My Own Personal O-Story

This past weekend, while I chased my daughter down the rows of our public library, I happened to catch the title of a book turned outward on one of the display shelves, Living Oprah, a memoir by Robyn Okrant. A yoga teacher and MFA student, Okrant attempts to embrace every directive given by the queen of talk for an entire year. The book catches my eye because I've recently started watching and writing about the cultural phenom, although I've only ever made it through two entire episodes. One with guest Jenna Jameson (see previous post) and one with Dr. Laura Berman, the sexpert, whose advice to makeout daily with one's husband for at least ten seconds I've both followed and dispensed. (I guess the common denominator is sex. Sorry Oprah! Good thing you are on when my daughter naps! Or perhaps this is not happenstance. The magazine is, in fact, titled O...)

Anyway, after 1202 hours, $4,781.84, near exhaustion, and a reluctant embrace of leopard print flats, Okrant realizes that her life is simultaneously better and worse for having followed Oprah's advice. She is thinner, but more stressed. Her apartment is more organized, but her marriage has been pretty taxed. What impresses me most about the book is that Okrant actually finishes the project and that more than 100,000 people visit her blog site. Despite Okrant's immersion journalism, the popularity of all things O still cannot be exactly explained. For what ever reason, that woman just permeates and captivates our consciousness.

Which made me realize, every one has an Oprah story. Here's mine:

Before becoming sisters, my stepsister Amber and I were best friends. We thought this was so remarkable that almost the instant that it happened, roughly around age eight, we were convinced we'd be on Oprah. We even went as far as staging mock interviews on the blue and white striped couch that had been moved from the living room of the house she had been growing up in to the basement of the house that had been mine.

Ever since age five when we met at the YMCA Youth Camp on a lake in mid-coast Maine where the bathrooms smelled so bad you'd rather pee your pants than be caught dead actually using them, we were inseparable. We spent as many afternoons after school together as we could, which amounted to practically every afternoon because all four of our parents worked. Yet, Amber's dad was a school teacher and could meet us both coming off the bus in front of her house.

We spent those long afternoons exploring the woods behind it, sledding down Bran's hill in the winter, or developing various schemes to earn money, mostly to purchase our then favorite red skinned hot dogs at the corner store.

Once we held a bottle drive and collected more than 100 bottles from the various neighbors. Only because we didn't actually have a cause, other than ourselves, we were forced to return the bottles. We were so embarrassed at the prospect of having to explain our misconceived notion of a fund-raiser that we rang the doorbell of the closest neighbor and ran away, leaving the four giant trash bags sitting lopsided on their porch. This was also around the time when we were becoming health conscious and learned that hot dogs contained things like lips and intestine, so we didn't really miss our lost profits at the time.

In short, we pretended we were sisters.

Then, something miraculous happened. Her parents got divorced. I remember her announcing this to a group of us as we sat on the floor, drawing the outlines of school lockers on large reams of butcher paper that would become the backdrop for one of our school plays. At that time, we were always acting out scenes from our overly romantic visions of high school that resembled not so thinly veiled allusions to Saved By the Bell (Amber was always the Kelly character to my nerdier, cause-driven Jessica.)

Then, something even more remarkable happened. My parents divorced.Shortly after, our parents moved in with each other and we were sisters.

I should remember the exact day this happened. The funny thing is, I don't. The series of our afternoons together meld in my memory and there is nothing to mark the occasion, the difference between when we played together as friends pretending to be sisters and when we actually became them.

What I remember instead is believing that we should be on Oprah as the coming true of an impossible wish, the Parent Trap incarnate. It didn't mater that my sister and I had no control over what was happening in our lives -- getting our parents alone in a room together was the furthest possible thing from our exploits – we still thought our story was worth telling to a national audience. A sort of truth is stranger than fiction and in our youth, when everything is both remarkably and horribly self-referential, we waited for the call from Oprah's producers.

Instead, we grew up.

High school was harder on our friendship than we imagined. To this day, I am still thankful that we had our sisterhood of chance to help our friendship of choice survive how awful and agonizingly hormonal we were to each other.

Now, as adults, I am happy to say, we are still best friends. Only, something again remarkable has happened, our parents are separated.

We did not choose the blending of our families, despite how badly we wished for it -- without a sense of repercussion and what divorce might actually mean to our parents, our siblings, ourselves. Our sister fantasy had more to do with us both being adopted by a rich and benevolent benefactor that would let us ride horses all day and eat copious amounts of calorie-free chocolate. The former something we actually grew up doing. (Thanks, Dad!!) The latter we still dream about. The reality is we have no influence over the current state of our parents' relationship.

When we first learned that our parents would be living in separate homes, I spent a considerable amount of time worrying about what this would do to our family. We live thousands of miles apart, almost clear on opposite sides of this continent. My husband and I had most recently started our own family and I wanted more than anything to bring my daughter into the larger one we all shared. I couldn't help but wonder what this development might do to the holidays I imagined?

In the months and weeks that went by, nothing much happened. We got together for the Thanksgiving. My stepmother did what she always does--cook an elaborate meal that tastes amazing and takes too long to prepare. My daughter played with her cousins. My sister and I even spent some time briefly developing another of our get-rich-quick schemes, this one involving trucking a boatload of hay from Maine, where the grass grows three cuttings, to Florida, where the sandy soil yields nothing for the thousands of horses that congregate there each winter season to avoid the cold of the more northern eastern seaboard states. Yet, even though she's moving from Maine to Florida, her leg is broken and I don't think our eight-month-old will take too well to a 1,500 mile road trip. We take a pass, still believing that there is always next year.

Perhaps what has happened to us in the last year is more remarkable than what happened to us as kids. We are still best friends and we are still sisters. We are still each other's first phone call when we long for someone simply to understand and commiserate in the way that only a shared history affords.
Oprah's show will end this year and still my sister and I aren't scheduled to appear on it. Perhaps now, we really should.

Becoming SAHM

There is this blog I've been following, the SAHM Project, a one woman countdown to getting out of the daily grind of her hated job and melting into what she imagines will be the slow rhythms of staying home with her kids. One is seven, the other is on the verge of being born. (For those who may have missed it, SAHM stands for stay-at-home mom.)

It's an escape fantasy really. She longs to trade the deadlines, awful people, the hurry up and go, do, complete for just being. As with many escape narratives, the focus is on the negative – what she is running away from instead of what she is running toward. (Although she does see herself staying in her pajamas for an inordinate about of time and mentions a preference for changing diapers as opposed to some of the crap she has to put up with.)

My favorite part of the site is the countdown clock on the side with eight figures: days, hours, minutes, seconds. It's reminiscent somehow of the blastoff clock that rolls back to send shuttles into space or the clock in Times Square that the whole world seems to watch to welcome in the new year. The hitting of the zeros is supposed to represent a great, anticipated, maybe even feared change. (Even though on the plain old New Year, this countdown is usually anticlimactic. January is still a long, cold, endless winter month.)

For the most part, I connect with the SAHM Project's journey. There are many days that my yearning for home has more to do with not wanting to be at the office. The fact that my child is waiting for me, wanting for me is one giant perk, but not the reason for the exit strategy. (Although really my personal SAHM fantasy didn't begin until after my daughter was born and because I was blindsided by this sudden desire, I am still trying to puzzle my way into a world I never thought I'd want.)

In Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (University of California Press, 2007), Pamela Stone investigates the forces in 54 professionally educated (MBA, MD, JD, etc), upper class women's lives that pushed them out of the workforce and pulled them home. The thematic message woven throughout these stories seems most consistently to be: It's simply too hard to combine the fast paced, stream of work with its infinite demands on our energy and brain power with the completely opposite rhythms of life with children, that is different, but no less demanding on our energies and brains (even if the time is less rigidly scheduled and tasks can be met in varying degrees of dress.)

Is it too far a leap to say: If we loved our jobs, we would stay in them?

Yet, the more complicated narrative being woven by Stone's book and others that have recently followed (Sylvia Ann Hewlett's On Ramps and Off Ramps: Keeping Women on the Road to Success) is that the current forces within our working culture are such that it is impossible to actually love our jobs once we become mothers.

The workforce, as it is currently conceived, is simply not compatible with being a successful parent (there for our children in all the ways we want to be there for them) and a successful, fully achieving professional (there for our bosses in all the ways they want us to be there for them).

The more time I spend toggling between being a professional and a mother the more I tend to agree with this assessment. (And yes, I feel as though I toggle, not that I am both, or that I do either as well as I could if I was not trying to do both. I tend to think that this is less because I've absorbed the cultural dichotomy and more because I actually feel this is how my reality plays out.)

There are thirty some-odd followers on the SAHM project. The comments that begin to pile up are messages from other mothers, ones I can only presume are SAHMs themselves because of their responses. They congratulate her. They praise her courage. They offer her encouragement, mostly in the context of their own transitions into SAHM-ville. They are waiting, excitedly, for her to join them there. The music is playing. The gates are opening up. I find myself caught up in their excitement, even if I haven't figured my way to join them, despite that ticking clock.

Then, the last entry is a curious one. It is more about loss than I expect. She sites her very real accomplishments in her workplace. She worries about what will happen there once she leaves. She also leaves the door very obviously open to returning by telling her co-workers that she'll be back. This too has a firm date, twelve weeks (thankfully protected by law). Even on the verge of her exit, she talks about being torn.

What she doesn't say, what she doesn't talk about is the life she is moving toward. I wonder why this piece of the narrative remains so hidden. Why the pure, unadulterated, uncomplicated joy, stays so tight to the chest (save the few short comments below each post, but even those talk about what a hard decision becoming SAHM was to make).

Are we so afraid of the mother who is in love with her SAHM life that we have to lock her up in the closet and pretend she doesn't exist? Do we sell her out and characterize her instead as the locked up women we fear becoming in the pages of the Feminine Mystic?

Or do we fear that the breadwinner father will figure out that he's drawn the short-end of the stick and will likewise begin to opt out? Breathe, only 1% of fathers are currently SAHD. Which begs the question: Is the acronym more prophetic than it means to be because so many dads are missing out or does it mean that some day a whole generation of fathers will also contend to be tortured by their choice to stay home?

Or is it simply that life is complicated and whether real or imagined, our stories are still stuck, having grown from a generation of women who were pushed out into factories than stuffed back into homes, followed by another generation who pried back open the doors to universities and the professional workforce, even though having children sent many of them back home. (See previous post -- Oh Pioneers -- for more on this statistic).

That is, of course, the trouble with fantasy, the problem with happily-ever-after. The clock hits zero. I want to know what happens next.

Ode to Joy

One afternoon while my daughter is sleeping, I sit my mother down and ask her to tell me the chronology of her life. I am curious about her choices – her relationship with her mother, her grandmother, and aunts, these women who've become almost mythical creatures in the way I've heard about the legends of their lives, even though they've barely intersected in real time with my own.

I am curious about the way her mother presses on her story in the same way I am trying to puzzle out how she is pressing on mine, in the same way I am not ready to face I will press upon my daughter's own.

What comes out of the afternoon?

Motivation, a fierce sense of ambition stemming mostly from rejection, fear, misunderstanding, a longing to be understood.

My mother's mother always said, I was a duck who had swans.

In this, my mother sees a forever disconnect, two separate species unlikely to share a nest let alone a lifetime.

She is still angry at her mother over some things – missing her doctoral graduation, offering no help while she struggled with a newborn – a list we have as daughters that we learn to bite back into our throats when we have our own. Yet, she will no more forgive her mother than her mother, long since passed, will cease to regret.

At the end of the afternoon, at the last possible second we can steal in conversation, already my daughter is shifting, crinkling the sheets in her crib, I beg my mother to remember in almost the same instant that I realize it, her mother named her Joy, and at least while she stirred inside the body they once shared, must have, indeed, felt it.