What I'm Reading

Note to self: There’s no such thing as “light” reading about working mothers.

So, after Jezebel did this piece, I decided to buy the book. If you know me, you know that this means nothing. My list of books to buy (a word document I tried to fix and upload at one point, but got too busy) sits at about 300 right now. I have eight books on my dresser waiting to be read. I’m in the middle of two books right now, and there are three other ‘unopened’ books hanging out on my Kindle, waiting for my attention. I have a book problem.

(I really don’t have a problem, and if I do it’s the fact that my brother-in-law gave me Game of Thrones and the Hunger Games early this year, and reading those 8 books threw off my schedule. I give him full credit for the backlog this year. Next year will be different.)

So I bought this because I’m reading a nonfiction book about a German pastor I learned about via the Kindle Daily deal (damn you Kindle Daily Deal!) and it is so. damn. dry. I want to finish it, but I go through these long phases where I just don’t care about his siblings, the family holiday celebrations, or the letters to grandma. I need frequent breaks.

Hubby and I went to Chicago for the funeral and I knew I didn’t want to read Holocaust-themed nonfiction, so I picked up I Don’t Know How She Does It and settled in to the trip.

Note to readers: What follows is not a review. It’s a personal, visceral, profanity-laden rant about my feelings after reading the book. If you’re looking for in-depth analysis, you’ll have to catch me on another day. Also, spoilers.

So this book made me want to open up a vein. I went into it expecting something like “Bridget Jones becomes a mom,” and I got something more like 9 to 5, except the bad guys kind of win. Apparently the only way to succeed at a parenting is to give up your high-stress high-profile career and live on your less ambitious husband’s salary. Also, single women that don’t want children should have them anyway, because the main character felt ‘awe’ when her children were born. That doesn’t make any damn sense.

I’m in a labyrinth here. The book tries desperately to paint a picture of the unfairness of judging the main character’s choices in parenting. I don’t actually want to judge her parenting choices. Thing is, every person in her life judges her parenting choices, AND SHE LETS THEM. She’s a well-paid, high-powered hedge fund manager with no backbone. Ultimately, she decides that everyone in her life that made her feel small, from the misogynists to overcompensating moms to her heinous in-laws, are somehow right. If all of these characters are right and she is wrong, then why isn’t a single one of them likable? I stayed up all night after reading this book, trying to figure out if my decision to TRY to get pregnant was going to destroy any hope of a career. I know that she’s a fictional character; I know she has more money than I do, and I know that she worked in a field with a LOT more men. Yet I found myself troubled and anxious about this book because it seemed to say that, no matter your gifts and talents, there’s only ONE WAY TO BE A MOTHER, and that way is all-consuming.

I’m not a mother (yet), but I’m obsessed with the mechanics of working motherhood. I’m less interested in the opt-out/opt-in debate, because it is presented as an argument for rich people. It’s never, “do I want to stay home?”, it’s always “am I squandering my intelligence/pedigree/greatness on kiddie time?” The real-life SAHMs I know don’t present their problems or choices in this way. A lot of them stay home because they don’t demand pay that would exceed day care. That’s an issue I can understand.

The thing is, even if I was rich, I’d still want to work. I’d want my children to see me working. I’d want to them to understand that coming home after accomplishing something is important. I think that ambition gets a bad rap in our society, and I want my kids to appreciate and nurture their ambitions. If, heaven forbid, one of my kids ends up in an abusive or otherwise nonfunctioning relationship, I’d want him or her to realize that economic independence is the way out. That’s easier to do if he or she grows up in a situation where economic independence is the norm for both spouses.

I can’t be appeased by a tacked-on ending about securing funding for a “lady business.” The ending almost makes it worse. She can only use her skills for a dollhouse factory. Because she’s a MOTHER. She can’t fight back against the environment in her office. She has to leave. Because she’s a MOTHER. It's the only option. How fucking depressing is that?

So who was he to you?

We’re sitting in Detroit, New York, DC, Philly, across Georgia, Ohio, everywhere. We’ve woken early to a missed call from the wee hours of the morning. We’re girding ourselves against the news. We’re calling back, spines stiff and cutting to the chase: “Who died?” We are absorbing the news, changing diapers, making breakfast, dusting forgotten shelves. The key for us is to keep moving. Keep moving and stay on the phone. We’re drinking coffee, we’re shredding junk mail, and we’re calling each other, over and over again. We’ve put on the music of our respective youths. In Georgia, you can hear the Dells. In DC, it’s Boyz II Men. Music, and ringtones. We have to keep calling each other. We have to tell each other stories. We have to wonder about funeral arrangements. We have to bicker and snap at each other, get briefly frustrated, hang up, and call back in a few hours. We have to guess how other family members are dealing. We have to call them after we decide how they feel… They don’t get the opportunity to disabuse us of our perceptions. We don’t actually say much, or we say everything. The silence and the noise, it’s all the same. It’s family. It’s the women of my family building a weathered, heavy chain against the grief. We don’t cry. Much. Not as long as we keep moving.

My cousin says, “All my life we’ve been searching for him.” I agree. Some years, we heard from him every week. Some years we didn’t even have a phone number for him. He was complicated. We are all complicated. My husband says, “Who is he exactly?” He cannot wrap his brain around my huge, huge, family. I say, “One of my grandmother’s brothers.” My grandmother had 10 siblings. His parents are close to my grandmother’s age. His grandparents passed years ago. He didn’t know their siblings, and they didn’t have all that many anyway. I say, “My uncle.” He stops himself from correcting me. He’s finally realized that in a family our size, we tend to simplify. Everyone older is an uncle or aunt. Everyone your age is a cousin. Even if they’re not. Everyone is family. Even if you don’t know how. My husband doesn’t know who this uncle is to me. He can’t recall if I’ve ever mentioned him. I don’t talk about my childhood much. It’s loaded for me, and I try not to dwell on things I can’t change. And there are so many aunts and uncles, so many cousins. I tell stories right before I take him to see someone. I tell stories right after someone dies.

He was a nice, nice man. One of my mother’s favorite uncles. I can tell, because he is complicated. I have inherited her love of complicated people. It is a narrow sliver of a counterculture streak, I suppose. For us, not so much. It’s never a radical act to love your family. He lived in Chicago, which was very cool. Detroit with a better reputation. We could trade barbs about our basketball teams. I grew up with the Bad Boys. He tolerated my armchair enthusiasm. He was a former athlete with a different perspective. I was a kid with a loud mouth.

He grew up in Detroit too. A very different Detroit from my own. It didn’t matter, much. Just as we are all family, our family is all Detroit. Very few of us move away. To my young brain, this made him an exception.

He would talk honestly about anything in his life. I didn’t get sent to the backyard to play in Chicago. I got a seat at the table, and he talked to me like an adult. I didn’t understand all of it. I don’t remember all of it. I know he wanted to help me avoid his mistakes. And I know his mistakes looked a lot like my father’s.

The dead father thing hangs between me and my family. Lots of silence, lots of assumptions about my feelings. We don’t talk about the thing. It’s a big reason I ran east after college. It’s a big reason I ran inside myself before I could leave for college. I want to wear it a certain way. In the Midwest I don’t get to do that, so I don’t stay for very long.

That’s not the fairest of assessments, but that is how it feels and therefore I don’t care.

My uncle didn’t care about how I wore it, or how I was supposed to be seen. (I didn’t even have words for that at the time.) He would just talk to me about the choices he made, especially the choices that overlapped with my father’s. He’d be very, very honest. He had some regrets. Most of the time, he was perfectly capable of surviving himself. My father did not survive himself. As a kid, I needed that juxtaposition. Needed to know that dad’s way wasn’t the only way. I needed to believe that with strength you can rise above. My uncle gave me that.

I haven’t seen him in years. An invitation to my wedding was returned by the post office. I would occasionally wonder about him, and about his kids. I assumed I’d hear from him, or about him. So many aunts and uncles, so many cousins. I didn’t hear anything until Saturday.

Eventually I have to stop calling and I have to stop answering the phone. I have to stare into space and hold my dog and sit still. It’s important to practice sitting still without crying. There’s an art to it. Someone will need me soon, or I will need someone else. This will all go better if we keep the emotional dreck at bay. We’re not an emotionally expressive group, as a whole. We don’t carry tissues. We carry bricks and build walls. We yo-yo each other, pushing away and then holding close. Fortifying ourselves with and against each other all at once. My husband looks at all of this and sees a lot of crazy. I look at my half-cleaned half-arranged house, I hear my music, I see myself clutching my phone, and I see my great-grandmother in her kitchen. I see my grandmother on her couch the day my father died. I see my mother in Georgia listening to the Dells. I see all their sisters and daughters too.

At my wedding, a woman is making a brief speech about marriage. She is poised and funny and full of life. My husband leans over and says, “Who is she?” I say, “She’s an auntie, related to my grandfather.” He says, “What’s her name?” I don’t know it. “How do you know she’s related to your grandfather?” he says. It’s the nose. And the charm.

With grandma’s family, it’s the stiff spine. It’s the refusal to limit mothering to your own children (or children at all). It’s the busy hands in times of tragedy. It’s the chip dip and peach cobbler and whisper fights. It’s a huge damn porch on Beniteau. It’s the tears that come eventually.

No matter how far away, it’s still family.

Read this

Hey, I'm working on a post for today, and hopefully I finish before Irene does a face punch to my fair city. In the meantime, read this awesome post from the Good Men Project.

What I’m Reading

How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else
By Michael Gates Gill

1. If your office has a community bookshelf, use it as an opportunity to read something you wouldn’t normally read. I found one of my favorite books that way.
2. Keep your expectations low.

Full disclosure: I don’t care for Starbucks coffee. It tastes like they burned the beans. Also I don’t go for fancy whippacinolatta stuff, so it’s not a business that really appeals to me.

I am a speed-reader. I can’t always stop myself from blowing through books and articles (especially if the language is fairly basic), and sometimes I think I lose something. I often read books over again, so I can kick back and enjoy the way that writers play with language. I don’t need to read this one again.

Michael Gates Gill grew up rich and a child of the rich, went to an Ivy League university, used his secret-society connections to land a high-powered, high-paying advertising job, meet loads of famous people, moved whenever his company told him to, and then he got old. Then he got fired. Then his consulting business dried up. Then he knocked up a woman he met at a gym. Then his wife left him. Then he discovered he had a (minor) brain tumor that causing him to lose his hearing.

Did you get all of that? I know it’s kind of involved. This is an autobiography, and there’s little motivation to skimp on details when you’re writing an autobiography. (unless you were President.) That’s why a book about working at Starbucks also includes a story about tea with the Queen. And one about meeting Frank Sinatra. And one about running with bulls in Pamplona because he wants to impress Hemingway. And one about how his dad’s archenemy is the guy that wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Still with me?

This book is bad. It’s not terrible (though the never-ending BJs to Starbucks are pretty ridic. And he can’t write dialogue to save his life, every character, regardless of age, ethnicity or educational background, sounds exactly like him, and nobody ever uses contractions), but it’s bad. I hate to say this, because Michael Gates Gill clearly needs a hug. He’s a very emotional man, and he has some legitimate regrets about the way he lived his life (Even though he did what he was raised to do. We are all screwed in some way), and he’s working really hard to repair that damage. It’s just…the man is fighting so hard for perspective and making so little progress and I kinda want to shake him. Also I don't care about his famous people encounters, and they seem really out of place in the narrative.

He’s sitting in Starbucks at the end of his rope (and in a very expensive suit), when a woman jokingly asks him if he wants a job. He says yes, without thinking. She says, “are you sure you can work for me?” and then he tells us about how much he loved his black nanny and how lonely she was when he left. Since his prospective boss is also black, this is relevant. Because this is how many black people he knows.(did I mention he lives in NYC?)

So he stumbles horribly through the interview and gets hired to work a month later. He’s not hired to work in the Starbucks he was sitting in, and this is a problem because he’s one of those people that only goes so far north and so far east or something (I don’t know New York, but I am familiar with this sort because they’re all over the Detroit suburbs). So this causes a panic, and he has to learn to ride the bus. MGG is always learning things.

He learned to clean the bathroom, and work the cash register, and talk to customers, and speak to his coworkers with respect, and carry trash bags and he’s the happiest he’s been in his life. He also realized that in his past life he’d purposely destroyed the career of woman much like his boss because she didn’t look like him. And he’s very sorry.

And I’m very irritated. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the guy. I mean, I don’t sympathize A LOT, but I do sympathize. I just…he revels in his new life like it’s a hobby. I never read Eat, Pray, Love because I thought it would be like this. Except this is full-time.

So I recommend skipping this one, but if my review is a bit too vague, just read these lyrics instead.

Definitely NOT progress

“If women want to vote and shit, they need to do this kind of stuff. I feel the same way about girls asking out boys and women opening their own doors. If chivalry is dead, it’s women who killed it.” – comment on my husband’s Facebook status on this morning.


Every once in a while I read or hear something that sets my teeth on edge. I’ve done a lot of work to avoid the obvious traps, for good reason. Living where I live, and knowing who I know, I have come to expect that my friends will disagree with me, as we represent a wide swath of experience. If I’m too amped up on the obvious triggers, it makes it difficult for me to give the benefit of the doubt to the people I love, and that is a path that leads to screaming. It’s better to try and focus your energy on things that matter and not wrap your head in knots over hyperbolic, deranged, intellectual midgets. That suck.

Comments like the one above though… they just fill me rage. It starts with my husband (and I’m not sparing him in this) posting this:

It is 2011, yet in my office when a mouse is found in a trap all that can be heard is, "We need a boy to take care of this." #notprogress

This is obnoxious on several levels. Here are a few:
1. My husband doesn’t even use Twitter
2. The women in his office shouldn’t be obligated to present “progress,” as he sees it, every moment of their goddamn lives.
3. The incident in question involved a 4-year-old that stepped on a live rat in a glue trap. The situation was a gross nasty mess that a lot of “boys” would’ve balked at, and the kid just wanted her shoe back. (Hubby didn’t balk, because he prides himself on being a burly Eagle-Scout fixer type. They were right to seek him out, though it was an expensive solution overall.)
4. The shit show comment listed above.

The person who posted it is a friend. We have drastically diverging views, but I like to think that we can respect each other’s opinions even as we disagree. I generally treasure my friendship with him, as it is one of the many things in life that reminds me that there are real, kind, thinking people in the midst of this screaming match of ideas. I’m not trying to make him into a strawman. I want to say that, and also say up front that I’m trying to present my view as calmly as possible.

“If women want to vote and shit, they need to do this kind of stuff.” The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified 91 years ago. How is it that men still think that my rights as a citizen exist at the whim of their perceptions? I’m not talking about governmental leaders here. I’ve heard everyday men from all walks of life utter similar phrases without a moment’s doubt. They feel comfortable saying such things because they still have the lion’s share of the power in this country. The steady (but damn slow in some cases) progress that women have made is edging ever closer to something resembling equality of opportunity, and statements like this ring out ever louder in the present day. It betrays a sense of resentment on the part of modern men who’ve never enjoyed the privilege of being the “head of household” of yesteryear. (Clearly this is an exaggeration, as these structures still exist in my country and others, but bear with me here.) Even taking this into account, this statement is fucking stupid. There’s still all manner of privilege to spare for them, including the rather pervasive cultural language that equates women with “bad” and men with “locked in an endless battle not to be women.” Also, we’ve used all manner of fiery hoops to disenfranchise voters in this country, but the “release the live rat from the toddler’s flip-flop test” would likely result in next to no one getting a vote.


“I feel the same way about girls asking out boys and women opening their own doors.” Fine. Whatever. A lot of us uppity voting women already do that shit. If men don’t ask out women they like, and treat them kindly on dates (the door-opening thing, thought it was supposed to make a woman feel special? Didn’t realize it was some gendered requirement that we sacrificed with the vote, and I’m betting I’m not alone in being confused by that.), I’m sure there will be some consequences, but they’re not really my problem or my responsibility.


“If chivalry is dead, it’s women who killed it.” This part actually made me laugh.

Dictionary definition of chivalry
• The medieval knightly system with its religious, moral, and social code
• Knights, noblemen, and horsemen collectively
• The combination of qualities expected of an ideal knight, esp. courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak
• Courteous behavior, esp. that of a man toward women

First and 30’s definition of chivalry
• A bunch of awkward and forced gestures that generally make me feel like the man I’m around thinks my arms and legs don’t work.


Chivalry (fourth bullet first list) is dead. We’re not a particularly courteous society a good chunk of the time. Blame the internet, blame the ever-shifting definition of community and failure on some fronts to enforce basic social norms, blame whatever you want. The end result is that we live in a world with less kindness than it should have (note that I didn’t say less kindness than it used to have. That’s how you know your blogger is black, people. I’m not fucking nostalgic for the “bad old days”). This is something that makes me both sad and tired. All people should be courteous to other people because it makes life easier and more pleasant. If it can only happen because of gendered assumptions, then we’re all fucked. Fuck dictionary chivalry, long live (un)common decency.

Chivalry (second list) is not dead, and I can attest to it, as it’s forced on me on a daily basis by random men that I’m usually not even paying attention to, and they take umbrage when I’m not interested. I’m totally sorry for opening my own door guys. I’m pretty sure I didn’t notice you holding open that other door because I was balancing my checkbook in my head, or drafting a meeting agenda in my head, or generally living my life, in my head and because you, as a stranger, are somewhat inconsequential to me. If I noticed, I would’ve thanked you, but now you’re acting as if my failure to register your existence is akin to murder, and I really just want you out of my face. Feel free to be mad about it though. That sounds like a good use of your energy. Fuck First and 30’s definition of chivalry, with absolutely no caveats.

My fundamental beef with both comments (my husband’s and my friend’s) is that everyone involved in this situation is an imperfect person that made imperfect choices. My husband’s coworkers heavily gendered their request, and that is problematic. I know what they meant (someone helpful, and not squeamish), and I know why they worded it that way (a lot of men really enjoy being “needed” in this way), but it’s still problematic because my stomach is in knots and I’m at like, 1300 words here. I shouldn’t have to defend their choices… but I feel like not defending these choices means not standing up for women. And if we’re going to denigrated together, then we need to hold shields together too. My husband put on his superhero cape (cuz that’s how he rolls), but then called them on the carpet because of the way they asked for help. Except…half of his damn identity is predicated on being the guy you go to for help. Just be happy about it, for fuck’s sake. Then my friend uses this conversation as a platform for his (unreasonable) belief that women should choose between their equal rights as citizens and their rights to ask for assistance in the interdependent society that we all participate in. That’s a fool’s choice.

In short, it’s 2011, and I’m still explaining to men that demanding that all women that “vote and shit” live up to their individual perceptions is sexist as hell. Definitely #notprogress.