The New Mom-ism

When I teach what sometimes turns out to be my lone lit course at the community college, I always teach a section on Feminist Perspectives. I do this for several reasons: 1. my own research and writing centers on female and feminine and feminist perspectives; 2. I am grateful that the anthology I use even HAS a non-fiction section, let alone one that features Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir; and 3. I think these perspectives are valuable as literature and philosophy and need and deserve to be heard, or seen, by as many willing and unwilling people as possible.



This semester, I even lovingly put together a Powerpoint to really give my students a sense of the legal and cultural oppression women faced in the 20th century. Powerpoint glowing and notes extensive, I was ready to go.



As I launched my pretty little Powerpoint, I felt, by innocuous slide 1 (the one that simply said "Feminist Perspectives"), a cold front descend on the class. Rapidly and undeniably, mental light switches turned to 'Off,' arms crossed across chests, jaws set and defenses went up and wow! suddenly nearly no one was listening. Now, I was used to resistance when I taught this section; cold breezes always started to a-blow when the word "feminist" first crossed my lips. But I'd never encountered such a powerful front before, such a sudden and dramatic Nor'easter of indifference and anger.

It made me stop and think. My daughter, who is three, has officially entered the princess phase of her life. I was told by other, more experienced mothers to expect this phase, yet I refused to believe that my daughter would go through it. Silently I thought, in response to other mothers, "You just weren't trying hard enough. You simply needed to be more vigilant. You let your daughter fall into the princess narrative. I am giving my daughter Bob the Builder tools and I am turning on Handy Manny for her to watch. There is nothing in her DNA nor her atmosphere that would allow this princess phase." I tried, harder.

This was nonsense, of course. I thought this because I hadn't been through this before. And I didn't realize that any bulwark I erected against the onslaught on Princesses could be nimbly scaled by friends, of the 3-year-old variety. 3-year-old friends wore princess underwear and carried princess backpacks to school. 3 year-old-friends went to Disneyworld and brought back princess pencils for everyone in the class. 3 year-old-friends had mothers and fathers who were not necessarily militantantly anti-princess. And my three-year-old plays with three-year-old-friends.

I decided not to ban princesses outright, as much as I wanted to. I was afraid of the Return of the Repressed. If I bounced every Ariel ball out the door and swept every Cinderella dress-up ballgown under the rug, I was afraid that my daughter would one day grow up and enter a beauty pageant. So I allowed the poufy pink polyester gown and the Belle doll and the wooden star wand she received for her birthday. And I allowed the Little People castle and the Mrs. Potts and Chip dolls and the princess party invitations. (I just made sure the dollhouse Santa gave her was made of environmentally responsible materials, and thanked Santa for bringing her a Thomas puzzle and Tinkertoys, and hoped for the best.)

It was fine, as it is. My daughter likely suffers from being an overly-scrutinized first-born, and little else. Some days, she wears that pink polyester dress and has a tea party, and other days she pretends that she is gasing up Lightning McQueen. All is well. But one thing I haven't budged on is the princess narrative.

She has yet to see a princess movie, start-to-finish, for two reasons. One, I can't think of one princess movie that is apprpriate for a three-year-old, and even a three-year-old of a non-feminist mom. Cinderella hates, probably rightly, her step-mom and step-sisters. And is basically a slave. (My daughter doesn't yet know the meaning of a few words, among them "slave," "hate," "embarrassed," and "death." I am not bragging here. This is simply the truth. She's only been on the earth for three years.) Snow White waits for a prince for her life to begin. Ariel longs to leave her home because of a man. Belle, I was encouraged, was my daughter's favorite, but I figured my girl didn't need to see scenes involving a mob calling for Beast's death. (The silverware is cute and all, but not cute enough to mitigate that terror.) Mulan, though, seemed great--a girl warrior! But what does it mean that I am valuing the desire to fight over the desire to fall in love? Why is that more legitimate? And do we need to keep teaching the same old story, as old as Shakespeare, and even older: "You are not good enough as a girl. You need to pretend to be a boy to do the things you want to do, because being a girl is not good enough"?

Reason Two. This is why I still teach a section on feminism: because THAT narrative is still present. I just wonder how long my daughter will exist before she confronts it, and wrestles with it. But this is my plea: stop telling it. Stop telling this story to your daughters and your sons. And maybe, some day, I can stop teaching my section on feminism, because we have silenced these narratives that tell us and our daughters and our sons that being a girl is something that needs to overcome.

Vernal

Today has been the first day that has had any spring in it in a long time. Springtime has always meant, for me, open windows, a scratchy throat, happy warm limbs, eyes puffed shut from attacking histamines, and the dizzying relief of Spring break (I'm someone who never really left school, and probably never really will). But now that I'm a parent, spring is no longer just spring. It's vernal.

Vernal mens springlike or of spring, but it also means "belonging to or characteristic of youth." Now Spring means, on the first day that's soared above 50 degrees since, probably, October, watching my 3-year-old daughter stand up from drawing on the driveway with chalk and say, "Now is a perfect time for me to take off my clothes." First the shirt, followed shortly by the pants, and there she is in her blue underwear and pink Crocs and nothing else at all, calling herself Mowgli and scratching her yet-unmarked back against the bark of a tree with utter and total glee. After the tree, raking leaves with her dad (or, more accurately, un-raking what he'd just raked) and after the leaves, the mud, of course. Oh the mud. At this point, her Crocs fly, as if of their own will, off of her yet-unmarked and childishly smooth feet, and those feet find and feel and flex in that mud. The soil and a shovel and the freedom to run around in her underwear seems to be all this child needs to have fun in Spring. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to buy toys, and then I remember: oh yeah, Winter.

Then, for Mowgli, an emergency tub followed by a necessary nap, and after nap and dinner, in the too-rapidly fading light we all head outside again, drinking every drop of this early spring day as if we're not sure we'll ever get another like it. So in twilight we spread out a blanket on the front lawn for the 4 of us, though only 2 of us stay: my daughter and my husband find their way back to the driveway and draw chalk figures in the early dark; my son (who is still a baby) and I stay on the blanket, where I watch him look up at the moon and the night sky for the first time in his life, waving his limbs in joy and opening his mouth to suck his first spring's air into his lungs and looking, unblinking and amazed, up into the wide sky.

What a world, when this is the world.

Why I'm Doing This (I think)

Well, it all started when I became a reluctant member of Facebook. And then a not-so-reluctant member (as my husband said, "For someone who says she dislikes Facebook, you sure spend a lot of time on there. You're like someone who says he reads Playboy for the articles."). Once I opened up to the (still) weird public-ness of Facebook, I felt like I also wanted a place to write. So here I am.

As for the title, it's from W.B. Yeats's poem "The Circus Animals' Desertion," which is, ironically, all about the poet's fear that his inspiration will leave him. But the Poet resolves to "lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." What better place to start?

This will probably contain a lot of posts about my kids, and a few about what I'm reading when the kids graciously allow me time to read. Maybe a few posts about what I'm teaching, or listening to, or eating. Who knows? But it feels good to be writing in this way again, and putting my foot on the first rung of that ladder.