Brilliant Mistake

I started knitting years ago when my kids were little.  It was a way to fill the time when I was spending so much time sitting in a room with kids watching Elmo, Kipper, Calliou, and J.J. The Jet Plane (I can still sing all the songs from all of these shows).

I am not a great knitter.  As with cooking, I am a recipe girl.  I have to write everything down and double check a lot.  I can't breeze along, chatting and I don't understand enough to ever create my own pattern or modify one in any significant way.  But I like to try new things, so have done cables, lace patterns, sleeves, and other things as I grew more confident.

Early on, I knitted a lot of clothes for the kids.  Gorgeous cable hoodies, striped cardigans, a dress for my daughter, hats, scarves.  But they grew out of them so fast.  I kept giving them to nieces and nephews.  I switched to making toys -- monsters of various sorts.  But in the last few years, I lost my mojo.  I knit a few baby blankets but they took forever.  I would barely pick up the needles at all.

Recently, I got the urge to knit.   I decided to knit something for myself.  I had made a few sweaters for myself in the past but not for a while.  I got a great pattern for a vest that could be knitted all in one piece.  It felt good.  I got my mojo back and was really enjoying knitting again.  Before the vest was even done, I got materials to make scarves for the kids and another sweater for me, this time from an amazing book of Knit Kimonos. But as I was finishing the vest, I, oddly, ran out of yarn.  Got more.  Finished.  Put it on and there was a huge ruffle on the butt.  I didn't remember that being in the pattern.  Realized that the reason I'd run out of yarn was that at a point when I was supposed to add two stitches at two places in a row, I'd instead added stitches the entire row between the two spots.  And I had done this three times! Oops. 

Rather than view this as failure, I have decide to consider it a brilliant mistake.  My first modification to a pattern.  I rather like the ruffle -- it is like a bustle.  It gives the vest an oddly romantic profile.  Or a peacock pride.  I will just try to keep the ruffles off the kimonos. 

Glad I'm Not Young Anymore

Yesterday, noticing that most of my summer Ts were worn out, stretched, or otherwise unspectacular, I tried to go shopping.  I thought I'd go to some cheapo stores and just pick up a few summer tops to perk up the old wardrobe.  So, when my husband came home to give me a break from kid care, instead of going somewhere to do work, I biked to a corner on Michigan Ave with Top Shop, H&M and the Water Tower Place. 

Top Shop was depressing.  The clothes were clearly all made of much younger gals than me.  There were lots of belly shirts, see through blouses, super short minis, and cutout dresses.  I felt myself dreading when my daughter reaches her teens and hoping fashion would change significantly by then. I thought how glad I was that when I was young, it was the era of punk and post punk, when you were not expected to be "sexy" in any conventional way and when combat boots and a vintage 50s dress with dyed asymmetrical hair were the height of cool.  Our clothes were not so body conscious (in fact, some looked like trash bags) and there did not seem to be such a mandate to be "hot" as there is now.  Funky, punky, aggressive, edgy and witty were more the adjectives we craved for our appearance.
 
H&M had clothes that looked like something I might wear -- basic striped Ts -- but when I tried them on, nothing fit.  I realized, once again, that while I am not hugely overweight, my body is out of sync with clothing designed for younger bodies.  I tried a few tops with what I imagined were waist ties, but the tie hit me at some bizarre point midway between what I think of as my waist (a space that has always been more imagined than real, as I never really indent at the middle) and what I would consider an empire waist, just below the hooters.  All this did was thicken me.  Then I tried a little summer dress.  Again, the waist fell in some nowhere-land -- it must be my descending boobs -- and the length managed to chop my thighs in a way that made my legs look like massive tree trunks.  (I am 5' 2", so I am not sure how these would fit on people of normal height.)

Moving to the Water Tower mall, I tried Banana Republic, my old standby.  But even there, I failed.  Instead of overly young, much of the clothing seemed too corporate.  As a teacher, who mostly works at home or bikes to coffee shops and libraries to work in the summer, I do not need fancy silk blouses.  And the more casual stuff they had was misshapen, too, but in different ways from H&M.  Instead of clothes that seemed cut for tiny dolls, the clothes at banana seemed too big.  The T-shirts were all long and baggy, cut to hit my thighs, even in the smallest size.

Some of this, I know, relates to how messed up our body images are.  The youthful shops aim for the anorectic crowd who all want to be size 0.  The older shops target obese Americans and alter all their sizing so that we do not know how fat we have gotten.  (I have dropped multiple sizes since high school while weighing more now than then).  So, a small is now built for someone who is not really small but smaller than the very fat person who used to shop in a specialty shop like Lane Bryant but now wears a medium in many stores.

I now understand how women of a certain age become frowzy.  The temptation to start wearing Birkenstocks and granny dresses, or pull-up pants and Ts with funny cats on them starts to make sense when you see the alternatives.    Better than trying to fit a youthful style, perhaps.  For me, vintage is the answer.  A few months back, I scored a gorgeous fifties floral dress, a sixties polka dot and a 70s Pucci, all in one day. All fit my body perfectly and did not make me feel like I was trying to compete with teenagers, but rather hoping to have cocktails with the grown ups, watch art films, or have meetings in skyscrapers. I'll continue to go backwards, not to some imagined youth in myself, but to an older style.

Stay at Home Madwoman

If it has not been clear before, it is now.  If I were a stay at home mom, I would go bananas.  I honestly do not know how people do it.  Every summer, there are stretches when I have a week or more with the kids, with no sitter or camp or anything.  It always has some very nice time -- swimming, playing games, cooking, bowling.  But I always blow my top, more than once. 

Part of it is that I do not have the capacity to entertain them for hours on end.  I would like to park them in front of a TV and ignore them all day.  But, I try to avoid having them become such lazy slobs.   I would like to open the door and say "go play and I'll see you at dinner time" but that doesn't happen anymore.  So, while  constantly trying to pry them away from ipods, TVs and other screens, I have to invent things to do (telling them to go read or play on their own works for a while but not all day).

This year, I have been setting up a lot of playdates, which helps keep the kids sane and gives them a little space from each other and from me.  It has mostly been nice -- I even got my daughter and her friend a manicure!  We have also baked, played board games, and gone for walks. But, then, because I am not the sitter, but the mom, part of me feels like I have to use this time, time when I cannot do my own work, to do practical stuff that I do not want to do when I am paying a sitter (and should be doing my own work).  So, in the cracks between playdates and bowling and playing and swimming, I have done doctor's appointments, haircuts, lots of errands, and massive clean ups of the basement, bedrooms, closets.  The kids are okay with the doctors and haircuts, even with the errands. But the clean ups are horrifying. These involve me taking all the stuff out of piles and boxes and cabinets and drawers and saying, "Can we get rid of this?" then fighting my kids' desire to save everything as a "treasure" or, as my 8 year old keeps saying, "something that has sentimental value."  According to my kids, the following have sentimental value:  broken toys, baby blocks, old chapstick, every drawing they ever made, every piece of plastic they ever got in a goody bag at a birthday party, every single stuffed animal that has ever crossed their paths. Sure, after wearing them down, we got rid of a lot.  It took some wheedling.  With books, I told them they could have the money we made selling the books to buy more books.  With the rest, I just made clear that no toys can come in unless there is room for them.  Still, it is a struggle.  So, inevitably I find myself yelling nonsense, making empty threats, sounding like a crazy lady.  I told my daughter that if she didn't change her ways she would end up on the reality show "Hoarders" and that she was grounded if she left even one stuffed animal on the floor out of a bin. 


Who is this crazy lady?  Why doe she care of her kids room is a mess?  Why can't she adopt a good enough housekeeping motto and leave it at that?  Why does she sound so much like her own mother?

I think it is because I am not a stay at home mom.  I want a clean place because home is both where I work and relax and both are troubled by random toys, piles of comic books, socks, and other strange misplaced items.  But, at the end of the day, I do not want it to be my job to clean that stuff up. (And I don't want it to be my husband's either.)  I kind of resent it, like I am being forced into a role that I thought I had decided to escape.  And I resent its inescapability.   I know the kids don't care, but I know, or think, they need good habits for later in life.  Even though I know that they, like most of us, will live like pigs for a while when they are older, then hopefully grow out of it and change their ways. I now have a greater sympathy for my own mom, who was also a working mom and who got no help at all at home (my father being much less helpful than my husband, who cooks and cleans a lot). And who yelled a lot.

Well, for now, it is tidy and, for now, I will try and be a nice mom.  But I, and they, are counting the days until the sitter starts work.

New Queer Histories

John Irving's new novel, IN ONE PERSON, is fascinating, for lots of reasons.  Those who know Irving's previous work will be tempted to read the book biographically:  it is written in the first person with an author as narrator; it is set in new England; it features wrestling, bears, of a sort, and lots and lots of transsexual and transgender characters.  The narrator is bi, attracted to both men and women and, especially, or also, transvestites,  transsexuals or pre-op transgender people. (there is a lot of talk in the novel itself about how the names for various types have changed over the years, so I am using all that are used in the novel.)  Reading it, one wants to know, is this Irving's coming out?  Is he the bi narrator?  Does this explain the earlier books?

But the book is interesting in other ways, too.  It revisits the AIDS crisis and reminds us that the Reagan years were not the perfect years presidential candidates seem to imagine, but years of misery (Many of us never forgot that -- in addition to AIDS, I recall masses of homeless people, strongly charged racial issues, a bad economy and a culture of violence and indifference).  In the context of conversations about gay teens and bullying, it posits a queer child who has the "wrong" crushes, one on his soon-to-be stepfather, one on an older woman who turns out to be a transsexual, and one on a fellow male student. It lays claim to the idea that being queer is inborn, literally, as the narrator has an absent but queer father.  And characters who try to "nurture" queerness out of other characters are seen as idiotic and ineffectual.   Against the model of the lonely child whose desires not only cannot be spoken, but make the child feel isolated, Irving creates a world in which there are multiple, helpful and understanding adults, and in which the narrator is far from the only queer in town.  In addition to a cross dressing grandpa and the transsexual crush, among the adults, the narrator retroactively discovers that more than a few fellow students are gay, bi, transsexual or otherwise queered.  Straight people exist in this world but feel like a minority.  In fact, one character late in the novel complains to the narrator that his books make difference seem normal! 

But the book is also somewhat misogynist.  A transsexual is highly valued but only one woman with a vagina is valued.  She functions more or less like the gay best friend has functioned in so many narratives -- as a safe place and best friend for the polymorphous narrator.  Lesbians exist in the novel but they come across poorly - as man-hating, vicious, or embarrassingly womanist.   It is a bit of a disappointment in a book that imagines a world of difference and demands tolerance on every page that people with penises are the best she-characters and women are somehow painted as the most negative forces.   And not just women, but mothers -- in particular, two mothers are blamed for trying to deny their son's gayness.  The "best" mother is one who leaves her husband because he can't accept his son's queerness, then kills herself when her son dies of AIDS.  I'm not asking for a politically perfect fiction, but, in a fiction so attendant to gender stereotypes,  I'd have expected a little more.

Evaluations

So, I just got what are described as Course Instructor Feedback forms, which are course evaluations.  Of course, I never feel that the course is being evaluated.  It is me.  And my evaluations this time placed me in the very good but not quite excellent category -- a number that should satisfy but feels like failure. 

This semester, I taught two theory classes.  One in film theory and one in feminist and gender theory.  These are always tough.  Both are required courses for the major and both involve lots of dense and difficult reading, with lots of jargony language. I try to account for that as best I can, to unpack the readings and make them seem relevant to the students.  Generally, there are a small number of students who love the courses -- the super smart kids, the ones who like the really tough stuff.  And there are a few who hate it, and me.  Often, these are kids who do not like or cannot handle super academic stuff  (weird, right?  at college?  But the vast majority do not like theory, want film classes to be more or less film appreciation, or to teach them what they already believe.)   Usually, the ones who hate it latch onto feminism as a way of saying what's wrong with me.  "How was the teacher?"  "She was a feminist."  So, in a sixteen week class in which we discussed feminism one week and queer theory one other week, one of the film theory respondents said that I spent the whole semester doing feminism and that it was not a film theory class at all.  I guess he forgot about Munsterberg, Benjamin, Metz, Altman, Kracauer, Bazin, Chion, Gorbman and all the others we read who had NOTHING to say about feminism or gender.  Others will complain that I make them see old movies -- they want me to show what is in theaters, I guess, instead of things like THE PAWNBROKER, BAREFOOT IN THE PARK, FRANKENSTEIN, KLUTE, THE SCIENCE OF SLEEP (isn't that recent?), DR. HORRIBLE'S SING A LONG BLOG (again, isn't that kind of recent?), ALIEN (how bad is that?), LETTER TO THREE WIVES, SOME LIKE IT HOT, PILLOW TALK, or HAIRSPRAY (okay, that is three that are from this century) I am supposed to show, what, TWILIGHT?  IRON MAN?
  
So, I know that evaluations will reflect this span and that in a difficult required course I am facing an uphill battle.


But what baffles me is the gap between my experience of the class and the final evaluation.  In the gender theory class, especially, I felt like I was reading the wrong evaluation.  This was a class with students who had chosen gender studies and therefore would not blame me for being a feminist.  This was a survey in which the span of readings -- from Wollstonecraft to Halberstam -- was clearly mapped out. This was a class in which the kids came to class every day prepared and ready to speak.  They had opinions about the readings and always seemed excited to talk about them.  And they were able to talk about them on their final exam.  We got into deep discussions daily and we also laughed and seemed to form a bond. It seemed like a love fest.   But when I got the evaluations, there were clearly some people who felt differently. 

But even more baffling is that in both classes the numbers did not match the comments.  In the written portion, they said I was a great teacher, well organized, knowledgeable, accessible, that the class was well organized, that I explained things clearly, was accessible, etc.  In gender, they loved that I had them blog and do a PR project.  In film, they appreciated that I let them do a film instead of a paper for their final assignment. 

Ad it isn't just me.  A very good friend of mine has also faced this lately.  I taught with her, have seen her in the classroom, admire her teaching tremendously and know that she really teaches her students well.  But the evaluations never reflect that. 

So, where was the failure?  Part of me imagines that people who get the tip top marks on these things pander to students.  But that is probably a cop out. Maybe I am the teacher they remember later?    Maybe challenging students is undesirable in the current student as client climate?   Maybe I just have a dissociative disorder and can't tell a good experience from a bad? Is this what it will feel like when my kids have to go to therapy to deal with whatever damage I have done to them, whatever troubles I am blamed for?   

Family meals

I recently started having my kids, who are 8 and 10, each take responsibility for cooking the family meal one night a week. I stole the idea from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/dining/a-mother-lets-her-sons-do-the-cooking.html?pagewanted=all

The writer there says she started having her sons cook because she was tired of having them bug her about dinner as soon as she got home from work, or complain about the meal. My reasons were different. Until recently, I didn't do any of the cooking in my home. My husband did. He is a more intuitive cook than I am. I am a recipe girl. So we had a oddly gendered break down in which he cooked meats and mains, and I did salad, desserts and baked goods. But I started cooking more in recent years. In part, this was because he started doing some more childcare, and it seemed like we had to balance chores. In part, it was because I needed to take hold of my diet as my metabolism slowed and my body started wanting to pack on fat. So, I started cooking a few nights a week, building more meatless meals into our schedule, as well as more fish, more chicken, more veggies.

I decided to have the kids cook not because I resented cooking at all. Instead, I thought it would be a good way to have them take ownership of something, to learn more about food, to prepare them for the future and to find a new activity to share (as they grow up and away from me). Also, I realize that nobody taught me to cook and I wish they had. My mom was of the generation that had discovered canned and frozen food as a godsend. She wanted to escape the kitchen, but never did. Even though she worked full time, she cooked every meal, and still does. To this day, at almost 80- years old, if my mother left my father he would have to survive on peanut butter sandwiches. I don't even think I have seen him open a can of soup! So, while she cooked many foods from scratch, she cooked more using ready at hand ingredients and mixes. I helped a little but was never shown how to chop an onion, how to store veggies, how to recognize cuts of meat. Instead, I heated fish sticks, heated sauce from a jar, boiled frozen vegetables, and poured pancake batter from a carton. Like many of my generation, I have been finding out about food as an adult as part of a return to the kitchen, and to whole foods.

My kids are growing up in a very different world. Most of our male friends do cook, and are generally the dominant cook in the house (in line with the gendering of cooking as male when it is gourmet and female when it is functional). Many of our friends have vegetable gardens or belong to CSAs. All shop at Farmer's Markets and eat at farm to table restaurants. Some have chickens! So, the kids have some knowledge of food, certainly greater than I did. And they have been helping in the kitchen sine they were little -- mixing muffins and granola bars and cakes, making salad dressing.

But the experiment was to have them think about a dinner, and make it as much by themselves as possible. I usually suggest a few things and they pick or they suggest something and I find a recipe. It has to be something the grown ups will like, not "kid food," whatever that is. We usually work with recipes from Cooking Light or Weight Watchers but they don't notice that they are less caloric or lower in fat because they have never made them any other way.

It has been a success. My son, who is a bit of a foodie, is the most enthusiastic. He likes to do everything himself. Seeing an eight year old chopping onions is a little nerve wracking, but he has now done it every week. He has made turkey sloppy joes, lemon pasta, pasta with sausage and spinach, fish tacos, French onion soup, pecan chicken, chicken pot pie, and more. We have made sides of sweet potatoes, butternut squash, spinach, rice, and beans. My daughter is trickier. Until recently, she only ate food that had melted cheese or peanut butter in it. She might be what they call a super taster which means she tastes things more intensely than others, but whatever the cause, she is picky (she finds "bitter" tastes in the oddest places). She has started eating some meat -- steak, ribs, bacon -- but no chicken, fish, or recognizable vegetables. So, with her I nudge slightly. We have made a cheesy potato soup, french bread pizzas, a creamy pasta which was served with peas for her brother, peas and asparagus for the adults, and plain for her. This week, we made cream of tomato soup and cheesy toasts, a recipe form Epicurious (the toasts were great, the soup so so). She lets me chop more than her brother does and gets a little bored, but she does a good amount of work and takes pride in the result.

At the end of the day, it is a nice way for us to spend time together and have a shared project. I hope it also prepares them to be independent and healthy adults, hosts, dates, and partners.

Romney Wars

I am a bit late on this, but wanted to jump in. When Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney had never worked a day in her life, she misspoke. She meant, clearly, that Romney never had a paid position outside the home. Her point, that Romney would not understand family economics because of that, was not really fair or accurate. Homemakers, of course, understand what feeding a family and running a house costs and they are often responsible for dealing with family budgets and finances.

There are two points here. One, that Ann Romney would not understand the problems of ORDINARY women, because of her privilege and wealth. Has she ever had a dilemma about whether she can take a day off to take care of a sick kid because she can't afford child care and can't afford to lose a day of work? Doubtful. Does she worry about how to feed her kids nutritious food when there are no good grocery stores nearby and she does not have money for fresh whole foods? Unlikely. Put simply, her budget is not my budget, or yours. But then, neither is Michelle Obama's.

The second point, and this, to me is what is really disturbing, is that Ann Romney should not be called upon to be the voice of women at all, neither by Hilary Rosen nor by Mitt Romney. Rosen's longer comment about the Romneys began with her saying that whenever Mitt is asked about women's issues, he says "My wife tells me women are really concerned about the economy" (more than whatever women's issue you want me to talk about). So, Mitt Romney's entire policy on women and his understanding of women's issues, boils down to what his wife tells him? Really? Of course, Ann Romney is just as insular. She says that she knows how valuable her work as a homemaker is because Mitt tells her everyday that she has the hardest job in the world. Uh huh. I am sure he will continue to tell her that when, god forbid, he is in the White House. "I may be killing Planned Parenthood, decimating health care, bombing Iran, and pardoning George Zimmerman today, honey, but you have the hardest job in the world."

Anyway, my point is that no president's knowledge of women should be only what his wife tells him. If Romney had a black friend and used him to explain race relations ("Well, Bob at the gym tells me that black people are really worried that millionaires might have to pay higher taxes") we could accuse him of egregious tokenism. Talking to your wife, who is white, rich, married, and a Mormon, and assuming that means you know anything about what American women want, is worse.

Women care about lots and lots of things in this election. The economy? Hell yes, especially as women are increasingly bearing the brunt of cutbacks. Equal pay? Yup, we want it. Health care? Yes, because the war on health care is a war on women's wellness as much as anything else. Abortion? Yes, because the Republicans have put it on the table front and center and tell us daily that job #1 is to kill Planned Parenthood. Immigration? Yes, there are lots of female immigrants with American born children fearing their status and the sundering of their families? Gay Marriage? Yes, for themselves, their gay sons, and all their allies. Schools? Absolutely. Most women can't afford to send their kids to private schools.

But Romney denies any of these "social" issues as having any bearing on women's lives. He claims we only care about the economy. But I doubt that he or his wife knows what unemployment, high gas prices, low wages, and other economic issues mean to most American women.

I know I do not speak for all women. And I know that I am privileged in many ways. No one woman is the American woman. But if the Romneys want us to imagine that they care about the American woman, they'd better start listening to the multitude of voices and viewpoints out there, instead of claiming that pillow talk is sufficient politics.