writing about circus performers. We saw this show in Montreal where three unbelievably strong and agile circus artists stood on top of a seven-foot building, lit by construction lights and watched by a rapt street-level audience. To the eerie sounds of a throat-singer and a single violin, they flipped their bodies around and above and on top of each other, with no props but each other (and no setting but the city; a stunning backdrop).

I was struck by an envy so intense it almost pulled me out of my awe. In those moments when they are inverted on one hand, that hand on another person's body, sixty or seventy feet above the street, they must be living more intensely than I am. They must be more aware, more in the moment, more themselves.

And to live in those bodies - able to move their weight on one wrist, hold themselves steady at impossible angles - it is not an easy grace, and that's its allure. It's a grace and a power that speaks to years of constant effort, gaining and refining skills, building and re-building muscles. They live in bodies they made themselves, intentionally, every muscle bent at a curve they made through repetitive actions. I work to keep my own body minimally competent, jogging my 11-minute miles so that I can climb stairs or bike to work. I control very little of myself. I live few moments with full awareness of any part of myself. I am so small and weak, my life so accidental.

And they have all this intentionality, all this power, that I lack...

(And watching, when my own self-loathing begins to overpower my admiration, do I not begin to think that I would feel better if I imagined a world where all this seeming power is the cause of their downfall?  I think I'm talking myself back into a position on Margaret...)

Delay, gratification

7-8 days shipping time. An hour's drive away. Three weeks before the schedules line up. Two hours 'till dark.

These are the delays: lengths of empty time separating me from a self-indulgent Lush purchase, from the nearest drive-in movie theater, from a weekend trip or a starry night.

And then, the gratification: Better than the shelves of right-here-right-now at CVS, better than the movies downloading on a tiny laptop screen, better than a half-enjoyed single nights' trip, better than - well, there's no hurrying sunset. Better than no sight of the stars at all.

It's a virtue, the perserving through the wait; it's a sign of good socialization if you have the self-control to hold off for the bigger payoff. And fundamentally, it's a trade-off. Something better than the best thing you could grab right now, but in exchange, the waiting, the doing-without, the inconvenience, the enduring, the unpleasantness.

It's not just a virtue; it's a sacrifice. Temporary abstention. It's something to teach children like sitting still when your muscles scream to move, eating things that taste bitter, working when you want to stop. You pay for your pleasure with a length of dissatisfaction, you earn your joy with your grim stolidity.

That, at least, is the way I've always understood delayed gratification: an unpleasant wait and eventually a satisfaction just profound enough to make up for all your inconvenience.

But here - where everything feels so far away, where buying or seeing or eating anything takes so long, where there's no such thing as ordering delivery or running to the grocery store - I'm starting to think I had it all backwards.

The delay is the reward. The wait is the gratification. The payoff? Eh. It's not so great. All the fanciest soaps in the world would provide not a whit of existential satisfaction. The movies always disappoint in the end. Vacations are exhausting, the starry nights are cold. There's pleasure in them, but it wouldn't be worth any grim endurance.

But it's more than worth the wait it takes, because the wait is wonderful. I live in an odd world here, its true, as beautiful as it is sparse. Waiting here is as luxurious as it is necessary. In some places, an hour's drive might really be a sacrifice, and an optional one, and my understanding of the value of delay would be unchanged. But here, an hour through Amish countryside, sun shining over uninterrupted hills of green, gray and red barns, peaceful cows, a playlist on shuffle and a van loaded with carless friends - that's the only way to get to a theater, and it's a pleasure, one that would be notably absent from a five-minute drive to a theater in town. And shopping in stores on your way home - a single purchase, immediately in hand? Oh, why bother? There's no frisson of anticipation, no checking of tracking numbers and imagining unsmelled-scents. I'll pay extra for a longer shipping time, thanks; send it to me via Scotland and Nepal, give my box customs stickers from foreign locales, let my package have adventures and tell me how it goes, I'll wait.

A spontaneous vacation would probably be delightful; but right now, when that's impossible, I have endless possibilities and no need to winnow them down. Miles on miles of urban bike trails in Montreal, dozens of bed and breakfasts along the way, right now I can stay at them all; or an Amtrak to the City, a night blowing our unspent change on a show? Why not? Which show? They're all on my list, no possibility excluded.

And then the slightly shifting colors of the sun's slow decline.

I'm rethinking what it means to be patient. Psychologists talk of delayed gratification in the mathematical terms of an economist, the future benefits delayed, but I'm starting to think of hiking: longer paths to taller peaks, the scampering of tiny chipmunks and the call of invisible birds along the way, the sweet thigh-burning of the climb.

And its starting to seem more and more misguided to lock a child in a room with a single marshmallow and tell them they get two if they wait. This may be an effective test to see if they can endure delayed gratification, but it teaches them nothing of how to enjoy it.

Sit them instead in front of an oven, with a box of Chips Ahoy in the trash and a big bowl of cookie dough in their laps and teach them to roll the sweetness into a ball; Marvell had it wrong, there's time enough for this. Lined up on a pan, popped in the oven. Longer than it takes to pop a cookie from a plastic tray, but not unpleasant for the extra time; no squirming, hand-biting, self-denying sacrifice. Just the smell of baking cookies.

I'm learning to inhale.

better stay alive

I recently read a blog post, or an article, it’s kind of hard to tell the difference these days, by whatshisface - who has that baseball novel in pennsylvania - Michael Chabon, that's his name, where he complains about the stifling dullness of other people’s dreams, particularly in literature. He also said, rather shockingly to my mind, that in his household, dreams are verboten. No more than a sentence allowed. It sounded awful, to be frank, a breakfast table where conversation is limited by the standards of literature and silence preferred to a child’s recounting of a nightmare.

A long way of saying that the most interesting thing to happen in my life lately was, in fact, a dream – a dream in which I died (of cancer –my body filled with dozens of separate tumors, pushing my organs into small corners of my body and edging out the rest of me over a matter of mere weeks) and traveled to the afterlife. I got there by bus – a long bumpy journey, dull scenery, dull company. And then an interminable city, never quite coalescing into skyscrapers nor melting into suburbs, colorless mountains in the distance. My new home was a large Victorian, identical to all the other houses on the block except for color; each its own shade of pastel, each past its prime but not yet on the verge of collapse, and stuffed to the rafters with lodgers. At any given moment a dozen people in the kitchen, which smelled of food but had no food, another dozen on the stairs, people spilling out into the dusty yard, sprawled on beds and floors, napping, arguing, yelling, yelling. They were all theater people but me. They were working on a production. They would always be working on a production. It would be in rehearsal but would never have an opening night; they’d build the set and run the lines for eternity and never see the house lights go dim.

All the theaters were still in rehearsal. No newspapers printed, no new books. You could look in though the windows at restaurants full of line chefs hard at work, but no dishes were ever sold; they weren’t open for business. I had only the novels I had carried on the bus, two Faulkners and Freedom, I think, nothing else, and I worried for their safety in this house crawling with strangers. If they were gone I'd have nothing at all to read.

With significant effort and superhuman patience, messages could be sent back and forth with earth. But all I ever received was a brief note saying that my family was bringing a lawsuit against the doctors who provided no treatment in the months before my death. Very unsatisfying.

So in my dream, desperate to escape the endless clamor of my soft-hued house, I did the only thing I could think of; boarded a bus at a stop down the street. Busses came in with new arrivals but, when they left, went nowhere; a slow and steady circle, past restaurant windows and shuttered theaters, all the unfulfilled promises of a world where nothing ever changed, and back again. And again. And again.

I’m typing on a new keyboard, a soft rubber roll-up only reluctantly responsive. It’s slowing me down. An odd feeling, having to type slowly, thinking about pushing each separate key, breaking words down into their constitutive motions. Like doing tai chi or meditation as I write, practicing a willfully inefficient self-awareness.

And tiring, too.