Back From the Jungle

A week ago yesterday morning, I was on a plane, traveling to my appointed rendezvous with lions.  (See my previous post On the Road Again. . . With Trepidation.)  At the urging of my children (who seem to be doing their share of urging lately, at least of me), I decided to suspend all other commitments and activities while at the three-day Ntosake training, including blogging.  So I have not yet reported on the experience.

As I wrote earlier, the Gamaliel Foundation identifies the term "Ntosake" as "South African," and cites its meaning as "She who walks with lions and carries her own things."  My quick and dirty research reveals some minor disagreement about the word's source, and spelling.  One site claims that the writer Ntozake Shange*, named Paulette Williams at birth, took her chosen name from the Zulu, “Ntozake” meaning “she who comes with her own things” and “Shange” meaning “she who walks like a lion.”  Contemporary American Women Poets:  An A-to-Z Guide agrees about the meaning of her name, but doesn't specify the source.  Black Baby Names.org gives the meaning of Ntosake as "She who walks with lions."  Proz.com:  The Translation Workplace, like the Gamaliel usage, combines both meanings as pertaining to Ntosake alone, and speculates that its origin is Swahili.   

But whatever the linguistic parsing I might be distracted to apply as I work up my nerve to write about my three days with the women of Ntosake, the real question is what happened there, and how it changed me, or didn't.  


I spent a couple of days online searching for "cover" as I pondered what to say.  I ran into all sorts of stories about the Gamaliel Foundation, its ties to Barack Obama, and its supposed "whackjob" politics and ideology.  None of that is of particular interest to me, since I have been working within "the network" for a number of years now, along with members of my congregation, and those right-wing concerns are not mine.


I was, however, intrigued by some fairly deeply buried insider controversy about the training methods of the organization.  And this is because of my reactions to the approach taken with me and the thirty-some women with whom I attended the most recent Ntosake training.


I had managed for several years to avoid "weeklong," the theoretically more comprehensive program in which all Gamaliel-affiliated leaders are expected to participate.  I have a background as a paid community organizer, extending over a four-year period in my twenties.  My social work undergraduate program and my master's in urban and regional planning with a concentration in social planning both included extensive coursework in community organization and the Saul Alinsky model that is the basis of Gamaliel Foundation congregation-based organizing.  And I have been working with my local organization for years, and been in positions of significant leadership.  Additionally, my life circumstances during this period precluded investing the money, and more particularly the time required to travel to attend.  My organizer gave me a "pass."

But Ntosake takes place over a long weekend; my life has changed a bit; I was invited to go along by a good friend.  And I was just plain curious.  I was especially caught by the notion of training designed by women, and for women, to empower us as women.  


My enthusiasm for the event foundered, however, on the rocks of agitation. 

As practiced within Gamaliel, and other Alinsky-inspired community organizing groups, agitation involves confrontation and challenge, in an attempt to draw out an individual's "self-interest," and to push her or him to attain "clarity," as a prerequisite to building a powerful public life.  All good, yes?

In notes for the brochure for the October 2010 Supported Life Institute's 24th Annual Conference for which she was a keynote speaker, Mary Gonzalez, Western Regional Director of the Gamaliel Foundation, and hands-down the best of my Ntosake trainers, had this to say about agitation and its intended fruit:

Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, said: “If there is no
struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom & yet
depreciate agitation … want crops without plowing up the ground, they
want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the
awful roar of its many waters … Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will.” 

The purpose of your path must be to build power and make a
demand that will bend the political will to do what is just.

Rev. Dennis Jacobsen, in his book Doing Justice:  Congregations and Community Organizing, writes of his memorably uncomfortable public agitation by Greg Galluzzo, Gamaliel's director, and how it ultimately strengthened his work, and made him more effective.  But he also points out that

Relationship is a prerequisite of agitation.  I have no right to agitate people I do not know.  If I don't know what their self-interests are, who they are, what potentiality they have, I am in no position to agitate them to live out their vision for their lives. . . An agitator is trying to create community, build an organization, raise up leaders.  

And further,

Agitation does not leave people hanging.  It honors the valuable gifts that they bring.  It summons them to release those gifts in service of their vision for their lives.  And it connects them to a community, such as a church or a congregation-based community organization, where their gifts can be actualized and their leadership developed.

Still,

sine qua non of saintliness.  It is also a difficult skill to be learned by those who enjoy running over other people.  A balancing act is required here.  As Che Guevara said, "One must be hard, but without losing tenderness."

Suffice it to say that some of my experience last weekend, and that of my sisters in the circle, fell a bit short of  Che's standard.  Some of our trainers might do well to review Rev. Jacobsen's text.  And I would venture to say that most, if not all of us, are still digesting what took place.  (See Eric Fretz's overall favorable account of his time at Gamaliel weeklong training for description of typical interactions.) 

The claim is made that this training approach, which some in my acquaintance have likened to tactics abandoned long ago by Marxist-Leninist cadres, the Black Panthers, and Wernard Erhard's EST training, is responsible for the substantial growth of women's leadership within Gamaliel, and in other national organizations. The jury is still out on my cohort of women.  I have reason to question how forthright we will be in sharing our Ntosake stories.

I did bring home a clearer sense of where I want to go in my organization, and what I will have to change in myself to get there.  And a couple of pretty deep scratches from my time with the lions.

* Shange is best known for her choreopoem "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf," recently adapted into a motion picture by Tyler Perry.

Reaching My Speed Limit

Rushing through traffic yesterday in the clogged lanes brought to us by stimulus-money-inspired road construction gone amok, I was led to contemplate the unpleasant experience of hurrying.  Something I'm doing too much of lately.  Hurrying, that is, not contemplating.  (And "late-ly" is how, and why I'm doing it!)


My middle child, who--fortunately, mostly--does not share my genes, is constantly haranguing me about walking too fast.  His reflex response to all requests from me is some variant of "Wait up" or "Calm down"--even when I think I'm relatively calm.  When he was a small child, The Hurried Child:  Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, by David Elkind Ph.D. was a decade or so old. Its ideas had percolated into our cultural consciousness to the extent that I referred to them without ever having read the book. And I used to say that this little boy of mine was "The Unhurry-able Child."  I am still trying to learn what he can teach me.


By now, we have graduated to something called the Slow Movement.  (Neither constipation, nor the adagio part of a symphony.)  Articles and websites and bookshelves abound with calls to convert to "Slow Food" and "Slow Travel;" to educate our children in "Slow Schools" and move to "Slow Cities." It has been twelve years since Richard Carlson and Joseph Bailey gave us Slowing Down to the Speed of Life: How To Create A More Peaceful, Simpler Life From the Inside Out. And longer still since Dr. Gershon Lesser coined the term "hurry-up disease," which he warned puts us at risk for hypertension and early coronaries--products of literally speeding to get through (with) life.

So why are we still rushing around?  And how do we stop?

At Slow Movement, a website dedicated to promoting the voluntary simplicity and downshifting at the heart of this cultural sea change, they make the argument that slow is all about connection, to place, to life, and to each other.  And that fear of death and dying are at the root of what physicians have come to call time urgency impatience a hallmark of the dreaded, and unhealthy Type A personality.  In our acronym-crazy argot, this malady has morphed into "TUI," or its variant "TUP"--Time Urgency Perfectionism, said to afflict women disproportionately.  Blogger Wendy, at Chronicles of Chaos, writes humorously of finding a diagnosis for a condition that had convinced her that "something was wrong with me."


Wendy dismisses the simplistic advice for improving the situation found in the Boston Globe article that put her onto the whole concept--namely 1) taking a one-minute break for a funny email, or dancing (too little to make a difference); 2) reminding yourself to slow down (not likely to help someone addicted to hurrying); and 3) retreating to a no-tech zone (but that's where she finds funny emails and escape from the pressures of her life).  Standard lists of suggestions, like this from  
MySelfDevelopment, include:

1. Set priorities. Make a conscious decision about what you consider important, and let your schedule (and your attitude) reflect your intentions. For example, if relationships and health are high on your list, turn off the TV to free up time for taking walks with friends.

2. Do one thing at a time. When you multi task, it becomes impossible to concentrate, feel deeply, or think clearly. “Doing two or more things at the same time splits our consciousness in two or more ways,” observes meditation teacher Eknath Easwaran.

3. Wake up right. “Set your alarm clock early, but don’t get up when it rings,” suggests Paul Pearsall, Ph.D., author of The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress Your Anger, Think Negatively, Be a Good Blamer, & Throttle Your Inner Child. “Lie there a few minutes and practice the savoring response: Think about who and what is worth getting up for and the privilege of being awake in such a rushed yet wonderful world.”

4. Take off your watch. “People hurry up when they see a clock, which is why stores don’t have clocks–they want us to linger,” says Honore, who experiences less anxiety since he unstrapped his own watch. Because there are clocks everywhere–in cars and on cellphones and computers–he’s still punctual, but no longer feels like a slave to time. Test this yourself by going “watch-free” on evenings and weekends.

5. Listen to relaxing music. “Your body synchronizes to the rhythms around you,” says psychologist Sharon Heller, Ph.D., author of Too Loud, Too Bright, Too Fast, Too Tight. Look for music that’s paced to a relaxed heartbeat, about 60 beats per minute.

6. Resist road rage, “See every traffic jam as a meditation assignment,” Pearsall advises. There are few better opportunities to practice positive thinking and forgiveness or perform your deep-breathing exercises.

7. Find your center. Techniques such as meditation and yoga allow you to access patience. “Practices that bring you into stillness and quiet turn off the stress response,” says Peg Bairn, N.P., director of training at the Mind-Body Medical Institute, and an associate in medicine at Harvard Medical School. “They help you recharge your batteries and come back into alignment with who you really are.”

For myself, I will think seriously about these strategies and experiment with their use.  In the meantime, two behavioral changes beckon.  First of all, I will set and adhere to firm deadlines by which time I must leave the house for scheduled meetings, work hours, appointments, and other events.  I most often find myself hurrying when I haven't left enough time to get where I need to be.  Secondly, I will keep, as Gretchen Rubin advocates in her Happiness Project blog, gas in my car--and ask those who share it to help out with this.  Jumping into a vehicle which has been left, by me or by others, on fumes in the driveway has contributed much anxiety to my days in recent months.  This is partly a result of post-Katrina gas prices, which have made filling up a thing of the past.  But it also comes from failing to plan ahead, and a kind of magical thinking that seeks to ignore the fact that I'm going to eventually--and before the week is out, probably--have to spend a certain amount to fuel my necessary travels anyway.  Rubin calls this "underbuying."


And now, I'm going to move slowly through this day, sandwiched between two fully scheduled ones.  Tomorrow morning, I need to be miles from here at 7:30, to meet up with my traveling companions for a full-day out-of-state consulting visit.  I need to leave the house no later than 7, in a car with sufficient gas in its tank.  Tomorrow's blog post must be written today--but not in a rush.  I will try to store up some tranquility, and to listen to my in-home spirit guide, who would have me walk slower, wait up, and calm down.  It probably wouldn't hurt, too, to wear my "Serenity" bracelet, and to squeeze in a little dancing. 

Finishing School

In one of the first posts of this blog, I mentioned having considered "Finishing School" as the blog's name.  I had intended it, of course, as a play on words, since a traditional "finishing school" is somewhere I would never have been caught dead.  


In the historical sense, a finishing school was "a private school for girls that prepares them for society by teaching social graces and accomplishments."  Modeled after Swiss and British establishments, 19th century American finishing schools were intended to return a young lady 

home "finished" and prepared to grace her father's house and to enjoy the freedom of a debutante while she practiced the arts and graces learned at the academy.

'Northwestern Chronicle, July 3, 1884; St. John's University Record, 1:55 (May, 1888) 

American finishing school curricula generally included French, music and drawing, and etiquette (or "charm"); other subjects could extend to quilling (paper filigree), "the fine art of fainting," elocution, poise, English, and other, more academic fare, as some of these institutions went on to morph into women's "seminaries" and colleges.

The term finishing school is occasionally used in American parlance to refer to certain small womens colleges, primarily on the East Coast, that were known for serving to prepare their female students for marriage. Since the 1960s, many of these schools have become defunct as a result of financial difficulties stemming from parents [sic] decreased interest in paying for such an education for their daughters, and the rise of feminism making it easier [sic] for daughters to follow loftier goals. (From Wikipedia)

In any case, finishing schools being generally a thing of the past, and the blog name already taken, "Put it to Bed" was born.  But I remain in need of learning how to finish.  And not, with the exception of my kitchen cabinets project, wood finishing.


And so I am trying to develop a "curriculum" that will encourage the needed behavior, or skill, or mindset.  By way of establishing a benchmark, I observe that my alacrity in starting things is not matched by my ability to limp across the "finish" line.  And that's putting it mildly.  More than four months ago, I posted "Stuff I've Been Putting Off," which detailed some of the things I haven't managed to be done with over a period of several years.  Since then, I've completed one of the tasks on that list of 15.  I called my brother, more than a month ago.  But he "wasn't available to take [my] call," and hasn't responded to the message I left, so that probably doesn't count.  Of course, I haven't called back, either.  Suffice it to say, I am still "completion-challenged."


A potentially fruitful idea came to me this week, as I was struggling to work on my late-spring housecleaning project.  I watched myself buzz from cleanup task to cleanup task, like a bee suffering from blossom-mania and unable to light on any one flower.  And I thought that maybe there was something to be gained by practicing finishing, on a small scale, disciplining myself to work through to the end on things I take up.  Perhaps I can build a muscle of denouement in this way.  


So this morning, I finished cleaning the microwave before I moved on to writing this post.  Not perfectly, but completely.  And I am challenging myself to bring to conclusion the odious task of filing my son's homeschool transcript in the form required, instead of the form I earlier provided it in.  If this improvement effort doesn't make me more marriageable, perhaps I will better 

grace [my own home], and ...enjoy the freedom of a [more effectively recovering procrastinator] while [I] practice the arts and graces learned at [this] academy.

The Politics of Housework

The men in my house don't look anything like the FDR types pictured here.  But despite my best efforts to cajole, bribe, instruct, and plead, they still exhibit this mentality.  Housework is something they "help out" with, at best.  And housework is something that gets in the way of the work I consider mine.


This week's focus goal is 

to make my home that of a happier woman.  So I can be.

This means that I am once again struggling with the politics of housework. 


I am dismayed, when I allow myself to think about it, that my life has taken a shape my younger feminist self would have found inconceivable. Its neo-traditionalist contours are not so very different from the domestic imprisonment that hobbled my highly intelligent, college-educated mother in the '60s and '70s. To be sure, the language and understandings of my marital partnership are more "evolved," reflecting an acceptance of the equality of rights of women and men. But the practice has never lived up to the words. 

The reasons for this are many, including an incredibly complex family structure of yours, mine, and ours kids; my exposure to radical feminist mothering philosophy and lifestyles through my study of midwives; the family-unfriendly environment of academia, in which I had planned to continue working; my husband's super-absorption in work and lack of basic skill (not to mention interest) in housekeeping tasks; my closely spaced last two children, who comprised my second family, and their particular needs; and, of course, the perfectionism that made it difficult for me to operate comfortably in two rival spheres.  But whatever the reasons for our present division of labor, I have never accepted its necessity or rightness.  It is not as it should be, not legitimate.  And I can at least claim to have married a man and raised young men who agree with me about that.


In raising boys, I had hoped to improve on the previous generation of men's behavior and competence with respect to the necessary work of making and keeping a home.  If words, and repetition, and various training methods were effective, I would have succeeded.  But I didn't count on the in-their-face example of a powerful male, and my own battle fatigue.  So having read and tried* several methods, employed various charts and systems of rewards and consequences, and lectured endlessly (according to my kids) on the subject of women's entitlements and men's responsibilities, I still find myself most days up to my knees in other people's stuff and left-behind messes.   

The responses I have tried to this ongoing household disaster have included:  1) nagging--not my favorite, or anyone else's, and anyway, not effective on any more than a momentary basis; 2) doing it all myself, with whatever voluntary help emerges--this approach leaves me smoldering with resentment, and also very tired; 3) giving up, and trying to work around the squalor--but then I am mired in chaos, and CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome, aptly named by Pam Young and Peggy Jones (the self-styled Slob Sisters) in their book Get Your Act Together:  A 7-Day Get-Organized Program For The Overworked, Overbooked, and Overwhelmed); and trying, Against Medical Advice, to reinstitute past systems that have worked for brief periods--this strategy flies in the face of previous experience, or seen another way, expresses eternally springing hope, not delusion.


One of these past systems was to disallow my children's guests from visiting until said offspring pitched in to make the house presentable.  As time has marched on, however, "presentable" got redefined to meet the standards of other teenagers, mostly males, and I became more concerned about my kids' needs for social contact with reasonable associates where I could have some oversight.  If I had counted on embarrassment to dissuade them from trashing the bathrooms guests would need to use, or the bedrooms they would close themselves into, or even the refrigerators they would raid, I had misplaced my trust.  My kids are either so secure (and so male) that they assume they will be seen as the cool people they actually are regardless of the wet towels and discarded clothing on the floor, the toothpaste in the sink, the unscoured toilets, etc.; or they are so supremely lazy that they can't be bothered.


I have also tried posting clever "reminders" where family members and guests alike can see them.  For example, over the counter that noone can apparently remember to wipe off, this sign:  

Dear Human and Porcine Occupants,

Thanks for leaving this area covered with food remnants, beverage spills and coffee grounds.   

Sincerely, Mortimer Mouse & friends, Abigal ("The Queen") Ant & Associates.  

 And this, over the toilet:

VITAL AUXILIARY INSTRUCTIONS

LIFE SEAT IF STANDING TO USE.  WHEN FINISHED, RETURN SEAT TO DEFAULT POSITION.

The Management Thanks You For Your Cooperation, As Our Maid Service Has Been Terminated!!!

And a far ruder version, when this one didn't work, specifying aim requirements and threatening exile to the neighboring gas station facilities for noncompliance.

But at this juncture, in response to my own mental health concerns, my priority is results.  I plan to do whatever works to return my home to a state I can live in, with or without help.  I am not above, though I might be beyond, nagging, charting, signage, bribes or embarrassment--which by the way, didn't work with me when I was a non-male teenager.  (My mother once brought a priest into my bedroom to dispel his notion that I was a mature and spiritual being.  I got up the next day, in the midst of a profusion of belongings and refuse, and began writing a short story about the scene!)  


I will do what it takes--though in the interests of the marriage I value, with all its imperfections, I will refrain from employing what my husband calls the Lysistrata tactic. 


If I, and most other women I know, have lost this battle, for this generation, I hold out hope for the next.  But I am breaking out of this stalag of untidiness, and reclaiming the ordered and aesthetic pleasing ground I've lost in the process.

---

* In searching the library catalog for the titles of books I remember reading, I find they seem to have been superseded by one I wish I’d read, called Chores without wars : turning dad and kids from reluctant stick-in-the muds to enthusiastic team play, by Lynn Lott, Riki Intner.  Their 2005 edition, Chores without wars; turning housework into teamwork, drops the name-calling and the culprit identification for a more cooperative approach.  I prefer the first subtitle.         

Procrastinating 101: Absolving Ourselves

Timothy Pychyl is something of a procrastination guru.  The Canadian psychology professor writes the procrastination blog Don't Delay for Psychology Today, provides weekly updates to his iProcrastinate Podcasts, co-creates an instructional, but nonetheless entertaining comic strip entitled Carpe Diem, and heads the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa.  (He is also, apparently, a sled dog musher and "Mr. Mum," which, while interesting, is probably off-topic.)  

Pychyl and his team of researchers have much to teach us, including their recently published finding that "self-forgiveness" for procrastination significantly reduces subsequent procrastinating.[1]  In a study of 119 university freshman, using self-report measures of procrastination and self-forgiveness prior to each of two midterms exams, they learned that:

1. Forgiving oneself for procrastinating on a given task is related to less procrastination on a similar task in the future.
2. This relationship is mediated by negative affect, such that self-forgiveness reduces procrastination by reducing negative emotions.
3. The presence of this relationship depends on the extent to which the individual procrastinated on the first task. In our study, only at high levels of procrastination on the first exam was self-forgiveness negatively related to procrastination on the second exam.

Okay.  So what does it mean to forgive ourselves?  According to Pychyl,

There are three essential parts to self-forgiveness. First of all, one must acknowledge the commission of an objective wrong and accept responsibility for that wrong.

Been there, done that. 

Secondly, one must then experience feelings of guilt and regret.

Check, and check. 

Finally, one must overcome these feelings (i.e., self-forgiveness), and, in doing so, experience a motivational change away from self-punishment toward self-acceptance. 

Not so much, yet.

But why does it matter if we forgive ourselves for putting things off?  Pychyl articulates the reasoning behind his team's investigation in this way:

[W]e argue that self-forgiveness for procrastinating may play a role in helping people overcome the negative effects of procrastination and encourage a change in behavior. If procrastination is viewed as a transgression against the self and results in negative feelings such as guilt, forgiving oneself for procrastinating should reduce this feeling. By reducing emotional distress associated with procrastination, the individual becomes less likely to avoid the stimulus associated with the feelings in the first place (i.e., studying for an exam). Moreover, because self-forgiveness is typically accompanied by a vow to change one's behavior in the future, this encourages the individual to engage in approach behaviors rather than behaviors motivated by avoidance. Thus self-forgiving for procrastinating may make it less likely that the individual will be motivated to avoid unpleasant tasks like studying and more likely that he or she will approach success by procrastinating less in the future.

In a conversation on NPR's Talk of the Nation in June of 2008, Dr. Pychyl further indicated a gender component to the self-forgiveness/procrastination connection, discussed in more detail in an earlier Don't Delay blog.  Basically, females tended to feel worse about having procrastinated in the first instance; and the effect of self-forgiveness was strongest for those who reported moderate or high levels of procrastination.  Pychyl speculates about why this would be so:

Based on previous research we've done, we think it may be explained by self-worth. Procrastination is related to self-worth or self-esteem for females but not males. So, to the extent that procrastination threatens sense of self, there is more of a transgression against self, more need for self-forgiveness and more of what I'm loosely calling "redemption."

So, basically, I'm in good shape here.  I'm a woman.  I feel lousy about procrastinating.  I have procrastinated at least moderately, have admitted my sins and experienced guilt and regret.  Now all I have to do is  "get over it."  I'm working on it.  Without delay. 

[1] Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T.A., & Bennett, S.H. (2010) I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences (2010), doi:10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029

Procrastinating 101—Devouring Hideous Amphibians

First, the title. Procrastinating 101—as in “Overcoming…,” as in “Dealing With.” Not as in “The Art of…,” or “How to Keep on…” Devouring Hideous Amphibians—as in Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time, by Brian Tracy, which I began reading yesterday.

If I were a character in a TV show, one of my characterizing quirks would be my reflexive library runs in response to life challenges.  Dyslexic kid?  Hit the shelves.  Panic attacks?  Pull out my library card.  Plumbing leak?  How-tos beckon.

So naturally, I have read a thing or two about procrastinating.  And my quest for remedies continues.  Somewhere in what I might loosely term “the literature” on why so many of us avoid getting to the things we supposedly want to do, there must be some useful ideas.  In “Procrastinating 101” posts, beginning with this one, I will consider the approaches recommended by my leaning towers of books on the subject.

I was led to pick up Eat That Frog! by its intriguing title.  In the first three chapters, read while my two-year-old grandchild napped (I succeeded, at least, in putting him to bed), I learned that:

1. Brian Tracy has also read a lot of books about procrastinating, time management, productivity, etc.;

2. the title refers to something I should probably have already heard of, since

it has been said for many years that if the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

 3. according to Brian Tracy, the frog stands for the most important thing we should be doing, and that we are most likely to procrastinate on;


 4. it has also been said [though Tracy doesn’t say by whom], “If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first;” and


 5. "[i]f you have to eat a live frog, it doesn’t pay to sit and look at if for very long."

Upon this amphibian foundation, Tracy erects a fairly common structure of rules and principles, with, thus far anyway, an emphasis on lists and written goals and plans.  I am struck by how gendered his orientation seems to me. 

He appears to assume an expanse of designated work time, if not space, that has eluded me for years; and a clear singularity of purpose that I find completely foreign.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that career success, measured by financial reward, is his focus.

He offers advice to be used in identifying my biggest, ugliest frog.  But in my woman’s life, and mind, and heart, I am having difficulty in applying it.  Is my frog the novel I want to be writing?  Or is it the teenagers I haven’t finished raising?  Or the tangle of health bills and insurance E.O.B.’s from which Obama hasn’t rescued me, which, left to their own devices, could bring down the house?  Or the paid work that produces the monetary band-aids I stretch over the cracks?  Or my small contributions to an effort to address entrenched minority joblessness in my city?  Or…?

I think I could bring myself to “just eat it” if I could figure out which one of these leaping green creatures was “the one.”

What am I Doing in the 19th Century?

In an earlier post, I wrote about my years of grappling with Tillie Olsen’s Silences.  Since finally finishing the book, I have been thinking about Olsen’s accounts of mothers who were writers, herself included.   I think back to images I have held since reading Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, mentioned in passing by Olsen.  And to the story of A.S. Byatt’s character Stephanie Potter, whose freakish accidental death in Still Life cuts short her halting attempts to resurrect her intellectual work, in the midst of young motherhood.

Adrienne Rich wrote memorably of herself as a mother of young children in the 1950s, and the strong emotions that tore at her as she fought to maintain something of herself and her work.  The fictional Stephanie Potter existed in this same time period, an ocean away.  Olsen was raising her children, as she said, “without household help,” in the 1940s and 1950s. 

Among the essays that make up Silences is Olsen’s treatment of Rebecca Harding Davis, who published Life in the Iron Mills in 1861.  Her early promise was, in Olsen’s view, buried under the domestic demands of her relatively late marriage and ultimate motherhood.  Olsen tells us, too, of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s trials, quoting from a letter to her husband, who was apparently sympathetic.

      

Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my efforts. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable and need a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?  (Silences, p. 204)

Stowe’s history-changing Uncle Tom’s Cabin would wait another ten years, until she was thirty-nine.  She

wrote it in magazine serial installments—in between—when weary with teaching the children and tending the baby and buying provisions and mending and darning; much of it on the kitchen table as the younger Harriet Beecher Stowe had, when trying to get writing done fourteen years before.  The firm, flawless style of her girlhood letters was gone.  (Silences, p. 206)

My three children were born between 1977 and 1993.  Two are still at home.  I have known Rich’s torment, followed Stephanie’s regimen, mirrored Olsen’s episodic pattern.  I have written, nearly to the word, Stowe’s lament.  Why am I seemingly mired in a time before my time?  What am I doing in the nineteen century, with my Subaru, my laptop, a dishwasher and central heating?  Why has technology not freed me to write?

I was born on the cusp of the changes many thought would bring relief, would allow women to “have it all.”  And yet, prior to the recent economic declines, many who could afford it were putting work on hold for motherhood, working part-time, changing careers to accommodate the kind of mothering we wanted to engage in.  We talked about “sequencing,” bumped our heads on glass ceilings, and some of us seemed determined to limit ourselves.   Add to this a new and powerful ideology of “natural” mothering, and in my case the “going native” phenomenon that lured me into the meaningful realities of my midwife dissertation subjects.  A perfect storm.

Olsen, again:

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptable, responsive, responsible. Children need one now (and remember, in our society, the family must often try to be the center for love and health the outside world is not). The very fact that these are real needs, that one feels them as one's own (love, not duty); that there is no one else responsible for these needs, gives them primacy. It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.... Work interrupted, deferred, relinquished, makes blockage--at best, lesser accomplishment. Unused capacities atrophy, cease to be.” (Silences 18-19)

And yet, in the nineteenth century, before washers and dryers and daycare, atrophy notwithstanding, a beleaguered mother of six surviving children changed the course of debate concerning slavery.  Who am I to sit in mourning for my weakened muse?