Fish In The Water

Part One

I want to go back to this idea of “giving up” your career to have kids. First off, I am only too well aware that this is a conversation of extreme privilege. Only women who are in a financial position to “give up” their careers can even have this conversation, and that in itself is profoundly sad. So I’m continuing on with the knowledge that I am extremely lucky that I can even consider things like this.

While I was in Germany we had several conversations about attachment parenting. Essentially, I think, the concept is that you give your kids what they want and let them develop at their own pace instead of trying to force the issue. This does not mean they have no discipline and that you let them stick their fingers in electrical sockets. But it does mean you pick them up when they cry instead of letting them scream it out, and that you breast feed until they are ready to give it up, though it seems there is a lot of leeway for adjusting this to fit your lifestyle.

But I was struggling with the idea, especially in light of all my friends that had to go back to work after three months. How could you do attachment parenting when you didn’t even see your kid? Of course, you can find a sitter who goes along with the attachment principles, and that kind of works. But I was still struggling with this idea, especially in terms of breast-feeding. I’ve seen so many women sitting at their desks pumping milk, and every time I do I think, wow, what a huge pain in the ass, and that pain in the ass could totally be eliminated if you just had your kid with you so she could latch onto your boob. But you’re not supposed to bring infants to work. They aren’t supposed to interfere with your career.

And this is what makes all this a uniquely complicated question of feminism. Say you have the option for one of you to stay home (you or your partner). Say you are a male and female couple. Your male partner could stay home with the kid, for sure. You could pump breast milk and he could bottle feed and do the whole attachment parenting thing, and that would be pretty cool. Or you could stay home and breast feed and skip the whole intermediate step of pumping and preparing bottles. And because we still don’t have an actual, honest to god equal society, guess which one society thinks makes more sense? This is why the male golfers don’t give up their careers.

What complicates this even more is when you, as a woman, WANT to “give up” your career to stay home and have kids. Is it unfeminist to be the one who stays home? Are you undoing years of hard work toward women being accepted in the workplace? What does it say about your relationship if you are the one at home with the baby, and your male partner is the one making the money?

I really can’t help but think it would just be better if you could both stay home, but maybe that’s just me.

I keep putting “giving up” in quotes, because I’m not sure entirely what you are giving up by leaving a job to be a full time mother (and as she said in that article, if you work part time, does that make you a part time mother?). If you leave for a year or two to take care of your kid, there is this concern that when you come back (if you come back) you will have lost everything that made you relevant in the job market in the first place (god I hate that term, job market). There is so much pressure now to constantly pursue “professional development”- which usually means keeping up with technology and having a lot of contacts, all of which can become completely obsolete in two years, especially if you have a technologically relevant job. I have trouble keeping up with professional development even when I am working full time. And because the economy is going to shit (yay!), chances are if you leave there will not be a job when you come back. Because no one in America gets maternity leave for more than three months, so if you intend to, I don’t know, take care of your infant yourself, society is basically telling you you’re fucked.

Are you unfulfilled if you lose the career and gain the kids? Are you crazy if you try to manage both? What are you giving up by being a “part time mother”? Is it wrong to want both things? In a culture where to some extent it has become “wrong” to have kids (and wow, what conflicting messages there are in the media about this), how do you even begin to untangle the mix of emotions you as a woman may feel about all this?

I know this can be a terribly touchy subject, and I am still trying to determine how I feel about it all, so please excuse any rambling. I don’t think there is a straight answer. There’s no one right way to go about this. I know what is best for me- because, after all, I’m not content with a career office job whether or not I have kids. Working at home will make it more logical for me to be the primary care giver for any potential children. But am I crazy? Am I “wasting” myself, as my high school teacher thought I was for going to art school? Am I not a feminist, for wanting to be home with my children?

I have no fucking idea. This is a fantastic take on the problem, though. And this one. My mind is kind of reeling right now from the one-two punch of those articles.

I will leave you with the end of this article, instead:

Regardless of whether you are a parent or not, if you are not being recompensed for work after your ‘day’ is done you probably should not be there. You have other things to do, you have a life. My priorities and work flow will shift several times over my lifetime, not because I am a woman but because I am human… Becoming a parent only sharpened my realisation of that fact. Perhaps parents will be the workers who humanise the workplace for everyone. After all, the problem is not children, the problem is the tyranny of workplaces that behave like you are theirs 24/7.

Should is one of those terribly dangerous words, and one we use far too often. We should wash the dishes. We should invite so and so to dinner. We should go to that party. Often it means something you don’t really want to do but feel obligated to in some way. Is the world going to end if you don’t do the dishes? No. But maybe you have company coming and it’s impolite to greet them with a sinkful of dishes. Then there’s the shoulds of feeling- I should feel guilty about eating this cake, which almost always means you do feel guilty but are ignoring it. And there’s the shoulds of wishful thinking. It should be this way, if only… I’m trying to stop myself lately when I get going with the shoulds, and think twice about whether its something I really want- or whether some outside pressure is making me feel that way.

The first is so easy it’s laughable. I should stay at work later. Ha! This one often crosses my mind, because I work in an office with people who have a tendency to stay late. There’s always more to do, I suppose. But that’s the long and short of it. There’s always more work to do, and nine times out of ten I’ve found it usually keeps until the next day. It’s not like I’m ever going to get on top of it. That’s impossible with that kind of job. It’s usually down to just trying to stay afloat, which I can manage and still leave by 5 PM, thanks. I have a life to get home to, and plants that need tending. But when my coworkers are still there- apparently unconcerned about their lives- the shoulds kick in. Fortunately I have strength of will and sunshine almost always wins out.

There’s a lot of I should feels in my life. Primarily I think its the constant refrain, I should be happy with all this. Right? Good job, wonderful partner, nice house. Cable, Netflix, car. What’s missing? But I’m not happy (very happy with the partner and house, just not with being away from them) and then I feel like I should be and then I feel guilty and it all becomes this tangled mess of why can’t this be enough? It seems to be for everyone else.

But I want more, so much more. I want my time to be my own, not regulated by the shoulds. I know exactly how I want to spend my days, but there are too many shoulds in the way. And I feel bad, because so many people have it way worse. At least I’m not working in an industrial slaughterhouse or something. But that’s very similar to the “I should finish the food on my plate because of starving children in Africa” line and it leads you to believe you should be unhappy because other people are. Which is bull shit. You’ll be much more use to the people in need if you aren’t miserable yourself (by this I absolutely do not mean ignoring the plight of others, or being happy at cost to them, just that beating yourself up over it doesn’t do anyone any good). Or at least that’s what people keep telling me…

I shouldn’t miss my home so much. It’s not really the house I grew up in, though when I dream of “home” it’s still that house. And I hated my home town and never want to go back there. But I miss the woods that were around the house. I knew every tree, and had names for most of them. I spoke to them often. And I used to sit and stare a them for hours and hours, until my mind was full of green. When I’m feeling totally calm and at rest, I’m sitting there in my mind.

But our culture tells me I shouldn’t miss it the way I do, because people move all the time. It’s totally normal. Get over it. But we- humans- should all miss the land so much. Each tree should be a trusted friend. That loss has led people to royally fuck things up (take your pick- nuclear waste, chemical toxin, climate change). If we did love our places again, love them in the way you love something upon which your survival depends, I highly doubt we’d have so many problems. We should be living in one place- one place that shapes our lives and who we are so deeply that there’s no separation. We should be moving with the seasons. But all that seems a fantasy what with the current state of affairs.

And that’s a real danger with this kind of should. I torture myself with these, with the dreams of what life should be like if only people would come to their senses and realize this whole mess is, well, a mess. For sure, things should be different. And it’s important to think about that, and to consider what needs to be done to move forward. But in the meantime, it’s very difficult to reconcile what is, with what you envision for the world. What should be… what is… and what can be. I should finish this up now.

I’m not accustomed to being in cities anymore. I suppose you could argue I’ve never lived in a “real” city (Savannah only has the one high rise) but really, they’re not so different from crowded suburbs, just taller and with less parking. They didn’t use to bother me so much, but then again I used to spend a lot more time there. Now a trip to “the city” is quite an occasion, after all, we fuss when we have to go “to town” to run a couple errands.

Pressed into a city for only a few days, I found myself irritable, was having trouble sleeping, and felt constantly bombarded. Combined with the effects of being in a country with a language I used to understand passably well but haven’t spoken in three years, I was feeling the need for some hardcore solitude.

I forgot what it feels like to be constantly surrounded by people, on all sides. They are above and below you while you’re sleeping, and you can hear them walking or yelling or opening their blinds. You look out the window and there are more people. You can see them, so presumably they can see you. You go out in the street and there they are, pushing past you. I was in Germany, incidentally, and on one of my first trips someone told me Germans do not move out of the way. This is true. Walking through crowds you are bumped, constantly. If you want to get through a crowd, you push. People stand on top of one another on the bus. Germans also apparently aren’t very big on talking to strangers, and you can tell. They never make eye contact if they can help it (at least where I was). I live outside a town of less than 5,000 people, which is pretty big for the area. I’m used to knowing half the people on the street, and at least smiling and nodding to the other half. It became very obvious when I came back the extreme difference- walking down the sidewalk at home on a Saturday morning, EVERYONE says hello, how are you, lovely morning, whether they know you or not. It would be a miracle to have this happen in most cities, though in their defense maybe it’s just me.

To be fair, I was highly entertained by wandering through shops and making note of cultural differences (there’s a penis on that box- a happy cartoon penis! for serious, look at it!). I especially enjoyed the “farmer’s” market, which I will write about later. But maybe it was my exhaustion- I’ve been on my last leg for months now- but it all just felt completely overwhelming, especially with people babbling at me in another language. It’s my fault for not practicing, for sure, but somehow I had a terrible time even working up the energy to try to understand what was being said around me.

The worst was the ads. From the moment I got off the plane, I felt like I couldn’t look anywhere without being advertised at. I don’t know if it’s the same in American cities- maybe I just don’t notice?- but literally everywhere you turn is an ad for something. There are posters everywhere (who puts them up? who takes them down?) and when you’re riding the underground they fly by on the walls and posts of every station, not to mention on all the walls inside the train. There were ads on a video screen on top of the baggage claim at the airport. Ads on video screens in the train stations. Ads on screens on the sides of buildings. I don’t know what anyone else thinks, but this seems to be a major intrusion. Since when did public spaces become so inflicted? Since when did I not have the right to look away? Because seriously, what are you going to do, never leave your home? At least there weren’t so many billboards.

There are days at home when no one sees me except the handsome fella and maybe a neighbor, not counting people who might see me driving my car to the office. In the city I felt watched, despite the lack of eye contact. And maybe it was just my own paranoia, but I felt judged. And I didn’t like it. I constantly felt like a country bumpkin, gaping at all the people and the signs and the buildings and the trains. I suppose I am, now, but that’s ok with me. There were plenty of times I wanted nothing so much as to be at home, staring at the peas in hopes they’d finally come up.

So, city people, how do you manage it? Do you just not notice after a while? Don’t you ever miss, you know, trees? Quiet? Streets without advertisement?

It is amazing to me how easily people take to being herded. People just automatically gravitate toward lines, even when unnecessary, and are so open to suggestion. Follow this path, follow those signs, go down this tunnel, and always at the end the expectation that you’re going to be where you think you’re going, and not in the slaughterhouse. Walking down the narrow metal tube that led to the airplane, I couldn’t help but think it might not lead to an airplane at all. And even then, how to know the airplane is actually going where you think it is? It all looks the same up in the air.

Yeah yeah, they’d be out of business if they started kidnapping people and delivering them to slaughterhouses. Whatever. We think cows are so dumb for walking up that ramp but we have no problem shuffling in and out of little metal boxes, assuming they will take us to our destinations.

Speaking of. I’m writing this from above the clouds, in a little metal box. We’re so ingenious, us humans. While we were taxiing I saw another plane take off and just kept thinking, that shouldn’t be possible. And as we took off, even though I’ve flown a hundred times, I still kept expecting to just drop right back out of the sky. I’m not afraid of flying, far from it, it just doesn’t seem, well, right. And we’re so organized. All the luggage on those little ramps and the food in the smaller metal boxes. Magically conjured and placed before you in neat little sections. The salad had some sort of mini shrimp on it, and I was thinking, where the hell did those come from? Were they farmed? Are they actually regular sized shrimp, cut up to look smaller like “baby” carrots? How did they peel those tiny things? And why? Where did the rest of this come from, and who put it all in these tiny boxes?

We’re trapped in one spot for eight hours, we accept our food on trays, we pay hundreds of dollars for the luxury of not being able to stretch our legs (though now you can pay a few hundred extra for “economy plus” which gives you a few extra inches), and put our trust in an unseen pilot that we’re going in the right direction. We don’t question the class system. It’s even called the class system. The people in front have more space and they get mimosas. Sure thing. Here we go.

When you watch people hurrying through an airport, or blithely taking off their shoes at security and submitting to pat downs, it’s no wonder at all that we’re in such a mess.

People, it seems, want to follow (all the while telling themselves they’re moving under their own free steam). Someone the other day told me the US isn’t a tyranny. I had to refrain from laughing in his face. No, we’re not in a tyranny in the sense that some other countries are- we’re not at the stage of people disappearing in the streets yet (that we know of). We’re still allowed to come and go as we please (more or less) and, after all, the US is a pretty big and comfortable cage. But cage it is. When standing in one of those new, full body scan machines, arms over my head, I contemplated sticking my tongue out. I decided against it. I didn’t want to give them an excuse to search me. I was scared, and rightfully so I think. It doesn’t take much.

When you think how easily people all go along in one direction, all under the guidance of people they assume know better, it’s no wonder it’s so hard to resist. Why it’s so hard to pull another way, even though more of us are pulling now than ever. But as he says in the Lost Language of Plants (which I am currently reading), it’s really not the common people who are in the end flying the plane. It’s all the ones with the letters after their names, and they are still stalwartly leading us into the slaughterhouse.