What's In a Name?

In FULL FRONTAL FEMINISM: A YOUNG WOMAN’S GUIDE TO WHY FEMINISM MATTERS, (Seal Press, 2007) Jessica Valenti demands that I “Hyphenate, bitch!” if I want our children to share the same last name as my spouse and me. She claims that changing your name is an ownership indicator, demonstrates that “you are not your own person,” and then says, “hyphenation is the new black.” Her final instruction is less militant. She asks merely that we consider the idea before just going ahead and changing our names without thinking about it.

If hyphenating your name is the “new black,” I hope she means black plague, so it goes away. To me, hyphenating is a one-generation stop gap to the issue of last names in families because my daughter as “Claudia Green-Robinson” marrying someone with the last name “Lewis-Clark” is going to produce a grandchild with more names than would ever fit on a driver’s license or diploma and might exceed even the extended names of royal families. Using a last name as a middle name is a great way to carry on a family name. However, hyphenation merely seems to solve the issue for you, and it then creates bigger issues for your child.

At one time, changing from your father’s name to that of your spouse (who was also definitely always a husband because your spouse could only be male), conveyed ownership “rights,” and you were considered property of one man and then another. Today, that is not the case in developed countries. I also do not believe changing your last name upon marrying indicates a loss of identity, especially for most women. If you have a professional career or extensive publishing history, sure, changing your name might be problematic. However, there are plenty of authors and artists who marry and legally change their last names, yet keep their “known” last name for publication and purposes such as that. It’s not like it is an “all or nothing” prospect. Your driver’s license and tax return list your married name and your books or canvases or film credits show your publicly familiar name.

Looking at history, the meanings of all kinds of things change in time. A hundred years ago, a Gay Gala was a happy, festive event entirely unrelated to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender issues. Today, you’d expect to receive an invitation to a “Gay Gala” only from an equal marriage organization or LGBT rights organization. The word would be used ironically, of course, and still not mean what it meant historically. Changing your last name upon marriage is much the same way. It does not indicate an exchange of your person as property. It also does not mean that you are not your own person. For me, changing my name invited a new identity that I desired: that of wife (spouse) and life partner that was legally recognized and socially sanctioned. I felt like taking my husband’s name, especially in the early 1990s when it was vogue to keep your name or hyphenate, was a way for me to demonstrate my commitment to our marriage. What did he do to show his commitment in such a way? Well, he was committed enough that he was happy that I was happy to share his name. While on paper it sounds sexist that he “wanted” me to have his name, the reality is that he was honored that I wanted to share his name. Hence, he was equally committed since he didn’t want me to keep my own last name. He never assumed I’d change my name, yet he was happy that I wanted to share a last name. It was another way for us to both be joined.

Some couples with hyphenated names create an entirely new last name from portions of the names they have. Some choose a single name because it is simpler, or continue the hyphenation thing, with the spouses each choosing one of their parent’s last names and then combining just the two. Friends of ours made that choice and remain happy with it.

While I agree we should all think about things before we just do them, especially if we’re doing them just because they are social norms and not because they continue to make any sense in our lives, I also believe that the name game is something deeply personal. It is a really good pre-marital discussion topic, as other strong beliefs and feelings are connected to this issue. Having a good, long talk, and talking more than once about one or both people altering his or her name will bring up things like tradition, family values, feelings about commitment, and autonomy. These topics lead to all kinds of other important values-based discussions, which are a great way to begin a marriage with a solid foundation of shared, or at least fully understood, beliefs and with principles of equality. While I am not a fan of hyphenating, personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with keeping your name, your spouse taking your name or you taking your spouse’s. To answer my question as the title to this post: what’s in a name? Apparently, quite a bit!

First published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/09/29/whats-in-a-name/

Mentioning the Unmentionable: Menstruation

inContext explores all kinds of topics related to women’s lives and how women are represented in literature. One topic that is largely missing from literature is that of menstruation. Outside of basic instruction for adolescents, it seems adult women don’t read or talk about something that, for most of us, occurs ever single month for more than thirty years of our lives. No one ever gets her period in a novel or a film, unless it is her first period, which is typically a part of the plot if it’s shown. In FLOW: THE CULTURAL STORY OF MENSTRUATION (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), Elissa Stein and Susan Kim lament that even the famous Kinsey and Hite reports don’t mention sex during menstruation.

Stein and Kim ask us and ask along with us: what is it that is so bewildering and unmentionable, all at once, about women’s cycles? Today, we have the option of chemically stopping our periods entirely, or at least for months at a time. The authors of FLOW cinch the argument precisely when they ask, “is this one giant leap forward for womankind…or just a step backward—that by ridding ourselves of an intrinsic part of being female, we’re just trying to make ourselves more like men?” Of course, they ask us to answer that question both individually and collectively. What do you make of the latest drugs on the market that are purported to reduce menstruation to four times per year or suppress it entirely? Can drugs like these free women from their biology? A deeper question might be: why is it that we wish to be free of our biology?

Advertising definitely contributes to women feeling “funny” about menstruation. The ads are always (and always have been) aimed at solving the “embarrassment” of menstruation. We are able to be carefree and active if we use x,y,z product to keep it all under “control.” There are little purses and carrying cases meant to hide tampons and pads. These have always struck me as silly. I mean, what ELSE would a long case hold inside it than tampons? The case isn’t long enough for pencils, or short enough to be a change purse. And, what are we hiding and why anyway? It should really not be a mystery to our fellow female friends, nor the males in our lives, that once a month we menstruate. Far from being abnormal, it is the most normal thing, like breathing, eating, eliminating waste, or blinking our eyes.

The women’s movement in its third wave seems to be based mostly around individual and personal choices. Feminism today is not collectively focused on equality for large groups, about change on a mass scale or about altering the dividing line of socioeconomic status that still separates women, regardless of religious, sexual, ethnic or racial differences. In our desire for ultimate autonomy, we seem to have lost the ability to question what we sanction and whether anything is “off-limits” for the individual.

There is so much taboo in our society around issues of women’s individual choices. We don’t want to spout too many facts about the horrors of c-section or not breastfeeding, lest we take away these as options for women who want to choose them. We can’t say that a woman choosing something is not making that choice from a stance of being educated and liberated. Most women who take surveys about breast augmentation, for example, say they’re doing it for themselves. And, who are we to argue? Yet, there is a creeping feeling for some of us that these “choices” are really about something unseemly beneath the surface of our society. We want c-sections supposedly because Grandma is visiting and lives so far away, so why not let her meet her grandchild while she’s here? We choose not to breastfeed because we, individually, do not want to feel any more tied to our babies than our partners are. If we bottle feed, our partner can get up every other night to feed the baby, right? In our never-ending pursuit of being politically correct and supportive of the singular desire of the individual, we might be missing something.

While FLOW puts out a lot of information, it leaves many questions for the reader to ponder. One has to wonder how we go from wishing for our periods so that we feel normal and some camaraderie with our junior high classmates a la Judy Blume’s ARE YOU THERE GOD, IT’S ME, MARGARET? (Yearling, 1970) to bringing an ad from a magazine to our gynecologist’s office seeking to just make it all go away. Rather than worrying about offending one another, we need to set aside our defense mechanism for our choices and discuss the reasons we make the choices we do. We need to talk with one another without judgment. I propose we talk about menstruation together now. How do you feel about menstruation? Are you glad for it? Do you wish it would go away? How do you feel about menstrual suppression via prescription? Feel free to comment and contribute to the discussion of this much-ignored aspect of women’s lives.

First published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/09/22/mentioning-the-unmentionable-menstruation/

Emotional Equality Within Personal Relationships

LUISAH TEISH

In THIS BRIDGE CALLED MY BACK: WRITINGS BY RADICAL WOMEN OF COLOR (Kitchen Table, 1984), one of the editors, Gloria Anzaldua, interviews Luisah Teish, a civil rights activist. Anzaldua discusses the power dynamic in families. She talks about women possessing power within the family while pretending that the men were in charge. Teish responds, claiming that this represents women seeing “the child in men” and then catering to that. She sees it evident in women handing money under the table to husbands or boyfriends so they can pay. Teish recognizes this when women make hints, and then when their ideas are used, “you praise him” as if it was all the man’s thought.

This shined a jaundiced light of recognition into my life and experience. Growing up, I saw this happen repeatedly. It was all about my father’s ego for my mother. He was “the man” and he was “in charge.” In reality, like Teish and Anzaldua discuss, my mother orchestrated everything. Thankfully, I broke that cycle in many ways. Regardless, when I worked full time while in graduate school and my husband took on the entirety of household chores like a single parent, my grandmother warned me that I might lose my husband. She scolded me for letting him cook and take care of the house and our children while I researched and wrote after work. She told me that it was my job to do those things. I attempted to share with her our egalitarian view of housework and childcare. She wasn’t buying it.

GLORIA ANZALDUA

I’ve written before about the equal responsibility my husband and I share with regard to raising our children and household chores. While we’ve shared these tasks, what was not “equal” for a number of years was the care and keeping of my husband’s ego. I was not previously conscious of my attention to his ego, and when I ceased feeding his ego, I was just as unconscious of the weaning process I undertook to accomplish this. To his credit, my husband never consciously or unconsciously expected the kind of backward control or ego-care hinted at in the Anzaldua and Teish interview, or blatantly stated by my grandmother.

Early in our relationship, I did the kinds of things my grandmother and the authors said were the “way” to get and keep a husband, though I was not aware of this as purposeful behavior. It was learned behavior from my childhood home that was merely repeated into the next generation. While I did not recognize it at the time, resentment grew within me. Years ago, I would not have been able to name this as such. However, I now recognize it. When I went back to school to complete my degree, I underwent a major change. Part of this change included a slow weaning of my former ego-building behavior within my relationship with my husband. Again, at the time, I did not realize I was changing this behavior since I did not recognize the behavior itself yet.

As my meta-awareness of this behavior in myself grew, I consciously worked to eradicate it, both for myself and for my husband. It might sound silly to say that I’ve ceased ego-building behavior toward my husband for his benefit. However, since this behavior is not something he ever wanted, even unconsciously, I approach him and our relationship with more respect as this behavior was left behind.

This whole thing has caused some conflict in our family. The conflicts have not been with my husband, but rather with our son. Henry is 14 and he is not sure what to make of the changes I’ve undergone. He sometimes accuses me of lacking empathy or asks if I’ve stopped loving his father. He sees the changes in me even more than my husband does. Partly, this is because as our child, Henry is excluded from the intricate dance of intimacy that is our marriage. He is not privy to the lifelong conversation we have, every talk as we drive somewhere, the things we say before bed or as we converse in the mornings. Our son is a part-time observer, while my husband and I are partners in motion together.

While our son might see my behavior change and see it as my lack of empathy or loss of love, the opposite is true. I actually have more empathy for my husband’s struggle to define himself as a human being developing his identity. Because I no longer cater to Chris’s ego with behaviors that negate my own identity and sense of self-agency, I love him more.

All of this is more complex than what I’m able to write in an article. When I read this aloud to my husband, he is likely to feel hurt that I was ever resentful, even unconsciously, at times in our marriage. It will feel to him that he’s been indicted for a crime he never committed. As I’ve become more aware of this former mindset, I move along a developmental trajectory, and I harbor no regret or feeling of victimization or loss.

I share all of this because I see this pandering to the “child in men” within so many relationships. I see women resent the backseat driving they’re forced to undertake to have power and control in their marriages, and how this merely leads to unhappy marriages. Men are not so childlike that they don’t feel the undercurrent or the invisible strings their wives manipulate.

This, to me, is one of those “problems with no name” within marriages. I write about it so that men and women in relationships might recognize learned behaviors from their families and come together on more equal terms emotionally. Even as my husband and I approached the tasks of a relationship and responsibilities of family and household equally, we still had to overcome learned behaviors of our families to bring our emotional relationship to the same level of equality.

Like most movements that seek to change power or social dynamics, this one, too, must start in the home. As women, we must raise our children to not only do the same amount of dishes and laundry and vacuuming whether they are male or female, we must also raise them to openly discuss and share decision-making and emotional support within their partnerships and marriages as adults. As we come to consciousness about injustices, especially when they are evident in our personal relationships, we need to tread lightly. The usual stages of anger and outrage should not be projected onto one another, since we’re all on the same team. If we can merely become more aware and leave the resentment behind as a by-product in order to move forward as whole individuals, we will honor our relationships and build stronger bonds with one another. Instead of seeing the “child in men,” I propose we look beyond and recognize the man in men to seek equal footing emotionally within our relationships.

First published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/09/15/finding-the-man-in-men-vs-the-child/

"Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists" Book Review and Reflection

Click Elicits “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

If I cried out, “Yes!” every time I thought it while reading Courtney E. Martin and J. Courtney Sullivan’s, CLICK: WHEN WE KNEW WE WERE FEMINISTS (Seal Press, 2010), I would have sounded like I was re-enacting that famous restaurant scene in the late 1980s film WHEN HARRY MET SALLY. A lot of what I’ve written lately seems critical of feminist writers. Frankly, it’s felt bad! It’s necessary, but also leaves me feeling like I’m complaining about the very people cheering me on and keeping women’s issues alive and relevant. Thankfully, I happened upon CLICK, which is a collection of short essays by women (and one man) who share their memories and experiences of realizing the need for feminism or becoming feminists.

Each story is a little different. Each is a testament to the latest generation’s feminism, and bridges the feminist thought and action of the seventies with women’s experiences today. The ideas run the gamut. Nellie Beckett tells us that we need to stop defending feminism and the appearances of feminists and have the true diversity that is feminist thought “recognized in the mainstream.” Succinctly and plainly, she says: “If there’s a movement whose image shouldn’t be the top priority, it’s feminism.” Then again, Courtney Martin wonders whether the stimulation of women through shared fashion sense isn’t a perfectly valid way of engaging subsequent generations. She recognizes that we are all most comfortable when we share something in our outward appearance and that after that initial spark of self-reflection in another, we might more easily draw out women (and men) to find more substantive things about which we can connect. She had no idea, for example, that a feminist could or would wear fishnet tights! These two seemingly conflicting views rest happily together, at once challenging a younger generation of women to stop worrying so much about appearances and start working together, and yet also not feel excluded if fashion is part of your list of passions in life.

Jordan Berg Powers writes about his own experience with feminism and how it feels to be a black, Jewish man and what it is like having a family full of feminist women who refuse to call themselves feminists because of the trappings of the term, which, in the black community, is seen as being a bunch of white women. In other non-white writers’ experiences, this is also true. Asian and Indian women find American feminism hard to take as part of their identities even if they and their families embrace feminist concepts and ideals. Powers claims that when we put gender into a box, we automatically create boundaries for the others, as well. He claims that feminism was the springboard from which he developed critical thinking and which altered his worldview. Joshunda Sanders writes about both race and economic status as separate from feminism, which she saw as a group of people who ignored her. Karen Pittelman contributes to this discussion, as well, with her essay that focuses on class, entitlement and privilege.

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne writes an emotionally charged and truly important essay about identity and uncovering our true selves. At the age of eleven, she demands that her father take her deer hunting, just like he’s done with her brothers and is done with the other eleven-year-old boys in her town. Her father quietly does what she asks and neither is prepared for her reaction. In the end, she warns us that we must always watch out for merely proving a point versus living true to ourselves. She says, “I had allowed myself to be defined by what the boys said I couldn’t do, rather than what I wanted to do.” While my personal experience of this idea is vastly different than Shelburne’s, her message hit a deep, personal place inside me. This is an extremely significant message to feminism and its evolution, which should not be missed. It’s not merely about women doing certain things because they CAN. It’s really examining whether what we want to prove is true within our hearts and minds. When I think of the COSMOPOLITAN magazine version of feminism in the 1980s and women serving in combat positions in our armed services, this wise sentence speaks volumes. It opens lines of communication we should explore as we work together to find a common ground and understanding among and between women and men.

This post reads more like a standard book review, I know. However, I am so excited and inspired by what I read that I wanted to touch upon the views represented because they reach out to every one of us. The take is fresh, modern and speaks to the “third wave” generation. Check back in for Part II next week as I conclude my raving about this amazing book!

This first section first published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/09/01/yes-yes-yes/

EDITORS COURTNEY E. MARTIN AND J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN

Part Two: inContext continues a consideration of CLICK: WHEN WE KNEW WE WERE FEMINISTS.

There are many women in feminist scholarship today who imagine a wider net cast for what is still called feminism. Women like Susan Faludi see the confines that restrict men, and in CLICK, we have Winter Miller who imagines what she calls a future of “equalists.” A few posts ago, I proposed “egalitarianism” as the new term for feminism. Part of my reason for writing about and including men in my arguments about feminist issues is due to being married. Another part is being the mother of a son and a daughter. My husband and I would like nothing more than for my husband to be home and for me to work and be the main breadwinner. For various reasons, this has not happened except for during a few short years of our lives. The societal pressures on men about defining manhood help keep him working, as it is his identity to an extent, no matter our personal preferences and desires. As the mother of a daughter, I want her world to be equal. I want her husband to respect her as a partner, an equal. I want my son to be the same man I’d want as a partner for my daughter. I also want him to stop worrying about his physical appearance as much as any girl. I want him to not worry about being sensitive. I want my husband to have other stay-at-home dads as friends and for men to not belittle him at family gatherings or parties with friends, neighbors or colleagues of his wife or his own. I don’t want him lonely as the token stay-at-home dad in his town. I don’t want his wife to get the evil eye from neighbors as she comes home from work at night. Thus, an essay about imagining a different kind of wave entirely is welcome.

Sophie Pollitt-Cohen asks questions about titles and terms, also hoping for something more inclusive since she believes feminism lends itself to females caring about female issues and uses the example that “There is no special word for people who support civil rights and fair treatment of black or gay people.” Maybe Faludi, Pollitt-Cohen and Miller are onto something here and we can collectively move not “beyond” feminism, but rather broaden the term to include widespread issues that are a part of feminist thought and action.

I will never forget when my best friend, a guy, was a freshman at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts back in 1989. At orientation, the new students were instructed to do the old “look left and look right” and to consider the men in the group as potential rapists. Date rape on college campuses was a pressing topic for the incoming freshman classes in the U.S. and this was how this public college in New England chose to handle it.

My friend was horrified at being called a “potential rapist.” I was equally horrified. While I did not have a husband or son at the time, I imagined that the freshman class was full of future husbands and it was definitely full of people’s sons. Sorry, freshman orientation leaders, all men are not potential rapists, and don’t you dare call my best friend, my brother, my cousin, my uncle, my father, my husband or my son a potential rapist. Just because a man has a penis, we cannot assume he has the potential to violently attack women. This is absurd and the kind of thing that motivated me, even over twenty years ago, to work toward equality and mutual respect between people regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, religion, ability, etc.

J. Courtney Sullivan makes room in feminism for her father, her mother (who only recently identified as a feminist) and for the arguments inherent to the feminist cause. In an extremely salient essay, Sullivan exposes the two-faced nature of our obsession with care-taking and housework. We simultaneously place no value on it while raising it to false heights of status. Housework and childcare are two places Susan Douglas’s “Enlightened Sexism” are ever apparent. We won’t pay women (or men) to stay home and take care of children or homes. We pay very little to those who do childcare and housework when they are paid. Yet, advertising (and increasingly politics) claim childcare and housework “priceless” and beyond commoditization. These are arenas of love and are promoted as spheres in which women call all the shots. So, on the one hand, we won’t provide government funding or require private companies to pay for extended maternity or paternity leave. However, we’ll also feed you a line with a cleverly hidden hook that claims you are doing the best thing in the world, and actually exhibiting a lot of control and power, if you “choose” to stay home. And, if that scenario applies only to those with the economic possibility of making that choice, that’s o.k., too. In the arena of advertising and consumer culture, those poor people who cannot choose to stay home weren’t making enough money to buy the products they’re selling anyway.

CLICK is the book on feminism I’ve sought. It is current, fresh and filled with stories that make sense to “my generation” of women. It is the book that I think might just be the thing that bridges the gap between my daughter, feminism and me. It has something for everyone and every experience of feminism and a search for equality. It speaks from different races, gives voice to lesbian and gender-based feminism, addresses religion, and speaks from poverty and privilege and even from a male viewpoint. Whether you read it now or not at all, consider sharing YOUR “click” moment as a comment below. Do you identify as a feminist? When did you begin to think of yourself as feminist? Do you think of yourself as an “equalist” or “egalitarian?” How do you define any/all of these terms?

First published: http://www.hercircleezine.com/2011/09/08/when-did-you-click/

Fear of Success

I am finally on a path I likely should have followed a long time ago. The reasons for my diversions are complex. I talked myself out of pursuing a degree in a field where I might have a career. I have this internal monologue loop that stems from a slew of youthful experiences and mixed messages in my upbringing.

After researching for two years to determine a "path" for my career, which I desperately want and need, I realize why I continue to find particular paths "impossible." They are impossible partly because they are not the path I want. I feel like I might have wasted time in a certain way and yet I also know the experiences I've had, especially in higher education, have changed me for the better. My worldview has been altered and I can see the past, present and look toward the future with new eyes (See Mills and his "Sociological Imagination" for what I'm talking about here). As a result, I knew I needed to go back for another degree. Because of all it took for my husband and I to get me through my bachelor's and first master's degree, I was afraid of my husband's reaction. He is incredibly supportive and wants only for my happiness. Of course, he supports any endeavor I want to pursue. He just wants it to work for me.

So, I'm taking an elective course because you can take an elective before being accepted into the program formally. After signing up for the course, getting passionate about career possibilities and my future being exactly what I want, I had a little bit of a hiccup. I let the mean girls from my childhood and Archie Bunker speak. He must have held the door to let them in and then followed behind. Archie Bunker is the amalgamation of my grandmother and my parents unspoken and subtle sexism.

First, the mean girls tried to tell me I'm not really good enough. Even if I succeed, it's not real. This stems from when I was in junior high and my mom let me enter a local modeling contest. I had had a tough time at school from when we moved from a city to small town. When I entered this contest, I was feeling pretty down about myself. I was not a cheerleader with a blonde pony tail. I've never actually wanted to be blonde (Snow White was my girl over Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Ariel over Cinderella) and I really liked short hair. When you're a kid, what you really want is friends and to be treated well. I was a social pariah in that school system. So, as "typical" as a modeling contest might seem, my mother thought it might boost my self-esteem to participate. The prizes included finishing school classes (imagine!) that were aimed mostly toward building self-confidence and helping young women present themselves professionally, and (of course) fashionably. Another prize was a professional photo shoot, which my mother thought would help me see my beauty even when ugliness was thrown at me verbally and physically at school.

I entered the contest and on the day of it, I examined the other contestants with a keen eye. I picked the girl who I knew would win and then tried to see if I might be able to get second place. No, that wouldn't happen. This other girl I saw there was definitely going to take that spot. I continued to look at my fellow contestants to see how (if) I measured up. I thought I possibly had a shot at third place. I knew I was enthusiastic and carried myself well as I'd been told that my entire life. I let the self-confidence I was raised with shine through versus putting up the protective shield I wore to school every day. I "acted" on the runway for each clothing change I needed to make to show my versatility.

The contest ended and third place was announced. I was not called. I was a little heartbroken. Of course, there was still a chance for second place, right? Just seconds later, my hopes were dashed as the girl who I picked for second place took that trophy. I clapped and held back tears of disappointment. Why couldn't I have gotten third place instead of that other girl? I waited for them to announce the absolutely beautiful girl as the winner, the one with the Breck shampoo of the seventies hair and more womanly body. Then, they called my name. I sat there a minute, unable to believe my ears, waiting for someone else to stand and walk toward the stage so that I knew I just heard wrong and didn't embarrass myself any further. I finally stood and the tears came, just like in the Miss America pageant. It was silly, but I was also in shock. I was proud of myself, and considering the beating I took most days of school, I wasn't sure I believed that a group of judges had seen the happy, smart, caring, motivated, hardworking, girl I was in my gangly adolescent body with my short hair.

I went to school that Monday with my sash and tiara in a white cardboard box to protect it. I didn't necessarily care about showing my classmates. I wanted to show my favorite teacher. I figured she'd appreciate my accomplishment. My teacher's reaction was not quite what I expected. She was mildly interested and did not praise me in the way I had hoped. Of course, the other kids found out about it and (of course) they claimed things like "the judges must have been on drugs," or "the judges were obviously blind." Even if I won a beauty pageant, I was still not beautiful. I wasn't even acceptable in appearance, never mind possibly even just pretty. As a kid, you don't really quite get the absurdity of it all. No matter how many times my mother told me I was beautiful, capable, kind, smart, mature, caring, etc., none of it mattered when five days a week for six hours a day I was told I was anything but any of these things. Sure, I was always the "better" person and never retaliated angrily in words or action. However, inside, it hurt terribly.

So, when I "do well" in life, I still sometimes hear those awful girls telling me that it doesn't matter what I "win," I'm still nothing. Like last night, when I was over-tired and should have just gone to bed, I let them speak and say those things to me. In the light...well, gray rain...of this morning, they're all back in junior high where they belong. However, it's those little moments when they can come raging back.

Archie Bunker is bit more insidious than the mean girls. He's kind of an unspoken threat, like in a movie about the mafia when a witness is on the stand in court and just the presence of a person in the court room causes him or her to change his or her testimony. Partly, this is because Archie is the voice of family, which is the foundation of who we are. Archie Bunker, is, of course, sexist. He wants "Edith to bring him a beer," which she can't do if she's off in graduate school, or working and teaching. The reason my Archie is "worse" than the real one is because he's that mafia figure in the court room. He doesn't actually "say" anything, just conveys it in sentences that seem complete and stop, yet have unspoken clauses at the end. Archie was the hidden or subliminal messages conveyed to me. I grew up with 70s second wave rhetoric about being "anything I wanted to be" and with Helen Ready on vinyl and Our Bodies, Ourselves on the coffee table. However, I also grew up with a father who once put dishes in the bathtub when my mother was away on a business trip because while he did feed us, he was not doing the dishes for her. Of course, upon her return, she realized this also meant we hadn't had a bath in a couple of days since we couldn't bathe in the tub with the dishes. She was supposed to be home, not traveling for work. Her work was only to be inside the home. I saw them fight and her leave a radiology program that might have saved their financial fate because he wouldn't help out so she could study. Still, today, at sixty-four, my mother makes my father's lunch at night while he watches television. I was told I could "be anything" but also witnessed and heard in other conversations what the rest of that sentence was, which is "wife and mother are the most valuable things you can be."

As a result of this kind of upbringing, while I had all these ambitions, none of them could be realized until I was ensconced as someone's wife and then mother to his children. I was not a real woman unless I was a wife and mother. Until those things were in place, nothing else mattered. Yes, trying to become something or to pursue a career while being married with young children is incredibly difficult. You fall into that trap of "just wait" until the kids do "whatever." Wait until they're in school, in high school, in college, oh, heck, just wait until they're grown. In the meantime, as a child of the seventies and witness to the eighties and nineties, you see women choose sixty hours of daycare to have careers and ask, "Why did you even have a child?" You see women leave careers to stay home, but also lucrative careers that can be done part-time or on a consultant basis and become envious that they had the support to attend college first and to establish careers first so that they had these options available to them. So that you're not "out" of the workforce entirely, you volunteer for non-profits, the PTO, you run small businesses, attempt direct selling (in all kinds of product categories) and take part-time paraprofessional type jobs like paralegal or pharmacy technician. You attend nurse's aid training. You finish your college degree. Despite your grandmother telling you that your husband will leave you if you aren't the one cooking dinner and caring for the kids instead of working and going to school, you hold down two jobs and graduate with an M.A. and a 4.0 GPA.

So, as I finally let my inner voice, the real-me-voice, speak and say, "Damn it, go for it!" about my further education and career, I find in tired moments that Archie and the Mean Girls (good band name?) can still squeeze in the door and attempt to wreak havoc with me. Maybe looking at "them" as a band will be helpful. He'll be the lead singer, with his whiny voice and penchant for beer served by a woman, and they're just back up to the drone of unmelodious songs with tired lyrics. I can choose to change the radio station, to walk out of the club and just not listen.