This Post Could Cost Me Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars and the Love of My Mother. So Be It.

My mom visited me twice last week, driving over with my dad, who is fixing up my breezeway. She and I sat at my dining room table and yakked up a storm. At some point during her second visit, she said to me, "If any of this turns up on Facebook, you're out of the will."

I choose to interpret that injunction as applying to only the subject we'd been discussing for some time at that point: the disposition of estates, family finances, and my father's life expectancy, which I promise you we had a good reason for discussing beyond "when can we get our hands on his hard-earned loot?"

But the conversation we had two days earlier? I figure that's fair game.

Also, my mother didn't say anything about my blog.

My dad is a man for whom actions speak much louder than words. Indeed, his actions often contradict his words. He complains about my mother's disability, but when it comes to caring for her he is, if not quite tender, then certainly kind and indefatiguable. Over the last decade he has taken over all the cooking and housework, after 50 years in a marriage with such traditional division of labor that my mother even fixed him lunch on Saturdays, something it would never occur to me to do for Raider. When my nephew, Word Boy 2, was born three years ago, my 75-year-old dad even took up diaper-changing so my folks could baby-sit him.

He built my mom a little half-step that he carries in the car to help her get up short unavoidable flights of stairs, like my front stoop. For some reason, this little wooden home-made step warmed my heart. Quintessence of Dad, right there, to jump in and build something to solve a problem.

Anyway, on Wednesday my mom and I sat around for three hours and told family stories. I like re-hearing the stories I heard as a kid, if only because it reassures me that I haven't made stuff up. Or because it lets me correct the misunderstandings and mistakes in my versions.

But sometimes, my mom surprises me by telling a story I haven't heard before, and that happened on Wednesday.

I used to joke, darkly, that I came from a long line of women who didn't want children. The only thing in that line that's not true is the "long" part. I don't know how my maternal great-grandmother, parent of 13, felt about having children. I do know that the family story goes that my grandma, number 13, didn't have a middle name because her parents had flat-out run out of ideas.

My grandma, though, didn't choose to have children. The defining story of her life is that at 17, a senior in high school and on-track to be valedictorian, she fell pregnant and was forced to drop out of school to marry my grandfather. She always regretted school; she was proud of her accomplishments there, and hoped at least to go on to nursing school as so many of her sisters had. She sometimes regretted my grandfather; their marriage was not an easy one, marked by conflict, some of it physical, and it wasn't until their children were grown and gone that they enjoyed some measure of financial stability.

She blamed my aunt for ruining her life, as if my aunt somehow got herself conceived and born, and she had a remarkable capacity for not forgiving. She carried childhood slights to her grave, and apparently never repented of her tendency to blame her children for the disappointments of her life.

She was 17 in 1927; she had three children while she and grandpa were still living with her parents. And here's the new story my mom told me:

Apparently, the road they lived on was a long, straight country road with no stop signs. Cars got moving pretty fast, and when the road ended in a T, it took many drivers by surprise. You could tell how surprised they were by the wreckage of their cars up against a big tree that stood straight ahead and brought them up short if they didn't make the turn onto the cross street.

My grandmother, not very happily married and with three young children, found herself pregnant again, and despaired. She told my mother that she drove down that street, thinking about that tree, and it was a powerful temptation.

"Well," my mother said, "I was her fourth child. Talk about your unwanted children!"

My grandma didn't want that fourth child so strongly that she thought about suicide. My mother, pregnant in 1965, didn't want that baby, either. She wanted an abortion, but she couldn't get one.

My mom told me about grandma and the tree without apprently referencing or remembering my own status as the baby who wouldn't be here if she'd had her druthers. And one direction this writing could go in might be about my mother's and my shared wound, of knowing that we were unwanted children. Or it could turn into a story about how my mother, recognizing her own wound, nonetheless turned around and inflicted the same one on me. I've always thought that the "I wanted an abortion" story was one I could have lived my whole life without hearing, and knowing that she was told her own version of it does make me wonder, just a little, what she was thinking, not keeping that to herself?

(It also lends a delicious irony to her distaste for people on Facebook who don't know when to shut up.)

But I don't see the story that way right now. What it has had me thinking about for days is my grandma, my mom, and me, and how our lives were shaped by the times we lived in.

My grandma became sexually active at 17 in a time when birth control was not only not readily available, but frowned upon for "decent" women. There's a story (there's always a story!) about her turning my grandpa out of her bed unless he bought protection. He drove to a neighboring town to buy condoms, because no decent man would use condoms with his wife.

Well, somebody saw him there. And word got back to my grandma that LJ was cheating on her. Because why else would he be buying condoms? The story goes, my grandma just laughed when she heard that.

I don't know if the condoms failed them, or they didn't use them for long, but my grandma got pregnant three more times after my mom, the unwanted fourth child, was born. One of the babies was a full-term stillbirth, which she birthed at home, all alone. Grandpa had to go to work, and although he had stopped by on his way to tell his sisters my grandma needed them, by the time they got to the house it was all over. My grandma had given birth, stripped the bed, bathed and dressed herself, washed and wrapped her stillborn baby and laid it neatly in a clean shoe box.

Because back then, women like my grandma were tough, strong, matter-of-fact people who did what needed to be done. I wonder how she felt about that baby, buried under a walnut tree somewhere on that farm. Grief, I imagine, and also relief. In what measures? We'll never know.

That's my grandma's story, in her time and place: seven pregnancies she had almost no control over; six children to raise in poverty. Wanted or not, the babies came.

My mom got married 40 years later, in 1957. She was 24 years old and had been living on her own and supporting herself for eight years. She and my dad had their first child, my brother, four years later. Sooner than they'd planned to; they were putting my dad through college and wanted him to graduate first. And they had me not quite four years after that, also at a time not of their choosing.

My mom and dad at least had some option for family planning. In the pre-Roe, pre-Pill days of their early marriage, though, their children also came as they would. Two birth control failures. That my folks wanted at least one child is implicit in the plan to "wait" until after graduation. They didn't get to choose their times, but they were at least able to space their children, to have only one kid under three at a time instead of 2 or 3. And they were able to stop at two.

My mom quit work when my brother was born. She'd been at the phone company since she was sixteen, and was by then a supervisor. She liked her work and was good at it. She has some great stories (of course) about being a telephone operator in a college town in the days when operators had to place long-distance calls for you, and fake collect calls ("Collect call from Miss Blue Shoes") could be placed in the hope that Dad would be clever enough to realize you needed something mailed to you in time for Saturday's dance.

In 1961, women quit work when they "started a family." So that's what my mom did. But she always regretted it, at least a little. She liked her work, and felt competent and appreciated there. She liked her independence. And she did not find being home full-time with her children especially fulfilling.

She was just a bit too early; she just missed a coming revolution. By the time I was in middle school in the mid-70s, the mothers of my friends--most of them a decade or so younger than my mom, who'd had me when she was 32--worked. Our neighbors worked. My mom thought it mattered that there was someone home for us when we got back from school, but the other kids in our neighhorhood got by with a mix of babysitters, unsupervised time, and the careless oversight of slightly older children. And they seemed to be doing fine.

To add insult to injury, it seemed to my mother that my brother and I envied them, that we also wanted the freedom of an empty house and no adult supervision. We didn't, it seemed to her, treasure the mother who waited for us at home. We resented her.

(I say "it seemed to her" because I don't remember feeling that way. But I am perfectly preparted to believe that my behavior was consistent with her interpretation.)

By the time I became sexually active, around 1985, I had easy access to a whole array of birth control options (and my mother, bless her, made damn sure I knew what they were and how important it was to use them). Abortion was an option. And by 1986, I'd stopped having procreative sex--I haven't had to deal with the spectre of unwanted pregnancy for 25 years.

I know that, as a lesbian and then as part of a couple who can't reproduce without medical intervention, I'm an outlyer. I could only have babies I planned for. I know that people still have surprise babies. Word Boy 2 was a late-life bonus for my brother and sister-in-law. My sister-in-law's sister has a daughter who is significantly younger than her other children. "We joked," she told me one time, "that we should name her Daisy. As in, Whoops-a-daisy!"

But even these surprise babies are, at least in some measure, chosen babies. At least for the families I know, who have the knowledge and the resources to exercise their options even in today's climate of attacks on abortion rights.

I had the luxury of actively choosing each of my children, something my mother aspired to and couldn't quite manage, something my grandmother couldn't even imagine.

My point is that I don't think my grandma's story, my mom's story, and my story are just sad personal tales of children who weren't wanted and knew it, of women trapped or constrained by childrearing. My grandma was eight years old when women got the right to vote in federal elections. The first time I voted, I voted for a woman for vice president. We're not just our own stories. We're the story of a whole century of women in America.

What It Was Like When We Were Young & Took Ourselves Way Too Seriously

As a quick aside, I'll mention that I am at the discouraged stage of learning to crochet amigurumi. A month ago, when I started, I was just thrilled to be able to do it at all, and if things came out a little lopsided, well, I didn't mind. Now I am ambitious. I really wanted the Tiny Tornado's hamster to come out well, and it...didn't. (Not that she minds.) I'm disappointed. This is the part where it's hard to stick with it until my skills catch up with my higher ambition.

And now, our feature attraction:

Years ago, when I was a Serious Writer hanging out with many other Serious Writers, I participated in many conversations about what responsibility, if any, a writer had to the people she wrote about in memoir or poetry. In my MFA program, at OutWrite (the Gay & Lesbian Writers' Conference I attended for many years), in casual coffee-shop conversations, we talked about it. And talked about it.

Being queer and feminist, we saw the writing we did about our own lives as important. We were always "breaking silence." People were writing about child abuse, sexual abuse, rape, harassment. About childhood crushes, same-sex experimentation, the hidden homosexuals in our family tree. One year during my MFA program, I swear half the class showed up with stories about their grandmothers' abortions.

All of this felt very meaningful. We saw ourselves as the inheritors of the second-wave feminists of the 60s and 70s, of the wild energy that drove the crowd at Stonewall. We thought it was an act of courage to write honestly about women's lives, about lesbians' lives, about children's lives. We thought it mattered to tell these stories. We thought it mattered to us, as we made sense of our lives and grew into our work. We thought it mattered to the broader culture, which had simply chosen to ignore a great deal for a long time and needed a reckoning. We thought it mattered to other women, to other lesbians, to girls and boys who didn't have words for their experiences, and who didn't know they weren't alone. In many ways, we were late to the party: second-wave feminism's mad ferment was already starting to die down, and Stonewall's 20th anniversary had come and gone. But we felt like we were part of it.

On the other hand, we didn't see much reason to be loyal to the people we might write about: mom, dad, the great-uncle with the roving hands, the drunken grandpa, the big brother or cousin who had much to say on the subject of dykes and faggots. My first lover's father sent out word on the family grapevine that he knew we were lesbians and he wasn't upset about it and nothing bad would happen, he just wanted her to be honest with him. So she was, and he suddenly realized he could no longer afford to pay her college tuition or help with living expenses. My own parents responded to my coming-out letter by not saying a word about it (the letter, or the topic) for a good fifteen years. I had one friend who'd been institutionalized as a teen for being bisexual. My David, an only child, lost both his parents in the same year, and was attacked by his uncle for bringing his same-sex partner--who had lived with his parents and cared for them in their illnesses--to his own mother's funeral.

In the realm of bad things that happen to people who are queer, most of our complaints were small. But we were connected, through our broader community, to people much worse things had happened to, were still happening to. We were just old enough to have been a part of the AIDS crisis; we'd seen The Normal Heart in Greenwich Village, we'd volunteered with Gay Men's Health Crisis, we'd viewed The Quilt at the March on Washington in 1987, and stood silent and tearful in front of the panels of friends and acquaintances and loved ones. Sometimes they were panels we'd sewn. We felt--even us lesbians--like we were part of a community that was under attack in a time of grief.

My point is, that when anyone asked whether what we were writing and publishing and reading out loud might hurt someone, we tended to say, "Who cares?" If we were accused of abandoning all family loyalty, well, for the most part they abandoned us first.

When I started writing this, I knew where I wanted to go. But I can't get there from here. I can't seem to get anyplace else, either. I've been banging my head against it for the better part of the afternoon, while the laundry molders and the children run amok. I give up. I didn't want to write a whiny rant; I wanted to start with this thing I'd been thinking about Art v. Relationships and take it someplace more nuanced and thoughtful. But the Muse laughs!

So, I'll just leave this here. Maybe something more will come of it sometime. Or maybe not. Sometimes all you get is a fragment.

Four Quick Book Notes

The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce.

I have found books about population and demographics very interesting in the past, so I grabbed this one at the library. I thought I might be hitting the point of diminishing returns on the topic; I already know a lot about the declining birthrates we're seeing all over the world, and suspected I might end up skimming this because it was all too familiar. What Pearce does that made this worthwhile for me, though, is devote chapters to exploring the cultural forces that drive lower birthrates in various parts of the world. For instance, I was interested in his discussion of industrial ghost towns in the former East Germany. For reasons I can't quite remember, young women are more likely than young men in these areas to leave for cities in the west, seeking education and professional employment. So Germany has a demographic skew, with 120 or more women for every man [edit: I of course mean for every hundred men. Oops.] in some cities, and the opposite in these depressed former industrial areas. The men left behind are lost in an epidemic of alcoholism, and educated single professional women have low chances of finding a man they consider worth marrying. This leaves a surprisingly large proportion of Germans child-free.

Pearce did a great discussion of forces in India and Singapore, as well. One kind of throw-away line caught my attention because we hear so much about the high academic achievement of children in Singapore, who often attend school for 8-10 hours a day, and have tutoring and enrichment classes on top of that. Pearce mentions a woman who, in an interview, suggested that one reason she and her friends had chosen not to have kids was that, having lived through that experience, they didn't think childhood was worth it. They didn't want to have kids only to push them along that same path, but they didn't think it was realistic to think they could opt out.

This is a book that reminded me, through both historical and present-day examples, that human hunger is rarely caused by actual food production shortages, but is almost always caused by political decisions made by people in power. I have ancestors (supposedly) who came to the US during the Irish potato famine, and I was fascinated and appalled to learn that many poor people in Ireland were forcibly relocated, forced onto crowded ships on which many (do I remember half? That might be too high) would die on the passage, and the rest would simply be dumped on a wharf in the New World with no money or resources. I knew people migrated because of hunger; I had not known they were ejected from their homes en masse and forced out under such circumstances.

His stuff on current-day patterns of migration, and the forces driving it, are very interesting, too. He says Europe's birth rates are so low that Europe finds itself in the ridiculous position of turning away and deporting immigrants it would have to go looking for if they weren't coming on their own. A good read.

A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, by Patricia Cline Cohen.

I love this kind of history, that points out ways that what we take for granted--like our assumption that a well-educated person will know mathematics--are actually historically-bound. Turns out it wasn't until well into the 19th Century that anyone thought math should be part of a well-rounded liberal education; it had always been seen as something only merchants and traders needed to know, and they only provisionally. Math was treated as a brute-force process of memorization of rules; people weren't even expected to understand, say, multiplication as a concept. Books called "Ready Reckoners" were published for the use of clerks; they were nothing but tables of calculations, so that a clerk selling X yards of cloth at Y price could look it up in a table, rather than be expected to perform the math.

To be sure, this was partly driven by the incredibly complex non-decimal money system, and by a system of measures that seems insane to the modern reader: a gallon of, say, milk had a different number of ounces than a gallon of beer, while a barrel of wine might have 4 more gallons in it than a barrel of maple syrup. There were three or four differing "ounces" used to measure different commodities. The spread of the idea that people should be able to perform math was partly made possible by Thomas Jefferson's drive to standardize measures and convert America to a decimal money system: at that point, ordinary people could figure this stuff out.

When math first became part of a standard education plan, it began as a single course taken during a student's final year of college. As it moved into earlier stages of education, the idea persisted for a long time that boys under 12 were simply not capable of grasping mathematics. We expect so much of elementary-aged children these days that I find it interesting to learn about how different expectations were not really that long ago.

Finally, I love stories of people resisting inevitable change. In the middle ages, as Arabic numbers first came to Europe, they were strongly resisted. Roman numerals had always been good enough, and even though the only thing you could do with them was count and record quantities, who needed to do more? Arabic numerals were seen as dangerous because they lent themselves to fraud: a 0 could easily be changed to a 6, for instance, or 412 to 1412. They evoked so much anxiety that in the late 13th century, the city of Florence actually outlawed their use. Like Canute commanding the tides.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.

I love spiritual memoirs. Sadly, despite its title, this isn't one. Janzen isn't a very good writer or a very deep thinker, and this book wanders around and skims the surface of what could have been some very interesting and meaty stuff. On the other hand, she can be wickedly funny. I'd be trying to read passages out loud to David and laughing too hard to finish them. A light read, kind of disappointing in some ways (I was thinking so often, "Wow, I'd like to hear more about that," and not getting it.), not too bad for passing an evening. Very glad I got it from the library; I wouldn't have wanted to pay good money for it.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.

I am an old fan of John Taylor Gatto for his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which has always seemed to me like a valid critique of school systems, and a good reminder that while we think we are teaching children content, our actions and words and expectations and use of time are also teaching them things we may not be aware of and wouldn't like if we were.

Gatto was a teacher in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he resigned in the year he won New York State's Teacher of the Year award, becoming a vocal critic of public schooling. I would like to give him an award, too: crappiest book I've read this year.

First, the book is not coherent. Oh, on the sentence level, it's fine. But I often could not figure out what he thought the connection between two ideas was. He'd talk about X for three paragraphs, and Y for the next three paragraphs, and I'd be mystified about why he put X and Y next to each other, what larger point he thought they made, why a juxtaposition seemed useful. The book is organized into chapters, but their content seems almost random.

But worse, Gatto's argument is founded on two bases, both of which are very weak. The first is anecdote. He loves a good story about a bad teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board. I think such stories can be useful, especially when they come from "good" schools--Gatto himself taught in a school in a very affluent neighborhood, and his students were the children of well-off, highly-educated parents. When he tells a toe-curling story and you know it comes from a school that might be held up as a model rather than a school everybody knows is broken, that does have impact.

But, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." There were 95,726 public schools in the US in the 2003-4 school year and 76.6 million children enrolled in 2006. With that many schools to draw on, it would be astonishing if I couldn't fill a book or six with crap anecdotes. Anecdotes are evocative; they are compelling; they are illustrative; they raise questions. They are not strong enough to support an entire argument about policy.

Fortunately, Gatto does not have only anecdotes in his toolbox. He has one other thing: The Genetic Fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the rejection of an institution or idea because of perceived problems with its origins, and critics of American public schooling have a lot of temptation for falling into this, because the genesis of our system is ugly, ugly, ugly.

You can find philanthropists, education experts, founders of the movement for public education, and even the occasional US president saying in so many words that public education's purpose is to fit the mass of people to accept a life of repetitive manual labor for the benefit of the few who will be allowed a true liberal education; to remove children from the home for so many hours and days that family ties will be weakened, replaced with loyalty to external authority; even to deliberately suppress children's innate genius, because, as one person Gatto quotes says (a president of Harvard, IIRC), we have more statesmen, entrepreneurs, and potential leaders of industry than we need already.

The first time you learn this stuff, it's pretty shocking. And I think it can be worth examining whether, given public education's ugly birth, there are legacies in our system that should be examined, that perhaps continue to work against the kinds of goals we have today, for student achievement and the fulfillment of potential.

But somebody needs to tell Gatto that repeating that one thing Woodrow Wilson said in 1909 in four different places in your book does not actually constitute a critique of public education as it is practiced today. None of his sources were written later than 1920, I don't think--the only time he dips a toe into more modern ideas, it's to compare something to "one of the first laws Hitler passed." Early 20th century eugenicists plus Hitler: a toxic combination, indeed, but not one that any rational person could think had a lot to do with 21st century schools.

[Edit: on re-reading it, I find The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher a bit overwrought as well. The six lessons are worth paying attention to; the rest of the essay, not so much.]